Intercept

by Patrick Robinson

  The critical point was the lack of forward commanders returning from various battlefields. Half of them had been grabbed from the field of conflict and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. The other half died in action, shot while trying to blow up their U.S. enemy. Also, when the men from the mountains were forced to spill the beans in the hot, brightly lit interrogation rooms at Guantanamo, the Americans tended to strike hard, using whatever information they had gleaned.

  The result was a series of sudden, merciless rocket attacks on several of Osama’s safehouses, and the instant death of literally dozens of al-Qaeda warriors trying to make their way back into the Hindu Kush and the Swat Valley, for the onward progression of the jihad.

  Right now there were two camps a few miles south of Kalam, right on the river, which were essentially closed for training owing to this shortage of instructors. The five men talked endlessly about the Valley, and the need for a Big Plan, a major strike against the West. And they talked of the crushing defeats in Baghdad, the disappointments of the Ayatollahs in Iran, and the overwhelming desire they had for another Great Victory.

  And, as ever, they talked of the possible return of young leaders still incarcerated in Guantanamo. In particular, Captain Amin had begged Allah, at mid-morning prayers, for the safe return one day of his beloved nephew, Ibrahim Sharif, the only son of his own sister Anandi:Almighty God, to whom all things are possible, we beg of you to rescue your faithful servant Ibrahim—for he will rise up and hold his sword against your enemies, and he will not falter, nor will he lose heart, nor fall into despair, until you, who have power over all things, gather him home unto your kingdom.

  The clock high on the ramparts of the Cunningham Tower stood at two minutes after 1 p.m., and all five men had heard its single resonant chime, the same metalic clang which had tolled out the hour after midday and midnight since the year 1900 when the tower was completed to mark the Diamond Jubilee of the reign of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Empress of India, and ruler of the Domains Beyond the Seas, including Peshawar.

  The great bell’s haughty echo of the old empire had scarcely died away on the warm mountain wind when sound came from the side door of the courtyard that led out into the alleyway—three sharp taps and then a pause, then two more and another pause, then a single crack on the heavy wooden gate. The entrance code was accurate. Whoever wanted entry was an insider.

  Kaiser Rashid was on his feet in an instant, drawing his curved combat knife as he walked toward the gate. He peered through a small glass peep-hole, smiled, re-sheathed his knife, and drew back the two black cast-iron bolts that barred the door. Outside stood an elderly Pathan tribesman, with a hard, nut-brown, wrinkled face, holding the reins of his camel.

  He and Kaiser exchanged the traditional Muslim greeting, bowing their heads and touching their foreheads, before bringing down their hands in an arc, the gesture of respect:“Salam alaikum (peace be with you), Kaiser.”

  “Wa alaikum as salaam (and also unto you), Ali.”

  He handed Kaiser a brown sealed envelope, and added, “From Islamabad, e-mail from the USA. I left last night.”

  “Will you stay for dinner? You must be tired. I’ll have someone take care of the camel.”

  “I cannot today. I have to keep going, up to the Valley. This is important news.”

  Kaiser said he understood, and wished him well before closing and bolting the gate.

  Shakir Khan opened the envelope and stared at the message. “Allah has heard our cries,” he said softly. “And now He has answered our prayers. The Americans have given in to world pressure and allowed our poor brave jihadists at last to be taken from the Guantanamo Hell, to stand before a civilian court of justice and demand either a fair trial or liberty, the rights of every man.”

  Captain Amin stood up and raised his eyes to the sky. He clasped his hands together and called to the azure blue heavens above the northwest frontier, “Allah is great. Ibrahim and his friends will come home. God has heard our plea. Almighty God, you have saved them from the oppressor!”

  Shakir Khan held in his hand a printout of the Supreme Court verdict. Carefully he read out the words of Justice Kennedy, the ones that rendered jihadist terrorists regular rights like any other U.S. citizen . . . the words that had appalled the president himself. Not to mention all of his key military and civilian security advisors.

