“Another minute and we would have left you out here with the scorpions,” Juan was told when they came abreast.
“Sorry, sir,” Cabrillo said. “Something I ate earlier.”
“Not to worry.” The team leader slapped him on the shoulder, and together they climbed up into the chopper. Inside its rear cargo compartment, fold-down seats lined both walls. Juan slouched into one a little ways off from the others, making sure his pant cuff covered his metal ankle. He was pleased to note that not everyone had lowered their kaffiyehs, so he laid his head against the warm aluminum hull and closed his eyes.
He had no idea if he was in the middle of a regular Army platoon or surrounded by fanatical terrorists. In the end, if they discovered him, he decided it probably wouldn’t matter. Dead was dead.
A moment later, they were airborne.
THIRTEEN
The music came in ever-rising waves as it neared its crescendo. The orchestra had never played better, never had more passion. The conductor’s face glistened with sweat, and his baton whirled and flared. The audience beyond the bright spotlights was held rapt by the performance, knowing they were experiencing something magical. The rhythmic pounding from the percussion section sounded like an artillery barrage, but even that couldn’t drown out the swelling notes from the violins and woodwinds.
Then came an off-key sound.
The musicians staggered in their play but somehow managed to find their place again.
The dull thud came again followed by a sharp click, and the music stopped entirely.
Fiona Katamora returned from the performance she had been playing in her head, her right hand poised with an imaginary bow, her left curled for her fingers to rest on the strings.
Practicing music in her mind had been the only way to keep herself sane since her capture.
Her cell was a featureless metal box with a single door and a chamber pot that was infrequently emptied. A low-wattage bulb protected by a wire cage gave the only illumination. They had taken her watch, so there was no way for her to know how long she’d been their prisoner. She guessed four days.
Moments before their aircraft made its emergency landing in the open desert, their pilot had come over the intercom to explain that they had spotted an old airfield. He managed to eke a few more miles out of their descent and set the aircraft down. The landing on the dirt strip was rough, but he had gotten them down in one piece. The cheer that went up when the wheels finally stopped rolling had been deafening. Everyone was up at once, hugging, laughing, and wiping at their joyous tears.
When the pilot and copilot stepped from the cockpit, their backs were slapped black-and-blue, and their hands shaken until they were probably ready to fall off. Frank Maguire had opened the main door, and a warm desert breeze had blown the stink of fear from the cabin.
And then his head had exploded, spraying blood and tissue onto the stewardess standing behind him.
A swarm of men emerged from along the length of the runway, where they had been hiding in foxholes covered with tarps and sand. They wore khaki uniforms, their heads swaddled in scarves. Several had ladders, and before anyone could think to reseal the cabin one of the ladders was set against the bottom sill. The pilot rushed to push it back, like a knight defending a castle wall. He was hit in the shoulder by the same sniper that killed Maguire. He went down clutching at the wound. An instant later, three men brandishing AK-47s had reached the cabin.
Fiona’s assistant, Grace Walsh, screamed so shrilly that Fiona later recalled being annoyed with her at the same time she feared for her life.
It all happened so fast. They were herded back away from the open door to allow more men to enter the plane. The terrorists kept repeating in Arabic, “Down. Everybody get down.”
Fiona somehow had managed to find her voice. “We will do whatever you say. There is no need for violence.” And she had gotten down on her knees.
Seeing her take the lead, the crew and staff sank to the cabin floor.
One of the men yanked Fiona to her feet and pushed her toward the exit at the same time that another man was climbing the ladder. Unlike the others, he wore dark slacks and a white short-sleeved oxford shirt.
Fiona knew the moment she saw him she would never forget his face. It was angelic, with smooth coffee-colored skin and long curling lashes behind wire-framed glasses. He was no more than twenty years old, slender, and almost bookish. She had no idea how he related to the gun-wielding savages shouting at her people. Then she noted he had something in his hands. A set of Arab worry beads and a copy of the Koran.
He smiled shyly as he passed her and was led into the cockpit.
She looked back to see her people being handcuffed to their seats, understanding telescoping in on her so the horror hit like a physical blow.
“Please don’t do this,” she begged the man grasping her arm.
He shoved her even harder toward the ladder. Fiona went wild, clawing at his face with her fingernails and trying to ram her knee into his groin. She managed to rip off his kaffiyeh and saw he didn’t have the classic Semitic features of a typical Libyan. She guessed he was Pakistani or Afghani. He balled up his fist and punched her hard enough that she momentarily lost consciousness. One second, she was scratching and kicking, and the next she was lying on the carpet, the left side of her face pulsing with pain. Men standing outside on the ladder started dragging her off the plane.
Fiona caught Grace’s eye just before she was hauled away. She had somehow managed to stifle her tears. Grace, too, realized what was about to happen.
“God bless you,” Grace mouthed.
“You, too,” Fiona replied silently, and then she was outside, being manhandled down to the ground.
They took her about a hundred feet from the aircraft and forced her to her knees, her wrists cuffed behind her back. Through the small cockpit window she could see the young man fiddling with the controls. She also saw that there was a hole in the plane’s tail section. It looked like a missile had struck the plane but hadn’t exploded. Which, she assumed, was the point. They wanted her but wanted the world to think she was dead.
