The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  Muhammad had been born in Mecca, lived in Mecca when he received the prophecies that led him to preach, been forced from Mecca in fear and returned in triumph. Five times a day, 1.5 billion Muslims turned toward the Kaaba, the black stone at the heart of the Grand Mosque, to pray. The hajj, the spiritual journey to Mecca, was a central tenet of Islam. Millions of Muslims came each year. Their numbers would have been even greater if the Saudi government had not limited the size of the pilgrimage to control stampedes. Meanwhile, non-Muslims were barred even from setting foot in Mecca. “Oh you who believe! The idolaters are nothing but unclean, so they shall not approach the Sacred Mosque,” the Quran’s ninth verse said.

  Yes, it was true that Muhammad had once commanded his followers to pray toward Jerusalem. He’d changed the direction of prayer to Mecca after falling out with the Jewish tribes in Arabia. And yes, it was true that many scholars believed that Muhammad had made the hajj part of Islam mainly to placate Mecca’s merchants. Even before Islam existed, Mecca had profited from pilgrims visiting the Kaaba.

  No matter. Wells didn’t have to believe in the literal truth of every word in the Quran to feel the pull of the place. When he faced the Kaaba to pray, he imagined a billion whispered prayers coming from all over the world, from every direction, from worshippers of every color. Pleas of fear, hope, redemption, and revenge, dreams great and small, vows to honor and to love, all melding at the Grand Mosque into one holy message that only God could hear.

  UNFORTUNATELY, AS A PLACE to live, Mecca left much to be desired. Home to almost two million people, the city was dust-clogged and overcrowded. Most Saudi cities dealt with their rapid growth by spreading into the desert. Mecca didn’t have that option. It lay in a valley ringed by low mountains. Unable to expand horizontally, it had occupied every square inch of space in the valley and then grown vertically. Office towers and apartment buildings now hemmed in the Grand Mosque from all sides.

  The mosque itself looked very different than it had fifty years before. To handle the crush of hajj pilgrims, the Saudi government had repeatedly rebuilt and expanded the structure. The mosque was now the world’s largest, with gleaming white marble galleries surrounding a central plaza that held hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The Saudis had also expanded the city’s network of walkways and pedestrian tunnels to ease the traffic jams that occurred every hajj as pilgrims traveled between the mosque and their temporary homes in tent cities outside Mecca.

  Mecca’s congestion offered endless hiding places for Graham Kurland and his kidnappers — assuming Wells’s hunch was right and they were in the city. For now the call Hassan had received was his only clue. He grabbed his sat phone, called Shafer. “I have a number for you. Saudi. Probably a disposable phone. Used twenty minutes ago. Can NSA do anything?”

  “If it’s on, probably. If not, I don’t know. It may take a while. Depends on the carrier, how much cooperation we’re getting.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. How hot’s the number?”

  “Maybe very.”

  “Those two words don’t go together. What happened at the house?”

  “One KIA, two WIA.”

  “One what KIA?”

  “I’m reasonably certain he was hostile.”

  Shafer was silent.

  “He wasn’t friendly, that’s for sure.”

  “If you’re wrong, you’d better hope the king likes you. Not much we can do if you killed a Saudi civ on Saudi soil.”

  “Just tell the FBI to get a team to the house. Tonight. One of the wounded is in bad shape.”

  “Sounds like you had yourself a fun time.”

  “It was unavoidable.” Aside from the guy I shot in the back. “I need that trace, Ellis. While I was there, somebody called, left a message. I think it’s related.”

  “Give me the number. And the number of the phone that received the call.”

  Wells did.

  “I’ll let you know soon as I hear.”

  The Jeep slowed as they approached a roadblock at the entrance to Highway 5, the road connecting Jeddah and Mecca. The cops running the roadblock weren’t cops. Half of them carried M-16s and wore Special Forces uniforms. The others were muk in black shirts and pants. They waved Gaffan over, put a floodlight on the Jeep. Wells kept his arms low by his sides. He’d noticed flecks of blood on the cuffs of his gown. On a close search, they’d be obvious.

