The Brotherhood Conspiracy (2 page)

Rory O’Neill.
Commissioner of the New York City police department.

Sam Reynolds.
Career diplomat of the U.S. State Department; assisted the team that found the Temple.

Moussa al-Sadr.
Imam; founder of the Lebanese militia that became Hezbollah; after thirty years in hiding, emerging leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

PROLOGUE

1978

Tripoli, Libya

The night air smelled of dead fish and diesel. The waves of the Mediterranean falling against the dingy gravel beach muted the faint sound of running feet. No moon marked the team’s passing. Their lives depended on being invisible.

This was blood work. Close, messy, fatal.

They ran through the shadows between the Esso refinery’s flashing scarlet lights and the dark parade ground of the women’s military college, best known for training Qaddafi’s female bodyguards.

They were four, covered head-to-foot in black, only their eyes visible through the holes of the hood. The leader had cold, blue eyes.

No insignias, no uniforms, no ID, no names. If they were caught, or killed, they would not be identified.

They ran under an oasis of palm trees, across a vulnerable, flat, open space, and then stopped short of a small parking lot, a stone garage protecting them from view of anyone on the other side.

Thirty minutes total. This close to the Libyan coast, the sub wouldn’t wait any longer. Get it done and get out, or get dead.

The main building was on the far side of the parking lot, across a stretch of lawn. The director’s wife grew roses, surrounding the mansion with sweet perfume.

The refinery director and his family were on a hastily arranged holiday.
Qaddafi had commandeered their lovely home once again—far from prying eyes in the capital—to celebrate his son’s birthday with those he trusted, and those he wanted to influence. He was here, tonight.

Pointing to the right, the leader broke his team into two pairs, each inching toward a corner of the garage. Night birds sang in the treetops, French tamarisk wrestled to mask the power of massed rose bushes. The leader and his partner approached the left corner of the garage and raised their silenced Glocks.

And came face-to-face with the muzzle of a rifle.

The other soldier must have hesitated for a moment . . . only a split second . . . surprised by these two ghosts in black. The leader put a bullet between the soldier’s eyes before he could blink. They ran through the small parking lot, clogged with stretch limousines, as the other team came around the right side of the garage and snapped C-4 incendiary devices to the gas tanks of the parked limos.

Through a grove of date palms and carob trees that blocked the garage from the view of the main house, they ran up behind a shoulder-high hedge of Phoenician juniper. Across an expansive, manicured lawn sat the director’s mansion, about a hundred meters away, the rear terrace aglow from the multicolored paper lanterns surrounding its outer edge.

Joined by the other two soldiers, the squad edged along the hedge until they had a clear view. There were three groups of men on the terrace, all—with the exception of one man—wearing kaftans and kaffiyehs, the robe and headdress common to Arab men. One group was seated in a semicircle, the other two groups stood at each side. In the middle of the seated group was Qaddafi, a thin, ascetic-looking man dressed in a long, flowing, golden robe, with a small, embroidered, round golden cap on his head.

To his left, in stark contrast, sat a black-robed imam, a black turban on his head, his jet black beard visible against Qaddafi’s golden splendor, even at this distance. Their target—not Qaddafi, but Imam Moussa al-Sadr, religious leader of the Shi’ites of Lebanon, founder of Amal, meaning
hope
in Arabic, the fourteen thousand–strong militia wing of al-Sadr’s Movement of the Disinherited . . . enemy of Israel.

Their orders were simple. Kill al-Sadr. Across the Mediterranean, twenty-five thousand Israeli troops poured into southern Lebanon as part of Operation Litani. The invasion was both in retaliation for the thirty-seven Israeli citizens massacred four days earlier by eleven Palestinian terrorists who hijacked a bus
in a daring, daylight raid near Tel Aviv, and to root out the terrorist base camps, like those of Amal, that spawned these agents of terror.

The Israeli commando leader didn’t know why al-Sadr ventured into the lair of Qaddafi, his bitter enemy. It didn’t matter. He had his orders, to snuff out the life of this enemy. He would obey. Or die trying.

The team’s two shooters extricated and assembled the pieces of their Remington M40A1 heavy barrel sniper rifles from their backpacks. Silencers would decrease the accuracy of the rifles. Night-vision scopes, the light on the terrace, and the training of the shooters and their spotters, would help. Still, the leader would have preferred another fifty meters closer.

Two muzzles were pushed through the branches of the juniper hedge.

Just as children came running onto the terrace.

There were dozens of them, swarming around and through the three groups of men, some being lifted by waiting arms. In the midst of the seated group, three children, two boys and a girl, came forward and crawled up onto the lap of the man in the golden robes, bringing a radiant smile to his face. A fourth, another boy, slower than the rest, stood at Qaddafi’s knees and looked back and forth for a place to sit. But there was no more room on his lap or in his chair.

As the commando leader raced through his options, the black-clad cleric reached down, picked up the boy, and brought him close to the others on Qaddafi’s lap. Qaddafi reached out his hand and stroked the boy’s head.

The leader looked, left and right, at his shooters. They shook their heads. At this distance, even without the silencers, there was no shot without great risk of killing one or more of the children.

The clock was ticking. The incendiary devices, intended as a diversion for their escape, would explode in ninety seconds. The plan was to get the shot, then run—without concern for stealth—for the darkness of the parade ground, getting there as the cars exploded in the parking lot. With luck, attention would be diverted long enough for the team to reach the beach and the inflatable. If Libyan defense helicopters weren’t in the air quickly enough, they had a chance of reaching the submarine.

