The Last Days Read online

  If everything went according to plan, each man would regroup in an old cabin tucked away in the high peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, not far from Lake Placid. Everyone had been briefed already, and all of them had been trained on the new GPS equipment. The cabin shouldn’t be hard to find. He just hoped they were all as ready for the snow and ice and cold as they insisted they were.

  None of these Al-Nakbah shock troops had ever been outside of their home countries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Palestine, other than the last eigh

  teen months they’d spent in Iraq, training night and day at Salman Pak, just outside of Baghdad. All of them were from small towns or desert villages. None of them had any experience in the United States, much less the extreme weather of the Adirondacks or the American northeast. But in every other way they were ready, and he’d have to trust them.

  Each had been chosen by commanders he’d personally recruited and trained. Each was in top physical condition. Each was trained either as a sniper or a suicide bomber. And each was ready to give his very life to wage jihad in the belly of the Great Satan. These were men without the slightest trace of fear, and soon enough, they’d have the chance to prove their mettle. Once safely across the Canadian border into the United States, and once convinced they weren’t being tracked, they’d rendezvous at the cabin, set up their shortwave radios, and gather any last-minute intelligence they could about homeland security preparations under way in their target cities. Finally, when all systems were go—when Daoud Juma said the time had come— they would fan out in four teams of three men each

  The first two teams would head to Manhattan. The third team would head to Boston. Daoud himself would lead the fourth team to Chicago. There were, of course, a hundred ways their mission could fail. He knew that better than any of these men, and he was sure his plan had taken all of those ways into account.

  Backup teams—men he’d never seen before, never wanted to see or know—would move in through Seattle, others through Tijuana, others through Miami. Some were traveling in groups. Others were traveling alone. Some would head to Las Vegas, some to Phoenix. Some would descend upon Chicago, others on Des Moines. He had a team headed for Montgomery, Alabama. Another was tasked for Jacksonville, Florida, while another was headed for Palm Beach.

  What made his plan so brilliant, thought Daoud, was its inherent flexibility. Each individual was responsible for his or her own targets—malls, restaurants, movie theaters, supermarkets, and the like. They weren’t required to tell him, or even their fellow cell members, exactly where they were headed, unless they wanted to work together to maximize their destructive impact. They weren’t even required to make a final decision on their target package until they got into their assigned city and got the lay of the land.

  It wouldn’t be difficult to find a highly populated and highly vulnerable strike point. Beyond obvious points of entry, U.S. homeland security was a joke. Thousands of miles of borders were Swiss cheese, and once inside the country most sites that attracted crowds—aside from government buildings and major sporting events—had minimal if any security. Why would they?

  Before September 11, 2001, commercial airport security throughout the United States was lax because Americans had never experienced an Islamic kamikaze. They couldn’t envision the magnitude of destruction inflicted upon them by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

  Before November 24, 2010—just last month—private aviation security in the United States was effectively nonexistent. No one getting on a private plane was subject to metal detectors or photo ID checks or bomb-sniffing dogs or security procedures of any kind. Why? Because Americans had never really taken seriously the prospects of a private business jet being hijacked and used on a kamikaze mission. Then Saddam Hussein commenced Op eration Last Jihad, sent fedayeen trained by Daoud Juma to attack the pres idential motorcade outside of Denver International Airport using a Gulfstream IV, and the world had changed forever.

  Now it would change again.

  Americans had never experienced a wave of suicide bombings and sniper attacks on the order Daoud’s Palestinian brethren were inflicting upon the Israelis. Because they’d never seen it happen, they never really believed that it could happen. But they would soon learn. Now Daoud would teach the Great Satan a lesson it would never forget. His men had full authority to switch cities if necessary to maintain operational security. No one but he knew precisely how many fedayeen members were deployed to the United States, and even he would have no idea how many actually got into the country and avoided detection and arrest. The only thing each cell member was encouraged to do, if at all possible, was strike on the same day, or more precisely, the same night.

  New Year’s Eve.

  Just four nights away.

  Yuri Gogolov didn’t like what he was seeing.

  Not all of it.

  True, the gun battles in the West Bank and Gaza were going better than he could have expected. Every television network in the world—except per haps state television in North Korea and Cuba—was showing the carnage nonstop, and there was no question the attacks had caught Washington com pletely by surprise. Moreover, a new scrap of intelligence had just come in from one of Al-Nakbah’s informants in Gaza. The source hadn’t ever given them anything of particular value in the past, but the initial reports, though sketchy and unconfirmed, were tantalizing, to say the least.

  The question was: Were the reports true? Could they actually have stumbled onto the safe house where this Bennett and his team were hiding? It seemed unlikely, but Jibril had convinced him that it wasn’t a possibility they could afford to ignore. Not with the stakes so high and the game so hot. Who knew? Maybe they’d get lucky.

  That said, however, President MacPherson’s speech had been a serious surprise. Gogolov could only admit that to himself, of course. But it was true, and part of being a great chess player meant accepting the state of play as it actually was, not wishing for something that wasn’t. The truth was the grand master had been caught off guard. The Israelis were not on the move. IDF forces were not battling Palestinian forces. Palestinian casualties at the hands of the Jews were not occurring at all, much less mounting rapidly.

