Opal gave it.
“Is that a Somali name?”
Behind him, the Somali shook his head. The Pakistanis did not understand.
“No, Sheikh, I am from Ethiopia.”
“That is a mainly nasrani country. Are you a Christian?”
“Thanks be to Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate. No, no, Sheikh, I am not. I am from the Ogaden, just over the border. We are all Muslims and much persecuted for it.”
The face with the amber eyes nodded approvingly.
“And why did you come to Somalia?”
“There were rumors in my village that recruiters from the Ethiopian army were coming to press-gang our people into the army to fight in the invasion of Somalia. I escaped and came here to join my fellow brothers in Allah.”
“You came from Kismayo to Marka last night? Why?”
“I am looking for work, Sheikh. I have a job as tally clerk at the fish dock, but I hoped for something better in Marka.”
“And how did you come by these papers?”
Opal told his rehearsed story. He had been motoring through the night to avoid the blinding heat and sandstorms of the day. He noted his petrol was low and stopped to fill up from his spare jerrycan. This was, by chance, on a concrete bridge over a dry wadi.
He heard a faint cry. He thought it might be the wind in the high trees that stand near there, but then he heard it again. It seemed to come from below the bridge.
He climbed down the bank into the wadi and found a pickup truck, badly crashed. It seemed to have come off the bridge and dived into the wadi bank. There was a man at the wheel, but terribly injured.
“I tried to help him, Sheikh, but there was nothing I could do. My motor bicycle would never carry two, and I could not bring him up the bank. I pulled him out of the cab in case it caught fire. But he was dying, inshallah.”
The dying man had begged him, as a brother, to take his satchel and deliver it to Marka. He described the compound: near the street market, down from the Italian roundabout, a timber double door with a latched door for the lookout.
“I held him while he died, Sheikh, but I could not save him.”
The robed figure considered this for some while, then turned to look through the papers that had come from the satchel.
“Did you open the satchel?”
“No, Sheikh, it was not of my business.”
The amber eyes looked thoughtful.
“There was money in the satchel. Perhaps we have an honest man. What do you think, Jamma?”
The Somali smirked. The Preacher let out a torrent of Urdu at the Pakistanis. They moved forward and seized Opal.
“My men will return to that spot. They will examine the wreck, which must surely still be there. And the body of my servant. If you have lied, you will surely wish you had never come here. Meanwhile, you will stay and wait for their return.”
He was imprisoned again, but not in the decrepit shed in the yard from which an agile man might escape in the night. He was taken to a cellar with a sand floor and locked in. He was there for two days and a night. It was pitch-dark. He was given a plastic bottle of water, which he sipped sparingly in the blackness. When he was let out and brought upstairs, his eyes puckered and blinked furiously in the sunlight from the shutters. He was taken to the Preacher again.
The robed figure held something in his right hand, which he turned over and over in his fingers. His amber eyes moved to his prisoner and settled on the frightened Opal.
“It seems you were right, my young friend,” he said in Arabic. “My servant had indeed crashed his truck into the bank of the wadi and died there. The cause”—he held up the object in his fingers—“this nail. My people found it in the tire. You spoke the truth.”
He rose and crossed the room to stand in front of the young Ethiopian, looking down at him speculatively.
“How is it you speak Arabic?”
“I studied in my spare time, sir. I wanted the better to read and understand our Holy Koran.”
“Any other language?”
“A little English, sir.”
“And how did you come by that?”
“There was a school near my village. It was run by a missionary from England.”
The Preacher went dangerously quiet.
“A nasrani. An infidel. A kuffar. And from him you also learned to love the West?”
“No, sir. Just the opposite. It taught me to hate them for the centuries of misery they have inflicted on our people and to study only the words and the life of our prophet Muhammad, may he rest in peace.”
The Preacher considered this and smiled at last.
