“My men will move in when the missile hits, not when it is fired. Sub-launched missiles are slower than ICBMs, not as accurate. It might miss the target, or it might be disarmed prior to impact.”
“It won’t miss, and once a Trident missile is in the air, it can’t be disarmed, redirected, or recalled.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Some of the newer missiles, maybe, yes. But not the older ones. Not the ones on the USS Louisiana.”
Abdul was unyielding. “We move on impact. Not before.”
After a short internal debate, Terry decided that at this point it wasn’t worth fighting about; a few more minutes wouldn’t matter in the end, not after all these months of captivity. “All right. It’ll be in the air eleven minutes. So, exactly 03:11 GMT.”
“I do not deal well with betrayal. If you don’t deliver, we will kill you, find your female friend, and she will join you in eternity, but only after my men and I have taken our turns with her.”
Spoken like a true religious fanatic.
Terry wasn’t intimidated. “I would expect nothing less.” From you, he thought. “And the money?”
“It will be transferred at 03:11 GMT. Exactly.”
The road to this moment had all begun the day Terry acquired the phone.
China’s growing weapons and economic ties to Pakistan had given him the perfect in. After he’d stolen the phone, he’d contacted his old handler from China to find out who to be in touch with in Pakistan. He bypassed the Taliban and went directly to Al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani government and made Abdul Razzaq Muhammad the offer: “I will acquire a nuclear weapon from one of the United States’s Ohio Class Submarines. I will fire it at the target of your choice if you will provide two things for me in return.”
“What are those?”
“Free me from a CIA detainment facility in Egypt and wire $100,000,000 to the bank account number I provide you.”
Yes, the dollar figure was significant, but so were Abdul Razzaq Muhammad’s contacts.
Terry calculated that some of the money would come from oil, but, considering the people he was working with, he knew that most of it would come from the United States government itself, siphoned from the $2.4 billion of annual aid that the US gives to Pakistan, officially “to help the citizens of the country democratically grow their economy,” unofficially, to combat the rampant anti-American sentiment: “A core component in the worldwide fight against global terrorism.”
In other words, spend billions of American taxpayer dollars to help grow the economy of a country where nearly 70 percent of the people still think the US is their enemy, while American unemployment hovers at 10 percent.
A plan like that could only come from Capitol Hill.
After making the offer, Terry had given Abdul the information he would need to confirm his identity and qualifications, and it took the Al Qaeda operative less than a day to verify that Terry Manoji, a man who’d worked undetected as a spy for two years while employed at the NSA, was the person he claimed to be and could deliver what he said he could.
So Abdul took the proposal to his people.
Terry thought they would come back to him with an American target, perhaps one of the usual suspects: Washington DC, New York City, LA, or maybe an American embassy or military installation abroad.
But Abdul’s associates chose someplace else.
The city of Jerusalem.
“We will bring down the Zionists,” Abdul told him, “while also putting the Great Satan in its proper place of humiliation in the eyes of the world.”
Orchestrating it so that the US rather than an Islamic nation wiped out Jerusalem was brilliant in a twisted sort of way. As far as Terry could see, in one fell swoop it accomplished nearly every goal Al Qaeda ever had-humiliating America, killing millions of Jews, devastating the US economy, and effecting all of this by turning the weapons of the world’s greatest superpower against one of its closest allies.
“What about the Muslims who live there?” Terry asked. “The Palestinians in East Jerusalem?”
“Allah will welcome any of the faithful who are martyred in his name.”
Martyred.
That was an interesting way to put it.
“And the Dome of the Rock?”
“Unwavering devotion to Allah is more important than the veneration of a shrine.”
Truthfully, Terry didn’t care about either Al Qaeda’s target or their reasons for choosing it. He cared about only two things-his freedom and his reunion with Cassandra. But he needed to know how committed Abdul would be to fulfilling his part of the bargain, so he asked him, “Your own clerics have called Islam a peaceful religion. Are you sure you’re ready to go through with something like this?”
“Anyone who calls my religion one of peace mocks it,” Abdul stated firmly. “Just as anyone who claims it is about war. Islam is not about peace or about war; it is about surrender. The name Muslim means ‘submission to God.’ Our religion is one of total submission to Allah-it is not about tolerance, it is not about appeasing others or compromising to make sinners happy. It is about devotion. We celebrate all that is in submission to the Creator, we fight all that is in opposition to Islam. You misunderstand if you think Muslims are for peace or for war. We are instead wholeheartedly surrendered to the spread of Islam because it is the will of Allah.”
“And your target threatens that?”
“Rejects it.” Now Abdul Razzaq Muhammad’s tone had turned cold and spiteful, and Terry could hear the man’s venomous hatred for Jews coming through loud and clear. “There is no greater calling than spreading the will of God to those who would scorn it or mock it or fight against it! Allahu Akbar!”
The rhetoric didn’t impress Terry, nor did the reasoning persuade him. As far as he was concerned, Islam was a religion of violence and totalitarianism. How else could you explain the deafening silence of the majority of its adherents to the daily suicide bomb attacks against civilians that their fellow Muslims carried out? How else could you make sense of the international outrage, protests, and deadly riots when someone drew a caricature of Muhammad or threatened to burn a Qur’an?
Even to Terry Manoji, for a religious person to place books and cartoons above human life was unfathomable. Sharia law? That wasn’t surrender to God; that was fascism.
But as long as he got his money, as long as he got his freedom, Terry didn’t care about their warped reasoning or their sophomoric and fustian ways of justifying violence in the name of religion.
And then, there was the matter of Israel’s response. Over the last few years, Israel had not been at all shy about their right to preemptively attack Iran if they thought Iran had nuclear weapons.
And of course, if there was a nuclear missile heading straight for the heart of Jerusalem, Israeli leaders would not hold cabinet meetings and forums, they would assume it was fired from the country that had repeatedly threatened their very existence.
Iran.
Even if the US claimed the missile had been fired by hackers or terrorists, Israel would presume who was responsible.
And they would retaliate.
Terry could only imagine how much damage they would do to that country in the eleven minutes between the time the Louisiana ’s missile was fired and when it actually struck the heart of their capital.
It would certainly be a memorable day, that much was for sure.
“It’s a deal,” Terry had said simply.
Now, with less than 150 minutes left before the ignition sequence would begin, Terry said to Abdul, “All right. You told me the consequences if I don’t deliver what I promised, now I’m going to tell you the consequences if you don’t.”
“And what are those, my friend?” Abdul’s voice did not sound friendly.
“Jerusalem will not be the only city lying in ruins. Mecca will become one giant crater and Allah will welcome 1.7 million more ‘martyrs’ home. Do we have a clear understanding here?”