by Brad Thor
Saud Wadi made his presentation, and pictures of his brother were handed out. He discussed what he knew of the plot and answered questions from the team. The ladies were then introduced to Yusuf al-Fihri, who would be taking them inside. He made sure the women were familiar with how to perform Salaat, the Islamic ritual prayer, and gave them tips on how to behave and where to go once they were inside the mosque.
The female operators then asked al-Fihri questions about the layout of the mosque, where certain rooms could be found, how many people would be there, and so forth. Once they were satisfied that they had obtained all of the information they could from him, Rita Marx thanked al-Fihri and had him taken to another room to wait. It was time to talk about the assault itself.
Al-Fihri had insisted that he could take in only three of the women. Casey didn’t like odd numbers and under pressure, al-Fihri had agreed to four. This way the women could break off into two, two-member fire teams. Deciding which of the women would go was another matter.
All of them wanted in and all of them were qualified for the assignment. They each understood Muslim culture, could converse in a handful of languages spoken throughout the Islamic world, and were incredibly well trained in close-quarters battle. In the end, the decision came down to appearance. Megan Rhodes was too tall and too fair. She would be the odd woman out.
That meant that Gretchen Casey, Julie Ericsson, Nikki Rodriguez, and Alex Cooper would be the ones to go in.
The tac team commanders discussed strategy with their American counterparts and a plan was settled upon. It was simple, but simple plans were often the best, especially when violently executed. The only way success could be better assured was to have the plan well rehearsed. With the clock ticking down to morning prayers, rehearsals were not something they had time to carry out.
Detective Marx left the conference room and came back with four shopping bags containing the Islamic garb the women would be wearing.
From an ops standpoint, Casey and her team loved burqas. They allowed them to mix in the Muslim community without drawing undue attention to themselves and a lot of gear could be secreted beneath. The fact that they were employing one of the most preeminent symbols of Islamic oppression against women to get up close and stick it to the bad guys was an added piece of sweet irony.
Opening their Storm cases, the team selected the weapons and equipment they were going to use. One of the items was a device Harvath had heard about, but had yet to deploy with—the new semiautomatic, multishot Taser X3. The new ECD, or Electronic Control Device, provided the opportunity to deploy a second and third cartridge immediately and could even incapacitate three subjects simultaneously.
It was a sexy-looking piece of gear with a cool space-age design. It had dual laser sights, a thirty-five-foot range, and unlike the bright yellow device Taser was so well known for, this was as black as night. It also matched their burqas, an observation Harvath decided to keep to himself.
Casey and Rodriguez walked back into the garage and selected several pieces of equipment from the tac team table and then Marx got them outfitted with radios. Before anyone knew it, it was time to launch.
They gave their weapons and radios one last check before climbing into Yusuf al-Fihri’s car.
As they pulled out of the garage and the vehicle disappeared down the street, Harvath had a bad feeling. But like his burqa observation, he kept it to himself.
When he climbed into one of the backup vans and took his place alongside Rhodes, he could tell by the look on her face that she was feeling exactly the same thing.
CHAPTER 46
Gretchen Casey sat in front and studied Yusuf al-Fihri as they drove toward the mosque. She could tell he was nervous. “Are you a smoker, Mr. al-Fihri?” she asked from beneath her burqa.
“Yes, miss,” he replied.
“Why don’t you have a cigarette? It won’t bother us.”
“I don’t like to smoke before prayers.”
“It will help calm your nerves. I think it’s a good idea.”
“Yes, miss,” said al-Fihri, who then fished out his cigarettes and lit one. He took a deep pull of smoke into his lungs and the soothing effect the nicotine had on him was instantly apparent.
“You’re doing the right thing, Mr. al-Fihri. Remember that.”
“I know, miss.”
They found a parking space and then, as instructed, walked behind al-Fihri the rest of the way to the mosque. Casey reminded him to take his time. They wanted to get there as late as possible. They had no desire to stand around socializing before prayers.
Approaching the front doors, al-Fihri nodded and said hello to several men he knew, but kept moving. He accompanied the women to a side entrance where he spoke a few words to a burqa-clad woman who appeared to be a greeter of some sort. Per the plan, he then berated Casey for making him late, shoved her inside along with the other women, and hurried back to the main entrance, which was for men only.
The greeter further chastised the women, and after they had removed their shoes, rushed them up a narrow set of stairs.
On the second floor, she shooed them into a small bathroom and waited outside while they performed their ritual purification. As they conducted their faux ablutions, Casey radioed a quick update over the bone mic in her left ear.
When they reemerged, the doorkeeper hurried them into the packed women’s prayer room and pointed to where she wanted them to stand in the back row. She then took up a spot right between them and the door.
The team was professional and maintained radio silence. Casey didn’t need to hear anything; she knew exactly what they all were thinking. The doorkeeper had just gone from being a pain in the ass to an actual impediment that would have to be dealt with.
