Collision of Evil Read online

  Ibrahim Baran grew slowly accustomed to imprisonment and found his universe of aspirations commensurately reduced. True to their word, his Turkish captors permitted him a respectable cell with a television, and gave him reading and exercise privileges. Just as importantly, Ibrahim’s cooperative attitude bought him access to a better cut of prison food than normal inmates were accorded. He gained significant amounts of weight. He continued to read the Koran with absorption, but had decided that the requirements of jihad and shahid were not, after all, roles destined for him.

  August Sedlmeyer continued to visit the dead in his dreams with nocturnal regularity. He knew that he was one of the last of his devastated generation, but was less proud of this distinction than weary. He still loved to see the outline of the Bavarian Alps at sunset, even if imperfectly through weakening eyes. Still, he felt increasingly out of place in a world of cell phones and satellite television, and an age that did not take much account of soldiers. It was time to leave and he waited for his exit, not with apprehension but with longing.

  Abdul al-Masri crossed from Turkey into Iraq and eventually made his way to North Waziristan in the uncontrolled spaces of rugged, rural Pakistan. He heard the news reports about the Oktoberfest attack while en route to a gathering of Al-Qaeda principals near the Afghan border. The men, armed with AK-47s, stood around a small campfire behind an obscure village mosque.

  Asked about the attack, al-Masri shrugged into his rough woolen cloak as he poked a long stick into the flames and stirred the embers. “It was not the success planned, brothers, true. We wanted to kill thousands, that was our holy ambition! We should not forget that the new weapon worked and can work again. Other weapons, too, await our use. It is a certainty. Be patient, brothers, the Prophet measures justice neither in days nor in years. There will come another time.” The embers flared as a breeze eased over the village, driven from the harsh and wild mountains above. It was a terrain that a poet might characterize as inherently savage and eternally uncompromising. Al-Masri felt quite at home.

  Afterword

  This book is a work of fiction and none of the characters involved are real. Nonetheless, not everything in the novel is fantasy. The motivations attributed to the Islamist terrorists are based on fact, including the public statements of Islamist terrorist operatives, and the Al-Qaeda leadership of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, among others. The transnational nature of Islamist terror networks and their cellular structure has also been established beyond doubt, and it is true that Germany has been targeted by Islamist operatives.

  Sarin is a real nerve agent and was developed in Germany and eventually weaponized by that country—though never employed—during World War II. It is also part of the historical record that Sarin and other nerve agents were produced by Nazi chemists at a facility in the town of Dyernfurth-am-Oder, and that a number of German workers were killed at the site by contact with nerve agents. Sarin (which was for years also part of the binary chemical weapons arsenal of the United States) is, in fact, linked to Al-Qaeda. Films captured in Al-Qaeda camps following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 contain footage of Sarin being employed experimentally on a dog, with lethal result. The experiment clearly suggests Al-Qaeda’s interest in employing Sarin as a weapon, both to inflict mass casualties and to instill fear of a weapon that cannot be seen or easily detected. The effects and symptoms of Sarin exposure as described in the story are factual, and there is a considerable body of professional literature on the chemical.

  The Munich Oktoberfest is the largest public fair in the world and attracts around six million international visitors a year during its sixteen-day run. As described, beer from the six major Munich breweries is dispensed to the thirsty in a series of enormous tents. The Oktoberfest was the target of a terrorist bomb attack in 1980 that killed thirteen people and wounded hundreds. That attack was attributed to neo-Nazi elements.

  According to open source information, Menwith Hill Station in the United Kingdom is a signals intercept facility jointly run by the U.S. and the British SIGINT service, GCHQ.

  Regarding the introductory episode of the novel, on July 17, 2003, a long-buried U.S. bomb from the Second World War exploded near the Salzburg train station (where the author was regularly underway during the period). Two of the technicians attempting to deactivate the bomb were killed and another seriously wounded. Could this entombed bomb have claimed the final casualties of World War II?