THE OPENING STEPS OF his violent choreography to reach the top of the bridge had gone as smoothly as a waltz on Dancing with the Stars, a series of well-drilled maneuvers so common and practiced that they even had names. He had opened with Excessive Force, to lure the curious enemy into a kill zone, and followed that with a Flash Attack to stun them. Now he was falling back in a controlled Australian Peel.
The Peel was a sniper’s protective game of leapfrog on defense. After an attack against a larger force, the sniper would stay put and lay down suppressive fire while his spotter fell back twenty meters, hit the ground, and took up the firing to allow the sniper to bound back another twenty meters, then repeat the process. The difference today at the bridge was that Swanson had to perform both roles: fire, then give up some ground to his pursuers to make them think they were making progress, with no idea that it was being given to them. Kyle did not want to break contact, and so far, it had worked. He was picking apart the opposing force.
He found no one waiting when he emerged up on the second level, so he ran to another doorway and squeezed in tight again, thinking of what to do next. He was uninjured and still had plenty of ammo if he was careful, some C-4, several hand grenades, and a bandolier of five grenades for the launcher that hung beneath the barrel of his CAR-15. There were plenty of moves left, although he was feeling the press of time. Eleven minutes.
He could hear the pursuers milling around below, an indication of a lack of discipline, training, experience, and leadership. He fired a single shot back down the stairs to focus their attention again, and the bullet struck metal stairs and zinged away like the clanging of a bell. The enemy fighters realized their quarry was waiting for them up on the next level, still ready to fight.
Kyle intended to make the most of his clear advantage in this small underground city of channels and burrows. Rooting out a skilled defender required patience, determination, luck, and skill, and the butcher’s bill was usually high. An untrained force such as he was facing today had little choice other than to pour in a lot of bodies.
“AHLO?” A STRANGE VOICE from the radio was tinged with despair, even as the caller said a universal form of “Hello.”
Ayman al-Masri of the New Muslim Order responded without introduction. “Who is this? Where are you?”
“We are on the third level, mister,” said the nervous voice. “There has been a horrible battle down here. The casualties have been heavy.”
“How many of the Zionist raiders have been killed?”
“None that I have seen, sir.”
“Well, how many are there?”
A pause. “About six?”
“Can you actually see the enemy from your position?”
A long pause. “No, mister.”
“Then how do you know there are six?”
“Ummh. That is just my estimate, mister. So much damage. So many men are down and badly hurt. Please send medical help.”
Al-Masri knew the pleading coward on the radio was hiding, not advancing.
“What is your name?” The demand was almost a snarl.
The radio went silent. Bonte Ibara had no intention of giving his name to the terrorist leader and possibly being singled out later for blame, or worse, to be appointed leader of the other men down in this hellish battle. The fifty-one-year-old Congolese man, with weathered dark skin and sprinkles of white in his black hair. was a month from the end of a one-year contract as an electrician subcontractor with a Saudi construction firm. Bonte looked over at his friend Guychel Mouko, a heavy equipment operator who had come north with Ibara as a contract worker. They had lived for months on meager rations, sending almost everything they earned back to their families. Both had come to work on a bridge, not to fight soldiers. They were not even Muslim.
Having survived civil wars in Africa, both had seen many times what bullets and explosions could do to the human body. Let the young hotheads who had never tasted a real fight do whatever they wanted, like that boy who had run forward without looking and stepped on the booby trap. The blast had torn the torso in half, painted the walls with blood and purple intestines, and clouded the corridor with smoke. Only a fool would want to be the first to go into that kind of death trap against an Israeli raiding party. Bonte and Guychel had lagged far behind coming down the stairs and were the only members of their small group still standing.
“Can you hear me?” The radio squawked, the New Muslim Order man obviously angry. “Give me your name!”
Guychel shook his head. “No.” He gently removed the radio from the hand of his friend and hurled it far down the corridor, where it smashed into pieces as it bounced and slid along the rock floor.
Bonte pushed open a door and went inside, and Guychel followed, closing it behind him, then turning the lock on the supply room. They put their AK-47s aside, sat on the boxes, and lit cigarettes. “It will be over soon. Fights this intense never last too long,” Bonte said. “What do you hear from home?”
Elsewhere in the complex, other workers were making similar decisions to let sudden, deadly violence pass them by.
