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“You can forget about them, Pete. Forever and always,” Brian announced.

CHAPTER 14

PARADISE

THE NEWS
crews flocked to Charlottesville like vultures on a fallen carcass—or started to until things got more complex.

The next news flash came from a place called Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs, Colorado, then came one from Provo, Utah, and finally Des Moines, Iowa.
That
made it a colossal story. The Colorado mall hit involved six dead cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy—several more had been pulled outside to safety by their classmates—and twenty-six civilian deaths.

But word of Colorado Springs had gotten quickly to Provo, Utah, and there the local police chief, with a good cop’s instinct, had dispatched radio cars to every shopping center in town. At Provo Towne Center, they scored. Each car carried the mandatory police shotgun, and an epic shoot-out developed between four armed terrorists and six cops—all of whom knew how to shoot. That produced two badly wounded cops, three dead civilians—a total of eleven local citizens had joined in the pitched battle—and four very dead terrorists in what the FBI would later term a bungled attack. Des Moines might have turned out the same, except that the local city police were slow to react, and the final score there was four terrorists dead, but thirty-one citizens to keep them company.

In Colorado, two surviving terrorists were holed up in a retail store with a police SWAT team just fifty yards away, and a company of National Guard riflemen—activated with alacrity by the state’s governor—on the way and champing at the bit to live out every soldier’s fantasy: to use fire and maneuver to immolate the invaders and set their remains out for cougar bait. It took over an hour for this to come to pass, but aided by smoke grenades, the weekend warriors used enough firepower to destroy an invading army and ended the lives of two criminals—Arabs, as it turned out, to no one’s surprise—in spectacular fashion.

By this time, all of America was watching TV, with reporters in New York and Atlanta telling America what they knew, which was little, and trying to explain the events of the day, which they did with the accuracy of grammar-school children. They endlessly repeated the hard facts they had managed to gather, and hauled in “experts” who knew little but said a lot. It was good for filling airtime, at least, if not to inform the public.

THERE WERE
TVs at The Campus, too, and most work stopped as the troops watched them.

“Holy Jesus,” Jack Jr. observed. Others had murmured or thought much the same, but it was somewhat worse for them, since they were technically members of the intelligence community, which had not provided strategic warning against this attack on their home country.

“It’s pretty simple,” Tony Wills observed. “If we do not have human-intelligence assets in the field, then it’s hard for us to get any kind of warning, unless the bad guys are really loose on how they use their cell phones. But the news media likes to tell people how we track the bad guys, and the bad guys learn from that. The White House staffers, too—they like to tell reporters how smart they are, and they leak data on signals intelligence. You sometimes wonder if they’re stringers for the terrorists, the way they give away code-word-sensitive information.” In reality, the staff pukes were just showing off to the reporters, of course, which was about the only thing they knew how to do.

“So, the rest of the day the newsies will be screaming about ‘another intelligence failure,’ right?”

“Bet on it,” Wills responded. “The same people who trash the intelligence community will now complain that it can’t do the job—but without acknowledging their own role in crippling it every chance they get. Same thing from Congress, of course. Anyway, let’s get back to work. NSA will be looking for a little cheering on the part of the opposition—they’re human, too, right? They like to thump their chests some when they pull off an operation. Let’s see if our friend Sali is one of them.”

“But who’s the big kahuna who ordered this one?” Jack asked.

“Let’s see if we can find out.” More important, Wills didn’t add at the moment, was determining
where
the bastard was. A face with a location attached to it was a lot more valuable than a face without one.

UPSTAIRS,
Hendley had his senior people together in front of
his
TV set.

“Thoughts?”

“Pete called up from Charlottesville. Care to guess where our two trainees were?” Jerry Rounds asked.

“You’re kidding,” Tom Davis responded.

“No, I’m not. They whacked the bad guys for fair, without outside assistance, and they’re back at the house now. Bonus: Brian—the Marine—had been having second thoughts about his function. That, Pete reports, is a thing of the past. He can’t wait to go out on some real missions. Pete thinks they’re just about ready, too.”

