Dead or Alive Read online

  “Six. Four gigs each. Plenty.”

  “Good. Multiple shots of everything, highest resolution. Get some extra lights on it, too, and drop something beside for scale.”

  “Reno’s got a tape measure.”

  “Good. Use it. Plenty of angles and close-ups—the more, the better.” That was the beauty of digital cameras—take as many as you want and delete the bad ones. In this case they’d leave the deleting to the intel folks. “And check every inch for markings.”

  Never could tell what was important. A lot would depend on the model’s scale, he suspected. If it was to scale they might be able to plug the measurements into a computer, do a little funky algebra or algorithms or whatever they used, and come up with a match somewhere. Who knew, maybe the papier-mâché stuff would turn out to be special or something, made only in some back-alley shop in Kandahar. Stranger shit had happened, and he wasn’t about to give the higher-ups anything to bitch about. They’d be angry enough that their quarry hadn’t been here, but that wasn’t Driscoll’s fault. Pre-mission intelligence, bad or good or otherwise, was beyond a soldier’s control. Still, the old saying in the military, “Shit runs downhill,” was as true as ever, and in this business there was always someone uphill from you, ready to give the shit ball a shove.

  “You got it, boss,” Tait said.

  “Frag it when you’re done. Might as well finish the job they should have done.”

  Tait trotted off.

  Driscoll turned his attention to the ammo box, picking it up and carrying it into the entrance tunnel. Inside was a stack of paper about three inches thick—some lined notebook paper covered in Arabic script, some random numbers and doodles—and a large two-sided foldout map. One side was labeled “Sheet Operational Navigation Chart, G-6, Defense Mapping Agency, 1982” and displayed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, while the other, held in place with masking tape, was a map of Peshawar torn from a Baedeker’s travel guide.

  4

  WELCOME TO AMERICAN AIRSPACE, gentlemen,” the copilot announced.

  They were about to overfly Montana, home of elk, big skies, and a whole lot of decommissioned ICBM bases with empty silos.

  They’d be burning fuel a lot faster down here, but the computer took notice of all that, and they had a much better reserve than what they’d had westbound over the Atlantic a few hours before—with a lot of usable fields down below to land on. The pilot turned on the heads-up display, which used low-light cameras to turn the darkness into green-and-white mono-color TV. Now it showed mountains to the west of their course track. The aircraft would automatically gain altitude to compensate, programmed as it was to maintain one thousand feet AGL—above ground level—and to do so with gentle angles, to keep his wealthy passengers happy and, he hoped, turn them into repeat customers.

  The aircraft eased up to a true altitude of 6,100 feet as they passed over the lizard-back spine of the Grand Teton Range. Somewhere down there was Yellowstone National Park. In daylight he could have seen it, but it was a cloudless and moonless night.

  The radar-sending systems showed they were “clear of conflict.” No other aircraft was close to their position or altitude. Mountain Home Air Force Base was a few hundred miles behind them, along with its complement of young piss-and-vinegar fighter pilots.

  “Pity we can’t steer the HUD off the nose. Might even see the buffalo on the infrared sensors,” he observed. “They are making a real comeback in the West, I’ve read.”

  “Along with the wolves,” the copilot responded. Nature was about balance, or so the Discovery Channel said. Not enough bison, the wolves die. Not enough wolves, the bison overproduce.

  Utah’s countryside started off mountainous but gradually settled down to rolling flatness. They again maneuvered east to avoid Salt Lake City, which had an international airport and, probably, a sufficiently powerful radar to get a skin-paint.

  This entire exercise would have been impossible thirty years earlier. They would have had to cross the Pinetree Line, one of the predecessors to America’s DEW—Distant Early Warning—Lines, and alert the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Well, given the current tensions between the United States and Russia, maybe the DEW and Pinetree would be recommissioned.

