The phone he still clutched in his hand vibrated. He lifted it, looked at the display. Terry. Thank God. Right now, in this time of tragedy, he wanted more than ever to be with his wife and daughter.
McCabe opened the phone, put it to his ear, and said, “Hey, babe, where are you?”
But instead of his wife’s voice, McCabe heard a horrible, familiar sound, one that he knew all too well.
The deadly chatter of automatic-weapons fire, followed by terrified screams.
CHAPTER 34
Burke didn’t know what was going on. One minute he had been trying to think of a way to get Terry McCabe and her daughter to buzz off and leave him alone with Allison—well, as alone as you could get when the two of you were surrounded by hundreds of yokels and yahoos anyway—and the next people were carrying on like something terrible had happened.
Burke supposed that was true, that something terrible had happened. He heard somebody talking about an explosion, and had a bad moment when he thought that something had blown up here in the store. Maybe the place was on fire, and he would either burn to death or get trampled in the redneck stampede.
Then he realized that they were talking about something they had seen on the television sets in the electronics department, which was a good third of the way across the store from where he, Allison, and the McCabe women were. Bad news traveled fast.
Allison turned and clutched at his arm. Burke had been hoping all morning that sooner or later she would touch him, but grabbing him in panic wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. Anything was better than nothing, though, he told himself.
“My God, did you hear that?” she asked frantically. “Did somebody say something about a day-care center being blown up?”
Burke felt a stab of genuine worry. “Your little boy,” he said. “Is he—”
Allison was shaking her head before he could finish asking the question. “No, thank God,” she said. “My neighbor babysits him. He doesn’t go to day care.”
“Then he’s all right,” Burke said.
“Yes, but all those other children—! It’s horrible, just horrible.”
Burke agreed, of course, but whatever tragedy had happened, there was nothing he could do about it. And his daughter didn’t go to day care either, so he didn’t see how it could affect him personally. Still, he started to put his arms around Allison to comfort her. He would have, too, if Terry McCabe hadn’t swooped in like a hawk and embraced her first, turning her away from Burke.
“It’ll be all right,” Terry said, patting Allison on the back.
But it wouldn’t be for a lot of families, Burke thought. He heard people saying that explosions had occurred in other places, too, like a bank and a post office. A lot of people must have been killed in those blasts. Banks and post offices were busy places, and of course, so were day-care centers. The death toll might reach into the hundreds. It was a sobering thought.
And a chilling thought went right along with it. Multiple explosions didn’t happen at the same time by accident, especially directed at specific targets like that. This was terrorism, pure and simple, Burke realized.
He wasn’t the only one to come to that conclusion. Nearby, a man shouted, “By God, we need to go over there and nuke ever’ one o’ them Ay-rab countries back to the Stone Age!”
“Hell, I’ll sign up to go right now!” another man said. “I’d rather kill those damn camel-jockeys up close and personal, though!”
A wave of revulsion went through Burke at the sound of those racist, hate-filled rants. He heard himself saying, “Hold on, hold on, we don’t know who did this. We don’t know yet who’s responsible.”
“Y’all know it had to be the Muslims,” a woman snapped at him. “Just like on 9/11.”
“What about Timothy McVeigh?” Burke said. “After Oklahoma City I heard people saying the same sort of things about Muslims, and it turned out they didn’t have a thing to do with that.”
“This is different,” a third man insisted. “Al Qaeda did this, sure as hell.”
“Or one of those other terrorist groups,” yet another man chimed in.
They were all ignorant bumpkins, jumping to the easiest, most hateful conclusion, Burke told himself. Typical red-state behavior. As far as he was concerned, reactions like that were more dangerous to the country than all the Islamic terrorists combined. He hated to think about what was going to happen over the next few days. Mosques would be vandalized. Peaceful, innocent Muslim Americans would be harassed—or worse. The way most Americans acted at times like this, Burke could understand why the rest of the world hated us. We deserve it, he thought. We deserve whatever they do to us.
He was so incensed and morally outraged over the unfairness of it all that for the moment he had forgotten about Allison Sawyer and the hopes he’d had of talking her into having lunch with him. Then he remembered her and looked around, fearing that she might have slipped away in the crowd.
He saw to his relief that she was still there. She had settled down a little and didn’t look quite so panic-stricken and upset now. She was talking to Ronnie McCabe, who looked around as Terry lifted her cell phone and said, “I’m going to try to call your father back. Maybe he’s somewhere here in the store.”
Burke was trying to figure out a way to ease Allison away from the McCabes when he looked over Terry’s shoulder and saw something that, for a second, his brain refused to comprehend or even admit that he was really seeing. Then, with a shake of his head, he realized it was real. A tall, dark-complected man with black hair and a neatly trimmed beard had opened his long, bulky jacket and was reaching for a couple of guns strapped to his body. Burke recognized the weapons vaguely from action movies he had seen as some sort of machine pistols. They had to be toys of some sort, he thought. Yeah, that was it. Toys the guy was trying to shoplift for his kids. Poor bastard was probably out of a job because the heartless corporation he’d worked for had downsized and outsourced all its personnel. Corporate executives were the real terrorists—
Then Burke screamed as the guy pointed the guns at the ceiling and squeezed off two quick bursts as he shouted, “Everyone down! On the floor now, or I’ll kill you! Everyone down!”