“So, we just need some solid targets?” Hendley asked.

“My people will be checking the feed from NSA. You gotta assume that the bad guys will be talking back and forth now. Their downtime in chatting back and forth should be coming to an end even now,” Rick Bell thought aloud. “If we’re ready to go active, then we can go active, and soon.”

That was Sam Granger’s department. He’d kept quiet to this point, but now it was time to speak.

“Well, guys, we have two kids ready to go out and service some targets,” he said, using a phrase the Army had invented twenty years before. “They are good kids, Pete tells me, and from what happened today I think they will be properly motivated.”

“What is the opposition thinking?” Hendley asked. It wasn’t hard to figure out, but he wanted additional opinions.

“They wanted to sting us cleverly. The objective here manifestly is to strike at Middle America,” Rounds led off. “They think they can strike fear in our hearts by showing us they can attack us anywhere, not just at obvious targets like New York. That was the element of cleverness in this operation. Probably fifteen to twenty total terrorists, plus some support personnel, maybe. That’s a fairly large number, but not unprecedented—they maintained good operational security. Their people were well motivated. I would not say that they were particularly well trained, though, they just decided to toss a mad dog in the backyard to bite some of the kids, as it were. They’ve demonstrated their political willingness to do some very bad things, but that’s not a surprise; also to throw dedicated personnel away, but that’s not a surprise either. The attack was low-tech in nature, just some bad guys with light automatic weapons. They have demonstrated viciousness, but not real professionalism. In less than two days, the FBI will have them tracked down to their point of origin, probably, and maybe their routes of entry. They did not learn to fly or anything like that, so they probably have not been in-country all that long. I’d be interested in learning who scouted out their objectives. The element of timing suggests some preplanning, but not much, I’d guess—it’s not hard to read the time off a wristwatch. They didn’t plan on getting away after doing their shooting. They probably came in with their objectives already identified. At this point, I’d bet a few bucks that they’ve only been inside our borders for a week or two—even less, depending on their method of ingress. The Bureau will have that one nailed down pretty soon.”

“Pete reports the weapons were Ingram submachine guns. They look pretty—that’s why they show up in TV and the movies,” Granger explained. “But they are not really efficient weapons.”

“How did they get them?” Tom Davis asked.

“Good question. Figure the FBI already has the ones from Virginia, and is busy tracking them down by serial number. They’re good at it. We should have the information by tonight. That will give them leads on how the weapons got into the terrorists’ hands, and then the investigation will get going.”

“WHAT’S THE
Bureau going to do, Enzo?” Brian asked.

“It’s a major case. It’ll have a code word assigned, and every agent in the country can be called in to work on it. Right now, first thing they’re looking for is the car the bad guys used. Maybe it’s stolen. More likely it’s rented. You have to sign for those, leave a copy of your driver’s license, credit card, all the normal stuff you do in order to exist in America. It can all be followed. It all leads somewhere, bro. That’s why you chase them all down.”

“How are you guys doing?” Pete asked, entering the room.

“A drink helps,” Brian answered. He’d already cleaned his Beretta, as Dominic had done with his Smith & Wesson. “It wasn’t fun, Pete.”

“It isn’t supposed to be. Okay, I just talked with the home office. They want to see you guys in a day or so. Brian, you had some qualms before, and you say that’s changed. That still true?”

“You’ve trained us to identify, close on, and kill people, Pete. And I can live with that—just so’s we’re not doing something completely off the reservation.”

Dominic just nodded agreement, but his eyes didn’t leave Alexander.

“Okay, good. There’s an old joke in Texas about why the lawyers are so good down there. The answer is, there’s more men who need killin’ than horses that need stealin’. Well, those who need killing, maybe you two can help them along some.”

“Are you finally going to tell us who we’re working for, exactly?” Brian asked.

“You will find that out in due course—just a day or so.”

