Intercept (36 page)

“The detonator can be activated from the bus as it leaves the school grounds, and all twelve bombs will explode simultaneously two minutes later. That’s the timeline. In that time, the bus will be at least a mile away. We’ll abandon it somewhere remote and switch to the regular vehicles, heading straight for Boston.

“I’m aiming for the Mass Turnpike within twenty-five minutes of the explosion because the Connecticut State Police will be in charge, and we want to be over the border in a different state as quickly as possible.”

“Yousaf, Ben, Abu Hassan, and I will fly out of Logan that night, direct to Madrid. The rest of you will just go home and keep your heads down until further notice.”

“That’s a good plan,” said Abu Hassan.

“Not mine, I’m afraid. I have just been chosen to carry it out. The entire strategy was mastered by Shakir Khan and his Saudi advisers. Faisal al-Assad was very important. And there will be great rejoicing at home when we carry it out. We will be heroes of the al-Qaeda movement.”

“When do we carry it out?” asked Yousaf.

“The date is next Friday. So we need to be efficient. But not in a tearing rush. We move carefully, and we prepare thoroughly. That way we will make no mistakes. I have the greatest confidence in every one of you.”

“Is the date firm?”

“Very firm. It’s a special day at the school, with many, many more people than usual. According to my orders from Faisal, it’s called Abraham’s Day, and all the parents will be there from around 10 a.m. Shakir
Khan is looking for a hit before noon. That gets us all out in time for the evening flight to Madrid, where our passports are in good order.”

“There is just one thing,” said Mike. “I’m concerned about the entrance to this property. I don’t know if anyone will suspect something is going on, but I do think we should post a guard down there. Not some armed killer parading around with a Kalashnikov. Just someone out of sight in the woods.”

“One of your guys?”

“Yes. I’ll brief Ali. He’ll do it. He’s big and agile, spent a few months in the Pakistani Army.”

“Speaking of Kalashnikovs,” said Abu, “will we take weapons in with us, I mean when we enter the school building?”

“Oh, I think that would be essential,” said Ibrahim, “because we might be apprehended by someone, or stopped, or questioned. And then someone would have to die. Our rifles should be in soft holders and placed on top of the boxes. If we have to fight our way out of the building, we’ll be ready. But I don’t think that will happen. We’ll be too well organized.”

“Wouldn’t matter much if someone did have to die,” said Abu Hassan. “If they’re in that building, they’re going to die anyway.”

“Everyone’s going to die, except us,” said Ibrahim.

 

THREE HOURS LATER
Mack Bedford was on his way down the main road to East and West Norfolk. He had checked out two of Aimee’s sales, and now he was on his way to Mountainside Farm, which he believed represented his best chance. He did not of course have a name or an address, just the sum of $875,000 scribbled on a map. He would probably have to ask where the house was once he reached the approximate area.

By now Mack guessed he may be around Torrington for a couple of days, and, driving along, he suddenly spotted the Blackberry River Hotel, a red-brick building in its own grounds, set back from the road. He decided to check in for a couple of nights, just to give himself a reasonable base. He was like al-Qaeda in that way; he needed a solid platform from which to launch an attack.

He talked to the receptionist, reserved a second floor double room, and dumped his bag on a big comfortable chair. It was growing colder outside and he pulled on his soft, waterproof, combat boots, the ones he’d worn at the bridge on the Euphrates. He wore a black turtle neck, his Navy sweater, and a heavy-duty, dark-blue and red parka.

Back downstairs, he asked the receptionist if she’d heard of Mountainside Farm and she told him precisely where it was.

“Cross the river, and turn left down the road. The farm’s about a mile down on the right, entrance through a copse of trees.

“Who lives there?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” said the girl. “It’s been on the market for months. But I did hear it had been sold this week.”

Mack thanked her and took a quick peak around the hotel. There was a nice downstairs lounge, and the restaurant looked charming. He said he’d be there for 8 p.m.

