The Mahdi, page 1
PRAISE FOR
THE MAHDI
“This gripping tale sheds the needed light on today’s white hot Middle East strife. A withering take on ancestral anger, a captivating cast, and a gripping story with vivid dialogue carries us to a memorable conclusion.”
—JACK BRAY, author of Alone against Hitler: Kurt von Schuschnigg’s Fight to Save Austria from the Nazis and The Tudor Wolfpack and the Roots of Irish America; retired Senior Partner, King & Spalding, LLP
“Cook employs the lens of a Bedouin American protagonist in his tale of the West Bank and Gaza before it all went bad. Great story, wonderful dialogue, fascinating view of things.”
—TANIA AMOCHAEV, author of Mother Tongue: A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women, native Russian/Serbian speaker, Stanford MBA, software executive, educational philanthropist
“An exciting look into the future of technology in warfare, driven by a powerful Bedouin American hero with a chip on his shoulder. Serious geopolitical possibilities with lots of violence, dialogue, and simmering personal relationships.”
—DAVID CAMPBELL, philanthropist, Founder of All Hands and Hearts, former President of Raytheon BBN
“A lot of people won’t like the outcomes in Cook’s thriller The Mahdi, but his thesis makes one consider alternatives and their likelihood. The portrayal of the impact of quantum computing on encryption is accurate, but we are not near that point in technology. Handheld quantum cell phone? Oh, no, no, and that’s been going on for three books! Once again, Cook writes a good thriller!”
— RICK CRANDALL, Founder of Enterprise Software CEO Roundtable, Chair of the Cyber Committee of the National Cybersecurity Center
“An action-filled thriller set in Gaza and Israel. It makes one really think about how this region can solve its problems. It’s a thinking person’s thriller.”
— BRUCE T. COLEMAN, Baker Scholar, Harvard Business School, software entrepreneur
“As a geopolitical thriller, it is fantastic. Great characters, brilliant women, great dialogue, lots of action. The Mahdi gives the reader an exciting look at Israel and the Middle East through the lens of a Sunni Arab.”
—JUDITH HAMILTON, corporate director, wildlife philanthropist, software entrepreneur
“A compelling read that mirrors the current world situation. A thought-provoking book, it made me seriously consider if Kufdani’s vision for a better Middle East could someday become a reality.”
—STANLEY B. JOOSSE, Colonel, USA (Ret)
Other books by Robert Cook
COOCH | PATRIOT & ASSASSIN | PULSE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by River Grove Books
Austin, TX
www.rivergrovebooks.com
Copyright © 2024 Robert Cook
All rights reserved.
Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright law. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.
Distributed by River Grove Books
Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group and Brian Phillips
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group and Brian Phillips
Cover images: © Tatkhagata, Wakajawaka, sergio34, Vandathai, and Kambiz Pourghanad.
