Intercept (18 page)

“Do you have a list of possible targets?” asked Abu Hassan.

“Not really,” said Khan. “But we can easily make our selection near strike time.”

Kaiser Rashid, Khan’s thoughtful former London law student assistant, spoke for the first time. “Sir,” he said, tentatively, “I have been putting together some kind of a dossier on the events that surrounded the Washington court’s decision to release our four brothers.

“It seems both law firms that assisted us were blown up on the very night of the court’s decision. Two bombs, detonated simultaneously. No accident.”

Shakir Khan, normally the very picture of calm, literally gasped, “Then someone has penetrated our communications system?” he growled.

“Epstein’s work on the case was public,” said Kaiser. “They had two lawyers in court, both relatively well known on the legal circuit. However the London firm, Howard, Marks, and Cuthbert, who passed on the request from the Saudi clerics to Washington, was not.”

“Was anyone killed?”

“No one in London because of the late hour. But Josh Epstein and both the lawyers who argued our case are dead.”

“Any conclusions?”

“Yes,” said Kaiser, somewhat darkly. “It must have been the Mossad. I have checked it out as thoroughly as I dare. And the conclusion is inescapable. The mere fact that they used a bomb, is pure Mossad. No chances taken, no assassinations, just a massive detonation on a Washington side street that destroyed their enemy, plus every last vestige of evidence.

“I am told the FBI in Washington is scarcely bothering to search for the culprits, simply because everyone knows who did it. But no one wants to know. The whole of the U.S. security force, military and civilian, is furious that Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan have been released.”

“Zionist pigs,” muttered Khan. “But they will surely pay for that crime.”

Captain Musa Amin had been silent during the explanations, but now he spoke and, for him, rather slowly. “It would be almost perfect if we could find a large college in the United States that was predominantly Jewish. That way, we could kill several hundred pigs with one stone.”

“Are there such places in the USA?” asked Ben al-Turabi. “I did hear of a couple in England—I think it was King David’s High School in Liverpool.”

“I had a classmate in London who went to a Jewish school, but I don’t recall the name,” added Kaiser.

And then Shakir Khan joined in the conversation. “There are more Jewish schools and colleges in the United States than there are in Israel. One of the most famous is called the Yeshiva University, way uptown in New York City.

“But I think we might seek somewhere more peaceful. The New York police and security forces are completely trigger-happy at the slightest suspicion, after the Day of Glory.

“No, gentlemen, we need a large, tranquil college in the American countryside. I’ll have Kaiser prepare a short list. East Coast preferably, where we are still better organized, but we should explore the Midwest, but not Chicago with its terrible, tough police force.

“Meanwhile, we should have supper after evening prayers, and then you all will be on your way. Because I have a feeling this place may very shortly be full of U.S. agents and spies, who will surely not like the fate that befell their assassins. Praise be to Allah, for He is great.”

 

AT 10 P.M. IN THE DARKNESS
of the alleyway beyond the wall, Shakir Khan’s official Mercedes Benz was running softly. The courtyard door was silently opened, and all four of the former prisoners slipped through the entrance and into the black automobile with its North West Frontier government plates.

The chauffeur closed both the rear doors, with Abu Hassan in the front passenger seat, and set off through the town heading north, up to the Grand Trunk Road, which is a slow-moving traffic nightmare all day, but a very decent stretch of highway at night. The chauffeur drove fast, only slowing up through the passes. It was almost 1 a.m. when they reached the banks of the tumbling Utrot and Ushu streams, which combine in Kalam to form the mighty Swat River, flowing south down the valley.

Four tribesmen, al-Qaeda fighters, greeted them. They had brought tribal dress for the four men, and there were three mule carts, laden with supplies, weapons, cushions, and rough blankets. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu, the conquering heroes, were given a warm and enthusiastic welcome.

