Intercept (50 page)

He explained as best he could, that he was on a 1,500 mile journey up to the Greenland port of Nuuk on the west coast, 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle. There he was transferring fifty tons of refrigerated Atlantic cod to another Murmansk vessel, the
Gorky.
After that he was going around Cape Farewell, and across the southern waters of the Denmark Strait to Iceland. He expected to be in Nuuk in five days, and in Iceland six days later.

Also he was not in the habit of taking on passengers who may be wanted by the coastguard or the police in the United States or Canada. “You don’t care where we’re going!” he bellowed. “That means you and your friend been very bad boys, and that’s not good for Igor
. HA! HA! HA!”

Ibrahim cooly asked, “Is there a price you would accept for such a risk?”

“Depends how bad you are!” laughed the Russian seaman. “You commit minor crime like rape or drunk, I’d probably take you for five hundred. You do something fucking terrible like murder a police I make that five thousand.”

Ibrahim could not help himself laughing. “We just got mixed up in some terrorist attack that didn’t even happen,” he joked. “No one got hurt or anything.”

“But how do I know you’re not telling the truth. Say I take you, and you blow up my fucking ship, what then?”

“Unlikely,” said Ibrahim. “Neither of us can swim.”

This almost reduced Igor to rubble, he was laughing so hard. But then he said, “Tell you what, I don’t know you, and I wouldn’t take you for a thousand dollars because you might cause me big trouble.”

“How about three thousand for both of us, all the way to Iceland?”

“That sounds like a nice deal for Igor,” he said. “You pay before we leave. I not trust terrorist. My aunt got killed by Chechen maniacs.”

“I pay now. Cash,” said Ibrahim. “And I’d like to move into a cabin right away.”

“You give Igor nice bundle of U.S. greenback worth three thousand, you can have mine,” said the master of the
Odessa
. “Fuck me, yes. Go fetch your friend.”

Ibrahim and Igor shook hands, and the Russian accepted the thirty hundred dollar bills, which Ibrahim handed over. Then he left the ship to walk down the jetty and collect Yousaf from the dockside diner. They were ensconced in the ship by 3 p.m., and Ibrahim had no intention of going ashore again until they were on the cold shores of Iceland. Also he had no idea where Iceland was.

 

MACK BEDFORD
stayed in close touch with Captain Ramshawe and Bob Birmingham, and they were all agreed that the former SEAL commander may as well remain at home, near a telephone, for the moment when Ibrahim and Yousaf broke cover, as they surely would. At that point they would decide a proper course of action.

Meanwhile both the NSA and the CIA were extremely grateful to him for almost single-handedly deciphering the intercept of the signal from Pakistan, foiling the terrorist plot against Canaan Academy, and taking out two of the four most wanted men from Guantanamo. All in secret, without leaving a trace.

The first moment they had a fix on Ibrahim Sharif, and Yousaf Mohammed, the entire security force of the United States would be at Mack’s disposal. They had just been witness to both the capabilities and intentions of these lunatics, which had confirmed the wisdom of their decision to have them killed.

Also, there was no one in the United States legal system who believed there was any military or government involvement whatsoever in the deaths of Abu Hassan Akbar and Ben al-Turabi. They had, after all, blown themselves up; no third party was even suspected, never mind named.

Mack Bedford’s performance had been superlative. He and Anne had dinner together that second evening he was home, while Tommy stayed overnight with friends in Bath.

It was a long way from summer, but Mack always grilled outside until the first snow appeared, usually in the first week of November. Tonight
he fixed one of his Down East masterworks: Lightly grilled swordfish steaks he’d been given by a lifelong friend, Brad Andre, skipper of a local dragger. He’d landed it only that morning on a long-line in deep water out beyond the Seguin Light. Brad had sold the huge fish to a restaurant agent for a fortune, but before he let it go, he cut two prime steaks, one for his own family, one for Mack’s. He’d dropped it off on the way home—just walked in and placed it in the fridge, with a note scrawled on the white wrapping paper:
“First one of these I’ve caught for three years! Four hundred pounder. Took 45 minutes to land him. Sonofabitch! Brad.”