  Instead, the American’s speech was winning high marks in every European capital, including Paris and Moscow. The feckless, spineless Mubarak—the faux Pharaoh of Cairo—was actually claiming credit on Radio Monte Carlo and the BBC. It was disgusting, thought Gogolov. Mubarak was telling the world he had personally intervened, demanding that President MacPherson take a hard line toward Doron and keep the Israelis out of the Palestinian territories. And Mubarak was getting away with it.

  All that would have been bad enough. But the problem went deeper than that. Something was rumbling on the “Arab Street.”

  A new Jerusalem Post story quoted Amin Makboul, a senior Fatah official in the West Bank as saying, “The Arab regimes have no credibility. In order to face external challenges, the Arab leaders should give their people freedom and democracy.” Another top Fatah activist, Taisir Nasrallah, told the Post: “The entire Arab order is in urgent need of reconstruction. What happened in Baghdad proves that the Arab order is dying.” Muawiyah al-Masri, a Palestinian legislator, added: “What is needed now is the democratization of the Arab world according to the wishes and aspirations of the Arab masses, and not as a result of American pressure.”

  Such thinking was heresy, but it was bubbling up everywhere. “It is not Saddam Hussein who fell. What collapsed are the big lies that accompanied him, praised him, and glorified him,” declared an editorial in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. “In this war [against the Americans], the Arabs were divided into two groups. One claimed that this is a war of survival, a war for honor, a war against the American conspiracy. Another group—silent either because they are in exile abroad or oppressed within Iraq—knew that this was a war of liberation, a war to rid them of a corrupt, murderous regime which should go out as it came in. It is an historical event for the regime, for which there
is no precedent. All the past wars were wars with Israel or wars of regimes. But this one is the first of its kind. It is a war against the evil Arab situation.”

  Not that Yuri Gogolov cared about the “Arab situation,” evil or otherwise, He wasn’t an Arab. He was a pure-blooded Russian—an ultranationalist, to be more precise, though some called him a fascist. He was proud of who he was and what he believed. He had no love for Saddam Hussein or his regime. It was, after all, he and Mohammed Jibril who sold Saddam the tactical nuclear weapons they’d stolen from Russian stockpiles. It was he and Jibril who persuaded Saddam to launch Operation Last Jihad against NATO and the Israelis. It was he and Jibril who, at the last moment—through Stuart Iverson and several other intermediaries—had tipped off the Americans and the Israelis, triggering a war that left Iraq smoldering. And their plan had worked flawlessly.

  But Gogolov’s mission wasn’t to set in motion a wave of democratic cap

  italism throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Far from it. Gogolov’s vision

  was to restore the glory of Mother Russia, to cleanse her of the capitalist pigs

  who let mafia bosses and prostitutes run rampant in the streets of Moscow

  and St. Petersburg, to make her a force the world not just feared but worshipped.

  To succeed—to reemerge as the world’s only superpower and leave the Americans gasping for oxygen—Russia would need to be purified of President Grigoriy Vadim, the whore who ran the country now. He was driving the country’s economy into the sewer. He was allowing the army to disintegrate for a lack of funding and expansionist missions. He was allowing Russia’s nuclear arsenal to be systematically dismantled. And he was too cozy with the West, with Washington in particular, but also with the Jews. Russia was no longer a superpower. It could barely be considered a world power at all. Indeed, it was in danger of imploding in a thousand ancient ethnic feuds. The festering rebellion in Chechnya was symptomatic of just how feckless the New Russia really was under Vadim’s limp hand. It was time to reverse the decline before it was too late, before Russia was an in ternational laughingstock of bread lines and beggars.

  Reviving the Great Russian Empire would not happen overnight. It would take time, leadership, and luck. It would require assassinating President Va dim, no small venture. It would require mounting a putsch—a coup—against Vadim’s government and the spineless thieves in the Duma. And once Vadim was gone, then things would really get difficult.

  Russia would need hard currency. Massive amounts of hard currency. For that she would need to control the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf. She

  would need to combine this with her own oil and natural gas reserves. She’d need to control warm-water ports in the south, and the shipping lines used to move the oil to all points east and west. That, in turn, would require an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  It was no small undertaking. But it was a goal worthy of their sacrifice. A Russian-Persian axis—a nuclear alliance that was virtually immune from challenge by the United States, NATO, or a newly defanged Iraq—this was precisely the goal for which Gogolov and Jibril were plotting their strategy and making their moves.

  They weren’t in a hurry. They understood full well that there were pieces on the chess board that needed to be moved around before they put the king in checkmate. But they also knew they weren’t simply playing chess against Grigoriy Vadim. They were playing against James “Mac” MacPherson. And now against Jonathan Meyers Bennett. They were up against two idealists, two men infecting the Arab world with Western visions of “free men, free minds, and free markets.”

  And it was clear. They must be stopped.

