Intercept (27 page)

Miguel, hidden just off to the left, pulled out his GPS and hit the buttons on his cell—“Hey, Pedro . . . yeah, it’s me. I’m at thirty-two spot four zero north, one zero seven spot five zero west. We got a gap?”

The others heard him repeat, “One hundred yards west of those two jeeps right ahead. Wires cut one side to the right, five feet high, four feet wide. My guys just shove it open. Any paint? Okay blue line at the base. Okay, Pedro. What time? Okay, fifteen minutes when the two jeeps leave. How long we got?”

The others did not hear Pedro’s reply—“Last night they went early, night before ten minutes late. Who the hell knows? Gringo bastards. Keep watching.”

“Watch the jeeps, guys,” he said. “Shift change very soon. They will both leave. Both going right. One new jeep will be back from the left about twenty minutes later. That’s your window. You run to the wire. I’ll be right out in front, find the cut.”

And so they waited. Miguel’s phone vibrated in his pocket. “It left already? That means fifteen minutes and the others are still here. That’s all we have. Otherwise we try again tomorrow? Okay.”

At that moment they all heard both jeeps start to rev up, and the first one moved forward, turning hard right, and then accelerating down the rough road toward the West Texan border city of El Paso. The other one instantly followed. And now there was not a single light along the long, twelve-foot high wire fence.

“THAT’S IT!”
yelled Miguel.
“COME ON! RIGHT NOW! GO! GO! GO!”

He rushed out and began racing over the ground, straight for the point where he knew the wire was cut. He reached the fence twenty yards in front of the others, who were now running hard.

“Hit the ground!” he yelled, diving forward. “They got radar and trip-lights everywhere. Stay down while I find the gap.”

Miguel crawled forward using a tiny flashlight. When it beamed on the low, blue-painted strip, he stood up and heaved, and the sliced tennis court wire ripped apart. Miguel hauled on it, and it came back like an opening door.

And even as he yelled his last command, a pair of blazing headlights came hurtling over the slight rise in the road to the west, some four hundred yards away.

Ibrahim and Yousaf were through, and Ben al-Turabi was five yards short of the entrance. The big Palestinian came charging through, pounding after the leaders. Abu Hassan was ten yards behind him, and
everyone could now see the oncoming patrol car. But it might not yet have seen them.

“Cut right,” bellowed Miguel. “Cut right. There’s trees, then get down!”

Ibrahim and Yousaf heard him, and swerved. But even as they did so, the headlights suddenly went on full beam, and now the jeep was headed straight for them. A guard with a bull-horn stood up from the passenger seat and bellowed to them both, to
“STOP! IN THE NAME OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES!
”

The jeep came to a halt and the two guards disembarked, one aiming a pistol straight at the two terrorists from the Afghan mountains. The second man caught sight of the charging Ben and aimed his revolver straight at him. All three of the arrested men held their cool, and made no attempt to reach for their Kalashnikovs.

Meanwhile Miguel, safe on his side of the border, had backed off and hit the deck in some bushes. Abu Hassan, with the wild animal instincts of the trained killer, rolled through the gap and pressed down on the ground next to the wire, watching the action. Quietly, he loaded a magazine into the breach of his rifle, and began to move behind the lights of the jeep, gaining cover from the vehicle as he went.

Neither guard saw him, because by now they had herded Ibrahim, Yousaf, and Ben into a group, and were busily checking them out. They asked them to remove their ponchos and hats and to produce documents just as Abu Hassan, his scarred face glowing with excitement, moved slowly out from behind the jeep. He shot the two American security officers dead, straight through the backs of their heads. Back in the cold darkness of the Chihuahua desert, they all heard a sharp burst of laughter, followed by “So long, gringos! They told me you could shoot straight!”

Now Ibrahim took the lead, walking due north, guided by his small pocket compass, toward a point on Route 9, just west of the New Mexico town of Columbus, on the southern slopes of the misleadingly named Florida Mountains.

THERE WAS SILENCE
now in the rough, wooded ground where the four Islamic killers walked. The two patrol guards lay dead in the dust some two hundred yards behind them, and, as if unnerved by the sudden and dangerous events of the past fifteen minutes, Ibrahim began to run.

Circumstances were closing in on him. He and his cohorts were ultimately still free, but they were plainly wanted men: they were four illegal immigrants, wearing Mexican ponchos, Stetson hats, cowboy boots, and each carrying a loaded Kalashnikov. Not to mention the hand-grenade, and the two cold-blooded murders.

Ibrahim understood that if the getaway vehicles were right where they were supposed to be, it might be okay. But if anyone else saw the four men, they had about an hour before they were on their way back to Cuba. They had documents and passports with false names. But the American authorities had excellent prison photographs of them all, and they’d probably fly that bastard Sergeant Biff Ransom in from Guantanamo to identify them.

In Ibrahim’s opinion, dressed and armed as they were, they were doomed in the United States. They did not have the knowledge or the experience to evade the law indefinitely. He himself had attended Harvard, but that was years ago.

Ibrahim hoped they’d have their moment of revenge sometime in the not too-distant-future, but right now the cards were stacked against them. Because sometime in the next couple of hours, they would all be wanted, nationwide, for murder.

They could not just hide their rifles because their fingerprints were all over them. They would just have to keep jogging forward wearing their
ponchos to hide the weapons. Ibrahim considered that prayer was the only answer, and as he jogged through the scrubland, he begged Allah to grant them safe passage toward the Islamic brothers who waited for them somewhere a mile up ahead. He also decided he would re-grow his beard, in the Islamic tradition, after the years of enforced clean-shaving in a U.S. prison camp.

