stoop-shouldered, shuffled into sight. He stopped and leaned heavily on his ornately carved wooden cane, a gift from Sarah, and shined the light back the way he had come. He held his breath to listen for sounds of footsteps behind him. But the tiny chamber he’d come to was silent, as were the passageways behind him. He couldn’t even hear the sounds of the generator lost behind millions of tons of solid rock.
He turned back, and played the flashlight beam into the narrow grotto that they’d discovered at the extreme end of the system of caves. It was at a higher elevation than the rest of the chambers, and was completely free of water. Cold, but dry as a desert, yet he thought that he could feel heat coming from inside. He shivered in anticipation.
The Americans had come as he knew they would. First the ineffectual fool from Riyadh, and then the man from Washington, who was a much more dangerous adversary than they’d ever faced, if Ali was to be believed. And his chief of staff was to be believed; the man never made a mistake. Never. He was a heathen, but a very useful tool. Do not blame the rapier for its penetrating insensitivity, it’s not the sword that kills the enemy, it is the hand that directs the thrust.
He stooped so-that he would not hit his head on the low roof and entered the inner chamber. About ten meters long and barely three wide, the grotto was nothing more than a passageway deeper into the mountain. But it stopped at a solid wall of rock. There was little or no airflow back here, and the air smelled ancient, indicating that there was no other way in or out except by the series of passages from the front.
For all of his life bin Laden had been surrounded by people; sometimes by his enemies, but for most of the time by his friends. But he’d always felt desperately alone. Five times a day at his prayers, and then at night with sleep that usually came only after a very long struggle, he was isolated with his own thoughts, which for the most part centered on dreams of hate and especially absolution, a concept he’d never really understood as a young man, but one that had become increasingly important to him as he grew older, and especially in this last, horrible year.
Except for a fiberglass case about a meter and a half on a side and half that deep, which rested on a slightly larger wooden crate, the chamber was empty. Bin Laden hesitated for a minute or so at the entrance, his light playing on the container.
In the beginning the struggle had seemed so simple to him. It had never been about religion, at least not in the sense that Westerners thought it was. Islam, Judaism and Christianity were fundamentally the same; they all believed in one God and the same prophets. It was a matter of interpretation, and a matter of living within a religion. The Jews blamed everyone else for their problems, as they always had, and they arrogantly believed that they, and they alone, were the chosen people. They wanted to take over their corner of the world, which in reality had always belonged to the Arabs, and they were willing to murder anyone who stood in their way. He hated them with everything in his soul. The Christians, on the other hand, led by the Americans, only paid lip service to their religion. For them the one true God was money. Their only aim since the Crusades was the rape and pillage of the world. In some ways even more important than the need for oil was the need to dominate the entire planet. To do this they were engaged in the systematic poisoning of the world with their industrial pollution, their technology and worst of all with their warped ideas. The struggle, in bin Laden’s estimation, was for nothing less than the minds and souls of Muslims to practice their lifestyle wherever they lived.
Lately, however, he had begun to question the methods he had used in the jihad. Every blow he’d struck had turned out to be nothing more than a pinprick. Bows and arrows against tanks. Valiant, but meaningless.
But it was difficult, and maybe even impossible, for him to let go of the hate and fear and even shame that he had carried deep inside of him for so long.
He closed his eyes for a moment. The woman’s name was Lynn Larkin, and she worked for the CIA as a field agent, though her being in Afghanistan was insanity. Most of the time she hid her identity as a woman as she went from the site of one firefight to another, bringing the latest intelligence information on Russian positions and troop movements to the freedom fighters. When she was in Kabul she wore the proper clothing, and although there were rumors, no one knew for sure that Lynn Larkin, the woman in Kabul, was the same person as Lawrence Larsen, the CIA spy in the field.
It was during the battle for Charikar that bin Laden came head-to-head with her. He wanted to attack the city because he had a gut feeling that the attack would be successful. The troops he was leading had had no clear cut victories in several months, and they were beginning to question the Saudi rich kid’s abilities as a battlefield commander. The CIA, however, advised against the attack. The city was too well fortified. The Russians had secretly brought in extra troops and heavy guns over the past several days in anticipation of just such an attack.
“You’ll get yourself and your men killed if you go in there now,” the woman insisted.
She was right, and bin Laden was wrong. In the attack he’d lost eighteen out of twenty of his men, and would have been killed himself except that the woman had crawled across a hundred meters of no man’s land in the middle of the night, and half-dragged, half-carried him back to safety.
“You stupid fool,” she said, bandaging his wounds. In the fight she’d lost her hat, and her blond hair fell around her ears and forehead revealing who she was.
Bin Laden remembered the deep, deep shame he’d felt at that moment. The other two men who’d she’d brought back started to laugh, and something snapped inside of him. He pulled out his pistol and shot both of them in the head, killing them instantly.
Lynn Larkin reared back and struggled to reach her gun as bin Laden turned his pistol on her and shot her pointblank in the face.
Before morning he burned her body, and then walked twenty kilometers to the nearest enclave of freedom fighters where he told them that the CIA had betrayed them, and that the Russians weren’t their only enemy. The Americans in fact were worse.
He opened his eyes. A slight sheen of sweat dampened his forehead from the pain of his illness, and from the pain of his humiliation.
He approached the container, dragging his left leg behind him. The legend stenciled on the top cover was in English. Written below that was made in china. That brought a smile to his lips. Life was a matter of interpretation, he’d come to understand in the last year. It was nothing more than a mirror reflection of then-everlasting existence in heaven; a wonderous gift not to be taken lightly. It was to be appreciated, to be honored. He’d sometimes seen that idea reflected in the eyes of his wives and children, but he’d never seen it so strongly and so fiercely proud as he saw it in the eyes of Sarah.
He closed his eyes again, and his lips compressed in pain. How to reconcile the jihad with her smile? How to understand Mohammed Toorak’s brutal attack on her body? Or McGarvey’s actions at the river. Believe in me and I will be your salvation. Sarah had been wrong to expose herself so wantonly. But Mohammed had twisted their religion to justify his animal lust And McGarvey had acted… how, bin Laden asked himself. Like a father? Would he have done the same thing if it had been McGarvey’s daughter? It was a question that he could not answer, because Sarah was much more than just a daughter to him; when he looked at her it was as if he were looking into the mirror image of himself.
Of all his children she was the only one who had remained at his side without question since his name had been linked to terrorism. Even when he said publicly that all Americans should be killed whenever and wherever they could be found, she did not turn away from him. Never once had he seen a questioning look in her eyes for something he’d said or done. She was his flesh and blood by birth, but she was also his flesh and blood by word and deed, right down to the bottom of her heart and soul.
When she was twelve in Khartoum, bin Laden had called her to his sitting room to punish her. Her brother, Sa’lid had caught her reading a years-old issue of an American teen magazine called Tiger Beat, and brought the magazine to their father.
When she came into the room she bowed her head, but there was a look of defiance on her face. Bin Laden held up the magazine.
“Is this yours?” he demanded.
She raised her eyes. “Obviously,” she told him, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
For a moment a black rage threatened to blot out his sanity. But then he regained his control. “Where did you get it?”
She said nothing, but she didn’t look away.
“You will answer me.”
