Broken Borders, page 14
For the next weeks, the three of them and others would spend time at the hotel, tanning around the pool, or hanging out at the main Fort Bliss O-Club.
9
NASTY PEOPLE
The Hotel Lucerno is a five-star hotel located in the center of the city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on Triunfa de la Republica. Ramiro Maureo and Paola Mirari were thoroughly enjoying the generous breakfast buffet in the highly touted hotel restaurant. What Ramiro liked most was that the restaurant opened up toward the large foyer area and his seat gave him a commanding view of who was coming and going. What he also liked was the fact that al Qaeda had been paying for his stays at hotels like this and meals at restaurants all over town. Tariq Ubaadah and Abdul Qudoos did not like Brazilian henchmen, but they knew that buying him and his whore hotel rooms and meals all over town made him feel powerful, so it was a profitable investment.
Tariq was the al Qaeda moneyman who flew in from Iran, and Abdul, a Saudi by birth, spoke fluent Spanish and had lived as a cell member for years in Ciudad Juarez. By agreement, Abdul was the spokesman for the two. They, as well as other AQ bodyguards around the room at the small red tables with gray chairs, were dressed as Mexican businessmen.
Ramiro was dressed the way he always was, as a gang-banger leader with loose gold jewelry hanging all over his body. His “woman” Paola was dressed simply like a cheap whore, but she did possess the physical beauty of an expensive call girl.
Although Brazilians speak Portuguese, Ramiro and Paola both could speak fluent Spanish, so that was how all conversations were handled. Besides Abdul, all the bodyguards in the room had taken Spanish classes and also learned the customs of the country. Each had also learned some English, too.
Tariq would whisper in Arabic to Abdul, who would translate.
He said, “Señor Ramiro, Tariq Ubaadah has brought with him a large amount of money today, which is a down payment for what we need.”
Tariq handed an envelope to Ramiro, and he nodded and opened it up. It contained $100,000 in large bills. He smiled and handed it to Paola.
“What do you want from O Grupo Grande?” Ramiro asked.
“We want you to take us across the border,” Abdul translated, “And we will have two very important packages. We must get those packages across the border at all costs. If the U.S. Border Patrol catches you, they must be killed, but you cannot get caught.”
“I want to know what I am transporting, amigo,” Ramiro answered, “Is it drugs?”
Abdul said, “No.”
“How much will we get paid after we get them across the border?”
Abdul responded, “An additional two hundred thousand American dollars.”
Ramiro said, “What will be in the packages?”
Tariq and Abdul whispered back and forth for a few seconds. Then Abdul again translated while Tariq spoke. “We are smuggling two Soviet backpack nuclear bombs.”
“Hijo de mil putas (son of a thousand bitches)!” Paola Mirari said.
Everyone looked at her, and Ramiro shook his head chuckling.
Tariq angrily said something to Abdul, who translated. “Why do you not beat her? Do you allow your woman to speak out like that?”
Ramiro did not like this. He stood up, his seven feet of muscle towering over the al Qaeda terrorists. Then he relaxed and sat down.
“Our society is different,” he said.
Tariq was angry and stood up, and Abdul followed suit, as did their AQ bodyguards. They started for the door.
Ramiro stood again and said, “What are you doing?”
Abdul translated Tariq’s dismissive words. “We will pay our money to the Mara Salvatrucha-13 (the MS-13 gang).”
They walked out the door, and Tariq tossed a wad of hundred-dollar bills at the maitre d’ hotel.
Ramiro said nothing, but headed toward the door as his gang members followed at his nod. It was obvious he was not only upset, but deep in thought.
A bus boy who had dark complexion indicating he might have indio ancestry came over to the round red table where the killers had talked. He started bussing dishes and knocked a spoon on the floor. Looking around carefully, he reached up under the table with his other hand and pulled a taped hidden microphone from under the table, finished clearing the table, and carried the dishes to the kitchen.
Five minutes later, Ramiro and his gang-member bodyguards caught up with the group who had walked down the street together. At the same time, an American tourist snapped shots on the street, while his wife simply stood by the rented car and applied makeup, balancing a mirror on her purse. As the groups walked down the street, she turned her mirror at different angles to apply her makeup, the hidden digital camera in the mirror frame catching all of their moves.