  “Why has this Kennedy person done this? Does he believe in our cause? Is he a traitor to America?” Kaiser Rashid was astounded.

  So was the far more sophisticated Shakir Khan. “My son,” he said, “the Americans are sometimes difficult to understand. They have big smiles and strike with weapons that would terrify the Prophet himself. They will kill us without mercy. All of you can bear witness to that. And yet there is a side to them that is inexplicable. As if they are ashamed of their own land, and laws, and people. They have fits of conscience, and try to atone for things that cannot be corrected. In the end they must lose our Holy War on them. Because they are soft, and too often they do not have the steel of the true warrior within them. They do not have the stomach for the fight. They are like poor, weak, pitiful women, and now they have invented a way to let loose our top warriors from captivity.”

  “Does this mean they are tired of the conflict?” asked Kaiser.

  “Of course they are,” replied Khan. “But we are not tired. This is a long war, and we will not rest until the American Infidel heeds the word of the Prophet and understands that Allah alone is great.”

  Captain Amin spoke next. “Either that, or he lies dead at our feet,” said the uncle of Ibrahim Sharif.

  2

  THEY PASSED THE COMMUNICATION from hand to hand—five robed native tribesmen staring at the verdict written seven thousand miles away in Washington, DC, by Justice Kennedy on behalf of the Supreme Court of the United States.

  No one spoke. The only sound was from the water softly splashing in the courtyard fountain. Ali’s camel, which had born the stunning news north through the dangerous mountain passes from the army city of Kohat, had padded silently away, down the alleyway, and into the streets of Peshawar.

  The Azzam brothers and Captain Musa could only ask for clarity, to help them understand the ramifications of the American judgment. Kaiser Rashid, Khan’s assistant, who had studied law in London, tried his best.

  “The important part,” he said, “Is the writ of habeas corpus.”

  “Which language is that?” asked Captain Amin.

  “It’s Latin,” said Kaiser. “Most Western law traces back to the Romans.”

  “How about ours?”

  “Older. Much older.”

  “Did we have habeas corpus?”

  “I’m not sure we needed it, Captain. We were well organized thousands of years before The Prophet.”

  “Hmmm,” said Amin. “Anyway I still don’t understand what it is.”

  “It means, literally, thou shalt have the body, meaning an appearance in court. The writ requires the person to be brought physically before a judge or a court, with the right to explain why he should be released from captivity.”

  “And this right would be given to Ibrahim?”

  “By the look of this document,” replied Kaiser, thoughtfully, “this right has been given to everyone being detained at Guantanamo under U.S. law.”

  “But surely the judge will listen and then send them right back for what they call crimes against humanity?”

  Shakir Khan interjected. “Maybe five years ago,” he said, “when President Bush was furious with the entire Muslim world. But not now. Times have changed. The Americans have grown tired of the conflict. And their politicians must listen to the people. They just want it all to be over. And they’re starting by getting rid of the prisoners.”

  “You mean they will just send Ibrahim and Yousaf home?”

  “It looks like it. But before they do so, we have much work to do. They need lawyers. American lawyers. And we must make arrangements, both to hire them and then pay them. It
must all go through Osama’s highest command.”

  “Can we work directly by phone and e-mail?”

  “I don’t think so,” replied Khan. “Because if they trace us, the Americans will have the government arrest us. It’s always better to remain concealed and to move our orders and operational documents on foot. It takes longer, but it’s much better.”

  By now the clerics’ call to the faithful was echoing from the minaret high above the glowing white walls of the Mosque of Mahabat Khan, north of Andar Shehr. All five men hurried from the courtyard and joined the throng that moved in great droves of devout Muslims preparing to prostrate themselves before their God.

  For the next hour Shakir Khan and his men would cast aside the possible release of their heroic brothers from Guantanamo and concentrate on their midday prayers. Allah is great . . . there is no other God. There would be time enough to set free Ibrahim and Yousaf during the long hot afternoon.

