Let’s nuke New York

The first man to dismount was short and slim but carried himself with the erect posture of a military man. The second visitor had a rather melancholy expression, and a neatly trimmed moustache.

Osama rushed to greet both men. From the warmth of their embraces, Mugniyeh understood instantly that they were close and dear friends, that the hugs they exchanged were not ritual gestures but the manifestations of deep and genuine affection.

Osama led the pair to Mugniyeh to introduce him. The shorter man was Major General Habib Bol, the former commander of Pakistan’s elite ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence, the secretive organisation whose responsibilities included safeguarding the storehouses in which the warheads of Pakistan’s nuclear force were hidden. His name, if not his face, were familiar, indeed, to the Lebanese terrorist.

What Mugniyeh did not know, of course, was that Bol was considered by the CIA to be the most dangerous man in Pakistan. And yet, for 10 years, Bol had fought with courage and determination alongside the CIA’s operatives in their war against the Russians in Afghanistan. They had baptised him the ‘‘BLG’’ — Brave Little General — for both his size and his valour in battle.

BUT for Bol, his American colleagues had become the ultimate betrayers in October 1990 when, with the Red Army defeated, the US government had imposed sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear programme, a programme to which the US had firmly closed its eyes during the decade in which Pakistan’s cooperation in fighting the Russians in Afghanistan was essential.

To one of those colleagues, Bol had become like ‘‘a woman scorned’’, so Bol’s fury at his former allies had no limits. His son, with CIA help, had been enrolled at Texas A&M and Bol promptly pulled him out. No son of his was going to be schooled in a university of the Great Satan.

He quit the ISI and joined the Islamic Extremist movement, the UTN, the Umma Tameer e-Nun, the Reconstruction of the Muslim Umma. Under its screen, he had organised a series of clandestine cells composed of ISI officers, including some whose responsibilites were guarding the nation’s nuclear arms.

The second man was Abdul Sharif Ahmad, a brilliant nuclear physicist. Mugniyeh recognised his name instantly. Together with a colleague, Abdul Khader Khan, he was recognised as the man responsible for building Pakistan’s atomic bomb, a kind of Pakistani Einstein.

Dr Strangelove? Meet jihad

OSAMA led them into the cave where a meagre but well-intentioned welcoming banquet awaited them. Mugniyeh could not suppress a smile at how tidy, how well ordered the cave now was, compared to the chaos he’d noted on his arrival. The notebooks, cartridge clips, computer discs had all been packed away and kerosene lamps, not candles, illuminated the place.

Osama, ever the good host, waited until his guests had eaten and mint tea and coffee had been served, before formally opening their discussion.

‘‘My brothers,’’ he said ‘‘I asked you to join me here today because I firmly believe the time has come for our jihad to rise above the guerilla tactics we have employed in the past. Brave martyrs driving trucks filled with high explosives into the barracks and embassies of the Indfidel, the markets of the Jews, placing bombs in the discotheques of their decadent youths, even flying jets into the skyscrapers of the Great Satan, were acts of courage and nobility, but we must escalate our struggle now to a new dimension.’’

‘‘Today,’’ he continued ‘‘the jihad must employ those very weapons the Infidel’s scientists developed to impose their rule on our universe. The Americans are embarked on a war of extermination against the peoples of the umma, our Islamic community. Look at what they did to Iraq. Look at how they help the Jews enslave our brothers in Palestine. And what have our leaders done? Nothing!’’

He sighed as if to underscore the enormity of that failure. ‘‘The Koran ordered us to give Muslims the strongest means of defence. Our leader’s failure to do so is an act of treason, a rebellion against the very injunction of Allah. I say let this (George W.) Bush suffer the horrible punishment of God for what he has done. We must take revenge upon him. We must strip him of his sense of security and stability.’’

Osama paused, took a sip of his coffee, a calculated, dramatic hiatus as he drew towards the climax of his little oration. ‘‘Thanks to the inspired work of our great brother Abdul Sharif Ahmad and his respected colleague Dr Abdul Khader Khan, the Sword of God is ready to be placed in our avenging hands. Ahmad and I have spoken often of this. He believes, as do I, that the bombs hidden in our arsenals in Kahuta are not Pakistani bombs. They are Islamic bombs.

‘‘They belong to the community of the Faithful, the umma. They must become the weapons of we, the wretched weak, to use against the powerful tyrants. Is that not so, dear friend?’’ Ahmad nodded solemnly.

‘‘Osama,’’ injected the ISI’s ex Major General Habib Bol ‘‘our missiles, perfected thanks to our North Korean friends, can deliver our atomic warheads to Madras but not Washington. We do not possess the missiles or the aircraft that can threaten America.’’

