The first two teams would head to Manhattan. The third team would head to Boston. Daoud himself would lead the fourth team to Chicago. There were, of course, a hundred ways their mission could fail. He knew that better than any of these men, and he was sure his plan had taken all of those ways into account.
Backup teams — men he'd never seen before, never wanted to see or know — would move in through Seattle, others through Tijuana, others through Miami. Some were traveling in groups. Others were traveling alone. Some would head to Las Vegas, some to Phoenix. Some would descend upon Chicago, others on Des Moines. He had a team headed for Montgomery, Alabama. Another was tasked for Jacksonville, Florida, while another was headed for Palm Beach.
What made his plan so brilliant, thought Daoud, was its inherent flexibility. Each individual was responsible for his or her own targets — malls, restaurants, movie theaters, supermarkets, and the like. They weren't required to tell him, or even their fellow cell members, exactly where they were headed, unless they wanted to work together to maximize their destructive impact. They weren't even required to make a final decision on their target package until they got into their assigned city and got the lay of the land.
It wouldn't be difficult to find a highly populated and highly vulnerable strike point. Beyond obvious points of entry, U.S. homeland security was a joke. Thousands of miles of borders were Swiss cheese, and once inside the country most sites that attracted crowds — aside from government buildings and major sporting events — had minimal if any security. Why would they?
Before September 11, 2001, commercial airport security throughout the United States was lax because Americans had never experienced an Islamic kamikaze. They couldn't envision the magnitude of destruction inflicted upon them by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
Before November 24, 2010—just last month—private aviation security in the United States was effectively nonexistent. No one getting on a private plane was subject to metal detectors or photo ID checks or bomb-sniffing dogs or security procedures of any kind. Why? Because Americans had never really taken seriously the prospects of a private business jet being hijacked and used on a kamikaze mission. Then Saddam Hussein commenced Op eration Last Jihad, sent fedayeen trained by Daoud Juma to attack the pres idential motorcade outside of Denver International Airport using a Gulfstream IV, and the world had changed forever.
Now it would change again.
Americans had never experienced a wave of suicide bombings and sniper attacks on the order Daoud's Palestinian brethren were inflicting upon the Israelis. Because they'd never seen it happen, they never really believed that it could happen. But they would soon learn. Now Daoud would teach the Great Satan a lesson it would never forget. His men had full authority to switch cities if necessary to maintain operational security. No one but he knew precisely how many fedayeen members were deployed to the United States, and even he would have no idea how many actually got into the country and avoided detection and arrest. The only thing each cell member was encouraged to do, if at all possible, was strike on the same day, or more precisely, the same night.
New Year's Eve.
Just four nights away.
Yuri Gogolov didn't like what he was seeing.
Not all of it.
True, the gun battles in the West Bank and Gaza were going better than he could have expected. Every television network in the world — except per haps state television in North Korea and Cuba — was showing the carnage nonstop, and there was no question the attacks had caught Washington com pletely by surprise. Moreover, a new scrap of intelligence had just come in from one of Al-Nakbah's informants in Gaza. The source hadn't ever given them anything of particular value in the past, but the initial reports, though sketchy and unconfirmed, were tantalizing, to say the least.
The question was: Were the reports true? Could they actually have stumbled onto the safe house where this Bennett and his team were hiding? It seemed unlikely, but Jibril had convinced him that it wasn't a possibility they could afford to ignore. Not with the stakes so high and the game so hot. Who knew? Maybe they'd get lucky.
That said, however, President MacPherson's speech had been a serious surprise. Gogolov could only admit that to himself, of course. But it was true, and part of being a great chess player meant accepting the state of play as it actually was, not wishing for something that wasn't. The truth was the grand master had been caught off guard. The Israelis were not on the move. IDF forces were not battling Palestinian forces. Palestinian casualties at the hands of the Jews were not occurring at all, much less mounting rapidly.
Instead, the American's speech was winning high marks in every European capital, including Paris and Moscow. The feckless, spineless Mubarak — the faux Pharaoh of Cairo — was actually claiming credit on Radio Monte Carlo and the BBC. It was disgusting, thought Gogolov. Mubarak was telling the world he had personally intervened, demanding that President MacPherson take a hard line toward Doron and keep the Israelis out of the Palestinian territories. And Mubarak was getting away with it.
All that would have been bad enough. But the problem went deeper than that. Something was rumbling on the "Arab Street."
A new Jerusalem Post story quoted Amin Makboul, a senior Fatah official in the West Bank as saying, "The Arab regimes have no credibility. In order to face external challenges, the Arab leaders should give their people freedom and democracy." Another top Fatah activist, Taisir Nasrallah, told the Post: "The entire Arab order is in urgent need of reconstruction. What happened in Baghdad proves that the Arab order is dying." Muawiyah al-Masri, a Palestinian legislator, added: "What is needed now is the democratization of the Arab world according to the wishes and aspirations of the Arab masses, and not as a result of American pressure."
Such thinking was heresy, but it was bubbling up everywhere. "It is not Saddam Hussein who fell. What collapsed are the big lies that accompanied him, praised him, and glorified him," declared an editorial in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. "In this war [against the Americans], the Arabs were divided into two groups. One claimed that this is a war of survival, a war for honor, a war against the American conspiracy. Another group — silent either because they are in exile abroad or oppressed within Iraq — knew that this was a war of liberation, a war to rid them of a corrupt, murderous regime which should go out as it came in. It is an historical event for the regime, for which there is no precedent. All the past wars were wars with Israel or wars of regimes. But this one is the first of its kind. It is a war against the evil Arab situation."
Not that Yuri Gogolov cared about the "Arab situation," evil or otherwise, He wasn't an Arab. He was a pure-blooded Russian — an ultranationalist, to be more precise, though some called him a fascist. He was proud of who he was and what he believed. He had no love for Saddam Hussein or his regime. It was, after all, he and Mohammed Jibril who sold Saddam the tactical nuclear weapons they'd stolen from Russian stockpiles. It was he and Jibril who persuaded Saddam to launch Operation Last Jihad against NATO and the Israelis. It was he and Jibril who, at the last moment — through Stuart Iverson and several other intermediaries — had tipped off the Americans and the Israelis, triggering a war that left Iraq smoldering. And their plan had worked flawlessly.