The Hogshead Bar was never going to be the meeting place for Atlanta’s social elite. Set on a back street off Auburn Avenue, the vehicles in its usually full car park, two pickups to every car, gave the first-time customer a good idea of the quality of its regulars.
Almussab pushed the heavy oak door open and Ibrahim Khalil followed him into the bar room. It was a dark room, the only bright lights were above the narrow space between the bar that ran the length of the room and the wall behind it. In that space, four men with all the personality and charm of robots, poured drinks for thirsty customers. In front of the bar was a row of tall barstools, mostly occupied, bolted to the floor to prevent them being used as weapons. On the wall behind the bar, spot-lit from the ceiling, was a huge Confederate flag. Above it was a sign vowing that ‘The South Will Rise Again.’ WWF wrestling was on the big screen television and Patsy Cline broke her heart through the loudspeakers of the jukebox.
It was a bar that smelt of stale beer and unwashed bodies. The floor was scattered with discarded beer cans, pretzel wrappers and spilt popcorn. The customers were loud and mainly drunk. There was a lot of long, badly cut hair and bushy moustaches. Most of the men and all the women wore denim.
When the two dark-skinned foreigners walked into the bar the noise of the crowd dropped suddenly, leaving Patsy’s tear-soaked voice the only sound above a murmur. No-one was listening to her.
A man pushed his way towards them.
‘Lookee here,’ he said in a throaty, nasal voice, ‘the cat’s dragged in two pieces of trash.’
Almussab looked at him and slowly put his hand into his jacket pocket. The fingers closed on the handle of a switchblade. If this low life started violence he would aim for the neck, cutting his carotid artery and he and Khalil would disappear in the confusion and flying blood.
The man who stood before him was tall, but scrawny, a thin face with pinched features and tobacco stained teeth. He wore an untamed beard, streaks of grey running through the brown, and a lumberjack shirt and a baseball cap, its peak sweat and oil stained. The shirt was loose, open at the front and worn outside his jeans, over a faded black t-shirt advertising Harley Davidsons. He started to pace around Almussab and Khalil.
‘Here’s what I’ll do,’ he said mockingly, ‘I’ll let you boys slither out of here, but not before you stand on the table and sing the first verse of “Dixie”.’
Almussab looked at the sea of expectant faces staring at him, faces like the crowd at an execution. He began to measure the distance to the door and the arc the blade would take to the wiry man’s neck.
‘Alright Seth, you’ve had your fun, these gentlemen are here at my invitation.’
A middle-aged man made his way through the crowd as he spoke. He didn’t have to push, people stood back for him. Seth turned to look at Ashley Hackett, the State Chapter Head of the Klan. Just behind either shoulder, as they usually were, stood the Naylor brothers. The Naylors were good in bar fights. They had to be, they started most of them. Tough as old boots and they had a habit of using pool cues, chairs and broken bottles as a weapons. They both eyed Seth with twin menacing stares. Seth lost his swagger and melted back into the crowd.
Hackett strolled towards Almussab, looking hard at the briefcase Ibrahim Khalil was carrying.
‘You got the goods?’ he asked.
Almussab nodded to Khalil, who lifted the briefcase towards Hackett.
‘Not here, we’ll make the exchange somewhere else.’
Ibrahim Khalil feigned surprise and confusion.
‘Let’s go,’ said Hackett, ‘we’ll drive you.’
‘No,’ said Almussab, as they turned back to the door of the bar, ‘we’ll follow you in our own vehicle.’
Ashley Hackett and the Naylors got into the back of a Buick Lucerne and Almussab and Hussein followed them out off the parking lot in the people carrier. As they drove towards Auburn Avenue, a pickup truck fell into line behind them.
‘They don’t trust us,’ said Almussab as he took a handgun out of his waistband and checked that the magazine was full.
They headed east along Auburn, then onto a Highway 41, north towards Buckhead.
As the convoy drove along the highway, two quad bikes rode quietly and carefully across the scrubland backing on to the warehouse. When Waheed Khoklar came back to the townhouse with the quad bikes in a rented trailer pulled behind a car he had hired, he fitted silencers to the exhausts, muffling the noise to just over a whisper. Then he drove, with the three others in the back of the car, to a point where the bikes could easily enter the scrubland. Hanjour rode the first bike with Rahan Hussein on the pillion seat and Khoklar rode the second with Faqir Rashid behind him. All were dressed in black and heavily armed.