It was three o’clock when he finally set out and he found the house easily, then driving past and coming to a halt about a half-mile down the road. He pulled off onto the grass and stepped out of his vehicle, taking with him the binoculars he always kept in the Nissan. He slung them around his neck, zipped up his parka, and stepped back into the trees, moving slowly toward the blacktop drive he could see up ahead.

He left the track and walked through the undergrowth to the end of the treeline, standing some forty yards from the gatepost that marked the end of the wood and the beginning of the private drive. There was no sign for a private road, or a warning to trespassers. Nothing to betray this was Mountainside Farm.

From this vantage point, Mack still could not see the house or any of the farm buildings. The black-top drive swung right, and there were more trees on its left side two hundred yards further on.

Mack moved further left, along the old broken post-and-rail fence, which had once been constructed to delineate the entrance wood from the pasture. Before the Manhattan botanist got a hold of the place, that is, and let it slide rapidly downhill.

He was now standing fifty yards to the left of the gate post on the left side of the track. There was a clump of bushes here, which had not only devoured the fence, but had wound themselves around the trunk of a scrub oak forming a prickly barricade. In Mack’s judgment it would have made a perfect “hide” for a duck-shoot, if there’d been any ducks. Which there weren’t.

“Friggin’ suburbs,” muttered Mack, who was, when it came right down to it, a raw-boned hunting/fishing Down Easter from the most rugged coastline in the United States. He smiled at his own sarcastic assessment of this mountainous wilderness, set two hundred fifty miles southwest and several light years away from the land he really loved.

He slipped into a prime spot in the “duck hide” and trained his binoculars on the farmhouse he could now see jutting out behind the far stand of maple trees. There were lights in the downstairs rooms, but no cars outside, and the big double doors to the barn were closed.

 

THE DARK-SKINNED
, Punjab-born guard, who was observing Mack from a position almost a hundred yards away had made a colorful journey from his home village in Pakistan to West Norfolk, Connecticut. A devout Muslim, Ali had been recruited to the Taliban at a very young age, and then joined that section of the Pakistani army that owed no loyalty to its comrades nor to the national government.

Ali had always been a freedom fighter, with sympathies only for the hard-line religious fanatics who had, before 9/11, ruled Afghanistan. In the ensuing years, having been almost destroyed by the U.S. forces, the Taliban had been making a rapid comeback, striking at the Pakistani army over and over.

Ali, who had been an enormous favorite of the Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud, had been dispatched to join the Pakistani national army and work on the inside. And his successes had been formidable. He and Mahsud had staged constant attacks on the official forces, and even more constant raids, during which they stole automatic weapons, grenades, mines, and all the equipment required to make suicide vests.

With Ali’s inside information, the Taliban pulled off some dreadful military-style coups, bombing and blasting their way into the headlines, and effectively running up a battle-scarred recruitment flag, which appealed to young Pakistani and Afghanis who were as fanatical and misguided as Ali himself.

But the Pakistani government started to hit back. Baitullah Mahsud was killed by an American Drone, and Ali’s position as master spy, traitor, and confidante of the boss became too dangerous. He deserted, and headed back to the lawless tribal areas of South Waziristan, the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), which lie to the south of the Khyber Pass right on the Afghan border.

With the Swat Valley under constant watch by the official military, these vast FATA lands of no-cities and few towns became the second most important training grounds in the world for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Driven ever closer by the western and homeland forces ranged against them, the two organizations now combined.

They built joint camps where they instructed young men in manufactured combat zones. Deserters from the army, like Ali, were appointed to positions of immense authority, training the new arrivals in weaponry, explosives and unarmed combat.

Stolen arms were run in through the mountain passes on a daily basis. And by night they fought in the hillsides alongside local warlords who thought they could defeat the U.S. Army.

Ali and his rookies crept silently through those almost impenetrable mountains, seeking out and attacking American patrols. They tried to bomb and booby-trap their own national army. They selected any target that would thrust them into the Western media. They sent in suicide bombers to strike at cricket teams and innocent women and children in their own city market places.

