by James Hunt
Burke lifted his head and folded his hands. “They agree for the most part and are ready to provide the proper resources so that when all teams are assembled, we won’t even have to leave the room. We can watch it all happen in real time.”
Angela felt ready to charge into action. She wanted a say-so in every decision made but recognized an unrealistic goal when she saw one. The government agencies were going to do it the government’s way, and she had a strange combination of excitement and dread at the thought. “Just tell me this,” she said, holding up a hand. “What is our main priority in finding these terror cells?”
“Finding your family, of course,” Burke answered without missing a beat.
Their meeting was soon adjourned. Burke left the room as abruptly as he had answered her question. The FBI team soon followed, leaving Chief Drake and Angela at an empty table in a darkened room, blinds closed and projector screen still on.
“You need to rest while they put this thing together,” he said.
“I couldn’t if I wanted to,” she replied, looking down at the table. It was true enough. She didn’t feel the least bit tired, but she couldn’t go on forever. The inevitable crash would come soon.
“I want you to go home, Angela,” Drake said, standing up and stretching. “In fact, I don’t care. Go to a diner. A motel. Anywhere but here. You need a break from this place so Homeland can do what they do. I’ll call you once everything is in order.”
She thought about her home—vacant, ghostly, and cordoned by yellow police tape. It was the last place she wanted to be. But in another way, she felt compelled to investigate—to fully face the reality of her situation.
“I’m ordering you to leave this station,” Drake said. “I’ll call you as soon as everything is ready.” He pushed his chair in and headed toward the door as Angela offered a “Yes, sir” in return. He left the room as Angela sat alone in the silence.
Martinez was unreachable. Doug was facing unimaginable horrors in the captivity of terrorists. And she couldn’t imagine the fear that Chassity and Lisa were going through.
There was no one she felt she could talk to. In what world was it possible that her family could be abducted by terrorists and held prisoner? They weren’t in Iraq or even the cartel-ridden landscape of some Mexican town. How could such a thing have happened?
Angela drove home in a daze to the familiar comfort of her neighborhood only to find her patchy front yard cordoned off by police tape, just as she had imagined it. A police cruiser sat in the driveway, with two male officers who seemed to be basking in the air conditioning fighting the midafternoon heat.
They followed Angela with their eyes as her light-blue Toyota Camry pulled in. If only they had been at her house the night before. She parked and got out of the car, introducing herself as the officer at the wheel rolled his window down. Despite their presence, they seemed to have little knowledge of what had actually happened and what was still going on.
“We were told to stay here until further notice,” the uniformed officer said. He sported a trim mustache and wore aviator glasses concealing his eyes.
Angela looked to her front door, where more police tape had been applied. “That’s fine,” she said in an exhausted voice. “I won’t be here long.”
The officer noticed her border patrol uniform in all its dust-covered glory. “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened here? They’ve only told us so much. A break-in? A kidnapping?”
He seemed sincere enough that she felt ready to tell him everything, if only to have someone to confide in. In the passenger seat, the other officer seemed uninterested, keeping his eyes on his cell phone screen and scrolling.
“Last night…” she began. “We had a break-in. And I received multiple threats that they’d be back. Something about me working for the border patrol.”
The officer covered his mouth, shocked. “Oh my God. Well, I can certainly relate. Is your family okay?”
Angela froze, choking back her tears. Once the officer grasped her growing distress, he apologized. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean anything by the question.”
“Yes, I’m fine. Don’t worry. Just a long night, that’s all.” She turned toward the front door, looking past Doug’s truck, and began to walk. She reached the door and turned the handle. It had been left unlocked. A sign was taped to the door saying: Trespassers will be prosecuted. She walked inside and immediately found the stillness of the living room unsettling.
It was as though the kids were just at school and Doug was at work. No flipped couches or smashed windows. Everything had been left intact. She crept in past the living room and went straight for the girls’ rooms down the hall. Their unmade beds and clothes scattered on the floor made saddened her. Some crazy hope made her call out to them, hoping that they would miraculously come out from wherever they were hiding, but no one appeared.
She then went to her bedroom, where Doug’s cell phone still rested on the nightstand. Surprised the police hadn’t confiscated it, she picked it up to look at its dim, locked screen with only ten percent of power remaining. His wallet sat next to the bedside lamp, and Doug never went anywhere without his wallet.
She took his wallet and cell and fell onto the made bed, sinking into the middle of the mattress in a fetal position. The side of her face hit his pillow, and she could smell his scent, shampoo and aftershave, still fresh. With no one around for the first time, she began to cry into the pillow—deep, crippling sobs that almost felt like a relief. And once the tears came, they wouldn’t stop. What had become of her life in the past couple of days? She wasn’t ready for it.
After a good five minutes, she plugged her phone charger in and set the phone on the nightstand, recharging it. She closed her wet eyes after wiping her face and sank her face back into Doug’s pillow while hugging her own to her chest.
She didn’t care how dirty her uniform was or that her boots were getting sand all over the bed. None of that mattered.
In one fleeting moment of peace, her cell vibrated. She jerked up and grabbed it, seeing the chief’s number on the screen. She swiped the screen and held the phone to her ear.
