Long-range surveillance was the speciality of the National Security Agency, and they’d tuned into the most dangerous terrorists before. In Ramshawe’s opinion, Bob Birmingham’s boys could cast a blanket electronic survey all over the North West Frontier. They could activate their moles and spies, and sooner or later the names Yousaf, Ibrahim, Ben, and Abu would come popping out of the ether.
Jimmy called the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and asked to be put through to Mack Bedford. He informed him of the missing CIA men and arranged for the ex-SEAL commander to come to Fort Meade that afternoon for a strategic discussion. Mack was unsurprised at the outrage in Peshawar.
“You have to meet these guys to understand their hatred of us,” he said. “Sounds to me like the assassins had been following our guys since Paris.”
“Then you don’t think Ibrahim and his buddies killed Phil and Fred?”
“I doubt it,” replied Mack. “They wouldn’t risk an uproar that quickly in the middle of a city, and for no reason. I’d guess al-Qaeda were on our case as soon as that PIA flight left Paris.”
“But they didn’t get Novio,” said Jimmy.
“Was he seated separately?”
“He was. As a bodyguard he wanted a longer view of the group, just in case anyone made a tricky move. He was sitting by himself, four rows back.”
“Then they may not have noticed him.”
“He also left the train station in Peshawar way in front of the other CIA guys, so they never connected him to them.”
“Lucky guy,” said Mack.
BACK IN PESHAWAR’S OLD CITY
, Shakir Khan sipped fruit juice in his wide, stone courtyard, now bathed in the warm noontime sun. He sat with his assistant Kaiser Rashid, the Taliban combat captain Musa Amin, and, from the nearby Grand Mosque, a black-turbaned Imam, who smiled through a white beard and solemnly wished peace and blessings on the Prophet Mohammed. Before them, on a stone bench, sat Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu.
This gathering was in the nature of a military debriefing, but it was not a nuts-and-bolts plan of action. It was an informal talk about life in Guantanamo Bay, and a kind of high-minded forecast of the wrath to come, the terror to be inflicted on the West. And, of course, the glory to Allah, which would surely follow when the Great Satan and its Zionist allies were driven from the Middle East forever.
“We will strike soon, and we will strike hard,” said Ben al-Turabi. “It’s important that they remember us. That we, who would be martyrs if necessary, had come back from the dead, and raised the Sword of the Prophet against our enemy, and smashed into them, as we did in 2001.”
The Imam continued to smile indulgently. “I am so proud of all four of you,” he said, “because, among us, you alone have understood that al-Qaeda and the Taliban will never be defeated, and that the more the Americans kill and humiliate us, the more we will expand as brothers in the cause of Allah.”
The other seven men in the courtyard all intoned together: “Allah is great. There is no other God but Allah.”
And the Imam continued, “A peaceful and happy life is a distant dream for us—and the false promises of the West will never be of any good to us. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan, you have kept alive the light of Allah in the darkest place on this earth, and now He has brought you home.”
The four ex-prisoners bowed their heads in respect, and then Shakir Khan spoke for the first time. “My friends,” he said, “we already know of the treachery of the Americans. Even as they cast goodwill upon us, and liberated our bravest warriors, they were already acting with venom and dishonesty, sending those two killers all the way to Peshawar to slaughter you all.
“Thanks be to Allah that His brave and gallant servants Nawaz and Fahd were able to cut down the American assassins before they could do us more damage.”
“Brave and gallant,” was a somewhat colorful description of the actions of Nawaz, who had hidden behind a curtain while stabbing Denson in the
back, and Fahd, who had shot Zarcoff dead from the heavy cover of a rickshaw parked forty yards away—while the police turned a deliberate blind eye.
Nonetheless, there was an element of pride in the courtyard as everyone congratulated everyone else, and the Imam wished peace and blessings upon them all.
More to the point was the plan formulating in the mind of Shakir Khan, whose task it now was to return Captain Musa and the four heroes to the al-Qaeda training camp up at the north end of the Swat Valley, in the mountains beyond the town of Kalam.