But eventually, with a price on his head, and a manhunt being conducted to locate and arrest him, Ali was spirited out of the country on the usual student route to Bradford, England. From there, in possession of elaborate documents, obtained at great cost by al-Qaeda, he made it into the United States on a three-month course in Western Literature at a Boston-based college. From there he promptly disappeared, and hooked up at last with Mike’s Sleeper Cell, which had been his ultimate objective ever since he vanished from the nuclear-armed forces of Pakistan.

As he stood silently in this Connecticut woodland with a German Luger tucked in his waistband, Ali, one of nature’s everlasting combatants, was wondering who on earth was this character with the binoculars, staring across the field directly at the house in which was being planned the most secretive, classified operation that al-Qaeda had conducted for years.

He could, he supposed, have defied Ibrahim’s orders and shot the guy dead, no questions asked. But Ali was a veteran, and he’d been on the run. He knew the consequences of indiscriminate killing in a place like the United States. Nothing but trouble. Lucky for Mack Bedford, who did not know he was there.

Ali understood the significance of the stranger’s presence. And he knew the questions that needed to be answered: (1) Who was he?; (2) Was he working for the police or Intelligence services?; (3) Could he have been just a bird-watcher or some nature nut?; (4) Did this mean someone was on to them?; (5) Did this also mean they should all pull out of here right away?

Ali understood one other thing: The only person who could supply immediate answers to those questions was the guy with the binoculars.
And since he was not permitted to shoot him, Ali needed to capture him, and either coax or punch those answers out of him.

The present and former Pakistani militant could feel the ground was wet beneath his trainers, soft and quiet. But parts of it were badly overgrown and difficult to walk over without stepping through vegetation. He was accustomed to a quiet approach toward his targets, but this ground would be a little noisy for a silent stalking.

Still, the guy with the binoculars was dressed in civilian clothes and would be unsuspecting. And Ali knew how to frighten the life out of a victim when making a surprise approach from behind. He’d been taught that all of his life by instructors and also by his father who had been a member of the 1980’s Mujahadeen—the modern masters of the art of slitting the throats of young Soviet officers in the Afghan mountains.

He began to move forward, slipping between the trees, making a line of sight that kept him hidden from the direct gaze of the interloper. He had advanced, zigzagging unobserved for sixty yards, keeping his eyes on the trees, and always keeping a substantial tree-trunk between himself and the guy with the bins.

His next move was one of around ten yards, and this required him to move left, around eight feet, and then go forward in a straight line, directly at the next tree, behind Mack. He made the eight-foot walk silently, hesitated, and then took two short strides forward.

And that was where he stepped on a thin dead branch, fallen from a scrub oak. It snapped, creating a muffled sound, too heavy to be a small woodland creature, too light to be a grizzly, and too sharp to be just a small falling branch.

Mack Bedford heard it and froze. Years of patrolling the same mountains where Ali had fought had taught him that to re-group, swing around, or relay anxiety in any way would be a poor—if not fatal—idea. He had to remain still, projecting unawareness.

He raised the binoculars, and swiveled his left eye trying to work out whether his stalker was armed. He spotted Ali standing still as a statue next to a tree thirty yards away, or, in U.S. Navy parlance, “right on his six o’clock.” Both of the man’s hands were free and unencumbered at his sides.

Mack betrayed nothing, and decided to allow something he had never once permitted any instructor to do in SEAL Sniper School. He would let the man “walk up on him,” and, if he so wished, grab him from behind.

Plainly, if the man had been some kind of a gamekeeper, he would already have shouted and announced his authority. It was more likely to Mack that the bastard was indeed a terrorist and might even have been the big fella, Ben al-Turabi. But he had not been able to see that clearly in his split-second of vision around the left lens of the binoculars.

He would not even have considered allowing a “walk up” if the man had been carrying either a knife or a gun, but that didn’t seem the case. Mack understood military odds, and right now they were heavily in his own favor, with only a remote likelihood that he’d have to kill his attacker. Because that would mean he’d have to call Ramshawe and get the clean-up squad in, ahead of the Connecticut State Police, which could blow everything. No, Mack would not kill the man unless he truly had to.