“The situation is as we have studied,” he told his people, the kids, as he thought of them.
At twenty-two, he was the oldest of the three soldiers for Allah, and the best trained. His father, two uncles, and his older brother had all worked the Saudi oil fields outside of Ras Az Zawr on the Persian Gulf, and at sixteen he’d joined them.
But he had been radicalized in school and at the mosque in Jeddah and firmly believed in his heart of hearts that the West was Satan’s domain and that he had no other recourse than to give his all in the war for the survival of all Islam. Especially Wahhabism as practiced by his countrymen.
The imam at the mosque in Ras had come to him with another man, whose name was Zishan and who had promised to put action to Omar’s hate for the West.
His first training camp where he had learned about weapons—everything from pistols to compact submachine guns and even the Russian Grail and American Stinger ground-to-air man-portable missiles—had been on the desert near Ash Sha’ra, nearly three hundred kilometers west of Riyadh.
From there he’d been sent on a training mission to northern Iraq, where, working under cover, he joined an ISIS brigade that was reinforcing Mosul, where an attack by the Americans was expected at any time.
During his two months in the field he’d learned about several impending attacks against the Saudi ground forces along the border with Syria.
One night he’d killed two fellow guards watching over fifty Iraqi women who’d been captured and were being used as sexual slaves, then made his way to Jordan in the southeast and from there across the border back into Saudi Arabia at Turaif, where there was a small airport.
He’d come to the attention of the GIP’s special operations division and was sent to another desert training camp, this one south of Bi’r Fardān, just within the boundaries of the vast Rub’ al Khali, one of the most inhospitable deserts in the entire world.
He was trained as an operational commander, which meant he became an expert with weapons, explosives of all types, leading men in the field by motivation, how to survive, and especially how to blend in. Groups like his were called chameleon squads.
But on the way he’d also picked up survival tips. Operations for the cause was one thing, but martyrdom was not his bag.
He looked at his watch. The signal their front man had sent would cause the explosive vests to go off in just under ten minutes.
But after he’d checked the south pillar girders, he had disconnected the trigger from his vest.
He wasn’t going to die here, but if he were cornered trying to make his escape, he would not be captured alive. Under no circumstances was he ever to allow such a thing to happen, his control officer—a man he only knew as “Uncle”—had drummed into his head.
The kids were looking at him, their eyes round.
“Are your weapons ready?” he asked. Each of them carried a Heckler & Koch personal defense weapon—a compact submachine gun called the “room broom” in the West.
They nodded.
Their orders were clear. They were to place their bodies up against the south pillar and no matter what happened they were not to move from the spot until detonation. If anyone tried to clear them away, they were to fight back.
Haddad checked his watch again.
“You are Allah’s chosen. Blessed be your lives and the paradise that awaits you.”
SIX
From where they were seated they could see the couple the police had escorted out of the restaurant crossing the park, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist. They were lovers now, and it made absolutely no sense to McGarvey.
“There goes the entertainment,” Pete said. “Too bad.”
The man looked over his shoulder, back at the tower, his face raised as if he was looking in the restaurant’s windows. At Mac.
Pete was suddenly serious. “What gives?”
“Nothing, probably,” McGarvey said absently. But his inner warning siren was coming alive, almost as if he were heading into battle.
A waiter came over with a pair of flutes, and the maître d’ himself brought an ice bucket on a silver stand with a bottle of champagne.
“May I do the honors, monsieur?”
“You’re not the sommelier.”
“No, monsieur. That would be Monsieur Gaston. But he is temporarily indisposed.”
McGarvey glanced again at the people down in the park. The couple had stopped and were still looking back toward the tower, as if they thought something was about to happen.
“Stay put,” he told Pete and got to his feet. “Take me to your wine room.”
“Monsieur?”
“Now.”
The maître d’ was flustered, which in itself struck McGarvey as odd. French waiters lost their tempers, but never their poise.
Other diners were looking their way now, curious about the latest disturbance in what was supposed to be an oasis of calm.
McGarvey headed toward the kitchen, the maître d’ catching up with him.
“Is there trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“No.”
The maître d’ led him through the compact and busy kitchen and through a swinging door into a short corridor that went past the storage lockers to the service elevator.
“The wine room,” McGarvey prompted.
The maître d’ went to the wine room and opened the heavy door.
McGarvey brushed past him and stopped just inside the door. The room was about the size of a walk-in closet, but with a high ceiling. The temperature was cool, and along the left wall a floor-to-ceiling temperature-controlled space behind tall glass doors was filled with bottles of champagne and other wines that needed to be kept at a lower and more constant temperature.
Nothing was wrong here. Yet McGarvey’s innards were singing.
Something about the couple who’d created such a disturbance that they had to be escorted out by the police was bothersome. The man had called someone on his cell phone, but he couldn’t have said more than a word or two. A code word. A signal.