Ramiro said, “Señor Abdul, please tell Señor Tariq to give me one minute privately to speak in that alley.”
Abdul spoke in a whisper and Tariq stared, then headed toward the alley with his group following. Paola was holding Ramiro’s hand. Both groups walked deep into the alley and stopped. Here, Tariq spoke in a normal tone of voice.
Abdul translated, “What do you wish to say, Señor?”
Ramiro, still holding Paola’s hand, said, “It is very simple. We want to do business with your organization. Let me prove it.”
He pulled Paola around slowly and smiled at her. Letting go of her hand, he raised his left hand up and caressed her cheek, and she smiled at him. Then suddenly, his face twisted, and he grabbed her throat. She tried to scream, but his powerful grip was just too much. He lowered his elbow and incredibly lifted her feet up off the floor, reached into his pocket with his right hand, and pulled out a large switchblade knife, opened it while she struggled and kicked, and plunged it into her torso over and over, until she went totally limp. He dropped her on the ground, then bent over and slit her throat from ear to ear. Ramiro tore her blouse off and wiped his hands and knife blade off on the clean part of the back of the blouse.
He turned and smiled at Tariq and Abdul, saying, “Okay, amigos, let’s go somewhere quiet and talk business. Sí?”
Tariq laughed and nodded, but looked over at Abdul saying, “Hayyaa binaa! Li-natruk hunaa!”
Abdul responded, looking down at Paola’s very bloody body, saying, “Laqad ghaadarat haadha i-makaan.”
Tariq started laughing and everyone started to leave the alley together, but now Ramiro was angry and stepped in front of them, saying in Spanish, “What is funny? What did you two say?”
Abdul said, “Oh, Tariq said to me, ‘Let’s go! Let’s get out of here,’ and I said to him, ‘She has already left here.’ He thought that was very funny, Señor. Do not worry. I think you have convinced him.”
They went down the street to a bar and went in.
Speaking in Arabic, Tariq said to Abdul, “The beloved and venerable Muhammad does not allow us to drink alcohol, but we are in the land of the infidels and must blend in. I will a have a drink or two and you should, too.”
Abdul was very glad Tariq said that, because he used the same lame excuse many times when he traveled. They allowed the bodyguards to drink, too, and soon the gang-bangers and the terrorists were all getting drunk together.
They agreed to meet the next day at Tariq’s current hotel, Hotel Villa Manport at Hermanos Escobar and Calle Panama, and from there they would walk to one of the many fine restaurants nearby such as the El Herradero Steak House, Villa del Mar, or the Mariscos D’Mazatlan.
While Ramiro Maureo loved staying at luxury hotels and getting room service and nice restaurant meals, such as staying at the five-star Hotel Lucerno, Tariq and Abdul, on the other hand, had been well schooled by al Qaeda and preferred the nice but much more modest Hotel Villa Manport, where the two of them and their bodyguards would be less noticeable. Tariq always checked the whole group in with a phony Mexican business name, usually a large national business with a known name.
Ramiro hired two prostitutes to accompany him to his hotel, so he could get the death of the beautiful Paola out of his mind, but he really did not care. Her death was the cost of doing business.
They met the next day for late breakfast at Mariscos D’Mazatlan, very noted for its seafood, which is why Tariq asked to meet there. He wanted some.
They made plans for Ramiro personally, and his other gangsters who would act as coyotes, to meet outside Cuidad Juarez at a spot not too far from the Rio Grande. The terrorists would bring their backpack nukes, and Ramiro would have his plan worked out for how they would smuggle them into the United States. Most of the al Qaeda members taking part in the operation had gone to college at various universities in the USA already.
The rest of Tariq’s men were on their way from Mexico City riding in a large ambulance, which had been gotten for a large bribe. They had two very large iceboxes labeled with cautionary labels in English and Spanish, reading: DO NOT OPEN—HUMAN ORGANS—KEEP ICED. Each box contained a Soviet RA-115 backpack nuclear bomb.
