eyes shut she could imagine her father at the pool, see his flashing eyes on her, and on Mohammed. She could see his disappointment in her, his scorn, his anger. But at her, not Mohammed. As hard as she tried, however, she could not imagine her father doing what McGarvey had done for her. And she felt guilty for wanting such a thing. Ashamed. Sad.
But she loved her father with every fiber of her soul. As long as he stayed here in the mountains she would remain with him. Gladly. Wherever he was, that’s where she would be. She did not feel complete except when she was at his side. Nor could she feel warm except in the glow of his approval. Which was why she was having such a terrible time of it now.
McGarvey coming here was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She didn’t think she would ever get over it.
The sun began to feel warm on her face as she started down the steep switchback trail. It was almost time for morning prayers and, afterward, bed. There were moments when the five-times-daily ritual seemed too much to bear, but this morning she felt a great need for the comfort of Allah. Repeating the Sura Fatihah forty times each day was an intensely personal connection between her and God that sometimes made her forget everything except the moment. She needed that surrender now more than she had ever needed it before.
By dint of great willpower, Osama bin Laden began to clear his mind for the morning ritual as he came into the main chamber. He felt an overpowering sense of doom and a strong, almost desperate need for the comfort of prayer. His plan had to work if he was going to be allowed to make his final trip to Mecca and then to Medina. It was the last condition he was going to impose on his enemies before he turned over the bomb, and it was an absolute.
He had been nothing more than God’s warrior, and he found himself now longing for the peace of Paradise. There had never been any innocents in the struggle, it was something they didn’t understand in the West. Nor did they understand that when an infidel died he simply went to hell for a period until his soul was finally cleansed by the fire. Then the gates of Paradise would open even for him. In the end they all would become brothers in one; all children of a merciful God.
Ali Bahmad came into the chamber and stood respectfully in the shadows without speaking until bin Laden noticed him.
“Yes?”
“Your daughter has returned.”
“Alone?” bin Laden asked softly. He was relieved.
Ali Bahmad nodded. “She’s coming down the hill now.”
“Thank you for letting me know. After prayers have her come to me.”
“As you wish.”
“What about Hamed? Have you heard anything from him?”
“He passed Sarah on the trail. But she was on the way back so he didn’t stop.” Bahmad explained. “She hid from him.”
Bin Laden suppressed a smile. His daughter was independent, for which he was both proud and fearful. “When he reaches the others I want to know.”
“Very well,” Bahmad said, and he turned to leave as a tremendous explosion shattered the early morning silence. It had come from down in the camp, and for a millisecond bin Laden wanted to believe that there’d been an accident in the fuel storage pit across from the helicopter.
A second explosion, then a third and a fourth shattered that illusion. McGarvey had not come here with a deal! He had been sent with his GPS chip to find this camp and guide the missiles to it!
Bahmad had already turned and was racing up the tunnel to the entrance, as three guards clutching their Kalashnikovs came running from the back.
Bin Laden grabbed his rifle and half-limped half-raced after Bahmad as so many explosions ripped into the camp that it sounded like continuous thunder. They were Tomahawk missiles; he well remembered the sound, like an incoming jet airliner, followed immediately by a very sharp slap as the burst shoved a wall of compressed air outward followed immediately by a mind-numbing blast.
Sarah was out there. Bin Laden was sick with fear and impotent rage. The Americans had always fought by then own sense of rules; fair play they called it. They had never gone after a man’s family, or even after an enemy leader, only the soldiers and weapons. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Bahmad lay on the floor of the tunnel just within the entrance, watching the attack. Dozens, maybe more, of the missiles rained down on the camp, the bright flashes lighting up the entire valley even brighter than day. Bin Laden could think of nothing other than his daughter. She was down there, her body naked to the devastation falling all around her.
Bin Laden stepped around Bahmad’s prone figure, when his chief of staff reached up, grabbed a handful of pant leg and pulled him back.
“Get down, you fool!” he shouted over the terrible din.
Bin Laden batted Bahmad’s hand away with the butt of his rifle. “Get everybody out of the cave, I’m going after my daughter.”
“You’ll get yourself killed! They’re targeting the camp not us up here!”
The three guards came from behind and tried to drag bin Laden back from the entrance. He swung his rifle viciously catching one of them in the face, pushing him back against the other two.
“You know what to do,” bin Laden snarled at Bahmad, and he stumbled outside as the missiles continued to fall on them, one after the other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes so many at once they could not be counted.
Keeping as low as he could despite the terrible pain in his knees, bin Laden scrambled down the steep hill into the maelstrom, as he searched the far side of the camp and the opposite hill for his daughter. It was hard to make sense of what was happening. The bright flashes and concussions made it nearly impossible to think. The helicopter was already destroyed, as were many of the buildings. Debris rained down in an area at least four hundred meters in diameter. Dust filled the air, and black, oily flames shot a hundred meters or more into the cloudless sky from the cache of fuel that had been dug into the ground and covered by camouflage netting.
He had fought for ten years against the Russians in these mountains, but he’d never seen anything as bad as this. He wanted to strike back, raise his rifle and lash out at the monsters who were doing this to them. But he was helpless.
At the bottom of the hill, he started through the bombed out buildings, his right arm over his head to protect himself from the dirt and rocks and brick and steel falling all around him, when a bright flash bang erupted directly in front of him. He was thrown back by a blast of hot air that felt like a brick wall. As he fell he could hear or sense pieces of metal softly whispering past his head like a thousand jagged pellets from a huge shotgun.
He’d lost his rifle when he’d been thrown back, and his head boomed as if he was inside a kettle drum when he picked himself up and started forward in a daze. At that moment the missiles stopped coming. In the deafening silence he thought he could hear men crying out, some of them screaming in agony. Three of them appeared from behind a low brick wall, all that remained of one of the buildings, and started toward him, blood streaming from dozens of wounds.
Too soon, the thought crystallized in his brain. He desperately waved his men back. This was just a pause in the action, the missile attack wasn’t finished. There would be a second round.
Others were pulling themselves out of the rubble when he spotted Sarah, the mangled stump of her left arm spurting blood, stumbling across from where the helicopter had been. He was instantly gripped with such nausea and fear that for a brief moment he was unable to move, when a missile struck fifteen or twenty meters behind her, throwing her body forward in a spray of rocks and debris and blood.
More bombs fell around them now, all through the camp, in a rolling thunder that hammered off the hills. Staggering forward, totally oblivious to the destruction around him, bin Laden reached his daughter’s body and fell to his knees beside her.
Her right leg was shattered, a big rock was embedded in her right shoulder, and her face was a mass of cuts and torn flesh. But she was still alive. There was still some awareness in her dark, pretty eyes.
“My Sarah,” bin Laden whispered as the missiles continued to rain down on them. He knew that she couldn’t hear him, but her eyes lit up in recognition.
“Father,” she mouthed the word, blood welling from her mouth.
Bin Laden, tears streaming down his face, gently cradled his daughter in his arms. Not this one, he prayed.