His government chauffeur would drive them out of the City at 10 p.m. in the limo, north through ancient towns, like Mardan, and then up through the passes through Madyan and Bahrain to Kalam, which straddles both sides of the river and is joined by a wooden suspension bridge. From this point on, you need a four-wheel drive with a strong engine and little value, or an ox cart, or a mule, or decent hiking shoes. The terrain is almost impassable, but the men of al-Qaeda knew what they were doing when they built their main training base up here. The land is cooler and the scenery spectacular, with massive snowcapped peaks rising above fertile farmlands, miles of blossoms in spring, and bounteous peach crops, plums, and oranges, even rice fields.
Tourists are banned, travelers are wary, and the locals suspicious. No one walks alone up here. And in the last hundred years no one ever could. Except for The Sheikh, who was nowadays in hiding or dead.
Shakir Khan’s driver would end his journey at Kalam. He would attend morning prayers at the picturesque wooden mosque, and then drive back to Peshawar. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan would change into tribal clothes and continue their journey over this rugged country, well-armed, and in a well-supplied mule cart, accompanied by two bodyguards from the training camp.
They would take the route that leads northward from Lake Mahodand, over the Dardarili Pass, and then down to Handrap on the Gilgit-Chitral road. Yousaf had relatives here, but he would not attempt to join them until his rehabilitation in the training camp with al-Qaeda’s highest officers. Many people had waited a long time to see the young warrior who had somehow gotten out of Guantanamo.
Shakir Khan mapped out all of this in the courtyard, and every now and then, touched on the revenge they would surely take on the Great Satan who had imprisoned the four men for so long without trial. The one
aspect of this revenge upon which everyone agreed was that it needed to happen very soon.
The four ex-prisoners, out of touch for so long, had no progressive ideas on a new and sensational attack on the United States. Indeed, they had not the first idea about a new target, a new strategic plan, or a new workable network of fundamentalists in America. The absence of bin Laden in recent years was, to al-Qaeda, like the Roman Legions without Caesar, or France’s Grande Armee without Napoleon. There was no big thinker, and al-Qaeda’s lower ranks had been terrified by the pulverizing attacks on them, launched by President George W. Bush and his co-horts Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Since then, the jihadists had made sporadic attacks on a nightclub, a Spanish railroad station, and a London bus—but nothing on the U.S. mainland, and nothing which truly made the United States sit up and take notice. It was time, and the powerful Shakir Khan, a devout Muslim fundamentalist to his fingertips, was considering taking over the role of principal al-Qaeda strategist. This was a position that would sit nicely with his Taliban roots and his clandestine support for this extremist religious organization, which had granted sanctuary, a haven, assistance, and military support to Osama and his men in the first case.
Shakir was a Machiavellian figure. He was secretly to the forefront in that ever-growing section of the Pakistan military that believed fervently in an Islamic State ruled by Sharia Law. He was constantly attempting to encourage a huge ideological division in the ranks of the Pakistani military. Indeed, he was widely suspected of being the leading figure in the background when the fundamentalists shot down Benazir Bhutto in December 2007.
Indeed it was Shakir’s friend, the al-Qaeda commander, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, who claimed responsibility for the attack, describing the Harvard-educated Ms. Bhutto as “the most precious American asset.” The Pakistani government also stated that it had proof that al-Qaeda was behind the assassination, and swore to God the killers belonged to Lashkar i Jhangvi-zan, an al-Qaeda-linked militant group blamed for hundreds of killings, including an attempt to assassinate former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
There were those who believed Shakir Khan was the secret leader of that formidable terrorist organization. And now, right here in the courtyard, he was expanding his vision on the major “hit” on the United States he intended, one that would attract world attention and implant a new
fear of the rising Muslim brotherhood—a fear that would prove, beyond doubt, the Islamists were back to their pre-2001 strength.
“Only by our actions, can we regain respect,” he said. “Actions, not words. And that leads directly to the subject of our new target, one that cannot be too heavily fortified by the American military.
