Suicide Bomber

By Burt Keimach

What can happen following 9/11 when suicide bombers are blowing themselves up. An exciting story with a gripping end. Where will you and family be when the next suicide bomber decides to blow himself up? Suicide bombers still believe fervently that they will enter Paradise by ending their earthly lives and killing 'infidels'. The tale is about the life of a young member of a Hamas Battle Cell. It details the deeply religious and historical rationale for his creed, going back to the time of the infamous hashish-driven 'Assassins' of early Islam, and leading him eventually to the target in the USA that is his objective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244414634

Book preview

Suicide Bomber

SUICIDE  BOMBER  by Burt Keimach

ISBN 978-0-244-41463-4

Copyright © 2018 by Burt Keimach All rights reserved

PROLOGUE

From the top of a brown dusty stronghold known as Alamut, the Eagle's Nest, the Old Man of the Mountain ordered deeds of darkness, mayhem, and terror.  High on hashish, his ultra loyal young devotees became the assassins as they harried and murdered all those who bucked the Ismaili way of salvation.

Hassan-i-Sabah lay back on his couch and stretched his legs.  He liked to reflect on a long career devoted to a cause that many said was just terror for its own sake. But the musings of shrill lesser brains never managed to deter him from what he was sure was really the new propaganda -- a way to achieve lasting freedom from doctrine, prophets, and all the constraining forces of those who would seek to control the righteous and the pure in spirit.

Sitting in his aerie at more than 10,000 feet high, his perch in the Alborz Mountains in the remote region of Persia near the Caspian Sea, Hassan was still not weary of the struggle. He gazed with pleasure at his abundantly lush green flower bedecked garden haven. Taking deep breaths of pleasure as he sipped a mint tea, he smiled and remembered that before his transformation of it, the spot where he was now had been nothing but a bare Spartan-like camp. It was no more than a daunting, stone-strewn plateau replete with thorn bushes and with only a single trickle of water oozing out from under a pile of heavy, jagged boulders. The old leader also recalled with satisfaction how the security of Alamut as he had conceived and devised it, had enabled his cohorts to carry out the thousands of assassinations he had ordered over the years. Yes, he thought, how hard and successfully he had worked to convert young stalwarts to his cause.

But it was the nature of the Eagle's Nest, the physical structure itself, and what he had made of it that was the vital key to his success. Hassan regarded his unique fortified compound as at least, if not even more important than the drugged and brainwashed legions he had directed on their intense and dangerous missions of violence and destruction.

The first thing he did when he arrived at the rocky outcrop so long ago was to renovate the castle itself. This entailed painstakingly improving the fortifications and the all-important water supply system. The visual camouflage to the approaches was also meticulously conceived so that it deceived the enemy by adding to the legend of a breath-takingly-beautiful Paradise. When after much laborious digging he had finally found more water springs, Hassan then built up the life-giving irrigation network in the barren region, ensuring that thousands of trees and abundant crops flourished. This eye-catching scene in the midst of a virtual desert seemed to advancing legions of attackers to be a true oasis. The merest sight of it from afar and from near helped feed the legend that Hassan had found Paradise. Potential besiegers had to trudge wearily all the way from Isphahan, their last outpost, and pitch their tents at the foot of the all but impregnable Nest. Failing time after time, army followed army in their frustrated efforts to capture the prize of Alamut. In their profound frustration over the years because of their repeated failures to dominate the stubborn defenders in the lofty fortress, legends and myths piled helter-skelter one on top of the other. Hassan readily seized upon them and did not discourage their spread among the eagerly devouring masses in order to weave his own mystique from which inevitably sprang his insurmountable magical dominance.

Truly now as the Grand Master of the secretive sect, Hassan genuinely accepted that he was actually descended from the ancient Himyarite kings of southern Arabia. Believe nothing and dare all and therefore gain freedom, he told fida'i, the self-sacrificers, his destroying angels, as he urged them to use their youthful strength and power to attain timeless wisdom through violence.

His technique was actually quite simple.  The best and most intense of his recruits would be induced to take a potent mixture of hashish, and while asleep would be carried into a lush garden.  Hours later when they awoke surrounded by young women and delicacies for the palate, and calmed by the steady sound of bubbling water, they believed they were in Paradise.  Then he could tell them anything and they would believe him.  All is false.  Only I, the Imam, and what I tell you is true.  This method had been working well now for more than half a century.