But night was passing and they still had miles to go under the cover of darkness. The six mules began to move softly into the deep, uncharted
regions of the Upper Swat Valley, into the northern mountains, back into the warm embrace of bin Laden’s jihadists, a place where each of the four devoutly believed he belonged.

And visions of that triumphant three-day siege of Number One School, Beslan, stood starkly before them. The pictures in their minds, relayed so powerfully by Shakir Khan, were magnified by their imaginations and made more vivid by the spectres of dying Infidels. These were the visions of the coming Days of Glory.

All four of the rescued terrorists felt safe now as they moved slowly into the uplands. They were almost in sight of their own Promised Land now. They all could sense the majesty of the place where warriors trained, where the dream of Muslim domination still thrived, and where that dream would never die.

Each of them knew the terrorist training camp to which they were headed was an integral part of the al-Qaeda organization. All nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the operatives in the USS
Cole
attack, had attended Afghan or Pakistani training camps. Following every successfully executed attack, there was a spike upward in recruitment and enrollment.

The training was diverse. Most recruits received conventional warfare training, but al-Qaeda needed foot soldiers, heavy machinery operators, and individuals who could bomb embassies or hijack planes. Specific terrorist training was given only to top recruits personally evaluated by bin Laden’s successors.

The overall plan was to encourage recruits to develop creative ways to conduct mass murder. The curriculum was unswervingly based on the ideology that Israel and the United States were evil. Martyrdom was the highest honor, and many recruits had volunteered for suicide missions.

The Iranian and Pakistani governments knew and disregarded the influx of al-Qaeda operatives moving through their respective countries, but the lines of communication were never down between them, and the twenty thousand individuals involved in this vast and determined network moved freely around the Middle East.

Only a select few would receive the ultimate specialized terrorist training, and for the next few weeks, Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan would provide it, passing on their combined knowledge, practicing their own skills with the young recruits, and preparing for the next strike against the American/Zionist Satan.

They continued on through the night, sometimes sleeping on the cushions in the back of the mule carts, sometimes staring up at the night sky.
They reached the camp at around 3 a.m. and were greeted by the commandant, Captain Musa Amin, who had been flown up by helicopter.

Like almost every one of the al-Qaeda camps, there was no accommodation block. Instead there were small, square, single-story houses, dusty, walled spaces, to provide protection from wind and rain. It occurred simultaneously to both Ben and Ibrahim that accommodations had been slightly more comfortable in Guantanamo Bay.

They unloaded their few possessions and retired to one of the dwellings as two hundred miles above them, the massive ten-foot-wide digital imaging mirror on America’s KH-12 CRYSTAL satellite swiveled ominously in the sky. This incredible, billion-dollar piece of flying hardware had trouble photographing only objects under five inches high, but three mule carts and a group of full-grown men were kid’s stuff. It had cost $400 million to get it up there, firing it into space with a Titan IV rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles. Now swiftly orbiting the earth at Mach 25, the KH-12 was a spymaster’s dream come true. It probably could not reveal the number on the front door of your house, but it could tell if there were a couple of bikes in the front yard.

Known as the Keyhole Class, the KH-12 was so secret, the National Reconnaissance Office in Virginia never even referred to it as number twelve. In fact, all these supersonic spy satellites were known only by random numbers like KH-362, to confuse foreign spy operations—and most of Washington.

The KH-12 had been programmed to pass over the camp in the upper Swat Valley the day the four prisoners were released. There were actually six satellites up there, making a total of twelve passes a day, or one every couple of hours. This meant that Ibrahim and his boys had been photographable for at least two hours, if you count their approach and the unloading of the carts.

The near-permanent frown of Abu Hassan’s face came up in ultra-sharp focus in the NRO after the stark black-and-white image was flash-transmitted through the relay network of communications satellites. They caught a couple of good ones of Ibrahim too, snoring like a B-52 bomber in the back of the mule cart in the still of the mountain night.

