Intercept (19 page)

Shakir Khan knew the way into the West. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu would fly out of Karachi, back to Europe, probably Amsterdam, and on to Leeds-Bradford International Airport. They would fly on Pakistani passports and student entry visas to the UK, issued with Islamabad support. They would then settle in the Pakistan-dominated city of Bradford for a few weeks before setting off for Mexico, probably via Madrid.

It was time-consuming but foolproof. If the guys made the border crossing into Texas, they, backed by the Sleeper Cells, would be home free to kill and maim U.S. citizens. The overall objective of the al-Qaeda quartermaster was maximum death and destruction, national and world outrage, international attention, and glory to al-Qaeda from all Muslims, all 1.4 billion of them.

Shakir Khan intended to run Pakistan one day. And he had cast his lot with the extremists, the Taliban, the Islamic fanatics who despised the center-left government the country now had. Shakir Khan wanted the fundamentalists to take over both the government and the military. That way, come the inevitable insurrection and the creation of an Islamic State stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Atlantic, he, Shakir Khan, must surely be in line to rule it; to rule half of the world, to become the second coming of the immortal bin Laden.

He could hardly wait to leak the news to the al-Jazeera television network when the U.S. college blew, that al-Qaeda now formally claimed responsibility for the latest atrocity. That the powerful North West Frontier politician Shakir Khan was believed to have been the mastermind, following in the giant footsteps of the Great Osama. Because surely after this, the Godless Americans unwelcome in the Middle East would pack up and be gone forever, leaving him, Shakir Khan, descendant of The Prophet, to rule the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

And he was going to enjoy this, especially when the time came to tell the U.S. authorities in an untraceable message that the perpetrators of the enormous crime against their people were the four men they found not guilty in a Washington courtroom, released, and then tried to assassinate.

 

MACK BEDFORD HAD RETURNED
to Dartford, Maine, to wait for his four targets to emerge. He had decided to say nothing about his new mission, or the consequences should he be successful, to his wife. He knew that Anne had been happy in California, and that a return to Coronado, with its glorious oceanside weather, would probably delight her, but he needn’t worry her with the rest.

Meanwhile he took great comfort in the fact that the entire machinery of U.S. Intelligence was working in the background, trying to locate Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan.

By day he continued to work at Remson’s Shipyard, making contacts with various foreign Navies, and by night studying the ever-growing documents relating to the prior activities of the four terrorists.

Only in the early morning, at first light, did the ironman former SEAL emerge, pounding along the coast road down the Kennebec Estuary, up hills, down steep gradients, through the rain and wind, finishing with the uphill sprint home that usually leveled him on the wet lawn. Right after that, he climbed to his feet and underwent his morning pull-ups on the steel bar he had rigged between the branches of an apple tree.

He had to stretch upward to grasp the bar, and the idea was to keep pulling his chin above the level of the steel until he had no more strength left. An average person might manage two or three, a trained athlete, possible eight or nine. Mack Bedford could do thirty-eight.

Four evenings a week he drove down to a small, hidden cove right on the estuary, stripped down to his wetsuit, and plunged into the river, swimming six hundred yards out to a line of rocks and back at full power. On evenings when he knew the current would be running hard, he wore big SEAL-issue flippers and powered his way through the entire twelve-hundred-yard training swim.

Ever since leaving the SEALs Mack had stayed with his ironman regime. Somehow, somewhere in the back of his mind, Mack Bedford never stopped hoping and praying that one day he would return to Coronado. And now he had his chance.

As each day passed, Mack was attaining an almost unprecedented level of fitness, more animal strength than human. Mack Bedford packed the fighting qualities of a Bengal tiger. He was still a SEAL to his fingertips, and even measured against that illustrious brotherhood, he was one of the very best there had ever been.

He understood the dangers of his new mission, and he did not under estimate his task. However it was incomprehensible to him that anyone in the entire world could defeat him in combat.

Mack studied the Guantanamo pictures of the terrorists, tried to asses their characters. Mostly he drew some kind of a blank, except for an obvious hard-edged evil expression common to all four. There was also defiance and hatred, common to most terrorists.

