“You mean?”
“Just watch. And please pray for me.”
PALM COVE
QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
Palm Cove was crowded with sunbathers, swimmers, and surfers. The heat was in the eighties. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
In front of a T-shirt shop near the southern end of the beach, a man in a blue bathing suit lay on a big orange and yellow beach towel. He was in his thirties, olive-skinned, very tan, with a mess of uncombed, perfectly blond hair, the product of a $14.99 bottle of peroxide. The effect was a slightly punkish look, a dark-skinned Johnny Rotten. He blended in, just another weirdo, at one of the most popular tourist destinations in Australia. That was the brilliance of the blond dye job. Nobody suspected Youssef was a terrorist.
Youssef’s chest was wiry, gaunt, but muscular. He had brown eyes, which cast about, always searching. The eyes were as blank as stone, but they hid a fury that was reaching its boiling point.
He looked at his watch, then sat up. He walked down the beach out into the water and began swimming freestyle parallel to the beach. After five minutes, he stopped and treaded water.
In front of him, the beach was dense with sunbathers, blankets laid out in a madras of stripes and colors, umbrellas dotting the sand. Youssef searched, then caught the movement of a man. That man was walking into the water more than a hundred feet away. He was a bald man, young, in his early twenties. He too was Arab.
Soon, the two men, tourists by appearance, Hezbollah by training, were treading water next to each other more than fifty yards from shore.
The younger man waited for Youssef to speak.
“Well, is it done?” Youssef asked.
“Yes,” said the bald man, whose name was Ahmed. “Basil collected a list of all of the ranches near Cairns. Youssef, there are more than thirty.”
“Thirty? Fuck me.”
“He could be at any one of them.”
“Thank you, professor fucking dildo head.”
“Sorry, I—”
“Button it,” said Youssef. “We need to think now.”
“I’ve mapped out the ranch locations,” said Ahmed. “We could literally just walk up and ask—”
“No! You stupid fuck. That’s not what we’re going to do. We need to surprise him. If we walk up to the wrong ranch and ask for a man named Andreas and he’s not there, what do you think will happen, jackhole? How long do you think he will then hang around, Einstein? We can’t do anything that will tip him off.”
“Well, you seem to be a genius, so how do we find him, boss?” asked Ahmed.
“Patience,” said Youssef, treading water. “And don’t wise off to me, fuck ball.”
“Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” said Youssef.
Youssef dipped his head beneath the water for a moment, then reemerged.
“Most of the ranches are north of here,” said Ahmed. “Starcke, Hope, Cooktown, Yarradan, Aurukun, Lakeland.”
“Good. We have seven men so we divide up the towns. Everyone goes out tonight, tomorrow night, every night until we see something or hear something. We go to the bars. We drink. We stay until we find him.”
“Maybe we fuck some chicks?”
“No, we don’t ‘fuck some chicks,’” said Youssef. “At least, you don’t. You’re too fucking ugly. Now me, that’s a different story. Will you look at some of that ass up there on the sand?”
Youssef nodded toward the beach.
“Unreal, brother.”
“But even
I
am not going to do that,” said Youssef. “We are single-minded until we kill this Chevrolet-driving asshole. It’s inevitable now. We look around. We listen. We will see him. There’s no other way. If we meet ranchers, we talk with them. No mention of Andreas. We need to spread out. If we see him, and we have a clean kill, we take it. If not, if we find out where he is, we wait and all move together.”
“Understood,” said Ahmed.
The two terrorists treaded water in silence, next to each other, staring at the beach in front of them.
“It’s only a matter of time now,” said Youssef.
“It’s Allah’s will,” said Ahmed.
“No, Allah has nothing to do with it, you silly idiot. Grow up. There is no such thing as luck in what we do. If you think like that, you will die.”
Youssef dove under the water, emerging a few feet away and began swimming backstroke down the beach.
“If you weren’t my brother I would drown you and let the sharks eat you,” said Youssef hatefully as he swam away. “Try not to do anything stupid.”
SEMBLER STATION
COOKTOWN
Dewey woke up after lunch. He went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face. He put on the clothes and went downstairs. Sitting on the kitchen island in the ranch house was a note:
Dewey,
Cold steak in the fridge.
