Monday Night Jihad

by Elam, Jason; Yohn, Steve

  Riley had struggled with the choice as he walked back down the willow-lined street to his quarters. A lot of what his CO had said was right. Would choosing the PFL be taking the easier and less meaningful way out? But he could still make a difference in many people’s lives playing football, right? And he certainly wouldn’t be the first guy to follow such a path.

  The precedent for a professional athlete opting out of military obligations had been set after the first Gulf War. Chad Hennings had returned a war hero after having flown A-10 Warthogs during the liberation of Kuwait. Although he had a long commitment still awaiting him, the air force believed he would serve them better in a public-relations role. It turned out to be a great decision; Chad had taken the opportunity to help lead his football team to three championships during the nineties.

  Once the door was opened, others had stepped through. Steve Russ and Chris Gizzi both served full-time for a couple of years after the Academy, then completed the bulk of their service in the reserves during the summers while spending most of the year playing professional ball.

  Riley wrestled with the decision through the night. He had made a commitment to the air force, and he did not take that lightly. The guys of his squad depended on his leadership, yet to a man they told him he would be a complete idiot not to jump at this opportunity. Still, he held back.

  Finally, early the next morning, a three-way call had come from his dad and grandpa.

  “God has given you the abilities and the opportunity to do something that few people have a chance to do,” Grandpa Covington had said. “Obviously, He’s got something special in mind for you.”

  “Riles,” his dad said, “you know that whatever decision you make, we’ll be proud of you. We’re much more concerned about who you are than what you do.”

  By the time Riley hung up the phone, it was like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He finally felt free to pursue his dream. Why it was so important to get the go-ahead from these two men, he couldn’t say. Maybe he wanted their affirmation, maybe he wanted their wisdom, or maybe it was just plain old respect for their opinion. All he knew was that their words were the key that opened the door to his PFL career. Six months later, he said his final good-byes to full-time air force life.

  Riley chuckled to himself as he thought about the final party his squad had thrown for him before he left AFSOC. He had never seen so much alcohol in his life. While he nursed his Diet Coke, his guys gave speeches that became more syrupy and less coherent as the night wore on. Skeeter Dawkins gave him a tribute that stretched out for a record eighteen words, and Kim Li actually cried during his fourth toast of the evening. The party had officially ended with last call at 2 a.m., but Riley had spent until four thirty driving his men home.

  Two weeks after that, he was running onto the Mustangs’ practice field at the Inverness Training Center.

  * * *

  Riley shut off the water and climbed out of the shower.

  As he got dressed, he glanced over at the Purple Heart and Silver Star his mom had framed for him and insisted he keep hanging in his home. This wall was the most out-of-the-way place that Riley could hang them while still honoring his mom’s request. Riley Covington had been called a hero, but he was uncomfortable with that label. He had simply carried out his mission the way he’d been trained—nothing more, nothing less. It was his duty as an officer in the United States Air Force. Riley had acted as the natural-born leader he was, and now he hoped to use that leadership to take his team into the play-offs.

  He went out into the garage and hopped into the black Denali he had bought used from one of the defensive ends who didn’t make the cut last year. As he backed the truck out, the tires crunching through new snow, he thought about the next two weeks. The team had started out the season slowly, but they were charging hard at the end, winning seven out of the last eight games. If they could win these last two games, they were assured a wild card berth.

  Riley was quickly becoming one of the key leaders of the defensive squad. The other guys were watching him, both on and off the field, and he knew he had to set the example for passion and hard work. He had no doubt that he was up for the challenge. Let them see your focus. Let them see your work ethic. Let them see your integrity. Be the first on the field and the last off.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t that different from his role as a second lieutenant.

  Chapter 2

  Friday, December 19

  CTD Midwest Division Headquarters

  St. Louis, Missouri

  The Yoo-hoo and Diet Mountain Dew Code Red blended together as they were poured into the cup, forming a frothing concoction the color of moderately underdone roast beef. Cherry chocolate nectar of the gods, Scott Ross thought as he threw out the empties.

  It had been ten months since Scott had made the transition from AFSOC to Homeland Security, but already he had created a name for himself as a top communications analyst. His ability to tie together seemingly random pieces of information was almost eerie. “It’s as simple as playing connect the dots,” he liked to say, “only without the numbers.”

  Scott grabbed a handful of ice from the drawer and added the cubes to his concoction. Three weeks ago, he had stayed after hours to insulate the bottom drawer of his workstation at the counterterrorism division (CTD) of Homeland Security. He had dropped in some coils from a small refrigerator left over from a long-ago failed attempt at dorm life, then cranked the setting up to high and let it cool overnight. The next morning he’d stocked his new minibar with the ingredients needed to create his cherished brew, dropping ice in a specially designed rear compartment. This was just one of Scott’s ways of “sticking it to the man”—“the man” being the guy who refused to stock the vending machines with Yoo-hoo.

  Even before the firefight in the Bagram Valley had left him bloodied and dazed, Scott had known that military life wasn’t for him. It was way too structured. The only reason he had joined the air force to begin with was that he had burned his bridges at two different colleges, and home was not a place anyone would want to go back to.