“Okay, I can wait that long,” Brian said. He was doing some quick analysis of his own. General Terry Broughton might know something. For damned sure that Werner guy in FBI did, but this former tobacco plantation they’d been training on didn’t belong to any part of the government he knew about. CIA had “The Farm” near Yorktown, Virginia, but that was about a hundred fifty miles away. This place didn’t feel like “Agency,” at least not in accordance with his assumptions, wrong though they could be. In fact, this place didn’t smell “government” at all, not to his nose. But one way or another, in a couple of days he’d know something substantive, and he could wait that long.

“What do we know about the guys we whacked today?”

“Nothing much. That’ll have to wait awhile. Dominic, how long before they start finding stuff out?”

“By noon tomorrow they’ll have a lot of information, but we don’t have a pipeline into the Bureau, unless you want me to—”

“No, I don’t. We might have to let them know that you and Brian aren’t the new version of the Lone Ranger, but it ought not to go very far.”

“You mean I’ll have to talk to Gus Werner?”

“Probably. He has enough juice in the Bureau to say you’re on ‘special assignment’ and make it stick. I imagine he’ll be patting himself on the back for talent-scouting you for us. You two did pretty damned well, by the way.”

“All we did,” the Marine said, “was what we’ve been trained to do. We had just enough time to get our shit together, and after that it was all automatic. They taught me at the Basic School that the difference between making it and not making it is usually just a few seconds’ worth of thinking. If we’d been in the Sam Goody when it all started instead of a few minutes later, it might have been different in the final outcome. One other thing—two men are about four times as effective as one man. There’s actually a study about it. ‘Non-Linear Tactical Factors In Small-Unit Engagements, ’ I think the title is. It’s part of the syllabus at Recon School.”

“Marines really do know how to read, eh?” Dominic asked, reaching for a bottle of bourbon. He poured two stiff ones, handing one to his brother and taking a pull on his own.

“The guy in the Sam Goody—he smiled at me,” Brian said in reflective amazement. “I didn’t think about it at the time. I guess he wasn’t afraid to die.”

“It’s called martyrdom, and some people really do think that way,” Pete told them both. “So, what did you do?”

“I shot him, close range, maybe six or seven times—”

“Far side of ten times, bro,” Dominic corrected him. “Plus the last one in the back of his head.”

“He was still moving,” Brian explained. “And I didn’t have any cuffs to slap on him. And, you know, I’m not really all that worried about it.” And besides, he would have bled out anyway. The way things had worked out, his trip into the next dimension had just happened sooner.

“B-3 AND
bingo! We have a bingo,” Jack announced from his workstation. “Sali is a player, Tony. Look here,” he said, pointing to his computer screen.

Wills punched up his “take” from NSA, and there it was. “You know, chickens are supposed to cackle after they lay an egg, just to let the world know how good they are. Works with these birds, too. Okay, Jack, it’s official. Uda bin Sali is a player. Who is this addressed to?”

“It’s a guy he chats on the ’Net with. He mainly talks to him about money moves.”

“Finally!” Wills observed, checking the document on his own workstation. “They want photos of the guy, a whole spread. Maybe Langley is finally going to put some coverage on him. Praise the Lord!” He paused. “Got a list of the people he e-mails to?”

“Yep. Want it?” Jack keyed it up and hit the PRINT command. In just fifteen seconds, he handed the sheet over to his roomie. “Numbers and dates of e-mails. I can print up all the interesting ones, and the reasons I find them interesting, if you want.”

“We’ll let that sit for the moment. I’ll get this up to Rick Bell.”

“I’ll hold the fort.”

DID YOU SEE THE NEWS ON TV, Sali had written to a semiregular correspondent. THIS OUGHT TO GIVE THE AMERICANS A STOMACHACHE!

“Yeah, it sure will,” Jack told the screen. “But you just tipped your hand, Uda. Oops.”

SIXTEEN MORE
martyrs, Mohammed thought, watching a TV in Vienna’s Bristol Hotel. It was only painful in the abstract. Such people were, really, expendable assets. They were less important than he, and that was the truth, because of his value to the organization. He had the looks and the language skills to travel anywhere, and the brainpower to plan his missions well.