Page 4 of The Last Days

  cuso’s life depended on what he did in the next few seconds. He wanted to get up. He wanted to help. But he couldn’t. He was terrified—afraid to fight, afraid to move, afraid of death and what might be on the other side.

  Suddenly, someone called to Bennett through the gunfire.

  “Jon, I’ve got it.”

  It was Galishnikov. Desperate to do something to help his friends, the Russian scrambled out from under the car. He jumped into one of the open passenger doors and rummaged around the backseats.

  “Where is it?’ Galishnikov yelled. “Where’s the ammo?

  “I’m out,” Mancuso yelled.

  “ can’t find it,” Galishnikov kept screaming. “ can’t find it.”

  Mancuso ejected his last spent clip, and rushed in behind Galishnikov. He opened a second ammo box concealed under the passenger seats, reloaded, and came out firing.

  CRACK. CRACK.

  Bennett pressed his face against the wet pavement. He couldn’t see where the shots were coming from, but they were close—too close—and he didn’t dare move. He looked over at McCoy, terrified that she might have been hit. She wasn’t. She was fine, and fighting back. Bennett began to breathe again. Then he heard it again. Two bursts—CRACK, CRACK—CRACK, CRACK. Mancuso wasn’t more than two feet from McCoy. Bennett saw Mancuso’s head snap back. Then he dropped to the ground. Bennett watched him fall. He watched a pool of blood begin to form around him.

  A flash of lightning stung his eyes. Time stood still. Bennett could feel himself slipping into shock, and it all came rushing back. Jerusalem a few weeks before. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse.” The gun battle that left Dietrich Black dead and Bennett bleeding to death on the floor. He could still see the Iraqi terrorist—the black hood, the fire pouring from the muzzle. He could smell the smoke, the gunpowder, the rancid stench of death. He could still feel both rounds—the excruciating pain, like his body had been set on fire—one grazing his right shoulder, the other tearing off a chunk of his left forearm.

  But somehow he’d survived. Mancuso was dead. The man had a wife, Four kids. He’d worked for the State Department for sixteen years. He’d been handpicked by the president to protect Bennett and McCoy, and now he was gone. Why? It didn’t make sense. What made a husband and father put himself in harm’s way for complete strangers? What possessed any man to give up his own life to save others?

  A shudder rippled through Bennett’s drenched body. Waves of guilt washed over him in the rain. He was paralyzed by fear. He couldn’t move,

  couldn’t think, and shame began to consume him. He’d give anything to be back in New York, crunching numbers, cutting deals. What the hell was he doing in Gaza? What the hell made him think he could cut a deal with the Devil? The stupidity of it all suddenly hit him—a Wall Street strategist in a world where money couldn’t help him. It didn’t walk, didn’t talk, couldn’t shoot an AK-47, and neither could he.

  The rules here were different. There weren’t any rules at all.

  Maybe Dr. Mordechai was right, thought Bennett, suddenly oblivious to the gunfire all around him. “The problem with you Americans is that you don’t believe in evil,” the former Mossad agent had told Deek Black in the summer of 1990, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. “You guys at the CIA and the FBI—and definitely the guys at State—don’t properly anticipate horrible, catastrophic events because you don’t really believe in the presence of evil, the presence of a dark and wicked and nefarious spiritual dimension that drives some men to do the unthinkable.”

  Bennett hadn’t known what to make of that before. It went against everything he’d been brought up to believe.

  “I believe Saddam Hussein is both capable of and prone to acts of unspeakable evil, and you don’t,” Mordechai had added. “I’m right, and you’re wrong. It’s not because I know more than your government. I don’t. I know less. But I believe that evil forces make evil men do evil things. That’s how I anticipate what can and will happen next in life. That’s how I got to be the head of the Mossad, young man. And why I’m good at it. It’s going to be one hell of an August, and my country is going to suffer very badly because your country doesn’t believe in evil, and mine was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.”

