Читать книгу Hell Night - Don Pendleton - Страница 5

The quiet ambience of the small Parisian café was in direct contrast to the proposed topics of discussion—mass murder and destruction.

Beneath the large shade umbrella on the patio, Benjamin Franklin Davis shifted his chair slightly to block out the setting sun. Behind him, a good-looking Frenchwoman sat on a tall stool, a guitar in her lap, singing a folk song. Although he couldn’t understand the words, Davis listened to her voice. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Davis focused his attention on the café’s door to the patio as his contact arrived. Davis nodded. He would have known the man even if Ibrahim Nasab hadn’t told him he’d be wearing a brown sport coat and an open-collared white shirt. The look in Nasab’s eyes gave him away as a man accustomed to violence.

It was the same look Davis saw in the mirror each morning when he shaved.

Nasab walked to the table and pulled out the chair next to Davis just as the sun sank below the horizon. The woman on the stool continued to strum her guitar, her voice low and husky.

“Do you speak French?” Ibrahim Nasab asked as he settled into his seat.

“I speak English,” Davis almost spit. “The American version. Or I don’t speak at all.”

For a brief moment, Nasab’s eyes filled with hatred, but then the Arab forced a smile. “Then we will speak English,” he said in a thick Middle Eastern accent. “For we have much to discuss.”

Davis nodded. “Indeed we do,” he said. He leaned forward, closer to Nasab so he could lower his voice when he spoke. The odor of some pungent spice filled his nostrils. He was telling himself to ignore it when another pretty Frenchwoman with long brown hair approached their table. She said something Davis couldn’t understand, but Nasab answered for them.

“I have ordered you another cup of American coffee,” the Arab said when she’d left again. “And one for myself.”

Davis nodded, cleared his throat, then glanced around him to make sure no one was paying them any attention. An elderly couple three tables away were the only other patrons on the sidewalk patio, and they hardly looked like potential police or intelligence agents. Davis scanned the office building across the street. Surveillance equipment had become so sophisticated in the past few years that a hidden microphone might be trained on them from any of the windows.

But that wasn’t the case, and he knew it. He had chosen this café at random less than ten minutes ago, and given Nasab the name and address by cell phone. Even if the French or the Americans or the Arabs were on to them, they wouldn’t have had time to get their listening gear set up.

For a moment, the two men sat silently, sizing each other up. Then Nasab asked quietly, “Do you really think this can work?” He had leaned in slightly, too, and if the look on his face meant anything, the movement was as distasteful to him as it had been to Davis. “Our philosophies of life are so very different.”

“Yes,” Davis said. “They are different. But if North Korea can work with Iran and Syria for a common goal, I don’t see why my American Rough Riders and Hamas can’t do the same thing.”

Nasab leaned back in his chair as a gentle breeze began to blow along the sidewalk. The woman on the stool behind Davis continued to sing.

“How do you propose that we join forces?” Nasab asked.

“I see things going down in two parts,” Davis said. “The first part will consist of the same things we’ve been doing separately all along. Bank robberies, random machine-gunnings at shopping malls and other areas where there are lots of easy targets, small bombs and the like.” He glanced at his watch and calculated the time difference between where he sat and Kansas City, Missouri. “Even now, some of my men are preparing to rob a bank later in the day.” He rested his arm on the table. “We’ll make sure everyone knows who it is behind the robbery, and we’ll make sure there are plenty of bodies left at the scene.”

Nasab nodded, then said out loud what all terrorists, the world over, knew in their hearts. “Each death sends horror through a thousand still-beating hearts.”

“That’s right,” Davis confirmed. “And in addition to the strikes you’ve already set up here in Europe, I’d like you to send some of your men to the U.S.” He glanced at the Hamas man’s sport coat, slacks and the rest of his Western attire. “And I’d like them to wear more-traditional Islamic clothing than you have on, if you don’t mind.”

“We can disguise ourselves as Christians and Jews when necessary,” Nasab said. “Won’t robes and headdresses draw attention to us?”

Davis almost burst out laughing. “Of course it will,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we want. It’ll scare the hell out of people, but they won’t get in your way. You’ve heard of political correctness?”

Nasab nodded. “Of course.”

“Well,” Davis went on, “the average American doesn’t know the difference between the Muslim sects, and they’ll be so afraid of offending you that you could probably hide a howitzer under your robe and no one would say anything.” He stopped talking long enough to pull a French cigarette from a crumpled package he’d purchased the day before at a tobacco shop. “They can call it political correctness if they want,” he said as he lit the tip, then cleared his throat. “I call it stupidity. But it’s a stupidity we can use to our own advantage.”

Nasab smiled his understanding.

“We’ll get the anthrax-mail thing going again,” Davis said. “But on a larger scale than whoever did it before. I don’t know who it was, but it was a damn good tactic. I want people afraid to even open their electric bill.”

“That is easily accomplished as soon as my men and I arrive in the U.S.,” Nasab said. “We already have a large supply of anthrax at our disposal. And much of it is already in the possession of our cells in America.”

“Good,” Davis said. “And I want to begin a food-poisoning campaign. It’s easy enough for someone to walk through the fruit-and-vegetable section of any supermarket and inject fresh foods with the poison of their choice.” He stopped talking as the waitress set their coffee on the round metal table. He didn’t open his mouth again until she had turned to go back into the café and was well out of earshot. “Even one death like this’ll make all of America afraid to eat anything that didn’t come out of an airtight can.”