BOOK TWO
“We interrupt regular programming to bring you this special news bulletin. In a story datelined today, November 4th, at 4:22 PM Eastern Standard Time, from Dallas, Texas, the Associated Press reports that a series of explosions has rocked the suburbs north of Fort Worth. We’re told that these were powerful blasts and that several buildings have been destroyed, including a bank, a post office, and a day-care center. It’s expected that the death toll from these explosions will be considerable.
“At this point we have no information on what caused these blasts, whether they were tragic accidents or deliberate acts of violence. No group has stepped forward to claim responsibility for them. The government is said to be monitoring the Web sites of suspicious organizations, both foreign and domestic, but so far there has been no mention of these explosions. However, best estimates say that the blasts occurred approximately fifteen minutes ago, so more information may be forthcoming at any time.
“The President has not issued any statements, and neither has the Governor of Texas.
“What’s that?…We have a correspondent from our network affiliate in Dallas on the line for an update on this situation…Hello? Can you hear me? Can you tell us what’s happened down there?”
“It…it’s all gone…it’s like the day-care center was never there, it’s just a crater in the ground…Oh, God…Oh, God…all those children—!”
“We’ll get back to that report in a moment. Right now we have some raw video footage from the Fort Worth area…I would warn our viewers that the images in this footage may be graphic. You may see things you don’t want to see….”
CHAPTER 35
The President wanted to put her hands over her face and shut out the sight of what she was seeing on the television in the Oval Office. If
she couldn’t see it, maybe it wasn’t really there.
This couldn’t be happening on her watch. It just couldn’t.
But of course it was, and no amount of denial would make it go away. Covering her eyes wouldn’t do a damned bit of good.
“We shouldn’t have let the Israelis do it,” she whispered. “And once they did, we shouldn’t have sided with them.”
The National Security Advisor had already arrived. She had been in the White House when word of the explosions in Texas had started to spread. She was there because of the terror alert based on the intel from Pakistan. Fresh intel had just arrived, pinpointing the location of the attacks.
But it had come too late to save any of the people in the bank, the post office, and the day-care center that had been leveled.
“This is all my fault,” the President moaned. She and the NSA were the only ones in the Oval Office at the moment.
“Nonsense,” the NSA said in her usual cool, brisk voice. “The Iranians didn’t do this.”
The President looked around at her. “Do we know who did?”
“Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
“Who’s that?” the President asked with a puzzled frown.
The NSA couldn’t keep from sighing in disgust. The President had a reputation for being extremely intelligent, the sort of policy wonk who knew everything about everything. But that only held true for subjects she was interested in, like social policies. Foreign policy and defense meant little to her other than as areas she could manipulate if she had to in order to line up more support for her reelection campaign, which had begun about ten seconds after she took her hand off the Chief Justice’s Bible and finished swearing to the oath of office during her inauguration to her first term.
“Hizb ut-Tahrir is a pan-Islamic terror group similar to Al Qaeda,” the NSA explained. “They’ve always kept a lower profile until recently. Now, though, they’re poised to take the lead in the terror campaign against the West. Their goal is to eventually unite all the Muslim nations and do away with the individual governments, leading to the rise of what they refer to as the Caliphate, a Muslim super state that will dominate the entire world.”
“But…but that’s insane,” the President said.
The NSA shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta start somewhere.”
The President looked at the TV again. “You’re sure these people are behind what’s happening in Texas?”
“Positive. The CIA just received an encrypted transmission from one of its agents in Islamabad. Another operative discovered the plans that were drawn up for this strike during a raid on a Hizb ut-Tahrir training facility on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The President glanced sharply at her. “We’re still conducting covert missions in that area? I thought I made it clear that America was no longer going to wage war in the shadows.” She slapped a hand down on her desk. “Everything has to be clean and open and aboveboard.”
Now that was a recipe for certain disaster, the NSA thought, and she was glad that certain people in government—including the Vice President and the President’s husband—realized it. Without some careful skirting of certain executive orders, the country might be conducting its official business in Arabic by now.
The NSA knew that. The President didn’t.
But the President probably slept better at night. At least…until now. Until all hell had broken loose in Texas.
The NSA ignored the other woman’s sanctimonious glare and got back to the subject at hand by saying, “I repeat, the Iranians didn’t do this. Hizb ut-Tahrir may be planning on using the heightened tensions in the Middle East as the excuse for this new terror offensive, but they would have done it sooner or later anyway. They’ve been biding their time, but they believe that now is the moment to begin the rise of the Caliphate.”
