by Gary Haynes
“How is he?” Crane said, although he felt stupid as soon as the words had come out of his mouth.
“Recuperating. But in truth that’s a misnomer. He’s still in a coma. Still unconscious. We’re feeding him through a nasogastric tube and he’s got a catheter. I won’t go into any more details,” the captain said. “You can have five minutes.”
“Thanks,” Crane said.
He watched the doctor open the steel door and leave before looking back at the general.
“You’re safe,” he said to the general. “But you and me know that safe is an illusion. Right? Remember that US officer, the Muslim psychiatrist who went on a killing spree at a base. No one’s safe, any more, right?”
Crane felt as morose as he could remember feeling, and he wasn’t cheery by nature. “So you need to get up outta that bed and get back to what you do best. You die in bed, general. And your country needs you, by God.”
With that Crane saw a flicker of movement, as the general’s left forefinger rose and fell a fraction on the white blanket. He appeared to regain a modicum of consciousness, although his eyelids were still closed, the eyeballs moving around frantically underneath as if he was in REM sleep. Crane thought it might be an involuntary spasm, but he kept talking for a further few minutes.
Suddenly the general’s mouth seemed to tremble beneath the clear respirator. He coughed, his finger shuddered. “My boy?” he breathed.
More than a little taken aback, Crane thought for a moment. He sure as hell didn’t want the general to have a relapse, so he moved forwards and knelt down, his head parallel with the patient’s. He lied, saying that Tom’s vacation had been cancelled due to an emergency assignment to Russia.
The general appeared to drift off again. Crane got up. He’d report to the captain and relay what had happened. But he felt sick to his gut for lying to the man who’d saved his life in Lebanon all those years ago. The general had put his career on the line then. His own life, too, Crane knew.
He patted the general on the hand with great tenderness and left.
Chapter 45
The lights had gone out in part of the old city two hours after nightfall due to a power cut, which the locals blamed on an Israeli bombing raid. Retribution, they knew, for the IDF soldiers who had died in a helicopter assault on a Hamas safe house. A Mossad spy had been killed there, or so the rumour went. But they’d put on their generators or gas lamps, or just sat in their little yards under the tight clusters of bright stars. Years of conflict brought with it a steely resilience in most. For those who couldn’t cope with it, the only option was to go silently mad.
Ibrahim had hidden out in another Hamas safe house near the harbour before being transported in the back of an SUV to the northern tip of the Gaza Strip. In the large trunk had been a six-foot kayak, painted matt black, as were the paddles. The kayak was made of Kevlar, which was lighter and stronger than fibreglass. Ibrahim had changed into a wet suit and had been launched into the calm waters of the eastern Mediterranean.
He’d paddled for a distance of thirteen nautical miles, as sleekly as a shark fin, using a handheld compass to guide him, averaging a speed of six miles per hour. The sea was mottled by moonlight, the calm surface only troubled by the odd fleck of spindrift. His passage was almost effortless.
A Turkish fishing boat was waiting for him outside of Israeli territorial waters. It had travelled down from the southern Lebanese coastal city of Tyre, close to northern Israel, and had anchored in international waters.
The boat, thirty foot long, had flaking white paint edged in light blue beneath the gunwale. Apart from the seeming tangle of nets and little hillocks of crab and lobster pots, the decking was bare, its wood rendered almost black from the constant swabbing down and scrubbing clean of fish scales and blood. The navigation lights had been cut a mile past Haifa.
It was travelling at a sedate pace now, the engine noise masked by a makeshift sound suppressor, consisting of a layer of mattresses and rubber mats laced with aluminium foil. It was heading for northern Cyprus, roughly two hundred and seventy miles away. With the four-man Turkish crew watching the flecks of cloud passing over the half-moon on deck, and the captain, a jolly man with skin like cracked sandpaper, at the helm in the wheelhouse, Ibrahim was standing in the small cabin, which stank of fish guts and gasoline.
