Countdown to Mecca

by Michael Savage

  She left her car at the curb and moved quickly across the lawn. She rang the doorbell even before she had made it up all the steps. When no one answered for a few seconds, she rang it again, trying to keep from holding it down. She wanted it to sound as normal and benign as possible.

  In the strict sense, Dover knew what she was doing was neither illegal nor unethical. She was following up on an active investigation, albeit on her own initiative, and acting not only in the best interests of the Bureau and the United States, but also in the best interests of the Morton family.

  She was about to press the bell a third time when the door opened. Mrs. Morton wore an apron over her jeans and casual sweater. Her face was drawn, and lacked makeup. It was obvious that she hadn’t had much sleep over the past several days.

  “Hi,” Dover said. “I’m Dover Griffith, and I work for the FBI.” She held up her credentials. “I really need to talk to you about something very important.”

  “My husband isn’t here,” Cynthia Morton said absently, vaguely looking around to see if she could spot where he went.

  “That’s okay,” Dover assured her. “I really wanted to talk to you.”

  “Me? Why me? I don’t know anything.” Mrs. Morton winced, then stepped back. Dover could see that she had been living on pins and needles ever since her son’s birthday party. “Yes, I know. That’s okay. I don’t want you to tell me anything. I want to tell you something.”

  “I see. Then—won’t you come in?”

  “Thanks,” Dover said, and followed her to the kitchen, watching silently as the woman went to the oven to check on a batch of cookies she was making. Dover looked around. The entire room was filled with fresh cookies, and cakes, and even pies. Apparently baking was Cynthia Morton’s escape, and she had needed her escape in spades for the last few days.

  “Coffee?” Mrs. Morton asked.

  “Sure,” said Dover. “That would be very nice. I am sorry to bother you. I know all of this is a horrible strain.”

  Mrs. Morton’s hands trembled as she measured the grounds. Dover went over and took the carafe to fill it. “I can help,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Mrs. Morton gave her a weak smile. “Does it get easier?”

  “Eventually,” said Dover, knowing that was what she needed to hear.

  “He saw prostitutes, you know.” Mrs. Morton’s lower lip quivered. “I always knew he did something—I suspected. I guess I didn’t honestly know the entire story. I didn’t want to know. But I thought it happened far away, when he traveled. Overseas, you know. Deployments and temporary assignments. When he missed me. Not here. Not in San Francisco.”

  She suddenly erupted into tears. Dover folded her into her arms.

  “I’m sure he loves you and your children very much,” she said. “That’s why he needs to tell you everything.”

  Cynthia Morton looked at Dover with dread. “More prostitutes?”

  “No, no,” said Dover. “Worse. Much worse.”

  Both women looked up and over as they heard someone else speak. Montgomery Morton was standing in the open door to the backyard.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he snapped at Dover. “How dare you. You have no right!”

  But Dover’s presence had the effect she had wanted on Cynthia Morton. Like a hostage suddenly set free, Mrs. Morton’s head rose and her voice, when it came, had an accusatory strength even Dover wasn’t expecting.

  “What does she mean, Monty?” She all but swung at her husband. “What have you done?”

  “Cynthia, we’ll talk about this in private.” He stepped forward, his hand out imploringly, but his wife was having none of it.

  “No!” she exploded, swatting his hand away. “We’ll talk about it now. I will no longer just stand here—a captive in my own home—as you eat away at yourself from the inside.”

  “Cynthia, please, you wouldn’t understand.”

  Dover kept a grimace from her face with great willpower. It was the worst thing he could have said to her.

  “Oh, I understand plenty!” she exclaimed. “I’ve understood so much from the moment you started working with Brooks. I’ve understood more than you!’” She whirled back to Dover. “What has he done? What has my husband and Brooks done?”

  “General Brooks is dead,” Dover reported somberly. She was surprised by Morton’s aghast reaction. “You didn’t know?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve heard nothing of his trip to the Middle East.”