  The ride was smoother than he’d expected. Riding in daylight, in summer, over the desert, could be bumpy indeed, what with the irregular rising thermal currents. Except for a few automobile headlights, the land below might as well have been the sea, so empty and black it was.

  Thirty minutes to go. They were down to 9,000 pounds of fuel. The engines burned it a lot faster down here, just over 5,000 pounds per hour instead of the usual 3,400 or so.

  “Wake the passengers up?” the copilot asked.

  “Good idea.” The pilot lifted the microphone. “Attention. We expect to land in thirty minutes. Let us know if you have any special needs. Thank you,” he added. Thank you indeed for the money, and the interesting flight profile, he did not add.

  The pilot and copilot both wondered who the passengers were but asked no questions. Upholding customer anonymity was part of the job, and though what they were doing was technically illegal, probably, by American law, they weren’t American citizens. They were not carrying guns, drugs, or anything else illegal. In any case, they didn’t know their passenger from Adam, and his face was wrapped in bandages anyway.

  “Hundred miles, according to the computer. I hope the runway really is that long.”

  “Chart says it is. Two thousand six hundred meters. We’ll know soon enough.”

  In fact, the airstrip had been built in 1943, and was scarcely used since, built by an engineer battalion that had been trucked to Nevada and told to build an air base—as practice, really. All the fields looked the same, built from the same manual, like a triangle with one line segment longer than the other two. They were angling for runway two-seven, indicating a due-west approach run into the prevailing winds. It even had runway lights installed, but the cabling had long since degraded, as had the airport’s diesel generator. But as there was little in the way of snow and ice here to damage the concrete runways, they were as good as the day they’d cured out, twelve inches thick of rebarred concrete.

  “There.”

  “I see ’em.”

  They were, in fact, neon-green chemical lights being broken, shaken, and tossed onto the runway perimeter, and they blazed brightly on the low-light HUD display. Then even more as a truck’s headlights turned on. One such pair even drove down the northern border of the runway, as though to outline it for the approaching aircraft. Neither pilot nor copilot knew, but they assumed that one of the passengers had called ahead on a cell phone to wake someone up.

  “Okay, let’s shoot the approach,” the pilot-in-command ordered. He eased the throttles back and lowered flaps to chop air speed. Again the altitude sensor announced their height above the ground, lower . . . lower . . . lower . . . then the wheels kissed the ground. At the west end of the runway, a truck flipped its headlights from high beams to low, back and forth a few times, and the pilot let the aircraft coast all the way.

  “We have arrived at our destination,” the pilot said over the intercom as the aircraft came to a slow and gentle halt. He took off his headset and stood to move aft. He opened the left-side door and lowered the stairs, then turned to look at his charter party, most of whom were up and moving forward.

  “Welcome to American soil,” he said.

  “It was a long flight, but a good one even so,” the chief of the group said. “Thank you. Your fee is already on deposit.”

  The pilot nodded his thanks. “If you need us again, please let me know.”

  “Yes, we will do that. In two or three weeks, perhaps.”

  Neither his voice nor his face gave much away, though now his face was somewhat obscured by bandages. Maybe he was just here to sit through the recovery period for whatever surgery he’d just had. Car accident was the pilot’s best guess. At least it was a healthy
climate.

  “I trust you noticed the fuel truck. They will make sure you are topped off. You leave for Hawaii when?”

  “As soon as we’re fueled,” the pilot answered. Four, five hours. He’d do autopilot for most of it, after clearing the California coast.

  Another passenger came forward, then turned to go aft. “One moment,” he said, entering the lavatory and closing the door behind him. There was another door aft of the lavatory. It led into the luggage compartment. There he’d left a duffel bag. He pulled down the zipper and flipped the cover open. Here he activated an electronic timer. He figured two and a half hours would be more than sufficient, then rezipped the closure and came forward. “Forgive me,” he said, heading forward and left for the ten-step stairs. “And thank you.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” the pilot said. “Enjoy your stay.”