“Quite simply, they are too strong both in weaponry and manpower. Therefore anything even remotely connected to their armed forces is out of the question because we cannot afford to fail. Also we could not undertake a major hijacking program because, again, their airport security is too strong.
“I refer you all now to the events of September 1, 2004, to an incident that still ranks as one of our finest triumphs—the successful attack on School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, the autonomous Russian republic in the North Caucasus.”
Shakir Khan outlined the brutal attack on the school, which had ended in violent explosions, fire and destruction, and the deaths of perhaps three hundred and eighty-five people, many of them students. A further seven hundred eighty people were wounded when a huge section of the roof caved in.
“The immortal brotherhood of the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance, financed and trained by al-Qaeda, led by our departed Muslim brother Shamil Basayev, held the great Russian army at bay for three days. We stormed and then dominated the school, and the town. No military operation since 2001 ever brought such endless glory upon our jihadist revolution. And such world attention. Gentlemen, I say to you now, Beslan was only a dress rehearsal.”
“But why, sir,” asked Ben al-Turabi, “have we never attempted a repeat of the operation?”
“Ben,” said Shakir Khan patiently, “after that, both U.S. security and Russian security were increased drastically, against us. Putin used it to tighten his grip on the Russian satellite republics, and the tyrant Bush continued to crush and humiliate us at every turn in the road.
“But the tyrant is gone from the White House. And the United States grows softer. Now is our chance to take them by surprise. And there is no place where surprise is simpler. Nowhere less heavily guarded than U.S. schools and colleges.”
“Are you suggesting that we four, within months of crossing the wire out of Guantanamo, should lead the highest-profile armed Muslim attack on the United States in a generation?” Abu Hassan was visibly cautious.
“If you were willing, I can think of no greater honor we could bestow on four of our finest young commanders, and no greater irony for the United States. That they should have stretched out some insincere hand of friendship for their usual political reasons, only for the jihadist warriors to spit at it, and then show them what we think of them.”
“Last time I spat at a U.S. combat soldier, he very nearly killed me,” said Ibrahim. “It was just before I was captured. He was a huge man and strong as a bear.”
“But these were proper U.S. troops, not security guards, which don’t exist in U.S. colleges.”
“The men who took Yousaf and I were Special Forces,” replied Ibrahim. “You could tell by their beards. They’re the only U.S. troops permitted to wear beards. It’s for working among us, in the mountains.”
“Well, you won’t find men like that in U.S. colleges,” said Shakir Khan. “And there you can effect the most terrible revenge on them for what they did to you and Yousaf, and to Ben and Abu Hassan.”
“When Shamil Basayev and his men took the Russian School, did the army come against them with full artillery and infantry?” asked Yousaf Mohammed, sternly.
“Oh yes,” said Khan. “The Russians deployed tanks and heavy armor against them, blasting holes in the walls of the school, killing indiscriminately, children, parents, and our brave fighters. But it still took them three days to defeat the small Islamic force. Though in the end we had many martyrs.”
He paused, and bowed his head, then looked up and added, “It was appropriate.
Riyadus-Salikhin
means ‘Garden of the Martyrs.’”
“And how did the al-Qaeda men get into the school in the first place?” asked Yousaf.
“Oh it was very simple,” said Khan. “They planted workmen in a team, which was in the school during the July holiday. We understand they concealed weapons and explosives in an unused area of the basement. We also heard they were able to walk into the school unannounced on September 1 because this was the traditional start of the Russian school year, their Day of Knowledge. The place was swarming with parents and other relatives of the children, and no one took a blind bit of notice of a few workmen wandering around the building.
“The preparation was so important in that mission. And it ended in worldwide headlines and praise for the brave jihadists who accomplished their mission. That day, the
amir
of the Muslim force was very proud of
them all. As indeed was Allah, for Allah is great, and He welcomes into His arms those who die in His service.”
Shakir Khan did not offer any examples of the outraged Western media, neither did he elaborate precisely why Allah so desired the mass slaughter of several hundred Russian schoolchildren.