True Faith and Allegiance
Page 39
Dalca agreed, then added, “That stuff happening in America isn’t coming from the data Albert stole. That’s insane.”
Now Dragomir looked at his lead researcher with a cocked head. “Hey . . . what was that back in there? You usually aren’t so quick to pass off praise to your team. That showed maturity.”
Dalca smiled. “Just wanted the Seychelles Group guys to know there are others involved.” He winked. “I think it’s only fair.”
Back in his office, Dalca poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at his desk. He felt a little light-headed, and he wondered if he was coming down with a cold. As he reached for his coffee cup, he knocked the liquid over his table. He leapt up, cursed in surprise and anger, and then headed out to the break room on his floor to get some towels.
Keep it together, everything is great, he told himself. He was as chill as a person could be, he told himself this with finality every day. But now as he rushed to get something to clean up his mess, he looked down at his hands and he saw them shaking.
He could convince anyone of anything, but right now his mind could not convince his body that he was, in any way, safe.
Peng and his men were looking hard for evidence that ARTD had helped ISIS, and Dalca was in the middle. He’d sent them away for now, but they weren’t going very far away.
Somewhere behind his calm façade he knew they would come back.
45
At 6:53 a.m., sixty-one law enforcement officers from various local and state authorities surrounded the Fresh Fest supermarket on West Ann Road in Las Vegas, Nevada. Two ambulances had already made the scene and left, their sirens wailing as they raced off to hospitals. But even now two more ambulances sat parked behind the police cars while EMTs and paramedics treated three lightly wounded civilians in the parking lot.
Forty minutes earlier, an Air Force Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle pilot had stopped in to pick up groceries on his way home from a twenty-four-hour shift at Creech AFB, northwest of the city. He’d been walking up to the checkout counter when he noticed a young olive-skinned couple next to him fidgeting nervously, glancing his way. The major was uneasy enough to walk over to a self-checkout lane, and when he looked back up at the couple he realized they were moving his way. The woman reached into her purse, and the man reached under his shirt.
As the guns came out and the major dropped his groceries, he heard a shouted command from up the magazine aisle. There, an older man in a baseball cap had drawn a small stainless steel pistol. He held it on the couple and ordered them to drop their weapons, but both of them instead turned to him and opened fire.
The old man shot the woman once in the chest, and once in the face, and while the first round merely rocked her back on her heels, the second shot killed her instantly. The civilian himself took a round through his shoulder and a second in his right hand. He fell to the ground clutching at his wounds, dropping his gun in the process.
A kid stocking shelves helped drag the wounded senior citizen to cover, and then through the market to escape out a back door.
The Air Force major bolted out the front door of the supermarket, chased by screaming nine-millimeter rounds. A store security guard, armed with a .38 revolver he hadn’t fired since qualifying with it, emptied his weapon at the would-be assassin, missing with all six rounds before he was hit in the throat by return fire. He bled to death quickly in front of the ATM just inside the doors.
A police car had been idling in front of the convenience store adjacent to the market while two LVPD officers inside the vehicle drank coffee, and they heard the gunfire even with their windows up and the AC running. They rolled up in front of the market within forty-five seconds, just as the deli and bakery employees passed by, running for their lives.
One officer grabbed his shotgun and the other pulled his Glock 22, and they rushed inside toward the unknown threat.
The surviving terrorist had been trying to revive his female partner, and he was surprised by the quick arrival of the police. He ran back deeper into the large store, but not before he was hit in the back by four pellets of buckshot. He kept his footing, shot and wounded a civilian who stumbled into his path in panic, and emptied his magazine over his shoulder toward the police while he retreated all the way to the stockroom.
He made it to the loading dock, and could have escaped out into a rear alley, but he saw employees ducked behind cars back there: men and women who could have pointed out his direction to police. Instead, he returned to the storage area of the grocery store, found a darkened corner behind pallets of breakfast cereal boxes, and collapsed in pain, exhaustion, and grief.
Kateb knew that he and his wife, Aza, had failed to kill their target, just as they had failed to kill the Navy SEAL two days earlier in L.A.
And now Aza was dead and Kateb was fucked.
—
Those first two police officers on the scene did not pursue the armed man into the stockroom, chiefly because when the cop with the shotgun knelt to check the body of the female attacker, he saw something horrifying. Her face was covered in blood from a ragged wound just to the left of her nose, and he found it odd she had a wire hanging out from the cuff of her shirt. At the end of the cord, he saw the detonator with the black swivel safety cap turned to expose the red button below it.
The young cop stumbled back onto the floor, then leapt to his feet and shouted to his partner to get the hell out.
As more law enforcement arrived the entire shopping center was evacuated and sealed off. The injured were hauled out by other civilians while the police held their pistols at the low ready, still coming to the slow realization that a couple minutes after enjoying their morning coffee and talking about their kids’ baseball tourney that weekend, they had rolled up on a terrorist attack with international implications.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s SWAT team is called Zebra; they are known as one of the best forces in the nation, and they made the scene within twenty-five minutes. No one on scene could tell them whether they were facing a hostage situation or simply a barricaded suspect, so the commander of the Zebras called for a robot.
