by Marc Cameron
“Okay, Jared. All right, we’re going,” she said, still unconvinced. “I’ll call you whe—”
The truck in front of Nordstrom broke through the red brick façade, sending a blinding orange fireball in all directions. It took a full second for the roaring boom to reach Roberson’s ears. In an instant, four stories of steel, mortar, and glass vanished behind a mushroom of greasy black smoke. The initial blast tossed row after row of cars across the parking lot like so many pitiful toys. The screaming pulse and honk of car alarms followed the superheated wave of hurricane-force wind.
“Jared, tell me what’s going on... .” Amazingly, Molly was still on the line, her voice hushed, fragile.
Roberson clutched the corner of his patrol car to keep his feet, leaning into the hot wind. “I love you, Molly—” he whispered as the two remaining trucks detonated.
Tornadoes of fire and flaming debris shot skyward. Curling dragons of black smoke completely obscured the mall. A searing pressure wave slammed into Roberson’s chest, driving him to his knees and burning the scar on his face. Bits of shattered glass, shot skyward by the blasts, fell now to rattle off the hood of his patrol car in a constant rain. Three columns of inky smoke twisted upward from what had been Fashion Center Mall, blotting out the sun.
Roberson pressed the phone to his blistered ear, heard nothing but static, and began to weep.
Ash and debris were still falling like dirty snow when Nimble Rock Fire and Rescue screamed onto the scene eight and a half minutes after detonation.
Spot fires hissed among the twisted piles of steel and brick, looking more like war-torn Beirut than a Colorado suburb. An entire section of escalator rested in the middle of one parking lot, perfectly intact, along with a charred baby stroller and assorted empty shoes strewn up and down the metal steps. The explosions that had reduced three huge department stores to smoking pits tore away half the center portion of the mall leaving all four levels crumbling, naked and open to the outside air.
Through the acrid smoke, arriving rescuers were treated to the grizzly sight of the mangled bodies of mall patrons thrown in pieces on top of counters and upturned clothing racks. Computers and cash registers dangled by sparking electrical cords. On the top floor, along what was left of the food court, a bewildered teenage girl, still wearing her bright red and yellow Corn-Dog-on-a-Stick uniform hat, staggered to the jagged edge of concrete and support steel in front of her store and collapsed, clutching a bleeding stub where her left arm should have been.
Children, blown from their clothing, stood blinking in wide-eyed shock, waiting for parents who had simply vanished. The pitiful screams and cries of the wounded and dying drowned out the wailing sirens of approaching rescue units from Denver. Panic-stricken mothers and fathers stumbled through the rubble and smoke on each sagging floor, their frantic searching exposed to the rest of the world as if they were inside a giant ant farm. Some, deafened by the explosions and unable to hear the shouts of arriving rescue personnel were driven by desperation in areas still on fire and jumped to their deaths on the jagged concrete three and four levels below.
Two of the first firefighters to arrive, both hardened professionals, well accustomed to sights of human misery and gory auto accidents, turned away to vomit.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Sanchez stood ankle-deep in a pool of greasy water and gray ash, wondering if he’d ever get the smell of cooked human flesh out of his head. Midnight had come and gone hours before, and his eyes felt as if he’d rubbed them with a handful of sand. The caffeine from five cups of coffee and the sea of strobing emergency lights combined in the predawn darkness to drive a spike through his aching head.
More than fifteen hours after the three vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices—VBIEDs in the parlance of the Global War on Terror—had flattened a Colorado shopping mall larger than four city blocks, Sanchez still had no firm body count—at least not one firm enough to give to the President. Someone from FEMA had come up with the bright idea of counting the cars in the parking lots and doubling that number for an estimate. Mall shopping, they reasoned, was rarely a solitary pastime.
Sanchez looked at a tiny green cube of shatterproof glass smaller than a dime in the palm of his hand. It came from a literal ocean of the stuff, inches deep, in what had only a day before been a busy American parking lot. It would take days to sort through the twisted bits of plastic, metal, and broken glass to figure out the number of cars. It was like trying to guess the number of rocks it took to create the sand in a desert.