“Yes, sir?”
“I apologize, Agent Gannon, but you may want to get back down here.”
Things were moving at breakneck speed, he said. That much she understood. She moved off the bed, looking around the room, but for what?
As though he could sense her distraction, he emphasized that she should take her time. “Nothing immediate. I don’t want you coming in here looking like you just crawled through the desert. Take a shower, change into a new uniform. None of us are going anywhere.”
“But, you said—”
“Yes. They’re ready to go with the next plan. Tentatively. You get here in the next hour. Everything will be ready to go.”
“No problem,” she said, wiping her face again.
She hung up the phone and headed toward the bathroom, stopping to glance into the mirror as she entered the hallway. Drake was right. She was a mess. She needed to shower and change into a new uniform. Who knew the next time she would get a chance?
Reckoning
Doug sat on the bare floor of a dark, empty room, separated from his daughters and from the outside world. A message he was supposed to read lay at his feet. A single ceiling bulb illuminated the concrete walls and floor. A thick metal door to his side looked impenetrable, with its multiple dead bolts, and a small air vent high above him was unreachable. He was trapped.
They had stripped Doug of his clothes and forced him into a baggy orange jumpsuit—the same garb he had seen on the victims of ISIS beheadings before. He hadn’t seen his daughters since they had reached the mysterious hideout, driving for nearly two hours in pure darkness, with hoods over their heads.
During their hellish journey, Doug had tried his best to assure Chassity and Lisa that everything was going to be okay. It was all he could do. He had told their captors that they weren’t going to get away with it, but it di
dn’t seem as though anyone was listening or that they cared.
With time alone in his cell, Doug let the severity of the situation sink in.
His feet and arms were no longer bound, a recent change after his captors’ first visit to him only moments earlier, during which they had brought him into another room and propped him in front of a camera and forced him to his knees.
“What have you done with my daughters?” he had asked through the burlap sack covering his face.
“Ask us again, and we’ll bring you their heads,” a man answered in an indifferent Arabic accent.
“No, that’s a little too much, don’t you think, Saheed?” another man had said in a British accent.
The British man then softly explained to Doug that he was going to be in a video, and as long as he cooperated, no harm would come to him. It was the very same man Doug recognized as Peter from earlier, the man who had come into his home and taken Doug and his daughters away.
Doug had also been told that he would be given an opportunity to speak in the next video. That video, Peter explained, was going to be seen all over the world.
After the first video, in which Doug had said nothing, he was back in his cell, free from the restraints on his hands, a piece of paper lying at his feet.
“Those are your lines,” a large man with soulless eyes said, walking out. “Memorize them and be ready.”
The door slammed shut, and Doug was left alone again. For how long, he didn’t know. The script was the typical propaganda he had heard from ISIS videos of the past: how ashamed he was of his country, how the US had murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims, and how the infidels were a great evil unto the world. He knew the drill. But never in a million years could he have imagined that he would be forced to say such words.
Hours had passed, and Doug knew that Angela would be worried sick about them. Despite the promises from his captors, Doug knew that he was in serious danger. He knew what happened to ISIS prisoners in the Middle East. They were promptly disposed of and discarded. But he wasn’t going to let that happen.
After an hour so of sitting in silence, the multiple dead bolts on the door slammed back, unlocked, one after the other. Doug huddled with his knees against his chest, shivering with apprehension in his orange jump suit. It’s time, he thought.
They were probably ready to prop him up in front of the camera again. He had looked over the scripted words on the crinkled paper before him but had failed to memorize them. Part of him was ready to refuse, but then he thought of his daughters. He knew the terrorists would use them to get what they wanted.
When the door creaked open, he saw two large, shadowed figures holding rifles. Doug backed against the far corner of the room in a defensive ball. Bright light seeped inside from the hallway. The armed men parted as another man, lanky and robed, stepped past them and casually entered the room. As he came into focus, Doug saw a man strangely similar in look and build to Osama Bin Laden.
He had a thin, graying beard that grew down well past his chin, and he wore a white turban, balled up like a cap. The edges of his long white robe dragged against the ground as he approached Doug with a curious look in his dark eyes. His hands were folded behind his back, and unlike the two other men, he didn’t appear to be armed.
His sandals shuffled against the concrete floor where he stopped—mere inches from the sheet of paper with Doug’s scripted words. Their eyes met, and the man slightly bowed his head in acknowledgment. “My name is Salah Asgar, and you are Douglas Gannon.”
Doug looked up, stone faced, his fear shrouded in anger. At first, he said nothing, but as the room went silent, with Asgar waiting for a response, Doug asked the only question that mattered. “Where are my daughters?”
“They are safe. For now. And their fate depends on you,” Asgar answered coldly. His eyes shifted to the paper on the ground then back to Doug. “Do you know why you are here?”
“No,” Doug said. “I don’t know what any of this is about, but whatever it is, you need to release them. They are only children.”
“In time. But first you must do something for us.”
