by Jeff Siebold
In the meantime, he would stay and help organize the strike. The vests needed to be activated, so that there would be no mistakes. No last minute failures. He would take the decision to detonate out of the hands of these young warriors. But no one must know that for now.
All of the faithful in the apartment were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Asad knew that their chances of survival were almost nonexistent, but the reason for the strike, closely coordinated with their Syrian leaders, was to demoralize the Americans, to terrorize their hearts. Much like the damage that was done in the 9/11 attacks, a devastating attack on U.S. soil would be an important blow for the Islamic State. And this time, they were taking the strike to the enemy’s front door!
“Would you like some halal meat? It is chicken.” Gabby was standing next to Asad, and her words drew his attention back to her presence. She was holding a white plastic plate heaped with fragrant curry chicken over Moghrabieh, pearl couscous. It had been cooking for hours on the small stove, and the odor was thick in the apartment. Asad looked at Gabby.
She was always around him, watching him carefully. She was an unusual woman. Asad was not unused to receiving the respect of the others. But this one is something special, he thought. And she feeds on the excitement, the violence, the energy. He took the plate. “Skukran,” he said. He would eat, and then he and the girl would go to his loft apartment for the night.
He thought through the upcoming events. Asad felt that their preparation was sufficient. Like the attacks in Paris last year, this would be the Sword of the Prophet.
Chapter 27
“OK, lets talk through it again, and we’ll go in after midnight,” said John Connell, the FBI SWAT Team leader.
They had just arrived from DC and were preparing to execute their search warrant. Connell was a large man, over six foot five and close to 300 pounds. Mostly muscle, too, Zeke noted.
“Are they armed?” he asked Zeke.
“Possibly, but I removed the firing pins from the weapons I found,” said Zeke. “They had eight fully automatic weapons in there.”
“That may not have been everything,” said Connell to himself. “OK, we’ll go in on full alert.”
* * *
“FBI, get down on the floor!” men shouted over each other as the door of the duplex came crashing in. “FBI, get down!”
A window broke and a phosphorescent bomb exploded and lit up the room and then a dozen large men in bulletproof vests and helmets with clear plastic visors attached filed into the living room, waving their assault rifles. There was a crash from the kitchen as a second group of FBI agents entered the small apartment through the sliding glass door, yelling as they came. “FBI! Get down on the ground!”
Most of those in the duplex were sleeping, crashed on the couch or on the floor, or in one of the bedrooms. Sammy Patel, however, was sitting on the floor of the living room with his legs crossed, holding an H&K G36. He’d reassembled it in his personal best time, and he was feeling proud.
“Gun, gun!” shouted two FBI agents, one from each of the entry points, and Sammy was immediately shot center mass by both agents. He was dead before his head hit the floor.
* * *
“We’re still sorting it out,” said Jack Connell, “But it looks like we may have gotten the leader.”
“Did you secure the guns?” asked Zeke.
“We did. All eight, seven still in their boxes,” he said.
“Anything else?” asked Zeke. Kimmy had joined him from DC while the FBI agents were setting up the raid. She’d ridden down to Charlottesville with the FBI SWAT team.
“Some bomb paraphernalia and some pills,” said Connell.
“How many bad guys did you take?” asked Zeke.
“We got four, including the kill,” said Connell.
“There are more than that,” said Zeke. “I’d say ten or twelve. They probably have another apartment around here somewhere.”
“Yeah,” said Connell.
“Have your guys interrogated any of the prisoners?” asked Zeke.
“Field interrogations, sure,” said Jack Connell. “We try to get them to talk while they’re scared, off balance.”
“What are they saying?” asked Zeke.
“Saying that the dead guy was their leader. Said his name was Sammy Patel. They’re trying to blame him for all of this…the guns, the bombs, you know.”
“I do,” said Zeke.
* * *
Zeke had noted the address of the apartment on the Kentucky brochure he’d found in the duplex. There was no warrant for that location, and no reason to get one, but he and Kimmy decided to check on it anyway. They decided to pay it a visit the evening after the raid, while the group was still off balance.
The loft apartment was fairly typical, fairly standard for a college town, Zeke thought, as he parked the rented QX80 around the corner from the building. It was a three-story structure, a brick building—maybe a former mill—with a flat roof. The loft was one of a number of similar apartments contained in the building, which had probably been first built over a hundred years ago. There was a concrete paved parking area and wrought iron fencing with a security gate surrounding the yard.
Some of them are probably in there, Zeke thought, or they will be later.
Zeke circled the city and pulled into his hotel parking lot.
Dusk was approaching, and Zeke ate a light, early dinner at a casual restaurant before he returned to the hotel and took a nap. He intended to be up early.
* * *
At ten-thirty Zeke awoke. He checked his smartphone and saw that Kimmy had sent him an innocuous text, “Looking forward to seeing you again,” it said. She’s ready, he thought. Good.
Zeke drove back toward the loft apartments, slowing for the stop sign at the intersection, but not stopping, taking a right turn as if he were in a hurry to get somewhere. Zeke saw no people, no lookouts on duty. The inhabitants were probably in for the night, he thought. He continued on to meet up with Kimmy.