Initial estimates of the dead were coming in between twenty-three and twenty-seven hundred. Surveying the slabs of shattered concrete and steaming support steel under the harsh lights, Sanchez was sure those numbers were far too low.
Concussive shock waves from the three blasts had broken the windows in virtually every building within a one-mile radius around the mall. A frantic elderly woman who lived almost two miles away called 911 an hour after the explosions to report that her pet dachshund had found a human foot in the backyard and refused to give it up.
Colorado National Guardsmen had secured the perimeter of the bombing site with sandbagged roadblocks. The state of Colorado and the nation as a whole now teetered on the nervous edge of dismay and twitchy terror, ever concerned with the possibility of delayed or secondary attacks. The President, as well as the VP and key members of the Cabinet, had bunkered up in secure and “undisclosed” locations. Sixty miles to the south, the four thousand cadets at the United States Air Force Academy were buttoned up tight with F-15s from nearby Peterson Air Force Base providing overhead security patrols. A half dozen AH-64 Longbow helicopters from Fort Carson flew close air support, lights out to guard against possible assault from the ground. All aircraft was cleared hot, ready to fire on any enemy they found.
Sanchez had called in a hundred and sixty agents from as far away as New York and Miami to assist. By order of the attorney general, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the U.S. Marshals Service had also responded, along with FEMA and Public Health.
The Pit, as they were now calling the place, was a hive of activity. Three FBI HRT—Hostage Rescue Team—helicopters hovered overhead, spotlights cutting white beams through the night as they played back and forth around the gnarled, smoking mess. Emergency rescue crews crawled in and out of the rubble, working under the blinding glare of portable flood lamps, borrowed from a Denver road construction company.
Five Labrador retrievers, highly trained as cadaver dogs, scrambled up and down in areas their handlers considered safe enough to send them. Teams of forensic scientists used ground-penetrating radar to look for anomalies that might be human under tons of debris. They’d found a few survivors at first, huddling near the center of the mall, miraculously shielded by the twisted remnants of an escalator. All were badly burned and at least two had died later at the hospital.
Since 9 P.M. the Pit had yielded nothing living—or even intact.
Sanchez took a sip of his coffee, then spit it out, sickened by the thought of anything on his stomach. His nerves were frayed and he jumped at a sudden female voice to his right. The speaker was backlit by the glaring headlights of a waiting ambulance. He couldn’t make out her face until she stepped closer, sloshing into his muddy pool to be heard above the pounding clatter of jackhammers and agonized whine of cable winches pulling up slabs of concrete.
“I think we might have an ID on one of the drivers,” the woman said, almost screaming to be heard. She was Carol Victors, the Denver Anti-Terrorism Task Force supervisor. In the past ten hours, she’d become Sanchez’s go-to agent in Colorado. No stereotypical Betty Bureau Blue Suit, Victors was tall, only an inch shorter than Sanchez at five eleven, and could hold her own in a battle of wit or muscle. Her dark hair was piled up under a navy-blue baseball cap with FBI emblazoned on the front in white letters.
“An ID?” Sanchez shook his head in disbelief. “No way. We don’t even have a solid lead on the type of explosives yet. So
mebody claiming credit for this?”
“We got lucky,” Victors said, setting her otherwise full lips in a tight line. It was good news, but circumstances were too heavy for a smile. “There was a security camera at the Public Works garage. One of the drivers turned and looked directly at it after he killed the night watchman.”
“So we got a face or an ID?”
“I ran the video stills through the facial recognition programs at State, Homeland Security, as well as ours at Quantico.” She shrugged. “Again, we got lucky. State had a hit. Our driver was one Mahir Halibi, a Saudi student majoring in soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He was using the name of Samir Mohammed and was here under a Jordanian passport.”
“Soil and crops?” Sanchez reasoned. “If this turns out to be ammonium nitrate—which it probably will—that would make sense.”
Agent Victors bounced from one foot to the other as if she had information that was to hot to hold inside.
“You’ve got more?”