“So we have a young man”—he was clearly speaking to his Somali secretary—“who is honest enough not to take money, compassionate enough to fulfill the wish of a dying man and wishes to serve only the Prophet. And who speaks Somali, Arabic and some English. What do you think, Jamma?”
The secretary fell into the trap. Seeking to please, he agreed their discovery was fortunate indeed. But the Preacher had a problem. He had lost his computer expert, and the man who brought him his downloaded messages from London, while never revealing that he himself was in Marka, not Kismayo. Only Jamma could replace him in Kismayo; the rest were not computer literate.
That left him short a secretary but facing a young man who was literate, spoke three languages apart from his Ogaden dialect and sought work.
The Preacher had survived for ten years on the basis of a caution bordering on paranoia. He had seen most of his contemporaries from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the 313 Brigade, the Khorosan executioners, the Haqqani clan and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen group, traced, tracked down, targeted, wiped out. More than half of these had been betrayed.
He had shunned cameras as the plague, changed residence constantly, altered his name, hid his face, masked his eyes. And stayed alive.
He would tolerate in his personal entourage only those he was convinced he could trust. His four Pakistani bodyguards would die for him but had no brains. Jamma was clever, but he needed him now to oversee the two computers in Kismayo.
The new arrival pleased him. There was proof of his honesty, his truthfulness. If he took him into his employ, he could be monitored night and day. He would communicate with no one. And he needed a personal secretary. The idea that the young man facing him was a Jew and a spy was inconceivable. He decided to take the risk.
“Would you like to become my secretary?” he asked gently. There was a gasp of dismay from Jamma.
“It would be a privilege beyond words, sir. I would serve you faithfully, inshallah.”
The orders were given. Jamma was to take one of the pickups in the compound and drive to Kismayo to take over the managership of the Masala warehouse and the Preacher’s sermon-broadcasting computer.
Opal would take over Jamma’s room and learn his duties. An hour later, he pulled on the bright red baseball cap with the New York logo on it that he had been given by the wrecked truck. It had belonged to the Israeli skipper of the fishing boat who had had to give it up when fresh orders came through from Tel Aviv.
Out in the courtyard, he wheeled his trail bike over to the decrepit shed in the wall to store it out of the sun. Halfway across, he stopped and looked up. Then he slowly nodded and walked on.
In a buried control room outside Tampa, the figure far below the circling Global Hawk was seen and noted. An alert call was made and the image patched through to a room in the U.S. embassy in London.
The Tracker looked at the slim figure in dishdash and red cap, staring at the sky in faraway Marka.
“Well done, kid,” he murmured. Agent Opal was inside the fortress and had just confirmed all Tracker needed to know.
• • •
The last killer neither stacked shelves nor served on a garage forecourt. He was a Syrian by birth, well educated and with a diploma in dental studies, and he worked as assistant to a successful orthodontist on the outskirts of Fairfax, Virginia. His name was T
ariq Hussein.
He was neither refugee nor student when he arrived from Aleppo ten years earlier but a legal immigrant who had passed all the tests for legitimate entry. It was never established whether he bore with him, that far back, the raging hatred for the West in general and America in particular that his writings revealed when his neat suburban bungalow was raided by the Virginia state police and the FBI or whether he developed it during his residence.
His passport revealed three journeys back to the Middle East during that decade, and it was speculated he may have become “infected” with his rage and loathing during those visits. His diary and his laptop disclosed some of the answers but not all.
His employers, neighbors and social circle were all intensively questioned, but it seemed he had fooled them all. Behind his polite, smiling exterior, he was a dedicated Salafist, subscribing to the meanest and harshest brand of Jihadism. In his writings, his contempt and loathing of American society emerged from every line.
Like other Salafists, he saw no need to wear traditional Muslim robes nor grow a beard nor pause for the five daily prayers. He was clean-shaven daily, with neat, short black hair. Living alone in his detached suburban bungalow, he nevertheless socialized with work colleagues and others. With the American love of friendly-sounding diminutives for first names, he was Terry Hussein.