The Zebra unit was not going through the front entrance of the market until the bomb squad checked the vest on the body fifty feet from the door, so they moved around back. They formed at an open loading dock and an unlocked employee entrance door, and waited for the negotiator on the scene to give the word to breach.
A small tactical robot run by the Zebra unit was sent through the automatic doors of the market. An officer with a controller watched the monitor in front of him and followed a blood trail all the way back into the stockroom.
—
Kateb sat propped against a pallet of cereal boxes, his blood soaking into the cardboard. His phone was to his ear, and his pistol hung between his knees in his other hand.
“I am sorry, Mohammed. Aza and I have failed you. I am wounded and she is dead. A stupid old man had a gun, like he was a cowboy in a movie. We did not expect trouble from the civilians. After she died and I shot the old fool, I turned back around to kill the major, but he was running out the front door. I tried to hit him, but I failed.”
Mohammed said, “I know, Kateb. It is on the news. They have you surrounded, my brother.”
The wounded man was not listening. Instead, he said, “She died right in front of me.”
“She was martyred in front of you. She was a warrior, as are you, my brother.”
Kateb looked at the dried blood on the back of his hand. Then he looked up. There was a sound echoing around the warehouse now.
“I can hear something. I don’t know what it is.”
“They will be coming now. It is time for you to become a martyr as well.”
“Yes, Mohammed. I did not kill the major. But I will kill these policemen.”
“Good! Very good! Allah be praised.”
Kateb
put the phone down, fought his way up to his feet, and raised his pistol out in front of him. With his free hand he took the plunger of the suicide vest, and he held his thumb over it.
The noise became louder and louder, it was an electronic whine of some sort.
Then it stopped abruptly.
Kateb rubbed sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve, then raised the gun again. He could hear his own heartbeat.
Suddenly a voice called out from right around the corner of the row of pallets, just ten feet from where Kateb stood.
“This is the Las Vegas Police Department—”
Kateb screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” and spun around the side of the pallet, firing the pistol, and the instant he made the turn, he pushed the plunger down.
Three feet in front of him was the robot, smaller than a push lawn mower. Over its speaker the negotiator was telling the wounded man to throw out his gun as Kateb detonated his vest, destroying the robot and several pallets of cereal boxes.
—
Abu Musa al-Matari placed his phone back on the table now that the connection was lost, and he cursed.
The drone pilot operation had been a failure. These two from the Santa Clara cell had been a joke. Yes, they spread terror from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and killed some people along the way, but they’d failed in both of their objectives.
They’d even failed in another sense. The woman, Aza, had been wearing a suicide vest and a camera mounted around the vest with bungee cord inside her open zip-up jacket. Al-Matari had been watching the attack in real time, and when he saw the policeman standing over her, he placed the detonation text on his phone, but the bomb did not go off.
He could only assume that the old man who’d shot her had severed the control wires to the detonator.
Lucky shot for him. Lucky break for the cop.
Good riddance, number fourteen and number fifteen, al-Matari thought, still thinking of the cell members by their Language School designations. He had better operators out there, and they were still bringing the fight to the infidels. Better he spent his time working with the real warriors and not have to waste his days dealing with the fools.
On the previous evening, three more attacks by the men and women of Musa al-Matari’s cell had taken place across the country.
The wedding of a Marine Harrier pilot in New Orleans was attacked with a bomb placed in the reception facility. The Marine and his bride were uninjured, but three guests were killed and six more wounded.
A CIA case officer posted in Oslo, home visiting a sick mother in Flint, Michigan, was killed in a drive-by shooting, along with a Good Samaritan passerby who was run down by the getaway vehicle while trying to stop it from leaving the area.
And in St. Louis, Missouri, a firebomb destroyed the SUV of an executive with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The man was able to escape the flames, but suffered second-degree burns.
Of al-Matari’s surviving Language School students, the fifteen men and two women were now working at a fever pitch. They had conducted attacks all over the country, which forced them into hours, and in some cases days, of travel. They were constantly looking over their shoulders, and while the results of the operations were clearly mixed, the Yemeni knew the combined actions were having the desired effect. America was stunned by the abilities of ISIS, the scope and audacity of a dozen acts of terror in less than a five-day period.
On top of this, al-Matari was studying the reactions of the police and the government to each incident, watching everything possible on television, and he was working on a new plan. It would be big and bold, and like nothing done before, it would push the public to demand that their nation send troops into the fight against ISIS.