Hassan's limpid, dark brown eyes sparkled as he remembered his greatest coup.  It was back in 1092 when he plunged the entire Muslim world deep into terror with the assassination of the powerful Seljuk Minister, Nizam al-Mulk.  With the demise of the Fatimids in Egypt, the Seljuks wanted their own puppet on the throne, but the true Ismailis insisted on Nizar, the son of the last Caliph.  When they failed, those in the east, in Persia, the home of Islam's true Shia insurgents rebelled, giving Hassan his first platform for dissension.

Hassan cracked the knuckles of his long fingers as he stood and looked out from his terrace onto the mountains below.  He smiled with deep contentment recalling how he convinced his young men to become destroying angels.  He would first throw them into doubt about everything they had ever learned before.  He made them query all previous teachings, forcing question after convoluted question into their tired brains.  This confusion technique made them more and more dependent on him as their Grand Master, and on his chosen deputies, the Grand Priors who ruled conquered districts.  The young fida'i fell into line, and often when they had inklings of doubt about the new teachings, Hassan promised and they believed that even if they were killed he would send his cohorts to carry them back into Paradise.

When Hassan died his successors carried on and a contingent of them even moved to the steep precipices of Syria.  There under Rashid, another true Old Man of the Mountain holding sway over the sect from his fortress in the redoubt of Masyad, they gained even more control over towns and castles in a frenzied drive for revenge over the rest of Islam's perpetually feuding divisions. In their minds this was payback time for deeds that were shrouded in the shadows of the seventh century rejection of Ali for the Caliphate  -- acts whose details were hazy as the ideas of terror for the sake of terror became uppermost.  For the Ismaili doctrine was essentially one of rebellion and rejection of the ruling order.

They ceaselessly harassed the Crusaders and thus petrified Europe. The fear from the very whisper of their dreaded name was intensified everywhere when even the legendary Saladin failed to break the back of the drug crazed murderers who never hesitated to pay the ultimate price when necessary. They wielded their daggers and swords remembering always Hassan's promise of Paradise no matter what happened.  So successful were they that their fume-inspired name, the Assassins, the hashish takers, in time found a place in every language of the world.

It finally took the might of the Sultan Baybars in the West and no less a personage than Hulagu, the grandson of Ghengis Khan in the East to smash the gangs and destroy Alamut and Masyad.

But more than just their name remains in the Middle East today.  From similar shadowy minds and secretive strongholds deep in the twisted alleys and cobbled streets of the West Bank and Gaza there has been a rebirth of an age-old unstoppable assault -- the suicide, the martyr, the payer of the ultimate price!Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother?Malachi II, 10 He who slays anyone shall be as though he has slain all of mankind, but he who saves a life, shall be as though he has saved all mankind alive. The Holy Qur'an, 5:35We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we in agreement; for we have made lies our  refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves. Isaiah XXVII, 15

CHAPTER1

The dark ones dumped him far from his village of Bira outside Ramallah.  They took him down the gradually descending old road beside the Wadi Qilt further and further eastward where the land was drier and rockier with each passing mile as it sloped towards Jericho and the lowest point on the face of the earth.  Nawaf Husseini was shaking like an olive about to fall to the ground in the harvest as he was seized with rough but respectful hands and coaxed out of the car. After all, he was a Husseini, a member of the most ancient and honourable hamula or clan in the entire West Bank.

The four dark ones knelt with him on prayer rugs they had brought. They all reverently faced Mecca hundreds of miles to the south deep in the sand-locked oil bearing wastes of Arabia. The great Holy City with its sacred Kaaba was beyond even Eilat and Aqaba and the coral reefs of the Red Sea. These were places Nawaf had heard about and could only vaguely imagine.

As they knelt, Nawaf could feel the sharp stones under the carpets, and began to chant in unison the verses praising the greatness and uniqueness of Allah.   Then all five men raised their heads and repeated the well-rehearsed Suras exhorting jihad, or holy struggle and the warnings that infidels were evil and dwelt outside Islam in the House of War.  And although Jews and Christians were Peoples of the Book, the Prophet said they were just like infidels and could be slain with impunity if they angered the True Believers in the House of Islam, the House of Peace.

During his months of training for his mission, Nawaf believed with all his heart that the Jews were evil, and that they had not only stolen his family's house and land, but had invaded the House of Peace of his people, and had usurped part of the Arab nation.  They had to be destroyed, and he was to be one of the blessed instruments of that goal.