  Bennett looked around him. Bullets whizzed over his head. Fires raged. Explosions were erupting all around him. Mordechai was right. He hadn’t believed in evil. Not really. Not until this. Now he could feel it in the air. He could smell it, taste it. The radicals had to be stopped. Suicide bombers and the groups and states that funded them—they weren’t misguided or misunderstood. They were controlled by evil. Pure evil. And evil couldn’t be negotiated with. It could only be hunted down, captured, or destroyed. Like a cancer or ebola. Ignore those possessed by evil and they’d kill you. Fast or slow, it didn’t matter. Remove some but not all traces of the virus and it would still kill you. Fast or slow, it was just a matter of time.

  Bennett could see it clearly now. To misunderstand the nature of evil is to risk being blindsided by it. For evil, unchecked, is the prelude to genocide.

  It wasn’t all Muslims. Most gave their religion mere lip service. But radical, fundamentalist Islam required jihad, a war of annihilation against Christians,

  Jews, and Western culture and modernity. It was a lethal virus in the global body politic. It was an unholy war, and it was winner take all. There could be no truce, no cease-fire, no hudna, as it was known in Arabic. You were either on offense, or you were losing. Fast or slow, it didn’t matter, and time was not on your side.

  He couldn’t just lie there and do nothing. Friends of his—men and women willing to put their lives on the line to protect him—were being slaughtered. Last time it was Deek Black. This time it was Mancuso. But it could have been McCoy. It could have been him. At least the last time he’d gone down fighting. At least the last time he’d tried to fight back. Bennett could feel his heart racing. His hands were trembling. His face felt hot. A surge of anger so intense and so foreign it scared him even more began forcing its way to the surface.

  The thoughts rushing through Bennett were alien to everything he’d been taught to believe. They smacked of the very intolerance and judgmentalism he’d been so relentlessly warned against back at Georgetown and Harvard. But what was “tolerance” in the face of terror? Wasn’t it surrender? Wasn’t it social suicide?

  Suddenly—without warning—Bennett began to move. He grabbed the machine gun, scrambled out from under the limousine, and took aim at the two hooded men who’d just shot Mancuso. Now they were charging at him. It was kill or be killed. It was winner take all, and he could see fire coming from the barrels of their AK-47s. He’d been here before. He’d looked into a killer’s eyes. Bennett raised the AK-47, pulled the trigger and didn’t let go. In a fraction of second, he emptied the entire clip, riddling the two men with dozens of rounds until they collapsed just fifteen or twenty yards away. They were screaming and thrashing about in pain and rage. And then, their bodies and screams went silent.

  McCoy was stunned. She just stood there, mesmerized by the two lifeless bodies, taken off guard by Bennett’s sudden engagement.

  “Erin, we can’t stay here—we’ve got to move out now.”

  Bennett wheeled around. He saw two men sprinting through the flames at the other end of the courtyard. Then he heard the incoming sizzle.

  “Get down—get down—RPG.”

  Bennett hit the deck, bringing McCoy down with him. He covered her body with his own as the rocket-propelled grenade came whistling through the gates. It missed McCoy’s head. It missed his own by no more than a few inches, and barely missed the limo as well. Bennett could still see the smoke of the RPG’s trail slicing the air above them, across Snapshot’s hood. The missile hit the PLC building. The ferocious explosion sent another massive

  shock wave through the compound. But it was the image of McCoy almost having her head blown off that changed everything.

  “You two, in the car—now,” Bennett demanded, pointi
ng to Galishnikov and Sa’id, then turned to McCoy. uGet them in—everybody—let’s go.”

  Bennett pulled Sa’id and Galishnikov out from under the car. He shoved them into the backseat of the vehicle that now had to save their lives. Then he looked down at Mancuso’s crumpled body. He checked his pulse—just to be sure—but it was too late. He was gone. He and McCoy lifted Mancuso’s body. They carefully set it inside the car, along with his MP-5 and the Sig-Sauer pistol inside his jacket pocket. McCoy climbed in beside him, slammed the door behind her, and covered Mancuso’s body with coats.

  Bennett grabbed Mancuso’s earpiece and radio, put them on himself, jumped into the driver’s seat, pulled the door closed behind him, and hit the automatic door locks.

  “Halfback, this is Snapshot—can you hear me?”

  Max Banacci—six foot three inches tall, former Army Ranger turned lead DSS agent for the assault teams—responded immediately.

  “Bennett, that you? Where’s Donny? Where’s McCoy?”