Used under license from Shutterstock.com
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
Print ISBN: 978-1-63299-790-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63299-791-3
First Edition
For PJ, my rock
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
South of Tangier: Friday
Tangier: Saturday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Sunday
Tangier: Sunday
Tangier: Monday
Tangier: Tuesday
Algeciras, Spain: Wednesday
Newark, New Jersey: Saturday
Northern New Jersey: Saturday
Northern New Jersey: Sunday
Upper East Side, Manhattan: Monday
West of Hackettstown, New Jersey: Wednesday
Washington, DC: Thursday
Washington, DC: Thursday
Upper East Side, Manhattan: Friday
Tangier: Sunday
Jerusalem: Monday
North of Jerusalem: Tuesday
Ktzi’ot Prison, Southern Israel: Tuesday
Bat Yam, Tel Aviv: Wednesday
Ktzi’ot Prison, Southern Israel: Wednesday
Haaretz Online, Tel Aviv: Friday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Friday
Tangier: Monday
Office of the Prime Minister, Jerusalem: Monday
Ktzi’ot Prison, Southern Israel: Monday
Tangier: Wednesday
Ktzi’ot Prison, Southern Israel: Wednesday
Tangier: Wednesday
Tangier: Wednesday
Negev Desert, South of Beersheba: Saturday
Ktzi’ot Prison, Southern Israel: Saturday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Saturday
Haaretz Online, Tel Aviv: Saturday
Office of the Prime Minister, Jerusalem: Sunday
Tangier: Sunday
Haaretz Online, Tel Aviv: Sunday
Shin Bet Headquarters, Northwest Tel Aviv: Tuesday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Wednesday
Washington, DC: Friday
Near Gaza City: Monday
Haaretz Online, Tel Aviv: Tuesday
Near Gaza City: Tuesday
Shin Bet Headquarters, Northwest Tel Aviv: Friday
Al-Bayuk, Gaza Strip: Saturday
West of Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Kufdani Command Center, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Al-Bayuk, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Shin Bet Command Post, Gaza City: Sunday
Al-Bayuk, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Shin Bet Command Post, Gaza City: Sunday
Kufdani Command Center, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Near Rafah, Gaza Strip: Sunday
Sufa Air Base, Israel: Sunday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Sunday
El-Arish, Egypt: Sunday
Bat Yam, Tel Aviv: Monday
Old Fashioned, Chesapeake Bay: Tuesday
Shin Bet Headquarters, Northwest Tel Aviv: Wednesday
Chesapeake Bay, Maryland: Wednesday
Old Fashioned, Chesapeake Bay: Thursday
Washington, DC: Thursday
Edgeworth Studios, Midtown Manhattan: Friday
Upper West Side, Manhattan: Friday
Mossad Headquarters, Tel Aviv: Saturday
Office of the Prime Minister, Jerusalem: Saturday
The White House, Washington, DC: Saturday
Upper West Side, Manhattan: Sunday
Upper West Side, Manhattan: Monday
En Route to Tangier: Monday
En Route to Riyadh: Friday
Royal Palace, Riyadh: Friday
Epstein Residence, Tel Aviv: Sunday
Edgeworth Airfield, Egypt: Tuesday
Tangier: Wednesday
Office of the Prime Minister, Jerusalem: Wednesday
Edgeworth Studios, Midtown Manhattan: Monday
The White House, Washington, DC: Wednesday
Edgeworth Studios, Midtown Manhattan: Friday
Tangier: Thursday
Tangier: The Following Friday
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR THIS, THE FOURTH OF THE COOCH SERIES, THERE ARE MANY TO thank. First, thanks to my readers with their enthusiastic reviews and word-of-mouth support, which are key to my efforts. Judy Hamilton and Sally Krueger, MD, again provided early support. For military matters and issues of national security, special thanks go to Admiral James Loy (Ret) and Admiral Thomas Fargo (Ret). Writer support and comments came from Art Allen, Jack Bray, David and Gay Campbell, Bruce Coleman, Bob Corman, Stan Joosse, and Rich Moore among many others.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS IS THE FOURTH OF THE COOCH SERIES. I CALL THEM NATIONAL security thrillers, for lack of a better term. They have the violence, sex, and intrigue common to good thrillers. There is always a national security aspect to them, since Cooch became a legal adult while training at the CIA’s Farm. It was fun to give him the hook into the Muslim world with a Bedouin mother.
Pulse, the thriller before this one, was a story about a US preemptive attack on Iran over a planned deployment of a nuclear weapon against Israel.
Patriot & Assassin was about Yemen and a nerve gas attack at an NFL championship game in Dallas.
Cooch, the original thriller that won an IPPY Gold Medal for thrillers, is about how Cooch evolved and his teen summers in the desert of Morocco.
I do my research for the Cooch books. Descriptions of modern weapons and their capabilities are accurate. Of course, no one has built a quantum computer into a cell phone or even used cloud computing, but it’s fun to invent what is needed for the story. Besides, if one existed, it could do what is described and more. Think of ChatGPT without the starter wheels. Think about our society with Emilie, our heuristic AI chatbot, in charge.
