The Hawaladar

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

SAALIM NASRALLAH had been in Saint Petersburg for three weeks now on an international visa, arriving there in mid-October as a crew member aboard the Aurora Crescent, an ocean-going cargo vessel owned by a U.S. company named Aurora Transportation, Inc., sailing under Liberian registry.

Nasrallah was in a hurry. He had disembarked and stayed behind under the pretext of important personal business while the Aurora Crescent made the circuit of several other Baltic ports. The ship was now, however, due back into Saint Petersburg’s Port of Kronstadt within three days. He needed to finish his business in the city and be ready to leave when it arrived. The Aurora Crescent would spend only two days taking on additional cargo, and then it would sail straight for the Canadian Port of Montreal and its entrance to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. If all went well with the purchase Nasrallah had been working to consummate during his time in Saint Petersburg, he would need to be on board again as a member of the crew when the Aurora Crescent departed, to ensure safe delivery of a very important cargo to its ultimate destination through the U.S. Port at Calumet Harbor in Chicago, IL. Once there, and the sensitive cargo successfully offloaded into the hands of the right party, he would be free to either continue on with the Aurora Crescent to its next destination, return to his home country of Liberia to await his next engagement, or remain in the Chicago area to take part in a very important operation that a little-known Muslim organization—to which he now belonged—was planning soon to undertake there. As an ardent jihadist, he had already made his choice in that regard.

It had taken Nasrallah only a few hours in Saint Petersburg to locate Demetri Fomin, the man he had come to see in that city, but it took another two days to arrange a meeting. Finding the man was the easy part. Everyone seemed to know him. Arranging a meeting with him was another matter. Fomin’s people had checked Nasrallah out thoroughly before the meeting was agreed to. The jihadist was impressed with their security. Once he was able to get together with Fomin and his associates, however, things progressed well with their negotiations.

Operating on knowledge garnered from messages passed to them, both by word-of-mouth and a complex network of Internet websites, Nasrallah’s fellow jihadists had learned that certain parties in Russia were in possession of a substantial amount of weapons-grade Smallpox pathogens, and that those individuals were willing to part with some of the materials at an acceptable price. Properly utilized with good planning, such a weapon could do much to further the goals of the organization to which he belonged. So, they sent him to consummate a purchase.

Negotiations for the bio-weapons were, to say the least, an experience that Nasrallah would never be able to forget. In their first meeting, Fomin explained to Nasrallah how his criminal organization had come into possession of the Variola pathogens through some poor, out-of-work, female Russian.

“Name of Lebedev,” said Fomin, as he recounted the story of how he obtained the pathogens to Nasrallah, “a brilliant female scientist with looks to match, but a little greedy, if you ask me. She apparently lifted these pathogens from one of the biological weapons stockpiles she had supervisory control of prior to the fall of the Republic. Had it stashed away in a private, personal lab she maintained at a country dacha that had been in her family for years. Held it for going on thirty years, waiting to sell it for big money. Her one tragic mistake was thinking she would squeeze us in the process.”

Nasrallah had little interest in how Fomin and his mafiya people had obtained the pathogens, but he could tell a megalomaniac when he met one. It had taken him much longer than he had anticipated getting to Fomin and beginning negotiations for purchase of the bio-weapon his organization very much wanted to obtain, and time was of the essence. So, as uninterested as he might be, it appeared as though he would have to suffer through Fomin’s recounting his acquisition of the pathogens in order to complete negotiations for the purchase he was sent to Saint Petersburg to make.

“This Dr. Lebedev had the unmitigated gall of thinking she could exact a ridiculous price from me and my associates in her attempt to market this product of hers, but we decided, shall we say, to use some time-honored bargaining techniques to satisfactorily resolve the matter,” Fomin recounted with a sadistic chuckle.