“If we don’t take the shot now, we’re out of time,” came a whisper from his left. The orders were clear. Eliminate al-Sadr. At all costs. The leader decided to wait. Ninety seconds and the bombs would go off. The children would be scared, they would run.

His men all looked in his direction. The leader held up his hand, flat, palm out. Wait.

In the silence, punctuated by the distant, muffled laughter of children, a soft breeze drifted off the Mediterranean, tasting like the sea. They waited for the explosion—the light, the noise, the confusion, the scrambling—to get their shot. They waited . . .

There was no audible or visible alarm. No claxon sounding, no searchlights reaching into the darkness. But from each side of the mansion, a dozen heavily armed soldiers came running—pinching in, straight toward their location. They were discovered . . . perhaps the dead guard was missed. At the same moment a phalanx of tall, beautiful warrior women ran onto the terrace and surrounded Qaddafi, rushing him from the terrace toward the house.

The shooter on the lieutenant’s right took a shot at al-Sadr . . . the one on his left responded. But the imam was moving. He put down the boy, and the first bullet ripped above his head. At the sound he dropped into a crouch as two bodyguards surrounded him. One spun to the ground in a death dance. And al-Sadr was gone.

The leader tapped his partner on the shoulder, sending him into the dark to cover their retreat as the shooters squeezed off four shots each, emptying their magazines. Five Libyan soldiers fell to the grass. The leader tapped them on the shoulders and they followed the first soldier, leaving the unidentifiable sniper rifles in the top branches of the hedge, grabbing their Uzis as they ran.

More soldiers were joining the attack from the sides of the mansion and, while some of the first group dropped to a knee to return fire, the rest were rushing headlong toward the hedge. The leader swept the advancing soldiers with two bursts from his Uzi, then spun around and ran toward the parking lot. Which is when hell came to visit Libya.

Even the leader was surprised at the viciousness of the blast and the ferocity of the fireball that consumed the limos in the lot, blew the front off the garage, and sent a shock wave through the copse of trees that nearly knocked him off his feet. In the shock and blinding light, the leader pursued his retreating team, running as fast as his legs and his lungs could bear.

There was a pause in the shooting coming from the Libyan soldiers, as he hoped. Then the fireball fell back to earth, its bulbous, burning mass cut by two-thirds, and the resultant loss of light intensified the blackness of the night. In this momentary eclipse, the leader burst from under the trees and raced
across the open space toward the parade ground. He knew one of his men was covering his retreat while the other two rushed on to free the inflatable and get it in the water. Perhaps they would make it.

First he heard shouts, then shots as bullets began buzzing past him like lethal bees released from a deadly hive. The bullets were too close.

In a split-second decision, he cut hard right, away from the parade ground. The sound of the Libyan’s automatic rifles seemed more distant. He ran harder. After only a few strides, he cut back to his left for an all-out sprint to the darkness. Then his body was ripped by a spray of bullets. Across his chest. From ahead of him. From his own.

I turned too quickly.

It seemed like a long time as he fell to the earth. Enough time to think of his wife, Tabitha. Their two sons—his sons—now without a father. He thought of his father, Chaim, who begged him not to take this risk so close to discharge. This risk . . . this job . . . unfinished . . . and he skidded into the dusty ground, thinking of his family, his life pouring into foreign soil he would never leave.

PART ONE

PROPHET’S CALL

1

T
HE
P
RESENT
• T
UESDAY
, J
ULY
21

New York City

Open-mouthed, Tom Bohannon, executive director of the Bowery Mission in New York City, watched as an earthquake in Jerusalem changed the future of the world.

Television news helicopters hovering a few hundred feet over the yawning chasm of the Temple Mount broadcast a surreal scene. From the center of the crater came billows of white, smokelike, limestone dust. As if released from a subterranean faucet, torrents raged from both ends of the ragged “V” that cleaved the Mount in two from east to west. New rivers swept through the Kidron Valley from one end of the cleft and into the streets of Old Jerusalem from the other.

Bohannon stared at the television screen in mute shock. Moments before, he had watched the first ritual sacrifice in a Jewish temple in more than two thousand years—a temple that was hidden under the Temple Mount for a millennium, a temple that he had helped discover. Now, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque had disappeared into the spreading cleft of the Mount’s platform, the flat stone base, supported by Herodian arches, upon which the Dome and the mosque once stood. Bohannon felt decades older than his fifty-eight years. His normally straight, strong six-foot frame sagged at shoulder and waist as huge slabs of the platform fell into the crater’s black maw.

Unseen, deep in the bowels of the Mount’s underground caverns, the Third Temple of God lay crushed under tons of stone and debris.

“It’s gone.”

Jerusalem

With the first shockwave, Captain Avram Levin was thrown off his high stool overlooking the banks of television monitors in the Aleph Reconnaissance Center. He crashed onto his right shoulder on the hard concrete floor. Pulling against the railing with his left arm, he was on his feet when the second shock hit. This one buckled the room in the middle, then a wave of movement flowed through the room, cresting as it hit the buckle. Half of the Aleph Center slipped away to the right amid a hail of sparks, taking screaming men and crashing equipment with it as it dropped into a crevasse where once was solid ground.

Levin’s left hand throbbed as he squeezed the rail with all his strength, his feet trying to find purchase on the wildly dancing floor. Bile rising in his throat, Levin willed his eyes away from the ragged opening that had just consumed his men. He turned his gaze to the few monitors that were still transmitting. A gaping cleft spread across the Temple Mount, swallowing everything in its wake.