“So I’ve been following Kazemi—the Iranian guy—from the time he went into the gates at Platte River. Here he is going in about two hours before the game. Check him out. He’s carrying a souvenir football, and he strolls right past a cop with a bomb dog. Not so much as a tail wag from our canine friend. Conclusion?”
“He doesn’t have the bomb yet,” Williamson answered, popping another espresso bean into his mouth. “We’ve seen this. Can you maybe speed things along?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hang on.” The rate of Gooey’s words was increasing with his excitement. He used his mouse to forward the timeline until a wide shot of the sidelines came on. “So, how did he get the bomb? This was about an hour and forty-five minutes before game time. Way over in the corner here, Kazemi’s leaning over the railing getting his souvenir ball signed. Take a look at who’s signing it.”
A gasp escaped each of them.
Hernandez said, “I know that number! That’s—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look here.”
“That’s al-Midfai getting a ball signed,” Hernandez said.
“And here.”
“That’s Mahmud,” Evie said.
“And here.”
“That’s . . . new guy,” Williamson said.
“Ibrahim,” Hernandez helped him.
“Yeah, Ibrahim,” Williamson finished.
“All the bombers got their footballs autographed before the game by the same player. ‘But,’ you might ask, ‘how did souvenir balls magically turn into bomb balls? And if they got the bomb balls signed, why wasn’t our friend’s name sprawled across the ball that was recovered from Mahmud?’ Good questions, grasshoppers. Let’s zoom in to the signing process. Here’s our favorite player holding a football tucked under his arm and signing someone’s shirt. Here he’s signing a picture. Now here comes Mahmud, who hands our boy a football. But Mr. Butterfingers accidentally drops it. Now watch carefully . . . there! Presto, change-o. We have a little ball swap. And, good guy that he is, he doesn’t forget to sign the new ball.”
“He’s turned the pen around!” Hernandez called out.
“Yep, he’s flipping the pen. I guess he didn’t want his name on the bombs on the off chance one of them didn’t go off. ‘But,’ you ask, ‘how did our football friend get the bomb balls into the stadium to begin with?’”
Gooey’s penchant for asking and answering his own questions was working overtime.
“Here he is walking into the stadium with a couple of other players. Check him out; he’s pulling a standard Mustangs ball bag behind him—eight balls rolling right past security. Just like that, we’ve got our football bomb distribution problem solved. But now for the coop de grass.”
Tara held her breath. She couldn’t imagine anything being more unbelievable than what they had just seen.
Gooey used his mouse to bring up a new screen with some grainy slow-motion footage. “You guys know about the videos shot by those two Zapruder wannabes by the field manger’s office. This is thirty-six seconds prior to detonation. The guy’s holding the camera above his head, trying to capture all the freaked-out people. Now, look who slides into the shot at the bottom left. Check out the jersey; check out the pads. . . . It’s Mr. Pen Flipper.”
“Good find, Gooey,” Tara said, “but we all know what happened to him in that tunnel.”
“Do we now? Let me zoom tight. Watch our player as he turns back toward the camera.”
“Wait! That’s not—”
“No, it’s not. My friends, meet bomber number seven, all dressed up like a football player. My guess is that he was hiding away in the field manager’s office until the fireworks started.”
“But why?” Evie asked. “It makes no sense. I mean, why go through all the trouble of a body double if you’re just going to get blown up anyway?”
“Ahhh, the key word being if, my young padawan,” Gooey answered, fully in his element and wanting to draw out the moment. “If you were going to blow yourself up, it would make no sense. But if you were not quite ready for your one-way ticket to martyrville but you wanted everyone to think you were, then it makes perfect sense. Take a look at this video from gate 5 during the postbomb mass exit. Let me zoom in real close-like to the dude in the overcoat and Mustangs hat. Look familiar?”
Williamson and Hernandez each exhaled matching expletives. Evie just stood there stunned. Tara ran across the room, picked up the phone, and dialed Scott’s secure satellite number.
Chapter 28
Tuesday, January 20
Barletta, Italy
The past thirty-six hours had been a nightmare for Riley—or more precisely, a series of nightmares. Dreams filled with betrayal; dreams filled with heartbreak.
