Not only that but it had a massive website, accessed from all corners of the world by people planning to visit Mexico. The intercepted message from Peshawar suggested the four ex-Guantanamo Bay inmates were right there, in one of Mexico’s newest mosques.
Jimmy was back on the line to Bob Birmingham in moments, and two CIA station field officers were dispatched to the doorstep of MCM to make inquiries. They learned that the four had made no friends in MCM, mostly because of their aloof and unsociable attitudes. No one liked them, especially the one with the scar.
One friendly imam was only too pleased to confirm they had been there, but had now left. He identified the photographs, confirmed the four men had been in residence for only twenty-four hours, and then left for the airport. He had no idea where they were going. This motley group of facts was presented to the director of the National Security Agency, and Jimmy instantly connected the missing Muslims with the border killings.
“Gotta be the same blokes, right?” muttered Jimmy to himself. “They’ve been helped by a national organization on every bloody step of their journey. Travel plans immaculate. Money no object. And we’ve been about five steps behind, all the bloody way.”
Jimmy Ramshawe was certain the cold-blooded shooting of the two guards must have been the work of Ibrahim Sharif and his team. It was the exact right day and the exact right time for these four professional terrorists to breach the border. “And now where the hell are they? Right back in the USA, of course. Everything that made us nervous on the day they were released, just came true.”
Jimmy knew the guys who had checked into the old MCM in Avenue Colonia, and the gang who had just blasted their way into the United States were one in the same.
We have to find these characters because they are planning something terrible.
He picked up his secure phone and dialed Mack Bedford in Maine. The ex-SEAL commander was surprisingly sanguine about the situation, saying simply, “Ever since last February, when that Judge Stamford Osborne kicked ’em out of the front door, I always thought they’d come right back in, through the back.”
THE
SOUTHWESTERN CHIEF
came thundering into Albuquerque’s First Street station four minutes late from Los Angeles. The massive diesel locomotive, now bound for Chicago, was a deafening presence in the quiet, sunlit, adobe New Mexican city.
Abrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan stood separately on the departure platform, some fifty yards apart. They had purchased new clothes and now stood dressed for a city. No neckties, but white shirts with sport coats and regular black loafers. No Stetsons or ponchos. Definitely no Kalashnikovs. Each now carried a briefcase: brown leather for Ibrahim and Yousaf, black for the others.
Their tickets had been pre-paid under the names on their passports. They each had a reserved seat, and they boarded the great American passenger train without even a flicker of recognition, seated far apart but with reservations in the dining car that placed them within conversational distance.
Yousaf thought the whole thing was, in a Western phrase, pretty nifty. Which was understandable since his normal family train rides had often involved carriages packed to the gunwales with rural farmers, and sometimes their livestock, with others riding on the roof carrying baskets of live chickens.
And the four gazed through the windows in awe as the mighty locomotive pulled out at 12:40 p.m. sharp, speeding through the manicured
suburbs of Albuquerque, on its 550-mile journey along the old cattle routes, to Dodge City: ETA a half-hour after midnight.
The route took them through vast expanses of the fabled American West, from New Mexico through wheat fields, past ranches and missions, across mountains and deserts, and sometimes thundering through curving canyon passages only a few feet wider than the train itself.
They dined on roast beef and ice cream, and rolled into Dodge City at 12:34 a.m. They were booked into separate sleeping cars, and slept as the
Chief
hammered its way across the great flat blue-stem prairies of Kansas.
They were all awakened as the train echoed its way into the gigantic Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, for its scheduled twenty minute service stop. Ben and Abu went back to sleep, but Ibrahim and Yousaf headed out onto the breathtaking concourse and gaped at the almost hundred-foot high ceiling, with its three massive 3,500-pound chandeliers, and six-foot wide clock hanging over the central archway.