The education backstory is personal. I’ve been involved with K–6 education for forty years starting with producing a video for a troubled elementary school in Baltimore (The Battle of City Springs) and with educating the intellectually gifted, financially challenged child for thirty years (Cook Honors College at Indiana University of Pennsylvania). I care and I keep track of what seems to work. Little I do has gained traction in the broader world.
The foundation idea for The Mahdi arose while I was reading the Economist magazine several years ago and read of the conflict in Israel over Bedouin ownership rights in Israel. Since I had been writing about Cooch as half-Bedouin for quite a while, I decided to pursue research to see if there was a book in there for me. There was, it was a great fit, and remains that way today. Netanyahu is still pursuing the right-wing agenda, confiscating Arab land and destroying the rule of law in Israel. The Israeli intelligentsia is going crazy, protesting in the streets, pretty much as I predicted. I heard one Israeli citizen say, “I don’t want to live in a repressive, failing, Middle Eastern Jewish theocracy. I like Israel the way it is.” Now we have the Hamas conflict with no good solution in sight, except, of course, perhaps the one I present with this fiction.
The Mahdi is the first novel where Cooch so broadly expresses himself as a Muslim. I describe the novel as one seen through the lens of the modern Muslim liberal. I don’t know of other fiction that so overtly does this.
If there is to be a solution between Israel and Palestine, it is likely to evolve from religious leadership, not politics.
—ROBERT COOK
SOUTH OF TANGIER
FRIDAY
THE MOROCCAN DESERT SOUTH OF TANGIER WAS HOT AND DRY, AS WAS usual at this time of year, with a wind stirring fine sand from the Sahara to the east and south. Shadows cast by the northern hills inched across a rock-encrusted sandscape toward a tented encampment, where a large group of men were seated in a circle between two large, ornate tents. Camels were tethered just beyond the circle, and an assortment of trucks were parked nearby. On the far side of the tents, women worked around several cooking fires, watching the men.
The man named Kufdani sat cross-legged in the circle’s center, atop a mound of dirt and sand. His eyes were closed.
A calloused open hand drove a slap toward Kufdani’s left cheek. His head jerked back enough to cause a miss, except for one ragged fingernail that caught his forehead near the hairline, bringing a thin line of blood to the surface. It matched several other bleeding scratches that mingled among a cluster of small, half-moon scars, similar but long healed. The slap from the opposite side followed immediately, but Kufdani dropped his head and lifted his right forearm to bump the slapping hand away from its target. The right-hand slap came again, part of an unceasing pattern, and again ended with a miss.
The breeze picked up another waft of sand, and another and another as the day grew into late afternoon. The watchful Bedouin crowd grew more still with each attempted slap, mesmerized, as blow after blow from a series of assailants failed to make direct contact.
“Time!” a male voice shouted at last, in Arabic.
A spontaneous shout erupted from the sitting crowd. “Kufdani, Kufdani!” They leapt to their feet and ran to help him from his perch, attempting to congratulate him by collectively pounding on his back. Several men hoisted him on their shoulders.
The Bedouin ritual was over. Kufdani had prevailed once more: No one had been able to slap him from the center spot, even though his eyes were closed. Nineteen Bedouin men from various tribes across the Middle East had entered the contest along with him. Even though their eyes remained open, each had been dislodged from his perch within the allotted three minutes of blows suffered per contestant.
Kufdani jumped from the shoulders of the men, who staggered under his shifting weight and slapped his back yet again. The others surrounded him still, waving their hands, reaching for him.
As he fought through the crowd, Kufdani decided it was time to figure out what all the excitement was about. An eager tension filled the desert encampment, and the chieftains clearly wanted something from him. The Bedouin rumor mill—active as ever—said it was about the West Bank.
It was always about the West Bank.
