Target America

10

Born in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1962, Nikolai Kashkin was not pure Chechen. His mother had moved from Chechnya in the months before his birth to marry his father, who was a soldier in the Soviet Army. Raised to follow in his father’s footsteps, Nikolai served as a lieutenant in his father’s armored battalion late in the Afghan War.

Their service together was not lengthy. His father was killed in action in the Panjshir Valley during the same battle in which Kashkin himself was taken prisoner along with seventeen other Soviet tankers. His fellow prisoners were summarily executed by Tajik fighters, but because Kashkin was half Muslim, an officer, and the son of a Russian colonel, he was spared until the Mujahedeen warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud could determine his value as a potential hostage. It was during his time as a prisoner of the Mujahedeen in the Afghan village of Bazarak that he first came to truly appreciate his Muslim heritage.

To that point in his life, in keeping with the policies of the Supreme Soviet, his father had forbidden Kashkin to practice any religion at all, while at the same time insisting that Kashkin’s mother keep her own religion private. Kashkin’s father was rarely home during his childhood, however, so his mother had been able to teach him about Islam in secret. Though Kashkin did not grow up a devout Muslim by any stretch of the imagination, he did reach adulthood with an intimate understanding of the Islamic faith, and it was this understanding of his mother’s faith that had saved his life in the Panjshir Valley.

During his meeting with Ahmad Massoud, the warlord spoke with Kashkin about his childhood, questioning him at length about the teachings he had received from his mother. By the end of their discussion, Massoud decided that the young Russian lieutenant was merely a misguided Muslim who had never been given the opportunity to properly allow Allah to come into his life. He then assigned to him a mentor named Orzu Karimov, and over the next eleven months, Karimov taught Kashkin how to walk the enlightened path of Muhammad.

When the fighting finally ended, and the Soviets agreed to leave Afghanistan in 1989, Kashkin was released to return home as a brother Muslim. Shortly thereafter, he and his mother relocated to Grozny, Chechnya, and it was there that Kashkin was exposed to the radical Salafi movement for the first time. Though he had not remained particularly loyal to the Russian army after the fall of the Soviet Union, nor had he bore it any ill will. It was not until his mother was killed by Russian artillery fire during the First Chechen War in the mid-1990s that he first took up the sword against the Russian Federation and, ultimately, all of Western democracy.

Kashkin was now sitting in front of the television in his Las Vegas hotel room watching CNN’s coverage of a so-far-unexplained explosion in southern New Mexico. As the hours passed, word got out that Texas’s Fort Bliss was on a nuclear alert status, and it was reported that a large-scale evacuation was taking place in the city of El Paso, where radiation levels were said to be on the rise. Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border from El Paso, was being evacuated as well, with the population there streaming south, deeper into Mexico. Fortunately, the land east of both cities was largely barren and sparsely populated.

There were no aerial shots provided of ground zero because a strict no-fly zone had been imposed by both governments, which were said to be working closely together in an effort to determine exactly what had happened. By two in the morning Vegas time, the talking heads on all major US news networks were blabbing a hundred words a minute, spouting all the possible worst-case scenarios, and managing to drive the national anxiety level off the charts with half the nation still asleep. A tired Wolf Blitzer of CNN eventually appeared in the wee hours to report that people all across the country were calling friends and relatives in the greatest call volume seen since September 11, 2001.

Kashkin had no way of knowing exactly what had occurred down on the Mexican border, but he was pleased to have chosen Zakayev to carry the second bomb, realizing that Zakayev must have been forced to make a choice between capture and detonation. The fact there had been limited immediate loss of life was a disappointment to Kashkin, but the news wasn’t all bad.

The New York Stock Exchange had announced that it would remain closed for at least the next thirty-six hours, and damaging the Western economy was at least as important as taking Western lives. Westerners were like flies on a manure pile — you couldn’t possibly hope to kill them all. What you could do was devastate their already struggling, interdependent capitalistic economies on both sides of the Atlantic. You could frighten their greedy, corporate-owned governments into imposing more and more restrictions upon their beloved freedoms.

Nuclear terror was the number one way to accomplish this.

Kashkin’s ultimate goal was far more ambitious than taking lives. He wanted to push the United States to the breaking point of its depraved society, steadily applying more and more pressure until Americans were finally killing one another in the streets, burning their own cities to the ground in protest over ever-increasing austerity measures. He did not expect to live to see the end results of his work any more than bin Laden had expected to, but the attacks of September 11, 2001, had taught Kashkin a very important lesson in the war with the West. Bin Laden’s strategy had exposed not only how fragile America’s economy truly was but also, even more importantly, it had exposed the fact that, as went the US economy, so went the economies of the rest of the Western world.

