The Enemy Within

by Larry Bond

Genres: Action & Adventure; Military Thrillers; Political Thrillers; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

America's largest cities are in flames. Its majestic landmarks are in ruins. Oceans and boundaries offer no protection. It is the first sophisticated, intelligently planned, and utterly ruthless terrorist campaign waged on U.S. soil. As national leaders, armies, and artificial intelligence strive to win the unconventional war, two men--once friends, now adversaries to the death--race to a decisive confrontation.

Release date: November 11, 2009

Publisher: Vision

Print pages: 496

Sample

“Chilling and totally plausible. THE ENEMY WITHIN marks Larry Bond’s emergence as our next true master of suspense.”

—Tom Clancy



“A chilling look at international terrorism.”

—San Francisco Chronicle



“Fasten your seat belt.… An electrifying and terrifying tale, told by a master storyteller.… Shockingly accurate … riveting
detail. Bravo to Bond!”


—Steve Emerson, counterterrorism expert and coauthor of The Fall of Pan Am 103



“Bone chilling.… His expertise as a naval officer and warfare analyst provides credibility to a topical novel I was unable
to put down.”


—Mary Matalin, co-host of CNBC’s Equal Time



“A novel of suspense that’s worthy of the early fuss being made over it.… This superbly suspenseful international thriller
has a disconcerting and uncanny ring of geopolitical truth and eerie prophecy.… The last hundred pages scream along to the
surprising conclusion.”


—Denver Post



“A swashbuckling thriller … fast-paced … spectacular.”

—Toronto Star



A superb storyteller.… Larry Bond seems to know everything about warfare, from the grunt in a foxhole to the fighter pilots
far above the earth.”


—New York Times Book Review



“Action packed … blazes along … brims with techno-thriller aspects.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer



“A gripping tale … a fine read.”

—Boston Herald



“THE ENEMY WITHIN seems to have snatched headlines off the front pages of the daily newspapers as it weaves a gripping tale
… in a fast-moving narrative that is eerily precise and terrifyingly real.”


—Former U.S. Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro



“Bond’s storytelling is superb.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer



“Moves along with the speed of a Tomahawk cruise missile and is just as on target.”

—Flint Journal



“Extremely well researched and credible … an enjoyable read.”

—Austin American-Statesman



“THE ENEMY WITHIN represents an exciting forward evolution in plot, character, and scope for Larry Bond.… For lovers of strategic
and high-tech thrillers, this book is indispensable.”


—James Grady, author of Three Days of the Condor



“This thriller successfully places Bond in the top group of the genre.”

—Copley News Service



“Compulsively readable … exciting, frightening, and full of action. Like Tom Clancy, he paints a broad canvas filled with
tight closeups.”


—Publishers Weekly



“The most accurate, chilling novel about terrorism ever written. When you read THE ENEMY WITHIN, you are reading the future.”

—Neil C. Livingstone, author of The Cult of Counterterrorism



“An exciting page-turner … excellent descriptions and dialogue.”

—San Antonio Express-News



“Once again, Larry Bond has outdone himself.… A fast-paced, tightly woven page-turner about a frighteningly real threat of
terrorism directed against the United States.”


—Steve Pieczenik, author of Pax Pacifica and co-creator, with Tom Clancy, of Op-Center



“Superb, with each piece of the puzzle adding beautifully to a very real-world scenario, while he builds the suspense until
the reader begs for the orgiastic climax.… Crisp, lean writing in the service of excellent fiction that is also a chilling
warning.”


—West Coast Review of Books



“Larry Bond is the Cecil B. DeMille of the techno-thriller.”

—Providence Sunday Journal



“Fascinating and scary.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch



“The best writer of techno-thrillers around … Bond has a superb sense of action and plot.… Nobody does it better than Bond.”

—Tampa Tribune



“Dynamite from beginning to end. Larry Bond captures the tense moves and countermoves of two sides locked in deadly battle
with the outcome never certain.”


—General Fred Franks, U.S. Army (ret.)



“Larry Bond is an expert at building suspenseful, true-to-life political and military scenarios.… Puts the reader on the cutting
edge.”


