McCabe slid backward along the shelf, pulling himself out of sight as the terrorists came forward to check and make sure the men they had shot were really dead. McCabe had no doubt of that. No one could have survived such a brutal, overpowering assault.
Even having witnessed the things he had during his life, he felt sick to his stomach. Not so much because good men had just died, although he felt a bone-deep grief for them.
It was the unholy glee on the faces of the terrorists as they massacred those men that sickened McCabe. He could never hate everyone of Middle Eastern descent, as the woman he’d captured hated all Americans just because they were Americans. He didn’t hate all Muslims, not by any means.
But right now, he hated these particular sons of bitches. Damn straight he did.
He swallowed that hatred and the sickness that came with it and lay there, silent and unmoving. If the terrorists conducted a search of the area, he would fight, of course, but right now he wanted them to just be satisfied with the slaughter they had already carried out and go away.
The way the guy who’d been hit by the shotgun blast went down, McCabe knew he was either dead or badly wounded. That was one more of the enemy out of the fight. Trading six lives for one was unacceptable.
But at least those six men hadn’t died completely for nothing.
McCabe listened as the terrorists talked excitedly among themselves, pleased by the murders they had just committed. Then they fell silent and after a moment, he heard what sounded like an older man’s voice castigating the others for letting some of the Americans remain loose to start with.
How had they hoped to keep a thousand or more people corraled with only a couple of dozen men? True, the hostages were split up into smaller groups of forty or fifty apiece, and one man armed with automatic weapons and willing to kill was probably a match for that many unarmed civilians who just wanted to get out of here alive. When you broke it down like that, the whole thing didn’t sound so unreasonable.
What they had really counted on, though, was the belief that the hostages wouldn’t fight back because they were scared. Because in recent years America had pretty much taken whatever punishment its enemies wanted to dish out and hadn’t done anything in response except some empty, futile saber-rattling.
Sure, the so-called “war on terror” had been victimized by some poor planning and worse execution, but at least the people in charge then had been trying to do something to stem the bloody tide of Islamofascism.
Even if those mistakes hadn’t been made, McCabe knew, the effort had been doomed from the start because of the country’s polarization and the stranglehold that the left had on the mainstream media, so that things would always look worse than they actually were. The rise to power of the liberal wing had just made the situation even more dire. Now our enemies around the world knew that they could do just about anything they wanted to and have nothing to fear except some harmless bluster and maybe a few economic and diplomatic sanctions.
Evil bastards like these terrorists just laughed at those hollow threats. Give them credit—they knew how to hate. They’d had centuries of practice. And they were never plagued by the self-doubt and self-recrimination that had paralyzed American willpower for close to fifty years.
No, what really gave the terrorists the upper hand, at least in their minds, was the utter confidence that Americans would throw up their hands and quit at the first sign of any tough sledding. They believed that Americans were gutless.
And when it came to most of the politicians and media figures, they were right.
That left any fighting that had to be done up to the common people…like the ones trapped in this UltraMegaMart.
McCabe heard the terrorists walking away. They were going the other direction, not toward him and the men with him. He closed his eyes for a second and breathed a sigh of relief.
They still had a fighting chance.
And now they could get to those weapons easier than they could have before, McCabe saw as he edged his head past the end of the shelves. The terrorists, in their arrogance, had walked off and left the rifles standing upright in the cabinets that were broken open. McCabe and his men would be able to get their hands on the guns, along with ammunition for them.
All they had to do was wade through the spilled blood of their countrymen and step over the bullet-riddled corpses of friends, neighbors, coworkers.
They could do it, McCabe thought. They could do it because they had to.
And using a small fire and the smoke detectors to set off the sprinkler system still wasn’t a bad idea. Anything to make things more difficult for the terrorists worked to the hostages’ advantage.
McCabe hissed, and when several of his men peeked out from their hiding places, he motioned them forward. With gestures, he asked for the paper he intended to use as kindling. He took it, being careful not to rattle it around too much. The terrorists might have left a man or two in the area, although McCabe didn’t think that was the case.
He arranged the paper in a pile in one of the aisles in the crafts area, almost directly underneath the smoke detector on the ceiling high overhead. The store’s heating system was running, which meant that air would be coming from the vents and moving around up there in currents, and McCabe didn’t know exactly what that would do to the smoke. He hoped it would go almost straight up as it rose. If it didn’t, he might have to start another fire, and he knew that it would be only a matter of time until some of the bastards spotted the smoke and came running to find out what was causing it.
But there was only one way to find out what was going to happen. Here goes nothing, he thought, and flicked the lighter into life.
CHAPTER 54
Terry’s head jerked up when she heard glass break somewhere in the store, followed by shouts. The sounds weren’t really close to where she, Ronnie, and the others were being held prisoner, but they weren’t all that far away either.
Jack!