“I do, boss,” she said. “Halibi was already on our watch list. He’s got ties to some serious people... .”
“How serious?”
Now Victors allowed herself the hint of a smile. “Does the name Farooq ring a bell?”
“Sheikh Husseini al Farooq?” Sanchez chewed on the swizzle stick from his coffee. “We’re sure about this?”
“Our friends at the Agency say Halibi’s father and Farooq attended the same madrassa in Damascus in the late seventies.”
Sanchez pulled the BlackBerry from his pocket. “Like father like son, then,” he said as he punched the speed dial. When the other party answered, he took a deep breath. “This is Paul. Connect me with the Director.”
Four hours later
Saudi Arabia
Sheikh Husseini al Farooq leaned over the marble chessboard like a lion considering his kill. A slender hand poised over his knight, fingers tapping lightly. Islam’s prohibitions against graven images of living things required the game piece to look like a squat painted mushroom instead of the more customary horse.
Farooq’s opponent, a boy in his late teens, watched in rapt fascination. “Is it not glorious?” the boy said. “The Americans are broken, shattered as glass before a stone!”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the dozen men in the room. Each sat on a soft pillow watching the contest. With the setting sun, plates of food had been set after a day of fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan. The entire palace had been abuzz with congratulatory fervor as scenes of the Colorado mall bombing streamed on a plasma big screen tuned to Al Jazeera television.
“Do not underestimate the Americans,” Farooq said, smiling as he maneuvered the knight in concert with his bishop, to put the boy in checkmate. “Underestimating one’s opponent is the surest way to fail—”
“Forgive me, my sheikh.” A man wearing a red Saudi ghutra on his head and a white, ankle-length robe burst into the room. Had it been anyone else but Dr. Suleiman, such an intrusion would have been met with quick and decisive violence.
Suleiman was in his mid thirties and clean shaven because of his need to wear protective masks during his experiments. His pink face beamed as if reflecting a great light.
“I suppose you have heard of the events in Colorado ?” Farooq nodded toward the television in the corner.
“I ... we have had a breakthrough in the lab.” The doctor smiled, ignoring the others in the room. “I believe this will make the mere bombing of a shopping mall pale in comparison.”
Farooq raised a brow. “Is that so?”
Suleiman stammered on. “Our Algerian friends have solved one piece of the puzzle. They are testing it as we speak. I believe I now know the answer to the problem that has always eluded us... . Of course ... it will require another, more particular test... .”
Farooq clapped his hands. A brooding man with dark eyes and long, windswept hair rose from his seat in the corner, hand on a curved dagger at his belt. “Yes, my sheikh.”
Holding up an open hand, palm out, Farooq turned back to Suleiman. His slender wrist protruded from the long sleeve of his white robe, identical to the doctor’s. “You’ve actually done it then?” he said.
“I believe I have.” Suleiman’s eyes shifted uneasily back and forth from the sheikh to the brooding bodyguard.
A sneering grin spread across Farooq’s angular face as he turned back to the man with the dagger. “We shall need a few more subjects on which to test the doctor’s theories. Inform Ghazan at once.”
CHAPTER 1
2 September, 2100 hours
Fallujah, Iraq
Jericho Quinn gunned the throttle, willing more power from the screaming motorcycle.
“Which one is Ghazan?” He threw the words over his shoulder, into the wind as he rode.
Blowing sand scoured his chapped face. He peered through the dusk, squinting, wishing he had a pair of goggles. Something pinched his nose in the gathering darkness—the telltale odor of wet wool seasoned with the sulfur that oozed up from the desert floor.
The smell of a sheep roasting in the flames of hell.
The scent of Iraq.
“There!” Quinn felt his passenger shudder behind him, his words ripped away by the wind.
“Which one?” Quinn scanned a knot of a half dozen FAMs—fighting-age men—loitering at the corner beneath the crumbling walls of a bombed mosque. In the three days following the horrific bombing of a Colorado shopping mall, any semblance of trust between cultures had evaporated from the streets of Iraq. Natives flinched and dropped their eyes when American patrols rolled past. Few in number from cyclical troop drawdown, U.S. forces stood on the edge of a full-blown assault at every encounter. Soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen boiled with righteous anger that over three thousand Americans—most of them women and children—had lost their lives in the blasts.