  Gaffan handed their identity cards to a Special Forces officer. He looked them over, then called the muk to check them out. Wells wondered whether Mansour had already learned the names on their cards.

  “You should be home,” the muk barked. “Where are you going?”

  “Mecca.”

  “Mecca? Why tonight?”

  “We have a job tomorrow. Cleaning a house. We didn’t want to get caught in the traffic in the morning.”

  The muk shined a flashlight over the Jeep. “I don’t see any supplies for cleaning.”

  “They’re all at the house.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The owner lets us sleep on his roof.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s on Abdul-Aziz Road. Two kilometers from the Grand Mosque.”

  The muk handed back their identity cards. “Drive fast, then. You only have thirty minutes, and if you get stopped at the western roadblock, they may make you sleep in the car and wait until the morning. Or they may arrest you.” He handed back their identity cards, waved them on.

  “Thank you, officer.”

  “Next—”

  Gaffan sped off. “Abdul-Aziz Road,” Wells said.

  “Figured it was a safe bet.”

  * * *

  THE DESERT TOOK OVER, the land as dark and flat as an ocean. If not for the glow of Jeddah behind them, Wells would hardly have believed he was traveling between two multimillion-person cities less than fifty miles apart.

  His sat phone rang. “Our friends say the number traces to western Mecca,” Shafer said.

  “You have a street? An address?”

  “They’re still working that. They may need you to call it again.”

  “I thought—”

  “It’s not Verizon. They can’t just ask nicely and get the location. And these disposables are tricky. Believe me when I tell you they’re pulling out the stops. They’re basically giving the Saudi telecom system an enema as we speak.”

  Five minutes later, Shafer called back. “They’re ready. They say if you can get that phone up, they can get to the specific tower.”

  “How long do they need?”

  “Thirty seconds. A minute would be better. But do it soon. They say that the way they’re spooning data, they could take down the whole system.”

  “‘Spooning.’”

  “It’s a technical term.”

  Wells reached for Hassan’s cell. Thirty seconds. If he screwed up, he’d not only blow his chance at finding the house, he might provoke the kidnappers into killing Kurland. Could he sound enough like a native Saudi to fool them? He murmured phrases to himself, smoothing his accent. They were halfway between Jeddah and Mecca now, rolling east at ninety miles an hour. As he watched, the cell’s reception shrank to a single bar.

  “Pull over.”

  “What about the curfew?”

  “Just do it.”

  Gaffan slowed down, edged to the side of the highway. Wells called the 966 number, keeping his hand over the microphone. After three rings, a man picked up.

  “I got your voicemail,” Wells said quietly. “But we may have a problem—”

  “Hassan. I can’t hear you—”

  Wells took his fingers off the microphone. “Better?”

  “A little.”

  “Usman says a helicopter’s circling.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Hold on—” Wells covered the microphone. “Usman—” He imagined himself on the first floor of the house, running to the roof. He waited, watched the call timer move past f
orty-five seconds, fifty. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up. He’d stretched a handful of sentences into a fifty-eight-second conversation. In a few minutes he’d send a calming text to the man on the other end. False alarm. Everything’s fine. See you tomorrow.

  “Let’s go.”

  THEY FLEW UNDER THE signs for the bypass highway that non-Muslims were required to take around Mecca. Wells wondered what would happen if they were arrested inside the city’s borders. Gaffan wasn’t Muslim at all, and a Wahhabi judge might find Wells’s commitment to the faith lacking. So they had the muk and the kidnappers against them, and now the religious police, too.

  The highway was nearly empty now, three lanes of freshly paved asphalt. Gaffan pinned the Jeep’s speedometer at an even one hundred sixty kilometers — one hundred miles — an hour. The land around them was still featureless, but ahead a halo of city lights rose behind a low mountain range. Then the road turned, and through a gap in the hills Wells saw a massive skyscraper towering over the city and the hills around it.

  “What is that?” Gaffan said.

