No, bin Rashid’s plan was the only way to force the hand of the American President.
He told ISIS leaders that wealthy Gulf patrons would plan, fund, oversee, and help carry out an attack against the United States of America. The Islamic State officials were skeptical, of course, but bin Rashid convinced them through his intermediaries that he had abilities at both the tactical and strategic levels that they did not have. He needed only some of their best recruits, their blessing, and, it went without saying, their cover.
ISIS was floundering at the moment. They had not achieved a major battlefield success in a year and a half, much of the oil revenue they’d been generating by smuggling Iraqi oil into Turkey and Jordan had been cut off by Western-coalition air strikes, and more air strikes had helped Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces take back territory. There was nothing ISIS needed more than a huge win against the West, and this shadowy group of Gulf benefactors looked like they had the right plan to make that happen.
Islamic State leadership arranged a meeting between bin Rashid and one of their top operatives.
The location of the face-to-face meeting was set up for Podujevo, Kosovo, a town of over 90,000 in the northeastern portion of the nation. Both the Saudis and ISIS had a foothold in the town, and it was seen as a safe location for both a Saudi operative — even though bin Rashid was actually an employee of a regional organization — and an ISIS operative, one Abu Musa al-Matari.
Sami bin Rashid’s intelligence contacts told him all about al-Matari. The Yemeni had recently worked his own plan to train American ISIS devotees in Syria, and then send them home to America to wreak havoc on the nation.
Bin Rashid found this plan bold, more or less intelligently crafted, and certainly the right idea, but it was lacking in many respects.
Not the least of which was that it had failed miserably.
The United States detected the training ground in Syria, the CIA and the FBI determined who was there, and then, by a cynical and arguably illegal order of President of the United States Jack Ryan, wave after wave of unmanned aerial vehicles turned the training camp to smoldering ash.
Al-Matari had already left the camp when it was hit, as had several of his U.S. passport holders. But when al-Matari returned to Raqqa, the surviving would-be ISIS jihadists were rounded up at airports in Europe and the United States, and al-Matari’s plan came to naught.
Then Sami bin Rashid met Abu Musa al-Matari in Kosovo, and months after that, al-Matari found himself in Central America, days away from beginning the operation against the West that he was certain would uproot the world order and bring forth a ten-thousand-year caliphate.
9
From El Salvador’s crowded capital of San Salvador, it is a straight shot south down the highway to the Pacific coast. It’s a good road by El Salvador standards, and the beaches at La Libertad are among the most desirable in Central America for surfers, who come from all over the world.
But no surfers end up in the village of San Rafael in La Libertad state, because it’s several miles north of the coast and a few miles west of the highway. And certainly few, if any, foreign travelers have ever ventured higher in the hills northeast of the village, following a rocky and winding track that is wholly inaccessible during the rainy season.
But if they did go there, they would see, right in the middle of the jungle, a locked iron gate at the front of a large parcel of private land.
The ownership of the property is confusing to the locals, since no one in the area lays claim to it. Most here assume a drug cartel from Mexico or Guatemala owns the property. It is fenced everywhere the thick foliage, sheer rock walls, or deep gullies don’t provide natural barriers, and no one in the town of San Rafael has ever been inside. There are no permanent caretakers, but it is said the municipal police keep an eye out to ensure nobody travels close enough to get a look.
The property had been abandoned for more than a generation, until one strange day six weeks ago.
That Sunday afternoon three large rental SUVs with no plates rumbled through San Rafael and continued up the hill without stopping. The locals who witnessed the unusual event confirmed the drivers and passengers were all Latinos, but they wore hats and shades and beards. The police didn’t harass them, but this just indicated to the locals that the police knew they were coming and had been paid to leave them alone.
Over the next few days half a dozen Latino men — those who heard them speak said they were Guatemalan — came into the village and bought enough supplies to sustain dozens of people for a month or more. The villagers of San Rafael knew better than to ask questions, they just wondered how long these narcos would stay, and if they would spend a lot more money in the town while they were here.
Two weeks later small convoys of four-wheel-drive SUVs, all clearly rentals from San Salvador, rolled through San Rafael, and soon after that, the sounds of soft and distant gunfire, sporadic and uncoordinated at first, and then tighter, faster, more organized, rolled down the hills and into the village.
Small explosions could be heard as well.
This went on for weeks and the locals figured the narcos couldn’t possibly be fighting each other for so long, so they must have been conducting some sort of training.
Beyond the gate to the property no one in San Rafael ever visited, a row of rusty corrugated metal buildings stood under the hot sun. They had been erected by the Salvadoran Army during the civil war of the 1980s, barracks with a small airstrip used by the American CIA, but the airstrip was invisible in the jungle now, and the current occupants of the property had nothing to do with America, the eighties, or that war.
The villagers had been wrong about the new visitors; the Guatemalans were not narcos, they were instructors. The six men had come to this disused property in the El Salvador back country to set up a temporary school and train a force in small-arms combat.
The six were former members of the Kaibiles, the Guatemalan military’s infamous Special Forces unit. They were all in their fifties, and during the 1980s they had been young men fighting a brutal war just north of here in Guatemala. Since then they’d worked as mercenaries, fighting or training others throughout Latin America.
The six men had taken two weeks readying the property: setting up generators, establishing the Internet, checking over their guns and ammunition, and even building a rainwater-collection station to augment the water they’d trucked in.
The company that hired them was a shell out of Panama. None of the Guatemalans looked into the shell, but still they were curious as to whom they would be training. All six of the former Kaibiles spoke English, a tip-off to them about their students, but English was a common international language, so when a Middle Eastern man who spoke fluent English arrived at the property, no one was terribly surprised. He called himself Mohammed and explained that he was training a unit to learn the combat arts so they could go into Yemen and fight the government there.
The Guatemalans did not know much about Yemen, and they cared even less. The pay was good, the work would be easy, and the Middle Easterner promised that if this contract went well this could turn into a recurring gig.
The students arrived over a two-day period. Twenty-seven in all. The Guatemalans were surprised to see among the expected Middle Easterners, there were gringos, blacks, and other Latinos as well. They also had not expected women, yet four in the class were female. One was black, one was Hispanic, the other two were olive-complexioned women of Middle Eastern heritage.
Whatever, the Guatemalans decided. They didn’t care where the men and women came from. If some bruja mexicana or some gringo pendejo wanted to go get his or her ass shot off in the Middle East, that was their problem.