“This is urgent,” Abdullah insisted but vowed he wouldn’t press further if he was rebuffed. In the background, he could hear a ship’s horn and the merry clanging of a buoy’s bell. Other than those noises, his response was silence. He honored his promise to himself. “Very well. Tell the Imam that the prisoners are attempting to escape.”
Abdullah didn’t know the details himself, so he kept his briefing vague. “It appears they overpowered the guards and stole one of the small trucks designed to ride on the old rail line as well as a boxcar.” Again, the man on the other end of the call said nothing. Abdullah plowed on. “Attempts to stop them at the mine failed, and a few trainees from the camp haven’t been able to stop them either. I dispatched some of our elite forces in the helicopter. They are going to blow up the trestle bridge. That way, we are certain to get them all.”
The terrorist commander swallowed audibly. “I, er, thought that with the information we learned from the American archaeologist our presence here is no longer necessary. We now know that our belief that the original Suleiman Al-Jama’s hidden base was in this valley, to the south of the “black that burns,” as the legend goes, is wrong. Al-Jama and the
Again, all he could hear was the buoy clanging and an occasional blast of an air horn.
“Where are you?” Abdullah asked impetuously.
“None of your concern. Continue.”
“Well, since we no longer need the pretext of reopening the coal mine, the burning black we mistook for the legendary sign, I figured blowing up the bridge was the best course of action. Two for the price of one, as it were. We kill all of the escapees and begin to dismantle our operation here.”
“How many of our elite forces remain there?”
“About fifty,” Abdullah answered at once.
“Do not risk those fighters on something as trivial as prisoners. Send more of the less trained men, if you must. Tell them that to martyr themselves on this mission will find them in Allah’s special graces in Paradise. The Imam so decrees.”
Abdullah thought better of explaining that there wasn’t time to withdraw their crack troops from the bridge. Instead, he asked, “What about the woman Secretary?”
“Helicopters should be arriving there in about thirty minutes. One of them has orders to take charge of her. Your primary concern is the prisoners’ deaths and making certain that our forces in Tripoli are at full strength. There will be legitimate security personnel at the gathering who they will have to overcome to gain entrance to the main hall. Once inside, of course, the targeted government officials aren’t armed. It will be a glorious bloodletting, and the end of this foolish bid for peace.”
That was the longest Abdullah had ever heard the other man speak. He believed in their cause as much as any of them, as much as Imam Al-Jama himself. But even he had to admit there were levels of fanaticism on which he wouldn’t dwell.
He’d often listen to the boys they had recruited chatting among themselves, youths from slum and privilege alike. They made almost a game of thinking up sadistic tortures for the enemies of Islam as a way to bolster one another’s confidence. He’d done the same years earlier, during the Lebanese civil war, when he had come of age. But secretly each knew, though never admitted, that it was only a diversion, a way to boast of your dedication and hatred. In the end, most were too petrified to even hold a pistol properly, and suicide vests had to be made as idiotproof as possible.
But not so the man on the other end of the phone. Abdullah knew he reveled in slicing off Westerners’ heads with a scimitar that reportedly dated back to the Crusades. He had roasted alive Russian soldiers in the desolate mountains of Chechnya and helped string up the mutilated bodies of American soldiers in Baghdad. He had recruited his own nephew, a teenager with the mind of a two-year-old who liked nothing more than to separate grains of sand into precise piles of one hundred, to walk into a Sunni laundromat in Basra carrying forty pounds of explosives and nails in order to flame sectarian violence. Fifty women and girls perished in the blast, and the reprisal and counterreprisals claimed hundreds more.
Abdullah would do his duty, as he saw it, for Allah. His contact within the Imam’s inner circle, Al-Jama’s personal bodyguard, killed and maimed because he enjoyed it. The open secret within Al-Jama’s organization was that the man didn’t even practice Islam. Though born a Muslim, he never prayed, never fasted during Ramadan, and ignored all the faith’s dietary laws.
Why the Imam allowed such an abomination had been the subject of debate among senior commanders like Abdullah, until word of such discussions reached Al-Jama’s ear. Two days later, the four who had questioned the Imam’s choice of top lieutenant had their tongues cut out, their eyes plucked from their heads, their noses and fingertips removed, and their eardrums punctured.
The meaning had been clear. By talking about the man behind his back, they had shown they had no sense, so they would forever-more have no senses either.
“The Imam’s will be done, peace be upon him,” Abdullah said hastily when he realized he should have replied. The line was already dead.
“LINDA, GET YOUR BUTT up here with the M60,” Juan shouted over the radio. “And as much ammo as you can carry. Mark, I need you to separate the Pig from the boxcar.”
“What?” cried Murphy. “Why?”
“You can’t go fast enough backward.”
Linc came over the tactical net. “I thought our problem was slowing down this crazy caravan.”
“Not anymore.”
Seconds later, the .30 caliber machine gun from the Pig’s roof cupola landed with a thud on the railcar’s tarry roof. Cabrillo rushed back to give Linda a hand with the unwieldy weapon. Behind her Alana Shepard stood with an ammo belt slung around her neck like some deadly piece of jewelry. At her feet were two more boxes of rounds. She handed up the boxes, and he helped boost her up.
“Trying to earn that fedora, I see.” Juan smiled.
Spying the bridge for the first time, Linda Ross understood why the Chairman needed the heavy firepower. As soon as she reached the front of the car, she extended the M60’s stumpy bipod legs and was lying behind the weapon, ready for him to feed the first belt into the gun. With Alana pulling a second hundred-round belt from one
