El Aqrab remembered the incident as if it had happened only yesterday. The blood. The silence and the flies. The vacant eyes.
Before Sabra and Shatila, the war had been a farce, the blackest of comedies, despite the carnage. The Zionists stationed a few tanks in the Baabda hills, which pounded the city regularly. The Israeli air force didn’t start their bombing runs until well past 4:00 PM. Then they returned to base for dinner before the night shift took their place. In fact, it was a war waged mostly for the foreign press. Skirmishes not rooted in personal vendetta were fought distractedly until the cameras arrived. Then everyone took on a Rambo sensibility, posturing for the lenses, taking unprecedented risks to show off to the world. This was Phoenicia, after all. Most Lebanese were much more interested in trade, in makeshift monetary exchanges, than in political agendas.
Then, after Gemayel’s assassination, Israeli troops — ringing the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila — had allowed revenge-seeking Maronite militiamen into the shantytowns. More than 1,500 refugees were slaughtered, including hundreds of women and children. Including babies, El Aqrab remembered. The narrow muddy lanes were choked with broken bodies, splattered with blood. Israel was widely condemned and, later, Yuri Garron was found to be “indirectly responsible” for the carnage. Indirectly responsible! “You are running out of time,” said El Aqrab.
“Why? Are you planning to go somewhere?” asked Seiden. “You have an appointment, perhaps?”
“You could say that.”
The UH-60L Black Hawk transport helicopter emblazoned with the Knesset seal prepared to take off in Jerusalem. More than fifteen meters in length, with a speed of 360 kilometers per hour, the Black Hawk was powered by two 1,500 horse power General Electric T700 engines that sputtered and caught as the rotors started to spin.
“What’s going on?” inquired the co-pilot.
“No idea,” the pilot said. “Must be urgent to get these guys up at this hour.”
Just then, a door burst open in the adjacent building. Three figures huddled together for a moment by the door. Then they dashed across the tarmac and ducked inside the helicopter. The ship rose steadily. She slid across the tarmac, reached transitional lift, and lifted herself into the air at 450 feet per minute.
Chapter 6
They had been watching the apartment in Long Island City for just shy of a week now, from a squat across the street — John Decker, Jr., recently transferred to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in New York, and his partner Anthony Bartolo; plus a second team made up of Special Agents Williams and Kazinski, who kept an eye on the three suspects as they commuted to and from their jobs each day. On this particular Thursday night, the second team was back at the office for a lecture on criminal financial networks by an Intel specialist named Otto Warhaftig, attached to the JTTF from the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a new, interagency Homeland Security initiative.
They knew the routines of the suspects intimately. Well… at least two of them. A Saudi Arabian by birth, the first was Mohammed bin Basra, a student, wanted for questioning by the FBI since the spring of 2002. The second, Ali Singh, was originally from Pakistan and worked for a local cab company. They had both been arrested once — for disorderly conduct at a mosque in Queens — but acquitted for lack of evidence.
The third suspect remained unidentified, despite many attempts to follow him over the past few days. The agents had nicknamed him “Mecca” because he always seemed to be praying, facing Mecca.
As they watched the apartment across the way, Bartolo kept up a running commentary about his fiancée, Angelina. He’d been trying to set Decker up with one of Angelina’s girlfriends for the past two weeks, to no avail. A blustery Italian kid from Hell’s Kitchen, Tony Bartolo was inconsolable. He was convinced that Decker needed to get laid, and Angelina’s high school girlfriend, Lissy, a Boricua, was just the thing: dark and voluptuous, with a dirty reputation that Bartolo knew was well deserved. “The best blowjobs in Hell’s Kitchen,” he repeated. Decker just ignored him. He liked his new partner but his infinite cajoling was beginning to wear thin.
As Bartolo rambled on, he took his jacket off, his handgun and his phone, and began his endless regimen of sit-ups, push-ups and crunches. He was obsessed with his physique, vainer than any girl Decker had ever known. Yet his vanity was endearing. Bartolo was completely genuine. Indeed, he made a fetish of his self-absorption, displaying it for all to see. He was a handsome man: six feet three inches tall; thick, dark brown hair; broad-shouldered, with an iron stomach, in sharp contrast to his feminine red lips.
When Bartolo was finally finished, he rolled in one smooth movement to his feet, grabbed his jacket and raincoat and gun, and started for the door. “More coffee?” he inquired.
“Sure,” said Decker. “Black. No—”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Bartolo said, slipping on his holster. “Don’t get how you can drink it plain like that though. I mean, it’s no espresso.”
“And I don’t know how you can stomach all that milk and sugar. It’s a wonder you’re not three hundred pounds, or more, the way you eat.”
Bartolo laughed. “That’s why I’m so sweet,” he said, opening the door and stepping out into the hall. He caressed the raincoat draped across his arm. “And why you sleep alone at night.” With that he slammed the door behind him.
Decker shook his head and returned to his surveillance. He had set up a Nikon D70 digital camera on a tripod with a telephoto lens. The suspects’ apartment was on the seventh floor of a nondescript pre-war, nine-story building just across the street. It was part of a whole row of rather run-down brick apartment buildings that stretched for almost eleven blocks. Decker took photographs of Mohammed bin Basra while the suspect used his PC in the living room. He couldn’t see the screen, not clearly anyway, despite the powerful lens; it was raining again. But he had seen and photographed the PC wallpaper before. It featured some kind of arabesque design and Arabic calligraphy that fascinated Decker. Indeed, curious for another perspective, a few days earlier he had even emailed copies of the images to some Islamic expert over at the CIA, who had promised to pass them on to NSA, who had… It was always the same, Decker thought. He likened it to skipping stones over black holes. He had yet to get a response to his email, and he doubted he ever would.
With a deep sigh, Decker zoomed in a little closer. It was difficult to read but he took some pictures anyway. As Decker photographed the PC screen, he managed to make out a few brief words in Arabic that he’d already documented in his notebook: Pregnant she-camels. And then, more chilling stilclass="underline" When hell is stoked up. He sketched a corner of the arabesque design. The notebook was already full of images, stray pieces of the PC wallpaper rendered over time. He flipped the pages and the images fluttered into place, coalescing like a film strip. He hesitated at the final page. In the lower right hand corner of the wallpaper was a number, clearly visible: 540,000.
Decker considered how they had first discovered the three suspects. The man on the PC, Mohammed bin Basra, had been linked to a scheme to sell stolen cigarettes tax free. Some of the profits had been funneled through bank accounts in Indonesia suspected of being connected to the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar and other Islamic terrorist networks.
Originally from Saudi, bin Basra first came to the United States in 1997, when he took undergraduate courses at Hunter College in New York. His father was relatively wealthy, involved in some kind of construction business back in Saudi. A few years earlier, bin Basra senior had been suspected of being associated with Al Qa’ida; the family had given money to a charity that turned out to be a front for the terrorist network. In 1999, Mohammed was arrested with Ali Singh and a youngster named Mohammed Qashir for disorderly conduct during a disturbance at a mosque in Queens, but the charges were dropped after his family made a sizeable contribution to the mosque. In 2000, he traveled to Afghanistan where — according to suspects imprisoned at Guantanimo Bay — he turned up at an Al Qa’ida training camp. Then, in the summer of 2002, although he was now wanted for questioning by the Bureau, bin Basra somehow managed to slip across the border into Canada. From there he traveled via Russia to Kazakhstan, where he underwent further training in explosives with a man named Gulzhan Baqrah, known associate of El Aqrab, the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar. This was after the U.S.-led invasion had shut down all the Afghan training camps. Henceforth his whereabouts remained a mystery, at least until the cigarette heist.