TEN MINUTES REMAINED BEFORE the inbound extraction birds were due topside. Kyle Swanson could not waste time hanging around in the second level of this subterranean maze. Nothing of value would be gained by forcing another firefight, but he had to do some damage before leaving.
The pursuing force was already in disarray, and their firing had momentarily ceased, so Swanson intended to make his next move as horrific as possible before they could shake off the feeling that certain death lurked around every corner. Mobility and his pitiless attacks had tilted things in his favor, and he needed to capitalize on that. His brain told him to be patient, to work it through step by step. Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
He pressed the latch of the grenade launcher slung beneath his rifle, slid its barrel forward, put the weapon on safe, and removed a stubby, low-velocity 40 mm high-explosive, dual-purpose grenade from his bandolier. The golden dome and olive green body slid easily into the chamber, and Swanson pulled the barrel toward the rear to lock it. Then he broke cover and ran to the corner where his latest corridor intersected with the main hallway. Leaning around, he saw it was clear, and he moved his finger to squeeze the launcher’s separate trigger.
The weapon bucked with a firm bhoomp as the M-433 HEDP grenade fired, and Kyle spun to the floor behind the concrete wall, curled into the fetal position, closed his eyes, and covered his ears as the grenade hit the stone steps with a stunning explosion and a blinding flash. The earsplitting blast tore a deep gouge into the stairs, spraying out a thick circle of shrapnel and debris that would have killed anyone within fifteen feet. With that echo still vibrating and smoke boiling, Swanson loaded a second HEDP round, moved to the other side of the auxiliary corridor, and took aim through the leaf sight in the opposite direction down the main hallway. When he was sighted on the midpoint of the big doors of one of the elevators, he fired, then again dove to the floor against the near wall as the grenade penetrated the thin-skinned door. A long tongue of red and yellow flame jetted out of the elevator shaft, the aluminum doors blew off, and heavy shards of rock and shrapnel ripped and tore at the cables supporting the elevator. The high-pitched squeal of tortured metal pulling against metal rose above the din of the explosion, and the heavy elevator was twisted and pushed with ever-increasing force against the braided steel cables that had been chipped and sliced. It did not fall but was jammed so hard between the walls and the support girders that it could not move.
The concussion slammed through the corridor like a broadside from a battleship and bounced Swanson like a ball. Even after the wave passed beyond him, he remained curled up, disoriented, certain that he had been deafened and blinded by his own doing. I was too close! Acrid smoke made him cough, and that automatic physical response brought the rest of his senses back online. The eyes blinked, but his ears were popping like little firecrackers. Nature of the business; part of the game. Spitting out dirt, he shook himself free of layers of debris, and junk fell from his clothing and gear. Using the wall for support, Kyle pulled himself back to his feet, peeled away from his position, and moved out. It had taken three minutes.
IN THE EAST TOWER, Beth Ledford had made good progress, towing the young engineer along behind as she advanced through the levels. In fact, the prisoner—she no longer thought of him as an ally—had been the only real opposition since she had separated from Swanson. She was almost to the top now, in the first basement level, and the main entrance was less than fifty meters away, framing a bright square of light outside. She could smell the fresher air. With less than seven minutes remaining before extraction, she had never felt so totally alert and sharp. There was no sense of panic.
An unattended line of little golf carts was parked along one wall, with slack cables plugged into power sources to charge the batteries. The corridor seemed clear, and distant explosions told her that Swanson still was going strong over in the other tower; it sounded like a war. She felt she probably could have walked out of this corridor in a miniskirt and high heels and nobody would have paid any attention, because everyone was at the party next door.
A silhouette crossed at the entrance, and Beth ducked out of sight between the carts and the wall, pulling her prisoner to his knees. He grunted, and she held a finger to her lips to shush him. They were long past the time where he might have anything to say that would be of interest to her.
The figure at the entrance passed through the cone of light and vanished again. Beth assumed it was a guard who had been left behind to secure that tunnel mouth while the hard fighting raged elsewhere. She could easily shoot him from this angle, but the retort of a rifle would be amplified enough in the tight confines of the corridor and might be enough to draw unwanted attention. She could not expect to just walk the next two hundred feet unobserved while pulling a man along on a leash.
“Get in this cart. Left side,” she whispered. “Call out or try to escape and I’ll shoot you.” Mohammad al-Attas nodded that he understood, and she dropped the end of the leash but unholstered her pistol. There was a rag on the floor, and she tied it like a kerchief over her blond hair.