“What can we do to stop them?”
That was a question that should have been asked—and answered—long before now. But the NSA just smiled thinly and said, “We can try to get ahead of them, so that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
The President gestured toward the TV screen. “But…but what about Texas?”
The NSA shook her head. “It’s too late for us to stop whatever is happening there. Whatever is going on…the only ones who can do anything about it are the ones on the scene.”
The sound was muted on the TV set, but the President suddenly grabbed the remote and raised the volume as a news anchor said excitedly, “We’re now receiving reports of shots being fired in the UltraMegaMart just north of Fort Worth, in the same general area as the explosions that occurred a short time ago. This UltraMegaMart, billed as the largest discount store in the world, is having its grand opening today, and reportedly thousands of shoppers were on hand for it. It’s unknown at this time what exactly is happening inside the store—”
The President turned the sound off again. This time she gave in to the urge and covered her face with her hands.
And groaned in despair.
CHAPTER 36
Walt Graham was on the phone with the Director of the FBI when Eileen Bastrop hurried into his office and put a note on his desk. “Yes, sir,” Graham said into the phone. “I’ll give you a direct report on the situation just as soon as I can. I’m on my way out of the office right now. I’ll be on the scene shortly.”
Graham looked at the note. It read, The press is here. The burly SAC made a face. He hung up the phone and said to Bastrop, “Back door?”
“They’re probably there, too,” she said. “Damn buzzards.”
“Shouldn’t talk that way about the intrepid guardians of our freedom.”
“I thought the people who guarded our freedom were the ones on the front lines.”
“Shows how little you know.” Graham grinned, but there was no real humor on his face. His eyes were hard and bleak.
He had gotten the encrypted transmission from Langley, too, since he was the SAC of the FBI office closest to the terrorists’ target. The Company’s covert-ops guy in Pakistan had identified the UltraMegaMart as the place where the scumbags intended to strike, but even as Graham had been about to send a desperate warning to local law enforcement, bulletins had started to come in about the devastating car bombings in the suburbs just north of Fort Worth. The CIA agent in Pakistan hadn’t mentioned anything about them. Either there had been some miscommunication somewhere, or the source of the intel just hadn’t known about the other bombings. Or the business about the UltraMegaMart being the target was just false intel, a deliberate decoy. Graham had run all those scenarios through his head.
Then, hard on the heels of the reports about the bombings came the news that shots had been fired inside the big discount store, and Graham knew the truth. The bombings were nothing but a prelude to the main attack, just something to get the attention of the government and the news media and let them know that the terrorists were serious about their demands.
And there would be demands, Graham thought. There always were in hostage situations. Even without being on the scene yet, he knew that was what was developing at the UltraMegaMart north of Fort Worth.
He motioned for Bastrop to follow him, and left the office through a rear door that led to a corridor through a service area, ending up outside where extra cars that belonged to the Bureau were parked. As Graham and Bastrop emerged into the sunny but chilly day, Graham was relieved to see that the reporters and camera crews hadn’t made their way back here yet. The sound of a helicopter made him glance up, though, and he saw a news chopper circling overhead. Within seconds the pilot would be radioing down to his associates on the ground that somebody was slipping out of the FBI office by the back door.
Sure enough, a camera crew charged around the corner of the federal building a moment later, but by that time Graham and Bastrop were in one of the spare cars. Graham was behind the wheel. He drove out fast, leaving the newshounds behind. He didn’t know if they had gotten close enough to recognize him and Bastrop. If they
had, they would probably follow.
Didn’t really matter, he told himself. He and the assistant SAC were on their way to the scene, and there would already be dozens of media people there. The grand opening of the UltraMegaMart was a big story all by itself.
If bloodthirsty terrorists had already taken the place over, then it would soon be the biggest story of the century so far.
CHAPTER 37
Hamed’s heart pounded wildly in his chest. He had never felt such exultation as that which coursed through him at the sight of all those terrified infidel faces as he fired his machine pistols into the ceiling. Fluorescent light fixtures burst under the assault of lead like fireworks, showering the crowd with fine bits of plastic.
As Hamed lowered the weapons, more people screamed and went diving for the floor. Nearly everyone in the crowd around him obeyed his shouted orders. One woman, a lean blonde about forty years old, glared at him and stayed on her feet longer than the others, but then a younger woman with her reached up, grabbed her arm, and dragged her down to the floor, saying urgently, “Do what he says, Mom, do what he says!”
Near that pair, a man in a business suit stared for a second as if he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing, but as Hamed started to swing the barrel of his right-hand gun toward the man, the infidel’s beefy face paled and he dived to the floor next to a fair-haired young woman. The man put his arms over his head—as if that would protect him from a storm of bullets if Hamed chose to unleash one! The only thing the infidels possessed in greater quantity than arrogance was stupidity.
“No one move!” Hamed shouted. “Everyone stay down! Eyes on the floor!” He heard similar orders being shouted in other parts of the store.
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