Destiny in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  Muhammed Khaled Issa led his small band of troops into the studios of WZTV, Channel 6 in Portland. Due to the early hour, there was no receptionist on duty, only an aging black security guard who was sitting behind the desk in the lobby sipping on a cup of coffee and chewing a bagel.

  “What the hell?” he began, rising to his feet and reaching for the ancient pistol in a holster on his right hip when he saw the band of terrorists coming through the door.

  Issa raised his silenced Uzi and shot the guard in the face, knocking him backward over his desk chair.

  Issa spoke to his men over his shoulder as he raced up the corridor. “Leave no one alive and smash all the equipment and cameras,” he growled in a low, deadly whisper.

  His men split up into teams of two as they spread out through the corridors, kicking office doors open and spraying whoever was there with molten lead from their Uzis. They grinned and joked among themselves like small children playing an innocent game of soldier as they killed over fifteen people in a matter of minutes.

  Issa himself stood before the large control room, filled with millions of dollars’ worth of communications gear, and laughed as he hosed the wall down with his Uzi on full automatic.

  The monitor screen on a far wall showed a handsome man with brown blown-dry hair sitting next to a pretty lady with blond hair pulled up in a chignon, both anchoring the morning edition of the news.

  Suddenly, the woman’s eyes flitted to the side, widening as she stared in horror at something off camera. The man stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open.

  Just as the screen turned dark and started to fade, their bodies could be seen dancing and twisting in their chairs under the onslaught of hundreds of 9mm bullets, blood blossoming on the front of their expensive designer clothes and splattering onto the camera lens before the picture faded to black.

  Engineer Tom Ferguson leaned out the window of the big diesel engine on the Portland-to-Boston express train, and checked to see if the brakeman was giving the go ahead. When he saw the lantern waving back and forth, he pulled the throttle lever toward him and the engine began to ease forward slowly.

  Just as it was building up to ten miles an hour, the early morning darkness was lit up by a huge explosion on the tracks just ahead of the express.

  Ferguson cursed and pushed the throttle all the way to full stop, and simultaneously took his foot off the dead-man’s brake to stop the train as fast as he could.

  Little by little the big engine slowed, but it was not fast enough. Ferguson screamed and jumped out the side door just as the wheels of the engine ran over the steel rails in front of it that were twisted like so many strands of spaghetti.

  Ferguson hit the ground, rolled twice, and came to his feet just in time to see the engine topple toward him. He screamed again and held out his arms, as if by sheer force of will he could hold the fifty-ton heap of metal off him.

  One by one, the cars behind the engine ran off the tracks and fell onto their sides, the shrill screaming of the passengers a counterpoint to the breaking of glass and the screech of tortured metal as it bent and twisted into a crumpled mass of wreckage.

  As the passengers began to crawl and walk out of the cars, Jamal Ahmed Fadl and his men stood in a row alongside the tracks, following them with the barrels of their Uzis.

  The passengers, when they saw what confronted them, all stopped and raised their hands.

  Fadl screamed a few words in Arabic and the soldiers began to spray the prisoners with murderous fire, killing men, women, and children where they stood.

  There are three major exits leading from Portland to I-95, the Maine Turnpike. Two of these were dynamited into rubble so as to be impassable by any type of vehicle, effectively sealing Portland off from access from the south. The third was barricaded with twenty men standing guard to keep anyone from approaching or leaving Portland via the freeway.

  Portland International Airport is small as such airports go. It has only two main runways long enough for jet aircraft to land on.

  Wadih El Amal and his men got to the airport just after the six A.M. flight to Newark Airport took off. Without bothering to go through the airport concourse, he and his men shot down the security guards and ran out onto the runway. The landing lights of an incoming plane could be seen in the distance.

  Amal had his men shoot out the tires of the three airplanes waiting to load passengers, and then he had them drive several of the long baggage trains out onto the runways. While he was doing this, three other of his men ran up the stairs to the control tower and burst through the door.

  A security guard managed to kill one of the men before the other two assassinated everyone in the room, blowing out the huge glass windows of the tower in the process.

  “Why waste explosives when you can shut the runway down using a landing plane?” he asked his men, laughing at his own joke as he pointed to where the baggage trains blocked the runways.

  Minutes later, a 727 American Airways jet drifted slowly lower toward the runway. The pilot was trying frantically to raise the control tower when his copilot screamed, “Pull up . . . pull up, for God’s sake!”

  The pilot glanced down, and barely had time to curse as the front of the jet hit a tractor and baggage train and disintegrated around him.

  The fireball as the jet erupted in flames rushed toward the airport concourse building a hundred yards away at over a hundred miles an hour.

  In an ironic twist, the fireball from the exploding jet incinerated Wadih El Amal and all of his men just as it did the 276 people in the building.

  The runway was left with a twenty-foot-deep crater surrounded by wreckage and twisted, shattered corpses covering over two acres.