Here at the mouth of the Wadi Qilt, he could see Jericho, the oldest city in the world just beginning to shimmer in the already hot morning sun.  Nawaf could imagine the central square filled with fruit and vegetable stalls and the mayor strutting out among the vendors and customers as he made his way to the newly built offices of the PA, the Palestinian Authority. Maybe as he passed stalls laden with ripening bananas grown nearby in the lush oasis lands of the River Jordan, this typically self-inflated mayor imagined himself as the great Caliph Hisham on his way to his new palace. That Eighth Century Omayyad built his version of the PA, which he called Khirbet el-Mafyar. But the unforeseen danger in those far off times was not political, but geological. In the space of less than twenty years an earthquake destroyed the whole edifice. More than 1200 years were to pass before modern archaeologists pushed away the sand dunes and uncovered the fallen remains of the once grand structure.

As the sun rose higher Nawaf was jolted back to reality and suddenly felt a hat being placed upon his head and heard whispered instructions in his ear. No, Jericho was not where he would be going today.  His destination, his test, would be a twenty-mile walk up the wadi in the increasing heat of a cloudless summer sky. He would ascend more than 3000 feet and leave the humidity of the festering market town near the shore of the Dead Sea. He would spend many hours plodding doggedly in the dust over boulders and sharp rocks flash floods had thrown down the whole length of the wadi, on this test of courage and conviction. Near the steepest parts of the wadi he was thankful that he could finally leave it for smoother ground near Ain Fara. Then with his shoes all but torn to shreds, he tottered exhausted to the boundary of the airport site at Anata. At last he was perched on the edge of Al Quds, the Holy City of Jerusalem itself where he was already being rewarded with the cooling breezes of dusk and the feeling that he would now surely enter Paradise. He hoped that at journey's end he would send many infidels to an eternity of misery.

Impeding his progress was the disproportionately heavy belt.  It was no more than an old cartridge holder with ten little bags designed to hold bullets for a long dead British soldier in the Western Desert.  But his Grand Master had directed the four dark ones to pack it with explosives -- ammonium nitrate laced with fuel oil, which could be set off by pulling a short string, attached to a Primadet detonator cap. This was what the American infidels called a fertiliser bomb.  It was 2000 pounds of this stuff that had been packed into 50 gallon plastic barrels and parked outside the Federal Building in Oklahoma City that had proved so effective.

Nawaf knew that what he carried over his shoulder and would later conceal around his waist under his trousers covered with his shirt would work when he pulled the string.  But as the sun rose and he climbed higher and higher, leaving the worst sections of the Wadi Qilt behind, he began to think of his mother Ayesha.  He felt guilty that he had lied to her about where he was going, and about where he had been spending the many afternoons he should have been at school preparing for his entrance to Bir Zeit University.  Nawaf could still see her bent over the vegetable cutting board.  Still lithe and pretty even after bearing six children during the past twenty-two years, she hardly seemed to hear his lies, but Nawaf sensed her rumbling suspicions.  In the presence of his father Abu Samir, Ayesha would not dare to open her doubting mouth to her second son.  She bent over her vegetables avoiding the glances of her husband as Nawaf stepped out of the front door into the narrow alley in front of the house.  As the car pulled up to take him away, she looked up only briefly, but sensing the penetrating eyes of Abu Samir, returned abruptly to her work.

Nawaf strained and could feel his heart beating as the sweat poured from his pores soaking his clothes but not penetrating the heavy British canvas of the vital pouches on the belt.  Finally he could see the twinkling lights of the city he knew well from boyhood school trips and from monthly visits with his father who haggled with the market traders as he delivered the finely tailored trousers and jackets he had spent hours crafting in the small mezzanine above the family kitchen. On those days the little boy would be allowed to roam the Old City streets of the Muslim Quarter and compare the myriad alleys lined with shops to the relatively scant offerings of Ramallah and Bira. As the years passed following June 1967, Israeli soldiers were becoming scarce on the ground as a lull set in the long wake of the war.  Only a few Arab policemen still wandered about and casually chatted with shopkeepers.  But following the first intifada uprising of 1989, and now in the middle of a second far bigger uprising, scarcely a corner or square did not have some Israeli presence infesting the pavement, he thought.  Mostly they were the Arabic speaking Druze, the traitors of the Muslim world who would serve even the Jew if it suited them.  Nawaf hated the swaggering Border Patrol Arabs from Druze villages of the Galilee with their telltale green berets, and regarded them as worse than Jews and Christians. They were filth and fully deserved to be sent to hell.  But as he looked at the shining golden dome of the Mosque of Omar, the Haram esh-Sharif, he sensed a niggling around his throat that was more than just a casual anxiety.  He wanted to burn in the memory of the Arab nation forever, and maybe there was some better way to do that than to simply pull a string and destroy himself merely to send a few unbelievers to hell

Nawaf walked boldly into the Old City with his belt securely hidden round his middle.  He knew that sections of the Muslim Quarter had been torn down to create a vast plaza in front of the Western Wall.  He boiled with anger when he thought of the displacements of old residents who had lost their homes.   There would be whole streets now unfamiliar to him with their new buildings and houses built for ultra orthodox Jews who wanted to live cheek by jowl with the site of Solomon's ancient Temple. But he was sure he would still be able to find the house he was seeking and where it was planned he would spend the night before setting out early in the morning to carry out his mission.