  He had grown up as an unusual kid—odd, some might, and did, say—in central New York. He was extremely intelligent but had struggled with what one of his teachers had termed a “focus deficiency.” Unfortunately, his parents had been too wrapped up with their own addictions to get him the help he needed.

  When he reached high school, his creative energies had started taking on a more destructive nature. That was when he met Mr. Pinkerton, the head librarian at the Fulton Public Library, where Scott spent much of his time devouring books like The Anarchist Cookbook and The Big Book of Mischief. Mr. Pinkerton had steered him to the classics—Milton, Dickens, Dostoyevsky—and to the sciences—Einstein, Hawking, National Geographic, and anything having to do with mathematics and statistics. Eventually, Mr. Pinkerton had become Scott’s mentor—a relationship that had lasted several years. But while the older man had greatly expanded Scott’s mind, he couldn’t do much with his authority issues, which expressed themselves by his barely graduating high school and later receiving invitations to leave both the University at Albany and Adirondack Community College.

  Strangely enough, Scott had thrived in the air force. He seemed to do much better when there were no choices offered to him than when he had the option to do something stupid. He completed the Special Forces training with flying colors and quickly rose to the rank of staff sergeant. But even with all his success, he’d known his military career would not last long. The air force had taught him discipline and focus and how to live with purpose. But his need for independence, combined with the extreme difficulty of getting Yoo-hoo in Afghanistan, cemented his decision to accept the employment offer presented to him by the Department of Homeland Security.

  “Hey, Scott, check this out,” fellow analyst Tara Walsh called.

  Scott grabbed his drink and moved to her workstation. “What’s up?” he asked as he leaned over her shoulder.

  “Oh, g
ag!” she cried, pushing the cup away from her face. “I asked you not to bring that stuff over here. It leaves a lingering odor like five-day-old birthday party.”

  “Sorry,” he said as he quickly chugged the drink and set the cup on her desk.

  “Oh, great. Now it’s five-day-old birthday party mixed with two-hour-old Egg McMuffin. Just keep your head turned when you breathe. So, anyway, I was sent up these strings of chatter, and they reminded me of what you were talking about in our briefing this morning. Check out these key phrases.” Tara laid summaries of two intercepted phone calls and one e-mail on her desk. She circled each phrase with a red felt-tip pen as she said it. “‘Hand of Allah’ here, here, and here; ‘heart of capitalism’ here and here; and ‘Allah controls the weather’ here, here, and here.”

  Immediately Scott’s brain kicked into high gear. All animation disappeared from his face, and his eyes became vacant as words and phrases flashed into his mind and were either kept or discarded—an interview from last week, a report from yesterday morning, an intercepted satellite phone call from back in October—bits and pieces flowing in and being flushed out. Hypotheses and theories were built up and shot down, but out of the wreckage would emerge other possibilities. Tara, like Scott’s other coworkers, had learned that when he drifted to this mysterious place in his head, it was best to just stand there, shut up, and wait.

  A few months ago Scott had been asked to describe the analytical processing his brain went through so that others could be trained in it. The invitation had caused Scott to flash back to the eighth-grade algebra class that had led to his expulsion from Fulton Junior High School. He had gotten all the answers right on his midterm but found it impossible to show the steps he had taken to figure them out. He had been called in to see Principal Stansfield, who wouldn’t believe Scott’s pleas of honesty. The principal had called him a cheater and accused him of stealing the test ahead of time. This had caused Scott to make the slight error in judgment of hurling a decorative lead-framed picture of Stansfield’s wife and two lovely daughters through a glass window, accidentally hitting the school nurse in the forehead as she was on her way back from lunch. “No thanks,” he had told the trainers. “I’ll just do what I do best and let you guys who have nothing better to do train the newbies.”

  “Where’s my cup?” he cried, suddenly returning from his trance. Glancing around, he spotted his oversize maroon mug with the gold letters spelling out “University at Albany: The Path to Success Starts Here” slowly rubbing off its side. Then he remembered his little chugfest. “Okay, never mind. Now, follow my train of thought here. ‘Hand of Allah’ has hit at least thirteen places in the last week that I can think of with the occurrences crescendoing up to today. ‘Weather’ obviously means inclement weather can either affect the implementation of the action or the number of casualties—I’m leaning toward the latter. I still can’t figure out the ‘heart of capitalism.’ Is it a financial center like Wall Street or maybe a manufacturing area? It’s got to be someplace with a real possibility of a major storm system shutting down or at least slowing the operation. We’ve got to put more time into this, but every indication I’m getting, Tara, is that the ‘hand of Allah’ is big and it is imminent.”

  “Do you think we have enough to take this to Porter?” Tara asked. Division chief Stanley Porter was notorious for ripping to shreds analysts who wasted his time. Countless were the times that Scott had left the DC’s office pondering the ways he could cause his boss the greatest amount of physical pain while leaving the fewest visible marks.

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Scott replied. “Give me fifteen more minutes to connect the dots; then we’ll enter the belly of the beast.”

