Retribution

Yousef was awake well before the eastern sunlight started to illuminate the cave entrance, cut by the hand of nature into a crack at the base of a cliff. It was bone-chillingly cold. The cave lay on the far end of the valley, below the steep mountain range to the west. Yousef moved slowly as he stepped past the bodies asleep on their prayer rugs back-to-back on the dirt floor. As he shook off the sleep, he looked toward the entrance, where dim gray light marked the early beginnings of the day.

The cave faced the east. Several mud huts, directly in front of the entranceway, had been built on rock-stacked foundations that had supported other huts from the past, which had occupied the site for centuries. The cave had provided protection since the army of Alexander the Great first crossed the mountains to the south. And as during time of Alexander, today the people of the valley resisted the invaders. Time was irrelevant; resistance lived on.

The sun first lit up the peaks well above the cave; the end of the valley remained in a dull light.

At the opening to the cave, an old woman poured a cup of steaming liquid from a black pot kept in the glowing coals of the fire pit. The pit was tucked into the entranceway, under the overhang of a lip of granite and out of sight of the sky. The smoke drafted back into the cave, which saturated the clothes that they wore, but the overhang kept the heat of the fire from registering on the satellites that constantly combed the mountains.

The liquid burned as he put the cup to his lips.

Yousef wrapped the end of his shawl around the metal cup. He blew on the chai. Steam floated up in the chilling morning air from the mixture of hot milk and tea.

“Give me the cell.”

Umarov, squatting next to the remnants of the fire, handed him a cell phone. It was one of several that would be used only once. Umarov never slept.

“And the card?”

“Mahmud had the bag.”

“That worthless dog.” Yousef threw the cup of chai against the wall of one of the mud huts. It clanked as it bounced off the yellow dirt wall. “Why did you give it to Mahmud?”

Umarov shrugged.

Yousef’s patience with Malik Mahmud had been wearing thin. Mahmud was the son of the senior Malik Mahmud, who led what had started out as the Free Aceh movement of Indonesia. When Yousef had insisted that Mahmud stay and fight with him before receiving money for his father’s group, he hadn’t realized the sad truth: Mahmud was not like his father. He was a whiner who could not abide the cold winter climate of Pakistan. It wasn’t only the weather, though: Mahmud always expected more than he would be given.

“Wake up, you flea-ridden carcass!”

Yousef kicked the small man sleeping at the edge of the group. It pushed Mahmud into another sleeping man less than an arm’s length away. The only thing that separated the two was the AK-47 machine gun that each kept close.

The twenty-odd fighters looked like geese sleeping in a large, dense flock. And like geese, as one awoke, the others awoke. Like dominoes, one turned over and, in turn, another one started to wake. They slept together in a tight roost, sharing their body heat in the frigid cave.

Umarov had taught those on guard duty to sleep on the outside of the circle. The guards would wake up their reliefs in two-hour shifts.

“You stupid fool. Where are the cards?” Yousef barked at the little man huddled on the edge of the circle near the wall of the cave.

“What? I’m sleeping.” Mahmud rolled over, ignoring Yousef, despite all the others starting to stir and shake off the sleep.

Yousef grabbed a rock from a pile stacked up at the entrance and slammed it into the back of Mahmud’s skull.

“Tuhan baik!” Mahmud yelled like a scalded cat, “Good God!” in his Indonesian language.

Yousef knew better than to seriously injure the man, but he drew blood nevertheless.

Sullenly, Mahmud threw the bag of phone cards at Yousef and pulled up against the wall of the cave holding the back of his head with blood dripping through his fingers. He looked like an abused pet huddled in the corner of his pen, his eyes locked on Yousef’s.

Yousef reached inside the small cloth bag and pulled out one of the NobelCom cards. It provided twenty minutes of international time, but, like the cell phone, it would only be used once and then tossed into the fire.

“Umarov, do you have the number?”

“Yes.”

“What time is it in New York?”

“Eight thirty-seven.” He stared at the cell phone in his hand. “Eight thirty-seven last night.”

Yousef looked at his own cell phone. It was just past 6:37 in the morning. He dialed the number on the phone card, entered another number, and then dialed New York.

Yousef stood at the very edge of the cave, trying to hold the signal. He didn’t dare venture too far into the open. The cell towers were to the southeast, down the valley toward Peshawar, but the Predators were never far to the west, roaming above.

The cell phone rang only twice before being answered.

“Yes.” Masood had expected the telephone call.

“Brother, Allah sends his thunderbolt!”

“Yes, Allah be praised!”

“All planning is Allah’s!”

“Indeed, Allah be praised!”

Yousef heard a click. The Americans’ eavesdropping satellite was also stationed above the eastern frontier of the Afghan border. Conversations had to be short. But each man knew what was being said.

The plot began.

Masood would receive an international Federal Express letter from Frankfurt with an unmarked key in it. The number had been filed off. It opened a mailbox in Brooklyn. In the mailbox was a slip to a package; small, but too large for the single box. The package had been held by the post office for several weeks.

The instructions were simple.

The verses of the Koran spoke to Al Rad: He sends thunderbolts.

Masood would write the number 13. It was the thirteenth verse.

“And all planning is Allah’s.”

The phrase spoke to the forty-second verse.

P.O. box number 1342.

