Walid lowered the helicopter to just a foot above the dam. Ibrahim hopped out, placed the bag in the largest crevice, and set the timer for one minute. Then he climbed back into the chopper and it soared off.
The young Syrian pulled off his sunglasses and looked back. He saw the sun rippling along the top of the water. Birds pecked at the fish, and the sky behind them was unusually clear. Then, in an instant, the tranquility was rudely destroyed.
Ibrahim winced as a yellow-red burst of flame grew quickly from the top of the dam. The sound reached them a moment later and caused the helicopter to shudder. Hasan and Mahmoud also looked back as the long stone expanse folded outward at the center. As it did, it pulled the sides of the sweeping structure with it. The reservoir came cascading over the crumbling top of the dam, swallowing the fireball and turning it to steam. The giant wave disgorged the stones it had swallowed, spilling them over the shattered top of the wall. The flood pushed down the center of the dam in a giant V shape that reached almost to the base. Water poured through the breach, easily brushing aside the ends of the earthen dam and crashing onto the trees below. The steam quickly dissipated as churning white breakers slapped away the control house and carried its shattered remains into the valley beyond.
The sound of the deluge filled the cabin, dwarfing the roar of the rotor. Ibrahim couldn’t even hear his own shout of triumph. He saw but did not hear Mahmoud praise Allah.
As the helicopter raced south over the thundering waters, Hasan suddenly tapped Walid on the shoulder. The pilot half turned. Has an held his hand out, palm down, and swooped it forward. Then he held up two fingers. Two jets were on their way.
Hasan was clearly annoyed. The helicopter had been flying too low to be spotted by radar, and he’d apparently heard no transmisison from the control house radio. Yet somehow the Air Force knew what had happened here.
“I am sorry, my akhooya, my brother!” Hasan shouted.
Walid held up his hand. “We put our trust in the word of God!” he shouted back. “It is written, ‘He that flees his homeland for the cause of God shall find numerous places of refuge.’ ”
Hasan did not appear consoled, though the other members of the team seemed exultant. The mission had been a success and their place in Paradise was secured.
Still, no one was quite ready to give up. As Walid guided the helicopter over the vast, swelling Euphrates, Mahmoud began loading another belt into his cannon. Ibrahim turned to his left to help him. Paradise notwithstanding, they would fight for their lives and for the privilege of continuing to do the work of Allah in this world.
Suddenly, Walid shook his head. “Saa-Hib!” he shouted. “Friend! You will not need that.”
Mahmoud leaned toward him. “Not need?” he yelled back. “Who will do battle for us?”
Walid replied, “He who is the Sovereign of the Day of Judgment.”
Ibrahim looked at Mahmoud. Both men believed in Allah and they had faith in Walid. But neither of them believed that the strong hand of the Lord would reach down and protect them from the Turks.
“But Walid—” Mahmoud said.
“Trust in me!” Walid said. “From safety you will see the sun set.”
As Walid flew on with some purpose in mind, Ibrahim contemplated their chances of surviving. The nearest Turkish Air Force base was two hundred miles to the west. Traveling at maximum cruising speed, the fighter planes—deadly American-made Phantoms, most likely—would be here in about twenty minutes. The helicopter would still be far from the Syrian border. From his Air Force days he knew that each of those jets probably carried eight heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles under each wing. Any one of those rockets would be enough to destroy the chopper long before the jets could be seen or heard. And the Turks would shoot them from the sky rather than let them leave the country.
Still, Ibrahim thought, let the Phantoms come. He looked away from his brother. The Ataturk Dam, the pride of Turkish arrogance, was in ruins. The Euphrates would flow as it did in ancient times, and the Syrians would have more water for their needs. Towns for dozens of miles downriver would be flooded. Villages upriver, which depended upon the reservoir, would be without water for their homes and crops. Government resources in the region would be sorely burdened.
As Ibrahim turned and looked back at the maelstrom, he was reminded of a passage from the Koran:
“Pharaoh and his warriors conducted themselves with arrogance and injustice in the land, thinking they would never be recalled to Us. But We took him and his warriors, and We cast them into the sea. Consider the fate of the evildoers.”