With their heads down, feet shoulder-width apart and their hands at their sides as they faced in the direction of Mecca, the ladies pretended to quietly utter their intentions to perform Salaat, the Islamic ritual prayer. Over her earpiece, Casey could hear Nikki Rodriguez reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Right away, Cooper and Ericsson joined her. Casey did too.
A voice crackled over the loudspeakers at the front of the room in Arabic and the Salaat began.
The Athena Team followed along, voicing the appropriate phrases and adopting the proper postures, until Casey signaled over the radio that she was going to take out the doorkeeper.
Rising from the floor, Casey wrapped her midsection and bent over as if she was in pain. She sat in that position until she could tell that she had gotten the doorkeeper’s attention. Standing up slowly, she then moved toward the exit.
The doorkeeper met her halfway and tried to stop her from leaving.
“I’m going to be sick,” she mumbled in Arabic and then added in heavily accented English, “Need toilet. Sick. Sick.”
The woman stepped out of her way, but followed Casey toward the women’s bathroom.
Approaching the door, she pretended to falter and the woman rushed forward to grab her arm.
She helped steady Casey and steer her into the ladies’ room. As she did, she took the opportunity once more to chastise her. “Shame on you,” she hissed. “You should know better than to come to mosque when you are sick.”
“I’m not sick, darling,” said Casey in her best Texas drawl as the door shut behind them and she reached over to lock it. “But I am getting pretty tired of what a bitch you’re being.”
“I, I, I,” the woman stammered, suddenly aware that something very bad was happening.
“Yup. You, you, you,” replied the Athena Team leader as she pulled her Taser from beneath her burqa and stun-drove it into the woman’s chest.
The doorkeeper’s muscles seized up and Casey caught her as she fell forward. She was in the process of removing the woman’s burqa to bind and gag her when she heard Ericsson’s voice over her earpiece, “We’re in the hallway. All clear.”
Casey reached up and unlocked the door. Rodriguez and Cooper helped her secure the doorkeeper in one of
the stalls as Ericsson continued to keep watch. Once they had her out of the way, Casey radioed Harvath that they were heading to the basement. Morning prayers would not last long, so they needed to move quickly.
With suppressed weapons at the ready beneath their burqas, they descended the narrow staircase. Casey took the lead, followed by Cooper, Rodriguez, and Ericsson.
On the ground floor they retrieved their shoes and proceeded to the end of the hallway where they found the door al-Fihri claimed led to the basement. Casey reached out and tried to open it, but it was locked.
She stood back and signaled Cooper, who stepped forward, checked the door for any sort of alarm, and then pulled out a lockpick gun. Within seconds, she had the dead bolt taken care of. Nodding at Casey, she stepped away from the door, replaced the lockpick tool beneath her burqa and readied her weapon.
Casey grabbed hold of the door handle and counted down quietly from three. When she said “Go” and opened the door, they followed her into the stairwell and down the stairs.
Their presence on the stairs was greeted with a string of sharp words spoken in Arabic. A young man, no more than twenty-two years old, with a Glock placed on the prayer mat in front of him, demanded to know what they were doing.
“Salam, salam,” peace, repeated Casey in the traditional Muslim greeting as she continued down the stairs toward him.
The man was nervous. The women didn’t belong there.
Had he not had a weapon sitting right in front of him, Casey would have transitioned to her Taser, but her primary duty was to protect her life and those of her teammates.
Don’t go for the gun, she begged him under her breath, but he did. It was a bad decision and the last one the young man would ever make.
Casey fired two suppressed rounds from beneath her burqa, both striking him in the face. It was a very difficult shot, especially having to aim down a set of stairs and firing from behind clothing.
The young man was still alive as they reached the last step, but barely. Pulling out her MP5, she popped him twice, just above the bridge of his nose, finishing the job.
“Contact,” she said over the radio. “Tango down.”
The man had collapsed on his prayer mat and Cooper and Ericsson used it to drag him underneath the stairs before the blood soaked through and stained the floor. Once they had him stashed they all removed their burqas. There was a distinct chemical odor in the air.
With Rodriguez covering the door at the top of the stairs, they got ready to clear the rest of the basement.
The fact that they had encountered an armed man told them two things. Not everyone had gone upstairs for morning prayers, and there was something down here someone felt very serious about protecting. Judging by the odor, whoever was down here wasn’t preparing cookies for the mosque bake sale.
The hallway ran the length of the building above with four doors along each side. The amplified voice of the imam radiated down through the ceiling and vibrated the dusty light fixtures above them.
Casey withdrew a special device with a long piece of fiber-optic cable from her pocket. She hit pay dirt with the very first door. Slipping the cable beneath it and raising the unit to her eye, she saw a makeshift lab, complete with long tables, jammed with glass jars, soldering guns, nylon bags of some sort, and stacks of discarded electronic equipment. She signaled for the team not to move. Beyond the tables, she could see at least six men, prostrated on prayer rugs.
Pulling the cable back out from under the door, she turned to her teammates and drew a quick diagram on the floor.