—Dale Brown



“A humdinger of a story … devilishly hard to put down.”

—Toledo Blade



“Bond displays a firm grasp of how the national security bureaucracy in Washington goes into action and how the military deploys.”

—Navy Times



“Bond sets a new standard for the techno-thriller.”

—Orlando Sentinel



“An outstanding novelist who succeeds on a multiplicity of levels.”

—Rave Reviews



“Arguably one of the best writers about war today.”

—Reader’s Digest

PROLOGUE


The accident scene looked real—even to Shahin’s skeptical eyes. A crumpled Toyota Corolla sat sideways across the narrow on-ramp
to Highway 680, surrounded by fragments of smashed safety glass and puddled oil. Four emergency flares cast a flickering red
light across a spiderweb of concrete pillars and rusting railroad bridge supports rising above the freeway entrance. As a
final touch of authenticity, the sharp, sweet smell of leaking gasoline hung in the chilly night air.


The short, bearded man nodded to himself, satisfied that his deception would hold for the brief time required. He moved off
the road and into the shadows beneath the overpass.


His cellular phone buzzed softly. He flipped it open. “Yes?”


The muffled voice of Haydar Zadi, his lookout, sounded in his ear. “Two minutes.”


“Understood.” Shahin slid the phone back inside his windbreaker and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. Their first
target, their chosen weapon, was on the way.


Perched high in the cab of his big rig, Jack Briggs saw the flare-lit wreck up ahead in plenty of time. He swore once and
braked smoothly, coming to a complete stop near the foot of the ramp.


Like most independent truckers, he preferred making his runs at night and in the early morning to avoid the Bay Area’s god-awful
traffic. It was a routine that worked well—usually. But not tonight.


Still growling to himself, he peered through the windshield. At least the Toyota’s driver didn’t seem hurt. The man had glanced
around once when the rig’s headlights hit him, but then he’d gone right back to staring down at his car’s smashed front end.
Might be drunk, Briggs decided. It was near closing time. Hell, only a drunk would wander off the main road into the little
town of Benicia’s deserted industrial park at this time of the night.


He shook his head angrily. Well, tanked up or not, the clown was going to have to help push that Japanese pile of junk off
the ramp and out of the way.


Pausing just long enough to square up his battered, oil-stained baseball cap and shut off the engine, the trucker yanked his
cab door open, jumped down, and started across the glass-strewn asphalt in long strides. He was still several feet from the
Toyota when the other man suddenly turned to face him, bringing the pistol he’d been concealing on target in one smooth, deadly,
flowing motion.


Briggs stared at the weapon in shock. His mouth fell open. “What the—”

A single 9mm bullet caught him under the chin, tore upward through his brain, and exploded out the back of his skull.



Shahin knelt, retrieved the spent shell casing from the road with one gloved hand, and dropped it into his pocket. Neatness
was a habit that had saved him so many times over the past several years that he indulged it without thought. There were many
others in the HizbAllah who were less careful, but none who could match his record of operational success. He rose to his
feet and turned away without giving the American he’d murdered more than a single disinterested glance.


Another pair of headlights swung across the scene and steadied as a small car, an old blue Nissan Sentra, pulled up beside
the dead man’s truck. Shahin stood motionless in the sudden dazzling brightness, waiting for the two other men who made up
his special action cell to join him.


Haydar Zadi was the first out of the car. The lookout grinned in clear relief, showing a mouthful of yellowing, tobacco-stained
teeth. “It went perfect, eh? Like clockwork!”


“Yes.” Shahin nodded curtly, biting down an urge to snap at the older man. Didn’t the fool know they had no time to waste?
At most they had only minutes to clear away all signs of this ambush and move their prize under cover inside the warehouse
they’d rented nearby. But Zadi was a “casual”—a fundamentalist radical recruited out of the local immigrant community for
this one mission. Snarling at him would only make him more nervous, more prone to panic. Instead, the Iranian gestured toward
the dead truck driver. “Toss that thing in your truck, my friend. We’ll dispose of it later.”