Riley is back with the Air Force Special Operations Command. Alpha Team is surrounded. Gunfire pings off the Humvee that is giving him temporary protection. He turns to Scott Ross, his number two, and tells him to order in some air support. But instead of lifting the radio, Scott picks up his Beretta M9, levels it at Riley’s head, and with a twisted grin, pulls the trigger.
Riley half awoke out of that horror into a hazy state. Everything was black; he couldn’t move his arms or legs. His body tried to writhe and twist, but the paralysis kept him locked in place. A gutteral yell escaped his mouth. The throbbing in his head was making him sick, as was the salty sweat dripping into his mouth. The chill on his naked upper body caused him to shiver uncontrollably.
Moments passed, and his mind began to clear. The lack of movement came not from paralysis but from the cords that bound his hands and feet to a chair. The taste in his mouth was not the bitterness of salt but the metallic tang coming from blood that was slowly oozing from where he had bitten his upper lip. His mind rewound, trying to remember how he had gotten to this place.
As he strained to bring clarity to the blurry images in his brain, a door opened and closed. Two sets of footsteps came toward him. Soft Arabic words were exchanged. Riley’s whole body tensed. Then he felt a sharp stab into his arm, and his mind swirled back into blackness.
Riley is back at his parents’ house. It’s Christmas, and earlier in the morning he opened a long package that contained his dream gift—a Crosman 781 pneumatic BB gun. That gift triggered a war that is now taking place on the battlefield of his backyard. For the last three hours, he has been out in the snow, setting up and plinking down his collection of green plastic army men. His boots soaked through a long time ago, and the pain in his toes makes him wince with every step.
“Just one more time and then I’ll go in,” he tells himself. But before he knows it, he finds himself placing the men back up on the soggy, wooden picnic table—targets for another tiny, copper-plated steel ball.
Riley’s post-Christmas morning bliss is suddenly interrupted by a scream from inside the house, followed by two loud pops. Without thinking, Riley runs toward the back door and throws it open. He races through the kitchen without taking off his boots, tracking snow on Mom’s squeaky-clean linoleum floor. He runs through the dining room and grabs the end of the banister, using its stability to reverse his direction. He bounds up the stairs two by two. When he reaches his parents’ bedroom, he stops abruptly in the doorway.
Riley’s mother and father are both lying on the floor, their bodies cocked at strange angles. Standing over them, holding a handgun, is Grandpa Covington. Riley gasps, and the retired airman turns toward him. Grandpa looks at Riley, then nods at his BB gun and smiles. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to bring a little more firepower than that, soldier,” Riley’s childhood hero says as he raises the pistol toward the boy and—
“NO!” Riley screamed as he woke up again. He was shaking all over, and his body was dripping with sweat. “It’s only a dream,” he muttered to himself. “It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream.”
The effects of the drugs gradually wore off. In the darkness behind his blindfolded eyes, he again tried to rewind the tape in his mind to discern how he had gotten here. He made
it to the point of the extraction of al-’Aqran. Everything had gone well, hadn’t it? No, there was a problem. Someone—Billy—was missing. He remembered sending the team on its way. . . . Skeeter wasn’t happy. . . . Then there was the house . . . Billy’s body . . . a sound—what was it?—glass; footsteps crunching glass, and then . . . Oh no! Please, no!
The door opened again, and the sound of footsteps echoed in the room—just one set this time. The door closed—a new sound. The footsteps scraped across the cement floor, then stopped. A wooden chair dragged across the hard surface and creaked slightly as someone sat. Silence hung in the air; the only sounds were the visitor’s light breathing and Riley’s own labored breath.
Time stretched on before Riley finally spoke. “Sal? Sal, is that you?”
The question floated without a reply.
“Sal? How could you do it, man?”
The silence of the visitor was exasperating. Riley’s voice began to crescendo with anger and pain. “Answer me, friend. How could you do it? Who are you, Sal? What are you?”
A hand grabbed the blindfold and pulled it violently down around Riley’s neck.