The thought went unbidden through her head. She still had no way of knowing for sure that her husband was even inside the store, but her gut told her that he was. That was how strong the bond between the two of them was.
“Mom, what’s going on?” Ronnie asked as she huddled against Terry’s side.
Terry put her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and squeezed hard. “I don’t know. But I’m going to hope it’s something good.”
“It’s Daddy, isn’t it? He’s doing that—”
More yelling broke out, this time in Arabic. Terry recognized the language, although not the words in this case because they were being spouted so rapidly.
A second later, a heavy boom filled the air. That was a shotgun, Terry thought. None of the terrorists had shotguns, did they?
But they had machine pistols, and that was the terrible racket that suddenly rolled through the store, a bull-fiddle roar of death maybe forty yards away, along the rear of the store.
Ronnie gave a short cry of fear. Terry tightened her arm around her. The rest of the hostages in this group looked frightened as well. Ellis Burke caught hold of Allison’s hand, and she didn’t pull away. Lucy Winston held her son Darius on her lap and bent her head over his as if to shield him from anything that was about to happen. Other parents clutched their children to them as the kids whimpered.
Terry kept an eye on Hamed. If he looked like he was going to get trigger-happy and start shooting, she would do her best to get to him and try to stop him before he could slaughter everyone. She knew she would likely die in the process, but that would be all right if she could stop him from killing everyone else.
But even though Hamed was wide-eyed with surprise, he appeared to be maintaining control. He glared at the hostages and swept the machine pistols back and forth menacingly, causing everyone to hunker even lower to the floor.
He didn’t fire, though, and after a few moments the shooting from the other part of the store came to a stop. The sound of the shots echoed from the high ceiling and slowly
died away, leaving a strained silence.
The older man who had been talking to Hamed earlier about the missing female terrorist came along the aisle a couple of minutes later. He looked angry, and when he spoke to Hamed the words came out fast and furious. Terry couldn’t pick up all of them, but she understood enough to get the gist of what the older man was saying.
Several men had managed to elude capture by the terrorists and had hidden out until now. They had broken into the gun cabinets and ammunition cases in the sporting-goods department and tried to arm themselves.
Some of the terrorists had gotten there before they could do so, however, and killed the Americans—but not before one of the men had been able to fire a shotgun and kill one of the terrorists.
Terry felt a fierce surge of exultation when she heard that one of the bastards was dead. He’d had it coming, that was for sure.
But her heart sank when she thought about the Americans who had been massacred. Could one of them have been Jack? That sounded just like him, making an effort to get his hands on some weapons so that he could fight back against these heartless monsters.
She swallowed hard as she realized that her husband might be dead. Deep down, though, she couldn’t make herself believe that was true. Jack would have been smarter than that, she told herself. He wouldn’t have made such a clumsy effort to get to the guns. He would have done something to distract the terrorists first…
That was when she looked again toward the area where the shooting had taken place and spotted a tendril of grayish smoke curling its way upward toward the ceiling—and she knew in that moment that her husband wasn’t dead.
Call it instinct, call it the bond between husband and wife…call it love…it didn’t matter what you called it, Terry McCabe knew…
Just as she knew, looking at that smoke, that he was making his move.
“Jack,” she whispered.
This standoff wasn’t going to last much longer, Hamed thought as Sheikh al-Mukhari walked stiffly toward the front of the store. The sheikh was angry that Shalla was still missing, he was upset at the carelessness that had allowed some of the Americans to elude capture, and he was ready to put an end to everything.
By now, the cameras in the news helicopters circling the store at a safe distance would be sending out their signal to the entire world. The television sets in the electronics department were still on, although someone had muted the sound on them, and they all showed the same picture: the huge, boxy shape of the UltraMegaMart sitting in the middle of what was now a mostly deserted parking lot. Scores of emergency vehicles with flashing lights lined the access road and the farthest reaches of the parking lot, but there was nothing they could do to stop what was going to happen.
That same picture was being watched in Europe, Asia, Africa, India, and Australia, despite the time differences. This was the sort of high drama that could captivate the entire planet. Everyone would be waiting to see what was going to happen.
Hamed glanced at his watch. Not quite twelve o’clock. Hard to believe that he and his companions had been in the store for only a few hours. Harder still to accept that they had been in command of the place for less than two hours. It seemed much longer than that, more like days rather than mere hours.
Soon the drama would be drawing to an end. At noon perhaps. High noon, the Americans called it. They had a movie by that name. Hamed had never seen it, of course, because he didn’t watch decadent American movies with all their unwholesome sex and violence, but he had heard of it.
That would certainly be fitting, and he wondered if Sheikh al-Mukhari had thought of it. At high noon, the UltraMegaMart would disappear in the blinding flash of a nuclear inferno, and the dirty bomb would render the entire area for miles around radioactive.
