Intercept (20 page)

Right now he was strictly with the losers, and he scoured the Yorkshire moors above the village of Ilkley, zooming in, consulting local ordinance survey websites. But then his cell phone rang. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “I’m on my way, sweetheart. On the highway.”

“Liar,” snapped Jane. “If you’re not here in fifteen minutes I’m going to Dad’s place for dinner.”

Jimmy was always amused at his spectacular-looking wife’s propensity to refer to the Washington embassy of Australia as “Dad’s place.” But he got her drift and swore to God he’d be there. And in that split second he spotted a place on Ilkley Moor marked down as Cow and Calf Rocks.

It’s the friggin’ stone cows, he breathed. And then he weighed up the conflicting merits of “nailing the towelheads, against the wrath of Jane,” and the willowy blonde from the sunlit harborside suburbs of Sydney won, hands down. He switched off the “ole Apple” and fled from his office, murmuring an old Aussie victory mantra, all the way down to the front lobby. . . .
You bastards, I’ve got you dead to rights!

At home, Jimmy was greeted with a chilled rose wine from the Barossa Valley, near Adelaide. For dinner, he and Jane enjoyed two supreme New York strip-sirloin steaks, which, Jimmy guessed, were testimony to her outrageous flirting with the seventy-year-old head chef at the embassy.

Jane announced she was getting ready for bed at 10:30 and walked sassily from the room. Jimmy then raced into his study, where his fingers flew over his computer keys as he punched in “Cow and Calve Rocks, Bradford.”

There they were, high up on the moors above Ilkley, one massive squarish stone a hundred feet high, the other only forty-five, and neither looking anything even remotely like a cow or a calf. The text suggested their name originated in the mists of time, probably prehistoric, the smaller rock having broken off from the main one.

Whatever the history, Jimmy surmised that these were indeed the “stone cattle” where the chosen ones would meet, fourteen hundred feet above sea level, high on the vast and desolate moors, less than nine miles from downtown Bradford. Jimmy made a note of the GPS numbers.

He switched off the computer and headed for bed, already looking forward to the new day, but not as much as he was looking forward to the night in the arms of his gorgeous new wife.

 

MACK BEDFORD WAS JOGGING
south along the Kennebec River estuary at seven the following morning when Captain Ramshawe called to inform him of what had been learned.

“All I can do, mate,” said Jimmy, “is to remind you to travel light, conceal weapons until you need ’em, and to stay in touch with Britain’s SAS. They understand the mission. Whatever you need.”

“Roger that, Captain. Bedford to Bradford. Messages via Stirling. Over and out.”

The former SEAL team leader headed home immediately. He sat on his front stoop and called the British military attaché at the embassy in Washington. Using his new code name, “Black Bear,” fashioned after the sports teams of the University of Maine, he requested a ride, as quickly as possible, on a military aircraft headed to England. The attaché was back on the line in five minutes. The Royal Navy had a Hercules going to RAF Lyneham in the English County of Wiltshire tonight. They would make a stop at the U.S. Navy Base at Brunswick, Maine, around midnight and pick him up. There would be an unmarked black Jaguar sedan awaiting him at Lyneham, but no driver. As requested.

Mack spent of the rest of the day reading up on the Internet anything he could find about the Bradford area of Yorkshire. He’d never been there, and tomorrow he would arrive incognito and check in with West Yorkshire Police, one of England’s toughest and most efficient antiterrorist forces, located on the edge of one of the largest Muslin enclaves in the Western World.

Mack would travel with no documents. His journey would be, ingoing and out, on military transport. His all-encompassing government credit card featured no name, just an indecipherable code number. There were only two such credit cards in the world, the one issued to the President of the United States, the other in the possession of Mack Bedford.

Presented to any credit-card machine, anywhere on earth, the words pop up:
“OK Visa. U.S. Govt.”
Uncle Sam, of course, has never defaulted on one dollar in its entire history. Mack did not represent much of a risk to anyone.

U.S. and UK police and the British military were aware he was on a clandestine Black Operation, but he was unrecognized by any government.

Should he be killed in the line of his duty, no organization anywhere in the world would claim to know either him or anything about his mission. He would die, as so many others have in war, an unknown soldier, known only to God. His death would represent one of the most mysterious exits from this planet, ever.

Mack dug out an old Afghan tribal disguise he once rescued from the Hindu Kush, white baggy pants, long shirt, and headdress. He crammed it into his waterproof leather duffel bag, along with a few pairs of pants, regular shirts, jeans, combat boots, and camouflage trousers and top. Hidden in a secret compartment beneath the floor of the bag was his SIG-Sauer 9mm service revolver, six magazines, his combat knife, and fifty thousand dollars in cash, drawn on his credit card from four different banks.

He wrote a short note to Anne—
I’ll be away for a few days. Don’t worry. Tell Tommy I’ll bring him a new rugby shirt. And whatever happens, remember you’re always on my mind. I love you forever, Mack.

He placed it on the hall table, under his cell phone, thus confirming there would be no contact until he returned. Anne’s heart missed about seven beats when she arrived home and read it. But she’d been married to a member of America’s Special Forces for a very long time. And she had always known precisely what that meant.

Mack traveled by taxi a dozen miles to the north and checked into the Parkwood Inn, in the little town of Brunswick. The Inn was surrounded
by the secluded ocean peninsulas of Bailey and Orrs Islands and the long waters leading down to spectacular Casco Bay. He had arrived in the early afternoon and settled down in front of the computer, checking data on the Swat Valley, Peshawar, the Hanfia Mosque, Bradford, the Muslim enclaves of Manningham, and the Cow and Calf Rocks, which Jimmy Ramshawe had sworn were an integral part of this operation.