The mafiya boss then went on to show Nasrallah video snippets of his men extracting information from the woman regarding the location of the Smallpox pathogens, matter-of-factly describing how the torture had taken place over approximately twelve hours of painful interrogation. Fomin seemed particularly proud that his men were “especially skilled at such things,” sadistically showing how they purposely kept the young woman alive long enough to eventually be used as a “human guinea pig” in testing the virus’ effectiveness once they had it in their possession.

Fomin sadistically studied Nasrallah’s reaction as he showed him another video of the tests. With Dr. Lebedev having barely recovered from the ordeal of her interrogation, Fomin and his henchmen had taken her and three other unfortunates—men who Fomin claimed had wronged him in one way or another—and caged all four in an airtight, stand-alone building where they were then exposed to a small amount of airborne Smallpox virus. Over the course of what Fomin rather coldly explained was about a three to four-week period, the video graphically depicted each stage of the disease’s horrible progress. What followed was perhaps one of the most gruesome, sickening things that Nasrallah had ever witnessed.

Looking and sounding much like a Discovery Channel documentary, voice-over in Russian described how the four hapless souls had been infected with but a “minute amount of the airborne virus.” Clinically explaining how the infection only required but “a few virions introduced into the mucosa of the respiratory system,” the narrator detailed how “the infection worked its way to the lymph system over an approximate three to four-day period, and from there on to the spleen and marrow of the bone.” Sadistically filming each stage, viewers were shown the ravages of fever and toxemia around the eighth to ninth days, told how the virus attached itself to the “leukocytes in the bloodstream”, and then “migrated on to the small blood vessels in the skin, nose and mouth.” By the fourteenth day, all four victims of the disease were in the throes of high fevers, with ugly rashes beginning to appear on their faces and upper bodies. By the eighteenth day, only the woman scientist was left alive, but even she was no longer recognizable as the attractive Slavic beauty that Nasrallah had seen at the beginning of the video. With all visible areas of her swollen face and body covered with darkened pustules, the only thing that hinted to the viewer who the individual in the film might be was the mane of auburn-colored hair still attached to the head of the person now struggling for each additional breath. The grotesque “marketing piece” ended with the viewer being shown the lab building engulfed in flames, with the narrator explaining how the fire resulted from “a highly accelerated blaze utilized to cleanse the facility of contamination,” and destroy any evidence of the grisly test that had occurred there. Nasrallah had been inoculated with Smallpox vaccine prior to his trip to Russia as a safeguard for his part in this transaction. That was reassuring considering the nature of his mission, but it did nothing for the extreme nausea he experienced while viewing the video.

“Assuming we can agree upon a suitable price, Mr. Fomin, how and in what form would we take possession of the pathogens?” Nasrallah took several long sips of the espresso the Russians had provided him at the start of the viewing of the video, knowing it would do nothing to settle his stomach. These are people I would not want to cross, he thought. The sooner I am done with this disgusting bunch of thugs, the better.

“As we previously stated in our e-mail exchanges during the last two months, our price for the product is $2 Million, and that is non-negotiable.” Fomin smiled with satisfaction as he thought about how the price he had just quoted Nasrallah was exactly the same as that which the recently departed Dr. Lebedev had quoted to him before she met her untimely demise, and it was for only part of the weapons supply he and his men had been able to extract from the lady scientist.

“That price is exorbitant, but we do not wish to quibble at this point. How do we proceed?”

“That’s simple. Pursuant to your specifications, the pathogens you requested have been suspended in an appropriate medium, and encased in aerosol containers labeled to look just like over two hundred other cases of four-ounce containers of Russian-made, commercial bathroom air freshener. Adequately marked so they can be identified from the others, ten cases of twelve canisters each have been loaded into the middle of a shrink-wrapped pallet in a warehouse at the port authority here in Saint Petersburg.”

“How do we tell those containing the pathogens from the others?”

“The ten cases containing the special aerosol containers have each been stamped with a small red ‘X’ on the bottom to identify them from others in the shipment, and the bottoms of each of the canisters in those cases has been similarly marked. I wish to emphasize, however, that no other controls beyond that have been used. So, you will need to take great care once you have taken possession.”