  Incredibly, the Saudi government had built a massive office and hotel complex beside the Grand Mosque. The development was centered on a two-thousand-foot skyscraper, the second-largest in the world, topped by a gigantic clock modeled on London’s Big Ben. Each of the clock’s four faces was one hundred fifty feet high — the size of a midsized office building — and had at its center the Saudi palm-and-crossed-swords logo. On its face, the complex was an awful idea, a giant commercial center on top of a sacred religious site. And architecture critics agreed that the buildings were ugly and ponderous, much too big for the site, their bulk worsened by their lack of glass. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s largest skyscraper, was a more-than-two-thousand-five-hundred-foot needle into the sky, a soaring monument to modern design and engineering. The Mecca tower was an overgrown Lego block.

  But the Saudis weren’t fools. And despite their wealth, they weren’t inclined to build skyscrapers. The tallest buildings in Riyadh were less than half the size of this building. The princes had placed the complex where they did to remind the world that the glory of Islam and the glory of the House of Saud could not be separated. They’d knocked down a historic Ottoman Empire fortress to build it, ignoring the protests of the Turkish government, delivering the message that Mecca would never again belong to the Turks. From its heights, the skyscraper flashed the call to prayer five times a day, its green and white lights glowing over Mecca and the desert. It was a gift from the princes to proclaim the might and majesty of Islam. The symbolism was as simple and overwhelming as the Saudi flag.

  Wells was starting to explain all this to Gaffan when his sat phone rang. “I have something for you.”

  “Please tell me it’s an address.”

  “Not quite. But we have it down to two blocks in a neighborhood called Hindawiyyah. Good news is there aren’t any apartment buildings. It’s all residential. Medium to big houses. A good place to hide someone.”

  “What’s the street?”

  “It’s called Shahab. The expressway turns into a road called Umm al Qura”—Mother of Villages, Mecca’s historic title—“which goes right to the mosque. Shahab’s off Umm al Qura, about twelve hundred meters after the expressway ends. Right-hand side. The hot zone is four hundred meters down, give or take.”

  “‘Give or take.’”

  “There’s a radius around the cell towers. Our friends played some games with the signal to triangulate, but they could only get to within about a hundred meters. A circle with a two-block diameter. Maybe thirty houses in all.”

  “Ellis. We can’t start randomly kicking in doors. If that’s all you’ve got, you better call the FBI.”

  “Mecca’s out for the FBI. Unless somebody repeals the Quran.”

  “The muk, then.”

  “Bad idea for lots of reasons. Including the fact that we’d have to tell them about forty-two Aziz.”

  “So it’s just us?”

  “It’s just you. But I have good news, too. Fresh overheads. You have Internet access?”

  “No.”

  “Get someplace that does.”

  “Ellis. The curfew starts in ten minutes. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to town before they close the city. The muk are looking for us. Pretty soon they’re gonna have the names on our identity cards. We don’t have time to sit back, boot up, check Gmail—”

  “Then I’ll walk you through them.”

  “You want to describe satellite shots to me over the phone?”

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  The Jeep slowed. Wells looked up to see another roadblock, this one on the edge of the city. “I have no ideas at all.” He hung up, stuffed the phone under the seat.

  THEY CLEARED THE ROADBLOCK, drove east on the Umm al Qura, toward the skyscraper that loomed over the Grand Mosque and the rest of the city. Like Jeddah, Mecca felt besieged, its streets empty, helicopters sweeping downtown and the ridges of the hills to the north and south.

  “What now?” Gaffan said.

  “Find this street, Shahab, and get deep into the neighborhood. Past the hot block. Find some place where we can pull over and I can talk to Shafer without getting us arrested.”

  The streets in Mecca were better marked than those in the Jeddah slums. At 10:59 p.m., Gaffan turned into an empty lot and nosed the Jeep behind a dumpster. If the rest of the neighborhood was any guide, the lot would soon be home to yet another giant concrete mansion. They were two blocks from the hot zone the National Security Agency had found. If they stayed here too long, someone would call the police, but for now the helicopters were closer to downtown and most of the police were at roadblocks rather than on patrol. They had a few minutes. Wells called Shafer.

