Sixty meters away, the tower guard disappeared. Al-Habib’s heart lurched, and he looked up from the scope. Everything hinged on taking the guard down without raising an alarm, so that they could approach the fence where a drainage tunnel was located, cut through the screen, climb the bluff up to the camp, take out the two guards outside Echo, retrieve the five prisoners waiting for them, and then make their way back to the Nueva Cruz.
“Men fadlak,” he whispered under his breath. Please. The diversion would begin at any moment. He could feel the tension of his men behind him.
A zephyr of a breeze caressed his cheek, bringing with it the hint of soft music playing from a great distance. A radio perhaps. He leaned forward into the sniper scope, steadying his aim so that the backlit reticle was centered on the tower’s west observation port.
“This mission is important, Sharif,” bin Laden had said. “The brothers you will rescue have an inestimable value. Do you understand?”
“We will not fail.”
A mock-up of a portion of Camp Delta had been built in the desert outside Damascus where al-Habib and his people had trained. It had been cleverly constructed in disconnected sections so that the satellites would see this installation as nothing more than another base for Islamic militants. Such places were common in Syria. Bin Laden had come to the camp at great personal risk to speak to al-Habib before he left for Cuba. It had been such a huge honor that al-Habib’s stature among the Syrians had immediately risen to astronomical heights.
“I do not want you to needlessly sacrifice your life for this mission, but the brothers you will rescue are even more important than you. You must free them and bring them back here unharmed.”
It was night and they stood beneath an awning to conceal them from an American Keyhole satellite. Bin Laden was a full head taller than al-Habib, but he had to use the battered Kalashnikov rifle he’d carried since Afghanistan as a cane. Their eyes met and al-Habib was struck by three things: the man’s patience, his great intellect, and a sadness that lay heavy around him, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“What if we run into resistance, Imam?” al-Habib asked respectfully. During the last three months of their training they’d all been struck by how fragile a mission this was. So many things could go wrong.
Bin Laden laid a gentle hand on al-Habib’s shoulder. “If it becomes clear that you will not succeed, you must kill them. Under no circumstances must they fall back into American hands.”
If the prisoners were so important, al-Habib wanted to know, why would they be held in the minimum-security Camp Echo? But he didn’t ask the question. There were some things better left unsaid. Now, he wondered if he’d been wise, or if he’d simply been dazzled by bin Laden’s presence.
The guard came into sight. Al-Habib’s gut instantly tightened. He thumbed the safety selector lever to the off, single-fire position, and with his free hand, motioned for his people to make ready. It was time now. Any second—
A bright flash blossomed in the hills several kilometers to the north, directly behind the base. Before the sharp boom of the explosion arrived, the tower guard started to turn toward the light, his head in profile at the exact moment al-Habib squeezed off one shot.
With a muzzle velocity in excess of 2,850 feet per second, the 5.56-by-45mm NATO round covered the sixty meters in less than one second, the noise from the supersonic round all but lost in the confusion. The guard’s head was shoved violently forward, al-Habib could see the impact of the bullet before the American was down.
The sound of the initial flash-bang mortar shell rolled across the base, followed immediately by a lot of small-arms fire, all concentrated to the northeast.
A siren sounded somewhere inland to the west, probably at base headquarters, and lights started coming on all over the place.
Al-Habib looked up from the scope and held his breath. The next part was crucial if their mission had any hope of succeeding. The diversion had to temporarily lead the American defenses away from this end of the base. The window did not have to be a big one, because Camp Echo was less than two hundred meters from this spot. But they needed at least seven minutes to get in, free the five prisoners, and get back out.
Another flash-bang mortar round went off in the distance, and the small-arms fire intensified, mostly Kalashnikovs, but al-Habib could hear machine-gun fire, possibly the U.S.-made M60s that the Cuban military used.
Nothing moved in the tower, nor had the local alarm sounded, which meant that the guard had gone down without hitting the Panic button. No one was coming to the rescue. Yet.
Al-Habib detached his weapon from its tripod and, keeping low, scrambled down the shallow slope to the two-meter-wide drainage ditch that paralleled the fence. An oval, corrugated metal drainage pipe, just wide enough for one man at a time to enter, crossed beneath the fence to a similar drainage ditch on the inside of the camp. The opening was covered by a thick metal grate.
He dropped to one knee and trained his scope on the nearest tower one hundred meters to the north as Abu Bukhari slung his weapon and started on the grate with bolt cutters.
The distant tower guard was gone, and when he raised his scope, he could see no activity on the bluff.
In less than thirty seconds Bukhari had the grate off, and without a word climbed into the twenty-meter-long tunnel and disappeared in the darkness. Ibin Kamal and Omar Sufyan, good West Bank boys, followed, leaving al-Habib alone for just a moment in the middle of a mission for which all of his self-confidence had disappeared. Once they were inside the perimeter, the Americans would shoot to kill.
Al-Habib touched the fingers of his left hand to his chest to feel for the one-kilo block of Semtex plastic explosive taped to his body. It had been his idea. Bin Laden didn’t want any of the prisoners they’d come to rescue to be recaptured. Neither would he or his men be taken alive. For just an instant he had a vision of his father’s tear-stained face, and he shook his head.
What is writ by the hand of God cannot be put asunder by the mere will of man.
The jihad was right and just. “Writ by the hand of God,” al-Habib mumbled. “No question.”
He ducked into the tunnel and crawled on his hands and knees to the other side, reaching the opening just as Sufyan was pulling himself out. He didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, nevertheless he was glad to be back out in the open air, even though he was getting the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that he had come to the end of his life.
The action to the north was heating up as American forces began returning fire. There would be nothing in Cuban or U.S. newspapers about the routine probe, but a U.S. military report would mention the incident, the greater-than-usual quantity of ordinance expended, and the fact that no casualties were sustained. Nothing would be mentioned about the prison break, or the casualties here.
The four of them crossed the no-man’s zone and started up the steep slope, clawing at the loose sand and crumbling rock, trying to hurry as fast as they could while making the minimum of noise.
At the crest of the bluff, they held up. Camp Delta, behind its own razor-wire-topped fence, consisted of several dozen concrete block detention units, each with its own inner fence and security station manned by MPs.
Kamal pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then pointed them in the direction of a low, concrete block building just outside the main detention area, which housed Camp Echo.