The NRO, located in Chantilly, twenty-five miles west of Washington, had been matching images of arriving and departing terrorists in the upper Swat Valley for several days, but when the group on the mule carts showed up, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. The high-quality prison
photographs, matched with the brilliant digital pictures taken from space, made identification simple. The findings of the NRO matched precisely those of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, and were placed on the link, instantly relayed to the National Security Agency.

When the images came up on Captain Ramshawe’s screen, he was filled with conflicting emotions. Loosely translated into the poetic turn of phrase so natural to his Aussie forebears, this came out as, “Well, at least we know where the bastards are, but we can’t start bombing in Pakistan, and we can’t go in and grab ’em, so we’ll have to bloody wait ’til they make a move.”

Bob Birmingham arrived at the same conclusion. So had Rear Admiral Andy Carlow and the CNO Admiral Mark Bradfield. There was nothing else to do except wait. But the wait did not last for long.

Six weeks after KH-12 took the space shots, Shakir Khan’s plans were in position. The four veteran al-Qaeda killers—Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan—would strike against the United States, by blasting a Jewish school or college, and preferably on the East Coast, from where it was quicker to escape.

Because entry into the United States would be impossible, Khan decided the four would join the hundreds of Mexican peasants trying to break in across the southern border with Texas, perhaps over the Rio Grande. Khan knew that scores of Mexicans were caught and sent back after crossing that infamous strip of desert. But the same rules would not apply to Ibrahim and his men, because they would have modern weapons and endless money. Also, they were ruthless killers, who would stop at nothing to get across, fighting under the unassailable banner of the Prophet Mohammed, in the name of Allah.

Shakir Khan would now set about awakening the “Sleeper Cells”—the terrorist groups already in place in the United States, which President Bush once assessed as about five thousand separate groups. There were not that many these days, but there were still plenty, and any one of them would move forward with limitless high explosive for the right attack on the Great Satan.

Final selection of the target would be made when Ibrahim’s squad reached Mexico. And that was another problem, because the tried and tested way out of the badlands of Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush was through the soft left-wing underbelly of the United Kingdom, where the thirteen-year socialist government had almost bankrupted the country, and needed its Muslim voters to love it still. The UK’s border officials would
have let Osama and his best buddies in, just so long as they had official papers confirming their enrollment at the Pakistan Culture and Commonwealth Centre for Advanced Literary Studies, with its sprawling “modern campus,” situated in one room above a Bradford fish-and-chip shop.

The scandal of these fraudulent universities has seethed for years, not to mention the ludicrous English laws that let in
anyone
—terrorists, tribesmen, jihadists, fanatics, lunatics, guys whose great-grandfathers had served in the Bengal Lancers, mullahs, snake-charmers, camel-drovers, bombmakers, fakirs, fuckers, and God knows who else. At the last count, to the fury of the police, Britain’s absurd Labour Government was issuing ten thousand student visas to Pakistanis ever year; between 2004-2008, they allowed 42,292 Pakistanis to enter the UK on these visas.

Even the notorious Abdul Rahman, jailed for six years in 2007 for recruiting British Muslims to join the Holy War, entered the country on a student visa. He lived in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, where in April 2009, police arrested in an Internet café eleven suspected terrorists who had entered the UK on student visas, and discovered only one of them was attending a “reputable college.”

There are an estimated two thousand fraudulent educational institutions in the UK, bogus colleges with big websites, many located in specific ethnic areas in big cities. And they have very grand names: Oxford and Cambridge World Scientific College; UK Harvard Advance Studies; Commonwealth Literature and Engineering School; and London Language School. This latter organization offered a £250 course in “door supervision”—an interesting euphemism for training students to become nightclub bouncers.

Even the embarrassed Pakistani High Commissioner in London complained to Britain’s unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, that the UK authorities were hopeless. Mr. Brown argued, defensively, as one might expect from a man whose political antennae have been compared to those of a song-thrush. At around that time it was discovered that the PM’s car was being officially guarded against terrorist boobytraps by an illegal immigrant from Pakistan or somewhere.