  SHAKIR KHAN outlined his suggestions in carefully coded Arabic and summoned a messenger to transport them on the next camel train leaving the city, laden with the bountiful fruit crops from the lush Vale of Peshawar—apricots, peaches, plums, pears, lemons, and oranges. The communiqué was delivered after a two-day journey to Pakistan’s green, leafy new capital of Islamabad, ninety-four miles to the east of Peshawar.

  The recipient was a Pakistani government official who kept a private office on Market Road a few hundred yards from the Parliament building. This is the center of the business district, known, curiously, as the Blue Area. Western Intelligence services are unwelcome here, for Islamabad represents the very heart of Islam, as its name suggests.

  Shakir Khan’s recommendations were e-mailed in private to the most militant group of Sunni Muslim clergy in Saudi Arabia. These were the men who had financed the gigantic Faisal Masjid, the world’s biggest mosque, which stands on the outskirts of Islamabad, a religious fountain-head of Muslim learning and history.

  From these powerful clerics Shakir Khan sought approval, both financial and spiritual. His message to them read: New U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding habeas corpus for detainees opens the gates of freedom to our brave fighters. Please appoint Washington attorneys to represent them in U.S. Appeals Court. Particular interest Yousaf Mohammed, and Ibrahim Sharif. There may be others.

  From here the words of Shakir Khan were faxed from the frantic offices of one of the world’s great oil shipping terminals and lost in the daily maelstrom of international tanker communications. When that fax arrived in a small law firm in the City of London, it was utterly untraceable.

  Which was how the law firm, Messrs Howard, Marks, and Cuthbert of London Wall came to appoint Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh, of 296 12th Street, Washington, DC, as the legal representatives of Yousaf and Ibrahim.

  The senior partner of Epstein’s, as it was normally known, was a shrewd and legally savvy graduate of Harvard Law School, who had worked for several years as legal counsel to the Texas and Gulf Oil Corporation, based principally in Riyadh and Galveston.

  Josh Epstein was sixty now, a big, fleshy man with dark hair and thick spectacles, who had somehow retained an aura of respectability despite grave suspicions among the politicos that he had a stupendously profitable sideline representing some of the most brutal jihadist killers on the planet. Worse yet, his paymasters were Saudi. In a city almost disappearing up its own backside with political correctness and adherence to the most lunatic human rights issues, Josh was, shall we say, a bit of an outsider.

  We should also say, perhaps, that Josh did not give a two-cent damn for all that. His God was money, and he was surely in the right profession for that. Dollars, euros, pounds, yen, rupees, rubles, sheqels, Josh loved them all in equal measure. But the sacks full of Saudi riyals were his favorites. Because those could be hidden away from the IRS.

  And he could hardly disguise his joy when that e-mail came ghosting in from London’s cyberspace, appointing him to head up what might be a truly lucrative appeals court team. Hundreds of hours, all billed at a premium thousand dollars per hour, not the normal five hundred, because of the risks to the firm’s reputation and all, plus expenses. Not to mention that there would be a massive bonus for success. Josh could barely contain his elation.

  Never a man to give much thought to problems that did not directly concern either him or his family, Josh cast aside any flickering concerns about the moral issue of liberating known mass murderers. Outside in the parking lot of the building, a dark blue turbo-charged Bentley bore testimony to the skill and ruthlessness of the senior partner of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh.

  Josh opened up his computer and clicked into Google Instant Messaging: Thank you, Keith, he wrote. I’m sending two appeals court specialists to Cuba tomorrow. Access no problem. We’ll file on Monday. Five seconds later came a one-word reply: Perfect.

  Josh Epstein summoned his two closest terrorist lawyers into his office. Then he reached across his desk and started the time-clock that counts off the billing hours, per lawyer, per case. In this case, a thousand dollars a tick. Times three.