McGarvey went to the back of the room. The wine racks reached the ceiling, twelve feet up, and a ladder on tracks—like the ones in the libraries of mansions—was positioned near the middle.
The racks stopped a couple of feet from the rear wall. The body of a man, lying on his back, was stuffed into the space. Even though the light was dim, Mac could see that he had been shot in the middle of the forehead.
“Call the bomb squad, and get everyone out of here—your staff as well as the customers.”
The maître d’ was frozen.
“Plus vite, salopard,” McGarvey shouted, brushing past the man. Fast, you son of a bitch.
Pete had come through the kitchen and was standing in the doorway.
“I think they put a bomb in here somewhere,” McGarvey shouted. “Get everyone out now!”
Pete nodded, her expression tight. “There’re at least two guys in white coveralls out on the catwalk,” she said in a rush. She turned and started shouting at the kitchen staff to leave.
* * *
Haddad was aware of a commotion in the restaurant. Naser had already taken up a position on the south pillar, his arms hugging the girders as if he were a lover of the steel.
Hanni Safar, at fifteen the youngest of them, was rooted to his spot, his eyes closed, his lips moving. He was praying.
People inside were getting up and heading toward the elevator. A woman with short red hair seemed to be directing the evacuation.
She looked over her shoulder and their eyes locked for just an instant, but then she went back to her business of getting people out.
She knew!
Naser had promised that would be impossible. “No one knows the complete operation except for us,” he’d warned repeatedly from the beginning, months ago. And he’d said it again at the apartment.
But somehow the bitch knew!
Haddad shoved
Safar toward the empty spot on the girder. “Go, now, Safar,” he said. “For Allah.”
“For Allah,” the young man mumbled.
Haddad pulled out his room broom with his right hand and his cell phone with the other and speed dialed Najjir’s number as he backed against the wall just to the left of the service door in the kitchen.
It rang three times before Najjir picked up. “Yes.”
“They know.”
“In four minutes it won’t matter.”
The connection was ended, and Haddad tossed the phone aside. He raised his weapon as he turned toward the window, when someone was suddenly beside him, shoving him aside, and the submachine gun fired a short burst into the air.
* * *
McGarvey could feel the bricks of what almost certainly were explosives attached to the young man’s torso beneath the white coveralls.
The terrorist was momentarily off balance. McGarvey snatched the Heckler & Koch from his hands and smashed the butt of the weapon into the kid’s jaw, sending him sprawling to his knees.
Haddad recovered almost instantly and sprang to his feet.
McGarvey raised the weapon and fired two shots into the kid’s face.
The other two were shouting something in Arabic, spittle flying from their mouths.
Without a doubt the explosives were on some sort of a timer that the bastard watching from below in the park had activated by cell phone.
Sirens were incoming from a distance, in all directions.
But it was too late to let it work itself out.
The explosives, if they were powerful enough and if there were enough of them, could possibly take out the south pillar. The entire tower could come crashing down. It was something no less likely than the downing of the twin trade towers in New York.
All that went through his head at the speed of light.
But there was no time to try to disarm the vests.
He opened fire at the terrorists, the bullets ripping through their necks and heads. They lost their holds on the girders and, almost as if in slow motion, their bodies pitched over the edge.
There would be casualties below when the vests exploded. But the Eiffel Tower would not come down.
SEVEN
McGarvey laid the room broom on the deck and ripped open the front of the terrorist’s white coveralls. The man was carrying what had to be more than thirty kilos of C-4, but the detonator wired to the cell phone receiver had been disconnected. All it would take to set off the charge was to reconnect the wire.
The kid had decided that he wasn’t going to die here, but he had the weapon and the explosive vest. He had planned on trying to make his escape in the confusion after the blast. Only if he’d been cornered, with no other way out, was he going to set off the explosives.
McGarvey looked over the rail. The bodies of the two terrorists were splayed out on the concrete apron about thirty feet to the left of the entrance to the Jules Verne’s elevator.
But people were crowding in toward them, trying to get a better look.
“Get away,” McGarvey shouted. He waved his arms, but no one seemed to pay any attention.
The same police officers who’d escorted the couple out of the restaurant were there, pushing their way through the growing crowd.
Sirens converging from all directions were getting closer.
McGarvey snatched up the Heckler & Koch and fired two short bursts into the air.
People below screamed in terror and started to scatter.
The officers started to draw their weapons. Pete came into view. She looked up, spotted Mac, then headed in a dead run for the cops, waving her arms and screaming.
“Get away! Get away! They have vest bombs!”
McGarvey snatched two magazines of ammunition from the downed terrorist’s pocket, and as he raced through the kitchen and out into the short back corridor, he ejected the nearly spent magazine from the submachine gun and reloaded the weapon.
The man and woman had stopped at the edge of the crowd and had watched everything. There was no mistaking the high probability that they were involved in the attempted attack. His only question was what the hell they had been doing so close to the action. Something could have gone wrong at the last minute and they could have been killed, or arrested.