Mack cast to the back of his mind that he was expected to commit four murders, but when the iron truth of his mission elbowed its way forward, he justified everything by confirming to himself that all four of these men had sneakily killed and murdered his brothers-in-arms, slaughtered innocent women and children, and deserved not one shred of mercy, certainly not his. Bastards.

And because the men he planned to take out were most certainly working on a vicious and terrible revenge on the United States, he even started to feel good about the operation. As always, Mack was protecting his fellow citizens, and some of the most important men in the entire nation were backing him. For the ex-SEAL commander it would be as it had always been, accompanied by an unending reminder of the creed of the United States Navy SEALs:

As he sat on the wide veranda of the Parkwood Inn, he recalled when he had first heard those words, when they had pinned the golden Trident high on the left side of the jacket of his dress uniform. No one ever forgets that moment, the day of indoctrination into the world’s greatest fighting force. They had never tried to take that Trident away from him. Because no one ever could. That was his gift. Goddamnit, that was his life, and it always would be. The solemn words still seared through his brain:

Mack had lost his commission. But he had never lost the soul of the Navy SEAL commander. And now he was within reach of regaining his old life. And he stared at the 8x10 glossy photographs of Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan, mass murderers. “If I pursue you to the ends of the earth,” he murmured, “I will find you. I will stop you doing whatever the hell you are doing. And you will die.”

 

THREE HOURS AFTER DINNER
, the hotel car dropped Mack at the gates of the historic World War II Naval Air Station, and the guards nodded him through. No documentation was asked or offered. A staff car driver transported him in absolute silence to the end of the 8,000-foot runway and, without a word, Mack climbed out and stood in the shadows.

The car drove away, and Mack checked his watch; still fifteen minutes early. It had just started to rain, and he buttoned his trench coat and turned up the collar but stood bare-headed in the hard southwesterly wind that slashed across the airfield directly off the Gulf of Maine. Like all local Down Easters (seaward natives of the State) he took a perverse pride, like desert bedouins, that they alone could easily stand the harsh climatic elements of their homeland. And Mack stared doggedly to the northeast, watching for the landing lights, when the gigantic Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules came howling over the 3,000-foot lighted runway approach.

Right now it was pitch dark beyond the markers, and the big ex-SEAL found his thoughts wandering to the last time he had been here, the shattering day when he had left the Navy. It might have broken a lesser character, but Mack Bedford turned his head sideways to the wind, as if daring the gusting squalls even to attract his attention.

Visibility was not so hot, but he’d been in worse. Then suddenly, maybe a mile from where he stood, he spotted two pinpoints of light, like twin stars sliding slowly toward the ground. The huge turbo-prop freighter was losing height quickly as it came thundering down the approach, landing wheels lowered. Mack watched all twenty-three wheels hit the blacktop with a sharp squeak as the plane’s massive wings flared out and then leveled.

One minute later, the aircraft taxied to where he stood and pulled up within thirty yards. From out of the darkness, a mobile flight of stairs emerged. Mack, holding his bag, loped across the runway and bounded up the steps, through the open door and out of the rain.

Mack heard the great aircraft door slam behind him as he was led to a wide seat made of netting. It was time for his 3,400-mile journey to begin
in one of the noisiest aircraft ever to wend its way through the stratosphere, an enormous echoing steel cave, designed strictly to transport heavy military gear. No one spoke, and no one offered help or instructions as he stripped off his coat, slung it with his bag on the next seat, sat down, and buckled himself in.

The flight crew knew he was no ordinary former SEAL, that this was the fabled Mackenzie Bedford, the ex-frog who had once led SEAL Team Ten’s Foxtrot Platoon to the sensational and ruthless capture of one of the biggest offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Iran (Proprietor S. Hussein). Eighteen armed troops were killed that night, none of them American.

The entire crew was under orders not to converse with their passenger—to merely bring him coffee, whatever food there was, and anything else he needed. But there would be no communication. They were transporting the closest thing to a ghost any of them were ever likely to encounter.

At the north end of the blacktop the Hercules made its turn, never braked, and, with its Boeing engines howling, screamed down the runway, shaking and rumbling as it gathered speed. It thundered into the night sky, through the coastal rain clouds and up into the clear air. It rose up through the pale rays of the almost-full moon, which glinted along its portside, as it made its way across the Atlantic Ocean.

 

AS THE U.S. HERCULES TOOK OFF
, the Pakistan International Airlines flight from Lahore to Amsterdam, a Boeing 777-300ER, was heading northwest somewhere over the eastern Mediterranean, preparing for its long swerve up over the Balkans, right across the old Soviet territories of Eastern Europe, and on to Amsterdam. Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu Hassan were seated in first class, each wearing a tailored Western suit and traveling on impeccably forged student visas.

They were confident, fit, and cheerfully reading Western magazines and newspapers, looking forward to their meeting with the rabid Bradford-based al-Qaeda leader, Sheikh Abdullah Bazir.

The big Pakistani passenger jet came in low over Holland’s flat country and sprawling network of canals, around the time of the morning rush hour. At Schipol Airport, nine miles south of the city, they were first out of the aircraft. They moved quickly through the line for transfers, the Dutch officials showing scant interest in passengers who were not remaining in their country.

One hour later they boarded a busy Air Iran charter flight bound for Leeds-Bradford, the final one-hour lap of their 4,500-mile journey. They
landed mid-morning and now faced the most dangerous part of the day, the moment of truth where a beady-eyed customs official could spot a flaw in their student visas and start demanding explanations. At least that would have been true in the United States, or Australia, or even France or Germany, certainly Japan. But not in England. The officials stamped the entry documents, giving the green light to the “University of British Literature and Law.”

One by one, Ibrahim, Yousaf, Ben, and Abu, walked right through, out of the airport, and boarded separate taxis. Each gave the driver the same instruction: “Please take me up to the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor.”