Zadi’s smile vanished, wiped away by his first good look at the murdered man. In the glare of the headlights, the blood pooling
around the American’s shattered skull glistened black. He swallowed hard and hurried to obey.


Shahin shook his head in disgust. He disliked being forced to rely on a squeamish amateur, but he had no choice. The HizbAllah
was one of the Middle East’s largest and deadliest terrorist organizations, but outside of New York its network of covert
operatives and sympathizers was still too poorly organized to support and conceal a larger force. He swung
away and stalked over to the only other member of his small team.


Ibrahim Nadhir was the youngest of them all, barely twenty. Taller than his superior, smooth-shaven, and slender, he stood
staring up at the giant vehicle they had captured.


Shahin clapped him on the shoulder. “You can drive this monster, Ibrahim?”

“Oh, yes.” Nadhir reached out a single hand and actually caressed the side of the big rig. His eyes were dilated. “It is a
beautiful machine. A perfect machine.”


Shahin suppressed a shiver. Tehran’s revolutionary mullahs had refined the brainwashing techniques originally taught them
by North Korean and Vietnamese instructors. He understood the value of what they had done to Nadhir. But surely no man could
be at ease in the presence of one remade into the living hand of Allah.


He followed the younger man’s fixed, adoring stare and smiled for the first time. The truck itself was nothing. Anyone with
money could buy or lease such a truck. No, the real prize for this night’s work was the big rig’s cargo: a massive, cylindrical
steel tank full of ten thousand gallons of high-grade gasoline.


The Marin County commuter tide was in full flood shortly before the sun rose. Tens of thousands of cars crept slowly south
along Highway 101, inching through San Rafael, up the lone incline above Sausalito, through the Waldo Tunnel, and downhill
toward San Francisco. Headlights glowed a ghostly yellow through the fog still shrouding the approaches to the Golden Gate
Bridge.


Two vehicles ground forward with the rest. Four cars behind the lumbering gasoline tanker truck driven by Ibrahim
Nadhir, Haydar Zadi gripped the steering wheel of his old, battered Nissan, darting occasional, frightened glances at the
quiet, angry man seated beside him.


Shahin scowled at their slow, snail-like pace. As their local contact, Zadi had been responsible for scouting this section
of their route. But nothing in the older man’s reports had fully prepared him for this halting procession of luxury sedans,
sports cars, and minivans. It was grotesque—an evil display of wasted wealth and power. Though a child on foot would arrive
in San Francisco sooner, not one of these decadent, arrogant Americans could bear the thought of parting with his prized automobile.


Inside the Iranian, contempt warred briefly with envy. His scowl grew deeper. These people worshipped their creations of steel,
chrome, fiberglass, and rubber above all other things—above even God Himself.


So be it, Shahin thought with grim finality. The HizbAllah would teach these idolaters a harsh lesson—a lesson scrawled in
fire and blood. His dark eyes settled on the gasoline tanker truck up ahead. “How much further?”


“Two kilometers. Perhaps less,” Zadi answered. He cleared his throat nervously. “The last exit before the bridge is very near.”

Shahin nodded, ignoring the fear in his companion’s voice. The old man would have to hold his cowardice at bay a while longer.

He leaned forward to get a better look at their surroundings. The steep hillsides of the Marin Headlands rose to the west—black
masses still more felt than seen through the last remnants of night and fog. To the east, the ground fell away into the dark
waters of San Francisco Bay. Distant lights twinkled along the eastern horizon, slowly fading as the sky paled before the
rising sun. Ahead to the south, the Golden Gate Bridge’s massive towers and suspension cables were already visible, rising
out of the mist.



Inside a sleek black-and-white cruiser parked just off Highway 101, California Highway Patrol Officer Steve Dwyer sat sipping
the last cup of coffee from his thermos, studying the cars streaming past him through bleary eyes. He yawned, trying to get
some oxygen into his bloodstream. After a long shift spent scouting for drunks, joyriders, and other lowlifes, the steady
crackle of voices over his radio and the lukewarm coffee were just about the only things keeping him awake,


Dwyer stifled another jaw-cracking yawn and ran a hand over his scalp, frowning when his fingers slid along skin where only
months before there had been hair. This goddamned job was getting to him, he thought. Hell, he was only thirty-two—way too
young to be going bald. Maybe he could put in a stress claim and get the department health plan to cough up for some of that
Rogaine stuff before he started hearing Kojak jokes and finding lollipops taped to his locker.