There, twelve inches from Riley’s face, was Sal Ricci. Hate and anger shone in his eyes. “Who am I, friend? I am Hakeem Qasim! What am I? I am an Iraqi! I am a child of Allah! I am a predator, and America is my prey!” Hakeem leaped up out of his chair and began pacing around the room.
Riley’s head dropped over the back of his chair. The room was spinning. He tried to say something but found that no words would come. All he could manage were short bursts of air. What could he say? What possible words would mean anything in this bizarre parallel universe?
“But Megan . . . Alessandra,” he whispered.
Hakeem walked to his chair, turned it around, and straddled it backward. He had regained some of his composure and now seemed almost anxious to speak. But there was still an underlying hiss to his voice. “There is an old Arab proverb: You are in a boat, and your father, your wife, and your child are all drowning. You have room for only one other person. Whom would you save? Not your wife; you can always marry again. Not your child; you can always have more. Would you save your father? Yes. Because you only have one. I have saved my father—or at least I have restored his honor. If it is at the expense of my wife and daughter, so be it.”
Riley shook his head in disbelief. “You can’t mean that. What’s happened to you, Sal?”
His former teammate’s closed fist suddenly exploded across Riley’s left cheek. “I said my name is Hakeem! Sal is dead.”
Riley spit a mouthful of blood onto the cement at the other man’s feet and looked at him with disgust. “Whatever. Hakeem will be dead too, soon enough.”
Slowly, a heart-chilling smile spread across Hakeem’s face. “Right you are, old friend. But I don’t think the circumstances of my demise will be quite what you have in mind.”
“Come on, Sa—Hakeem. What’s left to do? You’ve restored your family honor. Thousands are dead. The PFL is in shambles.”
“The PFL? Oh no, it’s not in shambles . . . yet,” Hakeem said with that same sickening grin.
“What do you mean ‘yet’?” Riley was trying to keep his wits about him, but he felt like he was right on the edge of a downward psychological slide from which he might not be able to recover.
“You know how it is, Riley. No one really cares about the regular season games. They only care about the big ones.”
The sick feeling that Riley had in his stomach was now becoming a sharp pain. His voice became pleading. “You can’t be serious. . . . Please, man. Leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone? Maybe you should be taking your own advice! Maybe if you’d left it alone you wouldn’t be sitting here bleeding all over yourself. What are you even doing here, Riley?”
“I’m tracking down a murderer. I’m hunting for Hakeem the terrorist.” Riley paused. Then he added softly, “I’m avenging the death of my best friend.”
Silence filled the air.
Hakeem stood up again and circled around Riley. “You weren’t supposed to be here, Riley. You’re supposed to be back in Colorado, taking care of Meg and Alessandra.”
“Funny, I thought that was your job.”
A hand came hard across the back of Riley’s head, rocking him in the chair. “You forget your place, old friend!” Hakeem walked around in front of Riley and slowly shook his head. “Why have you come here? This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Yeah, well, surprise. It did. So are you going to kill me, too?”
Anger flashed in Hakeem’s eyes. “I could have put a bullet in the back of your head in that house. And believe me, I’m the only one that’s keeping you alive right now.”
“What am I supposed to do? Thank you? Hey, I guess Sal’s not such a bad guy after all,” Riley said sarcastically.
A fist struck Riley’s face again. The other man’s mouth moved to within inches of his ear, and he hissed, “I said my name is Hakeem.”
Riley turned his head and the two men stared nose-to-nose. Blood and saliva filled Riley’s mouth. He prepared to spit, then turned at the last moment and shot the bloody liquid to the ground, splashing both their feet.
Hakeem straightened and walked to the single barred window Riley could see at the back of the room. He breathed in deeply, inhaling the salty night air that Riley could catch only a hint of through the scent of the blood coating his face. “I don’t understand you, Pach. You go around Afghanistan killing people. You come here to kill people. No one hits harder than you do on the football field. But you’re soft on the inside. There is no hate in your eyes. I mean, you’ve just found out that your best friend has lived a double life and betrayed you. And what do you do? Rather than dishonor him by spitting in his face, you spit on the ground.”