Fifty yards short of the warehouse they parked the bikes and silently crossed the land to the building. At the back wall of the warehouse, Hanjour and Rashid climbed to a first-floor window, opened it and slipped through onto the steel gallery where they hid behind cardboard boxes. Khoklar threw a grappling iron onto the roof and it caught in the guttering. He pulled at the rope, testing whether the guttering would take his weight, before climbing the rope to the roof. When he was over the guttering and moving towards the nearest skylight, Rahan Hussein followed him.
The convoy of the Buick, people carrier and pickup drove slowly in the dark along the uneven dirt track towards the warehouse. The headlights of the Buick picked out two men with hunting rifles slung over their shoulders at either side of the door. The three vehicles came to a stop and Almussab and Ibrahim Khalil got out of the people carrier, Khalil gripping the handle of the briefcase. Hackett and the Naylor brothers left the driver of the Buick in the car and Hackett motioned Almussab to follow them. As they walked between the armed men and through the doors of the building, the two men from the pickup were four paces behind them.
It was a clear, still night and this far from the Highway, the only sounds were the crickets in the long grass and the murmur of conversation from the warehouse.
Inside the building was a large industrial space with plain plaster covering breezeblock walls and a concrete floor. It was lit by fluorescent tubes, hanging in rows from the ceiling. In the middle of the floor were a dozen men, standing or sitting on cardboard boxes arranged in a rough circle round the five black holdalls. All the men were armed with handguns, rifles or machine pistols. Bucky Roberts stood out as the largest and loudest of them.
‘There you are, boys,’ said Ashley Hackett, pointing to the holdalls, ‘just give me the briefcase then, when we’ve checked all the money is there, you can take them.’
‘No,’ replied Almussab calmly, ‘that’s not the way we do things. If we give you the briefcase, how do we know you haven’t substituted our goods in the holdalls for bags of flour? We have to test the goods and, until then, no briefcase.’
‘We could just take you boys out here and now and then we have the bags and the briefcase.’
‘You think we’re some group of cheap gangsters!’ shouted Almussab. ‘The people who control us know what is happening here tonight. If this exchange doesn’t take place, they will send other people to avenge us and put to death you and everyone in this room!’
Hackett took a piece of gum from his pocket, unwrapped it, placed it slowly and deliberately in his mouth and began chewing. All the time he stared at Almussab. He took his time before he said anything.
‘So how do you want to do this?’
‘We place the briefcase on the ground here, then walk to the holdalls. At the same time your men move to where we left the briefcase. You count the money in the briefcase and we test the goods in the bags. Then you take the briefcase, we pick up the holdalls and everyone leaves. And you will have a dozen men between us and the door for insurance.’
Ashley Hackett showed no sign of agreeing or disagreeing. He just kept chewing for thirty seconds before he nodded.
‘Okay boys, come over here,’ he called and the group of men round the holdalls sauntered casually towards him, while Almussab and Hussein walked in the opposite direction.
When both groups were standing over their bags they looked at each other across fifteen yards of empty warehouse. Then one of the Naylor brothers bent down, laid the briefcase flat on the floor and pressed the brass buttons that snapped the catches.
There was an earsplitting roar and a blazing flash of white light as the briefcase exploded, taking Naylor’s right hand with it. Rahan Hussein had made the bomb to be loud and bright, so the men who crowded round the briefcase, craning forward to get their first sight of so much money, were temporarily blinded. When the killing started, they couldn’t shoot back.
Ziad Hanjour and Faqir Rashid stood up from behind the storage boxes and fired into the group of men standing round what had been the briefcase. Khalil and Hussein opened the skylights and abseiled down, Ibrahim Khalil firing into the group of men now dancing like demented puppets as the bullets hit them. Hussein didn’t fire, she just watched the front door. The sound of the detonation brought the two guards from the front of the building running into the warehouse. Hussein cut them down with a burst of automatic gunfire.
One man, standing a short distance away from the others, got off two shots at Hussein with a handgun before Hanjour killed him. The second bullet hit Hussein in at the shoulder, bringing her crashing down to the ground from ten feet above it.
