“Almost morning.” Naseer scowled. “The Americans have killed Koshen.”
“What?” He bolted upright. “How did this happen?” he demanded.
Naseer shrank back. “It says that Azim gave Koshen to the Americans. The Mujahideen attacked. There was a great battle and many were killed. The Americans got away but Koshen was killed, along with one of Azim’s men.”
He sagged against the bed in shock. “He was just a young boy.”
Nasser paused. “He died a martyr.”
“He was just a boy,” Abdullah repeated. So young!
“I am sorry. What should I do?”
He stared at the Naseer’s laptop resting on the floor. “Send this message. ‘We will avenge the boy’s death. He was martyred by this false Muslim, Azim. He will be executed for his actions.’ Send that message.”
Nasser typed the message and clicked the button to encrypt the data, then uploaded the picture to the website. “It has been sent.”
He placed his hands gently on Naseer’s shoulders and noticed his damp eyes. Naseer had liked Koshen, too. He shook his head, but he had to ask Nasser. “I must continue Jihad. I must go to America, but Azim must pay. Will you go back?”
Naseer’s eyes widened. “To Kandahar?”
“Yes,” he said. “You must lead the Mujahideen. You must execute Azim. His treachery must be punished. Koshen must be avenged. Will you do this for me?”
Nasser smiled proudly. “I will do this. For Koshen and for you.”
He managed a weak smile, even though his heart was broken over Koshen’s death. “You have been a faithful student. I know you will make Azim pay for his betrayal.”
“I will pray for you, Abdullah, that you may strike the Americans down and make them suffer for their affront to Allah.”
“The preparations are underway?”
“Yes. Mahbeer’s cousin will be waiting. I wish I could be with you when you strike the Americans.”
“It is Allah’s will,” Abdullah said. “Strike the false believer in Kandahar while I strike the Americans.” He grasped Naseer’s hand, clutching it tight. “For my wife. For Koshen.”
Eric was returning from Smith’s quarters when his cell phone buzzed, paging him to the War Room. He pounded through the brightly lit tunnels, making it in record time. The War Room was alive with activity. “What’s the situation?”
Clark greeted him and pointed to Karen. “We’ve got a hit. She’s working it now.”
Karen ran a hand through her short black hair. “It’s the website again. Do you understand steganography?”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “It’s hiding a message in another message.”
Karen nodded. “Exactly. It could be anything, like the hand signs you were taught to give if caught and taped by the enemy. I mean, there’s a whole history behind this stuff.”
She paused as Deion and Nancy entered the War Room. “We’ve been tracking Al Qaeda for years via steganography. Basically, when you encode an image in a jpeg you wind up with a bunch of ones and zeroes. You can swap out thousands of them in an image and the effects are unnoticeable to the human eye. But, if the receiver knows the pattern, they can take those values and extract the message. Google’s webbots crawl the Internet cataloging web sites for their search engine, and we get a copy of that data and run scrapes against it, looking for patterns. There are thousands of Jihadists web sites. The active ones have provided useful SIGINT, but the dormant ones are the ones I find interesting. After the FOB Wildcat bombing, I saw a stego’d message on what used to be a dormant site. Just a brief message indicating they had performed a successful operation, but after your mission, there was another message about an attack.” She pointed at Nancy and Deion. “That would be your trip to Afghanistan. It was filled with details about that boy’s death. Well, there was a new post talking about avenging the boy’s death. Here, let me pull it up.”
The screen displayed the message and his stomach sank. “You think this is Abdullah?”
“Could be him,” Karen said. “Could be his proxies.”
“Can you track the image?” Clark asked.
“Working on it. I’ve tracked the previous posts back to Kandahar. They’re routing the traffic through web anonymizers. But, after FOB Wildcat, I rooted a bunch of their anonymizers and now I’ve got my own back-door. From there I can track the IP back, hop to hop, until I find the source. I should know something in a few minutes.”
Deion turned to Eric with a raised eyebrow. “I’m glad she’s on our side.”
Eric grinned. “Better watch your porn surfing.”
“No porn surfing on base,” Karen said over her shoulder, her fingers typing furiously.
Eric watched as Karen did her magic, the map of IP addresses a foreign language to him, but soon she banged on her keyboard.
“We’ve got a winner!” Karen exclaimed. “It’s Europe. Registered to a German carrier. The range is blocked off for home use, in Landstuhl, Germany. Why does that sound familiar?”
“Ramstein Air Force Base,” Eric said. “That’s where the hospital is.”
“Oh yeah. Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Isn’t that where the Iraq and Afghanistan wounded go?” Karen asked.
Eric turned to Deion. “Get John. I want us wheels-up in thirty.”
Deion nodded. “You got it, boss.” Deion tore out of the room, brushing aside analysts as he went.
“I’ll have the jet loaded and ready,” Nancy said, her voice determined. “We’ll be there before lunch.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Gulfstream’s wheels woke John from his sleep, like the cries of the men and women in his dreams. He wiped the sweat from his brow with trembling hands, trying to put the dream behind him.
Eric, Deion, Nancy, Taylor Martin, and Roger Johnson sat at the table in the front section of the plane, deep in planning for the upcoming mission.
“Look,” Eric said, “I know we’ve been over this already, but I want it clear. No mistakes.” He pointed to an aerial photo of an apartment complex in the Landstuhl area. “John and Roger will go through the alley, then breach the door. Martin, you and Nancy come from the west, and Deion and I come from the east. I want no more than thirty seconds between breach and lockdown. Do we have the layout?”
John shook off the effect of the nap and joined the planning. “The front and side doors open to a living area and kitchen,” he said, pointing. “Bedroom and kitchen are on the first floor. Stairs are here,” he moved his finger, “and lead to the upstairs bedrooms here and here, bathroom here. Also, stairs to the basement, no windows.”
“Right,” Deion agreed. “No egress in the back. Just the windows there and there,” he pointed. “We go in standard close-quarter formation. Clear the first floor, then the upstairs, basement last.”
“Remember,” Eric said, “We need them alive.”
John noticed surreptitious glances from the rest of the team, and felt his face flush. “That’s not fair.”
“Just a gentle reminder,” Eric said with a grin.
“We’ve had surveillance on the building for the past couple hours,” Deion said. “Nobody’s gone in or out. It’s thin.”
Eric shrugged. “It’s all we have.”
The plane taxied off the runway and powered down its engines. Greg Clayberg, their pilot, opened the cockpit door. “Your contact is waiting. I’ll get the plane turned and refueled.”
John liked Greg, the man with the salt-and-pepper beard and hair. There was a twinkle in Greg’s eyes and he delighted in needling Nancy at every turn. John was surprised that Nancy allowed it. She didn’t seem to take shit from anyone, but somehow Greg came away unscathed.