Mack marinated the fish in herbs and olive oil, and grilled it over charcoal. One turn only to brown both sides, and served with melted butter and parsley. He and Anne shared the steak and a bottle of California chablis and retired early to bed.

 

YOUSAF AND IBRAHIM
were given the choice of having dinner with the twelve-strong crew or by themselves at the end of the galley. They chose the latter because practically anything they had to say was sufficiently private to put them both in the slammer for many years, if overheard by the wrong people.

And it set a precedent. They always ate by themselves and did not fraternize with anyone, not even Igor, who reasoned their three thousand bucks had bought them as much privacy as they wanted.

During the meal, Yousaf once more broached the prickly subject of the bomb. “Any more ideas?” he asked.

And Ibrahim replied, “Just a few.” For a few minutes there was silence, and then the terrorist leader spoke again, “I don’t think anyone bombed the bus from the air, or hit it with a Stinger missile. If we start by considering that was the biggest thing by far that went wrong, we should then go back and examine everything that went wrong. Try and get a pattern. Now, what was the first thing? Come on, Yousaf. Think.”

“Well, I can’t see it has anything to do with the bomb. But I suppose it was when Ali got in a fight with some local guy in the woods.”

“Correct. Except he may not have been some local guy. We don’t know who he was. We only know he arrived more or less the same time as Ali, who was on his first-ever watch, and ended up snapping his hip socket almost in half. That wasn’t a local guy, Yousaf. That was an expert in unarmed combat. Like we’re supposed to be.”

“Okay,” said Yousaf. “Then what?”

“Next night, late, in comes Abu Hassan saying some huge guy, bigger and stronger than King Kong, flattened him in the farm yard and then vanished.”

“Okay. Next.”

“Mike, who’s supposed to be on guard, comes in with a broken jaw, and says some guy hit him on the chin with a sledgehammer. Was it the same guy who broke Ali’s hip, and flattened Abu? I think probably. And why did I not put these three incidents together? Because I must be very, very stupid. But I take full blame.”

“None of us put them together,” said Yousaf. “They all seemed so separate, unconnected. Like accidents.”

“Which bring us to the most serious item. Do you remember the night Ben went back to the bus for the school floor plan?”

“Of course.”

“Well he came back and said quite definitely the barn door was not locked. No chain. No padlock. He didn’t say maybe. He said for sure. So I asked Asif to go out and check, and when he came back, he said the barn was locked like always with the padlock and chain.”

“And who was right?”

“They were both right. There was no chain and padlock on the door when Ben said there wasn’t. He might have been a bit flakey. But he wasn’t that flakey. When Asif headed out there about ten minutes later, there was now a chain and padlock on the door.”

“Huh?”

“You know what I think? Someone cut our padlock off during the previous three days while we were working and replaced it with one of his own, almost identical. He left it there unlocked, with the key in. When our last man locked up in the pitch dark, he was locking a different padlock. And the intruder outside had a spare key, which allowed him to enter our barn any time he wished, all through the night when we were asleep.

“Except for once. That’s when Mike walked around the barn and this character smashed him to the ground, broke his jaw, perhaps with a sledgehammer, and then vanished.”

“I’m trying to fit all this together,” said Yousaf.

“That’s very simple,” said Ibrahim. “On one of those nights, probably the last one, he enters the barn, maybe with a helper, and they rig a bomb up under our school bus, with a remote control just like ours.

“And then they waited, hidden in the trees on the school grounds. When we arrived, they detonated their own bomb, which blew our
ammonium nitrate, killed all of our people, and wrecked our attack on Canaan Academy.”

“You can’t be serious?”

“Can’t I? You can trust me on this. I have considered the problem from every angle. There can be no other explanation. It was that English bastard with the pipe who said, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, only the truth remains.’”

“Okay. You have solved the practical action of the problem. But now I ask you the real question: How did anyone know what we were going to do, where we were, and what our target was?”

“And that’s the one no one can answer,” said Ibrahim. “Because that could only have been discovered by someone who tapped into our most secret conversations. And I don’t know how that could have happened, or who could have done it.”