He’d been handed a backpack before he’d left Gaza, which contained, among other things, a hand mirror, a sharp pair of scissors and a shaving kit. Being careful not to cut himself as the boat rocked a little in the swell, he began to change his appearance again, cutting his hair even shorter, Western-style, and shaving his goatee.
He knew the Mossad would be focussing all of their attention on the Middle East, so getting a decent distance away was a priority now. As for the various Western intelligence agencies, not least the US Department of Homeland Security, they would be looking for armed jihadists, or suicide bombers, and tightening up security around scores of military installations. They would be wrong, but he would have to be careful.
Once they’d docked in Kyrenia, northern Cyprus, the boat would refuel and then cruise across the Mediterranean to southern France. He’d be driven up from Marseilles to Paris, whereupon he’d be hidden by jihadists in a mosque in one of the many immigrant suburbs.
After changing his appearance, Ibrahim applied the false beard and long hairpiece from the backpack and checked his image in the mirror, tightening his leg muscles in an attempt to steady himself. The hair was in fact human hair, sold in the refugee camps in western Turkey by impoverished Syrian refugees. His disguise was complete after he fitted the prosthetic nose, and although his natural nose was angular, it made it less symmetrical, adding a bump to the left side.
That done, he sat on the stained bench, thinking through the plan for the days ahead, which was as simple as it was devastating. The select brotherhood of jihadists lived in the West and all of them had fought with him in Syria and Iraq and had returned home. But only those who had said they were visiting relatives in Pakistan or the Middle East and had been believed. For those Sunni Muslims who’d been known to have fought with the Islamic State group or al-Qaeda, they’d be imprisoned, and upon their release, monitored by intelligence communities for the rest of their lives.
Those who’d escaped such scrutiny wouldn’t be suicide bombers, but rather suicide carriers. The Arab in quarantine back in Gaza had contracted the newest and most virulent of diseases emanating from the Greater Middle East, a mixture of SARS and MERS. The former was an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome, the latter for Middle East respiratory system. After an incubation period of ten days, the immune system began to break down. The new hybrid virus was Ebola times a thousand and caused a swift meltdown in the immune system, followed by five days of rampant fever and shortness of breath, and finally fatal renal failure.
It was thought to have originated in bats or camels, but no one really knew for sure. What was certain was that it was highly contagious and incurable, resistant to all known antibiotics and other viral vaccines.
The simplicity was that the future carriers were Muslim nationals in their own Western countries, mostly second-generation immigrants, already in place. There was no need to risk an attack on any protected military sites, or even carry weapons. A deadly human virus carried by willing humans, he thought. And all the weapons in the world couldn’t combat this killer, all the technology in the world offered no defence.
The Silent Jihad.
Ibrahim allowed himself a smile now and delved into the backpack for the package that held the parts of a state-of-the-art printer supplied for him by his brothers in Qatar. He couldn’t risk getting a gun past southern Cypriot coastal waters, and the Turks who’d take him to southern France had agreed it only on the basis that he didn’t carry a weapon. He guessed that they knew something was awry. Ensuring that a random coastguard boarding party wouldn’t find anything but dead squid and oilskins meant that they could legitimately plead ignor
ance to nothing other than a minor case of illegal entry.
But he had the 3D printer, and split in four parts it looked as innocuous as his own skinny and dishevelled form. He knew the hardy Turks wouldn’t have an inkling of what it was even if they saw it fitted together, just as they wouldn’t have a notion of who he was even if they saw him in his true light.
It was perfect.
Chapter 46
By 14:05 the next day, Lester had arrived in Ankara. He’d flown in from Ronald Reagan National Airport and had caught a taxi to the hotel. After unpacking and taking a shower, he and Tom had had a beer in the small hotel bar and had caught up with what one another had been doing for the past few months. Tom had said that he would brief Lester on the job here after they’d left the confines of the hotel, the rundown nature of which Lester had of course bitched about incessantly.