When Zeke walked into the downtown Charlottesville bar, there was an active crowd watching a ball game and cheering for the Nationals, the Washington baseball team. National League East, thought Zeke, they’re playing the Phillies. He spotted Kimmy sitting in a booth toward the back of the place. She was dressed in black slacks and a black, long sleeve turtleneck sweater, with a bright red and white jacket to complete the outfit. Team colors, thought Zeke. Good, she’ll blend well.
Kimmy’s hair was in a tight bun and she looked ready for action. He walked over and slid in across from her.
“All good?” she asked.
“Looks like it. I just checked the place,” said Zeke. “It’s quiet. They’re in for the night, I’d bet.” They had chosen the bar to meet, knowing that Muslims generally avoid alcohol and would be less likely to frequent a bar.
Kimmy smelled faintly of lilac, a sharp contrast with the bar’s overall smell of fried food and spilled beer. The server stopped by and took Zeke’s order for an iced coffee. She looked at him oddly, and then she noticed his eyes when he looked up, and she smiled to herself and walked away.
“What’s the action?” Kimmy asked.
Zeke ran down a physical description of the loft for her, taken from the blueprints in the town’s Building and Planning Department’s records. They talked about the cars and the possibility of guards and the locked fence. “We’ll want to take them quickly,” said Kimmy. It was eleven fifteen.
“Any cameras?” asked Kimmy.
“None visible,” said Zeke.
“The lock on the back gate sounds doable,” Kimmy said. “And we’ll be able to get in once we’re inside the fence.”
“Right. There’s a good chance that we’ll find the other weapons in there. And possibly the equipment for bombings. Can’t be too careful,” said Zeke.
“I know,” said Kimmy.
“We have a set of door keys from the loft building owner, thanks to the Charlottesville police, so unless
we’re spotted early, I think we can contain the situation,” Zeke said.
* * *
Kimmy, now without the red and white jacket, was almost invisible in the darkness. She silently approached the gate in the fence around the lofts.
The night smelled damp, Zeke noticed, like wet soil. He had dropped Kimmy down the street and parked the car, working his way back to this spot. Within six seconds of his arrival at the loft building he saw a small flash from a tight flashlight beam, invisible from the building. Kimmy was inside the fence.
Zeke carried his black backpack to the gate, upright and moving slowly, and walked through the open gate. Most of the visible windows were covered, but Zeke wanted to take no chance of being seen. He found Kimmy standing at a corner of the parking area, against the building. She was pretty much invisible in the shadow. He took two pairs of night vision goggles from his backpack and handed one to Kimmy. They donned the equipment.
“Let’s go,” he signaled her.
They moved together in the dark hallways to the front door of the apartment. This entrance has minimum visibility from the living area, Zeke remembered from the plans. Each of them stood to one side of the front door. Kimmy quietly took a small can of graphite from her pocket and sprayed the lock mechanism and the exterior door hinges. Then she took the key from her pocket and unlocked the front door. The lock moved smoothly and silently.
Inside, the large open room was bathed in darkness, the only light from a small clock on the floor near the far wall. On the floor, on blankets and mattresses, were the forms of two bodies, lying in the dark.
Zeke listened. Their breathing was regular and relaxed.
Kimmy circled right, toward the kitchen island, while Zeke crossed the width of the room quietly and took a position near the outside wall, about twelve feet from the sleeping bodies. They angled their approach so as to be across from each other, but not directly so, to best avoid stray bullets.
Suddenly the blanket closest to Zeke flew up, followed by the barrel of a handgun, rising to point in his general direction. A man was sitting up and squinting to see where Zeke was standing. Zeke was on the ground on his stomach before the barrel of the gun leveled out, and then he shot the man, three bullets to the heart area. The muzzle flare blinded him temporarily, but the goggles had served their purpose. When his vision returned a moment later, the man was lying on his back with three bloody holes in his chest.
Kimmy had closed her eyes during the gunfire and was now advancing toward the second body lying on the makeshift beds. “Don’t move,” she called. “Let me see your hands, right now, or you’re dead.”
Two empty hands came out from under the covers and shot straight up in the air. A female voice from the bed, said, “Oh, thank God you came. He was going to kill me.”
Chapter 28
The girl’s name was Gabby, she said, and she was a member of the Arabic Student Group at UVA. Zeke had met her briefly at the ASG meeting. Mostly, she told Zeke and Kimmy between sobs while they waited for the FBI backup to arrive that she cooked and cleaned up for the group and helped them with their studies. She seemed distraught and anxious, and she cried constantly. Yes, she admitted to Kimmy, the men had raped her, more than once. She told them that the man, Asad, had made her sleep with him there, close by in the blankets. He had prayed to Allah for forgiveness before he had raped her, and then, afterwards, he’d knelt down onto the floor and prayed again. But the gun was always there, always near his hand. He had threatened her family, and she had been terrified.
Kimmy sat the girl on a chair near the front door of the house, away from the beds and the man’s body. Zeke checked the man and recognized the body as Asad. He then checked the beds for other weapons as he looked at the surrounding sleeping area. Zeke tasted the name as it rolled off his tongue. “Asad,” he said. “The Lion.”