But there was something about Ibrahim Sharif, something distantly familiar. But Mack could never put his finger on it. The U.S. authorities had made the Afghani shave his beard during his incarceration in Cuba. Every Islamic fanatic Mack had ever seen wore a beard, so identification was just about impossible.

And yet, Mack still wondered whether he had ever seen Ibrahim Sharif before.

NOT EVEN MACK BEDFORD
understood the intensity of the U.S. and British sweep of the Hindu Kush mountain airwaves. The United States had installed powerful ground and satellite surveillance from Peshawar to the area north of the upper Swat Valley, and then covering the lands to the west, to Afghanistan, across the passes, over the towering peaks, and down to the scattering of villages clinging to the almost sheer escarpments.

They could intercept almost any call, and while this was a gigantic task, there were specialists looking for the rare conversation or signal that might have been military or terrorist based. And they were good at it. Too good for quasi-amateurs like Shakir Khan.

The Pakistani who would be king needed to inform the al-Qaeda leader in the UK, Sheikh Abdullah Bazir, of the pending arrival of his most holy and exalted four-man fighting force. He had it planned, and, so far as he could tell, he had no alternative but to use the telephone. But there were excellent codes between the Hindu Kush and the Islamic Sleeper Cells in England, and Khan was confident he could slip easily through the system. However it was a system he did not fully understand.

From the hub of his government office, he dialed a private number way up in the mountains on the Afghan side of the border. It was answered by an al-Qaeda commander, who did not speak, but wrote down precisely what Khan told him, and hung up. The man then dialed a number in the UK, and Sheikh Bazir answered from his office in a mosque in Bradford, Yorkshire, a town where there were eighty thousand Muslims in residence. The al-Qaeda man spoke only his message: “The chosen ones shall kneel before the Prophet in Hanfia. Blessings upon Allah who will guard them by the stone cattle RV.”

The call was as swift as any call could be. The line was cleared instantly. Sheikh Abdullah never even had one second to reply. Speed was everything, and that was understood by everyone in bin Laden’s organization. But they were not quick enough.

British army sergeant, Shane Collins, a specialist signals expert from one of the UK tank regiments, was at his post on a quiet morning in the British Intelligence listening post in Cyprus, located up in the hills north of the military base in the UK sovereign territory of Dhekelia, in the southeast of the island. Geographically this was a major crossroads of east and west, a British hub that intercepted satellite messages, phone calls, and transmissions emanating from all over the Middle East. To the north lay Turkey; to the east, Syria, Israel, and Iraq; to the southeast, Jordan and Saudi Arabia; to the south, Egypt.

This secret listening post was known in the trade as JSSU, and it was manned by the cream of British electronics interceptors from all three services. They maintained a relentless watch, monitoring communications around the clock, each of the operators a highly qualified linguist trained to make literal translations of intercepted messages and conversations as they were transmitted.

Faxes, e-mails, coded signals in a hundred languages were all recorded on a long-running tape for later analysis. Conversations that sounded particularly intriguing, however, were written down by the listening operator as they were spoken, and instantly translated.

Sergeant Collins chose to record this message because it pushed the exact right buttons: (1) it was excessively brief; (2) there was no response from the other end; (3) there was no personal greeting; (4) no recognition; (5) it made no sense; (6) and it contained references—in this case, “stone cattle.”

Sergeant Collins, whose grandfather was from Pakistan, understood Pashto, the language in which the communication had been spoken. But he needed a more accurate translation. In moments, he had it. He already knew the call, made on a cell phone, had come from somewhere fifty miles west of Peshawar, somewhere in Afghanistan.

And now he flashed a signal through to a second British listening post in the UK to retrace and track the line on the frequency he had in front of him. When the message came back it specified the line bisected the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, probably the town center, but could go no closer.

Sergeant Collins immediately called over his duty captain and reported he had a satellite signal, cell phone, one which, in his opinion, bore the hallmarks of secrecy, probably military. The captain agreed it was unusual, and passed the text straight through to Government Communications (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, for detailed analysis.