  The copilot was already out, supervising the fueling operation. The last passenger followed his boss to the stretch limo that waited on the concrete, got in, and the car drove off. Fueling took five minutes. The pilot wondered how they’d managed to get what looked like an official fuel truck, but it drove off soon thereafter, and the flight crew made their way back to the cockpit and went through their start-up procedures.

  After a total of thirty-three minutes on the ground, the Falcon taxied back east to the far end of the runway, and the flight crew advanced the throttles to takeoff power and raced back west to rotate and climb back into the sky for the third flight of what was already a long day. Fifty minutes later, and four thousand pounds lighter in fuel, they transited the California coast just over Ventura and were “feet wet” over the Pacific Ocean, cruising at Mach 0.83 at an altitude of forty-one thousand feet. Their primary transponder was switched on, this one with the aircraft’s “official” registration information. The fact that it had just appeared on San Francisco Center’s master scopes was not a matter of concern for anyone, since flight plans were neither computerized nor really organized in any systematic way. So long as the aircraft did nothing contrary to the rules, it attracted no attention. It was inbound to Honolulu, two thousand miles away, for an estimated flight time of four hours and fifty-four minutes. The home stretch.

  Pilot and copilot relaxed, the aircraft on autopilot and all the gauges within norms. The pilot lit another cigarette as he departed the U.S. coast at 510 miles per hour true ground speed.

  He didn’t know that in the aft luggage compartment was a bomb made of almost nine pounds—four kilograms—of PETN and RDX plastic explosive—commonly referred to as Semtex—working off an electronic timer. They’d let the passengers and the welcoming party handle such luggage as there had been. Just as the aircraft passed six hundred miles off the California coast, the timer went to zero.

  The explosion was immediate and catastrophic. It blew the tail and both engines off the airframe. The main fuel lines, which ran just under the deck, were vented to the sky, and the fuel that was being pumped created a meteor-like trail in the sky. It might have been seen by any aircraft trailing the Falcon, but there were none at this time of night, and the twin gouts of yellow flame flickered out and died in a few seconds.

  Forward, pilot and copilot could not have known what had happened, just a sudden noise, a firewall full of flashing emergency lights and alarms, and an aircraft that did not answer to the controls. Aviators are trained to deal with emergencies. And it took five or ten seconds before they realized they were doomed. Without a tail plane, the Dassault could not be controlled; the physics were undeniable. The craft started spiraling downward to an ink-black sea. Both aviators tried to work the controls, hoping against hope. A lifetime of training and endless hours on computerized flight simulators had ingrained in them what to do when their airplane didn’t respond to commands. They tried everything they knew, but the nose didn’t come up. They didn’t really have time to notice that the attempts at adjusting engine power did nothing at all. Locked in their seats by four-point safety belts, they couldn’t look back into the passenger cabin, and both were soon anoxic with the loss of cabin pressure that had ruptured the door aft. Their minds never had a chance to catch up.

  In all, it took just over a minute. The nose went up and down, left and right, of its own accord and at the mercy of the air currents until they smashed into the sea at a speed of 240 knots, which was instantly fatal. By that time their charter party was at its final destination, and hardly thinking about them at all.

  5

  AS IF A SIGN FROM ALLAH that his course was true and right, Dirar al-Kariim heard the Adhan, the call to prayer, echo over Tripoli’s rooftops and down to where he sat in the café, drinking tea. The timing was no coincidence, he knew. So focused had he been on playing and replaying the operation in his mind, he’d failed to see the sun dipping toward the horizon. No matter. Certainly Allah would forgive him the oversight—especially if he succeeded in his task—and it was his, wasn’t it, for better or worse? That his superiors had failed to see the value of the mission was an unfortunate waste, but Dirar was unconcerned. Initiative, as long as it was in keeping with Allah’s will and Islam’s laws, was a blessing, and surely his superiors would see that once the mission was complete. Whether he would still be alive to accept their praise was a matter for Allah to decide, but his reward was assured, in this life or the next. Dirar took comfort in the thought and used it to calm the churning in his belly.

