Collision of Evil (43 page)

The terrorist’s move had caught him by surprise.

Al-Assad ignored the man on the ground and fired at the rumpled shape in the near distance. Waldbaer’s pistol barked at the same time. Caroline winced at the percussion as both rounds found their targets.

Waldbaer felt the impact of the bullet as it tore through his jacket and upper right arm, entering and exiting. His pistol tumbled to the ground, and Caroline retrieved it as it fell.

The blow to his hip pushed al-Assad sideways, and he felt an electric wave of pain travel up his side. He forced himself to remain standing and dropped neither the pistol nor the Sarin. Seeing that his bullet had disabled his attacker, al-Assad turned on his heel and, despite his throbbing wound, urged himself along toward his target.

Caroline watched as al-Assad lumbered off and turned her attention to Waldbaer’s wound. She tucked the Walther into her waistband and yanked the scarf from her neck and wrapped it tightly around the detective’s arm as a tourniquet.

“I know where he’s going,” Waldbaer gasped. “Damn it, there’s a children’s event by the Ferris wheel. He’s after the kids.”

The trio of uniformed policemen caught up with them and one of them called for an ambulance.

“Leave me here,” Waldbaer growled. “Stop that bastard.”

The officers and the female CIA operative broke into a run.

Hirter was on his feet. Keeping to the shadow of the tents as much as possible, he quietly gained on al-Assad who was now moving at a much reduced pace. The American saw his target dart around a smoked fish concession, heading for the the Ferris wheel. He could make out a crowd in the distance, gathered under a blue and white striped canopy. As he continued to close on the scene and on al-Assad, Hirter saw a gathering of children, several holding balloons. Al-Assad was limping directly toward them. Hirter forced himself to pick up speed, sucking in oxygen for his aching lungs.

Ten yards from the crowd of children cheering the antics of a clown on stilts, al-Assad heard a rhythm of pounding feet and labored breathing behind him. He turned and saw Hirter close enough to make out his features. Al-Assad recognized him as the man he had covertly observed weeks ago in the mountain meadow.
I should have killed him then
, he thought in self-reproach.

Al-Assad raised his pistol and fired, but Hirter dodged to the left and the round went wide. He took aim again, but the man crashed heavily into him before he could exert trigger pressure. On impact, al-Assad’s pistol spun away.

Hirter slammed a fist directly at al-Assad’s bleeding hip, evoking a shrill scream as a tide of pain coursed through his body. Al-Assad fought back with animal fury, splitting Hirter’s lip and chipping a tooth. The two men rolled across the ground, while the children regarded the scene as another form of entertainment.

“Everybody get out of here,” Hirter screamed, but there was no response from the young crowd.

Al-Assad scratched at Hirter’s eyes, gouging a bleeding furrow in his cheek. Hirter grasped at al-Assad’s wound. Al-Assad used the moment to reach into the plastic bag and tear the lid off of the card
board container. Hirter slammed a fist repeatedly into al-Assad’s ribs. Despite the onslaught of blows, al-Assad pulled the gleaming cylinder free of the bag.

“No,” Hirter yelled through bloodied lips as he saw a grinning al-Assad depress the activation button. The device began to hiss and al-Assad raised his voice in a triumphal roar, oblivious now to Hirter’s continuing assault.

“
Allah Akhbar
,” he chanted.

As he opened his mouth again to repeat the ancient invocation, Hirter grabbed al-Assad’s head with both hands and slammed it down hard on top of the cylinder.

Al-Assad felt his teeth break as they impacted the metal device. He felt powerful and determined hands remorselessly force his mouth over the canister. He felt as well the cold spray as it coated his mouth, throat, and gums. He flailed blindly at Hirter, but his hands found no purchase. He tried to lift his head from the spraying vessel, but could not counteract the pressure Hirter applied. He was conscious that the man was whispering in his ear.

“This is for Charles, you piece of garbage. Drink in deeply.”

This was not in the vision
, al-Assad thought as his eyelids began to flutter uncontrollably along with his limbs. Blood ran from his nostrils and mouth, coating the slick sides of the Sarin cylinder. His heart was racing and he felt his bladder empty, soiling his twitching legs.
Not in the vision at all
. The mechanism atop the cylinder continued to efficiently spray its contents into al-Assad’s throat and was carried deep into his lungs.

By the time Caroline O’Kendell and Waldbaer reached the scene, al-Assad was staring lifelessly at the ground, mouth still firmly fixed to the Sarin dispenser. Caroline turned her gaze to Hirter, whose face held a coldly contented look that was, she knew, in all aspects primordial. She knelt down at his side and, professional demeanor vanished, encircled him in her arms.

Waldbaer’s recovery was slow on all fronts. His physical recuperation took longer than expected. The shoulder wound became infected in a Munich hospital and required a series of operations. Eventually the damaged arm was repaired and functional.

