both blocks and calmly began to wire them together, an almost saintly expression on his face, in his eyes, in the set of his mouth. He was a young man bent on making preparations for doing something good, even heroic.
“For Christ’s sake, talk to him, Chris,” Gail said.
The kid was connecting the wires to a simple switch, like the handle and trigger of a pistol.
“Does St. Lucie County have an evacuation plan in place?” McGarvey asked, watching the screen. He’d seen the same sort of look on the faces of terrorists he’d dealt with in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s acolytes, their religious zeal.
“Yes,” Gail said. “But an hour won’t do much for us. We’re talking a hundred and forty thousand people in a ten-mile radius. The plan was designed to get away from a slow-moving hurricane.”
“Nevertheless, get them started,” McGarvey said.
Gail nodded tightly. “Right,” she said, and she took out her cell phone and walked a few paces down the corridor.
“Gail,” McGarvey called after her.
She turned around.
“Call the local weather bureau and find out the wind direction.”
FIFTEEN
On the day the two pickup trucks filled with armed mujahideen warriors came into the ramshackle town of Sadda, one hundred kilometers southwest of Peshawar on the border with Afghanistan, Achmed bin Helbawi, known now as Thomas Forcier, was fourteen years old. Everyone was aware of Uncle Osama and the holy struggle against the West, but down here the war had passed them by. Mostly.
It was a school day and the children, all of them boys, ran out into the dusty street to see what the commotion was about, but when the teacher saw the guns he quickly herded the children inside. All except for Achmed, whose mother worried about him since he’d learned how to read at the age of six. “Your curiosity will be your undoing,” she harped at him.
He was curious now, but not afraid. He was just a boy: and what could mujahideen with guns want with a boy?
A battered Gazik, which was one of the jeeps that the Russians had left in Afghanistan when they’d crossed the bridge, followed close behind the pickup trucks that, to Achmed’s complete amazement, stopped in front of his parents’ house. And suddenly he was afraid.
His father was gone, tending the sheep, and when his mother came to the front door of their hovel to greet the mullah who’d gotten out of the Gazik, Achmed ran home as fast as he could. His young brother Sayid was up in the fields with their father, leaving only their mother and three sisters alone — to face a man and two truckloads of armed warriors.
But by the time he reached them, his mother had begun to cry with a very large smile on her face.
Closing his eyes for just a moment in the control room, his right hand on the switch, he recalled that morning in exact detail. He’d been truly frightened, perhaps his mother was going crazy, crying and laughing at the same time, but then after the mullah had explained why they had come to Sadda, he was confused, deeply saddened, and overjoyed all at the same time.
“Achmed, we have heard very good things about you,” the mullah, a very tall, stern-looking man with the traditional head covering said through his thick, gray beard, and the mujahideen followed his every word with rapt attention, as if they were listening to an important sermon. “Even in Peshawar.”
Sayid had been removed from school when he was ten, because he was needed to help tend the sheep. But Achmed had been given special attention, even been taught from special books on algebra, the premier invention of Islam, geometry, physics, chemistry and languages — mostly English and French. And he was very good at his studies. He wasn’t a genius, but he was bright, something unusual for a boy in this town, and after that day fearless.
The New al-Quaeda had gone searching for bright boys like Achmed, to take them from their homes and to educate them. He’d been sent first to Saudi Arabia where he lived with a devout family while he finished his secondary schooling, again with the emphasis on math and physics, then to the King Abdul Aziz University.
Once a year he was visited by someone from the Peshawar region who brought him news of his family. “They are well, Achmed. And if you continue to excel in your studies we will continue to provide for them.”
Achmed agreed, of course. Really he had no other choice, and by the time he’d finished his second year at the university he was as fully radicalized as any other student — including Uncle Osama himself — had ever become there.
“You are now the hero of Sadda. Your people expect great things of you, as do we.”
But very often there’d been long stretches of no laughter. He remembered that clearly now, holding the trigger. No fun, no games; there’d never seemed to be time even to play soccer in the street like he’d done as a boy at home. Nor did he much care for the limited television they were allowed to watch, though from time to time he did listen to music on the stereo tape player one of the other students had managed to smuggle into the dorm. It was Western and forbidden by the religious police, but not every student was there under al-Quaeda’s direction, and the rich kids whose fathers were Saudi royalty were the most irreverent. Nothing would happen to them.
He opened his eyes and turned to look at Stan Kubansky’s body lying in a pool of blood, his hatred and contempt rising so hard and fast that he could taste the bitterness of bile at back of his throat. The supervising engineer had been among the worst of the Americans Achmed had met, so profane and so proud of his atheism that sometimes he would talk and laugh at the stupidity of war — of religious war.
“And for what?” he would practically shout. “Ragheads killing Jews. Ragheads killing Hindis. Ragheads killing Brits, and French, and Germans, and Danes, and crashing airplanes here. Why?”
The first time Achmed had heard Kubansky’s tirade he’d been struck dumb, his jaw dropping, and he’d almost stepped back, afraid that Allah would strike the infidel and anyone near him dead on the spot. But he had maintained his composure as he’d been told he must — his life and the mission would depend on it — but the deepest hatred he’d ever imagined possible had begun to smolder inside of him.
Each training shift he’d pulled with Kubansky hardened his heart further and he’d begun to pray in the evenings for the chance to kill the heathen, even as he was making subtle changes to the computer programs that ran both reactors, locking out any possibility of remotely scramming them, and smuggling in the Semtex, detonators, controllers, and the weapons and ammunition.
It was different after Saudi Arabia, when he went to France — first Paris where he studied French literature to perfect his language, and then to Saclay and Montigny for his nuclear training. And by then he had become fully integrated into French society, and there were even times, especially in Paris, where he’d had fun. He’d learned to appreciate jazz and smoking and drinking alcohol and dancing with girls who wore no head scarves, all activities his handler from Peshawar, who continued to visit him once a year in the spring, insisted on.
“Outwardly you are no longer a son of Islam,” he was told. “In France you have your Saudi passport, but in the U.S. you will become a French nuclear engineer, and that is where your work for Allah will begin.”
Finally, before he was to assume his new identity and travel to New York, he was sent to the Syrian training camp in the desert, well away from Damascus. The nearest settlement was the town of Sab Abar twenty-five kilometers to the southwest, and the camp was remote and desolate, another planet from France, but one he understood from growing up in Sadda.
He turned again and looked at the LED counters running down. If he truly wanted to survive he could try to leave here now. There wasn’t enough time to disconnect the explosives or rewire the panels, or even to reprogram the computer. The main alarm indicator was flashing, indicating that the facility was being evacuated. It meant that the engineers, probably Strasser, had figured out something was going wrong, and when they couldn’t reach the control room they may have tried a remote scram. All of that was inevitable, and the reason why he’d stayed behind.
And when his mortal body was destroyed, his soul rising to Paradise, al-Quaeda would help his parents, brother, and sisters to a far better situation; enough money to move into Islamabad where Sayid could get a real education, and life would become easy.