An hour later, they were sitting on a wooden bench beside an old-fashioned lamppost in Güven Park near Kızılay Square close to the Monument to a Secure, Confident Future. The stone monument was erected in 1935, depicting stern-looking, half-naked and stylized representations of perfect Turkish manhood, and compelled the locals to be proud, work hard, and believe in themselves. It wouldn’t have been out of place in the fascist squares of pre-World War Two Berlin, or perhaps more fittingly, Rome, Tom had thought when he’d first seen it.
The heat hadn’t subsided and they were glad of the shade from the surrounding trees. Lester was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a pair of shades that Tom guessed had cost a thousand bucks or more. His wristwatch was likely worth five times that, he thought, the large face glinting with diamonds. The private security business was obviously still doing well, despite the downturn of US forces in the Middle East. Lester had put on weight, but all of it muscle, and he hadn’t been lacking in that department beforehand. He was lean, his black face handsome and devoid of lines for a man of his age. His hair was cut ultra short. He looked good, Tom thought.
“A bit Cold War, ain’t it, Tom?” Lester said. “I take it that hotel was random as well as shitty, so what’s the problem? We couldn’t talk there?”
“You know I was thinking. When I was a kid Europe and the Middle East might as well have been the sun and moon. I guess I’m just feeling a little paranoid.”
Lester smirked. “A little paranoid,” he said incredulously. “Shit, Tom, you wuz born paranoid. That’s why you’re so goddamned good at your job.”
A small brown bird landed on the tarmac path that led from where they were sitting to the busy highway. It picked about among the grit for something edible before flying off.
“So, buddy, why have you brought me over seven thousand miles?”
Tom told Lester everything he knew about his father in Ankara and the jihadist, Ibrahim. The only lead, Tom went on, was that Ibrahim was protected by a baba in the Turkish mafia. He left out what Crane had said about Al-Shabaab and Hamas. There just wasn’t any point raising it at this juncture. He left out what Crane had said about the planned attack on the US military, too. It was just his nature to be discreet. But he did tell Lester that he was now working for Crane, a subcontractor, and the fee was generous, plus all but unlimited expenses.
After Lester had bitched about the state of the hotel again, and had said that unlimited expenses sounded kinda ironic in the circumstances, he said, “And you want us to mix it with the Turkish mafia? I mean, just the two of us?”
Tom leant down, picked up a small piece of fallen branch. “I guess,” he said. He snapped the twig and tossed it towards the path.
“Shit, Tom, that’s like taking on a pack of grizzlies with a BB gun. A freakin’ jammed BB gun at that.”
Tom smiled. “It gets worse. You’re gonna be an African terrorist. You don’t speak English.”
“Great. And you?”
“A half-Saudi, half-American, who you will refer to as the Prince – that’s what bin Laden’s men called him.”
“They did?” Lester asked.
“Yeah, the Prince. I like it already. They had to ask him for permission to speak, too. So whatcha think?” Tom said, leaning back and interlocking his fingers behind his head.
Lester jumped up just as an elderly couple walked by. They looked petrified and shuffled off as quickly as they could. Respectfully, Lester waited until they’d moved out of earshot before going into his rant.
“Hey, you can forget that right this fucking instant. I ain’t asking nobody for permission to speak, you got me? I gave that up when I got kicked outta the Marines. Fuck it, you’ll be asking me to give ya a shoeshine next. Jesus, bro.”
Tom began to snicker.
“It ain’t funny, man,” Lester said, walking back and forth as if he’d dropped something on the grass.
“I’m playing with ya,” Tom said.
“You’re playing with me at a time like this. The hell you mean? The heat made you crazy or what, Tom?”
“I guess I just needed a release,” Tom said, snickering again.
It was the truth, too. The past twenty-four hours had been a head spin and it was either that or downing a bottle of Jack, and he didn’t think it was a good idea to mix it with the Turkish mafia with a hangover, even with Lester watching his back.
“‘Bout time you got yourself a damn woman, you ask me. You wanna release, get yourself a woman. Still, least you ain’t got anyone bitching about taking the trash out, shit like that.”
