Authors: David Hagberg

Soldier of God (3 page)

BOOK: Soldier of God

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McGarvey grinned. “You’re right, Katy,” he said. He took off his holster and stuffed it and a spare magazine in a side pocket of one of his bags.

“Do you think that’s wise?” Grassinger asked, skeptically.

“I’m a tourist on vacation,” McGarvey said, though he did feel somewhat naked.

“No, sir, you’re the director of Central Intelligence, and fair game for a good number of people who would like to see you become a permanent resident of Arlington National,” Grassinger said bluntly. He glanced at Katy. “Sorry, Mrs. M., I didn’t mean any offense, just doing my job.”

“None taken, Jim,” Katy said graciously. “And I would like it very much if you continued to do you job.”

McGarvey had been staring intently at his bodyguard. “What’s up, Jim, rats in the attic?” Every intelligence officer who survived long enough understood that it was wise to listen to hunches, gut feelings.

Grassinger took a moment to answer. “Not really. It’s just that we’ll be fairly well isolated for the next few days.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open,” McGarvey said. “What else is new?”

“Part of the business, boss.”

THREE

Twenty-nine hours later, a few minutes after eight, the forty-foot flybridge sportfisherman Nancy N. under the command of Khalil’s number two, Zahir al Majid, came out of the lee of Kuiu Island’s north bay into the teeth of a strong northwest wind that funneled between Admiralty and Entrance islands. The rain clouds had cleared, and the distant mountains and stark blacks and whites of the glaciers toward Mount Burkett on the mainland stood out in a beauty that was as harsh as the open deserts of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. This time of year, this far north, night came late, but it was twilight, and combined with the fantastic scenery, accurate depth perception beyond a couple of hundred yards was difficult at best. Almost nothing seemed to be in proportion out here.

Khalil’s seven soldiers were excited to finally be going into battle. They had been anxious all day. But Khalil appeared indifferent. He had been in battle before, and he expected that he would be in other battles in the coming months and years. He would continue the holy struggle until he was dead, a thought about which he was totally philosophical. His death would be of no more consequence than the death of a common soldier or a president or even an imam. Each man would either get to Paradise or not, according to the earthly life he had led.

Frankly, he was indifferent about any thoughts of an afterlife. His time was here and now. He made meticulous plans for the future, but he lived for the present. Whatever money and worldly goods he could possibly want were his merely for the asking. On the rare occasions he found that he desired female companionship, or a male friend, or even the services of a young boy, he had those pleasures as well.

His only real interest was in the game, what Western intelligence analysts called the
jihad
, which Muslims took to mean holy war, or the struggle, and in the fatwahs, or decrees, issued by religious leaders or scholars, who for years had been telling the faithful to kill all Christians and
Jews—men, women, and children—whenever and wherever they were found. He had visions of swimming in rivers of blood wider than the Tigris or Euphrates, wider even than the Jordan or the Mississippi.

Kidnapping the war criminal Donald Shaw, whisking him to a cargo ship one hundred miles offshore, and transporting him eventually to Pakistan, where he would stand trial for crimes against Islam, would be the perfect counterpoint to the supremely arrogant religious war in Iraq.

It would be doubly satisfying to the
jihad,
because Shaw had repeatedly made public his disdain for the cause, calling al-Quaida’s soldiers of God “criminals.” The former secretary of defense had been a combat pilot in Vietnam, flying more than one hundred missions before his plane was shot down. He spent the next two and a half years as a POW at the Hanoi Hilton. But the enemy never broke him. He was a genuine American hero. But all that would change when he stood trial and his crimes against humanity were exposed to the world.

No important westerner would ever consider himself safe after this mission, Khalil reflected. Presidents, prime ministers, even kings and queens would not be immune from accounting for their transgressions. Ultimately the effect of such kidnappings and trials would make every leader in the West think twice about supporting Israel or continuing the war against Dar el Islam. The world would become a safer place in which to live.