  In the inner city of Portland, people erupted from their homes like ants from a disturbed anthill as rumors of an invading Army spread like wildfire. The absence of any local television or radio stations on the air and the lack of response to any calls to the police stations only added to the confusion.

  Many of the men and women were carrying guns, rifles, shotguns, and pistols as they roamed the streets. Unfortunately, many more innocent natives were shot by the vigilantes than the few terrorists who were found and killed.

  As dawn began to break, Osama bin Araman recalled his squads by radio to the rendezvous point he’d shown them on the map. They met at a local Army National Guard station, where over fifty deuce-and-a-half-ton trucks and innumerable HumVees were lined up waiting for his men.

  As they arrived at the station, the leaders were given their orders, and they grabbed trucks and HumVees and headed south along I-95 toward Worcester, Massachusetts, where they would then scatter out westward and southward to spread more havoc across the country.

  Twelve

  After her phone call from Ben Raines, Claire Osterman called an emergency meeting with her cabinet and military advisors. Once they’d been seated and served coffee and pastries, she got right to the point.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, sitting on the corner of her desk, “I’ve just had a very disturbing call from Ben Raines.”

  Gerald Boykin, her Minister of Defense, looked up from his prune danish. “He called you direct?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He did. He said he had some disturbing intel he wanted to share with me.” She stood up and carried her coffee cup with her as she went around to sit in her desk chair.

  “He said his sources in Canada had information a man named Abdullah El Farrar had leased several hundred acres of land in Nova Scotia and on Vancouver Island.”

  Boykin sat straight up in his chair, a look of alarm on his face. “Farrar, the man known as the Desert Fox?” he asked, glancing around at the other men.

  “Yes,” Claire answered. “I see you are at least aware of his name, Gerry.”

  Boykin nodded. “We’ve been keeping an eye on him for the past six or seven months. His family was one of the richest in the Middle East, until the U.N. took their oil fields away from them for redistribution to oth
er nations.”

  “From what I hear,” Claire interrupted, “he’s now set on some holy war to regain his lands . . . and his riches.”

  Boykin nodded in agreement. “Yes, that’s our take on it. Seems he’s taken a lot of his family’s money out of Swiss banks and is using it to raise a ragtag Army of sorts. So far, there’s been no indication he’s gotten far enough along to be of concern to us.”

  Claire shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Well, you’d better kick your Intel officers in the butt, Gerry, ’cause Ben Raines thinks Farrar is using these locations as a staging area to gather troops for an invasion of the U.S.”

  All of the men in the room began to talk at once. The general consensus was the bastard wouldn’t dare.

  As the argument grew in intensity, Claire held up her hand. “Enough!” she exclaimed, her irritation showing.

  “General Goddard,” she said, addressing Maxwell Goddard, the man she’d assigned to lead her Army after Bradley Stevens’ failure in the last war.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he answered.

  “I want you to send some units to both coasts to check these allegations by Raines out. If this son of a bitch is even thinking about invading us, I want you to send some planes or whatever to those locations and blast him into the next world.”

  Goddard bit his lip. “That might be rather tricky, Madam President.”

  She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward, her elbows on the desk. “And just why is that?”

  He shrugged. “Well, to begin with, the Canadian government might look askance at our bombing their country.”

  “Fuck them!” she almost yelled, slamming her hand down on her desk and standing up. “If they’re harboring a hostile Army, then they deserve whatever they get.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Goddard said hastily and rose.

  “And General,” she added.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t spare the horses,” she said. “Send your best troops with plenty of firepower to do the job.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, putting on his hat and almost running from the room.

  After he left, Gerald Boykin spoke. “Claire, do you think you can believe what Ben Raines said? After all, he’s not usually considered one of our friends.”

  “Yeah,” Clifford Ainsworth, her Minister of Propaganda, said, “perhaps he’s just doing this to make you look foolish right before our elections.”

  Claire gave a secretive smile, as if she knew something the rest of the men didn’t. “No, Ben assured me he wants me to win this election. He said he feels that I am the leader our country needs right now.”

  She waved them out. “Now, get out there and beat the bushes. I want to know everything there is to know about this rag-head named Farrar.”

  Two hours later, General Maxwell Goddard stood in front of Claire’s desk, his face blotched and red, sweat beading on his forehead.

  Claire studied him as she chewed on the end of a pencil, noting his worried look.

  “I assume the news you’ve brought me is not good, General?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am. Before I could get any troops under way to Maine and Washington State, we began to get news of a serious problem in both areas.”

  “What kind of problem, General?”

  Goddard licked his lips and twisted the hat he held in his hands. “It seems there was an invasion in both areas last night and early this morning. Troops, evidently from the areas you mentioned, were transported into the ports of both cities and began a widespread attack on the populace there.”

  “Goddamnit!” she exclaimed. “Why weren’t we prepared for this?”

  Goddard shrugged and held out his hands. “Madam President, most of our troops and intel are concentrated on our southern borders, because of our concerns with the SUSA and Ben Raines. We never expected trouble from the north, since our relations with Canada have always been peaceful.”