The room appeared to run the entire length of the building on its south side. It must have been subdivided into offices or separate storerooms at some point as it had four doors leading into it. Casey planned to use this feature to their advantage.
Moving down the hallway, so she could get a good look at the men from the front, she positioned herself near the last door and fed the cable only partway beneath it.
She noticed that the voice of the imam above was even louder here and figured there must be speakers in this basement room, just as there had been in the women’s prayer hall.
Once again, she counted six men, all of whom had weapons with them on their prayer mats. At the very end, furthest from the door, was Rafiq Wadi. Gone was the beard he’d been wearing in the photo his brother Saud had showed them back at the plumbing warehouse. Like the five other men he was praying with, all were clean-shaven. That was a bad sign that this group had performed the Islamic ritual cleansing rites intended to speed their way into paradise. They appeared ready indeed to go operational.
Casey studied the men, trying to discern who was in charge, but it was impossible to figure out. Carefully, she withdrew the cable and backed away from the door.
The prayer service was almost over. She checked to make sure none of the doors were wired and then quickly cleared the other rooms. They were all being used for storage of one sort or another and one even appeared to be a bike room.
She searched for a fuse box or a circuit breaker, but couldn’t find one. They would have to come up with some other kind of distraction.
Based on the smell and the compounds known to have been used in the other attacks, Casey had no doubt these men were constructing organic peroxide explosives. This was going to be one of the trickiest assaults they had ever conducted. One wrong move and the entire building could be leveled; maybe even the entire block. Their job was made even more complicated by the fact that they needed to take as many of the men inside alive as possible.
Casey didn’t have time to formulate an elaborate plan. They also couldn’t risk using flash bangs for fear of setting off the bombs inside. They were going to have to go in hard and fast and hope that the element of surprise would give them enough of an edge.
She decided to pull Nikki off of covering the door at the top of the stairwell. Though this would leave their rear vulnerable, right now the men in that room posed a greater threat than anyone who might come down the stairs.
The room’s occupants were praying between the third and fourth doors and that’s where Casey decided to hit them. She would take door number four with Cooper, while Rodriguez and Ericsson took door number three. Cooper and Ericsson would be armed with their MP5s while she and Rodriguez, the fastest and most accurate shooters on the team, would be armed with their Tasers. The idea was to incapacitate all of the men if possible. If any of them were able to pick up their weapons, it was up to Cooper and Ericsson to take them out.
When both fire teams were positioned at their respective doors, Casey tightened her grip around the X3, took a breath, and then once again counted down from three.
CHAPTER 47
Though the sight of four heavily armed women kicking in the doors of their bomb factory scared the hell out of them, the six Muslim terrorists had been trained well and didn’t allow their fear to paralyze them.
They were in the process of rising from their prayer mats when the two doors exploded inward. In various stages of standing, they reacted quickly, scrambling for their weapons almost in unison; all except for Rafiq Wadi.
There was a series of pops as Casey and Rodriguez deployed their Taser cartridges. Cooper fired two rounds from her MP5, hitting one of the terrorists in the arm and upper chest. Ericsson fired her MP5 as well, hitting one of the men in the hand and the neck as he lunged for his weapon.
It was chaos as the men fell to the ground. The terrorists with the neck and chest wounds were already bleeding out.
Rafiq Wadi lay down on his prayer mat with his hands over the back of his head. He was yelling, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.” As a precaution and just to get him to shut up, Casey Tasered him anyway.
Cooper covered the men, while Ericsson entered the room and secured their weapons. As she did, Casey activated her radio. “Six tangos in custody, two with multiple GSWs.”
“What about explosives?” replied Harvath.
“Stand by.”
The team secured
the prisoners while Casey began searching the room for bombs. She went directly to the bike messenger bags and sure enough, they were loaded with explosives. There was a row of panniers and they had been loaded with explosives as well.
“I’ve got multiple explosive devices here. At least fifteen, maybe more. The compound appears to be TATP and it has been packaged in bicycle messenger bags and large panniers. It looks like they have been packed with ball bearings.”
“Roger that,” replied Harvath, who now realized how they were going to navigate traffic and all enter Piccadilly at the same time. It was not only extremely low-tech, it was incredibly creative. This method had been used in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. People rarely gave bike messengers or bike riders a second glance. While police would be keeping their eyes out for backpacks, bicycle-borne bombs could very well escape their scrutiny. They could weave in and out of traffic and park just about anywhere. Not only would it work well in London, where riders with their heads down could obscure their faces from surveillance cameras, the tactic would be brilliant in bicycle-choked Amsterdam. “Do you see any bikes?”
“Affirmative. There’s a roomful across the hall.”
“Don’t move any of them. They could be packed with explosives too,” cautioned Harvath, who pictured bike shrapnel in addition to the ball bearings in the bags tearing people apart.
“Roger that.”
“Are the bags armed?”
“Checking,” said Casey as she examined one of the bags more closely. “There are wires leading to some sort of reflection beacon. I’m assuming that when the beacon gets turned on, that’s when the bags blow.”