He braced himself against the control console and raised the motiondamping Steiner mil specs binoculars to study the green-and-white rotating beacon of the small airport at Kake on the big island of Kupreanof a few miles to the northeast. There was no activity over there at this time of the evening, nor would there be any scheduled flights in or out until morning, except for the twin Otter, parked at this moment in the Air West hangar on the south end of the field; it would leave and fly west sometime after midnight tonight. No one at the field would know about the unauthorized flight until it was too late. Nor would the tower be manned, so there would be no one to track the flight on radar out into the ocean where the airplane would be scuttled in water that was a half-mile deep.

Khalil had gone over the details dozens of times, from the initial planning stages three months earlier, when it was first learned that Shaw
might be taking an Alaskan Inside Passage cruise, until last night when he had gone over each step of the operation with Zahir and the other six operators. In addition to the eight men already aboard
Spirit
—four in engineering and four on the steward’s staff—they would present an overwhelming force, with superior weapons and the element of surprise.

Shaw traveled with a bodyguard, who would be armed, but his would be the only operational weapon aboard the ship. The one Ruger Mini-14 folding stock rifle and the few Colt .45 pistols in the ship’s weapons locker had been disabled, their firing pins removed. Meanwhile Khalil and his people were armed with the suppressed Polish-made 9mm RAK PM-63 machine-pistols, Austrian Steyr GB self-loading pistols modified to take the same Makarov round as the RAKs, several Haley and Weller E182 stun grenades, and a total of forty kilos of Semtex plastic explosive and acid fuses.

The crew and passengers would present no insurmountable problems. Those who did not instantly cooperate would be killed. Nor would communications be a problem once the ship’s SSB and VHF radios were disabled, and the comm center’s satellite phone rendered inoperative. In this stretch of the Inside Passage between Juneau to the north and Ketchikan to the south, cell phones were out of range. A cross-match of the crew and passenger lists with the FCC’s roster of amateur radio operators, to see who might be carrying portable radios or handie-talkies, came up with no hits. And the only other people aboard who might carry a satellite phone would be Shaw or his bodyguard.

Those two men were the primary targets. They would be brought under control so fast that neither of them would have time to react.

He checked the chart again, against what he was viewing through the windshield, and rechecked his weapons. Although he was supremely confident in his own preparations, he wanted the men to see that even he took special care with his equipment. Image had a lot to do with success, and he was a master at presenting the face that he wanted the world to see.

One hour later they finally came abeam of Kake settlement, a town of about seven hundred people, the wind screaming at a full force of at least thirty knots, with viciously steep, two-meter waves that slammed into the bows of the Nancy N. Anything or anyone not tied down or holding on for dear life would be in trouble.

“I have a target,” Zahir called out over the shrieking wind.

Khalil turned the binoculars across the pass toward Entrance Island, where he picked up the many lights of the small cruise ship. “I see it,” he shouted.

The Spirit was turning southeast into Frederick Sound at about ten or twelve knots, taking the seas in stride at her stern. She was a little early by Khalil’s reckoning, but he saw no obstacles to coming around the tip of the big island and catching up with her in the next half hour while most of the passengers would be finishing dinner and awaiting a show in the Grand Salon. He motioned for Zahir to increase their speed, despite the pounding they were taking, until they were practically flying off the tops of the waves.

“As soon as we clear the island, head directly for the ship,” Khalil shouted.

“We could broach if we take a big enough wave on our stern,” Zahir warned.

Khalil fixed him with a baleful stare. “In that case we would all perish out here. See that you do not allow a broach to happen.”

Zahir didn’t bother to respond, turning his entire attention back to controlling the boat. Khalil was a man who was not to be disappointed.

Khalil made his way below to where his operators were grimly hanging on. The cabin reeked of vomit, but he was satisfied that not one of them seemed like he was ready to give up. They were competent, if unimaginative, men. “Ten minutes,” he told them.

No one had a question.

In the pilothouse Zahir was getting set to turn downwind. He was braced against the console, one hand fighting the wheel, the other trying to feather the engines each time they came off the top of a wave. Water flew from every direction as if they had gotten themselves caught at the base of Niagara Falls.

They were clear of the tip of the big island but not quite abeam of the cruise ship. It took Khalil a moment or two to sort out the situation from the picture being painted on the radar screen. He saw immediately that Zahir was correct not to make the downwind turn until they crossed the cruise ship’s track. If they turned now they would almost
certainly broach, but if they waited they could steer a zigzag path toward the ship, keeping the waves on their quarters, not square to their stern.