They ran on for another ten minutes. There were lights, car headlights, traveling fast along Route 9. Ibrahim was searching for a grain elevator, his landmark. Somewhere to the left of that was his rendezvous spot, where there should be three cars so they could split up as the police would be looking for a group of four, not one single person or two.

Ibrahim was slightly out of breath now, but he still managed to tell Yousaf, Ben, and Abu they must get rid of their ponchos, hats, boots, and guns as soon as they reached the rendezvous point—to throw them into the trunks of the cars and instruct the drivers to lose them. Abu Hassan did not want to give up his Kalashnikov, but understood the foolishness of trying to keep it.

They reached the road, found the cars, and shook hands with their drivers. Then they piled their gear into the trunks, separated, and set off for the railroad station at Albuquerque, 267 miles to the north, straight along New Mexico Interstate 25.

Ibrahim and Yousaf traveled individually, both in fast Ford sedans; Ben and Abu in the back of a Buick. All three drivers wore jeans and cowboy shirts and boots, standard American gear for this part of the world.

Ibrahim understood there were many things that now mattered, which had not mattered before—their appearance, their avoidance of being seen together, the destruction of their old clothes and rifles, their constant unobtrusiveness. Everything was now heightened, and everything now mattered. Their eating habits, their dress, their newspapers. They needed to be seen as Americans
.

Ibrahim, however, was keenly aware of what really mattered. And that was the undeniable fact that they had breached the U.S. border. They were back in the United States and they were ready to attack. Shakir Khan’s al-Qaeda network was already helping them. The Sleeper Cells were active.

They were on their way to the East Coast to prepare for the next great Islamic assault on the Great Satan, in the name of Allah, and under the banner of the Prophet. That was what really mattered. Ibrahim slept the calm and tranquil sleep of the righteous, as his young driver, Abby Gamal, formerly of Lahore, gunned the Ford north.

THE BODIES
of the two patrolmen, Officer Ray Carrol and Officer Matt D’Arcy, were discovered by the incoming shift around one hour after the murders, just after eleven. The headlights of the jeep were still on and the engine was still running.

There were shootings and deaths quite often along this side of the border, but the killing of security guards was rare. Mexican peasants seeking only a safe crossing were not often armed, and most of the gun-fighting was conducted against drug-runners and other villains, who attempted to storm this back door into the United States.

Within an hour of the discovery of the bodies there were six New Mexico police cruisers at the scene
,
blue lights flashing in the night, a dozen state troopers, several forensic guys, and various homicide detectives from both the cities of Deming and Las Cruces.

If the bodies had been those of Mexicans, the authorities would have moved heaven and earth to keep things quiet at least for a few days, while the diplomats tried to calm down the Mexican government. But this was different. In the opinion of the police it was Mexicans who were the perpetrators, the Americans the victims, brutally slain while conducting their lawful duties on behalf of the State. This was an outrage.

Back at the Deming Police Department, twenty-three miles north of the crime scene, the public relations officer had already been called in at midnight to issue an immediate press release to every newspaper and television and radio station in the country:

The shootings had happened too late to make it into the morning papers on the East Coast, where they were two hours ahead of New Mexico. But
the release was perfectly timed for the twenty-four-hour rolling news channels. The
New York Daily News
revamped its front page in the small hours, hitting the street the following morning with:

The
Chicago Sun-Times
, with an hour more to prepare, was just as brash:

All through the night CNN, Fox News, and the rest were running and building the story, conducting interviews with half-asleep people, trying to get ahold of the families of the dead men, who were currently under the rigid protection of the Deming police department.

From a media point of view, the trouble with this type of story was that in the middle of the night, no one wants you either on the phone or standing outside the front door. But the reporters kept going, probing, trying to find out the number of bullets fired, from what kind of gun, who had been first on the scene, and if there were any suspects, motives, or angles.

There was a groundswell behind this story, merely because so many people wanted answers and there were none. There was no sign of a gun battle. The guards’ pistols had not been fired. There was no sign of a struggle, and thus no one knew why the Americans had died. There were zero witnesses and no suspects.

By lunchtime the CIA agents had arrived by helicopter, and were given unhindered access to both the police and local detectives. Subsequently they filed the best report, but only back to their own Langley headquarters.

Bob Birmingham read it thoroughly and passed it on to Captain Ramshawe. Both were intrigued that the guards had been shot from behind. They had fallen forward, both of them holding aimed, loaded revolvers. This suggested there were at least two, and possible three men standing in front of them, probably being told to raise their hands high. The man who had killed them was a third or fourth person, and they plainly had not known he was there.

That person had shot each of them in the back of the head, twice, using a Kalashnikov rifle, which is the weapon of choice for professional criminals, especially foreigners, because it’s relatively easy to purchase on the black market via Russia. It is also much less likely to be traced back to a specific gun shop by its U.S. serial numbers.

In Captain Ramshawe’s initial opinion, that gave the authorities probably four armed criminals, trying to cross the Mexican border into the United States. They had somehow been sighted by the guards, and apprehended; except for one of their number, who had hidden himself in the dark, and then crept around the parked jeep, with its engine running noisily, and shot the two guards who were about to arrest his mates. Ultimately, however, he decided that four made more sense than three because his own investigations into the disappearance of The Chosen Ones had led him to Mexico City about an hour before.

Ramshawe had ordered a massive computerized search for every Muslim organization in the world that had recognizable acronyms. There were of course thousands. But then the researchers asked for addresses, and fed, into the program, the Avenue Colonia del Valle, and out popped MCM (Muslim Center de Mexico), located on Avenue Colonia, a middle-class area of Mexico City.