Intercept

by Patrick Robinson

  “Nice job, Benny,” said Mack Bedford.

  “Not too bad yourself, buddy,” replied the Mossad’s chief New York agent.

  Thy goal is fixed, one thing I ask,

  Whate’er the cost may be,

  Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

  Soon to arrive with thee.

  And the music died in the hall, while the great stone building shuddered to its foundations. No one inside the concert room saw anything. In fact the only living witness to the explosion, aside from Mack and Benny and the police officer, was Ms. Calvert, who had been watching from the window before it cracked from end to end, and now stood in terror of what she had seen.

  She somehow sleepwalked to the telephone, dialed 911, and was switched through to the Torrington Police Department, where Buzzy had Tony Marinello on the other line, reporting that a Canaan Academy school bus had just been hit by a bomb. “Whoever had been in that bus could not have survived. Nossir. It’s like fucking Baghdad here,” he confirmed. “Terrorists, sir. They gotta be terrorists. I never saw anything like this.”

  The station chief could tell his man was in shock, and he told both Tony and Ms. Calvert he’d have reinforcements out there momentarily, plus the fire department and ambulances.

  “I’ll take the reinforcements and the fire trucks,” said Tony, “but don’t need the ambulances. Anyone who was in that bus just got cremated. I’m real certain of that. The metal just melted. You can’t get within a hundred yards of the wreckage, it’s that hot.”

  Ibrahim and Yousaf had just turned into the east gate and were making fast time down the north end of the drive when the bus blew. They couldn’t see anything because the academy itself stood between them and Abu’s big yellow time-bomb.

  But they heard the blast. If they’d been ten miles away, they’d have heard that. The building was still standing, although on the other side, way beyond the south portico, there were flames and black smoke rising up as if from the fires of hell.

  Ibrahim somehow knew the bus had gone up on the grounds that if you have a lovely wide parkland, an historic stone-built castle, and an old school bus crammed with fucking dynamite, and there’s a sudden mighty explosion, it’s probably not the parkland or the castle.

  He knew it was over and that they had failed. And he knew he and Yousaf had to get the hell out of Dodge, as it were. He also knew there were not that many places to hide. He jammed his foot on the brake, spun the wheel, tearing up the lawn, and headed right back the way he just came.

  Two miles away, hurtling down a woodland path, Mack and Benny were headed straight for the Blackberry River Inn, and almost collided with Johnny Strauss and his SUV when they arrived.

  “I guess that wraps it up for Benny and me.”

  “What about the other two?” asked Mack.

  “Mack, both Johnny and I are financed by the Mossad. And this Ibrahim and Yousaf have committed no known crime against the nation of Israel,” said Benny. “And that’s our brief. It would be like asking the immortal Wiesenthal to go after the Tamil Tigers.”

  “Not his business, right?” said Mack. “What about a cup of tea? For my ungrateful teammates.”

  And the three of them laughed as they walked. And, for a change, they used the front door of the hotel. No one noticed Benny was still gripping the remote-controlled detonator, gripping it as if he would never let it go.

  12

  IBRAHIM’S GETAWAY STRATEGY, if his school bus bomb had worked according to plan, had been to make for the hills, and cross the border into the State of Massachusetts. Right now, he had no idea what to do, and he was very scared.

  His little army had plainly been wiped out. And the failure of the mission had knocked the bounce right out of him. He was not, however, as scared as Yousaf, who was trembling uncontrollably in the passenger seat, and saying over and over, “They’ll send us back to Guantanamo. I know that’s what they’ll do.”

  Ibrahim had to remind him quite forcibly they had not been captured by anyone yet. And Yousaf was to shut up forthwith and allow his long-time friend and leader to think.

  Yousaf, however, was unable to shut up, and he kept blurting out his innermost fears, finally admitting he was frightened to death they’d send that bastard Staff Sergeant Ransom to catch them and take them back to their cell-block in Camp 5.