The sight of a gasoline tanker mixed in with the traffic streaming past him brought the CHP officer fully awake. For safety
reasons, tankers and other carriers of hazardous materials were banned from the bridge and its approaches during rush hour.
Everybody knew that, didn’t they? For damned sure, every trucker who wanted to keep his license knew that. Everybody except
this idiot, obviously.


Dwyer plucked his radio mike off the dashboard. “Dispatch, this is Five-Two. I have a HazMat rig trying to cross the Gate.”
He squinted into the slowly growing dawn. “Plate number is Delta, Tango, Two, Nine, Four, Five, Three. I’m making the stop
now.”


With its lights flashing, the CHP cruiser pulled onto the highway.


Shahin cursed as the American police car suddenly slid in right behind Nadhir’s truck. The Iranian bent down to tear open
the gym bag between his feet. He tugged a Czech-made Skorpion machine pistol out of the bag and checked its twenty-round clip.
Satisfied, he flipped the weapon’s folding wire stock into place and looked up. “Bring me close to that police car!”


When Zadi hesitated, the Iranian lifted the Skorpion’s muzzle, aiming it casually at the older man’s stomach. His eyes were
cold. “Do it,” he said softly.


Horrified, Haydar Zadi swerved left into the next lane and accelerated. Horns blared in outrage behind them.

Shahin ignored the noise, his eyes fixed on the patrol car still trying to pull Nadhir off the road. He could hear the policeman
using his loudspeaker now. That was a wasted effort, he knew. The younger Iranian didn’t speak or understand any English.


Weaving slightly under Zadi’s unsteady hands, the Nissan drifted up alongside the black-and-white police cruiser. Still pinned
by heavy traffic, neither vehicle was moving more than twenty kilometers an hour. Shahin held his breath, waiting for the
right moment. Closer. Closer. Now.


The two cars were less than two meters apart.

He poked the machine pistol above the door frame, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The Skorpion stuttered wildly, bucking upward in Shahin’s hands as he emptied a full magazine into the other vehicle at point-blank
range. Sparks flew off torn metal, and glass shattered, smashed into a thousand fragments by the hail of gunfire. Blood fountained
across the police car’s dashboard. Still rolling forward, the black-and-white slowly veered off the highway, spun around until
it bounced into the hillside, and came to rest with its lights still flashing.



Inside the Nissan, Zadi flinched, panicked by the sudden deafening noise. He yanked the steering wheel left again and then
back hard right, narrowly missing another car. More horns sounded angrily behind and all around them.


“Fool!” Shahin snarled. He glimpsed a road sign ahead and off to the right. They were practically right on top of the last
exit before the bridge itself. They had done their part. They had brought Ibrahim Nadhir safely to the brink of Paradise.
Now it was time to pull away—to live and fight and kill on another day. He grabbed Zadi’s shoulder and pointed. “There! The
exit! Go! Go!”


Pale and shaking harder than ever, the older man obeyed. He jammed his foot down hard on the gas pedal. The Nissan sped off
the freeway and flashed into an intersection without stopping. But they were moving too fast to make the turn that would have
taken them back onto 101 heading north. Instead, Zadi skidded left, turning onto a small, two-lane road that snaked around
and up the Marin Headlands, climbing ever higher along the sheer bluffs overlooking the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean.


Shahin whirled in his seat, straining to look through the Nissan’s rear window. Behind them, the gasoline tanker continued
straight on down the highway. It roared steadily past the exit, driving toward San Francisco.


Sitting tall behind the wheel of the tanker truck, Ibrahim Nadhir paid little heed to the chaos and confusion breaking out
on the road behind him. Zadi and Shahin were there. They would do whatever was necessary to safeguard his mission.