She yanked the cable on the cart from the power strip and climbed in. It was just an ordinary golf cart with a light blue fiberglass body, no more complicated to drive than a child’s wagon. When Beth pressed the accelerator, the vehicle moved forward on a battery-powered engine that was virtually silent. She steered with her left hand, with the pistol in her right, resting out of sight in her lap.
The guard might have been curious had he seen two people walking out, but he hardly noticed the approach of one of the buglike carts that constantly roamed the bridge and tunnels. Beth shot him with two point-blank taps to the head without even taking her foot from the accelerator.
IT WAS NIGHT IN Manhattan. The neon signs around Times Square took on a bright life of their own, the tourists flocked to the theaters, the Royal Shakespeare Company was doing Julius Caesar at Lincoln Center, the Rockettes were stretching out prior to another high-kicking show at Radio City Music Hall, and Jimmy Buffett was jamming with Neil Young in a Village bar. After another workday in the canyons of office buildings, millions of people were on the move again, hungry for entertainment and personal contact, going to restaurants or to their apartments or to the saloons. In midtown, a few blocks from the United Nations tower, three men were seated around a table in a luxury hotel suite that was protected by bodyguards with small machine guns. They all wore serious game faces. “I think we’ve got a Fish,” said one. “Not just a Fish, but fuckin’ Moby Dick.”
Fred Ellison, chief of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, sipped some sweet lemonade before continuing his pitch. Andy Moore of the Central Intelligence Agency and David Hunt of the Federal Bureau of Investigation listened with growing astonishment as Ellison spun his tale of how Undersecretary William Lloyd Curtis of the U.S. Bureau of American-Islamic Affairs had recently stepped far beyond his pay grade and used DSS assets to track an American citizen. “I put a stop to it as soon as I found out, then I read Curtis the riot act,” said Ellison. “At the time, I chalked it up to a mistake in judgment, although he was no glad-handing rookie diplomat. I underestimated him.”
“Is he a heavy hitter in the administration?” asked Hunt.
“Absolutely. Former ambassador to Kuwait and Egypt. Heavy campaign contributor to both parties as a civilian, with lots of experience, contacts, and knowledge about the Sandbox countries. He hosts swanky parties that cover as a backdoor channel for communication between Washington and the Islamic world.”
“Man, we could probably send him to prison just for that security breach, but it’s pretty thin. No real red flags that I see,” said Moore.
“It became a burr under my saddle,” admitted Ellison. “Not so much that he did it, but why would he do such a stupid thing? So I started showing a special interest in him.”
“So, since we all work in Washington, why are we here in New York?” Hunt leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
Ellison drew out a photo of a middle-aged fat man with dark hair and passed it around. “This man is Mohammed Javid Bhatti, who works for the Pakistani Foreign Office right over at the UN, and he has been showing up frequently, either in person or by phone or e-mail, with Undersecretary Curtis. I ran him by our resident security officer in Islamabad, who got back to me this morning. We’re here because there are too many leaks in Washington. I’ve known and trusted you guys for years, and want to keep this on the down-low.”
“Javid Bhatti is your Fish?” Hunt looked curiously at the photograph. “Pardon my French, Freddy, but this guy ain’t no Moby Dick. More like a fat flounder.”
Ellison rapped the table with his knuckles. “No, Dave. Undersecretary Curtis is the Fish. My RSO in Pakistan reported that this flounder, Mr. Bhatti, really works for the New Muslim Order.”
Moore and Hunt exchanged frowns, and Hunt cleared his throat. “You think this Bhatti and the NMO are trying to manipulate or blackmail a ranking American diplomat?”
“Worse. I think Curtis is working for them of his own free will. My opinion, the son of a bitch is a closet jihadist.”
“Why? He had to have gone through a complete security clearance just to get his job”
There was silence in the room, and the noise of New York drifted up to the fifteenth floor, a muted burble of yells, taxi horns, and a siren from a traffic accident. “I want to do another one, deeper this time. All the way down to the bone because I missed something the first time around. I propose a full-court press on this, guys, but keep it quiet. All three of our agencies have to be involved and cooperate.”
“What about Homeland Security?” Hunt asked with a slight smirk.
“Who?” laughed Moore, removing a white legal pad from his briefcase to draft a game plan.