“Excellent.”
“And you do have the man?”
Yousef knew exactly what Zulfiqar was talking about.
“Yes.”
“And the plans, you have the plans to Kamra?”
“I do.” He turned to Umarov again. “Give them to me.”
Umarov gave him a look. Yousef knew what he meant. The release of plans too early always risked the deadliest threat to an operation: a leak.
“Get them.”
Umarov reached into the truck again. He pulled out a manila envelope and handed it directly to Zulfiqar.
“Midnight in two days. The man in Kamra will be ready when I call. Not sooner, not later.”
“Brother, we will be ready.”
“I will be in the plar.” The cave was a protected site.
“Yes.” Zulfiqar put his hand up to his mouth. He had the habit of rubbing his lips when he was hesitating to say something.
“What is it, brother?”
“This man, is it wise?”
Yousef didn’t think anything was a secret in the mountains of the northwest frontier province, but he had made the point of only a very few knowing about the planned visit of the journalist from London.
“It is important, brother, that we earn more bags like this one.” Yousef poked the bag of money with his finger. “The journalist will help us do that. A movement must have a face. It must have an identity.”
“I understand.”
Yousef knew that Zulfiqar was lying. A man like Zulfiqar could not see beyond the limits of his tribe. He could never have envisioned a plan like Yousef’s, never could have raised the funds or created the cells that were needed to implement such a plan.
“I do need your help with security. I may need the TTP to be available in the next few days.”
“We will have a company of men within easy reach.”
“Brother, the next two days. We will be like clouds dropping much rain.” Yousef ’s quote of Muhammad from the Koran was more than just a metaphor.
“Yes.” Still no smile, but Zulfiqar had a spark in his eyes that Yousef recognized. The old man had become a believer in him.
The meeting ended, the vehicles leaving in two different directions, with Yousef ’s heading up the valley, to the west.
“Stop here.” Again, Yousef pointed to the side of the road, just short of the riverbed, at the mouth to the valley. “You know what you need to do with the other one.”
“Yes.”
The second bag of money was going to Peshawar. It was stuffed with another hundred thousand dollars. It was to be handed to just one person, a woman. She was the badly ill mother of a young man and a much younger daughter. Both the woman and her daughter had developed chills some months ago. They continued to lose weight. The daughter was only a child of twelve, already painfully thin. The mother and her daughter were infected with tubercle bacillus. It was as Yousef had promised that both the mother and daughter would have the money to move to London and receive the treatment needed. The bag also had identification cards and passports that would allow the two ill people to be treated as if they had lived their entire lives in the East End. With some luck, Yousef promised, the two would survive. In return for this gift, the woman’s son, a technician at Kamra, needed only to do one favor.
“I will walk the remainder of the way.”
“Here!” Umarov threw a water bag across the cab. Dehydration remained a constant threat, particularly at this altitude. The valley’s floor was well over ten thousand feet.
“Brother!” Yousef drank from the bag. It would be well below freezing soon. He wore an army coat layered over his salwar kameez, a pajama-like, thick cotton outfit.
“Keep it.”
Yousef slung the water bag over his shoulder, then the rifle.
The cave lay several miles up in the mountains. “I will see you in a day after you pick up our new friend.”
Yousef turned and headed to the northwest. He reveled in this opportunity to be alone. He would follow the riverbed for several miles and then cut up into the mountain ridge. As far as the eye could see, the landscape offered an endless stretch of frigid boulder-strewn rubble. In the cloudless sky, the white-capped peaks of the Himalayas could be seen well to the north. He followed the potholed, twisting, pencil-thin road toward the mountain range.
He also knew that he would be at his safest while he walked alone. The Americans would never take notice of a man walking alone toward the Afghan border region. The tribe of the valley knew who he was and that he must be protected. The man with two cell phones would be an easy target walking alone. A single bullet would prevent the birth of Yousef ’s new nation. He smiled. No one would notice. And no one would stop him.
CHAPTER 43
“The pond is over there.”
James Scott could barely hear what the crew chief was saying over the roar of the Pave Hawk helicopter’s turbine engine, but he could tell from the chief’s motion, pointing out the open door, what was being said.
“There’s the village and the pond is just there.” The chief was yelling the words. Scott leaned forward in the canvas seat. The harness tugged at his waist as he looked out over the snow-covered landscape. Property lines were marked in odd-shaped rectangles and squares of tree lines that surrounded the village. The air should have been chilling, but the jet engine warmed the blast coming through the open door. The helicopter tilted hard to the right, pulling Scott back into the seat, as he looked down directly to the ground below.
A blue pickup truck with a snow shovel on the front end was directly below the helicopter, pushing snow along streaks in front of a thick, rectangular bunker that was a part of a network of buildings. Each of the buildings were linked by a black-striped taxiway in a chain. The helicopter tilted again, sharply to the right, pushing Scott’s shoulder into the tubular frame of the seat.
“I’ve read about the pond,” Scott yelled back to the airman. “It’s the reason the Roman Legion was here.”
Lakenheath’s Pond existed thousands of years before the first Roman soldier set foot on the island, but the freshwater supported the establishment of the first garrison. Scott saw in his mind the encampment of the Legion in the clearing next to the pond, a perfect quadrangle, holding more than twenty thousand Romans. In the center of the encampment was the praetorian’s, or general’s, tent, the lines of the streets and tenting perfectly straight, like the geometry of the Coliseum. The small tent city was surrounded by a rampart, more than a dozen feet high, followed by a ditch twelve feet wide and twelve feet deep. The Roman measurements were exact. They had built the perfect killing machine.
But it was here in the center, the praetorian’s tent, that Caesar stayed during his visit to the frontier.
Here, in Lakenheath. Julius Caesar.
Julius Caesar had been a success because he became an emperor after being a great field general. The empire lasted a thousand years not because of emperors like Nero and Claudius, but because of the Legion. The Legion, under command of men like Agricola, refused defeat. An engine of warfare, the machine took forty years to march through this island, but eventually it crushed the tribes of Britain as it did with all of its enemies.
Almost every day, Scott found that some lesson from Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came to mind, often in a relevant way. He’d studied Gibbon at Eton and Oxford.
Scott glanced down at his Submariner Rolex. He twisted it the several hours to mark the time in western Pakistan.
Parker is well over the Mediterranean by now.