  As he walked back to his workstation, he became more and more unsettled. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was the same one he had experienced many times in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, whenever it came on, nothing good ever followed.

  Friday, December 19

  North Central United States

  “I am so cold!” Abdel al-Hasani told his older brother, Aamir. “How do people live here? I’m wearing three layers of clothing, and I’m still chilled to the bone.”

  “Don’t worry, Brother. Soon enough, you will be luxuriating in a perfect world with a perfect climate surrounded by perfect women.”

  “That truly will be amazing. However, even though I know we’re promised seventy-two of those perfect women, I would be content with just seven—as long as they all looked like Areej, the daughter of Abdullah the butcher.”

  “Ah, one Areej for each day of the week,” Aamir laughed. “You are a discriminating man, Abdel.”

  Ten days ago, the brothers had flown from Riyadh to Paris, where a car and fake passports had been awaiting them in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. They had then driven to Zurich, where they had boarded a Swiss International flight to Winnipeg with a stop in Toronto. Renting a car with their new Canadian passports was not a problem, nor was crossing the border from Fort Frances, Ontario, to International Falls, Minnesota. They had continued to their destination city, where they found an envelope taped under a car parked in space D-136 of the international airport’s west parking garage. The envelope contained a list of instructions and five keys. This began a scavenger hunt of sorts for Aamir and Abdel. They visited the bus terminal, the train station, two Mail Boxes Etc. stores, and the trunk of a 1988 Buick LeSabre. At each location, the locker or mailbox or trunk contained an identical gym bag, which they transferred to their car.

  Now they were in their room at the Days Inn, carefully working with the contents of these bags. The men sat beside their beds, each of which had been covered with a tarp. On each tarp were thirty-five pounds of C-4, a vest with multiple pouches, and several boxes of large ball bearings. The brothers were forming solid cylinders of the plastic explosive. When they completed four of these cylinders, they would tape them together and place them in a pouch. In a mesh outer pocket that spanned the length of each pouch, each brother had already deposited dozens of ball bearings that would become deadly projectiles when the bombs exploded.

  As Abdel molded the cold, gray material, he began thinking again of the moment these explosives would shred his body. Most of the time he was able to shut out that part of his task, but every now and then reality slipped in. He closed his eyes and felt the impact of the explosion. He heard the ricochets of the ball bearings. He smelled the smoke and the blood. His hands began to shake.

  Abdel’s mind drifted back two weeks to the humiliating day when he made his martyr’s video. With his shemagh wrapped around his head and cascading over his shoulders, he had stood there awkwardly holding an AK-47 and mumbling his way through a script that had been handed to him ten seconds before the tape started rolling. Never a good reader, it had taken him three attempts to finally get all the words right.

  Aamir’s performance had been quite different. Abdel’s older brother was so confident, so defiant of the Western world, so determined to take this course of action. Aamir had spat out his words with hatred, even embellishing the script. He was a true believer.

  What I simply think, Aamir knows. But . . . but what if he’s wrong?

  “Brother, are you sure we’re doing the right thing? I mean, is there no other way to accomplish our goals than by this act?”

  Instantly, Aamir’s hand connected hard with Abdel’s cheek, knocking the younger brother to the ground.

  “Never say that again! Do you hear me? Never! We have been chosen for a great honor, a monumental task. There are others around this very city right now who will join us in this strike. They will not back down like cowards. You have a responsibility to carry out your mission. For this you have been created. You have a responsibility to Allah, to your family, to the Cause, to your fellow martyrs, and to me!” He glared down at his brother, then picked him up by the front of his shirt and deposited him back on his chair. He gently placed his hand on Abdel’s face. “Soon all this will be ove
r. We will have struck the Great Satan a tremendous blow. And while they try to put the pieces of their decadent country back together, we will be shahids—martyrs, guaranteed a place in paradise.”

  Abdel just stared at Aamir until his brother finally took his hand away. Then he turned away without a word, picked up some more C-4, and began his work again. Aamir was right. If he didn’t go through with this, he was a dead man anyway, and that same fate would probably extend to his family as well. Allah, I do this for you. Make me like Aamir. Give me the confidence I lack. Allahu akbar!

  * * *

  Scott knocked on the division chief’s door.

  “Make it quick!” came the reply.

  Scott gave Tara a momentary grin, and they walked into the lion’s den together.

  The two analysts couldn’t have made a more opposite pair. Tara looked like she had just stepped off the cover of Vogue. Her perfectly blushed cheekbones matched her perfectly shadowed eyes, which offset her perfectly painted lips—all of which were framed by perfectly coiffed, shoulder-length blonde hair. She wore a dark blue Dana Buchman pantsuit and a pair of Kate Spade pumps, both of which she had saved up for and still could only afford once they had made their migration to Nordstrom Rack.

  Scott, on the other hand, had a goatee that was double the length of his No. 2–razored hair, and the Yoo-hoo combos were just starting to show on his waist—hence his switch to Diet Code Red. He was making his own particular fashion statement today with jeans that were tattered at the cuffs, flip-flops, and a T-shirt from Blue Öyster Cult’s ’78 North American tour.