There was a long pause. Finally, the voice said simply: “Stay by that phone, Detective. I or someone else will be back to you in short order.”
It took only five minutes. The voice was different. Another major, this time from Personnel Records. The officer you wish to speak to cannot be reached, he said.
Hall was getting angry. Unless he is in space or at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he can be reached. We both know that. You have my personal cell number. Please give it to him and tell him to call me, and fast. With that, he put the phone down. Now it was up to the Corps.
Taking Lindy with him, he left HQ for the hospital, grabbing an energy bar and a fizzy soda for lunch. So much for healthy eating. At First Colonial, he pulled down the side road, the oddly named Will O Wisp Drive, and around the back to the ambulance entrance. His first stop was the morgue, where the ME was finishing up.
There were two bodies on steel trays, covered by sheets. An assistant was about to consign them to the cooler. The ME stopped him and pulled back one sheet. Det. Hall stared down at the face. It was now scarred and distorted but still the young man in the photo from the vehicle bureau. The bushy black beard jutted upward, the eyes closed.
“Do you know who he is yet?” asked the ME.
“Yep.”
“Well, you know more than me. But maybe I can still surprise you.”
The ME pulled the sheet down to the ankles.
“Notice anything?”
Ray Hall looked long and hard.
“He has no body hair. Except the beard.”
The ME replaced the sheet and nodded to the assistant to remove the steel tray and its cargo to the cooler.
“I’ve never seen it in person, but I’ve seen it on camera. Two years ago at a seminar on Islamic fundamentalism. A sign of ritual purification, a preparation for passage into Allah’s paradise.”
“A suicide bomber?”
“A suicide killer,” said the ME. “Destroy an important national of the Great Satan and the gates of immortal bliss open for the servant passing through them as shahid, a martyr. We don’t see much of it in the States, but it is very common in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a lecture on it at the seminar.”
“But he was born and raised here,” said Det. Hall.
“Well, someone sure converted him,” said the ME. “By the by, your crime lab people have already taken the fingerprints away. Other than that, he had nothing on him at all. Except the gun, and I believe that is already with Ballistics.”
Detective Hall’s next stop was upstairs. He found Dr. Alex McCrae in his office, lunching off a very late tuna melt from the cafeteria.
“What do you want to know, Detective?”
“Everything,” said Hall. So the surgeon told him.
When the badly injured general was brought into the emergency room, Dr. McCrae ordered an immediate IVI—an intravenous infusion. Then he checked the vital signs: oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure.
His anesthesiologist searched for and found good venous access through the jugular vein, into which he inserted a large-bore cannula and immediately started a saline drip followed by two units of type O rhesus-negative blood as a holding operation. Finally, he sent a sample of the patient’s blood for cross-matching in the laboratory.
Dr. McCrae’s immediate concern, with his patient stabilized for the moment, was to find out what was going on inside his chest. Clearly there was a bullet lodged there because the entry hole was in view, but there was no exit wound.
He debated whether to use an X-ray or a CT scan, but chose not to move the patient from the gurney but to settle for an X-ray by sliding the plate beneath the unconscious body and taking the X-ray from above.
This revealed that the general had been lung-shot and the bullet was lodged very close to the hilum, the root of the lung. This gave him a three-choice gamble. An operation using a cardiopulmonary bypass was an option, but it would be likely to cause even further lung damage.
The second choice was to go for immediate invasive surgery with a view to extracting the bullet. But that, too, would be highly risky, as the full extent of the damage was still unclear, and it could also prove fatal.
He chose the third gamble—to allow twenty-four hours without further interference in the hope that, even though resuscitation so far had taken a huge toll on the old man’s stamina, he would achieve a partial recovery with further resuscitation and stabilization. This would enable invasive surgery to be undertaken with a better chance of survival.
After that, the general was removed to intensive care, where, by the time the detective conferred with the surgeon, he lay festooned with tubes.
There was one from the central venous line on one side of the neck and the intravenous cannula on the other. Oxygen tubes up the nostrils, known as nasal specs, ensured a constant supply of oxygen. Blood pressure and pulse were displayed on a bedside monitor that, at a glance, revealed the heartbeat.
Finally, there was a chest drain under the left armpit between the fifth and sixth ribs. This was to intercept the constant leakage of air from the punctured lung and guide it down to a large glass jar on the floor, one-third full of water. The expelled air could leave the chest cavity and emerge underwater and bubble to the surface.
But it could not then return to the pleura, for that would collapse the lungs and kill the patient. Meanwhile, he would continue to inhale oxygen via the tubes in each nostril.
Having been told there was not a chance in hell of talking to the general for days to come, Det. Hall left. Back in the parking lot behind the ambulance entrance, he asked Lindy to drive for him. He had calls to make.
His first was to Willoughby College, where the killer, Mohammed Barre, had been studying. He was patched through to the dean of admissions. When he asked for confirmation that Mr. Barre had been a student at Willoughby, she agreed without hesitation. When he told her what had happened on the Princess Anne golf course, there was a stunned silence.