In 1999, terrorism expert and author Yossef Bodanksy, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and the man who first warned the world about Osama bin Laden, quoted a senior Arab intelligence official as saying, “Osama bin Laden has acquired tactical nuclear weapons from the Islamic republics of Central Asia established after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
According to Bodansky, “Bin Laden’s emissaries paid the Chechens $30 million in cash and gave them two tons of Afghan heroin with a $600 million street value in exchange for nuclear weapons.” This was done well before September 11, 2001. In his 1999 book, Bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America, Bodanksy wrote: “Evidence of the number of nuclear weapons purchased by the Chechens for bin Laden varies between ‘a few’ (Russian intelligence) to ‘more than twenty’ (conservative Arab intelligence services).”
Even Tariq did not know how many al Qaeda possessed, but he did know he had two of them and that the job before him and his men could get them all into Paradise forever.
In fact, he knew he would make Paradise detonating the two devices on American soil, because it was even addressed by the clergy.
In 2003, Saudi cleric Nazer bin Hamd al-Fahd wrote a fatwa entitled: “The Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels.”
Nazer bin Hamd’s fatwa says, “Weapons of mass destruction will kill the infidels on whom they fall, regardless of whether they are fighters, women, or children. They will destroy and burn the land. The arguments for permissibility are many.”
This gave Tariq great comfort. Like Osama bin Laden, he was an outcast from his own very wealthy Saudi Arabian family, and most of the activities of his adult life were “I’ll-show-you” actions, starting with his Penn State business degree and his MBA from Harvard.
The plan al Qaeda had laid out for this operation was even more complex than that on 9/11. They not only had to smuggle the two nuclear devices into the United States undetected, they had to take them both cross-country, get one into New York City and the other into Miami, and detonate them. But it was a little more complex than that. The bombs dropped from the Enola Gay on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were fifteen-kiloton nuclear bombs; and in Nagasaki a brick building, although a very well-built brick building, a little over two hundred yards from ground zero, essentially survived the atomic blast without being demolished, and a streetcar, which was just over a mile away from ground zero, also survived the blast.
Tariq Ubaadah had to emplace both bombs in both cities so they would create the most damage and also cause the most terror, which was always Osama bin Laden’s concern. That was why his goal always was to detonate both bombs during daylight hours, simultaneously. He wanted to make sure the U.S. news media would replay the blasts and damage over and over.
The Soviet RA-115 backpack nuclear bombs only weighed just over fifty-seven pounds each, and could fit not in a backpack, but in a large suitcase, so they could be carried and hidden almost anywhere. But Tariq’s other challenge was to put them where they could rain fire and fear on the U.S. populace.
With a nuclear bomb, over fifty percent of the damage done and lives lost is from the initial blast, and then over thirty-five percent is from the radiation wave, and then the rest from fallout and residual affects. Tariq and the other al Qaeda leaders had had a great many discussions on what to target. The blast from a one-ton backpack is considerably less than the fifteen kilotons that hit the Japanese cities in World War II, but the falloff with nuclear bombs is not really that great as the size decreases. The ground zero blast from a one-megaton nuke, which would be like one thousand backpack nukes, has only a seventy-percent increase over a two-hundred-kiloton nuke. Which is like comparing a hole in the ground seven to eight miles across with one four to five miles across.
An airburst nuclear bomb could spread radiation over a very large area, but would do significantly less blast damage, as most explosions blow up and out. So, to get the most out of the backpacks, it was determined to execute a ground burst detonation, but Osama bin Laden always favored the destruction of national monuments or symbols of America for the symbolism of their destruction, though many in the leadership wanted the practical destruction of strategic targets.
The attack on the World Trade Center was supposed to be a symbolic gesture of attacking America’s free-enterprise system of capitalism, and the attack on the Pentagon was obvious. Flight 93 was intended to strike the White House, which would have made bin Laden ecstatic. He and none of the al Qaeda leadership had any idea that the World Trade Center towers would collapse from the intense heat. They had hoped for the deaths of hundreds, but when the buildings collapsed, they thought Allah was indeed blessing them.
