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  “This will be very expensive,” Bahmad said. “Not only in terms of money, but in terms of men.”

  “This will be my last blow. Time is running out for me.” Bin Laden gave him a sad, knowing smile. “But I think you already guessed.”

  “Cancer?”

  Bin Laden nodded. “Unless there is a miracle I have one year.” He looked at Sarah’s shrouded body. “I want America to feel the same pain I am feeling at this moment.”

  “If we do this thing your name will not be respected,” Bahmad warned. “You will be vilified not only in the West, but among Muslims as well.”

  Bin Laden’s gaze hardened. “But I will be remembered.”

  “Indeed you will.”

  Bin Laden thought about it for a long time, and when he looked up once more his resolve was as clear on his face as his pain. “How do we proceed?”

  “Give me a minute and I will show you.” Bahmad got up and went to his sleeping quarters off the operations center near the back of the cave. He lit one of the gas lamps and went to a four-drawer file cabinet, which he unlocked. The room was austere, only the bare rock floor, a small cot, a writing table and the file cabinet. There was nothing on the walls, no photographs or pictures; no rugs or vases, nothing to mark that anyone had lived here on and off for more than a year. But since Beirut, Bahmad had been a man who carried all of his decorations and mementoes in his brain.

  He took a thick manila envelope out of the top drawer and relocked the file cabinet. He’d been an avid reader for a long time, a habit he had developed in England working for the SIS. Part of his job had been to read all the newspapers, journals and magazines coming out of the Middle East, and read transcripts from television and radio broadcasts, as well as from intercepted military and diplomatic traffic. He’d developed an insatiable appetite for news of what was going on in the world. Here in the mountains it had been fantastically difficult to keep abreast of what was happening in the outside world, but he had managed to have a weekly package of newspapers and magazines from around the world brought up here. And he consumed all the international news as it was presented, with different spins in the major newspapers of a dozen different countries. He had time to think, to plan, to let his mind soar wherever it would; to make connections where seemingly there were none; to make associations where none were apparent; and to draw out scenarios based on what he had learned.

  Holding the envelope containing his planning details, he wondered why he had taken this notion as far as he had. Most of his ideas were just that, nothing but ideas. Way too fantastically difficult or even horrible to consider. But this idea had stuck with him, for some reason, and the operation would be his very last. With bin Laden dead, however, Bahmad would be set financially for the rest of his life. If he could pull this last thing off and get away, he had the numbers for a dozen of bin Laden’s secret offshore bank accounts worth somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred million dollars. Enough to last any man a lifetime in luxury. And with bin Laden gone there would be no one to come after him.

  Returning to the main chamber where bin Laden was waiting, Bahmad stopped a moment in the corridor. One last time he asked himself if he should go through with this. The idea was so monstrous that it had taken even his breath away when it had come to him. But years of hate had burned out whatever conscience he’d ever had. Yasir Arafat had fed into it, used it, just as bin Laden had, so that now even the bizarre seemed ordinary to him. Human life did not mean to him now what it had when he was a child.

  The problem, he thought, walking into the main chamber, would be fitting the plan with Elizabeth McGarvey’s assassination. For that he would need a diversion, and even before he sat down beside bin Laden it came to him; the entire thing in perfect detail, and he smiled. It would only take a few more phone calls and a transfer of some funds to the proper accounts.

  “I see that you have already given this some thought,” bin Laden said.

  “Yes, I have.” Bahmad opened the envelope and took out several articles that he had clipped from the New York Times, Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner three months ago. He handed them to bin Laden.

  “I will read these later—”.bin Laden said, but then a photograph of a pretty young woman in the lead article caught his attention. He drew a sudden, sharp breath and looked up, a sense of wonder on his face.

  “She would be the target,” Bahmad said.

  Bin Laden’s mind was racing a thousand miles per hour. “But not the President?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Not the President,” bin Laden said forcefully. He studied the photograph. “I want him to feel the same grief I am feeling. A father’s grief when his daughter is killed in front of his eyes. It must be done that way.”

  “The target will be Deborah Haynes, the President’s daughter.”

  Bin Laden sat back and closed his eyes. “You would use a nuclear weapon to kill one person?”

  “No, there would be many others. Perhaps two thousand, probably even more than that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The President’s daughter is mildly retarded, which makes the fact of her innocence without argument. America loves her as they love their President. Every father can have sympathy for the family. For what they will go through. But America is also very proud of her. Besides being beautiful, she is talented. She is a gymnast and a longdistance runner.”

