Charles Z. David
The Dreadful Menace: Nuclear terror may strike anywhere at anytime
This book is a work of fiction and all its characters and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, or to real events, is purely coincidental. Likewise, any depiction of Israeli governmental personnel or agencies is solely the product of the author's imagination.
THE DREADFUL MENACE
Menace — a threat or danger that causes intimidation (Wikipedia).
Prologue
It was close to midnight and the streets outside the historic medieval district of Tours, le Vieux, were almost deserted. Two men silently made their way toward the famous cathedral. Both wanted to carry out a dreadful act, for opposing reasons. Their pathways to the impressive Gothic cathedral were diagonally different. Each carried a backpack, and by the looks of it, both backpacks were quite heavy.
One man slowly limped along Rue Lavoisier, taking 10 minutes to cover the short distance from Chateau de Tours. The limp was due to an injury he had received fighting Islamic Jihadist rebels with the French special forces in Chad. His name was Guillam St. Pierre, but he was completely ignorant of his British namesake, Peter Guillam, who was a fictitious character in several of John Le Carre's espionage novels. The French Guillam was an unhappy man. His wife had left him because of his excessive drinking, that had taken a turn for the worse after the last elections. He had hoped that the Front National, the right-wing party he wholeheartedly supported, would win the second round of the Presidential elections, and was deeply disappointed when it didn't. He strongly believed that the waves of Islamic refugees threatened the French traditional way of life. He anticipated that the predictions of Michel Houellebecq's dystopic novel, 'Submission', would open people's eyes to see that France was already in the process of becoming an Islamic stronghold in Europe. He was now on a self-imposed mission that was meant to force the true French people to rise and reverse the trend. A provocative act, so extreme, so monstrous, so atrocious, he hoped would serve as a wake-up call. He had carefully considered his target. The construction of the Saint Gatien's Cathedral began in the 12th Century and took several hundred years to complete. It was a landmark and the biggest tourist attraction of the town that had a symbolic importance. The Battle of Tours (also often referred to as the Battle of Poitiers) on October 10th, 732 AD, was where Charles Martel, with his alliance of Frankish and Burgundian troops, won a crucial victory over the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate. This stopped the Islamic encroachment on Europe, although it took a few more decades until they were driven south of the Pyrenees, out of present-day France.
The other man approached the cathedral from the west, along Rue des Halles and Rue de la Scellerie. His pace was fast — he didn't want to linger on the streets more than necessary. He, too, thought of the Battle of Tours as a turning point in the history of Europe, and of the world. Had Abdul Rahman Al-Ghafigi defeated Charles Martel on the battlefield, there would have been no organized forces who could have stopped the expansion of the Caliphate. He fantasized that the Scandinavian pagans would have been converted to Islam rather than to Christianity, and then perhaps America would have been discovered by European Muslims, sailing out of Scandinavia. In his imagination, the Muslim Governor of the United States would have been appointed by the Caliph in Bagdad and not democratically elected by the people. As he approached the cathedral's impressive portal he focused on the task on hand — planting the backpack where it would have the most psychological effect, without causing any loss of life. The name in his Canadian passport was Jean Devantier, but he was also known as Le Docteur, Albert Anwar Pousin or Professor Jacque Deleau. He had selected the Huguenot surname, Devantier, in his forged passport as a small act of defiance against the Catholics who were still the majority of the French population.
The two men had similar but divergent objectives. Jean Devantier wanted to demonstrate that NEMESIS had not been eliminated, despite the setbacks it had suffered in Europe and the United States. The acronym stood for Nationwide Emirate in the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, and the Sharia. The main objective of this extremist Islamic terror organization — it could no longer be considered as a real movement because it only had a handful of active supporters — was to revive the dream of the Islamic Caliphate and make people live according to the laws of Islam, the Sharia. For this purpose, a symbolic act, like blowing up the ancient portal of the Saint Gatien's Cathedral would suffice, or at least serve as the first step in the 21st Century march of Islam to dominate Europe.
On the other hand, Guillam St. Pierre wanted his act to cause nationwide furor in France and resound among all Christians, Catholics and Protestants alike, globally. He wanted to destroy the cathedral, turn it into rubble, not just damage it. He had studied the architectural plans and had surmised that blasting the buttresses on the north-side that supported the cathedral's north walls would topple it down. The public outcry would evoke a wave of anti-Islamic sentiment and legislation and eventually lead to the expulsion of Muslims from France. Of course, the plot's weak point was that this attack had to be attributed to Muslim Jihadists, and that the evidence for their responsibility had to be irrefutable.
This part of the plan involved the other three members of his small clandestine cell. The brute force was provided by Jean-Michel, an ex-convict and former heavyweight boxer. The man's weight was well above 100 kg, so that the sum of his weight and IQ was slightly below an aggregate score of 200. The same was true for Jean-Claude — the brains behind the operation. He weighed less than 60 kg and looked exactly like the brilliant nerd he was. With little or no social skills — he spent 20 hours a day on his computer, surfing websites that made-up conspiracy theories or recycled them. His favorite story was that the Arabs were aliens sent to destroy the planet and eradicate the Christians. The third member of the group was a blonde girl, Adalie, who at the age of 12, ran away from the orphanage where she had been left as baby. After spending time in the back-alleys of Tours, Adalie had become a sex-worker, a euphemism for a prostitute, and used the money she earned to support her drug-addiction. Guillam had found her after she had been beaten up by her pimp, a shady gentleman known only as scar-face Mohammad, and left to die in a dark alley. Guillam took care of her and convinced her that Muslims were responsible for her problems, and that he would help her take revenge.
Her task was to strike up a conversation with a Moroccan Muslim and seduce him, and then to seduce him to accompany her to her apartment. Jean-Michel and Jean-Claude would be waiting there. The former boxer would overpower the innocent victim and the nerd would inject him with a tranquilizer that would knock him out instantly. Then they would bring the man to the cathedral and wait for Guillam behind the buttresses. The plan was to set off the explosives and have the poor man blown to bits, making it look like an Islamic terrorist act that had gone wrong. Guillam liked the plan. It was simple and would place the blame on the Moroccan man.
Guillam whistled quietly as he approached the cathedral — this was the agreed upon signal. It was barely audible but attracted the attention of Jean-Michel and Adalie, who rose from their hiding place behind the fence that separated the cathedral from the street. It was also heard by Jean Devantier as he reached the square in front of the main portal, that was appropriately, but unimaginatively, named Place de la Cathedrale. Devantier stopped dead in his tracks, took cover behind a parked car, and watched. The lone man limped slowly toward his two comrades and there was a short exchange of indistinct words, but he gathered from the tone that the new arrival was pleased. The man crossed the fence and took the backpack that he had been carrying off his shoulders and handed it to the large man who had been waiting behind the fence. They disappeared from Devantier's sight, but from the sounds of what they were doing he gathered that they were up to something that involved physical exertion. A moment later the three figures crossed over the fence and headed north at a fast pace and disappeared down Rue Lavoisier.