He braced himself next to Zahir. “You steer,” he shouted. “I’ll take the throttles.”

The boat, the seas, and the wind were three separate living things that had to be balanced against each other to avert disaster. Ten seconds after he’d taken over the throttles, his respect for his chief lieutenant soared. But then, he thought, fear was the most powerful of all motivators. Without it Zahir would have turned back by now.

In every operation Khalil made certain that the men feared him more than they feared the mission itself. He had worked with Zahir on previous operations, but for the other men he’d instilled that fear on the very first day of their training by selecting the most battle-hardened of the recruits and challenging him to a hand-to-hand combat exercise. With the same indifferent cruelty that a cat shows for its prey, or that a Bedouin father shows for a physically flawed daughter, Khalil took the man apart piece by piece, until in the end he was reduced to a sobbing, bleeding hulk, begging for mercy.

“I do not reward failure by anyone,” Khalil, speaking in a calm, reasonable tone of voice, told the recruits assembled at the desert camp. He grabbed a handful of the man’s hair, pulled his head back, and in several deft moves, the cuts so swift and the knife so razor sharp that the man had no time to react, Khalil removed his nose and his lips, and then peeled the skin from his face as if he were skinning a dead animal.

The man reared back suddenly, screaming in abject horror at what was being done to him. Blood flowed from a dozen wounds in his body.

“Go into the desert now and die,” Khalil told the man, and he turned to the recruits. “Now we will have a meal together, and you will tell me why you think that you could be loyal soldiers in Allah’s struggle for justice.”

The wounded man, having nothing left to lose, his eyesight obscured by blood, reared up, stumbled into Khalil’s back, pulled a pistol from the holster at the hip of his tormentor, and then stepped back.

Khalil calmly turned to face the man, and looked directly into the muzzle of the gun. “You have two choices now, Achmed. Either shoot me,
thus putting an end to our just and godly mission, or turn the pistol to your own head and pull the trigger.” Khalil shrugged indifferently. “Of course, no matter what you decide, you will die tonight.”

The soldier turned to his comrades, but no one raised a hand to help him. He looked again at Khalil, then stepped back another pace, not at all certain what he should or could do.

As the man hesitated, Khalil pulled a pistol out of his tunic and shot him in the head at point-blank range.

“Never trust in chance,” Khalil told his men, and from that moment they were his, body and soul.

That was eleven weeks ago. They would not let him down tonight.

The cruise ship was well aft of their beam now. Zahir glanced at the radar image, then at Khalil, and nodded. He was very frightened, but he looked determined.

“Now,” Khalil shouted over the wind. He feathered the props as Zahir hauled the boat into a tight turn to starboard. For several breathless seconds it seemed as if they would be caught with the seas on their beam. The Nancy N. heeled sharply to the right, practically burying her gunwales in the black water of Frederick Sound, but at the last moment Khalil gunned the starboard engine. The prop on the low side bit, and the boat spun around as if it were on a pivot, came upright, and suddenly shot downwind as if it were a lemon pit squeezed out between a thumb and forefinger.

The motion was still lively but they were no longer taking a pounding, and the
Spirit of ’98
’s bright stern lights were suddenly very close.

“Good work,” Khalil shouted.

“We were lucky,” Zahir replied, without breaking his concentration, though the water was getting much calmer in the lee of the island.

The answer was irritating, and Khalil was instantly enraged. But he gently patted his lieutenant on the shoulder of his uniform blouse. “I disagree my old friend; it was not luck, it was your skill. Now take us the rest of the way.”

He took a walkie-talkie out of a pocket, and hit the push-to-talk switch. “Charlie, any luck catching fish tonight?”

“I’m checking the bait now,” Abdul Adani radioed from where he
waited at the stern of the ship. They spoke in English in case the frequency was monitored.

Khalil switched on the Nancy N.’s navigation lights for just a moment, then shut them off. “Try the back spinner on about two hundred yards of line.”

“Good suggestion. I’ll drop the hook in the water now.”

BOOK: Soldier of God

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