The identification of the morning’s killer had not been released to the media. He would be at the college in twenty minutes, he said. He would need the dean to have available all records and access to the student’s private quarters. In the interim, she was to inform no one and that included the student’s parents in Michigan.
The second call was to Fingerprints. Yes, they had received a perfect set of ten from the morgue and had run them through AFIS. There was no match; the dead student was not in the system.
Had he been a foreigner, there would have been records with Immigration, dating from his visa application. But it was becoming clear Mr. Barre was a U.S. citizen of immigrant parents. But from where? Born Muslim or a convert who had changed his name?
The third call went to Ballistics. The gun was a Glock 17 automatic, Swiss made, with a nearly full magazine, five bullets fired. They were trying to trace the registered owner, whose name was not Barre and who lived near Baltimore, Maryland. Stolen? Purchased? They arrived at the college.
The dead student was of Somali extraction. Those who knew him at Willoughby declared he seemed to have had a change of personality around six months back, from a normal, outgoing, bright student to a silent, withdrawn recluse. The core reason seemed to be religious. There were two other Muslim students on campus, but they had experienced no such metamorphosis.
The dead man had taken to abandoning jeans and windbreakers in favor of long robes. He began to demand time out from studies five times a day for prayers. This was granted without demur. Religious tolerance was supreme. And he grew a bushy black beard.
For the second time that day, Ray Hall found himself going through the private possessions of another person, but there was a fundamental difference. Apart from the engineering textbooks, all the papers were Islamic texts in Arabic. Det. Hall understood not a word but collected them all. The key was the computer. With this, at least, Ray Hall knew what he was doing.
He found sermon after sermon, not in Arabic but in fluen
t, persuasive English. A masked face, two burning eyes, the calls for submission to Allah, for a completed preparedness to serve Him, fight for Him, die for Him. And, most of all, to kill for Him.
Detective Hall had never heard of the Preacher, but he closed the computer down and impounded it. He signed for everything he had confiscated, leaving the college with permission to inform the parents, to call him when they wished to come south to pick up their son’s effects. Meanwhile, he would personally inform the Dearborn police. Taking two trash bags full of books, texts and the laptop, he returned to police HQ.
There were other things on the computer, including a search of Craigslist for a man with a handgun for sale. Clearly the paperwork had not been completed, which would lead to a serious charge for the vendor, but that would come later.
It was eight p.m. when his cell phone rang and a voice introduced himself as the son of the stricken general. He did not say where he was, only that he had received the news and was on his way by helicopter.
Darkness had fallen; there was an open space behind police HQ but no floodlights.
“Where is the nearest Navy base?” asked the voice.
“Oceana,” said Hall. “But can you get permission to land there?”
“Yes, I can,” said the voice. “One hour from now.”
“I’ll pick you up,” said Hall. While he waited out the first half hour, he consulted police records nationwide for any similar assassinations in the recent past. To his surprise, there had been four. The golf course slaying made the fifth. In two of the previous four cases, the killers had immediately taken their own lives. The other two had been taken alive and even now were awaiting trial for murder one. All had acted alone. All had been converted to ultra-extremism by online sermons.
He picked up the general’s son at Oceana at nine and drove him to Virginia Beach General. On his way, he described what had happened since seven-thirty that morning.
His guest questioned him closely on what he had discovered in Mohammed Barre’s dorm room. Then he muttered: “The Preacher.” Det. Hall thought he was referring to a profession, not a code name.
“I guess so,” he said. They reached the hospital main entrance in silence.
The reception desk alerted someone to the arrival of the son of the man in ICU, and Alex McCrae came down from his office. As they went up to the intensive care floor, he explained the seriousness of the wound, which had precluded surgery.
“I can hold out only slim hopes for recovery,” he said. “It’s touch-and-go.”
The son went into the room. He drew up a chair and gazed in the dim light at the rugged old face, locked away in a private place, kept alive by a machine. He sat there throughout the night, holding the sleeping man’s hands in his own.
Just before four in the morning, the eyes opened. The heartbeat quickened. What the son could not see was the glass jar on the floor behind the bed. It was rapidly filling with bright red arterial blood. Somewhere, deep inside the chest, there had been a rupture of a major vessel. The general was bleeding out too fast to save.
The son felt a tiny pressure on his own hands from those he held. His father stared at the ceiling and his lips moved.
“Semper Fi, son,” he murmured.
“Semper Fi, Dad.”
The line on the screen went from mountain peaks to flatline. The bleep converted to a single wail. A “crash” team appeared at the door. Alex McCrae was with them. He strode past the seated figure of the general’s son and glanced at the bottle behind the bed. He held up an arm at the crash team and gently shook his head. The team withdrew.
• • •
After a few minutes, the son rose and left the room. He said nothing, just nodded to the surgeon. In the ICU, a nurse drew the sheet up over the face. The son walked the four flights down to the parking lot.
In his car twenty yards away, Det. Hall sensed something and awoke from a light sleep. The general’s son walked across the parking lot, stopped and looked up. Dawn was still two hours away. The sky was black, the moon had set. Far above the stars glittered; hard, bright, eternal.