  THE ONLY MINOR blot on the horizon of Epstein’s new case was a big Chevy transit van, parked right on 12th Street, maybe forty yards up the sidewalk from the firm’s main entrance. On the driver’s side was a small decal, two inches across, which bore the unmistakable insignia of the Central Intelligence Agency, with its white battleshield inscribed with a red compass rose. A thin, white line beneath it confirmed this was an operational vehicle, which may not be disturbed. Every cop in Washington recognized that insignia, and the unspoken message: If we need you, you’ll hear, real quick.

  Inside the van, four operatives sat before a bank of computer screens. Each man wore a slim-line headset and a wire-thin microphone. It was stifling hot in their ops-room, and they wore only T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers. And they all spoke in a completely foreign tongue.

  They were hooked into the law firm of Epstein, Myerson, and Marsh, through a clandestine network of telephonic wires and carefully planted listening devices, situated throughout the law offices. It had taken months to set it all up, wire by wire, bug by bug, office cleaner by office cleaner, mole by mole.

  But now the system was on stream. And the CIA, which had been subversively, and probably illegally, involved in making it possible, had stepped back. The four men in the van worked for the Mossad, Israel’s ruthless Secret Service. They were controlled by the vast Intelligence operation that works from the deep basement of the Israeli embassy, three miles north of the city of Washington.

  Cooperation between the CIA and the Mossad began to intensify during the first Gulf War and it had, if anything, grown stronger with each passing year. The Israelis have never dropped their guard against the growling threats of Iran, never forgiven Iraq for unleashing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in 1991, and never forgiven any Western power that offered even the remotest support to the Palestinians.

  Since President Bush declared vicious and open war on terrorists, the Israelis, and especially the Mossad, had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States. No country, no organization has ever been braver or more loyal to Uncle Sam.

  The CIA trusts, admires, and uses the Mossad on a daily basis, both in terms of information and direct action. Only rarely is a favor judged too great to be asked or granted. The secretive pact between two of the world’s greatest Intelligence Services is binding, one to the other, essentially because their interests are usually identical.

  The big blue van represented the explicit wishes of the Mossad, wishes honed over decades of study. That van represented conclusions reached after hundreds of hours pouring over court cases and identifying lawyers who had fought for the freedom of jihadists and terrorists, killers who had attacked, London, New York, Madrid, and countless targets in Israel.

  The Mossad were the world experts on the links: those in Afghanistan between al-Qaeda and the Taliban; between Hamas and al-Qaeda; between Iran and al-Qaeda in Iraq; between Hezbollah and Tehran. The
men from King Saul Boulevard knew beyond any doubt that there were certain law firms, in the United States, the UK, and Riyadh, that specialized in fighting for the liberties of such men. The Mossad had deep files on all of those law firms. Especially Josh Epstein’s.

  They had been parked in various locations on 12th Street for weeks, ever since Justice Kennedy’s ruling. And with CIA backing, they could find out anything—particularly if Epstein’s men were representing terrorists who had killed and murdered in Israel.

  For a start they could trace every incoming e-mail or instant message to its source, because electronic passage through the Internet leaves a trail, which traces Internet activity from the recipient to the user. And the information can be gathered covertly. These techniques of Internet tracking and tracing enable authorities to pursue and identify anyone and anything. The CIA and the Mossad were masters.

  As a point of interest, the FBI was not far behind them with a tracking program called “Carnivore,” capable of scanning thousands of e-mails with the speed of light. Which was why Josh Epstein could hardly make a move without a red-alert sounding in faraway King Saul Boulevard. It was easy to understand why bin Laden’s high command infinitely preferred camels for transmitting sensitive communications.

  Within moments, the men in the blue van were able to record that Epstein had just been appointed to represent, legally, inmates of Guantanamo Bay. And a split-second more to learn that he considered that appointment to be “perfect.” This caused four wry smiles of amusement, because everyone in the mobile ops-room knew there was a similar blue van parked in a side street off London Wall, conducting an identical operation on the heavily bugged offices of Howard, Marks, and Cuthbert.