All Necessary Force

than anything else.

He opened the report and felt a small sliver of fear. The only items listed were a reconnaissance journal and a camera. He immediately willed himself to calm down. No way any film has lasted this long, and even if it has, the odds of it having anything besides some bamboo bunkers is nil.

Just to satisfy his curiosity, he Googled “processing old film,” and felt the fear return. Apparently, it not only could be done, but it was done routinely. There were whole Web sites dedicated to finding old cameras at garage sales, developing the film, then trying to determine who is in the picture. Several companies were solely dedicated to developing outdated formats, and claimed success with film from the early 1900s. A roll of film from 1970 was well within the art of the possible.

He returned to the JPAC report, seeing the items were currently located in the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia and that the investigation was labeled INITIAL, which meant JPAC wouldn’t get to it for at least six weeks.

He closed out his account. He had too much on his plate to worry about it now. Just have to beat JPAC to the camera when I get back.

11

Peering out of the grimy Kentucky Fried Chicken window, through the growing throngs of Egyptian tourists, Rafik saw a young man wearing a white shirt enter the cafe and look at his watch. At precisely one o’clock, he sat down and removed his sunglasses. Rafik waited. The man pulled a tattered paperback book from his pocket, thumbed through the pages, then placed the book facedown on the table, still open.

So far so good. Rafik had never met the contact from the Muslim Brotherhood and didn’t know what he looked like. The only way he could be sure he wasn’t walking up to a stranger or into a trap was if the contact followed his instructions to the letter.

When the man crossed his legs, the final signal, Rafik started to rise, then abruptly sat back down, a spike of adrenaline coursing through him. Left leg over right. Not right over left. To protect himself, he had given the contact an emergency signal. If the man was compromised and was making the meeting under duress, he was to cross his left leg over his right. If everything was fine, it would be right over left.

Rafik stared in disbelief, running through his mind all of the connections that could have lead to compromise. He came up with very, very few.

He saw the man give a small start, then recross his legs right over left. Rafik debated. The idiot probably just screwed up. Rafik knew he should leave and reestablish contact, but he was running out of time. A new meet might take another week to set up.

There was one more check he could do. The book was supposed to be on page 100. Anything else, and he’d leave. Approaching was a risk, but a small one. If the contact had been turned, the authorities would want the meeting to continue for the information they could glean. They wouldn’t make a hasty arrest.

Rafik left the KFC and circled around to the contact’s blind side. Walking as if he had another destination, he slipped into the seat next to the contact at the last second. He grabbed the book before the man could react and saw it was on page 100. He tossed the book on the table and said, “I’m the falcon. Follow me.”

He stood up without looking back and wound through the close-packed alleys surrounding the food court, getting lost in the Dumpsters and garbage. When he was sure they couldn’t be seen from any street, he turned abruptly, pulling a knife and thrusting the contact up against a grimy cinder-block wall.

“Empty your pockets.”

The man struggled for a second, until the knife bit into his neck. Then he sagged, doing nothing.

Rafik backed off a foot. “I said empty your pockets. And open your shirt.”

In short order, Rafik had determined that the man had no recording or transmitting gear.

“Why did you swap your legs?”

The man clasped his hands as if he was praying. “It was a mistake. I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m with you. I’m one of you.”

“You make a mistake like that again and we might all die.” Rafik raised the knife until it was a millimeter away from the contact’s left eye. “Understand this: If it happens again, one person will die for sure.”

The man twitched his head vigorously, attempting to nod without putting out his eye.

Rafik said, “I’m told that you are the man who can help me get into El Nozha Airport.”

The contact nodded his head but said nothing, apparently afraid to speak.

“And that there is a plane coming with special cargo.”

The man nodded again.

Exasperated, Rafik said, “Tell me something I don’t know. How are you, a mistake-prone child, capable of this?”

“It’s coming in at night. We don’t know when. My boss will get a call twenty-four hours before. I’m in the Army unit that provides security for the airport. Nobody checks anything there. I could dress up my mother in a uniform and put her on the gate. It’s a closed airport, after all. Nothing really to protect.”

Rafik knew that the aging El Nozha Airport had been closed for close to a month, with all commercial traffic diverted to Borg El Arab Airport outside of Alexandria. Whether this was for renovations or was a permanent condition, Rafik could never determine.

“And how is this plane landing at a closed airport?”

“I don’t know. Someone was given baksheesh, I guess. I only know that we’re being paid to turn on the runway lights for a period of three hours. The plane will land, do whatever it’s going to do, then take off again.”

Rafik already knew everything being said except the three-hour window. That would make things tight.

He knew that an American private air contractor had leveraged the chaos of the current Egyptian government by bribing several government departments to use the decrepit airport without any official knowing. Well, at least any official who was not on the payroll. He also knew the cargo, something this low-level foot soldier did not. Somewhere, during the six months of complex secret negotiations, using intermediaries throughout the Egyptian government, the cargo had been revealed. This knowledge meant little to most of the people involved, but one man, another member of the Muslim Brotherhood, had understood the significance and had sent a message to al Qaeda. Rafik had been lucky enough to be one of the many in the nebulous chain of the reporting used by the terrorist network. He was supposed to pass it along in its complex path to the al Qaeda leadership, but he instead chose to use it for his own plan.

For six months he had wondered if the message was real. If maybe he was basing a plan on a chimera. Sometimes, lying awake at night, he hoped it was fake. The mantle of responsibility was enormous, weighing him down like a wrought-iron chain around his neck. He had no grand organization like bin Laden’s. Outside of his small circle, men who would follow him into hell, he had to rely on others for help. Algerian contacts in Montreal, prison recruits in the United States, and radical members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. And he still had to convince another organization to provide him with an aircrew for the plane.

Today, though, all of that was forgotten. The aircraft was real, which meant the cargo was real. Soon, insha’Allah, his victory would be real.

12

Bull and Knuckles were waiting for us when we returned to our hotel in Phnom Penh.

“Any issues with the embassy?” Knuckles asked.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t even want an ID. It was strange. Like they couldn’t give me the stuff quick enough.”

“They probably just figured there was no way someone would fake a name like Nephilim.”

“That’s what I mean. Usually, I spend fifteen minutes trying to sort out the message traffic because some idiot changed my name to Nicholas or Nestor. This time Nephilim was right on the sheet, and when I said that was