Neither of them had ever seen anything like it, anywhere, never mind in a train station. And they forgot about not knowing each other as they stood there gazing around them, staring at the ornamental plasterwork completed in the 1999 renovation. It would, of course, have meant nothing to them, but the spectacular mouldings in the ceiling were crafted by Hayles and Howe, fresh from restoring the ceilings of Windsor Castle after the 1992 fire.
Ibrahim and Yousaf walked back to the train and headed to the dining car for breakfast, speaking softly at adjoining tables as the locomotive pulled out of the Taj Mahal of railroad stations at a quarter to eight in the morning.
They were still sipping coffee as the train hauled over the 135-foot high steel bridge that spans the Missouri, America’s longest river. From there it set off on a three-and-a-half hour journey across the plains of northern Missouri, and then made a twenty-mile dash through southern Iowa. But just after the scheduled stop at Fort Madison, right on the Illinois line, the train came to a shuddering halt, for no apparent reason, in the middle of nowhere.
Ibrahim, raised on a lifetime of old, mostly pirated British and American movies, half-expected a squadron of Hitler’s Nazis to come jackbooting along the corridor demanding papers. American Nazis, of course, but nonetheless officers who would seize him and his pals and bring them back to the concentration camp of Guantanamo Bay.
He turned to a young man sitting right next to him reading the
Kansas City Star
and asked, “Why this hold up? Is this official?”
“Official! Hell no,” the kid replied. “We just reached the Mississippi. We got river traffic coming under the bridge. It happens sometimes. Probably make us twenty minutes late getting to Chicago.”
Ibrahim Sharif had not felt such relief since Judge Osborne had freed him. He had no idea why a ship could shut the bridge, since he thought ships went under bridges and trains ran over them. He’d certainly never seen a bridge where the center span pivots to make a gap. And he sat patiently until the
Chief
moved forward again, and rumbled over the world’s longest double-decked swing-span bridge, high above America’s second longest river.
They reached Princeton, Illinois, at one o’clock and Chicago at twenty minutes after 3 p.m. Right on time at the end of the line, with 1,340 miles behind them. They had been on that train for almost twenty-seven hours, and no one in the United States had the slightest idea of their whereabouts.
The CIA suspected they were hiding out somewhere in the endless scrubland desert of New Mexico. Captain Ramshawe thought it more likely they had cleared the datum, and possibly taken a plane to God knows where.
But the FBI had alerted every airport security office and issued photographs of the four men, top-class photographs taken both in Guantanamo and in the Washington Court. They had e-mailed the images nationwide. Every airport guard was on the lookout for the four murder suspects. In Albuquerque’s International Sunport, a force of twenty reinforcements had been drafted in.
Every highway patrol in the country had the four photos on their cruiser screen. State troopers scanned every vehicle as they drove past. In New Mexico and the adjoining states of Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and the Oklahoma panhandle, any vehicle, car or truck, was pulled over if it carried more than four people. There were unprecedented traffic jams on the freeways of the southwestern states.
The murder of the two border guards was being treated like an assault on the very manhood of the United States. Who the hell were these little creeps, come busting in here, and opening fire on Uncle Sam’s finest? Left to the public and the media there could be a good old-fashioned Wild West lynch-party before sundown.
Except no one knew where the murderers actually were. And the gigantic manhunt taking place was having no luck whatsoever. Ibrahim,
Yousaf, Ben, and Abu were having coffee at separate tables in the Chicago station, trying not to look at each other, waiting to board Amtrak’s famous
Cardinal
for the 1,145-mile journey to New York City, partway along the historic old lines of the picturesque Norfolk and Southern Railroad.
And so, while the entire southwestern sprawl of the United States was consumed with their capture, the four former Guantanamo prisoners were casually reading the afternoon newspapers, which by now were splashing with the photographs, big, on the front page, of the men who were wanted for the double murder.
It’s a strange phenomena in the United States that the railroads, which opened up the lands to the west, and played such a massive part in forging the nation, are not considered as mainstream long-distance transport. Everyone flies. So if a police force seeks out fugitives from justice, they go for airports and roads
.