The worst act of terrorism on American soil since 9/11, the media had dubbed it the Fifth Sunday Bombing—but it was impossible to put a title on something so horrible. Most just spoke in whispered reverence about Colorado. Hunting down those responsible was priority one for men like Jericho Quinn.
Ghazan al Ghazi was the HVT—the high-value target—of the moment. Quinn felt a familiar sensation in the back of his neck—the tingle that told him violence was close at hand—and wondered if he was enjoying this too much. He had no idea what he’d do if peace suddenly broke out in the world. Not much chance of that.
“Which one?” he asked again, leaning back to be certain Sadiq heard him.
“The large one ... he wears aviator sunglasses. He is tall ... there on the end with the neck of a bull.” Sadiq groaned, hiding his head against Quinn’s back as he spoke. “A blue shirt ... open down the front. Please ... you should drive on... .”
In the street, horns honked and beeped, churning up whirling clouds of yellow dust. Thick, angry voices rose into the dusk on ribbons of heat as the snarl of evening traffic came to a standstill. Stopped almost directly in front of their target, Sadiq began to twitch, so much so Quinn was sure it looked as though he was having some kind of fit.
“Hold on,” Quinn yelled in colloquial Arabic as he tried to go around the jam. He nearly spilled avoiding the twisted hulk of a bombed Nissan pickup planted squarely in the road. Giving the bike enough throttle to keep it upright, he ducked down a side street away from the din of cars and military and NGO convoys. Slowing, he made a left turn on a quieter side street.
The motorcycle was a Kaweseki, a Chinese knockoff. Little more than a scooter, it had the look of a Japanese sport bike and the suspension of a skateboard. It was sure to rust or fall to pieces just when he needed it most, but it was what the locals rode. It was all they could afford. As an agent with Air Force Office of Special Investigations or OSI, Quinn had an impressive array of weapons and technology at his disposal. But for the moment he rode a piece-of-junk motorcycle and wore an ankle-length cotton dishdasha, called a man dress by Americ
an soldiers. His life, and more importantly his mission, depended on the ability to blend in with the locals.
He leaned over the handlebars, twisting the last ounce of horsepower from the protesting Chinese motor. The back tire shimmied, throwing up a shower of gravel as he ducked behind an abandoned café. Behind him, Sadiq clawed at his waist in an effort to hang on.
Despite the fact that he was surrounded by men who would be happy to saw off his head with a dull pocketknife if they discovered who he was, Quinn found the orange-blue dusk oddly soothing. Above the rubble of bombed buildings and rusted vehicle hulks, a neat row of Medjool date palms lined the road, their straight trunks silhouetted against the evening sky. They were reminders of another Iraq, untouched by decades of war.
“Get off at the next corner.” Quinn leaned back as he shouted to the lanky Sunni. The boy spoke passable English, but Quinn kept their conversations in Arabic to pacify any listening ears. “I must hurry and get back to Ghazan before he slips away.”
“You will please pay me—before you go.” The sallow university student’s voice wobbled with a mixture of terror and the disorienting effects of the bumpy ride.
“Get off,” Quinn snapped. “I don’t have time to stop. I’ll pay you later tonight.” Sadiq was a good informant, but he liked to make things more difficult than they needed to be.
“I insist you pay me now.”
Jericho let off the throttle, then gunned it suddenly to spite his rider.
“Must you Americans drive so fast?” Sadiq’s voice was a curdled scream against the wind. “Ghazan is a dangerous man. He may kill you when you speak to him. Where would that leave me?”
One of the countless emaciated stray dogs that roamed the country darted in front of them, eyeing the men like a piece of meat. Quinn horsed the little bike to the right, fearing the flimsy handlebars might snap off in his hands. He took a quick moment to wish for his own motorcycle, a massive BMW 1200 GS Adventure. It was impossible to find a good motorcycle in the desert—at least one that allowed him to look like an Iraqi.
