Alex Berenson - The Secret Soldier

“Ellis. We can’t start randomly kicking in doors. If that’s all you’ve got, you better call the FBI.”

“Mecca’s out for the FBI. Unless somebody repeals the Quran.”

“The muk, then.”

“Bad idea for lots of reasons. Including the fact that we’d have to tell them about forty-two Aziz.”

“So it’s just us?”

“It’s just you. But I have good news, too. Fresh overheads. You have Internet access?”

“No.”

“Get someplace that does.”

“Ellis. The curfew starts in ten minutes. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to town before they close the city. The muk are looking for us. Pretty soon they’re gonna have the names on our identity cards. We don’t have time to sit back, boot up, check Gmail—”

“Then I’ll walk you through them.”

“You want to describe satellite shots to me over the phone?”

“Unless you have a better idea.”

The Jeep slowed. Wells looked up to see another roadblock, this one on the edge of the city. “I have no ideas at all.” He hung up, stuffed the phone under the seat.

THEY CLEARED THE ROADBLOCK, drove east on the Umm al Qura, toward the skyscraper that loomed over the Grand Mosque and the rest of the city. Like Jeddah, Mecca felt besieged, its streets empty, helicopters sweeping downtown and the ridges of the hills to the north and south.

“What now?” Gaffan said.

“Find this street, Shahab, and get deep into the neighborhood. Past the hot block. Find some place where we can pull over and I can talk to Shafer without getting us arrested.”

The streets in Mecca were better marked than those in the Jeddah slums. At 10:59 p.m., Gaffan turned into an empty lot and nosed the Jeep behind a dumpster. If the rest of the neighborhood was any guide, the lot would soon be home to yet another giant concrete mansion. They were two blocks from the hot zone the National Security Agency had found. If they stayed here too long, someone would call the police, but for now the helicopters were closer to downtown and most of the police were at roadblocks rather than on patrol. They had a few minutes. Wells called Shafer.

“You’re there?”

“Yes. I don’t see how this can work, but talk.”

“First, make sure we’re talking about the same place. Four blocks in, at the corner, there’s a three-story house that reaches almost to the edge of the lot, with a green minibus parked in front—”

“Yes.” They’d driven past that house maybe a minute before. Sitting in an office in Virginia, six thousand miles from these streets, Shafer could see over walls and into backyards invisible to Wells. The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had said it best: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

For fifteen minutes, Shafer described cars, yards, fences, garages, trying to find the clue that Wells needed. “Next”—Wells would say when Shafer had exhausted a property’s possibilities. “Next—”

And then Shafer said it.

“This one’s not on Shahab. Half a block down, looks like new construction, a garage behind it. Parked in front of the garage, I see a motorbike, small, and what looks like an ambulance—”

“Say again, Ellis.” Wells thought of the paramedic case he’d seen at 42 Aziz.

“In back. There’s a vehicle, maybe five years old, you know, a cargo van, white, red stripes and the red crescent logo on the side and brackets for a light bar on top, but I don’t actually see the light bar. Smaller than an American version, but an ambulance is pretty obvious, right?”

“Does it have a name, a hospital, anything like that?”

“I don’t see one.”

“What else?”

“The wall on this one is maybe eight feet, a little higher than the neighbors, nothing special. Nobody outside, nobody on the roof.”

“Any pipes coming off the house or the garage, any signs of ventilation?”

A pause. “Could be a vent off the left side of the garage. I can’t tell for sure.”

“Ways in and out?”

“Nothing obvious. It’s a fortress. The front gate’s solid, and the top of the walls is studded with glass. You can’t see it from the street, but it’s there. There’s no alley in back. You think this is it, John?”

“It’s our best shot.” By “best,” Wells meant only.

“’Cause it’s gonna be tough. Too bad that ambulance isn’t running. You could call nine-one-one, get them out of the house.”

Nine-one-one. Get them out. The words triggered an idea. “Maybe we can.”

WELLS HUNG UP, TOLD Gaffan about the ambulance.

“You know, it’s probably coincidence.”

“What if I can prove it’s not?” Wells explained his plan.

“That’s the best idea anybody’s had since this whole thing started.”

So Wells reached down for the cell phone he’d taken from Usman.

CUTTING OFF KURLAND’S HAND HAD TAKEN LESS THAN A MINUTE. After hitting bone twice, Bakr found the groove of Kurland’s wrist and pressed the saw forward. Kurland tore at the vises, but their grip held him tight. He screamed, but Bakr couldn’t hear him over the shriek of the blade. After the first surge of blood coated the floor, Bakr was surprised how slowly it came, thin, unsteady dribbles.

When the operation — as Bakr thought of it — was done, Bakr picked Kurland’s hand off the floor and stuffed it into a plastic bag. He wanted it for a keepsake, if nothing more. He wrapped Kurland’s stump in cotton gauze and strapped it to Kurland’s chest. Then he tugged Kurland’s mouth open and poured a half-dozen Cipro pills down his throat. Bakr didn’t know if Cipro would help, but he didn’t much care. Kurland had only two or at most three more days to live, anyway. Probably for the best. His eyes were dead already.

Before Bakr left the cell, he gave Kurland another hit of morphine to calm him. Still, Bakr had to be careful. Between the shock and the pain, too much morphine might send Kurland over. Bakr intended a messier and more public death for Kurland, an on-camera beheading. When he was done, Bakr would tell America and the world how the Saudi government had supported him. He’d have dates and bank accounts, evidence that the United States couldn’t ignore. He imagined the response in Washington. The Americans had already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Now they would do the same to Saudi Arabia. In turn, the Muslim world would rise against them. And Bakr would lead the battle. This was his destiny, the reason Allah had saved him that day on the dune.

AFTER WATCHING THE DIGITAL video of the amputation on his laptop, Bakr decided he needed to make two versions of his propaganda tape. The raw footage was too graphic. Even his stomach turned as he watched Kurland’s hand hanging half off the stepladder with the saw digging in. He wanted to enrage the Americans, not sicken them. He would post the uncut video only to a few jihadi websites.

With the help of Abdul, his translator, Bakr recut the video to focus on the minutes before and after the cutting. He included a glimpse of Kurland’s face and a longer cut to the gauze-covered stump to prove the tape was real. At the end of the video, he made an explicit threat to execute Kurland in twenty-four hours if his demands weren’t met — and explained that the Saudi government had sponsored him, with the details to be revealed after Kurland’s death.

Bakr planned to get this video to the world’s news channels the same way he had delivered the first tape. Abdul would drive a freshly burned DVD to Hassan’s safe house in Jeddah. From there, Hassan would copy it and upload it to a site run by a Finnish company that specialized in anonymous Internet hosting. They’d used a Russian company for the first video. Then they’d call Al Jazeera and CNN and give them a link to download the video. Bakr knew that the Americans had amazing abilities to monitor the Internet. He wanted to be sure that they couldn’t track these transfers anywhere near him.