GCHQ is the jewel in the crown of Britain’s espionage industry costing $1.5 billion a year to run. The NSA in Maryland willingly pools all of its Intelligence with Cheltenham, where the staff of four thousand operates in blast-proof offices under an armor-plated roof. It was a huge building, absolutely circular, with a round center courtyard. They called it “the Doughnut.”

Within five minutes, GCHQ had completed its search. Its computerized system had made several trillion calculations and had arrived at the
irrevocable analysis that this was not code. It was veiled speech, with military overtones. They agreed that this was a signal, not a conversation.

And, as ever, the critical question stood starkly before them. Had JSSU in Cyprus just tapped into an al-Qaeda Command Headquarters? Was this as vital as their greatest triumph years before, when they had tapped into bin Laden and his henchmen high in the Hindu Kush?

This was also a call made from the nearest big city to the same Hindu Kush. GCHQ admitted being baffled about motive, culprit, and recipient. They were not however in any way confused by the innate importance of Sergeant Collins’s signal.

Shortly before noon, they relayed the message to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland—For Your Eyes Only, Captain James Ramshawe—in big red letters
FYEO
.

Shakir Kahn had, essentially, been intercepted.

CAPTAIN RAMSHAWE STARED
at the the incomprehensible note, now designated as “veiled speech.”

“Peshawar,” he muttered. “Gateway to Nut Country.”
Now where the hell does it say that phone call went? Bradford, England, where they’ve got more bloody Muslims than Mecca.

Jimmy read and re-read the signal:
The chosen ones shall kneel before the Prophet in Hanfia. Blessings upon Allah who will guard them by the stone cattle RV.

“Now what in the name of Christ is that all about?” he said to his empty office. “Hanfia? Where’s that? And who’s RV when he’s up and dressed? Ravi Vindaloo? Or does it mean rendezvous, military rendezvous? As for the friggin’ stone cows, beats the hell out of me.”

The British spooks in Cyprus believed the word “guard” had definite military overtones. They also thought the RV meant rendezvous. There should have been a period after the word “cattle,” if there was a signature. Could have been a mistake. But the sender made no mistake with the other two periods, one after “Hanfia”—another at the end. And there was no greeting.

Jimmy Googled “Hanfia” and instantly came up with a burial site in the middle of the Punjab, which Jimmy knew was also home to about eighty million Pakistanis
.

As problems go, this one seemed more or less unsolvable. Riddles like this preyed on the mind of the young director of the National Security Agency, and he could not stop wondering about the “chosen ones,”
and their trip to the bloody graveyard, even if it was eight thousand miles away.

He called the Middle Eastern desk at the CIA but detected no progress. And then he settled down to his Internet link, researching terrorists with roots in Peshawar or the Punjab, looking for a link, trying to find a connection.

His new wife, the surf goddess from Sydney, Jane Peacock, daughter of the Australian ambassador, had called him twice on the general subject of lateness, before he decided to give it one last shot. He Googled “Bradford,” and hit pay-dirt in the first twenty seconds. Zooming in on the city center, he instantly spotted the Hanfia Mosque, situated right on the edge of the Pakistani area of Manningham.

The chosen ones shall kneel before the Prophet in Hanfia.
“That,” stated Jimmy loudly, “looks like four Pakistanis headed right for England and reporting to some mullah in the old Hanfia Mosque. Beaut.” He put a signal on the link to Bob Birmingham’s office in Langley, suggesting a very fast alert to Scotland Yard’s Antiterrorist Squad in London.

Before leaving for home, he zoomed out of the city of Bradford and scanned the surrounding area, glancing at a few Yorkshire Towns and villages, searching for clues. But there was little to the south and east of the metropolitan area, and nothing much on the great plateaux of the Pennines. In the north, the Pennines divide the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which in the fifteenth century fought the Wars of the Roses—white for the House of York, red for Lancaster. Jimmy knew that Lancaster won.