Besides the clock and the handgun, a SR9 model Ruger, he found a curved dagger, some pills in a small plastic bag and a wallet. The photo ID in the wallet identified the man as Asad Hassan, and the photo matched the dead man on the floor. There were sixty-two dollars in the wallet.
In seventeen minutes, a black van pulled up to the loft apartment and stopped in front of the entry gate. Zeke opened the gate from the inside and the van pulled into the parking area. The gate closed and four large men dressed in navy blue jumpsuits got out of the van. They moved with a practiced, economical motion. Two retrieved a gurney from the back of the van while the other two talked with Zeke quietly, away from the women.
Asad Hassan, the girl told Kimmy, was the leader of the Arabic Student Group and was from a Syrian family that now lived in Turkey. He was the spiritual leader of the group, sort of. Yes, she had overheard them talking about some kind of an attack, but she was never given the details. The women in this culture were excluded from the business of the men.
After a couple hours, Zeke and Kimmy gave Gabby to the FBI SWAT team agents, who decided to take her with them to FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, along with the weapons they’d found yesterday and the three terrorists they had arrested in the duplex. The terrorists were presently being held in separate cells in the Charlottesville jail. Then Kimmy filled Zeke in on her interview with the girl.
Zeke and Kimmy made a brief stop at the hotel to pick up their things and check out, and drove directly to DC. They arrived Monday morning at 7:30. The FBI team in Charlottesville had radioed ahead and the full FBI anti-terrorist team was in action when they arrived.
* * *
The FBI SWAT officers had driven Gabby back to their DC offices and were interviewing her about the activities of the UVA Arabic Student Group. Kimmy and Zeke were waiting in Clive’s office to talk with him about the operation.
“Do you think we stopped them?” asked Kimmy.
“We took five from Charlottesville, including two dead,” said Zeke, “if you include Asad, the one I shot. From Roger’s research, it looked like there were at most a dozen people involved, so yes, it appears that we’ve dismantled or at least seriously damaged the core of it.”
Clive entered his office and took a seat in one of the leather club chairs. “The FBI seems happy,” he said, “although some of the rough boys wanted to be with you at the second house, the loft. But, they seemed pleased to clean up the rest of the group at the duplex.”
“They had their fun,” said Zeke. “Have they found out anything else from the girl, Gabby?”
“Apparently, she’s pretty hysterical,” said Clive. “She’s crying and seems out of control. Relieved, the doctor says, and traumatized. He’s going to give her a sedative.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Zeke. “We may want to hold off on that.”
“Uh-oh,” said Clive.
“Well, at first I bought her story about the kidnapping and rape,” said Zeke. “But when I checked the bedding in the warehouse, I found a janbiya.”
“A what?” asked Kimmy.
“It’s a curved blade dagger. This one had a saifani hilt, rhinoceros horn, illegal and fairly expensive. It struck me as odd since they’re typically worn by wealthy men in Yemen. And school records show that Asad was from Syria, not Yemen.”
“But the girl?” said Kimmy.
“Her accent could be Yemeni, and she sounds somehow wealthier, a more proper dialect which would fit with this particular dagger,” said Zeke. “I bet that it’s hers.”
“Anything else to support that?” asked Kimmy.
“Well, yes. The whole time she was with us,” said Zeke, thinking through the last few hours, “she never asked us who we were.”
“And?” asked Kimmy.
“And it seems odd to me that she never asked for help. She was on campus, even at the ASG meeting. When I saw her, Asad was preoccupied, leading the meeting. She could easily have escaped.”
* * *
“Let’s interview the prisoners taken at the duplex,” Zeke suggested to Clive and Kimmy, “They’re separated, right? Let’s chat with them and see what they ha
ve to say.”
“Alright,” said Clive. “I’ll arrange it. They’ve been banged around some, but they should be able to talk with us.”
Clive was dressed in a silver suit with a light blue pinstripe, and an Oxford tie. He had taken off his jacket and was rolling his shirtsleeves over his forearms as they spoke.
“I’ll clear it. You two head over to the FBI detention area and start the interrogations.”
* * *
“Where’s the girl?” Zeke asked the FBI SWAT team leader, Jack Connell. Connell was still dressed in full SWAT uniform, blue overalls, black boots and the dramatic black face paint that SWAT used for their nighttime operations. He towered over Zeke and outweighed him by about a hundred and forty pounds.
Interesting, Zeke thought. He put on his face paint even though there was no FBI action last night.
“We’ve got two girls,” said Connell, putting his hand over the phone speaker he was holding and pointing toward the detention cells with his elbow. “One is the victim, and one was with the terrorists. We arrested her.”
“The victim?” asked Zeke.
“She’s in with the nurse, second door on your right.”
“May I borrow one of your men?” Zeke asked.
“Sure, take Browny,” said Connell and nodded toward a second large man standing nearby and dressed in identical SWAT team garb. “Browny, go with Zeke, OK?”
“Sure, Skipper,” said Browny. His name was Alex Brown, according to his stitched name plate, now exposed by its open Velcro cover.
Jack Connell took his hand off the phone speaker, turned away and said into the phone, “I’m back.”