Masood would open the package and take out a Federal Express overnight inside. His job was to deliver the package to the nearby Federal Express box. The Federal Express package contained a flash drive. It would go to an address in Chicago on North LaSalle Street. The secretary to the director of Chicago’s OEMC operations center would open the package to see a letter from the director of DNCO with the accompanying flash drive. She wouldn’t have the slightest hesitation when she saw the stationery and signature of Homeland Security’s director of Domestic Nuclear Detection Office.

She or her boss would slip the flash drive into an office computer and open it up. It would appear to be another briefing on foreign threats. In this one, the flash drive would be the threat.

The programmer who’d built the flash drive had a special reputation. His online handle was simply Plato. The Chinese government had allowed him to freelance for several years as long as it was the right project. And as long as Plato kept his superiors informed. He was considered a fen qing, another brilliant computer genius who was angry, very angry, at the Americans’ attitude and very angry at the imperialists. He and several in the Ministry of Defense made a profit from these jobs. Usually it was in the tens of thousands. This one was in the millions. He was a safecracker who got the thrill of hearing the tumblers click, but this job had to be his last. He and everyone along the line of payment would need to disappear after this final job.

Plato’s malware program created a back door deep inside the computers they were sent to. It would throw a switch when activated by a cell phone in a mountain cave in western Pakistan, which would drop the guard of the most sophisticated computers in the world.

“Tell that dog to go back to sleep!” Yousef joked with Umarov as he tossed the cell phone into the fire pit. He smiled broadly. “Our special guest will be the first to report on Titan Rain!”

Yes, Sadik Zabara would get the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime. An early tip on the story of the century. Titan Rain was a code word for the computer virus, so named by the Department of Defense when, shortly after 10:23 P.M. Pacific time on November 1, 2004, it opened a hole in the computers at NASA, Red-stone Arsenal, and several other military-related computer sites across the United States. Many thought it was a Chinese effort to probe the military and intelligence computers of the United States. Unlike Titan Rain, Yousef’s malware would cause another set of equally important computers to go blank at exactly the same second.

“Are the other cells ready?” Umarov warmed his hands over the fire as he spoke.

“What?” Yousef squatted down by the fire pit and picked up a stick, then poked at the melting cell phone.

“The delivery cells?”

Umarov was asking too many questions. His words were a problem. It was the voice of doubt.

“Yes. They are all ready. All we need are the HEU cores.”

The plan had been mapped out for months, four interlinked but independent cells in an operation that would circle the globe. The PIA cell in Islamabad consisted of two men, well paid, who would receive the small wooden crate marked as containing picking levers for a Sulzer G6200 weaving machine. Pakistan was known for building some of the best industrial weaving machines in the world. Picking levers were small metal parts no bigger or more unusual than staplers on a desk. Buried inside, under the stack of levers, would be a small lead box. It would emit no radiation, and only a well-trained customs agent looking for something unusual would find it.

The crate would be shipped by air express on the PIA cargo liner directly to its pickup in Toronto, Canada. The second cell would pick up the shipment in a small cargo van rented from Ryder Trucks. They wouldn’t try to cross the border but, instead, would drive north to a small village on Georgian Bay. The drive would take most of the night, heading north to a small harbor where a boat would be waiting. The boat would head north, following the shoreline, until it crossed over to a small, isolated place named Lonely Island.

The girl with the limp would meet them on the road on Georgian Bay. She had been trained as a pilot in New Zealand for a reason. The same training in the States would have put her on a list.

Piloting the seaplane, she would leave Lonely Island on a direct course, south by southwest, never climbing more than fifty feet above the surface of Lake Huron and well below radar detection. The pilot would follow a path over the water into Saginaw Bay, where just south of Grand Rapids it would enter the United States. The aircraft’s fuel capacity would allow her to cross over the land without stopping, still on the south-by-southwest course, passing just south of South Haven Lighthouse as it again headed out over the water of Lake Michigan. From the lighthouse, it would be unstoppable, too low to detect as it crossed the water, heading toward the center of the city of Chicago.

At precisely noon, the software virus, buried deep in the Office of Emergency Management, would shut down both the OEMC operations center and Chicago’s Operation Virtual Shield, a network of security cameras that covered the metro region. The city’s disaster-response capability would be paralyzed.

Also at noon, the seaplane would cross the bay on the final leg of its trip. While the technicians were frantically working on the downed emergency system, she would near the buildings of Chicago and reach for the trigger on the yoke.

The seaplane would deliver a solid, twenty-kiloton nuclear explosion, its fallout intensified to perhaps twice its magnitude if there happened to be any early November snowfall.

Umarov nodded his head in agreement. “I only wondered . . . separate cells? All at the same time? All must work perfectly, yes?”

“Umarov, my friend, are you in doubt?” Yousef moved next to his leader while holding his palms out, facing the warmth of the fire. “Have you ever heard of the doomsday principle?”

Yousef knew the answer. The man could barely read.

“No.”

“There is a probability that mankind will become extinct. That only a finite number of humans will ever exist.”

“Yes?”

“It is our duty, we must . . .” Yousef poked the fire as though putting a blade under the ribcage of his enemy. “We must make sure that the last man standing be a true Muslim. That is our duty.” He paused as he continued to push the stick into the glowing embers of the pit. “This American giant must suffer a deep and severe wound. Only this will bring him down.”