‘‘But,’’ protested Osama ‘‘surely our nuclear arms can destroy their brothers in Israel, can they not?’’

‘‘Of course, they could do that,’’ Bol agreed. ‘‘Our newest missiles can reach Israel with no problem at all.’’

‘‘My brothers.’’ It was Ahmad. ‘‘I agree with Osama when he says ours is an Islamic bomb, not a Pakistani bomb. When Prime Minister (Zulfikar Ali) Bhutto first asked me to work on it in a secret meeting in his office in December 1974, I immediately saw it as an Islamic bomb, not as did he, as a means of defending ourselves against Indian aggression. I thought ‘the Americans have the bomb. The Jews have the bomb. The Chinese have the bomb. Why is it we, the Muslims, are the only people forbidden to have it?’

‘‘Today, thanks in large part to my work, we now have 47 bombs in our nuclear arsenals. Certainly, we could fire six of them on Israel and feel sure at least three would reach their targets, Israel is geographically a very small nation and three bombs would destory it, leaving us all the arms we need to defend ourselves against India.’’

Smiles came about as often to Osama bin Laden’s ascetic features as snow does to the tropics, but those words brought a radiant regard onto them. ‘‘There, my brothers’’ he said ‘‘is our answer.’’

‘‘No,’’ Ahmad replied ‘‘it is not. Israel’s ncuclear force is larger than ours, larger then India’s, larger even than England’s. Most of their bombs are fitted onto their Jericho missile in hardened underground silos in the Judean Hills. They will survive our attack. Our bombs may kill three million Isaraelis but some will have lived to fire those missiles on us. They will eradicate our nation and kill 40 million of us. I built my Islamic nuclear bomb to defend our nation, not to destroy it.’’

ISI hand, card of death

“No one in this cave loathes the Americans more than I do,’’ declared General Bol, the ex ISI officer, branded Pakistan’s most dangerous man by the CIA, ‘‘but as a soldier I understand and accept Ahmad’s position. That is not the way to use the great weapon he and his fellow scientists have put at our disposal.’’

‘‘Then what is?’’ Osama bin Laden asked.

‘‘Are you are aware, my brother, of the clandestine organisation I have created inside the officer’s ranks of the ISI, ‘Fighters for Islam’, men who share our ideals and realise, as do you, the need for jihad in these terrible times?’’Osama nodded.

‘‘When the Americans set out to destroy the Taliban, that traitor (Pervez) Musharraf sold our country to them for their war. At the same time, he took our nuclear devices from their storehouse in Kahuta and dispensed them to six new, secret locations.

‘‘One of them is not far from here. The ISI officer in charge is one of my Fighters for Islam. So, too, is the officer in charge of the facility in Chasma, where the detonation sets are kept.’’

Bol reflected for a moment on what he was about to say. ‘‘Perhaps I can convince the officer in charge at Tikrim Mir to let us spirit a device out of his facility, in the middle of the night. He will see that nothing in the records indicates it has gone. We will take it to a location near Chasma where we can secretly equip it with a detonation test. Surely you, with your international network and skills, can find a way to smuggle it to an appropriate target somewhere in America where we can detonate it right in the Great Satan’s heart.

‘‘The Americans will not know where it came from, so they will not be able to retaliate against us because they won’t know who to retaliate against or where to strike.’’

A glimmer of understanding flickered on Osama bin Laden’s face as he glanced towards Ahmad. The scientist displayed no emotion. Ahmad, as bin Laden knew, was a man who loved poetry and flowers, but hopefully, his hatred of the Americans was such that killing a million or so amongst them with one of his bombs would not disturb him.

He looked next across the carpet to Mugniyeh. ‘‘I am sure that amongst your followers are brave young men who crave death so that eternal life will be given unto them as martyrs. Men who, with the help of my organisation and our knowledge of interanational customs and travel regulations, would be prepared to deliver this weapon to the land of the Great Satan.’’

At his words Mugniyeh’s thoughts went to the horrors of the Ain el Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. It was, by far, the most horrible of those horrible camps, a sinkhole festering with hatred and despair, where hope was an illusion, not a promise.

‘‘Yes, my brother, and they will be people who can speak fluent English and glide among the Americans as one of them, believers who have spent their lives studying and preparing for the opportunity God has never given them — until now. May I ask how large this device will be?’’

Bomb in the dishwasher

OSAMA looked at Ahmad. Although very few people knew it, he, like Dr Khan, was a member of an extremist movement called Laskar-e-Tibi, Soldiers of the Cause, an organisation closely allied to Osama’s Al Qaeda.

‘‘Not large at all,’’ Ahmad said after a moment’s reflection. ‘‘What I could do is go to Chasma where no one will be surpised, of course, to see me. General Bol and I will find an appropriate place where I can connect the bomb to its detonation device.