Which left Ibrahim and his guys more or less in peace until the
Cardinal
reached New York City.
And once more, the four terrorists stayed separate, uttering no word about their current notoriety, but each of them wishing there had been another way across that Mexican border, a method that might have prevented Abu Hassan blowing Ray and Matt’s brains out.
They boarded the
Cardinal
at 5 p.m. ready for the 5:45 departure. Ibraham had looked up the timetable and discovered the huge locomotive would haul the train for more than twenty-eight hours, with thirty-one stops, before it pulled into New York’s Penn Station, tomorrow night.
Ibrahim had no idea who the al-Qaeda mastermind was who was arranging their travel. But when he had reported to the ticket office in Chicago, everything was ready. Under the same false names, which required passport or driver’s license photo identity, there were travel tickets, vouchers for the dining car, and reserved sleeping berths. There would be no need for any of the four to speak one word throughout the long journey.
The
Cardinal
pulled out on time and headed south southeast through the flat wheat fields, past the soybeans and fruit, hay, hogs, and oats, two hundred miles, running in the dark, all the way to the Ohio border. They reached Cincinnati in the small hours as the men from the Middle East slept soundly in the sleeper car.
In the relatively short run along the northern edge of Kentucky, dawn began to break, and still the presses were pounding out newspapers, demanding the police find the men who had murdered the border guards, almost two thousand miles behind the train.
The sun rose over the banks of the mighty Ohio River as the
Cardinal
prepared for its final swing to the south from the West Virginian city of Huntington. From there it rolled on toward the southern end of the Allegheny Mountains. It stopped at White Sulphur Springs at 11:30 a.m. And when it left, it headed directly toward the high slopes of the Virginia Appalachians.
For Ibrahim and Yousaf, it was hard to believe this was all the same country. And now they were in some kind of wonderland, crossing the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, where another revolutionary, General Stonewall Jackson, had once nearly driven the government armies crazy.
If Ibrahim and Yousaf had understood the slightest vestige of U.S. history they would probably have sensed an affinity with that great southern warrior, and the Valley where his ghost haunts to this day. But they knew nothing. And when they reached Charlottesville, home of President Thomas Jefferson, they also knew nothing. Even when the conductor announced the significance of the stop, they stared blankly and separately, unaware of the revolution the third president had so influenced more than 230 years before—an even greater rebellion than their own.
They were, in a sense, kindred spirits passing in the mountain mists. Because they were men for whom a flame of righteousness could not be extinguished. The difference was, the Americans were highly educated, sure of their truths, sure of their intellectual ground.
Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan were little more than rabid dogs of war, fanatics who would kill and maim, without one thought about the ultimate outcome, the futility of their efforts, or the shocking consequences of staging a four-man war on the United States.
Right now, they rode in peace, heading to Washington and then New York. It grew dark again as they left the nation’s capital, and it was almost 9:30 as they pulled into Penn Station.
Ibrahim had slyly informed them to meet him outside the main entrance where the taxi queue was located. He had an address, to which they should report. He also had a phone number, and all four still had their cell phones given to them in Mexico but connected to an American network.
Everyone was calm and confident, except for Abu Hassan, who was the most distinctive of them. All the way from Alexandria, he had been conscious of a fellow passenger staring at him. Every time he looked up, the man, a middle-aged, balding guy in a city suit and necktie, was looking
directly at him. Abu also noticed the man was reading the
Washington Post
, which had photographs of all four of them splashed on its front page. The Palestinian had been on the run for most of his life, either from the Mossad, the Israeli army, or the U.S. armed forces. And right now he smelled danger, not because of who the man might be, but because it didn’t matter who he was. Anyone in this country could betray him with one phone call. It would not take much more than that for all of them to find themselves under tight arrest.
Abu could not talk about it, nor could he indicate he suspected he was being watched. Instead he kept his head down and watched for the moment when the guy moved or left the carriage. If he made a phone call, Abu believed he would have to act.