  Dover saw a world of distress in his denial. He had to know by now that the plan he had helped nurture was lost.

  “He’s been walking around this place like a zombie ever since General Brooks left,” Mrs. Morton told Dover. “Something’s eating away at him.”

  “How did he die?” Morton suddenly blurted.

  “We’re not sure,” Dover admitted. “It appeared to be a heart attack, but—”

  “But what?” The vehemence of his interjection took even Dover aback.

  “The man who was with him at the time disappeared for several hours, so anything is possible.”

  “Who was this man?” Morton snapped, becoming more and more sure of himself.

  “His aide, Peter Andrews.”

  The name had a telling effect on his expression. “Andrews killed him,” Morton said flatly. “I knew there was something wrong with that bastard.”

  “Are you sure?” Dover asked.

  Morton nodded once.

  “He’s accompanying Brooks’s body back to the States,” Dover informed him. This time his expression fluctuated between deep concern and sudden panic.

  “General Morton,” Dover said. “I know everything you’ve done was out of a patriotic love for this country. But I know, and I think you know, that now it is this very country that is in danger.”

  Morton’s eyes were hollow when he searched Dover’s face with them. “What do you want of me?”

  Dover thought carefully about her next words. If she revealed that her superiors still wanted to believe that the threat had died with Brooks, Morton might think that he could get away with all his collaboration if he just stayed silent. “Come with me now,” she said. “Help us stop Andrews.”

  Morton took one step back. Dover silently cursed the luck. “N-no,” he stammered. “I-I’ve got to think…!”

  “What is she talking about, Monty?” Cynthia demanded. “What are you not telling me?”

  He answered by backing away, waving his hands in a futile effort to wipe out the last year. “Just leave me alone!” He staggered back into his study, and slammed the door. Dover immediately pressed her business card into Cynthia’s hand. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. If I’m right, we’re all in terrible danger, and I’ve got to try to stop it.” She pressed her hands on Cynthia Morton’s shoulders and looked deeply into her frightened, shaken eyes.

  “Go to your husband, Mrs. Morton. Make sure he doesn’t kill himself.”

  54

  Baja, California

  Pyotr never ceased to be disgusted at the casual wealth of America, and how it was expressed in so many thoughtless ways. It was a sign of extreme decadence, a complete loss of values. But it was also an opportunity for him, and in using it he was surely fulfilling the intentions of Allah that decadence seeds its own destruction.

  He could depend on Americans for three things: a pathetic appreciation of sob stories, a begrudging following of orders, and their worship of the all-mighty dollar. So getting the pilots to make an unscheduled landing had not been as difficult as anyone else might have supposed.

  After all, he told them, he was not a military man, nor a member of Brooks’s family. Let them claim his body without him, an interloper, nearby. Besides, Colonel Ashlock needed him to disembark with their ordnance at a completely different airport.

  The pilots had checked their schedule, and, after pocketing the hundred-dollar bills the event coordinator had slipped them, found the stop workable. Peter Andrews smiled at their cooperation wh
ile thinking, The Americans are sleepwalking toward their destiny. But that had been true from the very start. Even Brooks, who, in some ways, was the only person Pyotr encountered fully aware of Allah’s intentions, was blind to the threats within his conspiracy.

  * * *

  So, hours later, he stood on the tarmac of the private airport with one of Ashlock’s sleeper agents dressed in overalls. “Is the fact that the average American is completely blind to the battle that was being waged another sign of their decadence?” the agent asked.

  “Were they so drunk on their evil diversions, their sex and their drugs, their movies and music, that they did not understand that the world was at war with them?” Pyotr replied. He laughed. “So many of them bought the ridiculous claims about Islam being a religion of peace—what is a religion of peace? How could such a religion exist? War is a necessary part of human existence; a religion that does not get involved in it would surely be wiped out and cease to exist.”

  * * *

  The two climbed back into the cab of the truck after having secured their payload—the one the pilots had been so kind to help them unload—in the back. As they started forward on the access road, Pyotr began to consider why he was feeling so contemplative this evening. It was as if the imam was talking to him from inside his brain.