  Bin Laden opened his eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Three months from now, in September, Deborah Haynes is going to take part in the International Special Olympics in San Francisco. After the opening ceremonies in Candlestick Park, she, and perhaps as many as fifteen hundred other handicapped runners, is going to compete in a half-marathon. From the park she’ll cross the Golden Gate Bridge and head to Sausalito, but she’ll never get that far. Joshua’s Hammer will be aboard a ship passing beneath the bridge. At the moment Deborah Haynes is in the middle of the bridge the bomb will explode.”

  For just a moment a touch of sanity crossed bin Laden’s face and he looked away, his eyes coming to rest on his daughter’s shrouded body.

  “There’ll be no going back to the old ways for any of us,” Bahmad warned.

  “It will be no mere footnote in the history books,” bin Laden said softly. “Unlike Sarah’s murder.” He turned back. “Where will you go afterwards?”

  “I have a place in mind,” Bahmad said. The money he already had would be sufficient to gain him the safe haven. And once he had raided bin Laden’s accounts, he would buy a large ranch inland. He’d thought about raising horses, perhaps even sugarcane. Legitimate pursuits. He would never be able to travel again, but then with what he had in mind there would be no need. He would trade his career as a terrorist for one of a gentleman farmer.

  “When we leave here we will never see or hear from each other again.”

  “Where will you go, Osama?”

  Bin Laden said nothing, and after a few moments of silence, Bahmad nodded.

  “It’s just as well that I don’t know. But we need to be gone from here’ within the next twenty-four hours, no longer.”

  “Do you have a plan for transporting the bomb to California?”

  “Yes, but for that I will need your help. Four of your most trusted mujahedeen need to move it out of here, and your international connections to get me a cargo ship.”

  A sudden understanding dawned in bin Laden’s eyes. “It’s why you insisted on camouflaging it in that package. It will be—”

  Bahmad held up a hand. “No one must know about this except for us, Osama. Not your mujahedeen who will transport the device, and certainly not the ship captain or his crew.” He took the newspaper articles from bin Laden’s hand, and dropped them onto the live coals in the brazier. The paper flared up, and Bahmad took the rest of the planning documents, maps, photographs, notes and timetables out of the manila envelope and fed them to the fire too. Lastly he dropped the envelope into the flames. He knew everything
by heart.

  They watched in silence until there was nothing left but ashes, which Bahmad stirred with a small wooden-handle rake.

  “Insha “Allah,” bin Laden said.

  Bahmad held his piece. But no, he thought. In this instance he didn’t believe that Allah or God would play any part, because this act would be too bloody even for them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The White House

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” The President’s press secretary Sterling Mott stepped aside and the Washington press corps got to its feet as President Haynes strode purposefully into the map room and took his place at the podium. He’d brought no notes, and when he looked into the television cameras his manner was stern but forthright.

  “Here’s a man with a clear conscience,” the AP political analyst said to the ABC newswoman seated beside him, which elicited a chuckle.

  “For several years the United States has offered a five million dollar reward for the capture of the Saudi Arabian terrorist, Osama bin Laden,” the President began. “Since the bombing of a Saudi National Guard Post in Riyadh in 1996 in which five Americans were killed, bin Laden has been directly or indirectly tied to numerous other terrorist acts in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of other innocent civilians were brutally killed or injured.”

  The President paused. “Dahran, Kenya, Tanzania and even New York City bin Laden has waged his war of terror against the West — against specifically the United States and all Americans — for a very long and bloody time.

  “In 1998 he made it perfectly clear to the world that it was every Muslim’s duty to kill Americans and our allies, both civilian and military, wherever and whenever possible.

  “Under the banner that he calls Al Qaeda, or the Base,

  he has systematically recruited three kinds of people-those who were failures and had nothing else in their lives, no jobs, no families, no prospects for the future; those who love Islam but have no real idea what the Koran teaches; and finally those who know nothing but fighting and killing-professional terrorists.

  “In August of 1998, President Clinton ordered missile strikes at bin Laden’s camps near the town of Khost in northeastern Afghanistan, and at a bin Laden-financed chemical weapons factory in Khartoum. All the targets were heavily damaged or completely destroyed, seriously affecting bin Laden’s ability to wage his war of terrorism against us.”

  The President paused again to gauge the effect that his words were having.

  “Although bin Laden escaped personal injury, we thought that such an attack would make him think twice about continuing what he calls his jihad — or, holy war. But we were mistaken.

  “Over the past months our intelligence agencies have been engaged in what we thought was a meaningful dialogue with bin Laden. We acted in good faith, agreeing to lift the bounty on him, to negotiate with the government of Saudi Arabia for the repatriation of his family, and certain other considerations that we felt would put an end to the killings.

