Crosswhite shifted into drive and pulled away from the curb. He wasn’t surprised that the neighbors were all still inside their homes. This wasn’t the part of town where people came out to gawk when the feds showed up blowing holes in the walls; that was a good way of getting caught in a crossfire that had nothing to do with you.
“Are we solid back there?” he asked a couple of minutes down the road.
Tuckerman took a moment to pull off his balaclava. “I made it look like a gangland hit.” He looked into the back, where the little girl was sitting on the floor, resting against the backpacks full of money. “I’m sorry it’s not more comfortable back there, sweetheart. Where do you live?”
“Chicago,” she said.
Tuckerman slugged the door panel, wishing he could kill the little girl’s abductors again.
“Take it easy,” Crosswhite said quietly. “Do we have any accounts in Chicago that need servicing?”
“Yeah. There’s a guy on the South Side who can put something together for us.”
Crosswhite turned the corner as a police cruiser passed them going in the opposite direction without any lights flashing. “And still nobody’s called it in,” he said, watching the cop in the side-view mirror. “I think I might actually miss this town. It’s been good to us.”
“Too good,” Tuckerman said, pointing a thumb toward the back. “This here is definitely a sign that it’s time to go.”
“Roger that,” Crosswhite replied. “I was just thinking the same thing. Chi-Town’s a good place to expand our business.”
10
Born in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1962, Nikolai Kashkin was not pure Chechen. His mother had moved from Chechnya in the months before his birth to marry his father, who was a soldier in the Soviet Army. Raised to follow in his father’s footsteps, Nikolai served as a lieutenant in his father’s armored battalion late in the Afghan War.
Their service together was not lengthy. His father was killed in action in the Panjshir Valley during the same battle in which Kashkin himself was taken prisoner along with seventeen other Soviet tankers. His fellow prisoners were summarily executed by Tajik fighters, but because Kashkin was half Muslim, an officer, and the son of a Russian colonel, he was spared until the Mujahedeen warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud could determine his value as a potential hostage. It was during his time as a prisoner of the Mujahedeen in the Afghan village of Bazarak that he first came to truly appreciate his Muslim heritage.
To that point in his life, in keeping with the policies of the Supreme Soviet, his father had forbidden Kashkin to practice any religion at all, while at the same time insisting that Kashkin’s mother keep her own religion private. Kashkin’s father was rarely home during his childhood, however, so his mother had been able to teach him about Islam in secret. Though Kashkin did not grow up a devout Muslim by any stretch of the imagination, he did reach adulthood with an intimate understanding of the Islamic faith, and it was this understanding of his mother’s faith that had saved his life in the Panjshir Valley.
During his meeting with Ahmad Massoud, the warlord spoke with Kashkin about his childhood, questioning him at length about the teachings he had received from his mother. By the end of their discussion, Massoud decided that the young Russian lieutenant was merely a misguided Muslim who had never been given the opportunity to properly allow Allah to come into his life. He then assigned to him a mentor named Orzu Karimov, and over the next eleven months, Karimov taught Kashkin how to walk the enlightened path of Muhammad.
When the fighting finally ended, and the Soviets agreed to leave Afghanistan in 1989, Kashkin was released to return home as a brother Muslim. Shortly thereafter, he and his mother relocated to Grozny, Chechnya, and it was there that Kashkin was exposed to the radical Salafi movement for the first time. Though he had not remained particularly loyal to the Russian army after the fall of the Soviet Union, nor had he bore it any ill will. It was not until his mother was killed by Russian artillery fire during the First Chechen War in the mid-1990s that he first took up the sword against the Russian Federation and, ultimately, all of Western democracy.
Kashkin was now sitting in front of the television in his Las Vegas hotel room watching CNN’s coverage of a so-far-unexplained explosion in southern New Mexico. As the hours passed, word got out that Texas’s Fort Bliss was on a nuclear alert status, and it was reported that a large-scale evacuation was taking place in the city of El Paso, where radiation levels were said to be on the rise. Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border from El Paso, was being evacuated as well, with the population there streaming south, deeper into Mexico. Fortunately, the land east of both cities was largely barren and sparsely populated.
There were no aerial shots provided of ground zero because a strict no-fly zone had been imposed by both governments, which were said to be working closely together in an effort to determine exactly what had happened. By two in the morning Vegas time, the talking heads on all major US news networks were blabbing a hundred words a minute, spouting all the possible worst-case scenarios, and managing to drive the national anxiety level off the charts with half the nation still asleep. A tired Wolf Blitzer of CNN eventually appeared in the wee hours to report that people all across the country were calling friends and relatives in the greatest call volume seen since September 11, 2001.
Kashkin had no way of knowing exactly what had occurred down on the Mexican border, but he was pleased to have chosen Zakayev to carry the second bomb, realizing that Zakayev must have been forced to make a choice between capture and detonation. The fact there had been limited immediate loss of life was a disappointment to Kashkin, but the news wasn’t all bad.
The New York Stock Exchange had announced that it would remain closed for at least the next thirty-six hours, and damaging the Western economy was at least as important as taking Western lives. Westerners were like flies on a manure pile — you couldn’t possibly hope to kill them all. What you could do was devastate their already struggling, interdependent capitalistic economies on both sides of the Atlantic. You could frighten their greedy, corporate-owned governments into imposing more and more restrictions upon their beloved freedoms.
Nuclear terror was the number one way to accomplish this.
Kashkin’s ultimate goal was far more ambitious than taking lives. He wanted to push the United States to the breaking point of its depraved society, steadily applying more and more pressure until Americans were finally killing one another in the streets, burning their own cities to the ground in protest over ever-increasing austerity measures. He did not expect to live to see the end results of his work any more than bin Laden had expected to, but the attacks of September 11, 2001, had taught Kashkin a very important lesson in the war with the West. Bin Laden’s strategy had exposed not only how fragile America’s economy truly was but also, even more importantly, it had exposed the fact that, as went the US economy, so went the economies of the rest of the Western world.
This was the key to defeating them.
Final victory was at last within sight, within the collective reach of the arm of Islam, and all for the cost of a few million wicked American dollars won at a Las Vegas poker table, passed on to a dying old KGB agent wanting to live out his last few months in the South Pacific being pampered by exotic women.
Kashkin switched off the television as the sun was beginning to dawn in the east, opening the drapes to a bright new day. He ran his fingers through a head of gray hair and drew a deep breath to alleviate the tension in his chest over his heart, gazing out at the Luxor pyramid, the Sphinx, and the obelisk, shaking his head with antipathy. What decadence, what an obscenity. The United States had just been attacked with a nuclear weapon, and this city of vice and greed continued to function as though nothing had happened. He felt it fitting that the money he’d used to purchase both RA-115s from Daniel Mulinkov had been won right across the street in the Luxor casino.