  “Mancuso’s dead. McCoy’s with me. I’ve got Galishnikov and Sa’id. We’ve got to get out of here—now.”

  “No, no,” Banacci insisted. “We can’t just leave these guys here. We’ve got to—”

  “Banacci, it’s over. We’ve got to get out of here—now.”

  “No way. IfMancuso ‘s down then I’m in charge now and I say we stay until—”

  “Until what? We’re all dead? Forget it. I work for the White House. You work for me. Now get us the hell out of here before the rest of the peace process goes up in flames.”

  “You ‘re out of your mind, Bennett1.” Banacci shouted. “We don’t leave until we get the last man out. No one gets left behind. That dear enough for you?”

  Bennett fought to control his anger.

  ‘Everyone who’s alive is coming widi me,” Bennett shot back. “If you’ve got a problem with that, bring it up with the president. I’m taking these guys home.”

  FOUR

  Air Force One shot across the Atlantic at 43,000 feet.

  Among those aboard were Defense Secretary Burt Trainor, Deputy Secre tary of State Dick Cavanaugh, Press Secretary Chuck Murray and a cadre of se-nior officials from the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department Policy Planning Staff. Those who weren’t working were sleeping or watching the in-flight movie system. Events on the ground were moving fast, and word of what had just happened in Gaza would reach the president any moment. But it hadn’t yet.

  MacPherson sat alone in his airborne office, sipping a cup of coffee and reviewing the latest intel from Iraq. The Persian Gulf port city of Umm Qasr was controlled by the marines. Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) commandos were almost finished clearing mines from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Basrah and Nasiriyah were largely secured by army units in the south, as were Mosul and Kirkuk in the north. There were still sporadic skirmishes in Karbala and Al Kut. Holdouts from the Republican Guard were booby-trapping cars and fedayeen snipers took potshots at night. But that was to be expected. He had no doubt the entire country would soon be secure.

  All things considered, civilian casualties in Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein and Saladin—Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem in A.D. 1187—were much lower than he’d feared.

  Baghdad was not so lucky. American spy satellites had found the “smoking gun” the world had been demanding. Saddam had been minutes away from launching a nuclear ICBM—code-named The Last Jihad—against New York or Washington, or perhaps Israel or Saudi Arabia. His nuclear forces had been hidden in a children’s hospital in the heart of the city, not far from

  Baghdad University. The president didn’t have a choice. It was kill or be killed.

  MacPherson knew he’d done the right thing. But that didn’t make it easier to sleep at night. It didn’t make it easier to see the latest bomb-damage assessments, or read the latest intelligence updates, or listen to Paris, Bonn, and Moscow denounce him at the U.N. This was the price of being the world’s only superpower, and it was high indeed.

  Banacci was a Ranger.

  He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind the bodies of his fallen comrades. And as a senior DSS agent and team leader, he was supposed to take over after Mancuso. But Bennett was right. There were bigger fish to fry here and they didn’t need to be fighting each other. Banacci needed to get the president’s “point man” out of this hellhole and back to Washington. His job was to provide security for Snapshot and its occupants, so that’s what he’d do, like it or not.

  “Fine, hold on, “he shouted into his microphone. “We’ll give you guys cover.”

  Banacci cranked up the air conditioning and directed the team in the Suburban ahead of him—code-named Halfback—to take the point. His Suburban—Fullback—would bring up the rear. Agents in both vehicles locked their doors, popped in new ammo clips, and sucked down bottles of water.

  McCoy scrambled into the front passenger seat, next to Bennett. She pulled out a map and quickly tried to assess their options, navigating a way of escape. Bennett looked in his rearview mirror. What was this guy waiting for?

  Bennett gunned the engine. He was determined to get his team out alive. But if Galishnikov or Sa’id asked him what their chances were, he’d be tempted to lie. Yes, he’d raced his Porsche turbo down hairpin turns in the Colorado Rockies on weekends. He’d floored it on country straightaways in Connecticut. But he’d never been trained by the CIA’s school for defensive driving, or the Secret Service’s. And yes, he’d reviewed some maps and logistics on the flight from Washington. But he didn’t really know where he was. He hadn’t driven this team into Gaza. And he knew one wrong turn was a death sentence.