The last of the terrorists finished securing the people left aboard. The suicide pilot stepped from the cockpit and hugged the last gunman at the door’s threshold. He paused there, waving to the others, who cheered him riotously. When the gunman was on the ground and the ladder hauled away, the pilot closed the hatch and retook his place in the cockpit.
Tears were running down Fiona’s cheeks. She could see faces pressed to the aircraft’s windows. Those were her people—men and women she had worked with for years. For them, she would show no weakness, and she willed herself to stop crying.
The working engine fired up, its howl building until it hurt her ears. There had been vehicles hidden along the dirt strip under camouflage tarps, one of which was a small utility tractor like those seen at airports the world over. It approached the big plane’s front landing gear, and the driver attached a tow hook.
It took several minutes for him to position the plane at the foot of the compacted-earth airstrip. Another moment passed before the engine beat changed and the Boeing started accelerating down the runway.
Fiona prayed that the damage done by the missile strike was severe enough to prevent the aircraft from reaching its takeoff speed, but with so little fuel in the tanks and so few passengers on board she could see it gaining speed rapidly. It flashed by her, its exhaust like a reeking hot breath. The terrorists were firing their AKs into the air, cheering as the plane’s nosewheel slowly lifted from the ground. It hung awkwardly for a long moment and then the tail struck the gravel strip, a result of the damage and the inexperience of the pilot.
The nose started to fall back to earth, and Fiona was sure her prayers had been answered. They were running out of graded runway. He wouldn’t be able to take off.
And then the plane rose majestically into the air at a slight tilt. The cheering redoubled, and the amount of ammunition pumped i
nto the sky was staggering.
Fiona bit her lip as the jetliner slowly gained altitude. She had no idea how far they were going to take it. For all she knew, they were headed for Tripoli, to crash it into the conference hall where the peace summit was to be staged. Yet none of the terrorists acted as though they were ready to leave. They all looked skyward as the aircraft shrank into the distance. She couldn’t bear to watch but couldn’t tear her eyes from it.
The plane started to wing over, its nose now pointed at a hill some distance away. The pilot made an effort to regain control, and for a moment the aircraft leveled. Then in one violent maneuver it flipped completely onto its back. It slammed into a hill with enough force to shake the ground. Chunks of it went spinning away. The wings separated from the fuselage before bursting into flame. One of the engines tore free of the conflagration and somersaulted up the hill, kicking up gouts of earth. Dust blown up by the impact obscured the scene for many moments before slowly dissipating. The wings burned on while the white tube of the fuselage rolled safely out of the fire’s reach.
Fiona gasped while the men around her roared with approval.
Even from this distance, she knew no one had survived. Though they had been spared the horror of burning alive, no one could have lived through such a violent crash. Off to her side, just out of earshot, several of the terrorists began speaking in low, earnest tones. She could tell by their body language that they were disappointed that the plane hadn’t burned more thoroughly, and were probably deciding how best to proceed.
Across the runway, a tarp was pulled off a large earthmoving machine. Its engine bellowed, and soon it began erasing the evidence of the landing by systematically tearing up the strip they had graded to lure Fiona’s pilots into landing there. At the pace they were going, in just a few hours no trace of their presence would remain.
The meeting ended abruptly. The person Fiona assumed was the group’s leader issued orders to the others. She missed most of it, but did hear, “Make sure to remove any trace that the plane was hit by a missile, and don’t forget the handcuffs.” He finally approached her where she knelt on the stony ground.
“Why have you done this?” she asked in Arabic.
He leaned in close. All she could see were his eyes, dark pools of insanity. “Because Allah willed it to happen.” He called to one of his men. “Bring her. Suleiman Al-Jama will want to inspect his prize.”
A hood was tossed over her head, and she was manhandled into the back of a truck. The next time she was allowed to see, she was here in this cell, covered in a kind of burqa she recognized as the Afghani chadri. Her entire body was covered except for her eyes, which were shielded by a fine mesh of lace.
The noise she had heard that ended the concert in her head was a key being rammed into the lock and the bolt thrown. The door squealed open. She had yet to see any of her captors’ faces, other than the suicide pilot and the man she’d grappled with on the plane. The two men who filled the doorway were no different. They wore matching khaki uniforms without insignia and traditional headscarves.
One of them actually snarled when he saw she had managed to tear herself free of the burqa despite her cuffed hands. Averting his eyes so as not to look her in the face, he recovered it from where she’d been using it as a pillow and quickly draped it over her head and body.
“You will show respect,” he said.
“I recognize your accent,” Fiona replied. “You’re from Cairo. The Imbaba slums, if I’m not mistaken.”
He raised a hand to strike her but stopped himself. “Next time, my fist flies if you dare speak again.”
The guards took her from her cell and led her outside the prison building. She was actually grateful for the lace mesh, which protected her eyes from the brutal glare of the sun pounding against the desert floor. She could tell by its angle that it was late morning, but the heat wasn’t as bad as it should have been. They were higher in the mountains, she decided.