  “Yousaf,” said Ibrahim, “I want to tell you three things. First we are not yet captured, second we are not yet being hunted, third we have just one objective and that’s to get the hell out of the United States and stay there.”

  “But, we can’t do that,” moaned Yousaf. “They’ll close the airports, search people, put up road blocks, blockade ships.”

  “Look, Yousaf,” said Ibrahim, “It is important we don’t panic. I know we had to shoot and kill to get into this place, but it’s always easier to get out. We have our traveling bags, we have our legal documents, and we have money. We also have friends. So stay calm. And have faith in Allah. He will guide us home.”

  “I have been thinking one thing,” said Yousaf. “If we had blown up the school, we’d be even more wanted by the authorities. We only blew up a bus, and that’s not nearly so bad. Maybe we got a better chance now than if we’d been successful.”

  “Maybe we have,” replied Ibrahim. “Maybe we have.”

  They were in the Connecticut town of Canaan, now, and so far there were no road blocks. It was only five minutes since the explosion. And Ibrahim registered his only success of the day so far, when he turned hard right off the downtown area and headed up Interstate 7, less than a mile from the border.

  Thoughts cascaded through his mind, all of them about the historic city of Boston. For him, the place represented a refuge, a network of al-Qaeda Sleeper Cells, of safe apartments, several owned by Osama himself, others owned by bin Laden family members. Not all of them were friendly, but neither were they hostile.

  There were Islamic contacts there. There was the Mosque for the Praising of Allah in Commonwealth Avenue, the Masjid Al-Quran, Mohammed’s Mosque. Ibrahim had friends who had flown from Pakistan to study at the Islamic Society of Boston.

  And yet, for all of its undercurrents of friendship, Boston was embarrassed up to its Brahmin ears by the events of 9/11. Both flights, which hit the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, American 11, and United 175, had taken off from Boston, and the city had been branded the terrorist launch pad.

  The airport staff had been cleared of any wrongdoing, but the police department, right there on New Sudbury Street, was full of hard-eyed Boston-Irish officers who were apt to stare very beadily at anyone who looked like a native of Arabia or anywhere in the Middle East.

  On reflection, Ibrahim Sharif, with his black beard, swarthy looks, and horrendous background, photographed and printed in Guantanamo Bay, of all places, was inclined to give the City of Boston the widest possible berth.

  Which left him with a series of questions, all of them unanswered, and probably unanswerable. Where do we go? Who can help? How do we get out of the USA? Do the Connecticut police have any idea what happened? What we planned? Are they already after us? Does that mean a local manhunt or a national one?

  Right now the old Dodge truck was hurtling down the freeway near Sheffield, and Ibrahim planned to go straight for another eleven miles before swinging right, up Route 23, and then heading directly for the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  He just wished he knew the scale of the trouble he was in. And he needed a companion with whom to talk it over. But Ben al-Turabi and Abu Hassan had crossed the bridge, and Yousaf had dissolved into fear. Ibrahim was, for the moment, on his own.

  JOHNNY AND BENNY headed back to New York, while Mack collected himself before briefing the heavyweight U.S. security chiefs on the events so far. He was not much looking forward to it, because a bang the size of the one at Canaan Academy should have been quite sufficient to end his mission, and it hadn’t. Only half of it.

  The good news, however, was that he had not brought himsel
f any attention to himself. No one knew of his involvement, which was precisely how it was supposed to be.

  Mack returned to the Waldorf Astoria at around 2 p.m., to a message that Johnny would be there at three o’clock. Benny had quietly dis - appeared back to the Israeli Consulate on Third Avenue.

  Mack immersed himself in a hot bath where he always considered he did his best thinking. And he reflected on the slightly obscure truth that if he’d blown up Mountainside Farm, or the bus while it was still there, or the bus while it was driving along a public highway, there would have been a complete uproar, investigations, arrests, and huge publicity. And he might not have nailed all four of them, and thus would have no idea who was dead and who was still alive. Also innocent civilians might have been killed or wounded.

