It hadn’t been like this in Switzerland. She’d been watched very closely of course, but she’d been allowed to read books, attend classes with the other girls, watch television. It was wonderful. Free. Easy. Happy. Relaxed. And yet if she had known then what she would have to come back to, she wondered if she would have gone to Switzerland in the first place. Or, once she was there, if she wouldn’t have run away, to London or Paris or Rome, somewhere they could not find her. Where she could have started a new life.
Topping the last rise above the camp at the same moment the sun appeared between a pair of snow-covered peaks far to the east, she pulled up. The return trip had taken longer because she had been lost in thought, struggling with a host of new emotions and new ideas. She’d also been delayed for a few minutes when she’d spotted someone coming up the trail toward her. She’d hidden herself in the rocks until she got a good look at the man as he passed, recognizing him as one of Ali Bahmad’s special soldiers. She had debated following him to find out what he was up to. But in the end she decided that she’d done as much as she could, and it was time to get back.
McGarvey’s presence had been so disturbing to her because he had given life to her most secret dreams about someday leaving the mountains for good. He was the first American man she had ever met, and certainly the first Western man she’d ever spent any length of time with. He was older than her own father, and she had no romantic illusions about him, or at least not many—he had seen her naked—but he had turned her head with his easy attitude and relaxed self-confidence as completely as the most ardent suitor could ever do.
The camp below was dark, and it struck her all at once that it was horribly dreary and isolated. Despite her strong will, and her deep faith in her religion and in her father, she began to cry. She didn’t close her eyes, nor did she wipe away her tears, she simply stood looking down into the camp and wept, her shoulders unmoving, her back ramrod straight. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried, but it must have been when she was a little girl in Khartoum. Nor could she remember what it had felt like. But now a great sadness came over her like a thick blanket of fog falling into a deep valley, obscuring everything. She didn’t know what she was thinking at that moment; she was just feeling sad, lost, depressed, melancholic. She wanted her mother. She wanted someone to have tea with, someone to brush out her hair and braid it, someone to listen with a sympathetic ear. But her mother had returned to Khartoum in secret two months ago and there’d been no mention of when or if she was coming back.
McGarvey had been ready to kill Mohammed. She had seen it in his eyes, and in his deep anger. He wasn’t ashamed of her, nor had he blamed her for the attack. He had simply been a father protecting a girl. Squeezing her eyes shut she could imagine her father at the pool, see his flashing eyes on her, and on Mohammed. She could see his disappointment in her, his scorn, his anger. But at her, not Mohammed. As hard as she tried, however, she could not imagine her father doing what McGarvey had done for her. And she felt guilty for wanting such a thing. Ashamed. Sad.
But she loved her father with every fiber of her soul. As long as he stayed here in the mountains she would remain with him. Gladly. Wherever he was, that’s where she would be. She did not feel complete except when she was at his side. Nor could she feel warm except in the glow of his approval. Which was why she was having such a terrible time of it now.
McGarvey coming here was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She didn’t think she would ever get over it.
The sun began to feel warm on her face as she started down the steep switchback trail. It was almost time for morning prayers and, afterward, bed. There were moments when the five-times-daily ritual seemed too much to bear, but this morning she felt a great need for the comfort of Allah. Repeating the Sura Fatihah forty times each day was an intensely personal connection between her and God that sometimes made her forget everything except the moment. She needed that surrender now more than she had ever needed it before.
By dint of great willpower, Osama bin Laden began to clear his mind for the morning ritual as he came into the main chamber. He felt an overpowering sense of doom and a strong, almost desperate need for the comfort of prayer. His plan had to work if he was going to be allowed to make his final hajj to Mecca and then to Medina. It was the last condition he was going to impose on his enemies before he turned over the bomb, and it was an absolute.
He had been nothing more than God’s warrior, and he found himself now longing for the peace of Paradise. There had never been any innocents in the struggle, it was something they didn’t understand in the West. Nor did they understand that when an infidel died he simply went to hell for a period until his soul was finally cleansed by the fire. Then the gates of Paradise would open even for him. In the end they all would become brothers in one; all children of a merciful God.
Ali Bahmad came into the chamber and stood respectfully in the shadows without speaking until bin Laden noticed him.
“Yes?”
“Your daughter has returned.”
“Alone?” bin Laden asked softly. He was relieved.
Ali Bahmad nodded. “She’s coming down the hill now.” “Thank you for letting me know. After prayers have her come to me.”
“As you wish.”
“What about Hamed? Have you heard anything from him?”
“He passed Sarah on the trail. But she was on the way back so he didn’t stop.” Bahmad explained. “She hid from him.”
Bin Laden suppressed a smile. His daughter was independent, for which he was both proud and fearful. “When he reaches the others I want to know.”
“Very well,” Bahmad said, and he turned to leave as a tremendous explosion shattered the early morning silence. It had come from down in the camp, and for a millisecond bin Laden wanted to believe that there’d been an accident in the fuel storage pit across from the helicopter.
A second explosion, then a third and a fourth shattered that illusion. McGarvey had not come here with a deal! He had been sent with his GPS chip to find this camp and guide the missiles to it!