Abu Almussab ran to the front door, jumping over of the bodies of the men Hussein had shot. As he went through the door, the driver of the Buick had started the engine, put the car into gear and was driving away at speed, the back wheels spinning in the loose dirt. Almussab dropped into a combat crouch, aimed his handgun, steadied in both hands, and put eight shots through the back window. The window and the windscreen shattered, the car lurched suddenly to its left and catapulted into a water-filled ditch, water pouring into it through the missing windows. It sank like a stone up to its roof. Almussab waited for thirty seconds to see if there was any sign of life. When there wasn’t any movement from the ditch, he turned back to the warehouse, putting the gun back into the waistband of his trousers.
When Waheed Khoklar and Faqir Rashid talked about it later, they both thought that the gunfire had gone on for a long time. From the first bullet to the last had been less than nine seconds.
From the hammering of gunfire and the screams of the dying, the warehouse plunged suddenly into complete silence. The attackers all stood, guns still to their shoulders, looking around them. The attacked lay in an untidy pattern of blood on the floor. Above them all, a haze of gunsmoke hung like a grey vapour cloud.
Waheed Khoklar, the only one with medical training, ran to Rahan Hussein and knelt down beside her. He unzipped Hussein’s combat jacket and, using the knife tucked into the top of his boot, he gently rolled Hussein over and saw the bullet had passed clean through the muscle without shattering the collarbone.
‘Flesh wound,’ he said. ‘Get up, I’ll wash and dress it when we get back to the townhouse.’
Ibrahim Khalil and Faqir Rashid were checking the bodies. There was a soft moan from a man lying on the floor halfway to the front doors.
‘This one is still alive,’ called Rashid.
Ziad Hanjour took the few steps to stand over the prone figure of Bucky Roberts. Roberts stared up at him with a pleading look in his eyes. Hanjour smiled at him and pulled a handgun from the shoulder holster under his left arm. The look in Robert’s eyes turned to resignation.
‘Get it over with,’ he grimaced through the pain of five bullets in his torso.
Hanjour’s smile broadened as he shot Bucky Roberts between the eyes.
As he was putting the gun back into the holder, Almussab walked slowly back into the warehouse. He raised his voice.
‘Khoklar and Rashid, you know what to do. The rest of you, get out of here.’
Hanjour and Hussein got onto one of the quad bikes and drove slowly away. After he and Khalil had loaded the holdalls into the people carrier, Almussab stood in the door of the warehouse and watched Khoklar and Rashid start their work inside. After two minutes he turned back to the vehicle, got into the passenger seat and Khalil drove back towards the highway.
Khoklar and Rashid lifted and rearranged the bodies to make it look as if there were two groups who had opened fire on each other. It would be enough to fool the police for a while. After a few days the forensic people would work out that the bullets in the bodies didn’t match the guns, but by then Almussab and the others, if they were lucky, would be at the other side of the world. If they weren’t, they’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.
Khoklar left the main door open and got on the pillion seat of the quad bike Rashid had started up. On a slow journey through the undergrowth, they made a detour, stopping at a garage on the edge of the scrubland. It was on a quiet road which ran adjacent to the highway and 80 yards away from it. The couple who ran it wanted to sell, but they couldn’t find a buyer. They were too old to work the long hours, so they closed each night at eight. There was a payphone on the forecourt, the overhead lights were off and there was no-one about.
Khoklar dialled the emergency number and asked, in a well-trained Southern accent, to be put through to the police. He told them he had heard gunshots from the Chandon warehouse. Local talk was that there had been some friction between two factions of the Klan and it sounded as if it had spilled over into violence. The operator asked for his name. He replied that this was the Klan they were talking about and he wasn’t about to give it, then he hung up. That should be enough to start the police off on the wrong foot.
He got back on the rear seat of the quad bike and ten minutes later phoned Hanjour to tell him they were nearly there. As they drove out of the undergrowth onto another quiet road, Hanjour was standing by the open doors of the closed trailer. Rashid drove up the twin ramps Hanjour had put up to the doors and parked the quad bike behind the other, inside the trailer. Within two minutes, the ramps were stowed, the doors closed and the three men and Hussein were in the 4x4 hitched to the trailer. They would park it in the garage of the townhouse overnight and in the morning Rashid would remove the silencers, wash all the vehicles, remove any sign of their users and they would be returned to the shops who had hired them.