Those same stars, unseen in a pale blue sky, would be looking down on another man, lost to sight in a wilderness of sand. The standing man looked up at the stars and said something. The Virginia detective did not catch it. What the Tracker said was: “You just made this very personal, Preacher.”
4
In a world of code names to hide real identities, the Tracker had given his new helper the pseudonym Ariel. It amused him to choose the sprite from Shakespeare’s Tempest, who could fly invisibly through space and get up to whatever mischief he wanted.
But if Roger Kendrick struggled on planet Earth, he was nothing like that when he sat before the treasure trove of intoxicating equipment the U.S. taxpayers had provided him. As the man from Fort Meade had said, he became a fighter ace, now at the controls of the best interceptor money could buy.
He spent two days studying the construction the Preacher had built to mask his IP address and thus his location. He also watched the sermons and became convinced of one thing at the outset. The computer genius was not the masked man who preached religious hatred. There was another somewhere, his real opponent, the enemy ace flying against him; skilled, elusive, capable of spotting any mistake he might make and then shutting him out.
Had Ariel but known it, his cyberenemy was Ibrahim Samir, British, born of Iraqi parentage, schooled at UMIST—the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Kendrick thought of him as the Troll.
It was he who had invented the proxy server to create the false IP address behind which he could hide his master’s real location. But once, at the beginning of the sermon campaign, there had been a real IP, and once he had that, Ariel could place the source anywhere on the face of the Earth.
He also perceived very quickly that there was a fan base. Enthusiastic disciples were able to post messages for the Preacher. He determined to join it.
He realized the Troll would never be deceived unless Ariel’s alter ego was detail perfect. Ariel created a young American called Fahad, son of two Jordanian immigrants, born and raised in the Washington area. But first he studied.
He used the background of the long-dead terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who had headed al-Qaeda in Iraq until wiped out by Special Forces and a fighter strike. A copious biography was online. He came from the Jordanian village of Zarqa. Ariel created two parents who came from the same village, lived down the same street. If questioned, he could describe it from online information.
He re-created himself, born to his parents two years after they arrived in the USA. He could describe the school he went to, though now supposedly he’d been removed because of panic attacks.
And he studied Islam from online international courses, the mosque he and his parents attended and the name of its resident imam. Then he applied to join the Preacher’s fan base. There were questions—not from the Troll personally but from another disciple in California. He answered them. There were days of delay. And then he was accepted. All the while he kept his own virus, his malware, hidden but ready for use.
• • •
There were four Taliban fighters in the brick office in the village outside Ghazni, the capital of the Afghan province of the same name. They sat, as they preferred, not on chairs but on the floor.
Their robes and cloaks were wrapped around them, for although it had just turned into the month of May, there was still a chill wind off the mountains, and the brick government building had no heating.
Also seated were three government officials from Kabul and the two farangi officers from NATO. The mountain men were not smiling. They never did. The only time they had seen farangi (foreign, white) soldiers had been in the sights of a Kalashnikov. But that was a life they had come to the village to abandon.
There is in Afghanistan a little-known program called simply Reintegration. It is a joint venture by the Kabul government and NATO, run on the gr
ound by a British major general named David Hook.
The avant-garde thinking among the best brains has long been that Taliban body count alone will never win. As fast as Anglo-American commanders congratulate themselves that one hundred, or two or three hundred, Taliban fighters have been taken out, more just seem to appear.
Some come from the Afghan peasantry, as they always have. Some among these volunteer because relatives—and, in that society, an extended family may number three hundred—have been killed by a misdirected missile, a wrong-target fighter strike or careless artillery; others because they are ordered to fight by their tribal elders. But they are young men, little more than boys.
Also young are the students from Pakistan, arriving in droves from the religious madrassah schools, where for years they study nothing but the Koran and listen to the extremist imams until they are groomed to fight and die.
But the Taliban army is like no other. Its units are extremely local to the area that bred them. And the reverence to the veteran commanders is total. Take out the veterans, reconvert the clan chiefs, bring in the tribal heads, and an entire county-sized area can simply abandon the fighting.
For years, British and American Special Forces have been disguising as mountain men, slipping through the hills to assassinate the middle- and upper-ranking Talib leaders, reckoning that the small fry are not really the problem.
Parallel with the night hunters is the Reintegration Program that seeks to “turn” veterans, to take the olive branch held out by the Kabul government. That day in the hamlet of Qala-e-Zal, General Hook and his Australian assistant, Captain Chris Hawkins, were representing the Force Reintegration Cell. The four wizened Talib chiefs, crouching along the wall, had been coaxed out of the mountains to return to village life.
As with all fishing, there has to be bait. A “reintegrater” has to attend a course in de-indoctrination. In exchange, there is a free house, a flock of sheep to enable a resumption of farming, an amnesty and the Afghani equivalent of a hundred dollars a week. The purpose of the meeting that bright but crisp May day was to attempt to persuade the veterans that the religious propaganda they had all received for years was, in fact, false.