“I’m not reading that,” Doug said, pointing to the paper. “Whatever this is, it needs to stop. You and your men are going to get yourselves killed. For what? Forcing me to say words I don’t believe? You can’t possibly think you’re going to get away with this.”
Asgar studied Doug as though he was gathering his thoughts. He exuded a calm patience, making Doug think he might be able to talk some sense into him. Asgar’s gaze turned to his men, and he signaled them away, speaking in Arabic. The two men in the shadows nodded and left the room, closing the door behind them.
Doug thought it strange to be left alone with this man, surmising him as the leader. He wondered where “Peter Graves” had gone and what role he played in the organization.
“If you do as we say and say what we ask, no harm will come to you. This is a one-time offer. For you see, my men are eager to spill the blood of your family all over these walls.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Doug asked, more perplexed than ever. “I don’t know any of you. I’ve never seen you in my life.”
Asgar took a step closer, his face contorted in anger. “Your government slaughtered many of our brothers in cold blood, several of them unarmed, in a midnight raid in which your wife played a key part.”
With the mention of Angela, things were suddenly beginning to make sense to Doug, despite his skepticism of everything that came out of Asgar’s mouth.
A long finger pointed inches from Doug’s stubbly face. “You will reveal the truth of this crime against innocent Muslims. You will detail how your government conducted an illegal raid, and you will apologize for your country. Only then will we even consider releasing you.”
Doug reluctantly picked up the paper and began skimming its lines. “What about your demands?” he asked. “The release of all Gitmo prisoners? Our government has a strict policy against negotiating with terrorists.”
“That seems to have changed as of late,” Asgar said. “And that’s none of your concern, anyway. Just read the script.”
Something about Asgar’s certainty and arrogance made Doug bristle with anger. Here Asgar was, on American soil—he presumed—with a group of men who claimed to be members of ISIS. The very idea was preposterous to him. He took the paper crumpled it up, much to the shock evident in Asgar’s eyes.
“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” Doug said, tossing the paper to the side. “I’ve seen enough ISIS videos to know what happens to people after they read this bullshit. You’ve got the wrong guy this time.”
Asgar reminded him of his daughters, and Doug realized that for a moment, he had forgotten the significant leverage the group had over him. He decided, however, to play his last card in a defiant attempt to stand up to what he assumed was a ragtag group of terrorist phonies. “Let me and my daughters go, and I can guarantee that the feds go easy on you. Keep this up, and you’ll be signing your own death warrants.”
Asgar folded his hands at his front and sighed. He took another step closer, standing directly over Doug, staring down at him in near contempt. “You Americans are all the same. So sure of yourselves. How soon you forget that we are at war with you.”
“Who? ISIS?” Doug said.
Asgar raised one foot and pushed against Doug’s leg, taunting him. “All of us under the banner of Islam.”
“That’s not true. You and your men are nothing but extremists.”
Suddenly, Asgar stepped away, shaking his head in what appeared to be disappointment. He pivoted swiftly with his finger in the air. “We have over one hundred cells throughout this state alone. Thousands of fighters throughout this country. How do you think I was able to dispatch a team to your home so quickly?” Asgar crouched as his knees cracked. “Once we attack, how many Americans are we going to kill? A thousand? Two thousand?” He then smiled, and in his eyes Doug could see pure malice.
“No, Mr. Gannon. It will be far more than that.”
Doug thought of his daughters, of Angela, their friends, family, and neighbors. The man before him was threatening all of their lives and relishing it, and Doug could take it no more. He pushed back against the wall and leapt up, surprising Asgar with his audacity.
Doug charged forward and tackled Asgar, throwing him against the ground with a resounding thud. Asgar was light and bony, but the hands that clutched Doug’s wrist had a tremendous grip. He lay on top of Asgar, crushing his body against the ground, as both men gasped for air. Doug jerked one hand loose and punched Asgar directly in the jaw, hearing a pop. Asgar cried out in pain and released his grip on Doug’s other hand. He then covered his face in agony as Doug punched him twice on the other side.
As he wailed and thrashed against his captor, Doug didn’t know what had gotten into him. It was as though abject rage had taken over. The repercussions were certain to be severe, but Doug wasn’t thinking about that. He only cared about how much damage he could inflict on the man who fancied himself a terrorist leader.
“Bastard!” Doug shouted, striking Asgar in the side of the chest.
The door then swung open and slammed back against the wall, as the two men rushed back inside, their rifles drawn. Doug looked up and froze as the muzzles entered his field of vision. The men shouted wildly at him while Asgar, pinned beneath, demanded that they hold their fire. Doug looked up and felt Asgar grip his neck with a claw-like hold.
“Get off of him!” one of the guards shouted.
Doug slowly raised his hands up, surrendering. The guard’s eyes were furious, but they did not fire. Instead, he received treatment similar to what had been dealt him during the home invasion.
Their rifles were on him like clubs, beating his already-bruised body repeatedly until he fell onto the floor in a tight ball, praying for the blows to end. One final bludgeon to the back of the head with a buttstock ended his resistance. His ears rang, and after a white flash exploded on his retina, he could barely see anything. He was drifting fast, but before total blackness came, Asgar knelt down next to him and spoke softly in his ear.