Like the taskmasters of Egypt and the sinners drowned in Noah’s flood, the Turks had been punished with water. Ibrahim was briefly moved to tears by the glory of what had just transpired. Whatever suffering might await him, it could only enhance the sense of holy purpose that filled him now.
TWELVE
Monday, 9:59 a.m.,
Washington, D. C.
Bob Herbert rolled his wheelchair into Paul Hood’s office. “Mike was right as usual,” the intelligence chief said. “The NRO confirms that the Ataturk Dam’s been heavily damaged.”
Hood exhaled tensely. He turned to his computer and typed in a single word: “Affirmative.” He appended this to his emergency Code Red E-mail of 9:47 a.m. which contained Mike Rodgers’s initial evaluation. Then he sent the confirmation to General Ken Vanzandt, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also copied it to Secretary of State Av Lincoln, Secretary of Defense Ernesto Colon, Central Intelligence Agency Director Larry Rachlin, and super-hawk National Security Advisor Steve Burkow.
“How close is the ROC to the affected region?” Hood asked.
“They’re about fifty miles to the southeast,” Herbert said. “Well out of the danger zone.”
“How well is well?’ ” Hood asked. “Mike’s idea of a buffer zone isn’t the same as other people’s.”
“I didn’t ask Mike,” Herbert said. “I asked Phil Katzen. He had experience with the great Midwest flood of 1993 and he did some quick computations. He says that within the fifty miles there’s a good fifteen-to-twenty-mile cushion. Phil figures the Euphrates will rise about twenty feet straight down through Syria to Lake Assad.That won’t hurt the Syrians much, since a lot of that area is seasonally dry as toast and deserted. But it’s going to flood out a lot of Turks who live in villages around the river.”
Darrell McCaskey arrived as Herbert was speaking. The slim, forty-eight-year-old former FBI agent, now interagency liaison, shut the door behind him and leaned quietly against it.
“What do we have on the perpetrators?” Hood asked.
“Satellite reconnaissance showed a Turkish 500D leaving the site,” Herbert said. “Apparently, it was the same helicopter stolen from the border patrol earlier in the day.”
“Where’s it headed?” Hood asked.
“We don’t know,” Herbert said. “There’re a pair of F-4s looking for the chopper now.”
“Looking for it?” Hood said. “I thought we had it on satellite.”
“We did,” Herbert said. “But sometime between one picture and the next it disappeared.”
“Shot down?”
“Nope,” Herbert said. “The Turks would’ve told us.”
“Maybe,” Hood said.
“All right,” Herbert agreed. “Even if they didn’t, we’d have spotted the wreckage. There’s no sign of the helicopter for a radius of fifty miles from the last place it was seen.”
“What do you make of that?” Hood asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Herbert said. “If there were any caves in the area which were large enough, I’d say they flew right in and parked it. We’re still looking, though.”
Hood was annoyed. He wasn’t like Mike Rodgers, who enjoyed putting clues together and solving mysteries. The banker in him liked information orderly, complete, and now.
“We’ll find the chopper,” Herbert added. “I’m having the last satellite photograph analyzed to get the exact speed and direction of the 500D. We’re also running a complete study of the area’s geography. We’ll try to find a place like a cave or canyon where a helicopter could hide.”
“All right,” Hood said. “In the meantime, what do we do about the ROC? Just leave it?”
“Why not?” Herbert asked. “It was designed for on-site reconnaissance. You can’t get any more on-site than this.”
“That’s true,” Hood agreed, “but I’m more concerned about security. If this attack is a taste of things to come, the ROC is relatively vulnerable. They’ve only got two Strikers covering four open sides.”
“There’s also a Turkish security officer,” McCaskey added.
“He seems like a good man,” Herbert said. “I checked him out. I’m sure Mike did too.”
“That’s three people,” Hood said. “Just three.”
“Plus General Michael Rodgers,” Herbert said respectfully, “who is a platoon unto himself. Anyway, I don’t think Mike would let himself be evacuated now. This is the kind of thing he lives for.”