  No, his master stroke was to have allowed the terrorists to kill themselves, to blow themselves up on private land, wiping out only the bus—and a couple of oak trees. This way, somehow, the police were absolved of any responsibility. They did not even know about the terrorist plot, and they could spend all the time in the world trying to find out. So far as the great State of Connecticut was concerned, there had been no casualties.

  “It was like the friggin’ bus was driving itself,” concluded Mack. “The driver and its occupants were not even officially in the country. We got a couple of Peshawar bus drivers strayed seven thousand miles into East Norfolk, and set fire to a school bus with no kids in it. I like that. I really like that.”

  He just about had time to dress before Strauss arrived with the photographs he’d shot at the entrance to the farm. There were good shots of the bus and of Abu Hassan and Ben al-Turabi. “Unmistakable,” said Mack, admiringly.

  The photographs of Ibrahim and Yousaf were of equally good quality. Yousaf was just about identical to the Guantanamo prints, but Ibrahim’s beard changed him drastically, and Mack stared at it very hard.

  “You know, Johnny,” he said, “I’ve always thought there was something familiar about this guy. But when he was clean shaven, I never got a handle on it. But that beard changes things. You got great shots of him from different angles, and he had the driver’s side window open.”

  He stared again at the black and white prints of the terrorist leader, and he said, very quietly, “I know this guy. I arrested him in some shitty little village up in the Afghan mountains a few years ago. And before I did it, I damn near drowned him trying to get him to talk.”

  “Drowned him!” said Johnny.

  “Yup,” said Mack cheerfully. “I grabbed him by his beard and held him underwater in the rain barrel. I was trying to get a grip of the village supply of TNT at the time. This little bastard had just blown up a truckload of marines plus a couple of SEALs. All buddies. He was darned lucky I didn’t break his fucking neck.”

  “You sure he was guilty?” asked Johnny.

  “That’s one thing you can put your life savings on,” said Mack. “Our guys in military INTEL up in those mountains don’t make mistakes. If they’re not certain, they don’t speak. And if they don’t speak, we don’t move.”

  “You ever seen the other guy before?” said Johnny.

  “Not sure,” replied Mack. “There were two of them up in that village. And the guy in the passenger seat of the Dodge could easily have been the other one. But he was heavily bearded up there. Mostly what I remember of him was he wouldn’t stop spouting the Koran at me while we were searching for the dynamite. So I kicked him straight in the ass.”

  “Did you find the dynamite?”

  “Hell, yes. We always found it.”

  It was time for Mack and Johnny to go their separate ways. Johnny would retreat to Banda Fine Arts and transmit the photographs to the CIA in Langley. He had contacts in there as good as Mack’s were. And Mack would deliver a full report of the events to Bob Birmingham in East Norfolk.

  To the CIA boss he would reveal all, because the CIA was not in any way interested in getting to the bottom of whatever crime had been committed. They were interested in the pure and simple elimination of Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu. And while they were gratified to know that Ben and Abu had left, they wanted only to know when and where the other two were scheduled also to die.

  Mack revealed everything he knew to the CIA about Mountainside Farm and the school bus that had been converted into a traveling bomb. And, as he had suspected, Bob Birmingham just wanted broad brush strokes on the current whereabouts of the two men he wanted dead.

  Mack provided the registration number, and a good description of the old, mud-caked Dodge truck he suspected Ibrahim and Yousaf had fled the scene in, and told Bob he could expect very good photographs in the next hour.

  “Good,” said Birmingham. “Keep at it.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, the Torrington police chief was trying to work out what, if anything, he should investigate. All of the human remains had been blasted widely all over the parkland as well as incinerated. Microscopic DNA testing might yield something but none of the forensic guys was holding his breath.

  No one had been reported missing. The CIA had said little about the farm. And, aside from a few cracked window panes on the south side of the school, there was no damage, not a single scratch on any of the students, and no harm to either teachers or parents. As major bomb blasts go, this one had somehow been absorbed. And yet, there was something so utterly shocking about such an explosion so terrifyingly close to a large private school packed with the sons of extremely important people . . .