“I suppose we could have had someone on our tail in Bradford,” said Yousaf, “or even Mexico. There were messages passed from Peshawar and Islamabad. We don’t know how secure Faisal al-Assad was. And we definitely don’t know if anyone mentioned Canaan Academy.”

“Whoever it was must have been connected with the U.S. Government,” said Ibrahim. “Because only governments, or very big organizations, can operate like that. But this group did not behave like a government. They behaved like gangsters. There is no end to my hatred of the Great Satan.”

“Or mine,” said Yousaf. “I did not think it was possible to hate anyone as I hate them.”

 

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, as the sun rose out of the Atlantic, the two terrorists slept soundly in their bunks on board the
Odessa.
It was 6:30 on the U.S. mainland, and two young girls riding their ponies in the pine woods just north of Bar Harbor discovered the Chevy that had belonged to the Bangor bank manager, Jed Ridley.

Fortunately, they did not discover the bank manager himself, who was resting in peace under the salad in the back. But the vehicle was in such an outrageous place, driven into heavy undergrowth almost out of sight, the girls decided to tell someone. The Chevy was empty and apparently abandoned.

They took their time, and told their parents at around 8 a.m. after they returned from the stables. By the time the police had responded it was nine o’clock, and they finally hauled the vehicle out at 9:45. That was when
they discovered the missing Mr. Ridley lying dead on the floor in the back.

A police ambulance took the body back to Bangor, and the announcement hit all the news channels by noon. No one was especially excited that Mr. Ridley was dead, or that he had been found in his car just outside elegant Bar Harbor, summer playground of the rich. It was that he’d been shot dead with one bullet—and that he had disappeared from the same supermarket parking lot where an old Dodge truck, which had been used by two known terrorists, had been abandoned.

To the detectives in charge of the case it looked suspiciously as if those two terrorists, identified by the CIA as Ibrahim Sharif and Yousaf Mohammed, both of either Afghani or Pakistani descent and both ex-Guantanamo Bay, had used the bank manager’s Chevy as a getaway car.

And there was only one reason for them to drive down to off-season Bar Harbor, and that was the ferry to Nova Scotia, the one way they could cross a national border without too much trouble.

The Maine State Police Department was on the line to the Canadian authorities immediately. And at exactly 2:30 p.m. two Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruisers came howling into the Yarmouth ferry port, sirens blaring, lights flashing.

They weren’t looking for a couple of questionable foreign bombers, who may have committed a crime far away from here. They were looking for two murderers, trying to escape justice. Two murderers who had shot and killed a well-respected United States citizen and dumped the body into woodland over at Bar Harbor. They immediately sealed off the ferry port, warning everyone that there would be extensive questioning, and that the 5 p.m. ferry would be subject to delays.

It was the beginning of an elaborate and thorough investigation. But by this time, the
Odessa
had already cleared Dennis Point and was headed out to the open sea. Much like their erstwhile colleague, Faisal al-Assad, Ibrahim and Yousaf had already flown the coop.

THE AL-QAEDA DISASTER
in the hills of Northwest Connecticut resonated all the way to Peshawar, where the local bazaars simmered in stifling ninety-degree heat, sheltered as they were from the cooling breezes that wafted down from the Khyber Pass.

Pakistan is a talkative country, and in Peshawar, rumor, innuendo, and the occasional fact, rip around those marketplaces with reckless uncertainty.

Everyone seemed to know that something had gone shockingly wrong in North America. Al-Qaeda men had died. There had been a stupendous accidental explosion. The expedition had been sabotaged. Osama bin Laden had called a Council of War right here on the western hills of the Swat Valley, even though no one had seen him for nine years.

Not one of Peshawar’s three million citizens knew precisely what had happened in West Norfolk. Not even Shakir Khan, whose government car had just deposited him in the dark alleyway leading to the
Andar Shehr,
right outside the side gate to his grandiose walled residence.

The assembly of the North West Frontier Province had risen for the day, and Mr. Khan was accompanied by his assistant, thirty-year-old Kaiser Rashid, whose two brothers were both decorated Taliban commanders.