  These grave questions of righteousness and fate—these were things the imam spoke of, not things that Pyotr contemplated. He was a man of action, one whose lust for blood—he could admit that now, in his final hours—had been used by the one true God for greater purposes. He was not a man who thought idly, but practically. He was not a teacher, and certainly not a prophet. He was a doer.

  Perhaps at the end, everyone became a prophet. Perhaps that was the final preparation for Paradise.

  He stopped ruminating and leaned forward as the new plane came into sight from around a corner. It was a thing of beauty: a single-engined Cessna Super Cargomaster EX. Some forty-one-and-a-half feet long, powered by a single Pratt & Whitney PT6A-140 turboprop, the aircraft could carry a maximum payload of 3,665 pounds and cruise at roughly a 185 knots; it had a maximum altitude of 25,000 feet, and most importantly for this mission, could take off in roughly two thousand feet, depending on its weight.

  “Is it ready?” he asked the truck’s driver.

  “Prepared. A dream to fly. Brand-new.”

  Pyotr hopped out of the truck as it rolled to a stop. He inspected the aircraft while the others took the weapon from the truck.

  “There is one difficulty. The runway is too short,” said Ashlock’s agent as Pyotr entered the cockpit. “It is only fifteen hundred feet, not the two thousand we were expecting.”

  “How was this mistake made?”

  The agent shook his head grimly. “The macadam was broken up for some sort of project and then not repaired. We cannot take the plane over it. We have to lighten the load to get in the air. The fuel is the only variable. So we will have to alter the course to make a direct line to the target.”

  “No,” said Pyotr. “That is not acceptable. The flight plan has been well established. It is imperative.”

  “Flying over the ocean and making the approach—”

  “The Americans can be very suspicious of last-minute deviations. The route has been established to avoid any questions,” said Pyotr. “We will lighten the load.”

  “Commander, the fuel has already been lightened. That is my point.”

  “And use one pilot if necessary.”

  The agent tightened his lips. It was to have been the two of them in the plane, and he already guessed that Pyotr would not give up his place. “We will recompute it and see.” Pyotr allowed it. He knew what the result would be. He, alone would fly the plane into history, as he had always supposed. He wanted to do this himself. It was his final act, and he didn’t want to share the glory with anyone else.

  The imam would not have approved, but that was no longer a concern. Pyotr no longer had any concerns, except for staying exactly on his course. It would be a glorious feeling, to be alone in a plane, flying toward Destiny. The Muslim Charles Lindbergh, he thought, with a smirk. It was an intoxicating feeling to think about all the people who would die the next time he crossed the altitude threshold to set the bomb off.

  He would push down and there would lightning, tremendous lightning. The hand of God would smite a million people in one blow. Millions of others would die over the next several weeks. The hundreds of thousands of those initially infected would linger for weeks, suffering from internal bleeding and diarrhea. Without sufficient quarantine they would spread the disease and cause the health care system to collapse … dragging the rest of the state and municipal infrastructures with it as people failed to report for work. Los Angeles would die quickly; the rest of America would follow with shocking alacrity.

  Pyotr’s only regret was that he would not see each and every death. But perhaps that boon would be given to him in Paradise.

  “I will take off in an hour,” said Pyotr. “I will fly the original path, and I will succeed. There is no other possibility.”

  55

  San Francisco, California

  If the situation hadn’t been so dire, the gathering at the airport would look like a reunion.

  Jack all but bounded off the private jet as Dover and Carl Forsyth approached him across the tarmac. The sight of Dover’s superior confused him, but not as much as the sight of the C-17, which was at rest some three hundred yards away.

  “What, they landed already?” he complained.

  If Jack looked confused, Doc looked positively perplexed. “But, how…?” he started, then turned to Jack. “Our Gulfstream is a hundred miles per hour faster and has three times the range.” Both he and Jack were frustrated enough that they had to refuel twice during the eight-thousand-mile flight from Riyadh to America as it was.