Among these friends at the local bar, he could explain his teetotalism as a desire to “keep in shape,” and this was accepted. His refusal to touch pork or sit at a table where it was being consumed was not even noticed.
Because he was single, a number of girls made eyes at him, but his rebuffs were always polite and gentle. There were one or two gay men who frequented the neighborhood bar, and he was asked once or twice whether he was one of them. He remained polite as he denied it, simply saying he was waiting for Miss Right.
His diary made plain he believed gay men should be stoned to death as slowly as possible, and the thought of lying beside some fat, white pig-eating infidel cow filled him with revulsion.
It was not the teaching of the Preacher that created his rage and hatred, but it channeled it. His laptop showed he had followed the Preacher avidly for two years but never betrayed himself by joining the fan base, though he longed to contribute. Finally, he decided to follow the Preacher’s urging: to perfect his adoration of Allah and His prophet by the act of supreme sacrifice, and go to join them in paradise eternal.
But also to take with him as many Americans as he could and die a shahid, a martyr, at the hands of their infidel police. For this, he would need a gun.
He already had a Virginia driver’s license, the principal photo ID, but it was in the name of Hussein. Given the media coverage that several assassinations that spring and summer had already generated, he thought the name might be a problem.
Staring at his face in the mirror, he realized that with black hair, dark eyes and a swarthy skin, he looked as if he might have come from the Middle East. The surname would prove it.
But one of his coworkers in the laboratory was similar in appearance and he was of Hispanic origin. Tariq Hussein determined to secure a driver’s license in a more Spanish-sounding name and began to scour the Internet.
He was surprised by the simplicity. He did not even have to present himself in person nor write a letter. He simply applied online in the name of Miguel “Mickey” Hernandez, up from New Mexico. There was a fee, of course: seventy-nine dollars to Global Intelligence ID Card Solutions, plus fifty-five-dollar express delivery charge. The Virginia license to replace his “lost” one came in the mail.
But his principal research online had been for the right gun. He spent hours poring over the thousands of pages concerning guns and gun magazines. He knew more or less what he wanted and what he needed it to do. He just sought advice on which gun to buy.
He dawdled over the Bushmaster, used at Sandy Hook, but discarded it due to its lightweight 5.6mm bullets. He wanted something heavier and more penetrating. He finally settled on the Heckler & Koch G3, a variant of the A4 military assault rifle, using standard NATO ordnance of 7.62mm, which, he was assured, would tear through tinplate without shredding.
The online research engine informed him he would be unlikely to secure the fully automatic version under U.S. law, but the semiautomatic version would suit his purpose. It would fire a round for every time the trigger was squeezed—fast enough for what he had in mind.
If he was surprised at the ease of obtaining a driver’s license, he was bewildered by the simplicity of buying a rifle. He went to a gun show at the Prince William County Fairgrounds at Manassas, hardly an hour away and still in Virginia.
He wandered in some perplexity through the sales halls, offering an array of lethal weaponry sufficient to start several wars. Finally, he found the HK G3. On production of his driver’s license, the beefy salesman was delighted to sell him the “hunting rifle” for cash dollars. He just walked out with it and loaded it into the trunk of his car. No one raised an eyebrow.
The ammunition for the twenty-round magazine was just as easy, but from a gun shop in Falls Church. He bought a hundred rounds, an extra magazine and a magazine clamp, to clip the two mags together and give him forty rounds without the need to reload. When he had all he needed, he drove quietly back to his small house and prepared to die.
• • •
It was on the third afternoon that al-Afrit came to visit his new prize. From the bridge of the Malmö, Capt. Eklund saw the larger fishing dhow when it was already halfway between the shore and the ship. His binoculars picked out the suit of Mr. Abdi, beside a white-robed figure, under an awning amidships.