  Maybe he should have let McCoy take the wheel, but things were happening so fast. They’d be moving in a second—they’d be moving now if Bennett were leading. He couldn’t say it out loud. He could barely say it to himself. But the fact was that even a bulletproof, armor-plated limousine wouldn’t be enough if they were stopped and surrounded. Eventually, the

  mob would break in, the four of them would be yanked out, and, if history were any guide … it was a thought he couldn’t finish.

  Yuri Gogolov held the satellite remote in his hand.

  He was transfixed by the coverage from Gaza. He was watching on four different television sets, while checking the latest updates from AP, Reuters, and Agence France Presse on a laptop. The images of fire and death were mesmerizing. Thus far, the operation was going far better than expected. But these were just the first, early minutes. The world had no idea what still lay in store.

  MacPherson’s thoughts turned to his own Judas Iscariot.

  Stuart Morris Iverson—held in isolation under a twenty-four-hour-a-day suicide watch at a federal maximum-security prison—wasn’t talking. He re fused to cooperate unless the Justice Department—and the president him self—promised to take the death penalty off the table. The man wasn’t asking for a pardon, or immunity. He knew such inducements were out of the question. He was simply negotiating for his life, and he was a world-class negotiator.

  Unless MacPherson spared his life, Iverson—the man who’d served as president and CEO of the Joshua Fund and GSX, who’d served as the na tional chairman of then-governor MacPherson’s campaign to succeed George W. Bush as the forty-fourth president of the United States, who’d been approved by the Senate ninety-eight to nothing to become MacPherson’s Treasury Secretary—would simply refuse to talk. He’d refuse to divulge what he knew about a terrorist conspiracy whose tentacles reached from Moscow to Tehran. He’d refuse to tell the FBI the inside story of Yuri Gogolov— the shadowy Russian ultranationalist—or his Iranian operations chief, Mohammed Jibril.

  FBI Director Scott Harris and Attorney General Neil Wittimore didn’t care. The case against Iverson was solid. They didn’t need a plea bargain. They needed to fire a shot heard round the world. The president had to send the world a message: terrorists would be hunted down and brought to a final justice. To send Stuart Iverson, a personal friend of the p
resident, into the gas chamber—or order him to receive a lethal injection—would do just that. Yet to show even the slightest bit of leniency—especially with Iverson— would be devastating to the country’s war-on-terror efforts, Harris argued. It was a compelling case, even to a president who could generally be described

  as willing but ill at ease with enforcing the death penalty.

  “Mr. President, you’ve got an urgent call from the Sit Room.”

  Was there any other kind?

  The president looked up from his reading.

  “Which line?” he asked.

  “Line three, sir.”

  MacPherson picked up the phone and found his National Security advisor on the line. Marsha Kirkpatrick quickly briefed the president on the crisis in Gaza.. She explained that Bennett and his team were pinned down, and a torrential electrical storm made it impossible to send in a rescue team by air—not yet anyway.

  MacPherson tried not to betray the emotions suddenly forcing their way to the surface. But it wasn’t easy, and for a few moments, the line was silent. He was numb. He’d never even considered the possibility of Arafat being assassinated. Certainly not by a fellow Palestinian. And certainly not by Arafat’s own personal security chief. It was unthinkable. Abu Mazen, maybe. Mazen didn’t have Arafat’s stature in Palestine, much less throughout the Arab world. He might never develop it. But Arafat was Palestine. He was the face, the voice, the spirit of the Palestinian revolution.

  Most of MacPherson’s top advisors considered Arafat a major obstacle to peace. Jack Mitchell’s guys at the CIA were adamant that MacPherson should refuse to even acknowledge Arafat’s presence or give him a role. The Clinton team had courted Arafat aggressively, constantly inviting him to the White House. But what had they gained? The most violent phase of the Palestinian intifada began during the Clinton years. So did the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And the evidence was compelling—the vast majority of those suicide bombings (Mitchell called them “homicide bombings” to put the emphasis on the fact that their purpose was murder, not self-sacrifice) were encouraged, paid for, and/or explicitly or tacitly approved of by Arafat and his henchmen.