‘‘I think that what we must do is marry the detonation system to a mobile telephone of which you, brother Osama, will have the number. I can set the detonator so that it will only activate the bomb in response to a telephone call to that number. That way no matter what happens, the bomb will not explode unless the secret number has been called.’’

‘‘The entire device,’’ he concluded ‘‘will weigh somewhat more than 50 kg — 100 pounds. I will pack it into a large wooden crate like the kind that would contain, for example, a dishwashing machine. You will be able to transport it without difficulty, on camel’s back.’’

Osama and Mugniyeh listened, fascinated, indicating their approval of the scheme with enthusiastic nods of their heads. The idea of moving an atomic bomb by camel’s back was intriguing but before they could question it, Bol spoke up.

Annihilate America, via Jaisalmer

“BRAVO,’’ he declared. ‘‘But shipping the bomb directly to Karachi to put it on a US bound freighter would present us with a double risk. The first is that between Chasma and Karachi it might somehow be intercepted by CIA agents or Pakistani police in their way. From that, the second risk — the Americans would then be able to determine that the bomb came from our stores and that would be a catastrophe.

‘‘We must make sure that until the bomb is on a ship bound for the US, it stays as much as possible on Indian soil. Since the border crossings between our two nations are all officially closed, we must pass the bomb in one of the smugglers’ camel caravans that regularly slip across the Rajasthan desert. Those smugglers pay off the police on both sides of the border and nobody ever bothers them. All we need to do is have a team of Al Qaeda men meet them in Jaisalmer.’’

‘‘And after Jaisalmer?’’ asked Mugniyeh whose knowledge of Indian geography was limited.

‘‘From there, my men will take over. They will be responsible for finding a way to smuggle it into the United States. If, by any ill chance, the Americans somehow manage to find it, they’ll blame the Indians, not us.’’

‘‘Where do you propose to explode it?’’ Ahmad asked Osama.

‘‘I would like to see it placed in New York. New York is the symbol of everything we all loathe in America, their power, their greedy, grasping hands strangling us financially, their corrupt, decadent television an entertainment industry. And, after all, there are more Jews in New York than there are in Tel Aviv.

‘‘You told me in Kabul that the most awesome aspect of a nuclear explosion in the heart it generates, killing people for miles around the blast, setting thousands of fires. So be it. Let us burn New York. Reduce that evil citadel to ashes with the scourge of fire.’’

Plan B. Blackmail

“SIDI — sir’’ It was Mugniyeh who had found himself assigned a far greater role than he had imagined possible when he had voyaged to Osama’s secret hideaway. ‘‘May I make a suggestion?’’

‘‘Of course.’’

‘‘What will detonating the bomb in a great American city achieve for our cause?’’

‘‘It will tell the Americans one thing — what you have suffered until now was only the initial skirmishing. Now, the real battle has started.’’

‘‘No, my brother, it will only lead the Americans to seek blind and brutal vengeance against Muslims. The hate 9/11 inspired will seem mild in comparison.

‘‘I have learned one thing in the operations I have conducted, beginning with the bombing of the US marine barracks in Lebanon. To be effective, an operation must have a very precise objective. In Beirut, my ambition was to drive the Americans from Lebanon. It suceeded. When (Ronald) Reagan saw how many of his beloved marines had died, he fled.’’

‘‘So what would you propose? That we tell the Americans they must force their Isaraeli allies to leave our Dar el Islam — Islamic lands — forever?’’

‘‘No. That would never work. Israel is not going to commit suicide. We must choose an objective that we can hope to achieve. Suppose we tell the Americans the bomb will explode in New York or Washington or Chicago in a week, if you do not force the Israelis to promise publicly before the entire world that they will leave all the illegal settlements that they have installed on the land seized from our Palestinian brothers in 1967?’’

Six million Americans. One mad mission

HE sat back to sample reactions to his words. ‘‘That is something we could realistically hope to achieve. All the world, even the American people themselves, see the terrible injustice those settlements represent. Everyone, except the fanatics in Israel, will support our just demand. And if six million Americans die, it will be the Israelis’ fault, not ours.’’

Bin Laden turned to General Bol. ‘‘What do you think as a military man? And also as someone who knows so well how our nuclear arms are stored. Could we smuggle one out? Is such a plan really possible?’’

Bol streched out on his carpet and closed his eyes in thoughtful concentration. ‘‘Yes,’’ he said, on opening them. ‘‘I think it is possible. It will take some time because it must be done in total secrecy, but I know which of my Fighters for Islam I can count on to help us.’’

‘‘Brilliant!’’ Osama said. ‘‘Our Islamic nuclear bomb will bring justice to our brothers in Palestine, at last. In a way the whole world can accept and understand. How can the Americans do anything but agree?’’