Waldbaer’s professional health was more complicated. The nerve gas attack on the Oktoberfest had been disrupted, it was true, but not entirely. When the final tally was taken, sixty-eight people had been killed and hundreds sickened. The two policemen shot by al-Assad had also died. Some newspapers applauded Waldbaer’s performance, others criticized it. Politicians were equally split in their comments, and the Bavarian Interior Ministry conducted an official investigation. The Kommissar was fully exonerated in the ensuing report, but any chance of Waldbaer being promoted or assigned to a more prestigious location than Gamsdorf was buried by the controversy.

For his part, the detective did not seem to care a whit and went about his tasks with the same irritable attitude that he had always evidenced. Waldbaer had been invited to spend a week’s vacation with Robert Hirter in Washington the next summer and had accepted. He told his beer drinking friends at the Alte Post that he intended to stop smoking within the year. He usually exclaimed this with a weary sigh as he reached without enthusiasm for a cigarette.

Robert Hirter, Allen Chalmers, and Caroline O’Kendell were presented with Exceptional Operational Performance awards by the director of the CIA’s Clandestine Service. Their actions in working
with foreign police to disrupt a major Islamist terror attack were regarded as a textbook example of joint operations by the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center. Robert Hirter and Caroline O’Kendell joined a Fairfax County tennis club together and, mutual acquaintances believed, were on their way to building an association deeper in nature than friendship.

Ibrahim Baran grew slowly accustomed to imprisonment and found his universe of aspirations commensurately reduced. True to their word, his Turkish captors permitted him a respectable cell with a television, and gave him reading and exercise privileges. Just as importantly, Ibrahim’s cooperative attitude bought him access to a better cut of prison food than normal inmates were accorded. He gained significant amounts of weight. He continued to read the Koran with absorption, but had decided that the requirements of jihad and
shahid
were not, after all, roles destined for him.

August Sedlmeyer continued to visit the dead in his dreams with nocturnal regularity. He knew that he was one of the last of his devastated generation, but was less proud of this distinction than weary. He still loved to see the outline of the Bavarian Alps at sunset, even if imperfectly through weakening eyes. Still, he felt increasingly out of place in a world of cell phones and satellite television, and an age that did not take much account of soldiers. It was time to leave and he waited for his exit, not with apprehension but with longing.

Abdul al-Masri crossed from Turkey into Iraq and eventually made his way to North Waziristan in the uncontrolled spaces of rugged, rural Pakistan. He heard the news reports about the Oktoberfest attack while en route to a gathering of Al-Qaeda principals near the Afghan border. The men, armed with AK-47s, stood around a small campfire behind an obscure village mosque.

Asked about the attack, al-Masri shrugged into his rough woolen cloak as he poked a long stick into the flames and stirred the embers. “It was not the success planned, brothers, true. We wanted to
kill thousands, that was our holy ambition! We should not forget that the new weapon worked and can work again. Other weapons, too, await our use. It is a certainty. Be patient, brothers, the Prophet measures justice neither in days nor in years. There will come another time.” The embers flared as a breeze eased over the village, driven from the harsh and wild mountains above. It was a terrain that a poet might characterize as inherently savage and eternally uncompromising. Al-Masri felt quite at home.

This book is a work of fiction and none of the characters involved are real. Nonetheless, not everything in the novel is fantasy. The motivations attributed to the Islamist terrorists are based on fact, including the public statements of Islamist terrorist operatives, and the Al-Qaeda leadership of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, among others. The transnational nature of Islamist terror networks and their cellular structure has also been established beyond doubt, and it is true that Germany has been targeted by Islamist operatives.

Sarin is a real nerve agent and was developed in Germany and eventually weaponized by that country—though never employed—during World War II. It is also part of the historical record that Sarin and other nerve agents were produced by Nazi chemists at a facility in the town of Dyernfurth-am-Oder, and that a number of German workers were killed at the site by contact with nerve agents. Sarin (which was for years also part of the binary chemical weapons arsenal of the United States) is, in fact, linked to Al-Qaeda. Films captured in Al-Qaeda camps following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 contain footage of Sarin being employed experimentally on a dog, with lethal result. The experiment clearly suggests Al-Qaeda’s interest in employing Sarin as a weapon, both to inflict mass casualties and to instill fear of a weapon that cannot be seen or easily detected. The effects and symptoms of Sarin exposure as described in the story are factual, and there is a considerable body of professional literature on the chemical.

The Munich Oktoberfest is the largest public fair in the world and attracts around six million international visitors a year during its sixteen-day run. As described, beer from the six major Munich breweries is dispensed to the thirsty in a series of enormous tents. The Oktoberfest was the target of a terrorist bomb attack in 1980 that killed thirteen people and wounded hundreds. That attack was attributed to neo-Nazi elements.

According to open source information, Menwith Hill Station in the United Kingdom is a signals intercept facility jointly run by the U.S. and the British SIGINT service, GCHQ.

Regarding the introductory episode of the novel, on July 17, 2003, a long-buried U.S. bomb from the Second World War exploded near the Salzburg train station (where the author was regularly underway during the period). Two of the technicians attempting to deactivate the bomb were killed and another seriously wounded. Could this entombed bomb have claimed the final casualties of World War II?