The young Iranian smiled gently. All the long months of his training and religious instruction were close to fruition.
His full awareness, his very soul itself, was focused on one overriding objective: the huge structure looming out of the fog
in front of him. Everything in his life had come down to this one moment. This one place. This one act of faith.


He crossed onto the Golden Gate Bridge. The sound of the road beneath the tanker’s tires changed, becoming hollower and more
metallic.


Taillights blazed a brighter red as the cars ahead slowed, preparing to wend their way through the tollbooth plaza blocking
the bridge’s southern end.


Still smiling, Nadhir brought the big rig to a stop right in the middle of the span. The situation was perfect. Cars crowded
with Americans hemmed him in on all sides.


He lifted his gaze from the road before him and looked east. A bright glow through the mist marked the rising sun and a new
day. His eyes alight with an inner fire, he murmured, “God is great.”


Ibrahim Nadhir breathed in for the last time and reached for the detonator on the seat beside him.

The tanker truck exploded, spewing jagged pieces of steel shrapnel and ten thousand gallons of burning gasoline across the
deck of the bridge. Vehicles inside the blast radius were shredded, smashed, and then set ablaze. Other cars and vans further
out were hit broadside by the shock wave and blown completely off the span, plummeting into the icy waters below. Everywhere
the gasoline landed, fires erupted, fed by new fuel from ruptured automobile gas tanks. Within seconds, the jammed center
of the Golden Gate Bridge was a roaring sea of flame.


Half a mile away and five hundred feet above the bridge, Shahin tightened his grip on the car door handle, grimly
holding on as Haydar Zadi took another hairpin turn too fast. The speeding Nissan skidded wildly, sliding across the centerline
with its tires screeching.


The sky behind them caught fire, lit red and orange by an enormous explosion.

Zadi screamed, half blinded by the sudden glare off his rearview mirror. Still screaming, he spun the steering wheel around
in a frantic effort to stay on the road. He turned the wrong way.


Moving at more than fifty miles an hour, the Nissan Sentra flew over the edge of the cliff, tumbling end over end down a sheer
slope in an avalanche of dirt, rock, torn brush, and shredded metal.


Building 405 had started its life as part of the Benicia Army Arsenal. Since the Army closed its base back in the early sixties,
the warehouse had changed hands more than a dozen times, moving from owner to owner and landlord to landlord in a dizzying,
confusing procession. All of them had valued its sheer size and easy access to the freeway, railroad, and waterfront. None
of them had valued Building 405 enough to spend much time or money on maintenance. From the outside, the place looked more
like a ruin than a going concern—a heap of flaking, cracked concrete walls covered by moss, rust stains from an old tin roof,
and spray-painted graffiti.


FBI Special Agent Michael Flynn stopped at the entrance to the cavernous warehouse to watch his investigative team at work.
More than a dozen agents were scattered throughout the building, poking and prying everywhere with gloved hands as they looked
for evidence. Others were busy stringing
yellow police tape around areas marked for closer inspection. Camera flashes went off in a rapid, uneven sequence as photographers
recorded every aspect of their search.


Flynn followed every move intently, fighting hard to control the fury surging through him. The tall, grim-faced FBI agent
had just come from the explosion site at the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-four hours after the bomb blast, firemen and forensics
specialists were still prying charred bodies out of mangled cars strewn across the span. More than one hundred innocent men,
women, and children were dead. Dozens more were critically injured—all of them badly burned or maimed by flying chunks of
steel. The bridge itself would be closed for days, both by the investigation and by the need to make sure the fires set by
the tanker explosion hadn’t affected its structural integrity.


He shook his head. Over the years he’d seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of murder scenes. But he’d never seen anything
like that tangled, twisted slaughterhouse on the Golden Gate Bridge.


Flynn wanted the bastards responsible for this massacre. He wanted them more than he’d wanted any murdering thug he’d hunted
in his twenty-six years with the Bureau. His hands clenched into fists.


He looked up as his top aide broke off a hushed conversation with some of the other agents and hurried over. “What’ve you
got for me, Tommy?”


“Plenty.” Special Agent Thomas Koenig nodded toward one of the work benches surrounded by yellow tape. “We found some cut
strands of detonator wire over there. And the chemical sniffers are picking up definite traces of plastic explosive. There
and all over this dump.”


