Al agreed, but reminded me, “We don’t assassinate traitors. We put them on trial. Bottom line, Mom and Dad may get Junior removed from the CIA terrorist kill list.”
I didn’t reply, but I wondered now what the goal of the mission was. It’s a lot easier to whack someone than it is to capture them and return them to U.S. soil. Therefore, someone-like the CIA-had perhaps decided that Bulus ibn al-Darwish needed to be killed quickly, before some Federal judge got him removed from the kill list. After The Panther was dead, the lawsuit became moot. Strange war. I mean, judges, lawsuits, and all that.
Al advised me, “You didn’t hear any of this from me.” He stood, we shook, and he said, “Good luck.”
“Thanks. See you next year.”
“Maybe sooner.”
I found Kate strolling around, saying a few good-byes to colleagues, but I hate long and repetitious good-byes, and I got us out of there in five minutes.
We began the six-mile walk back to our apartment-her idea, not mine-and we took in the sights and sounds of New York City, my hometown. Could be the last time, but with luck, we’d be back.
I thought about telling Kate of my conversation with Al Rasul, and how I’d just discovered the real reason I was being sent to Yemen. Bait. But… well, did she have a need to know that? Actually, yes. But she wanted to think that her pal Tom chose us for this mission because we were the best of the best. And we were. So Tom only half lied to us.
Also, Tom knew I wouldn’t go alone, so he told the bosses in Washington that they had to include Kate, who he knew would want to go. Plus, Kate had worked the Asad Khalil case with me, so for all I or Washington knew, Kate was also on The Panther’s menu.
A sane man would have pulled the plug on this. But… did it make any real difference? If Tom had told us we were bait, would we have said no? And if I confronted Tom with this, he’d say, as he always did, “I didn’t know that. Nobody told me that. Where did you hear that?”
In any case, I now understood what had happened behind the scenes. Actually, I always understood.
We spent our last afternoon in our apartment, taking care of some final details and calling our parents. Hers were in Minnesota, as I said, and mine were retired in Florida. Thank God none of them would visit us in Yemen. The place sucked enough.
I’d already convinced my parents that Yemen was the Switzerland of the Mideast, so they weren’t too concerned, though my mother warned me about getting too much sun. “You know how you burn, John.”
Kate’s parents were a little more hip to the situation, and they expressed a mixture of pride and concern for their little girl. And some advice for me. “Take care of our daughter.”
How about me? Maybe they were in on this with Tom.
Funny, though, that when all is said and done, the last thing you do is call Mom and Dad. I wondered if The Panther ever called home.
At 5 P.M., we phoned Alfred, our doorman, and told him we needed a porter with a luggage cart and a taxi to JFK.
As the porter was loading our luggage into the taxi, Alfred, who knew what we did for a living, and knew we were going to someplace in Sandland, said to us, “Thank you for your service to our country.”
Kate and I shook hands with Alfred, then got into the taxi. Kate, I saw, was wiping a tear from her eye.
I took her hand and squeezed it.
At least, I thought, I was going into the jaws of the beast armed, finally, with the truth, as revealed by Al Rasul. The truth is good, except when it’s bad.
And there was another truth that had occurred to me-another reason we were being asked to go to Yemen, and it also had to do with the past-but not The Lion-something else that happened years ago, that involved Kate and the CIA.
I put that thought in the back of my mind, but not too far back. The answers to Why me, why Kate, and why Yemen, were in Yemen.
PART III
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bulus ibn al-Darwish, al-Numair, The Panther, wearing the white robes and shiwal of a Bedouin, stood before a gathering of his fighters; forty-two jihadists, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and shoulder-fired rocket launchers.
It was past the midnight hour, but he could see his men sitting cross-legged in the bright light of a waxing half moon, and he could see, too, the flat, desolate landscape of rock and powdery soil, stretching to the star-filled horizon.
The Panther said to his men in a loud, clear voice, “This night, you will achieve a great victory for Islam!”
The men cheered and raised their rifles in the air.
“You will kill the infidel and cleanse the sacred soil of Islam with their blood!”
Another cheer.
The Panther looked out at his soldiers. They were mostly new recruits, hastily trained in the mountain camp. But among them were four hardened jihadists from Afghanistan, and two officers of the defeated Army of Iraq.
These two former officers had met the Americans in battle and had fled their homeland after the defeat, and they were now here in Yemen to avenge that humiliation. What they lacked in the spirit of holy war, they more than compensated for in hate.
One of the officers, Behaddin Zuhair, a former captain of the elite Iraqi Guard, would lead the attack on the American-owned Hunt Oil installation. The other Iraqi, Sayid al-Rashid, would be his second in command.
The Panther had great faith in these combat-proven soldiers, and he knew they would give courage to the young recruits. With these two Iraqi officers, and with the four battle-hardened jihadists from Afghanistan within the ranks, The Panther saw no reason to lead this attack against the American oil facility himself.
The Panther reminded his men, “The security forces of this foreign compound are all paid mercenaries-men who have no loyalty to the Americans, only to the American dollar. They will surrender and beg for mercy, or they will run-or they will die at your hands!”
The men cheered more loudly.
The Panther knew, as did his officers and men, that the Americans had also hired a hundred men of the Yemeni National Security Bureau to provide additional protection for the oil installation-the housing units, the offices, the trucks, the machinery, and the pipelines and pumping equipment. These one hundred para-military policemen were well paid by the Americans but poorly trained by the government in Sana’a, poorly equipped, and poorly motivated. And, as The Panther recalled from his dealings with these men at the Bilqis ruins, they were easily intimidated and more easily bought.
He reminded his fighters, “The police camp is outside the perimeter of the oil company, on the north side, and you will attack from the south.” He also assured his men, “The police will not engage you. And you will not provoke them.” He smiled and said, “They will be sleeping like lambs and will hear nothing.”
The men laughed, but Bulus ibn al-Darwish could sense that it was forced, nervous laughter.
Men on the edge of battle, he knew, were fearful. This was understandable. But faith overcame fear. Leadership overcame inexperience. And that was his job-to foster faith and show leadership.
He said to his fighters, “You have been shown the plans of the defenses of this American colony on the soil of Islam. You know that this place is weak, and you know the secrets of these defenses. And you know that the mercenaries who guard this place for the Americans are infidels without heart or soul. And the Yemeni laborers who are with them have sold themselves to the Americans and are unworthy of God. They are all sheep to be slaughtered this night!”
The men stood and cheered wildly.
Captain Behaddin Zuhair stood to the side and watched his men, then looked at his chief, Bulus ibn al-Darwish, who called himself The Panther, though some called him al-Amriki-the American, which al-Darwish did not like.