Less than halfway through their list of locations, Abdul Ali considered himself lucky that they’d only lost one of the Chechen soldiers. It was a treacherous but necessary path they’d been forced to follow. The Troll had explained that each location would be more difficult to assault than the last, and that was why Ali and his team were taking them in ascending order of difficulty. There was no sense starting with the most difficult location and working their way backward only to find that Mohammed bin Mohammed was being held at one of the less fortified sites. It seemed reasonable and there was a consolation, however small, that with each location they scratched off their list, Abdul Ali was one step closer to recovering Mohammed.
Whether the man was waiting inside this location or the next made no difference to the Chechens. Unbeknownst to Ali, the Troll was paying them on a per-assault basis, and so it was in their financial interest that the attacks continue until the very bloody end.
What Ali did know was that the Troll had been one hundred percent correct about the American government’s penchant for secrecy-especially when it came to the deep-cover operations on their list. Both the left and the right hands purposefully strove to keep each other in the dark and thereby created a considerably uncommunicative culture. It would take days to sort out what had happened to the various New York undercover operations, and by then, Allah willing, Abdul Ali and Mohammed bin Mohammed would be long gone.
As the team approached its next objective, Ali was supremely confident that its occupants had no idea they were coming. He girded himself with the hope that this might be the last assault they would have to conduct.
The vents for the Lincoln Tunnel vent shaft were located at the West Midtown Ferry Terminal, also known as Pier 79, on Manhattan ’s West Side. As Abdul Ali and his Chechen mercenaries arrived, the vent shaft towers were still belching plumes of acrid black smoke high into the air from the hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles burning in the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.
Emergency personnel were everywhere as they tried to use the ventilation shafts to evacuate survivors. With over forty million vehicles passing through the tunnel each year, it was one of the busiest in the world and a perfect target. Ali quietly marveled at the chaos. Allah had indeed blessed their undertaking.
Attached to the north ventilation tower was a New York Waterway bus garage, and Ali instructed Sacha to park just past it alongside two large dumpsters. The men readied their weapons and then donned their gas masks and black tactical helmets. In practiced unison, they exited the vehicles and raced into the nearly empty garage accompanied by a very special Trojan horse.
Most of the bus staff had raced next door to try to help extricate survivors from the tunnel and only a handful remained behind. They were quickly dispatched by three of the Chechens who then dragged their bodies to the rear of the garage, where they could be hidden away out of sight.
The secondary stairwell secreted within the north ventilation tower had been constructed to be very difficult, if not impossible, to find without proper help. Once it was located, the team readied its secret weapon and sent “Ivan” hobbling down the stairs.
Via a fiber-optic camera mounted inside the animal’s collar, Ali and his Chechen handler watched as the small yet sturdy border collie with its brightly colored search-and-rescue vest, limped forward toward a large steel door. Three feet away, the handler depressed a button on his remote, which caused the dog’s collar to beep twice in quick succession. Immediately, the dog began whimpering and laid itself down.
For a moment, it appeared that their tactic was not going to work. Then the groan of metal on metal resounded through the corridor and up the stairwell as the steel door began to slowly open. Two men outfitted similarly to the marines at the Geneva Diamond and Jewelry Exchange appeared, and seeing no one else in the corridor, shouldered their weapons and cautiously approached the injured dog, wondering how it had made its way down there. They assumed it must have been part of the search-and-rescue efforts in the tunnel and had somehow lost its way.
What the marines should have been asking themselves was where the animal’s handler was.
Once the marines were close enough, Ivan received another cue, got up and limped inside the facility.
Having seen enough from Ivan’s collar-mounted camera, Ali nodded to the handler, who then signaled the rest of the team to get ready. The dog was then sent its final cue.
Ivan bit down on a tab at his right shoulder and pulled it forward, causing the heavy vest packed with plastique and ball bearings to activate and fall to the ground. The speedy dog was halfway to the stairs before anyone inside knew what had happened.
With the deafening roar of the explosion still ringing in the ears of those not instantly killed by the detonation, Abdul Ali and his men rushed inside with their weapons blazing. They plowed a bloody trail through the odd submarine-like structure as they searched for the man al-Qaeda was willing to risk anything to recover.
But once again, it was all in vain. Not only was Mohammed bin Mohammed nowhere to be found, there was no sign he had ever been there to begin with.
When they were safely inside the Tahoes and back out into the maddening traffic, Abdul Ali quietly went over the plan for taking down their next target. From everything he had read, this one was going to be their most difficult yet, and for the first time since they had started, he questioned his team’s chances for success.