Flynn grimaced. “So this was the bomb factory?”

“Yeah,” Koenig said flatly. “The way I figure it is this: They popped that truck driver out near the highway.” He pointed
to the two massive ramps that led directly from the street into the building’s interior. “Then they drove the
tanker right up one of those ramps, parked it, and pulled down those steel doors. After that, they had all the time in the
world to wire it up for the big show.” He shrugged. “No muss. No fuss.”


“Shit.”

“Exactly.” Koenig looked up at him closely. “Get anything besides a couple of John Doe stiffs out of that wrecked Sentra?”

Flynn nodded. Connecting the smashed-up Nissan they’d found at the bottom of the Marin cliffs with the bomb blast and dead
CHP officer hadn’t required brilliant detective work, just common sense. “Weapons: a nine mil and a Czech machine pistol.
They’re on the way to ballistics. Plus, we found a coil of wire and about a half-kilo block of plastic explosive in the trunk.”


Koenig whistled softly. “Curiouser and curiouser.” He frowned. “Think somebody else was out there yesterday morning cutting
away a few loose ends?”


“Maybe.”

“Sir!” One of the agents manning their bank of laptop computers and secure phones waved him over. “A fax just came in from
D.C. They’ve got positive IDs on both those bodies.”


Flynn arched a slate-gray eyebrow in surprise. That was damned quick work. Somebody was on the ball back at the Hoover Building
after all.


He tore the paper straight out of the machine and scanned it rapidly. The Nissan’s driver was pegged as a man named Haydar
Zadi, a legal resident alien and Iranian national. His eyes narrowed. Zadi had been on the FBI’s Watch List because of his
reputed ties to Islamic radicals. No wonder they’d been able to identify him so quickly.


The biggest news was at the bottom of the fax. The other man they’d found wedged inside the crumpled Sentra was a bigger fish—a
much bigger fish. Though they didn’t have any fingerprints to match for a positive ID, the Bureau’s counterterrorist specialists
were virtually certain the dead
man was one Rashim Mahdi, alias Mir Ahrari, alias Mohammed Shahin.


“Son of a bitch.” Flynn ran his eyes down a long list of unsolved assassinations and bombings—some in Europe, some in the
Middle East. This Shahin character had been marked by a host of Western intelligence agencies as one of the HizbAllah’s key
operational commanders. He looked up from the fax. “Put me through to the Director. Now.”


Outside the White House, the sun had long since set, bringing another cold, gray, and windy winter day to a dreary end. The
streets around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were almost empty—abandoned by the capital’s cadre of bureaucrats, politicians, and
high-priced lawyers heading for plush suburban homes. Inside the executive mansion, however, staff aides, cabinet members,
and uniformed military men still crowded the Oval Office.


Major General Sam Farrell knew it was considered an honor to be asked to offer advice to the President of the United States.
Right now he was beginning to wish there had been some graceful way to decline that honor. He’d been invited to this high-level
White House confab because he headed the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters controlling all U.S. military
counterterrorist units, including the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. That made him one of the Pentagon’s
top experts on terrorism. So far, though, Farrell, a sturdy six-footer with an open, friendly countenance, had been asked
precisely two questions: Did he want coffee or a soda? And could he
please move his chair over to make room for the Chief of Naval Operations?


To the general, the seating arrangements for this meeting reflected the current administration’s fundamental priorities and
power structure. The President’s political gurus and media advisors filled the overstuffed chairs closest to his desk. Beyond
them, the Director of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General sat in an awkward row,
wedged together on a couch that was just a shade too small for all four of them. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Farrell, and a
few other subordinate officers were furthest back, relegated to seats lining the far wall.


At last, the President looked up from a thick, red-tagged briefing book he’d been devouring while the discussion raged around
him. There were shadows under his eyes. Even in normal times the nation’s chief executive often had trouble sleeping. Now
his fatigue showed plainly. He fixed his gaze on the FBI Director. “You’re sure the Iranian government was directly involved
in this attack on us? That this wasn’t just