Not bothering with the elevator, Mac took the stairs two at a time down to the ground level.
The crowd continued to scatter, but Pete was still there with the cops, not five feet from the bodies of the three terrorists.
“Get the hell out of here,” he shouted.
Pete looked over her shoulder.
“Go, go, go!”
She turned back to the cops, who had their weapons drawn and were still looking up toward the catwalk.
“Christ,” McGarvey swore.
He fired another short burst into the air, and this time Pete grabbed one of the cops by the gun arm and pulled him away.
She shouted something that McGarvey couldn’t make out, then he headed in a dead run toward where he’d seen the couple standing, watching.
* * *
Worst-case scenario, create a back door. A path and a means for escape in a situation that has fallen or is about to fall apart. It was SOP, Standard Operating Procedure.
“What the fuck are we standing here for?” Miriam shouted.
People were streaming away from the base of the tower, but they were moving slowly, and there was still a big crowd around the south pillar of the tower. The explosive vests would detonate at any moment. No matter what else happened, there would be casualties.
Najjir phoned his backup, and the man answered on the first ring.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“Boulevard de Grenelle, near the Quai Branly. Do you need an extraction?”
“Yes. We’re one block from the Parking Pullman on the avenue de Suffren.”
“Two minutes,” his contact said.
The Saudi contractor and four others in the anonymous Toyota van, all of whom had been members of special forces in one European country or another until they had been discharged for use of excessive force, were too highly skilled to waste on suicide missions.
Najjir had hired them and briefed them three months ago and had arranged for their accommodations in an apartment complex on the rue Saint-Denis, just to the east of Les Halles. The neighborhood was one of the seediest areas in all of Paris, and along with the Bois de Boulogne was the stomping ground for prostitutes, drug dealers, and the scum of the city.
His contractors felt at home there, in part because they’d been paid well and they had the real chance of shooting people.
Two massive explosions, coming nearly simultaneously, made the air dance and ripple directly down the long park filled with people, and the tower swayed toward the southwest, at least three or four feet off center.
There was no third explosion.
Yet watching the tower sway and then rebound gave Najjir hope that the son of a bitch would actually come down after all.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” Miriam mumbled.
People were screaming, sirens were getting closer, car alarms were popping off, and an air raid or fire alarm on some building off to the left began to wail.
The crowd parted slightly, giving Najjir a brief glimpse of the man in the blue blazer, carrying a Heckler & Koch low at his side. He had to have taken it from one of the boys.
People trying to escape in earnest now that it was too late obscured him from view.
Time to leave, but Najjir hesitated. The bastard had put himself in the middle of something that was none of his business. But the fact that he had removed the threat to the tower had to mean something. He’d possibly known what was about to happen and had shown up to prevent it.
His being there, with the woman for cover, could very well mean that there was a leak in the organization in Riyadh. It was one piece of information that was too vital to leave to chance.
“Bleeding Chri
st, what the fuck are we standing here for?” Miriam demanded, pulling at his sleeve.
“Shut your mouth,” Najjir told her, trying to catch another glimpse of the man who’d screwed everything up.
“Give me the keys and I’ll get out of here on my own.”
Najjir took his Glock 10mm pistol from the holster under his left arm and pointed it at her chest from a distance of just a few inches. The positions of their bodies concealed the gun.
She squeaked and started to move away, but Najjir took her arm and pulled her even closer.
“We failed, this time,” he told her. “But the operation is not done with until I say so.”
“You’re fucking out of your mind.”
“You’re right. But if you want to survive to take the train back to London this afternoon you’ll do exactly as I say.”
She looked past him at the crowds moving directly away from the tower. “You won’t shoot me, not in front of all these people, and the cops will be all over the place any moment now.”
“Care to bet your life on it?”
It only took her a moment to back down. “I told you that I was in for the duration, so don’t get your arse in a bundle.”
Najjir glanced over his shoulder. The man was less than fifty meters away—out of the range of the room broom, but closing.
The fox to the hounds.
“Now,” Najjir told Miriam, and he holstered his pistol as they started toward the parking garage.
At that moment two police vans pulled up on the avenue de Suffren and a dozen cops dressed in combat gear—ballistic vests, Kevlar helmets, automatic weapons at the ready—piled out.
EIGHT
Pete was lying on her side with no immediate recollection of how she’d gotten there, except that something heavy and wet was on top of her. Her head was ringing and her stomach was flopping over so badly that she was sure she was going to throw up.
It was dark, dust or smoke so thick it was hard for her to make out much of anything farther than a few feet.
She shifted her weight and managed to shove the thing off her and sit up. The thing was the decapitated body of the cop she’d managed to pull around the corner of the south pillar, just before the flash of light and the concussion that had knocked her out of her shoes and had torn away much of her skirt.
Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 3