  “You’re there?”

  “Yes. I don’t see how this can work, but talk.”

  “First, make sure we’re talking about the same place. Four blocks in, at the corner, there’s a three-story house that reaches almost to the edge of the lot, with a green minibus parked in front—”

  “Yes.” They’d driven past that house maybe a minute before. Sitting in an office in Virginia, six thousand miles from these streets, Shafer could see over walls and into backyards invisible to Wells. The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had said it best: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  For fifteen minutes, Shafer described cars, yards, fences, garages, trying to find the clue that Wells needed. “Next”—Wells would say when Shafer had exhausted a property’s possibilities. “Next—”

  And then Shafer said it.

  “This one’s not on Shahab. Half a block down, looks like new construction, a garage behind it. Parked in front of the garage, I see a motorbike, small, and what looks like an ambulance—”

  “Say again, Ellis.” Wells thought of the paramedic case he’d seen at 42 Aziz.

  “In back. There’s a vehicle, maybe five years old, you know, a cargo van, white, red stripes and the red crescent logo on the side and brackets for a light bar on top, but I don’t actually see the light bar. Smaller than an American version, but an ambulance is pretty obvious, right?”

  “Does it have a name, a hospital, anything like that?”

  “I don’t see one.”

  “What else?”

  “The wall on this one is maybe eight feet, a little higher than the neighbors, nothing special. Nobody outside, nobody on the roof.”

  “Any pipes coming off the house or the garage, any signs of ventilation?”

  A pause. “Could be a vent off the left side of the garage. I can’t tell for sure.”

  “Ways in and out?”

  “Nothing obvious. It’s a fortress. The front gate’s solid, and the top of the walls is studded with glass. You can’t see it from the street, but it’s there. There’s no alley in back. You think this is it, John?”

  “It’s our best shot.” By “best,” Wells meant only.

 
; “’Cause it’s gonna be tough. Too bad that ambulance isn’t running. You could call nine-one-one, get them out of the house.”

  Nine-one-one. Get them out. The words triggered an idea. “Maybe we can.”

  WELLS HUNG UP, TOLD Gaffan about the ambulance.

  “You know, it’s probably coincidence.”

  “What if I can prove it’s not?” Wells explained his plan.

  “That’s the best idea anybody’s had since this whole thing started.”

  So Wells reached down for the cell phone he’d taken from Usman.

  CHAPTER 24

  CUTTING OFF KURLAND’S HAND HAD TAKEN LESS THAN A MINUTE. After hitting bone twice, Bakr found the groove of Kurland’s wrist and pressed the saw forward. Kurland tore at the vises, but their grip held him tight. He screamed, but Bakr couldn’t hear him over the shriek of the blade. After the first surge of blood coated the floor, Bakr was surprised how slowly it came, thin, unsteady dribbles.

  When the operation — as Bakr thought of it — was done, Bakr picked Kurland’s hand off the floor and stuffed it into a plastic bag. He wanted it for a keepsake, if nothing more. He wrapped Kurland’s stump in cotton gauze and strapped it to Kurland’s chest. Then he tugged Kurland’s mouth open and poured a half-dozen Cipro pills down his throat. Bakr didn’t know if Cipro would help, but he didn’t much care. Kurland had only two or at most three more days to live, anyway. Probably for the best. His eyes were dead already.

  Before Bakr left the cell, he gave Kurland another hit of morphine to calm him. Still, Bakr had to be careful. Between the shock and the pain, too much morphine might send Kurland over. Bakr intended a messier and more public death for Kurland, an on-camera beheading. When he was done, Bakr would tell America and the world how the Saudi government had supported him. He’d have dates and bank accounts, evidence that the United States couldn’t ignore. He imagined the response in Washington. The Americans had already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Now they would do the same to Saudi Arabia. In turn, the Muslim world would rise against them. And Bakr would lead the battle. This was his destiny, the reason Allah had saved him that day on the dune.