Keeping track of details like that and playing classical music in her head helped Fiona keep from dwelling on her predicament and the fate of her friends and staffers.
The terrorist camp looked like the hundreds she’d seen in surveillance pictures. There were a few wind-battered tents tucked up against a cliff that was pockmarked with countless caves. The largest, she knew, would be their last redoubt if the camp were ever attacked, and she had no doubt it was rigged with enough explosives to take down half the mountain.
A drill instructor was leading a batch of men through calisthenics on a parade ground. Judging by the crispness of their movements, they were nearing the end of their training cycle. A little ways off, in the lee of the mountain looming over the camp, another group was gathered to live fire AK-47s. The targets were too far away for Fiona to judge their accuracy, but with the amount of money funneled into terrorist groups such as Al-Jama’s they could afford to waste rounds training even the worst recruit.
Beyond the shooting range she could see a half mile into a shallow valley, with an even larger massif of mountains on the far side. There was excavation work under way at the bottom of the valley, and a rail line. She could see several boxcars on a siding next to a row of dilapidated wooden buildings. On the far side of the structures hulked a monstrous diesel locomotive that dwarfed a smaller engine which was configured much like the truck used to bring her here. The burqa’s mesh face screen made seeing details impossible.
Again, she had no intelligence on this place. A terrorist camp near a railhead had never been mentioned in any of the reports she read ad nauseam from the CIA, NSA, and FBI. This many years into the war on terror and they were still playing catch-up.
The guards led her into a cave a short way off from the main cavern. There were electric wires strung from the ceiling and bare light-bulbs every thirty or so feet. The air was noticeably colder and had that clammy feeling like an old basement in a long-disused building. They came to a wooden barrier built across the cave with an inset door. The guard who’d threatened to strike her knocked and waited until he was summoned.
He opened the door. They were at the very back of the cave. The room was ringed on three sides with rough stone. Thick Persian carpets were laid four or five deep on the floor, and a charcoal brazier smoldered in a corner, connected to the outside through a chimney tube that followed along next to the wires.
A man sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. He wore crisp white robes and a black-and-white kaffiyeh around his head. He was studying a book by the dim light—the Koran, she suspected. He didn’t look up or acknowledge their presence.
If ever there was a posed scene, this was it, Fiona thought. Had this been her office, she would have been at her desk, bent over an important-looking document with a pen in hand. She’d kept people waiting for up to thirty seconds, but this man didn’t look up for a full minute. His tactic of dominance was wasted on her.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked, closing the Koran with reverence.
“Ali Baba?” she said to goad him.
“Are you to be my Scheherazade?”
“Over my dead body.”
“That isn’t my particular predilection, but I’m sure it can be arranged.”
Fiona had no desire to let him pretend to be anything other than the monster he was. “No one knows your real name, but you go by Suleiman Al-Jama. Your stated goals are the destruction of Israel and the United States and the formation of an Islamic State stretching from Afghanistan to Morocco, with you as . . . Sultan?”
“I’m not sure what title I’ll take,” Al-Jama said. “Sultan works, but it has decadent connotations, don’t you think? Harems, palace intrigues, and all that.”
He rose to his feet in a quick fluid motion and got tea from a brass urn placed near the brazier. His motions were graceful but predatory in their swiftness. He poured himself a glass but didn’t offer any to Fiona.
Now that he was standing, she could see he was nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders and, judging b
y the thickness of his bare wrists, strongly built. She couldn’t see his features, and in the wavering light and through the burqa’s lace she could discern little of his eyes, other than the impression that they were deep-set and dark.
“Your Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Did you know he is a prophet in Islam? Not the last one, of course. That is Muhammad, peace be upon Him. But your ‘Savior’ is recognized as a great teacher.”
“We both worship the God of Isaac and Abraham,” Fiona said.
“But you do not believe in His final pronouncements to His last chosen Prophet, the holy words written through Muhammad and laid into the Koran.”
“My faith begins and ends with a death and resurrection.”
Al-Jama said nothing, but she could tell he had a stinging retort. He finally uttered, “Back to the quote. Do you think you are blessed?”
“If I can bring about the end of violence, I think the work itself is what is blessed, not those who participate.”
He nodded. “Well said. But why? Why do you desire peace?”
“How can you ask that?” Despite her earlier reservations, she felt herself drawn into the conversation. She had expected a tirade on the evils of the West, not an intellectual Q-and-A session. It was obvious the self-styled Suleiman Al-Jama was well educated, so she was curious how he would justify his brand of mass murder. She’d listened to tapes of Bin Laden’s ramblings, read transcripts of detainees at Guantánamo, and watched dozens of martyrdom videos. She wanted to know how he differed, although she already knew that the difference, if any, had no meaning at all.
Al-Jama said, “Peace equals stagnation, my esteemed Secretary. When man is at peace, his soul atrophies and his creative spirit is snuffed. It is only through conflict that we are truly the beings that Allah intended. War brings out bravery and sacrifice. What does peace bring us? Nothing.”