Jimali and his fellow pirates had been replaced by another dozen youths, who were indulging in a Somali practice the Swedish mariner had never seen before. When they boarded, the new guard crew brought with them large bundles of green leaves, not sprigs but bushes of them. This was their khat, which they were chewing steadily. Stig Eklund noticed that by sundown they were high on it. Then they varied between somnolent and easily angered.
When the Somali standing beside him followed his eyeline and spotted the dhow, he sobered up fast, ran down the companionway to the deck and shouted to his companions, lounging under the awning.
The old clan chief climbed the aluminum ladder to the deck, straightened and looked around him. Capt. Eklund had his cap on and saluted. Better safe than sorry, he thought. Mr. Abdi, who had been brought along as interpreter, made the introductions.
Al-Afrit had a lined and almost coal black face beneath his headdress, but his legendary cruelty showed in his mouth. In London, Gareth Evans had been tempted to warn Capt. Eklund but could not know who might be standing beside him. Mr. Abdi had also said nothing. So the captain was unsure exactly whose prisoner he was.
With Abdi tagging along to interpret, they toured the bridge and officers’ wardroom. Then al-Afrit ordered that all the foreigners line up on the deck. He walked slowly down the line, ignoring the ten Filipinos but staring at the five Europeans.
His gaze lingered for a long while on the nineteen-year-old cadet, Ove Carlsson, neat in white tropical ducks. Through Abdi, he ordered the youth to take his cap off. He stared at the pale blue eyes, then reached up and fondled the corn blond hair. Carlsson blanched and pulled away. The Somali looked angry but took his hand away.
As the party left the deck for the ladder, al-Afrit finally uttered a stream of Somali. Four of the guards he had brought with him jumped forward, seized the cadet and hustled him to the ground.
Captain Eklund rushed out of the line to protest. Abdi grabbed his arm.
“Do nothing,” he hissed. “It is all right, I am sure it will be all right. I know this man. Do not anger him.”
The cadet was forced down the ladder into more waiting hands in the dhow.
“Captain, help me,” he shouted.
Captain Eklund rounded on Abdi, the last man off his ship. He was red-faced with rage.
“I hold you responsible for this l
ad’s safety,” he snapped. “This is not civilized.”
Abdi, with his legs already on the ladder, was pale with distress.
“I will intervene with the Sheikh,” he said.
“I am going to inform London,” said the captain.
“I cannot permit that, Captain Eklund. It is about our negotiations. They are very delicate. Let me handle this.”
Then he was gone. On the way back across the swell to the beach, he sat in silence and cursed the old devil at his side. If he thought snatching the cadet would put pressure on London to raise the ransom price, he would ruin everything. He was the negotiator; he knew what he was doing. That apart, he feared for the boy. Al-Afrit had a reputation with the prisoners.
• • •
That evening, the Tracker called Ariel in his Centerville attic.
“You recall the short film I left with you.”
“Yes, Colonel Jackson.”
“I want you to screen it on the Jihadist Internet channel, the one the Preacher always uses.”
It went worldwide an hour later. The Preacher sat in his usual chair, talking directly into the camcorder and thus to the Muslim world. With an hour of preannouncements, the entire fan base would be listening, plus millions who were not converted to extremism but were interested, and every counterterrorist agency in the world.
They were all surprised, then riveted. The figure they saw was a hard-looking man in his early to mid-thirties, but this time he wore no covering drawn from his headdress over his lower face. He had a full black beard, and his eyes were of a strange amber hue.
Only one man watching knew that the eyes were contact lenses and that the speaker was Tony Suárez, who lived in Malibu and could not comprehend a word of the Koranic inscriptions on the sheet behind him.
The voice was accent-perfect, the tones of the British mimic who had listened to only two hours of previous sermons before producing an identical replication of the voice. And the screening was in color, not black and white. But to the faithful, it was undoubtedly the Preacher.
“My friends, brothers and sisters in Allah, I have been missing from your lives for some time. But I have not wasted my time. I have been reading, and studying our beautiful faith, Islam, and contemplating many things. And I have changed, inshallah.