Bahmad had already turned and was racing up the tunnel to the entrance, as three guards clutching their Kalashnikovs came running from the back.
Bin Laden grabbed his rifle and half-limped half-raced after Bahmad as so many explosions ripped into the camp that it sounded like continuous thunder. They were Tomahawk missiles; he well remembered the sound, like an incoming jet airliner, followed immediately by a very sharp slap as the burst shoved a wall of compressed air outward followed immediately by a mind-numbing blast.
Sarah was out there. Bin Laden was sick with fear and impotent rage. The Americans had always fought by their own sense of rules; fair play they called it. They had never gone after a man’s family, or even after an enemy leader, only the soldiers and weapons. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Bahmad lay on the floor of the tunnel just within the entrance, watching the attack. Dozens, maybe more, of the missiles rained down on the camp, the bright flashes lighting up the entire valley even brighter than day. Bin Laden could think of nothing other than his daughter. She was down there, her body naked to the devastation falling all around her.
Bin Laden stepped around Bahmad’s prone figure, when his chief of staff reached up, grabbed a handful of pant leg and pulled him back.
“Get down, you fool!” he shouted over the terrible din.
Bin Laden batted Bahmad’s hand away with the butt of his rifle. “Get everybody out of the cave, I’m going after my daughter.”
“You’ll get yourself killed! They’re targeting the camp not us up here!”
The three guards came from behind and tried to drag bin Laden back from the entrance. He swung his rifle viciously catching one of them in the face, pushing him back against the other two.
“You know what to do,” bin Laden snarled at Bahmad, and he stumbled outside as the missiles continued to fall on them, one after the other; sometimes in pairs, sometimes s
o many at once they could not be counted.
Keeping as low as he could despite the terrible pain in his knees, bin Laden scrambled down the steep hill into the maelstrom, as he searched the far side of the camp and the opposite hill for his daughter. It was hard to make sense of what was happening. The bright flashes and concussions made it nearly impossible to think. The helicopter was already destroyed, as were many of the buildings. Debris rained down in an area at least four hundred meters in diameter. Dust filled the air, and black, oily flames shot a hundred meters or more into the cloudless sky from the cache of fuel that had been dug into the ground and covered by camouflage netting.
He had fought for ten years against the Russians in these mountains, but he’d never seen anything as bad as this. He wanted to strike back, raise his rifle and lash out at the monsters who were doing this to them. But he was helpless.
At the bottom of the hill, he started through the bombed-out buildings, his right arm over his head to protect himself from the dirt and rocks and brick and steel falling all around him, when a bright flash/bang erupted directly in front of him. He was thrown back by a blast of hot air that felt like a brick wall. As he fell he could hear or sense pieces of metal softly whispering past his head like a thousand jagged pellets from a huge shotgun.
He’d lost his rifle when he’d been thrown back, and his head boomed as if he was inside a kettle drum when he picked himself up and started forward in a daze. At that moment the missiles stopped coming. In the deafening silence he thought he could hear men crying out, some of them screaming in agony. Three of them appeared from behind a low brick wall, all that remained of one of the buildings, and started toward him, blood streaming from dozens of wounds.
Too soon, the thought crystallized in his brain. He desperately waved his men back. This was just a pause in the action, the missile attack wasn’t finished. There would be a second round.
Others were pulling themselves out of the rubble when he spotted Sarah, the mangled stump of her left arm spurting blood, stumbling across from where the helicopter had been. He was instantly gripped with such nausea and fear that for a brief moment he was unable to move, when a missile struck fifteen or twenty meters behind her, throwing her body forward in a spray of rocks and debris and blood.
More bombs fell around them now, all through the camp, in a rolling thunder that hammered off the hills. Staggering forward, totally oblivious to the destruction around him, bin Laden reached his daughter’s body and fell to his knees beside her.
Her right leg was shattered, a big rock was embedded in her right shoulder, and her face was a mass of cuts and torn flesh. But she was still alive. There was still some awareness in her dark, pretty eyes.
“My Sarah,” bin Laden whispered as the missiles continued to rain down on them. He knew that she couldn’t hear him, but her eyes lit up in recognition.
“Father,” she mouthed the word, blood welling from her mouth.
Bin Laden, tears streaming down his face, gently cradled his daughter in his arms. Not this one, he prayed. Please God, not Sarah. But it was useless. She was going to die here and now, and no power on earth or in heaven would save her. No miracle would be enough.
He looked into her eyes as he held her, watching her life run out, feeling it in the unnatural looseness of her muscles.
“Peace, my little one,” he said. “Insha’Allah.”
Sarah’s face went utterly pale, and blood stopped bubbling out of her mouth at the same time the last missile struck a hundred meters away, destroying the nomad tent.
Bin Laden threw back his head and screamed a cry of anguish from the bottom of his soul, while in another compartment of his brain he could feel his heart already hardening for the terrible task that lay ahead of them.