  “Bin Laden responded in a very clear, very concise and very deadly manner. Two weeks ago, gunmen, under the direct orders of bin Laden, shot to death a State Department employee, Alien Trumble, his wife and two children along with two bystanders in the parking lot of EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida.”

  That got everybody’s attention and two dozen hands shot up, but the President held them off.

  “I ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to withhold the essential facts of the attack until we were certain who was behind it. When we had concrete evidence laying the crime on bin Laden’s doorstep, we continued to with hold the announcement while we considered an appropriate response.”

  A heavy silence fell over the room. All eyes and cameras were on the President.

  “Yesterday, after a week-long series of meetings with my National Security Council, I ordered our armed forces to strike at bin Laden’s primary camp in the mountains of Afghanistan, eighty miles north of the capital city Kabul.”

  The announcement answered the questions about anti American rioting in Kabul that had begun this morning. Until now the White House had stonewalled the issue.

  “In addition to the incident in Orlando, our intelligence services confirmed the strong likelihood that bin Laden was planning another, even more deadly attack against Americans on U.S. soil. I cannot share all the details with you at this time because of national security concerns, but we believe that if such an attack were brought against us the loss of lives would be staggering. It would be a far worse tragedy than anything bin Laden has engineered to date.” _

  The President was grim-faced. It was clear to everybody watching and listening that he had been forced into ordering the attack. It was something abhorrent to him. And yet he was being firm. During his campaign he’d promised the American people that he would take back the fear. And this was the first necessary though painful step in that direction.

  “The mission was a success,” he continued. “Preliminary reconnaissance aircraft and satellite photos indicate that the terrorist camp was obliterated. Wiped from the face of the earth. There was no loss of American lives, nor were any civilian targets damaged or destroyed. This was a surgical strike.”

  The President looked directly into the television cameras. “I made it perfectly clear when I was hired for this job, and I will make it perfectly clear again: The United States has a zero-tolerance policy toward all acts of terrorism against Americans, wherever they may be, and against the monsters who perpetrate them. There is, and will continue to be, no safe haven for terrorists anywhere on earth. Strike at us, and we will find and destroy you. And that is a promise.”

  In the Afghan Mountains Sunset was in another twenty minutes at 8:27. McGarvey had gone without proper rest for more than forty-eight hours, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up.

  The worst part had been climbing down the steep cliff beside the waterfall. He’d almost lost his footing several times, and when he finally reached the lower camp his legs had shaken so badly he had to stop for ten minutes before he could go on.

  Twice making his way down the arroyo to the valley he’d stumbled on rocks and nearly broke an ankle. Afterward, however, the going was much easier and he had allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette and a drink of water.

  The day had been very warm, but now with the sun behind the mountains to the west the temperature was dropping fast. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but a strong wind blew down the valley and he could smell the snow on the upper peaks. Just thinking about what this valley would be like in the dead of winter made him shiver, and he picked up the pace.

  Already he was behind schedule. The climb down the cliff and through the arroyo had taken much longer than he thought it would. He tried jogging, but after a hundred yards or so he was winded because of the altitude, and he felt a very sharp, painful stitch at his side, so that he had to slow down. The feeling he’d had at the top of the cliff that someone was behind him — perhaps Farid had turned around and come back after all — had finally faded. He stopped several times to look back, but each time he saw nothing. No movement of any kind. He could have been on a deserted planet.

  As he walked he thought about Sarah. If she had taken her time getting back to the camp she would have missed the attack. But if she had hurried she would have been caught in the middle of it. Then her only hope would have been to get inside the cave. Either way if she had survived it would have been a terrible blow for her. Everything her father had taught her about Americans would have been proven true. They were not to be trusted, their word was as godless as their society.

  However badly we hurt them up there, the surviving mujahedeen would be tending to their wounded. McGarvey knew from the last time bin Laden had been hit that his people would be gone from that location within twenty four hours.

  But they would be sending someone for him. Of that he had little doubt. And if they came he would have to kill them. The time for neg
otiating had passed.

  He spotted the outlying stubble of the abandoned cornfields, and the outlines of the bombed-out buildings in the village, and he picked up the pace again. It was possible that there was another, faster path down from bin Laden’s camp; the route they had taken might have been only for his benefit. Even now he thought that he would have a hard time retracing his steps. Every arroyo looked almost exactly the same from the valley floor as every other one.

  With darkness coming he angled to the west up into the hills above the valley. He reached a spot from where he could look down into the village, and held up. Nothing moved below. From where he crouched in the scrub brush he could make out the barn where they had parked the Rover, and even a bit of the camo netting. On the other side of the village he could see the wide stream meandering down the valley. And above him, at the crest of the hills, there was nothing.