  “Did they screw around with the scheduling to throw us off again?” Jack wondered. He smiled in relief at Dover, but his smile disappeared when he saw her grave expression. “What? Did you get him? Has Peter Andrews been detained?”

  “That’s a decoy, Jack,” she said, stabbing her head angrily toward the C-17. “We were all over it as soon as it landed. It has Brooks’s coffin, but nothing else.”

  “Where is the rest?” Doc growled, his eyes narrowing, his memory of that gnawing fear returning.

  “We checked every landing and departure for a thousand miles around,” Forsyth stressed to Jack. “Doubts be damned, I had the whole office working on it within minutes.”

  “And?”

  “And they made an unscheduled stop, Jack,” Dover told him with concern. “Andrews deplaned at a small suburban airport and took a large crate with him.”

  “Small?” Doc echoed. “For a C-17?”

  “Just large enough,” Forsyth shot back.

  Jack stared at her, and then her boss, in disbelief. “We have no time for quibbling! I gave you new information,” he said accusingly. “Sammy found a target in America. And when the attack might take place.” He checked his watch. “Soon!”

  “No way an American general would target Hollywood,” Forsyth contended. “No way.”

  “Not Brooks,” Jack yelled at him. “This Andrews guy.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Forsyth countered.

  “Check the e-mail accounts yourself,” Jack told him. “If my brother could get in, so can you.”

  “We will,” said the FBI special agent.

  “Do it now.”

  “We need a warrant,” said Forsyth. “There’s a process.”

  “Don’t you have some sort of emergency exclusion or something?” asked Jack. “While you’re fooling around getting a subpoena, Andrews may be on his way to blow Hollywood up!”

  “I want to, Jack,” said Forsyth. “That’s why I’m here. But I need proof that will stand up in court.”

  “The hell with court,” raged Jack. “You’re arguing about some law school garbage when people are trying to destroy Am
erica.”

  Forsyth stared at him. “Your word isn’t enough! Maybe there is a threat, and maybe there isn’t. You’ve cobbled together information from sources that may or may not be sources at all. There’s simply not enough here for probable cause.”

  “You’re talking like a lawyer, Carl,” Jack pleaded. “Come on!”

  “I am a lawyer, Jack. I got my law degree before I joined the Bureau.”

  Frustrated, Jack turned and started to storm back to the plane. Dover reached to stop him, but he kept going. This was insanity. But he had to do something.

  “Jack, wait,” said Dover, running after him. “What are you going to do? Where are you going?”

  “L.A. If that’s what Andrews is targeting.”

  “His name isn’t Andrews,” came another voice. Jack looked over, and saw, emerging from the FBI SUV, Montgomery Morton.

  Jack’s jaw fell as he looked from Morton to Dover to Forsyth. So that’s why they had all come to meet him.

  “He’s a Russian mercenary named Pyotr Ansky,” Morton said heavily, coming to stand between Jack and Forsyth. Dover hadn’t even gotten to her car outside the Morton residence when she saw the general emerging wearily from his front door. It had been a choice between suicide and coming clean … and his wife was not going to let him try suicide again.

  “Ansky was hired by Brooks to obtain the Russian bio-agent that you were tracking. He was very good at his job. Ruthless. The general came to depend on him far more than me. I—I still had a conscience.”

  “Did he kill Schoenberg?” Jack asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. But I would guess yes, probably. It has his signature—efficient, no trace. He had sniper training. By then the general was depending upon Ansky exclusively.” Morton looked down to the black tarmac. “I thought he was going to kill me as well.”

  “He’s told us everything, Jack,” Dover said. “How they were planning to smuggle the bomb into Mecca in a crate of books for needy children, and how they were going to have their fellow conspirator, Andrew ‘Bull’s-eye’ Taylor, fire a flaming arrow from a helicopter into the crate to detonate the bomb.”