“Yeah, right,” Tom said. “But listen up. Our first stop is a brothel.”
“A brothel? Lester said, making a face. “You ain’t been to a whorehouse your whole life. Me, I could write an A to Z.”
“Okay, I know you’re gonna tell me anyway, but what’s the Z?”
“Zanzibar,” Lester said. “That was hot, and I don’t mean the sand on your feet.”
Tom stood up and looked serious. “This is how it’s goin’ down.”
Chapter 47
The weather had turned in Ankara in a matter of a few minutes. The sky was now pigeon-grey and the temperature had dropped a good five degrees. Tom and Lester were sitting in the back of a white Mercedes taxi en route to the mafia-owned brothel. Lester had wanted to rent a car but Tom had been against it, saying that he didn’t want a direct link to them, which would be the case if Lester had given out his passport and credit card details to the rental company. When Lester had said they’d already done that at the hotel, Tom hadn’t answered. He wasn’t at his best and he knew it.
“Your father will be okay,” Lester said.
“Sure.”
Lester tried to cheer Tom up by telling him about the time he and some fellow jarheads had been in Istanbul. They had to line up at a metal gate guarded by police that sectioned off an alleyway called Giraffe Lane in the Beyoglu district. Once they’d satisfied the police as to their identification, they’d had to hand over their keys, cellphones and lighters to a civilian custodian, and walk through an airport-style metal detector before being let loose in a cul-de-sac that constituted Turkey’s oldest legal red-light district, which was founded in the days of the Ottoman Empire.
Tom forced a smile. Part of the info on the Turkish mafia that had been sent to him by Crane, which he’d read in the hotel, had included that criminal organization’s involvement in the sex trade. Attitudes had changed since Lester and the jarheads had had their fun in Istanbul. Prostitution remained a legitimate business in licensed brothels, and the taxi was heading for what was left of Ankara’s Bentderesi red-light district, which had been all but demolished several years ago by the municipality. But now, rather than being protected by the police and undergoing regular health checks, the unofficial and some said religiously-motivated crackdown on legal prostitutes hadn’t reduced their numbers, but had simply driven them further into the hands of the babas.
The taxi driver, a skinny guy, with a seemingly elongated neck, bad teeth and pimples, parked up beside a house with broken windows at the head of a dilapidated backstreet. When Tom told him to keep the chang
e from the fifty Turkish lira note he’d handed over, the guy didn’t say a thing. He clearly knew what the area was infamous for, and by the look on his gaunt face as he’d turned around, he didn’t approve of it, either.
Tom and Lester got out walked about twenty yards down the street, which smelt of a mixture of fried food and something like smouldering rubber, towards a doorman wearing a thick overcoat and heavy boots. He was bearded and reminded Tom of a bear. He was smoking a cigarette and had a walkie-talkie in his other hand. He took a long look at Lester before turning to block the doorway with his bulk.
The terraced house had a concrete facade and a flat roof. The discoloured drapes were drawn. A dull yellow light from a low-level lamp was just visible on the ground floor. It was the address that Crane had provided for Tom and which he’d been given by Jack Donaldson at the embassy.
“English?” the Turk said.
“No,” Tom said.
“It extra for the black.”
Tom sensed Lester tense up beside him. He put out his hand and touched his friend lightly on the wrist. “Two things. First, we are not tourists. Second, we are in the flesh-buying business, and I mean business, not pleasure.”
The doorman looked a little nervous.
“It’s okay,” Tom said, raising a splayed hand slowly. “I just want to speak with the baba who owns this establishment.”
“Es…tabli…tent?”
“Whorehouse, you dumb sonofabitch,” Lester said.
Tom shook his head in exasperation.
The doorman dropped the cigarette. He didn’t stub it out with his foot and Tom knew that meant he was going to use his free hand to fetch something out of his coat, which was unlikely to be a stick of gum. He pulled out a claw hammer.