Hamed felt something go through him at the thought. A tingle of fear and regret?
No, he decided, it was a shiver of anticipation. He was ready to die for the cause of jihad. Ready to die for his god, and to take all these filthy unbelievers with him. He looked at them and smiled.
They didn’t know how little time they truly had left in this world.
The thoughts continued to spool out in his mind. The Americans watching everything unfold on TV would be shocked to their cores when they saw the explosion. They wouldn’t be able to believe that such a thing could happen.
In the Middle East, though, where everyone would be watching the coverage on Al Jazeera, wild celebrations would sweep the streets of Cairo and Damascus and Beirut, Baghdad and Tehran and Riyadh. The people there would know that a blow for freedom had been struck. This victory would be just the first step in the rise of the Caliphate and the ultimate doom of the sinful West. In time the Caliphate would rule the world, and through it Allah would reign supreme.
It was such a beautiful vision that Hamed almost wished he could be alive to see it.
But of course he couldn’t, because he and everyone else here had to die to bring that vision about. To bring paradise to earth…
What was that smell?
He lifted his head and frowned as he sniffed at the air. Something burning?
“Hamed? Hamed, listen to me.”
He looked around in surprise. One of the infidels was addressing him? It was that blond woman, he saw, the one who had bothered him all along with that look about her—a look that said she wasn’t really afraid of him. She was climbing to her feet now, as she said, “Hamed, I really need to talk to you.”
He jerked the barrel of his right-hand gun at her and barked, “Sit down! Sit down with the others or I will kill you.”
She held her hands out toward him. “There’s no need for that. Listen, if we can just talk for a minute—”
Hamed figured out then that she was trying to distract him, and the only possible reason she would be doing that was because she had noticed him trying to locate the origin of that smoke he had smelled. He had forgotten about it for a second, but now the realization that something was wrong came rushing back into his brain—and the blond woman was part of it.
She would pay for her treachery. “Infidel bitch!” he screamed as he leveled the right-hand gun to blast her into eternity.
Before he could pull the trigger, a wailing like that of crazed jinni filled his ears, and somehow—even though he was inside—the heavens opened up with a deluge.
CHAPTER 55
“—reports that more shots have been fired inside the UltraMegaMart just a short time ago! Our correspondents on the scene tell us that a considerable amount of gunfire was heard coming from inside the store. The shooting supposedly lasted for at least a minute, perhaps longer. As for what this latest outbreak of violence means for the safety of the hostages, we have no idea at this point.”
“How long is this going to go on?” the President asked in despair.
“It’s only been a couple of hours so far,” her husband pointed out.
They had retreated to the family quarters on the second floor of the White House. Down below, the Oval Office was still crowded with all the subordinates who had been there earlier, except for the National Security Advisor.
That bitch was long gone.
The President knew that sooner or later she would have to call the NSA’s top deputy and have him come to the White House, since he had inherited the job whether he knew it yet or not. For now, though, she couldn’t stand people looking at her anymore, obviously waiting for her to make a decision.
That was why she had come up here. She had to get away from that constant pressure, even if it was just for a few minutes.
That big boob of a husband of hers, though, had insisted on turning on the television, so they still couldn’t get away from what was going on in Texas.
She hated Texas. To her way of thinking, nothing good had come out of that state since Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society.
Now it had given her the worst crisis of her Presidency, hard on the heels of those fiascos in Laredo and San Antonio.
Sh
e stared at the TV screen, where the same image was still being broadcast: the big, ugly store and the empty parking lot. Except for the graphic superimposed in the bottom corner of the screen that read LIVE, and the occasional passing shadow cast by a circling helicopter, the picture on the screen might have been a still photo. Nothing changed.
But things were going on inside the store, if the reports of gunshots were to be believed. More than likely, American citizens were being killed, and sooner or later, she would be blamed for their deaths by her political enemies. She was sure that was how the conspiratorial right-wing bastards would behave.
Her foot began to tap nervously on the floor. “I’m going to have to do something,” she said.
“What?” her husband asked. “It’s too late to withdraw our support from Israel. It wouldn’t do any good. And even if it would, that would be political suicide. Trust me on that. You don’t want to piss off the Jews. You’d lose too many votes.”
“You think I won’t lose votes if I stand by and do nothing and those bastards blow up that store and kill a thousand people?” she snapped.
He shrugged. “Not as many as you will if you turn your back on Israel. Hell, you’re never gonna carry Texas anyway, no matter what you do, and in the long run, people in California and New York aren’t going to care if a bunch of rednecks get blown up. The middle of the country doesn’t really exist as far as they’re concerned anyway.”
She knew he was probably right about that; she trusted his political instincts. That was about the only thing about him she trusted, but still…
“All right. We can’t negotiate with the terrorists. We can’t appease them, can’t give in to their demands. We have to go in.”
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