  Gogolov picked up the telephone and dialed Mohammed Jibril’s private digital cell phone number. It was the wee hours of the morning, too early for either of them. But this could not wait. It was time to counter MacPherson’s move. It was time to get back on the offensive. It was time to force the Israelis to invade the West Bank and Gaza, douse all this talk of freedom and democracy, and reignite the fires of jihad.

  Bennett never heard it.

  The black phone on the desk in Ziegler’s private quarters rang twelve annoying times. But Bennett was still sound asleep on the couch. A disoriented Erin McCoy, startled out of her own nap in the chair beside him, finally managed to grab the receiver on the thirteenth ring. It was Jake Ziegler, calling from the main control room.

  Yes, he was well aware of the fact that it was only 2:19 A.M. Tuesday morning. But back in Washington it was only 7:19 P.M. Monday evening. The president was about to begin another secure videoconference with his National Security Council and he wanted Bennett and McCoy to join them immediately.

  By this point, everyone on the NSC knew what the president was thinking. They knew he was considering sending forces in not just to rescue Ben-

  nett’s team and any DSS agents out there that might still be alive but also end the Palestinian civil war and bring some semblance of order to the dis puted territories. Their staffs were feverishly working on a range of tactical military options, target packages, intelligence needs, and subsequent diplomatic scenarios. But the president knew none of them were ready to talk details yet. This meeting, therefore, was to talk about strategy, not tactics. Specifically, if the United States went in, what geopolitical objectives would they want to achieve? What could they achieve? More to the point, should the United States back any one of the factional leaders now battling it out in the streets of Palestine? Could one of them reasonably be able to become a U.S. partner for peace?

  For this the president turned to Erin McCoy. The president had known McCoy all her life and he trusted her judgment. Over the past thirty-one years, he’d not only watched her grow up, he’d seen her emerge as one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most effective operatives, following in her late father’s footsteps.

  When Erin had graduated as an Arabic specialist from the Defense Language Institute, the MacPhersons flew out to Monterrey, California, to cel ebrate with her. When she’d completed the CIA’s Arab-language undercover training program in Casablanca, they met her in Paris to celebrate at her favorite Moroccan restaurant. When she’d been chosen for the “Bennett as signment,” MacPherson had personally grilled her for hours until he was satisfied beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could handle the job. And now she was all grown up, and he wanted her assessment of the situation. “Erin, there aren’t too many people who have a better idea of what I’m hoping to accomplish and the facts on the ground than you do,” MacPherson began. “So here’s what I need. Give me your take on who could end up replacing Arafat, and if there’s anyone in particular we should get behind, Now, I’m operating under the assumption—based on all of our meetings prior to the trip—that we’re not inclined to trust one of Arafat’s longtime political cronies, be it Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi, or one of the major Fatah leaders. But I don’t really know much about these factional leaders waging the war right now—Dahlan or Rajoub or that other guy.” “Barghouti?”

  “Exactly. I mean, who are these guys? Are any of them are actually capable of making peace when the dust settles?”

  McCoy wasn’t quite sure where to begin.

  She knew the dossiers on these guys inside and out. Ever since the CIA had assigned her to work on Bennett’s team and the Medexco deal began gaining steam, she’d made it her mission to become an expert on all things Palestinian. But the president wasn’t asking for factoids. He was asking for her assessment of their character and their potential for leadership.

  McCoy asked Ziegler for a glass of water, and then began her narrative with the leading “candidate” to succeed Arafat, and perhaps the most powerful man in Palestine at the moment—Mohammed Dahlan.

  Dahlan, she explained, served as head of the Palestinian Preventative Security Forces in Gaza from 1995 through 2002, resigned to go into business and make money for a few years, and then came back into government under Abu Mazen as head of all Palestinian security forces and effectively the �
��Interior Minister,” though he didn’t officially hold that title. Tall, dark, and dashing, with a dazzling smile and closely cropped black hair, Dahlan was married with three children. He was fluent in Hebrew, passable in English, had a huge power base in Gaza and the West Bank, and long fancied himself the rightful heir to Arafat, though he’d made a tactical decision to back Mazen when Arafat appointed Mazen as prime minister back in 2003.

  Born in 1961, in a refugee camp in Gaza, Dahlan began life under the control of the Egyptian government. He was six in June of 1967 when the Israelis won the Six Day War. From that point on, he lived under Israeli occupation and thus began a deep and passionate hatred of the Israelis. As a teenager, he joined Arafat’s Fatah, the armed political base of the PLO, began launching terrorist attacks against the Israeli Defense Forces, and eventually

  rose to become a commander of operations for Fatah. Between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays, Dahlan was arrested ten times by the Israelis, That’s where he learned fluent Hebrew, in Israeli prisons.

  The Israelis’ mistake, McCoy said, was ever letting him go. In 1987, almost as soon as Dahlan got out of an Israeli prison, he became one of the young leaders of the first intifada uprising against Israel. He recruited young people to become terrorist cell leaders. He trained them. He supplied them. Again he was arrested. Again he was released. This time he was deported to Jordan, where he fled to Egypt, then fled to Iraq, then eventually slipped back into the West Bank.

  His rap sheet of terrorist acts went on page after page, and he had an

  unfathomable network of other terrorist factions with which he worked. At