“You’ve dishonored yourself enough already, Sal. You don’t need my help,” Riley said, the swelling in his cheek causing him to lisp slightly. He noticed that the mention of Sal’s name hadn’t drawn a swing this time. “You kill out of hate. When I have to kill, I do it out of duty. And I don’t kill innocents, only perpetrators.”
“Ah, the higher ethics of murder.”
“My actions are not murder. Bombing a stadium is murder.”
“Then what do you call your actions, O virtuous warrior?”
Riley’s temper went over the edge. “You want to know what I call it every time I kill some button-pushing psycho like you? Preventative medicine!”
Hakeem walked back from the window and straddled his chair again. He was chuckling, and Riley knew his temper had cost him an edge.
“That’s quite the high road, Riley—‘Your killing is bad, but mine is good.’” Hakeem’s smile quickly disappeared. “But what do you call it when your government blows up a house, and a ten-year-old boy watches his family die in front of him? Was my mother a perpetrator? Was my aunt a perpetrator? Your president wiped out my whole family. Am I supposed to sit back and say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. Accidents do happen’?”
“Get over yourself, Sal. There’re a lot of people who have had horrible things happen in their lives, but they don’t go turning themselves into a walking mass of C-4.”
Hakeem started to reach across to hit Riley again but pulled his arm back and stared at him.
Riley realized his temper was about to cost him any influence he might have on his old friend. He forced himself to dial the rhetoric back a notch. “Listen, I’m sorry you lost your family. I can’t imagine what you went through. But this—what you’re doing—it’s just plain whacked.”
“See, there—right there!” Hakeem cried, poking Riley on his bare shoulder. “That’s why I say you’re soft. If you hit me, I’ll hit you back—only harder. That is the answer! If I hit you, what do you do? You just sit there and do nothing. Or you look for ‘alternatives’ or ‘understanding.’ And please spare me your ‘turn the other cheek’ drivel.”
“Wait a second; get your facts straight! If you hit
someone close to me—someone I love—trust me, you won’t be doing it again. But if you hit me? Yeah, I’ll ‘turn the other cheek’ or ‘take one for the team’ or whatever you want to call it.”
Hakeem laughed derisively. “Well, I’ll tell you what. According to your beliefs, Jesus ended up on the cross because He turned the other cheek. But Muhammad is a warrior; he struck the other cheek. One day Islam will dominate the earth because we fight back. It’s the way of the world—the strong take over the weak. Face it—my religion is one of strength; yours, of weakness.”
“Your religion? What religion do you have? I’ve read your file, Hakeem. You’re a Ba’athist—a worshiper of Saddam Hussein. I’ve got bad news for you, friend. Your god died at the end of a rope in 2006. Don’t go talking to me about religion. You have no more love for Allah than I do.”
Color flushed across Hakeem’s face, but his voice remained steady. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m no Ba’athist. Saddam was a strong leader, but he was not my god. I am a follower of Allah, the one true God. And I am a follower of Muhammad, his prophet. What I do, I do for Islam and in the name of Allah.”
Riley gave a bitter laugh at this religious declaration. “Maybe your own twisted brand of Islam. Most Muslims hate what you’re doing, but they won’t say anything out of fear one of you whack-jobs is going to plant a bomb in their mailbox.”
Hakeem dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “Interpretation of the Koran has been watered down in the name of political correctness and world opinion. Tell me, what do these weak vessels do with Surah 5:33, where we are told that the only punishment for those who wage war against Allah and his prophet is that they should be killed or crucified or have their hands and feet chopped off? Why, in Surah 4:74, does Allah promise reward for those who sell this world’s life for the hereafter and die fighting for him?
“You look surprised that I can quote from the Holy Book. Well, all those nights in the hotel rooms on the road while you were studying your Gideon Bible, I was learning the true words of the Prophet. That’s why I know my calling to be true. I fight the infidel, and I wage jihad against those who try to take what belongs to Allah because that is what I am commanded to do!”
Monday Night Jihad Page 26