  The CIA divulged there was some terrorist suspicion, but plainly all of the terrorists were dead, blown up by their own hand. Except for two. In the opinion of the CIA’s criminal investigation department, two of the ringleaders had not been in the bus, but rather had been on standby to get everyone away after the deed was done. But also in their opinion was that there was no point in alarming the population with a story that suggested U.S. authorities had uncovered and prevented a massive terrorist hit on a U.S. school, and that there was now a nationwide search going on for two of the ringleaders. Because the secondary effect of that would be to put the said ringleaders instantly on their guard.

  So with a minimum of public announcement, the agency requested the Torrington police be on the lookout for a a black, old and dented Dodge Ram truck, probably muddy, with a Massachusetts registration number, which they supplied. They advised that the truck was likely still in the Torrington area, within a two-mile radius of East Canaan.

  They also advised the Torrington police that in the truck were two known terrorists, Ibrahim Sharif and Yousaf Mohammed, both originally from the Afghan/Pakistani mountains, both former inmates of Guantanamo Bay, and that both were likely armed and extremely dangerous.

  The station chief put Captain “Buzzy” Hannon in charge of the case, with the swiftly recovered Officer Tony Marinello as his assistant. If he’d searched the entire country, he could not have found two more zealous policemen, nor two less likely to allow it all to be kept under wraps.

  Within one hour, they had ransacked Mountainside Farm, and found very little except a lot of spilled ammonium nitrate in the barn. There was no sign of personal possessions because everything had been burned the night before or was in the bus when it blew.

  They questioned people at the school, but no one had seen anything. Mark Jenson especially could not help, now paralyzed with fear about what this near attack could mean for the school—for current students and new enrolment—with Canaan’s new reputation as number-one al-Qaeda target.

  It was soon clear to Hannon and Marinello that there was little to be gained from continued questioning of people who were not even witnesses. And the only person who had seen anything, Ms. Calvert, had had an emotional breakdown over the events and tendered her resignation.

  Mark Jenson called a staff meeting in the Common Room for 6 p.m. to discuss the future of the academy. He was keenly aware that if they decided to go ahead, as normal, and another bomb was to hit the school and kill several hundred students, he woul
d be held accountable.

  Tony Marinello did his level best to convince the headmaster that the chances of the killers returning were extremely remote, simply because people here would be ever on their guard. “Sir,” said Tony, “you probably have the safest school in the country. They never come back.”

  “You may very nearly be right,” Jenson replied. “But they hit the World Trade Center back in the mid-nineties. And, as we all know, came back for a more successful second try in 2001.”

  “Different, sir. Very different. The Twin Towers were a world symbol of U.S. power, unmatched anywhere. There was nothing comparable. This is just a school. There are hundreds like it. And any one of them will do just fine for a terrorist group trying to frighten the populace.”

  “Well, we do like to think we have unique qualities here at Canaan . . . ”

  But Officer Marinello was already out of the door, with his case, in his own opinion, proven beyond reasonable doubt.

  THERE WAS A GENERAL ALERT out for the scruffy Dodge Ram throughout New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. But this general alert did not instantly develop into a manhunt, because the evidence that there had been a suicide bomb was too strong. Thus state troopers in the half-dozen states that surround Connecticut were not fired up and lasering their way down the highway, searching for the old Dodge banger to the exclusion of all else.

  Ibrahim was on the Turnpike heading for Boston within forty minutes of the explosion. He felt more relaxed in Massachusetts, but the truth was, he had no idea where he was going. But by a process of elimination he’d arrived at one single word. North.

  South led back to the Mexican border, which gave him the shudders, even though it had been Hassan who had shot dead the two border guards. New York also gave him goose bumps, both because of the bomb in the men’s room and his sneaking suspicion that Faisal al-Assad had flown the coop.