This was the key to defeating them.

Final victory was at last within sight, within the collective reach of the arm of Islam, and all for the cost of a few million wicked American dollars won at a Las Vegas poker table, passed on to a dying old KGB agent wanting to live out his last few months in the South Pacific being pampered by exotic women.

Kashkin switched off the television as the sun was beginning to dawn in the east, opening the drapes to a bright new day. He ran his fingers through a head of gray hair and drew a deep breath to alleviate the tension in his chest over his heart, gazing out at the Luxor pyramid, the Sphinx, and the obelisk, shaking his head with antipathy. What decadence, what an obscenity. The United States had just been attacked with a nuclear weapon, and this city of vice and greed continued to function as though nothing had happened. He felt it fitting that the money he’d used to purchase both RA-115s from Daniel Mulinkov had been won right across the street in the Luxor casino.

He’d been friends with Mulinkov since the Afghan War, and Kashkin had long suspected the KGB man to be in possession of a Cold War suitcase nuke, but Mulinkov had always denied it. “There’s no such thing, Nikolai,” he would say, waving his hand. “There never was.”

Then came the day five months ago when Mulinkov had arrived unexpectedly at Kashkin’s home in Grozny, the whites of his eyes just beginning to yellow, the cancer in his pancreas having spread to his liver. He admitted to being in possession of not just one but two RA-115s, confiding in Kashkin that it had been his responsibility to retrieve them from East Berlin in the final days of the Soviet Union. Very few people in the Soviet government had been privy to the bombs’ existence in those days, so when Mulinkov’s direct superior died of a heart attack while making love to his mistress, there had been no one left alive who knew that Mulinkov was in possession of the weapons. It was in this manner that a pair of two-kiloton nuclear bombs had simply ceased to be.

Kashkin’s cellular phone beeped on the nightstand. He picked it up. “Hello?” he said in English.

“What went wrong?” asked a voice in English with an Arabic accent. “Did one of your stupid couriers make a mistake?”

Kashkin looked at himself in the mirror, his pale blue eyes smiling back at him. “There have been no mistakes, Faisal. Everything is fine.”

“So then you people won’t be bothering me for more money?”

“I don’t think so,” Kashkin lied. “Everything is going according to plan.”

“That’s it then,” the caller replied. “I’m out. Leave me alone.”

The caller hung up without another word, and Kashkin tossed the phone onto the bed.

He was packing his bag a short time later when there came a knock at the door.

It was his nephew Bworz, another blue-eyed Caucasian from the Caucasus. “What happened?” was the first thing he said after closing the door behind him.

Kashkin shrugged, going back to packing his bag. He had important business up in Montana. A request had been made by his AQAP allies living in Windsor, Canada, two brothers named Akram and Haroun al-Rashid. He had met the fundamentalist Wahhabi brothers through his contacts in the Riyad us-Saliheyn Martyrs’ Brigade, and they had arranged for the funding he needed to purchase the RA-115s, asking only a simple quid pro quo in return… to kill an American hero at his own game… on his own soil.

“Obviously something went wrong,” he said. “There’s no point to worry about it. What’s important is that Zakayev did his duty. The bomb did not fall into enemy hands. Your men are protecting the other weapon?”

“Yes,” Bworz said. “We rented the house on the corner… the one you suggested. It’s extremely close to the target.”

“Good.” Kashkin flipped the suitcase closed and buckled it. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m finished in Montana, and we’ll work out the details of our escape.”

Bworz stood staring at him. “I don’t like the idea of you going after Shannon by yourself. He’s dangerous… as dangerous as any the Americans have.”

“I can travel more easily alone.” Kashkin handed him a small blue laptop from the dresser. It was one of two, the only difference between them being the color. “There’s no need for the red one now that the second bomb has been lost.”

“There’s no need for this one either,” Bworz said, tucking the blue laptop under his arm. “We’ve studied the target area in great detail. My men know it by heart.”

“Then be sure to destroy the hard drive before you get rid of it.”

“I will,” Bworz promised. “Have you purchased a rifle for the hit?”

“I found one yesterday at a local gun show,” Kashkin replied. “I had to pay the vendor quadruple his asking price because I’m not a citizen, but it’s a good rifle. The Germans killed many Russians with it during the Great War.”

“A Mauser,” Bworz muttered. “Shannon will have something much better.”

Kashkin hefted the suitcase from the bed to the floor. “The man will never even know I am there. Now take that down to the car for me. I have to pray.”