Two weeks into their planning sessions, Ghadab sensed that his team had become complacent, even lazy. Ghadab himself had done the hard work two years before, planting deep agents, arranging for young devotees to infiltrate college programs, getting everyone in place. There was much left to do — security routines to be investigated, money to be moved, sleeper cells to be reactivated — but his team here seemed nonchalant, unfocused. They argued among themselves over petty things. Worse, several were spending inordinate hours at the cafés in town. So far as he knew, none were violating the law — if he had even suspected any of drinking alcohol, punishment would have been swift and final. But they lacked the discipline a successful operation required.
And so he planned an exercise in a desert village a few miles south of Dar al’Abid as Sud. Perched on the lowest slope of the mountains, the handful of buildings were grouped around what in ancient times was probably a river, but now was just an indentation in the scrubland. Government troops had recently moved through the village, setting up outposts along the highway to the east, between the settlement and Palmyra. It was roughly eighty miles away from his bunker, if they could have traveled in a straight line.
That, of course, wasn’t possible.
His men assembled at one in the morning, woken personally by Ghadab.
“We are having an adventure,” he told the few who dared ask why they were being summoned.
They boarded four pickups commandeered from local citizens. Using Caliphate vehicles would have entailed a requisition and unnecessary questions and even possibly interference, and Ghadab had neither the time nor the inclination to deal with such trivialities. It was far easier to walk up to the owner in the market and tell him that the truck would be returned in a few days, with a full tank of gas as payment.
No one argued. He didn’t even have to show his gun, though one or two did glance at his knife — he’d bought a fine sheath for the khanjar and hung it from his belt.
They drove on the highway for an hour, following Ghadab, before he veered off five miles short of the government checkpoint. He drove another ten miles southwest over the desert, doing his best to avoid the worst of the dunes and pits as he followed his instincts and a GPS unit he’d bought at the bazaar. The dim light revealed a succession of landmarks he’d memorized the night before; finally, he came to a wide, flat plain with loose sand and stopped.
The rest of his team gathered in a semicircle around him.
“The village of Hum lies in that direction,” he told them as they got out of the trucks, “ten miles. It is filled with apostates and nonbelievers. They are Shia, and they welcomed the blasphemer’s army. We will show them what happens to such sinners. Here is a map of the place.”
Ghadab unfolded a paper image of the place from Google Earth that he had printed earlier. A pumping station sat at one end of the village; before the war it had supplied water for the modest farms on the southern end of town. “How do we punish these apostates? What are the steps?”
“We cut these power lines first,” said Idi the Sudanese. “We take over the police station and secure their weapons.”
“Strike the pumping station at the same moment,” said Ahmed. He was new to the team, a student from Egypt, but very promising: he had recruited two suicide bombers in Cairo before being called. “But we don’t have enough explosives.”
“This is a farming area, and there are not enough explosives?” prompted Ghadab.
The question sparked the group. They had been thinking in simple terms — cut power, blow up the obvious symbols of corruption. But now they began to think creatively, to see the possibilities, to appreciate the destruction they could inflict. He sat back quietly as they spoke back and forth, until at last they had an outline of a mission.
“I think it is an excellent plan,” he said. “But the proof is in the doing. So let it be done.”
39
Ten years before, T’aq Ur had been a small but prosperous village on the Euphrates, dominated by Kurds but very much a part of Syria. The people who lived there, Sunni Muslims mostly, grew a variety of vegetables in the river-irrigated fields. There were pomegranate trees, olive groves, apricots. The most prosperous had goats, primarily for their own or their neighbors’ tables. The meat was slaughtered by the local butcher in accordance with practices well over a thousand years old; the farming itself was only slightly more advanced. The tiny town was a place time had forgotten.
But the dictator had not. And in the early days of the revolution, he remembered that a politician who had been born there had once opposed him. The Syrian army shelled the town for a week before coming to pick through the remains.
Then came waves of rebels, some backed by Turkey, some part of ISIS. They took the village after two weeks of sieges. A counterattack by the Syrian government failed. The Russians came and bombed, ineffectively, since most of what was left by that time was rubble. A Syrian platoon backed by Iranian regulars managed to gain a foothold, only to be driven out by a Turkish-backed rebel group that numbered no more than two dozen men. The stones changed hands once or twice again, but by that time, the only inhabitants of T’aq Ur were mosquitoes. Even they soon quit the place — there wasn’t enough fresh blood to live on.
The Kurds arrived in January, setting up an outpost with American help. The troops moved on within days, pushing their front farther south. T’aq Ur was finally completely free — and completely empty.
The lack of people was exactly why Johansen had chosen it as his base of operations. They were a good distance from Palmyra — roughly a seventy-minute drive across the desert — but within range of the devices that would help find Ghadab. His teams could stage from here without fear of interference or being attacked by surprise. If they needed help, the Kurds were nearby.
His headquarters was in a bunker complex the Israelis claimed had been part of Syria’s clandestine nuclear program. There had been six buildings at one time; one was about the size of a small U.S. elementary school. This was now a pile of rubble; besides the bricks, it contained a number of unexploded artillery shells. The next largest building was a barracks designed to hold about a hundred soldiers. It, too, was wrecked, but it had a usable basement, and it was in the basement that Johansen set up shop.
They moved in at night. The basement was cleared easily enough, with the help of Peter and the two mechs programmed for lifting. While it was dusty and filled with spiders and even a few snakes, the walls and ceiling were sturdy, and there was plenty of room for sleeping bags. Partitions were stretched between the piers that held up the building.
They slept in the space closest to the stairs: if the roof collapsed, they’d have the best chance of getting out from there. The next night they cleared more of the building, reinforced the ceiling, then divided the area into living and working quarters.
Prep work nearly done, Johansen sent out patrols in pickups to get a feel for the area. Everyone wore nondescript fatigues; if anyone checked the labels, they’d find they came from China. As much gear as possible had been sourced from outside the U.S.; even the vehicles that had taken them there were Japanese.
Not that the charade would fool anyone.
The agency would use Massina’s newly minted public profile as an antiterror firebrand to imply he was behind it alclass="underline" a self-made billionaire unleashing a private army to revenge his city.
There were precedents, most notably the mission launched by Ross Perot to rescue his people kidnapped by Iran in the late ’70s. The media would have a field day drawing parallels between the two men.