Nasab smiled. “I like the plan so far,” he said. “Then, perhaps once they have quit eating fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and other foods, we can plant men in the canneries. Your Americans will be less suspect than my darker-skinned brethren, and they can poison the canned food, making your countrymen afraid to eat anything.” He paused, chuckled and took a sip of coffee. When he had replaced the coffee cup in its saucer, he said, “And what is the final part of your plan?”

Davis leaned even closer. “Part two?” He grinned. “We attack and destroy the very heart of the American government.” He went on to tell Nasab the exact site, and what he had planned as a joint strike by the Rough Riders and Hamas. “Not as many people will die as they will in the events leading up to it,” he finished. “But just think about the symbolic shock to the United States. No one will ever feel safe again, even in their homes. They’ll know that if we can get in there, we can get in anywhere.”

The smile remained on Nasab’s face. “It will be a true jihad,” he said quietly.

“For you, yes,” Davis said. “I’ve been calling it the Night of Hell. My men are already in America, so they’ll be easy enough to move to the attack sites. You have men in cells all over the country, as well. But I’d like you to start bringing in even more. Through Mexico is always a good way—you’ve proved that. And the Canadian border is still unguarded for the most part. There are dozens of back roads you can take, and no one will even know your men are here. And don’t forget the coasts—both Atlantic and Pacific. One ship pulling up to an isolated spot can off-load hundreds of Hamas operatives.” He paused for a sip of coffee. “You’ll need to bring your own small arms for the most part. If you run short, I can arm some of your men. But I don’t have enough rifles or sidearms for all of Hamas. And we’ll need as many of those suicide-bomb vests of yours as you can smuggle in.”

Nasab frowned. “Your men are going to use them?”

Davis laughed out loud. “Of course not,” he said. “Killing ourselves isn’t quite our thing. But it’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Ibrahim Nasab said slowly, “it is one of the tactics we employ when necessary, yes. And it is a path directly to Paradise.”

“In any case, suicide bombings are what you’re most famous for, aren’t they?” Davis continued. “The World Trade Center and the Pentagon? All your buddy Bin Laden missed that day was the White House with that last flight. And you’ve blown up thousands of people—including the bombers themselves—in smaller ops against Israel and other spots around the world.”

“You expect all of the suicides to come from my men?” Nasab asked.

“Like I said,” Davis replied. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

The Arab forced a smile. “Yes,” he said. “It is what we do. But why stop with the vests? We have small backpack nuclear bombs in our possession. One is all it would take.”

Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I want this to be a surgical strike. Controllable. Besides destroying ninety percent of the United States infrastructure—which we’ll need once we step in and take the reins—a nuke would indiscriminately kill my men, as well as yours.”

An expression of loathing and disrespect curled Nasab’s lips into a frown. “So you do not mind if my men die, only your own?”

“Exactly,” Davis said. “But don’t forget it was you guys wrote the rules on suicide bombings, not us. We don’t do suicide. Or windows.”

The puzzled look returned to Nasab, the joke obviously lost on him.

A long pause followed as the men finished their coffee. Finally, seeing only tiny black grounds in the bottom of his cup, Davis said, “Then it’s decided, right? My American Rough Riders and Hamas will work together for our common goal—the attacks leading up to the big one, and then the one we’re calling the Night of Hell. I’m not kidding myself—it won’t bring the American government completely down. But it ought to drop it to its knees, and from there we may be able to pound it on into the ground.” He started to stick out his hand to shake Nasab’s, then drew it back, remembering whom he was dealing with.

Nasab had almost lifted his own hand. But now he dropped it again. “You have called it the Night of Hell. We have been referring to it simply the American jihad.”

“American jihad,” Davis said. “Night of Hell. Same thing.”

Nasab nodded. “We have one major strike planned right here, tomorrow night in France. It will come the next day after your bank robbery in America, and can serve as one of the attacks leading up to the big night.”

Davis nodded. “We’ve got a few things already planned in the U.S., too. In the meantime, start smuggling your operatives across the border.”

“It is agreed,” Nasab said. “But what are we to do once our joint mission is accomplished?”

Davis stood up, leaving several euros on the table next to his empty cup. Nasab followed him to his feet. “We’ll have to work something out between us,” he said. “But there’s no sense worrying about that now.”

Nasab nodded hesitantly.

Davis could see on the Arab’s face that they were thinking the same thing.

Once the Night of Hell was over, the alliance between them would end. And it would become time for Hamas and the Rough Riders to start killing each other. But that didn’t matter right now. And by the time it did, Benjamin Franklin Davis’s other plan—the one about which Nasab was completely unaware—would have corrected the problem.

“We’ll stay in touch by cell phone,” Davis said as the two men left the sidewalk café and began walking down the street. “My electronics expert has worked on them, and they’re all but untappable.”

“When do we begin?” Nasab asked as they passed a florist’s shop and the pleasant odor of freshly cut spring flowers filled their nostrils.

Davis glanced at his watch. The bank robbery should be well under way by now. “We already have, my friend,” he said. “We already have.”