The killing of the CENTCOM commander had been, by far, the most consequential act to date, but al-Matari’s new op would be exponentially larger. Right now Tripoli was with three of the Chicago cell members and Omar, the leader of the Detroit cell. All of them were scoping out locations here in the city for the important mission. Meanwhile, David, Ghazi, and Husam were in Brooklyn, scouting for another operation that would take place in a day or two there. The four survivors from Santa Clara were down in Arizona and action was imminent on their next op, and the four remaining from the Atlanta group had split into two teams of two and were preparing for other missions.
On top of all this, the first copycat attack had taken place just outside Detroit the evening before, where a sergeant in the Michigan Air National Guard was shot dead while sitting in a fast-food restaurant. The local police cornered the assailant minutes later in the public library, and the young man of Somali origin fell to his death as he tried to escape out a third-floor window.
Al-Matari was especially proud that some brave mujahideen had joined in the fight, and he decided he would make sure the Detroit killing was reported in the next ISIS social media blast as having been conducted by someone outside the official cell of warriors under direct Islamic State control. He thought by promoting this unknown man’s martyrdom, it would bring out more of the self-radicalized and serve as an important force multiplier in the fight.
The Yemeni had to admit his operation was not without its problems. American law enforcement was already responding to the new threats, getting to the scenes faster and with more force. And American citizens were fighting back with their own personal weapons, something he hadn’t seen when he’d orchestrated bombings and shootings in Turkey or India or Malaysia, or when others from his organization executed attacks in Belgium and France and Germany.
But all in all, the men and women of the Language School had caused significant damage and an impressive amount of noise and fear in America. He had only to keep up the carnage to draw in new members, and soon this match he had lit in the past week would turn into a raging fire.
46
Dan Murray had been on the go almost constantly for the past few days. The attorney general moved among meetings at the White House, the Pentagon, and the J. Edgar Hoover Building. His own office was in the Robert F. Kennedy Building, just across the street from FBI, and yes, he did have meetings there throughout the day as well.
Now he walked through the West Wing for his third meeting there in as many days. But for today’s get-together he was heading back to the Oval, not to the Situation Room, because the meeting this morning was going to be a smaller affair.
SecDef Burgess had just arrived and was sitting down on the sofa where Mary Pat Foley was already seated. The President of the United States leaned forward from his chair facing the two sofas, and he poured coffee for everyone from the service on the table.
He looked up at Murray. “Dan is light cream, no sugar. Same as for the last twenty-five years.”
“Thanks, Jack.” Dan took a seat across from Mary Pat and Bob.
There were three people who worked for President Jack Ryan who felt comfortable enough to call him by his first name in private, and Dan and Mary Pat were two of them. Bob Burgess, on the other hand, was a former Army three-star general, he wasn’t a friend from way back, and he wouldn’t dream of calling the Commander in Chief by his given name, even if Ryan begged him to.
The third person in the “Jack” club was Arnie Van Damm, and he entered with a notepad, shut the door behind him, and took a seat on the couch next to Murray.
Ryan said, “Couple of things to get to this morning. The PDB covered the attacks overnight and this morning around the country. As everyone anticipated, it’s getting worse by the day. Anything new since the daily brief?”
Murray said, “The thing in Vegas is the most recent. We’re blanketing the scene for evidence, but both the perps are dead, so we won’t get anything out of them. Looking at the security cameras of the L.A. attack in Starbucks where the movie star was killed, this appears to be the same couple.”
Ryan replied, “At least al-Matari is going through his killers rapidly.”
Jack took that in, then turned to Burgess. “You’ve been working on ways to protect servicepeople here in the U.S. What have you come up with?”
“We are adopting measures to get more security for off-base meetings and conferences.”
“You aren’t canceling some of these meetings?”
Burgess shook his head adamantly. “No way. We will defend against these terrorists, but we won’t cave in to them. We start canceling the daily operations of the U.S. military, and ISIS will play that as a victory. We go on as normal, but with increased security.”
“Okay. What else?”
Burgess took a long breath before saying, “I’d like every serviceman and -woman in the U.S. to have the right to carry a sidearm off base.”
Jack was silent for fifteen seconds. Then he said, “Why the hell not?”
Murray jumped in. “I get it of course, but you are going to get a ton of pushback from New York, New Jersey, California, Illinois, and a few other states.”
Burgess said, “Yeah, states that make millions off of military bases and personnel. Mr. President, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best single option we have. We are also spinning up self-defense and training classes, contracting firearms trainers across the country to give as many classes to servicepeople as they can physically do. The men and women in the military are trained with handguns, but the training isn’t what it should be. This will help, and we won’t encourage anyone to carry who doesn’t want the responsibility.”
“Military weapons?”
“Yes, sir. We aren’t going to force some lance corporal who makes seventeen grand a year to go out and buy a six-hundred-dollar pistol, plus a holster and ammo, to protect himself from terrorists. We can issue Beretta M9s, duty holsters, and ball ammo. Standard weapons they are trained on. There are a few other weapons used by other branches, too, so we’ll issue those, where warranted. Everybody will go with what they know, so they are more proficient.”