He headed for a small alley just off Chain Street and knocked on the heavy iron door beside a wide closed roll-down shutter of the adjacent shop. Opening the door was a short, corpulent man with a full grey beard, tired brown eyes, and short, stubby hair on his head.  He was wearing a dirty blue shirt which hung out where it wasn't tucked in over baggy blue trousers held up by what appeared to be a frayed rope.  But the eyes, tired though they seemed, looked intensely and furtively up and down the alley as a strong hand grabbed Nawaf around the wrist and pulled him quickly inside.

You are late, said the man as he quietly closed the heavy door.

I came as fast as I could, Nawaf answered, looking around at the shabby, unkempt room.

It is not easy walking 20 miles up the Wadi Qilt, and my feet…

Quiet, insolent one.  We are not alone, cautioned the man abruptly.

But there is no one else in the room, Nawaf protested.

The Jews are everywhere.  Their spies have big ears, and their mouths have the gift of tongues.  They are a clever foe, and they will not hesitate to kill us if they knew what you were about to do, the man said.

How do you know what is planned?  No one is meant to have that information.  I was told I was to stay with you and that no one, absolutely no one in all of Jerusalem would have the vaguest idea that…

Quiet you fool!  I told you the Jews have big ears.  They will stick a sword up your rear and fry you for breakfast.  Do I look stupid?  he warned, dropping his voice to a whisper.

You think I'm just a shopkeeper bribed or intimidated by the Hamas or the Nidal people into hiding you for a night, he continued, sitting down on a rickety straight-backed wooden chair.

I was once a custodian in the Haram esh-Sharif.  I have as much knowledge about you as I have about the holy site.  Like Muhammad you too are to go on a journey and will ascend to the seven heavens and then return to Mecca, and then….

Nawaf listened to him ranting on about Abraham's rock of Moriah, and that was why it was called the Dome of the Rock when it was built by Abd el-Malik at the end of the seventh century.   But he knew all that history, learned well at the feet of his Grand Master in the lurking presence of the dark ones as he was prepared for his mission over many months.

Nevertheless he remained politely quiet in the small room standing before his seated host.  But suddenly his attention was riveted again.

I said I know all about you too, Nawaf Husseini, the agitated old man explained, gesturing for him to sit in an equally unstable chair opposite.

I know which part of the clan your family comes from.  And I know the names of your parents and your brothers and sisters. I know too what you were taught, and that your mission has great meaning.  It is important not only for what it will accomplish, but for what it will mean to Allah. There is a hidden interpretation to everything we do, another level of understanding you feel when you begin to see the signs behind the numbers and the letters of the commands….

Here Nawaf became lost in a train of thought that baffled him.   It was something like the old Ismaili notions of the Assassins that he only vaguely heard about during the long months of his indoctrination. There was a word.  What was it?  Neo-Platonism?  Meanings behind the obvious meant only to be fathomed by an enlightened elite?  No, rubbish! What nonsense this old fat fool was talking.  He wanted to sleep but the fat one, who said his name was Abdul Rais, waffled on and on, oblivious to Nawaf's drooping eyelids.

I know that you will go out of the Old City tomorrow by the Jaffa Gate and will walk normally all the way up the Jaffa Road to the huge Jewish market  --- Mahane Yehuda.  By mid morning it will be crowded with greedy, greasy Jews buying squawking chickens and gutted fish, fat tomatoes, and big green watermelons.  You will appear and pull a string and they will descend to hell and you will rise up like the Prophet to the seven heavens.

By now Nawaf was getting deeply bored but Abdul Rais forgot his cautions about wily Jews listening from beside, above, and beyond the very walls as he raised his voice in excitement.

There will be great crowds and your name will go down in history.  Saddam Hussein will send your family $25,000 all the way from Iraq, and Ayesha your mother, and Abu Samir your father the tailor… you see I do know everything about you, will be rich and respected.  Every family in Palestine will have a martyr if that's what it takes for us to win.  We shall have a state, and then we will push the Jews into the sea and watch them drown like rats, and then…

Here old Abdul stopped, and Nawaf soon found himself directed to a bale of dirty sheep's wool flattened out on the floor next to an equally dirty and lumpy mattress where the old man