Now al Qaeda was counting on two RA-115 backpack nuclear bombs to create more damage than Hiroshima and Nagasaki with one-fifteenth the blast power of each. To that end, and to satisfy the wish of Osama bin Laden, it was decided that Tariq Ubaadah would have to emplace one of the devices about halfway up the Empire State Building. Osama was in favor of blowing up the Statue of Liberty, but they had already tested the defenses, and the ground zero blast zone would have little effect on New York City proper, which would only get some radioactive fallout, and maybe some initial thermal blast that would be far less than the winds of a tornado.
They reasoned by bombing halfway up the Empire State Building, they would achieve bin Laden’s goal of attacking a major American landmark, but as a practical result, they would destroy most of the building, sending pieces of brick, concrete, metal, desks, chairs, computers, and other items flying and falling as deadly pieces of shrapnel spread in all directions. Additionally, the upper half of the building would be gone and all the people within would die, and the radioactive fallout from the blast being raised high above the ground would spread over a large area, especially if prevailing winds were not blowing out toward the ocean. Had they blown the building lower, much of the shrapnel falling would not be deadly, but from the higher elevation, they reasoned, a falling coffeemaker could become a deadly weapon.
The initial planning was to detonate at Disneyland, but even though Nazer bin Hamd al-Fahd’s and others’ fatwas allowed the killing of women and children, the AQ leadership concluded it could bring disfavor from moderate Muslim nations. They did not care about non-Muslim nations, as anybody who was not Muslim was an infidel, an unbeliever, and some were simply to be used toward the end of achieving eventual Islamic world domination.
The metropolitan area of Miami had a population of 5,500,000 people, many celebrities lived there, and most importantly, the Miami metro area had a very large Jewish population, so most of the al Qaeda leadership saw it as a no-brainer over destroying Disneyland. Picking a target would be more difficult because Miami had no Empire State Building. It was simply famous for sun and sand and Cuban refugees, as far as the terrorists were concerned. Tariq himself was assigned the research for strategic bomb emplacement there, too. What he found was also a no-brainer to him.
The Four Seasons Hotel and Tower on Brickell Avenue in Miami had a height of exactly 788 feet, 9 inches, making the tower the tallest U.S. building south of Atlanta and tallest U.S. residential building south of New York City. So it was much more than the tallest building in Florida. It also had office space for lease, and hotel rooms, which would more easily facilitate unencumbered bomb emplacement. The building itself, if a room or office could be used halfway up, could serve the same purpose as the Empire State Building. The construction of the sixty-four-floor high-rise was a reinforced concrete structure incorporating core shear walls, post-tensioned slabs, and perimeter columns with spans between the columns that reached forty feet. It would work.
Tariq learned that the tower was supported by caissons six feet in diameter that ran 140 feet deep, which was about 40 feet down into the bedrock, so a ground zero at ground level would not be good, but the airburst effect halfway up could be ideal for their goals.
To make the planning even better, Tariq found that floors forty through seventy of the building housed residential units, ranging in size from 1,697 square feet to 6,603 square feet, while floors thirty through forty housed either hotel rooms or suites, which ranged in size from 600 square feet to 2,000 square feet, He also learned that the building also contained 184 condominiums and 84 condo/hotel units, 200,000 square feet of office space, and even had a 45,000-square-foot fitness and spa facility. When discussing the shrapnel effect with his murderous cohorts, Tariq happily reported that the building contained over twenty various types of finishes, including imported Italian marble, imported stones, and floor-to-ceiling glazed glass. He was very elated picturing shards of thick fancy glass flying through the air as deadly projectiles, as well as pieces of marble falling on the heads of aging Jews on the streets below.
To mock both the Hebraic and Christian religions, the code word with al Qaeda for “New York City” became “Sodom” and “Miami” would always be referred to as “Gomorrah,” after the two famous cities of crime, lust, and sin in the Old Testament that are spoken about in many Bible verses, most notably Genesis 13:13, 18:20, 19:24, 29; Hosea 11:8; Deuteronomy 29:23, 32:32; Isaiah 1:10; Ezekiel 16:49; Matthew 11:23; 2 Peter 2:6; and Jude 7. They were two cities that were actually named afterward, with Sodom being the Hebrew word for “Burnt” and Gomorrah Hebrew for “Burning Heap.” The word Sodom, in fact, because of the city’s deviant sexual practices in the eyes of many, begat the modern words of “sodomy” and “sodomite.”