“When can that be?”

“When satisfactory p*****t is received, we will provide you with the appropriate bills of lading, the pallets will be loaded on the ship you designate, and then control of the product will be in your hands. Any problems that occur thereafter with respect to the handling of this delicate cargo will be on your shoulders.”

“We are prepared to pay one-half of the requested $2 Million purchase price once the cargo is on board a freighter flying a flag under Liberian registry, named the Aurora Crescent, which is currently docked at the Port of Kronstadt,” responded Nasrallah. “$1 Million in cash will be available to you just as soon as you hand over the bill of lading to me. When the special cargo arrives at its U.S. destination, $1 Million more will be hand delivered to you either here in Saint Petersburg, or any other location of your designation.”

“That suits us just fine, Mr. Nasrallah. I will meet you on board your ship tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. So you are forewarned, however, I will be accompanied by several of my associates when I arrive. This is a delicate matter. So, they will be present to see that all goes smoothly. The first $1 Million will be in our hands before you receive the necessary papers to leave with the cargo, and the second $1 Million will be delivered in a timely fashion before one month has passed, or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the security agencies of most of its allies will somehow receive word of the transaction and as much information as we can provide on you and all of your associates. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do indeed, Mr. Fomin.”

◊◊◊◊

WHEN THE Aurora Crescent departed Saint Petersburg, Russia the day after his meeting with Demitri Fomin, Saalim Nasrallah was once again on board as a crew member. A forty-four-year-old Liberian Muslim, and a third-generation mariner with over twenty years of experience on the high seas, Nasrallah was on his third pilgrimage to the Saudi Arabia city of Mecca in 2012—or Hajj 1433 according to the Muslim calendar—when he first met the recruitment team of the infamous al-Qaeda terrorist organization and was enlisted by them into their ranks. The al-Qaeda had adopted a relatively low-lying operational posture since the supposed halcyon days of post 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, but they were still a preeminent force with which to be reckoned.

Nasrallah’s recruitment had not been a hard sell for the al-Qaeda. The career seafarer came from a long line of strict Wahhabi Muslims who had been waiting most of his life for such a call to come. Having always envisioned himself as one day becoming Shahid, or martyr to the cause of Islam, it was his thinking al-Qaeda might well be Allah’s tool in that regard.

Al-Qaeda had likewise for some time been looking for someone with Nasrallah’s profile when he came to their attention. The terrorist group was always much in need of dependable couriers. To be able to recruit a person with Saalim Nasrallah’s background and capability into that capacity was in the words of one Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda since the death of bin Laden in 2011, “a gift from Allah.”

Nasrallah was not only a master seafarer registered with the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry, but because of such registry he also possessed a legitimate international visa. In fact, he was one of the first to be issued that organization’s new, hi-tech biometric identity card that accompanied his Seafarer’s Identification and Recordbook when they were first issued in February 2002. This new system of identification used a 2-D bar-code technology, which included a data strip that contained one or two fingerprint templates, a digitized version of the cardholder’s photograph and several pages of encoded personal information on the registrant. It was considered virtually counterfeit proof, since the technology of the card doesn’t capture actual fingerprints, but instead creates a unique template that utilizes mathematical algorithms. An optical fingerprint scanner compares stored fingerprint templates with the cardholder’s live fingerprints and then matches the bearer to the registry on the spot. With such credentials, he could enter, exit and enjoy extended stays in most ports-of-call countries with little problem, making him the ideal operative to both purchase and accompany a sensitive shipment of cargo.

Nasrallah’s al-Qaeda overseers had, therefore, asked him to do just that with the purchase and handling of the shipment of sensitive materials now bound from Russia to the United States and the ports of Chicago, Illinois. Following safe arrival, and successful delivery of the very special cargo to its ultimate destination, he was to consider himself under operational control of a fledgling, al-Qaeda affiliate terrorist organization with respect to his future disposition, should he desire to remain.