“Ah,” said El Aqrab. “At last! Be quick now, you have lost much time.”
Seiden pressed a button on the DVD deck. The recording of the murders in Tel Aviv began to play. One of the images — one of the boys on fire — was clearer than the rest. Seiden could just make out the words “Pregnant she-camels” and “Hell” in Arabic flaming on his flesh. The sound was deafening — the screams of the young boys and their helpless father, tied to his chair with his back to them, unable to even see his children as they cried out in desperate agony. It was so loud and distracting that Seiden almost missed the word El Aqrab whispered as he watched, as if the murders were a fireworks display. It was almost drowned out. Almost.
“Beautiful!”
Chapter 8
Gulzhan Baqrah stood on the naked bluff, a thousand feet above the darkling plain. The morning sky still swirled with stars. It was teeth-chatteringly cold. Gulzhan listened patiently to the tinny voice at the other end of the satellite phone pressed against his ear. It was exactly as he’d feared. There was no doubt about it now. His most odious suspicions were confirmed.
He turned off the phone, slipped it into his vest, and wept. A rather portly man, with a low forehead, sloping shoulders and stubby legs, Gulzhan had a wide round face almost entirely covered by a thick black beard — spotted with gray — and bristling mustaches. He wiped his eyes, brushing the tears away. He had no time for tears. And then, as if on cue, a cold wind billowed across the bluff, born on the snowfields of the mountains of Kazakhstan, and blew the tears away. A young man approached from below.
“What is it?” Gulzhan said.
“Salaam,” the young lieutenant answered. “It is time.”
“Uhud has arrived?”
“He is just here.”
Gulzhan turned his face, pitching his sorrow away. It was unseemly to appear so weak in front of his men. He was getting old, he thought. “Tell them I come.”
“Yes, Gulzhan.” With that, the young lieutenant disappeared.
Gulzhan stared out across the plain, now streaked with sunbeams from the gathering dawn. Uhud had finally returned. He could see him in his mind’s eye. He could visualize the tall lean figure riding through the valley on his cinder stallion, hear the signal as the sentries fired off a round, feel their jubilation as they recognized the rider — slung to the side to avoid the bullet wound that still troubled his left thigh — as they recognized his handsome face. Uhud was late but this only generated more anticipation. Uhud was popular with the men. Too popular. He had come along too fast, too soon. Just back from Iraq, where he’d assisted in the bombing of the Great Mosque of Samarra in an effort to stir up sectarian violence, he would become more popular still. And now this latest news. Gulzhan was heavy with despair, weighed down by what he knew he had to do.
He looked across the bluff to the east. There was no time to tarry. They still had a long way to drive before dying.
Gulzhan Baqrah was an Islamist fundamentalist. He had been fighting the Soviet-style autocrat — President Sergey Nazanov — for more years than he cared to remember, since the fall of the USSR. President Nazanov ruled the Newly Independent State with an iron fist, killing and maiming his political enemies through his ruthless Aristan secret police, hunting down so-called radicals, the Muslim warriors who believe in the Ummah, the transnational empire of Islam. Ironically, Gulzhan Baqrah had once assisted President Nazanov by kidnapping, torturing and — in some cases — killing over a dozen well-known journalists who’d spoken out against the Nazanov regime. It was alleged the Nazanov family had amassed a fortune in excess of one billion dollars squirreled away in some Swiss bank account, much of it earned by selling off bits of the country piece by piece, including vast armories of former Soviet weaponry left behind after the collapse of the Empire. Some said Nazanov had even helped facilitate the sale of nuclear technologies by his top military advisors, members of the Kazakh National Security Committee and the former KGB, renamed — inventively — the KNB: from designs and prototypes of explosive devices; to all manner of machinery, such as centrifuges used in the refinement of plutonium and uranium.
As a rule, the President’s henchmen afforded Baqrah a precarious sanctuary in the desolate mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan. But whenever an opportunity arose, the government wasted little time in harassing the villagers under the guerrilla leader’s care, throwing up roadblocks and tolls, taxing capriciously, mercilessly. Prominent citizens were always being fined for crimes which remained obscure even after they’d been found guilty and sentenced. Or worse, they simply disappeared, kidnapped and murdered by the Aristan police.
Gulzhan ran a camp in a small valley between two mountains northwest of the town of Taraz, a training farm for terrorists from throughout the Middle East and Africa — Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and the Occupied Territories; Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Somalia — made popular after the camps in Afghanistan and Iraq had been closed by the Americans. Whenever the Islamic Jihad or Hamas, whenever the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Iraqi insurgency had a need for extra training for their swelling ranks — generally following a heavy blood-letting surrounding an Israeli or American offensive — Gulzhan was there with cots and trainers. It was lucrative work for one who’d been cast out.
As they traveled in two battered Mercedes-Benz 814 diesel trucks to their destination, Gulzhan thought about his old friend El Aqrab. They knew the risks they ran each day, but El Aqrab’s arrest was still a cold awakening for Gulzhan. They had planned for it, of course, with the meticulousness with which El Aqrab drew each of his designs, years ago, the two of them, while hunting in the mountains, under the stars. If either of them were ever captured, the other would mount this mission. It was their insurance policy.
The train moved slowly through the mountain pass, chugging through the snow-flecked slopes, transporting a turbine and a shipment of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City. Inside the first car, a member of the Aristan secret police, Vladimir Petronov, was thinking about his sorry career, how everything had gone downhill since his wife had left him for another man — a schoolteacher, of all people. It wasn’t fair. He’d always been a good husband, faithful and understanding. A good provider. But she had left him anyway. And all that she could tell him was that she did not love him anymore. As if, somehow, that really mattered.