THIRTEEN
The White House
President Haynes glanced at the clock when the direct line from the CIA chirped. It was 10:05 P.M. Waiting with him in the Oval Office were his national security adviser Dennis Berndt and his chief of staff Tony Lang. He’d been in a blue funk all evening, ever since he’d agreed to the missile attack on bin Laden’s mountain camp. “This isn’t a war game, Dennis,” he’d peevishly told his NSA earlier. “Real people are going to get killed up there.”
“Sometimes things like this have to be done, Mr. President,” Berndt had replied.
The problem was that he saw no other way out of the gravest situation the U.S. had faced since Pearl Harbor. The President put the call on the speakerphone. “Good evening, Roland.”
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Murphy replied, tiredly. He sounded resigned. “The attack just got over, and it looks good. From what we’re seeing the camp was completely wiped out. There won’t be many survivors.”
The President looked at his advisers. “Was there any indication of a secondary nuclear explosion?” It was something he’d worried about.
“No, sir. My people tell me that even if we had hit the package, it would not have caused a detonation. But we’re putting a drone on target now to check for radiation.”
“No accidents this time?” the President asked. “We didn’t hit anything we weren’t supposed to hit?”
“No, sir. There’s nothing in the near vicinity of bin Laden’s camp,” Murphy assured him. “We’re putting together the damage assessment now. Should be ready in a couple of hours once we get the data back from the drone. I can bring it over to you tonight.”
“That’s not necessary, Roland. It’s too late for any sort of an announcement tonight in any event. I’m scheduling a news conference for eleven in the morning. If you can get over here by nine it’ll be plenty of time.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I’m sorry about McGarvey, he was a brave man. What he tried to do for us out there was very courageous. But he never really had a chance.”
“You’re probably right, Mr. President.”
“I’ll call his wife—”
“Mr. President, why don’t we wait on that until morning,” Murphy said. “I haven’t told his daughter yet either.”
“You can’t think there’s still hope.”
“McGarvey’s come out of tough situations before. He’s a survivor. Let’s wait.”
Berndt was shaking his head in disgust, and for some reason it irritated the President and he shot him a dirty look.
“Okay, General, we’ll hold it until morning,” the President agreed. “But I want you to know that if there’s any sign that McGarvey’s still alive I’ll give you anything you need to get him back. Anything.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
“Try to get some sleep, Roland. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”
“You too, Mr. President.”
In the Afghan Mountains
McGarvey crouched in a depression above the path waiting for them to come after him. As soon as he’d heard the first batch of what sounded like incoming jets down in the valley he’d slipped away. He knew what they were, but Mohammed and the others had jumped up and run down river to the cliff to look.
It was just his bad luck that they’d had the presence of mind to take their weapons with them. But he had managed to grab Mohammed’s pack and get out of there before they came running back. As soon as he’d found a suitable vantage point from which to defend himself, he’d retrieved his gun and spare magazine of ammunition from the bundle of filthy, stinking clothing, blankets and food. The gun was oily and gritty from something that had gotten all over it, but he pumped a couple of rounds out and the mechanism worked okay.
McGarvey watched the path carefully, as he considered his options. He was pissed off, but his anger would have to wait. For the moment his biggest challenge would be saving his own life and then somehow getting out of Afghanistan. The time for talking had ended when the first cruise missile had struck. If bin Laden had survived he would use the bomb. There was no doubt about it. Their only hope now was to stop it before it got to the States.
For that he nee
ded a phone to warn Otto, and to work out a means of getting out of the country. That’s providing he could first survive the three-to-one odds he was facing now, and then make it down to Kabul without running the car off the mountain cliffs.
He thought about trying to reach Pakistan over the mountains, but that would be next to impossible without guides and provisions. And it would take far too long. Because of the missile attack they no longer had the luxury of time.
What the hell were they thinking? They could have waited for at least a couple of days. He didn’t want to get into a firefight with his mujahedeen. He was outnumbered and outgunned. But he didn’t think Mohammed was going to simply give up and scurry back to camp. The man had a score to settle and it was going to be here and now.
McGarvey raised his head a couple of inches above the rim of the depression in time to see Farid dash up the path and duck behind a large boulder. They were about five hundred yards from the camp, just beyond the copse of trees and the pool where Sarah had almost been raped. The stream tumbling over the rocks just below the path made a lulling sound, but from farther up he could hear the deeper-throated roar where it fell down a series of cataracts.
“We have to go back now, mista,” Farid called up.
McGarvey studied the path and the rocks and brush below it. He could make out the flash suppressor on the end of Farid’s rifle, but he could not spot the other two mujahedeen.
Farid suddenly leaped up and darted another ten yards up the path, throwing himself into the ditch. A second later Hash sprung from the trees and keeping low raced to the protection of the boulder Farid had just left. He leaped up and fired a sustained burst into the rocks and boulders about twenty yards farther west from McGarvey’s position, the gunfire shockingly loud in the narrow defile, bullets ricocheting all over the place.
They knew that he was up here somewhere, and they were trying to draw him out to pinpoint his position. He was at a triple disadvantage; they not only outnumbered and outgunned him, but these were their mountains. They were just as at home here as McGarvey was in Paris or Washington.
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