The message was clear: Arafat and Mazen had better watch their backs.
But that was all years ago. Neither the CIA nor ITA had any warning of this, and now the house of cards was collapsing all around them.
THREE
Flames shot out of the gutted limo.
Thick black smoke made it hard to see. Mancuso again speed dialed the Op Center in Washington, and went to a secure frequency. Mancuso actually knew Rob Trakowski — not well, but well enough to know he was just doing his job.
Trakowski was a decent guy, and loyal. If extraction teams could be sent from either of the U.S. aircraft carriers steaming across the eastern Mediter ranean — either the USS Ronald Reagan or the USS Teddy Roosevelt—there wasn't any doubt in Mancuso's mind that Trakowski would have dispatched them immediately. Something really was wrong. Weather, politics — it didn't really matter. What mattered was that Mancuso needed to get his team out before it was too late.
"Black Tower, this is Snapshot. You still got that feed from Predator Six?"
"Affirmative — what do you need?"
"Can you get a shot of the Great Mosque down the street?"
"Roger that. What are we looking for?"
"Just tell me what you see."
"All right, hold on. "
Mancuso reloaded his MP-5. It was only a few moments — but it felt like forever.
"Son of a—"
"What? What is it?" Mancuso pressed.
"Sir, you 've a militia of some kind lined up at the back of the mosque. Someone s handing out machine guns, RPGs, ammunition, you name it."
"Who?"
"A bunch of mullahs—/ can't tell for sure. They've got a bucket brigade aping — they seem to be bringing up weapons from the basement and handing them out the back door, as fast as they can. "
"How many are we talking about — a few dozen?"
"Actually, sir — it looks like hundreds. "
They were only forty yards away and coming fast.
Their faces covered in red kafHyahs, they poured out of two guard stations in either corner of the compound. Who were these guys? Whose side were they on? Were they coming to help, or finish them off?
McCoy was pretty sure they were members of Force 17, Arafat's elite bodyguard unit. All these guys knew for sure was that their leadership had been blown away in the last few minutes. Arafat was dead. Abu Mazen was dead. So were half the Cabinet and most of the top legislators. But did any of the Force 17 guys know how or why? Did they know it was one of their own guys? Maybe not. Most had been manning posts inside the legislature or the adjacent buildings when the motorcade had arrived.
Likewise, all the DSS agents knew for sure was that the Secretary of State was dead. Many of their own were dead. Now their entire detail was under fire from multiple directions. Palestinians of some kind were doing the shooting. What did it all mean? Was this a one-man coup, or a larger conspiracy? Did the armed men rushing at them work for Arafat, or his killers? Should they trust them, or shoot them?
Bennett assumed they were good guys. He was wrong. At thirty yards, they began firing from the hip. Glass was cracking but not shattering above him. Round after round was hitting the limo's doors and windows, but so far, none had broken through.
"McCoy — behind you!" Bennett yelled, unable to get a clear shot.
McCoy and Mancuso wheeled around and returned fire. They cut down eight or ten men in the first few bursts. Mancuso's assault teams took out a dozen more. They also watched their teams' backs, providing covering fire against threats from the front gate and Omar El Mukhtar Street. Mancuso passed the word that more trouble was on the way.
"This is an NBC Special Report. Now from Washington, Brian Williams." It was Monday morning, barely a few minutes after 3:00 a.m. Washington time — just after ten in the morning Gaza time. Most of America was asleep, but each of the cable news networks were already covering the mushrooming crisis live. Now, one by one, each of the major U.S. broadcast networks began covering the gun battle in Gaza, as well. NBC simulcast its feed from the MSNBC crew on the ground. ABC and CBS had more difficulties. Without a cable news channel of their own, and without any plans to do a live broadcast of the arrival of the Secretary of State, they were caught without exclusive footage. Soon whoever was up at that hour watching ABC began seeing a feed from Al Jazeera, while those watching CBS saw a combination of feeds coming in from Israel's Channel Two, the BBC, and an Abu Dhabi TV crew.
A mob of Palestinian militants were now working their way up the main street, and several side streets, shooting wildly into the air. A wounded CNN cameraman was on the roof. He and his crew broadcast the scene to the world. Their presence caused the U.S. sharpshooters to think twice. Should they wait until they were fired upon directly? Or should they be systematically picking these guys off, one by one, before the rest of the U.S. team was ambushed and outnumbered?
Only a handful of U.S. officials had ever heard the name Jake Ziegler.
To most of Washington — and all of the Arab and Islamic world — he didn't exist. As the CIA's station chief in the Gaza Strip, it was Ziegler's job to be invisible. And he was good. In a covert operations center along the Mediterranean coast known as Gaza Station, Ziegler watched the nightmare unfold via satellite feeds from three U.S. networks, as well as from live video images provided by the unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle — Predator Six — hovering over the crime scene. His mind reeled. The images were hor rifying. But what did they mean?
The death of Arafat had the potential of triggering all kinds of scenarios. Few of them were good. The most serious: a Palestinian civil war, as various faction leaders mobilized their forces and tried to seize control of the power vacuum left in Arafat's wake. Ziegler should know. As far back as the spring of 2002, he'd written the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate on what could happen when Yasser Arafat one day passed from the scene. Even now — eight years later — he could still recite from memory key findings from his report.
"Who would be the likely successor to Arafat as head of the Palestinian Au-thority?" the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had wanted to know. Ziegler's answer — factored into his report — was blunt, and grim. "PA and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat has no clear-cut successor," he wrote, "and any candidate will have neither the power base nor the leadership qualities necessary to wield full authority in the PA." Ziegler went on to note that, "Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Arafat's principal deputy and Secretary General of the PLO Executive Committee, and Ahmad Qurei (Abu Ala), Speaker of the PA's Legislative Council, are poised to assume preeminent roles after Arafat. Security chiefs like Mohammad Dahlan (former head of the Gaza Preventative Security Forces, now in charge of all PA Security Forces), Jabril Rajub (the longtime head of the West Bank Preventative Security Forces), and Fatah Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti are likely to play important supporting roles in the succession." He also pointed out that "according to PA laws, after Arafat's death, Ahmad Qurei, in his role as Speaker of the PA's Legislative Council, would assume the duties of PA president for no more than sixty days, during which time a new president would be elected."