Pushing through the swarming crowd to the trough past the big tent, Kufdani dipped his head in the water, letting it run over his blood-spattered, sweat-soaked shirt as another tribesman pumped the handle on the aging well. Then he peeled the shirt over his head and rinsed again, until the water flowed from his thick black hair and down across his naked chest. He was tall—not quite six feet, four inches—with the muscularity of a gymnast, but thicker in the chest and stomach. A random series of ragged lines and puckered, half-inch circles appeared randomly across his torso and arms, healed masses of white flesh against his dark skin tone. Among the special ops community, where he had spent eight years, these scars were called “zippers” and “assholes,” depending on the shape and the cause: shrapnel and knife wounds versus bullet holes. A single, long scar ran down the side of his face too, beginning in the wrinkles beside his left eye.
Someone handed Kufdani a towel, and he wiped his face before accepting a dry shirt from one of his former assailants, who was grinning at him and squinting through a swelling, newly blackened eye from his own time on the contestant perch. Pulling the shirt over his head, Kufdani moved through the crowd, grinning and slapping the impatient hands that swayed in the air, toward the largest tent in the complex. A flap was pulled back, and he eased through the crowd, stepped inside the tent, and looked for a seat.
“Here, Kufdani!” a grizzled man in traditional garb shouted in heavily Bedouin-accented Arabic. “You are next to me. We have business.”
After slipping through the last of the admirers, Kufdani stood beside a colorful cushion woven from goat’s hair where the man sat. When he shook the man’s hand, applause broke out among the throng assembled in the tent. These were tribal leaders from the large Bedouin tribes—desert people who live traditionally by tending cattle or camels inland across the Middle East. They represented more than a million Bedouin Arabs who recognize no central government or authority. Kufdani waved to them and sat down.
The tent flap was dropped, and air circulated from the skirt as it was raised waist-level around the tent’s base. In a ring just outside the flap, other men gathered in the dust, legs crossed, to listen to the elders. Body odor was prevalent both inside and outside the tent.
Mint tea was served. The aging man in the traditional honor seat was named Badawi, and he had recently been elected the leader of all Bedouin tribes—by a substantial voting margin. A successful trader in livestock, he owned a prize-winning herd of camels and kept Arabian horses in several locations, all tended by his fellow Bedouins.
Badawi wore a scarf looped around his neck and a loose cotton shirt that fell around his waist. His face was a map formed by his life’s history in the bright desert, his skin a deep mahogany, built layer by layer from decades of exposure to the Saharan sun. Wrinkles pulled at his face and puddled near his chin and under his eyes, and hair grew densely from his ears and nose. His hands were dry and mottled with prominent purple bruises.
“Congratulations, Kufdani,” the old man continued. His speech was modulated by breath whistling past a missing incisor. “You are again victorious in our traditional game of slaps. Welcome back to the contest and to our gathering of Bedouin peers.”
“It is my honor to be here,” Kufdani replied, bowing his head slightly. “Thank you for allowing me to sit beside you during this meeting.”
“Yet something is more critical now than your honor alone,” Badawi said loudly, his voice quivering with emotion. “I have been elected spokesman for the tribes’ leadership. We need your winning skills, your leadership, in preserving the honor of the Bedouin nation.”
As he looked around the room, expectant faces peered back. “Honor is a vital component of our people’s being,” Kufdani replied in a strong voice audible to all seated in the tent. “How may I help preserve it?”
“It is the Israelis. They treat us as animals. They have stolen our land. We get no respect.”
Badawi’s voice rose.
“The Israeli government has bent our Israeli Bedouins over! The Orthodox Jews, the Haredim, are raping our Bedouin tribesmen. Their government moves our Bedouin people—Israeli citizens—from lands on the West Bank of the Jordan that we have occupied for two hundred years and then settles us by their garbage dumps. They build homes on our land for Russian Jews who don’t work, don’t serve in the military, and weren’t born in Israel. They attack our children on their way to school. A large percentage of them may not even be Jewish by DNA, though they are certainly Russian—Cossacks, mostly. Strange, no?”