A woman named Jessica called,
said it was important.
Joe
Dewey went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and saw a blue and white porcelain plate with a big steak on it. He walked to the sink, picked up the steak with his right hand and took a big bite. He left the plate in the sink then walked outside into the pebble stone circular driveway, eating the cold steak like a candy bar.
At the stables, he found Deravelle. He brought him outside, sprayed him down with cool water and scrubbed the stallion from head to toe. He toweled him off and brushed him down, then fed him before putting him back inside the barn. He took one of the ranch horses, an older mustang named Buzz, and rode back out to the fence line he’d cut the night before. He fixed the fence then returned to the ranch. By then, it was nearly dinnertime.
Dewey walked down across the manicured green lawn that spread for a quarter mile to the bunkhouse. The lawn looked like a large green rectangle, bordered by white horse fence. Behind everything, in the distance, the dark blue of the ocean sat like a backdrop, miles in the distance, dark mercury that framed the vista.
The bunkhouse was a large, simple building, three stories tall, white clapboard with navy blue shutters. It stood a few hundred yards across from the Sembler house. Inside the bunkhouse, thirty-five bedrooms held the ranch hands, who ranged in age from eighteen to sixty.
Dewey heard music as he approached, country music coming from the stereo in the great room on the first floor, a large open room with couches, chairs, a big kitchen, a couple of pool tables. The room was crowded with men when he walked in through the screen door. It was Saturday, and most men were back at the bunkhouse. On Saturdays, drinking usually began right after dinner. That was followed by an evening in town, at Cooktown’s restaurants and bars.
“Dewey!” yelled one of the men when he walked in through the door. It was Talbot, one of the younger ranch hands. He was seated on one of the couches, a beer in his hand, his face layered in dirt. “The man of the hour!”
Someone turned down the music. Then another hand, Bill Zachary, leaped on top of the pool table. He stood with a pool cue in his hand. From the way he wobbled slightly, Zachary had clearly already had a few beers, like most of the others.
“Everyone,” bellowed Zachary, waving the cue through the air. “Let’s give a big one for Dewey! A fucking hero! Good job, old man!”
The gathered ranch workers all cheered and clapped. Talbot stood up and handed him a beer. Dewey smiled.
“Thanks, guys. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
As the thirty-odd ranch hands gathered around him, Dewey retold the story of saving Nicola Chasvur.
“Where’d you learn to climb rock like that?” one the men asked when he’d finished the story. “Nighttime? In the rain?”
“You would’ve done the same thing,” said Dewey. “Every one of you. You’d be surprised what you’re capable of when your back’s against the wall. A lot of it was just plain old luck.”
“Luck, my ass,” said Zachary.
For the next hour, they cranked the music, played pool, and relaxed. At some point, Dewey felt a pat on his back and turned to see Talbot.
“You up for a night on the town?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Dewey. “Let me grab a shower.”
CHAKLALA AIR FORCE BASE
RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN
At 2:46
P.M.
, a Chinese-made F-7 fighter jet, painted in the light green colors of the Pakistani Air Force, barreled down the 8,900-foot runway at Chaklala Air Base in Rawalpindi.
This PAF jet was one of a series of fighter jets taking off at steady intervals from Chaklala, now the main staging area for the air war. All of them, a smorgasbord of F-7s, Mirage 3 and 5s, A-5s, F-16s, and JF-17s, were weighted down with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. Their primary mission was dumping missiles on the Indian Army supply lines in the Kargil area. An increasing number of jets were being sent directly east, toward Srinagar, Kashmir’s largest city; PAF was attempting to divert Indian resources so that the Kargil area could be fortified by Pakistan and used as the staging ground into Srinagar. But the going was tough for the PAF pilots. Already, seventeen Pakistani jets had been shot down.
But on this day, at this hour, one particular F-7 fighter jet was different from the others. It looked the same, same light green paint job, same gold star on the rear wing, and beneath the left wing of the jet, the normal payload was strapped; three surface-to-ground missiles. But beneath the right side of the jet, something different had been attached: A single, roundish, polished steel bomb. It looked like a slightly elongated, very large football. On its nose, an unusual appurtenance; a black cube the size of a shoe box that extended out in front of the bomb.