  She snapped her pencil in half and threw the pieces across the room. “And what are you going to do about this invasion, General?”

  He held out his hands in a placating manner. “Don’t worry, Madam President. From what I can gather, the number of troops was not exceptional, probably less than twenty or thirty thousand in each location. I’ve moved several battalions into both areas, and we should have the invaders under control in a matter of days.”

  He wiped his brow with his sleeve. “And I’ve sent several squadrons of attack helicopters as well as observer planes to aid in the defense. Hopefully, they’ll be bottled up soon and we can proceed to destroy them at our leisure.”

  A knock sounded on the door and the rest of her ministers filed in, all carrying stacks of papers in their arms.

  “We’ve heard what’s going on, Claire,” Gerald Boykin said. “We’ve managed to get quite a bit of intel on Farrar and his followers.”

  She waved Goddard to take a seat and she leaned back in her chair. “Good. Give it to me.”

  After they’d filled her in on Farrar’s background and history, and that of the men known to be following him, she shook her head.

  “This man has managed to survive years of being targeted by the U.N. security forces, and in that time has even built up a sizable Army of men who are willing to go into combat and die for him.”

  Boykin nodded, not sure where she was going with this.

  “So,” she continued, “we know one thing for certain. The man is no fool.”

  “No, ma’am,” Boykin said.

  “Then, why on earth would he try to invade and take over a country of two hundred million with only fifty thousand or so troops?”

  “Perhaps he is a megalomaniac, Claire,” General Goddard said.

  “No, I think we’re missing something, General.” She looked around at her advisors. “I have a feeling defeating this man is not going to be as easy as you all think.”

  “You think he’s got something up his sleeve?” Boykin asked, glancing at General Goddard.

  “I don’t know what it could be,” the general said. “So far, all they’ve used is small arms, no heavy guns, no air support, nothing to indicate they are going to be able to give us too much trouble.”

  “That’s if he fights as you think he’s going to,” Claire said through pursed lips.

  “How else can he fight?” the general asked.

  “What if instead of keeping his men together and moving as a unit, they separate and spread out across the country, turning this into a guerrilla war?”

  The general shrugged. “What would that gain him?” he asked. “Sooner or later, his men would be picked off, one by one. They might be able to do some damage here and there, but as far as being a serious threat to the country, I just don’t see what good that would do them.”

  Clifford Ainsworth cleared his throat. “I have an idea,” he said tentatively.

  “Speak up, Cliff,” Claire said with irritation.

  “Well, as Minister of Propaganda, it’s my business to keep a close check on the mood of the country.”

  “We know that . . . get on with what you have to say,” Claire interrupted.

  “It’s just that, since our last war, with the cutbacks in essential services and consumer goods, the mood in much of the country is not too favorable to the government.”

  Claire bristled. “Don’t those fools know it takes money to wage a war?” she argued.

  Ainsworth held up his hands, his face paling at her anger. “Claire, don’t kill the messenger here,” he pleaded. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “Perhaps this Farrar expects to tap into this discontent and to get some new recruits to his Army ... sort of a civil uprising in support of his cause.”

  Goddard stroked his chin. “That is the only way a guerrilla war would make any sense.”

  “Do you think he’ll find any sizable support out there?” Claire asked through tight lips.

  Ainsworth shrugged, not wanting to tell Claire just
how hated she was by a great many of the people she ruled over. “I don’t know, but it’s certainly possible,” he said in a low voice, as if speaking the unthinkable any louder might make it more likely.

  “Okay then,” Claire said. “We’re going to have to fight this battle on two fronts. One, General, you’re going to have to go all out to kill these bastards as fast as you can.”

  When the general nodded rapidly, she continued. “Two, Ainsworth, you’re going to have to step up our propaganda efforts, especially as regards this Farrar and his men. I want you to put out everything negative you can about the Arabs... their religion, how they treat women, the fact they don’t allow liquor . . . in short, I want a full-scale attack on everything Muslim or Arabic.”

  “But, Claire,” Boykin argued, “what about our native Arabs and Middle Eastern types? Won’t this put them at risk of attack by the citizens—like the Japanese in World War II?”

  She glared at him. “So what? We’re at war here, gentlemen. We don’t have time to play nice or by any set of so-called rules. I want us to put everything we’ve got into this, and I want it fast.”

  Thirteen

  Abdullah El Farrar and Mustafa Kareem sped down I-95 heading south. They were traveling in advance of the convoy of terrorists using the same road, and were headed for a meeting with the man who was going to put them in contact with various U.S. dissidents who were organized around a single idea—to get rid of the regime of President Claire Osterman by whatever means necessary.

  John Waters was the head of the FFA cell on the East Coast—the Freedom Fighters of America—and was a right-wing zealot whose ambition to be a leader in the U.S. knew no bounds. Standing a shade over six feet tall, he was lean to the point of being gaunt, and sported a thick black beard covering his entire face. His head was bald and his face was angular and hard, with eyes as black as coal and as hard as stones.