All Necessary Force

I thought about it but didn’t want to lose our original target. If something had been passed, it might play out today — in the next couple of hours.

“No. We’ll take a risk but split the difference. Bull, you get on the bus. Jennifer, you come with me. That way I can finger him and you’re a fresh face.”

Jennifer and I left the catacombs, finding a cafe on the corner across the street with a view of the metal entrance gate to the park, currently blocked by our tour bus. We watched the group exit the park, with the tour guide rounding everyone up. We saw Bull talking to him, giving some excuse for us. When the bus drove off, we had an unobstructed view of the gate. I saw the Arab man just inside, sitting on a bench and watching the bus depart. I pointed him out to Jennifer.

She said, “You want me to close the gap on him?”

I watched the Asian tourists we’d seen taking photos drive off in the opposite direction. “Naw. Let’s just wait here and see what he does.”

Looking around at the grimy neighborhood, Jennifer said, “I’m not sure we got the best of this deal. I’d rather be on the bus.”

I laughed, watching the tour bus reach the first intersection, having to maneuver around a parked car in the cramped confines of the street. It stopped for a second, then began to back up, the car blocking its ability to turn the corner. Something about the scene spiked in my head. Egyptian drivers were horrible. Nobody would park there and risk a hit-and-run — unless they wanted to target the intersection. I started to rise, when the bus exploded in a fierce ball of fire.

21

Reacting by instinct, I dove on top of Jennifer, the pressure wave of the blast knocking over the umbrella on our table. A split second later, I was running flat out to the bus, Jennifer right behind me.

Reaching the carnage, I screamed at Jennifer to get back, afraid there was a second bomb waiting on people who responded. She ignored me.

The badly parked car on the right side of the bus was peeled open like an empty beer can, black and burning. The bus was knocked over on its side, the middle compressed as if a giant hand had squeezed it. The smell of charred flesh and burning rubber mixed together.

I grabbed a piece of metal and began tearing into the wreckage. Once I had a hole, I started pulling out the pieces. Arms, legs, torsos, anything to clear the way for me to find my friends. Please, dear God, be on the left side of the bus.

A crowd had gathered and begun to help. The keening wail of someone injured sliced through the air. I kept going, now pulling out whole bodies. Eventually, I reached someone alive. I got him out, and saw Bull’s jacket underneath a seat. I screamed for help and found Jennifer by my side.

“I’m going to lever that seat up. Pull him out.”

I jammed a broken piece of metal underneath the frame and leaned into it with everything I had, raising the seat a foot. Jennifer dragged him out. I was relieved to see he was whole, with all of his limbs. I ran to him and began immediate first aid, checking for breathing and a pulse. He had neither.

The side of his skull was cracked open, with his brain matter falling onto the ground. I shunted the image to the back of my brain and returned to the bus, looking for someone who still needed help. Looking for Knuckles.

I was pulling another body from the wreckage, when I heard Jennifer scream my name. She was yanking on a piece of smoking metal, blood on her arms, her hair singed. Racing over, I saw my friend faceup, a vicious slice running down his torso, exposing his intestines underneath. And the rise and fall of his chest.

Rafik felt the blast from inside the courtyard, the shock wave shaking a cloud of dust from the walls. He scrambled out into the street, seeing a huge plume of smoke rising to the west. He ran toward it.

Fighting his way through the crowd around the wreckage, he circled, looking for Noordin. He reached a makeshift morgue, with the bodies unceremoniously thrown one on top of the other and a small stack of arms and legs looking like cast-offs from a wax museum. He saw what might be Noordin’s clothes, and moved the corpses for a clear view.

The head was missing, the neck a mass of torn tissue with the spinal cord sticking out stark white against the red, but it was him. Rafik was sure. He couldn’t believe the irony. Noordin was the contact with the pilots for the aircraft, and now he’d been killed by some other group. The whole plan destroyed by an infantile attack that garnered nothing.

He let out a scream of frustration, beating his hands into the ground. The people around him looking on in sympathy, misunderstanding his rage for grief. After a moment he regained his composure, thinking through his options.

All is not lost. Noordin was dead, but he wasn’t the pilot. Just the contact. The pilots were in Cairo, at the trade fair. Drinking booze and whoring around. They weren’t believers and had no knowledge of Rafik, but they knew they were doing something unsavory. Rafik couldn’t be sure they didn’t think they were just smuggling drugs, or how they’d react if he confronted them, but he was the ultimate money man, so that would count. Especially since their employer was now dead. In the end, he needed only one pilot. If they weren’t swayed by money, there were other ways.

He’d had that lesson branded on him as a child prisoner in Algeria.

22

Eating dinner on a two-story boat anchored in the Nile River, Congressman Ellis wasn’t enjoying the belly- dancing floor show like the rest of the entourage. Since his last conversation with Han, he hadn’t enjoyed much of anything. His appetite had dropped off to nothing, and he felt permanently sick to his stomach. He’d told his aides that he’d caught something, and they’d seemed to buy it.

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Excusing himself, he went to the bathroom and read a simple text message: Check the news. Call the plane.

He pulled out his worldwide BlackBerry and accessed the Web. Within short order, he located the terrorist attack in Alexandria. The initial death toll read eighteen, with no mention of nationalities. Jesus. They blew up a bus? The magnitude did nothing to dim his relief.

Thinking a minute, he dialed his pay-as-you-go phone, waiting on the long-distance connection. His contact answered, sounding like he was speaking in a tunnel.

“Hello. Can I help you?”

“Yes, I’d like to speak with Carlton Webber.”

“He’s not here at the moment. Can I take a message?”

Now that they were no longer in the States, they had established a code to ensure that each was who he said he was. Congressman Ellis had no doubt that Egypt maintained a pretty healthy capability for listening in on domestic cell phone calls, so their entire conversation would be benign.

Congressman Ellis said, “Yes, tell him that he can come as planned. But I had a question.”

“What’s that?”

“How long can he stay?”

“He’s only paid for three hours.”

“I know. I made the plan. Can he stay longer?”

“Uhh… possibly, but it will cost more money. And he won’t stay past the night. He has to be back here the following morning.”

Congressman Ellis realized the pilot was afraid of being at the closed Alexandria airport when the sun came up. He wanted in and out in one night. It was the best Ellis was going to get.

“Fine. Make that happen. Call me before you cross the Mediterranean.”

He hung up the phone, feeling a little release. Barring any hiccups, I’ll give Han his twenty-four-