This piece of hardware was a thirty-four-kiloton nuclear bomb.
Inside, the bomb held weaponized plutonium, trapped in an ion-free, airtight alloy capsule spiked through with a sophisticated, altitude-sensitive trigger mechanism. The bomb and its trigger mechanism had been designed by Osama Khan and his team of nuclear engineers. It was neither the largest nor the smallest of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. It was not the newest technology, nor the oldest. Of the one hundred and sixty-one in the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, this particular bomb was average. But, it was reliable. The trigger mechanism had been thoroughly tested, the fissile material ratio was known and dependable.
The Chengdu F-7 climbed quickly to 12,000 feet, aiming northeast toward the LOC above Kargil. At Drass, however, when the jet should have veered slightly south, toward Kargil, Captain Ranala, the pilot, kept the flight path northeast. After several minutes, he pulled the throttle back, moving the F-7 to more than nine hundred miles per hour, climbed to 21,000 feet and arced north.
* * *
At the Indian Army’s Northern Command headquarters, Lieutenant Ashwan Miri, an intelligence officer in the battle operations group, stared at his radar screen. Miri tracked Pakistani jet movements into the war theater, and, based upon the trajectory of those inbound fighters, dispatched the routes to the appropriate missile battery for targeting. The job was largely an automated one, thanks to the sophisticated SIGINT system designed by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Miri’s job was to move his cursor to the flight line, then simply click the mouse three times, at which point the computer would pick up the trajectory and push the assignment for the incoming jet to a missile battery, based on proximity to the predicted target of the fighter and supply of weapons at the batteries, as well as the altitude and speed of the inbound jet.
Miri picked-up the Pakistani F-7 as it crossed the LOC. The inbound jet formed a pattern they had seen many times, swooping down to the Indian Army supply lines attempting to get weapons, fuel, and troops to Kargil. Miri triple-clicked the tracking protocol on the F-7 as it crossed the LOC. When the F-7 didn’t turn when it was supposed to, above Kargil, Miri did not notice, for the jet’s flight path had already been locked down by the SIGINT system, assigned to a battery; the bright red path on Miri’s screen was now gone, the dull blue just another line he did not need to pay attention to.
* * *
More than four miles in the sky above Karoo, Captain Ranala listened as the target system inside the jet chimed monotone. He smiled nervously, flipped the steel cover cap off the launch button, moved the red safety button to the left. He paused a brief moment, only a moment, then he depressed the green button. He listened as the nuclear bomb roared to life, felt a slight bump beneath the right side of the jet as the weight of the nuclear device was freed from the body of the F-7. Ranala maneuvered the fighter jet to the left and up, directing the plane higher in the sky then turning back toward Rawalpindi. Outside the window to his right, there was a black trail of smoke, wavy and quickly dissipating behind the increasingly small object that roared through the cold blue sky toward the ground, toward Karoo.
KOT COPPER WORKS, LTD.
KAROO OPERATIONS
KASHMIR
The afternoon sun, high in the sky, beat down on Gautam’s forehead as he stood next to the portable toilet, just a few yards from the sluice station. He finished a cigarette and realized that he had already smoked an entire pack today. He shook his head as he dropped the butt to the ground and stepped on it.
“You’re going to kill yourself, Gautam,” he whispered.
The chemical smell from the portable toilet made his stomach turn. And yet, every day, at the end of his shift, he stood here and had a cigarette before walking down the gravel hill to the small mining town of Karoo. The smell was disgusting, but it reminded him of the smell in the alley behind his father’s barbershop in New Delhi. How many times did his father make him go out with leftover na’an from dinner the night before, and give it to the homeless men who slept in the alley?
“Why do we feed them?” Gautam would ask his father. “They urinate on the walls. They smell. They’re worthless bums.”
“We feed them,” his father would say calmly, “because we are human beings together. If I was ever in their position, I would want to know that someone cared enough to bring me a piece of bread. Gautam, do you really want to live in a world where a man won’t even spare a piece of bread for another man?”