  Up until recently his role in the jihad had been largely supportive, providing transportation and information, offering his home to fellow soldiers, and occasionally aiding in reconnaissance and intelligence collection. He had handled weapons, of course, but to his great shame, he had never wielded one against an enemy. That would soon change—before the next dawn, in fact. Still, just as he’d been taught at the training camp outside Fuqha, proficiency in weapons and their use was only a small part of an operation. In that at least the American military was correct. Most fights are won and lost before the soldiers even take to the battlefield. Plan, replan, then triple-check your plans. Mistakes are born of poor preparation.

  His target of choice had proven unfeasible, not only given the limited number of soldiers under his command but also because of the target’s location. The hotel was one of the newest in Tripoli, with enough exits and floors and unknown entry points that it would take two dozen or more men to secure it, and that didn’t even take into account the on-site security force, all former soldiers and police officers armed with advanced weapons and backed up by a surveillance system second-to-none. Given time and enough resources, Dirar was confident he could make such a mission work, but he had neither at his disposal. Not yet, at least. Next time, perhaps.

  Instead he had chosen a secondary target, one that had already been proposed by another cell—the Benghazi group, Dirar suspected—but was subsequently rejected by the leadership. No reason had been given, nor an alternative suggested, and like many of his compatriots, Dirar was tired of waiting while the West continued its crusade unchecked. Unsurprisingly, he’d had little trouble finding other cell members who felt the same, though the recruitment had been a hazardous affair, Dirar never knowing whether word of his plan had found its way to unwelcome ears, both from within and without the organization. Over the past year Qaddafi’s Haiat amn al Jamahiriyya had successfully infiltrated a number of cells, one of which had been led by a childhood friend of Dirar’s. Those nine men, good soldiers and true believers each, had disappeared into the Bab al-Azizia barracks and never come out—not alive, at least.

  The secondary target was softer to be sure, and only peripherally responsible for the act it would soon be punished for, but if he succeeded, Dirar was confident the message would be clear: Allah’s soldiers had long memories and even longer knives. Kill one of ours and we kill a hundred of yours. He doubted he would reach a hundred here, but no matter.

  Along with several of the café’s other patrons, Dirar stood up and walked to a shelf built into the café’s wall and took down a rolled sajada. As was req
uired, the prayer rug was clean and free of debris. He returned to his table and unrolled the rug on the brick patio, taking care to ensure that the top was pointed in the direction of the Qibla, Mecca, then stood erect, hands at his sides, and began the salaat, starting with a whispered Iqama, the private call to prayer. He immediately felt a wave of peace wash through his mind as he proceeded through the remaining seven steps of the salaat, ending with the salawat.

  O Allah, bless our Muhammad

  and his people;

  Surely you are the Glorious.

  O Allah, be gracious unto Muhammad

  and the people of Muhammad;

  As you were merciful unto Abraham

  and the people of Abraham.

  Surely you are the Eternal, the Glorious. . . .

  Dirar finished with a lingering glance over each shoulder—acknowledging the angels that recorded each believer’s good deeds as well as his wrongful deeds—then cupped his hands at his chest and wiped his face with his palms.

  He opened his eyes and drew in a deep breath. In His wisdom, Allah had seen fit to require believers to perform the salaat at least five times per day, before dawn, at noon, at mid-afternoon, at sunset, and in the evening. As did most Muslims, Dirar found the frequent rituals were as much a personal recentering as they were a tribute to Allah’s power and grace. He’d never spoken of this feeling to others, afraid it was blasphemous, but in his heart he doubted Allah condemned him for it.

  He checked his watch. Time to go.

  The only question that remained now was whether he would be alive to perform the day’s final salaat. That was in Allah’s hands now.