by Brent Towns
Sirens sounded in the distance as Kane looked at Thurston. “Your call, boss.”
Thurston’s pretty brown eyes did nothing to betray her thoughts as she studied the weeping Reardon for a moment. But a slight tightening of her jaw gave away some of the emotions brewing behind her otherwise impassive face. She abruptly pulled her gaze back to Kane and Traynor. “Cops will be here soon. You two better bug out. I’ll hang back, clear things up with the authorities, and meet you back at the airport.”
Her eyes returned to Reardon, his tears spilling into his wife’s hair as he held her close and murmured her name again and again like a litany of grief. In a voice both soft as silk and hard as steel, she said, “Oh, and gentlemen? You can bet your asses we’re going after these bastards.”
Chapter 2
Due to the fluctuating timetables of the targets, the three terrorist attacks didn’t happen in perfect synchronicity, but they all happened on the same day within hours of each other. When Jack Carter, the President of the United States, entered the Situation Room for his first briefing on the triple-pronged strikes, he commented, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can rule out coincidence.”
The Atlantic Ocean
Ned Tarkinson had captained the Norwegian Gem, a Jewel-class ship for the Norwegian Cruise Line, out of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal at least fifty times in the last three years. Hell, he probably could have done it half-drunk and with one eye closed, but that would never happen because Tarkinson took great pride in his nautical duties. He always looked the part of a captain, his uniform clean, pressed, and sharply creased.
Since taking command of the Norwegian Gem, he’d never had a serious incident, nothing beyond the usual seasickness (why the hell did people prone to motion sickness book cruises?) and the occasional got-drunk-and-fell-down injury. In fact, the top cruise review sites on the internet rated him as one of the safest captains working the ships today.
On this sunny late June morning, Captain Tarkinson had no idea that his impeccable safety record was about to suffer some serious damage. Permanent damage.
They were three hours out to sea, headed for the south Caribbean at twenty knots, with just over two thousand passengers on board. The Atlantic was calm, the sailing smooth, and the gulls wheeled overhead with their distinctive cries. Captain Tarkinson looked forward to strolling the decks later, mingling with the guests so he could savor the crisp, clean smell of the salt air, which he considered the greatest scent in the world.
He heard the metallic buzz of the Cessna 172’s motor a few seconds before the single-engine plane spiraled down in a twisting kamikaze dive and slammed into the bridge at what seemed like 200 mph. Most of the crew were killed immediately, bodies crushed and mangled. Those lucky enough to survive the initial impact were only lucky for another split second, then the hundred pounds of Semtex that had been packed into the plane’s cargo hold exploded. The blast blew the bridge—and everyone in it—to shattered rubble. Fiery debris and torn body parts rained down on the lower decks as the passengers screamed and panicked. Burning aviation fuel sent flames racing among the wreckage as smoke billowed into the sky.
Two minutes later, four unmarked speedboats appeared, throttles wide open, racing toward the damaged cruise ship. Each boat was piloted by a single person. Some of the Norwegian Gem’s passengers pointed and cheered as the vessels raced toward them, thinking they were rescued. They had no idea how wrong they were.
Dead wrong.
The speedboats were not salvation. They were damnation, ridden by suicidal zealots and Semtex. Though nobody on the crippled cruise ship could hear it over the crackle of the flames, the panicked screams of the passengers and the high-speed whine of the boats’ engines, all four pilots chanted three words as they closed in on their target.
“Bin Laden rises! Bin Laden rises!”
Their cryptic last words. In their final seconds of life, they raised fists clenched in victory. Then all four boats slammed into the port side of the ship at almost exactly the same time and erupted into fireballs of destruction, tearing gaping holes in the ship’s hull. A quarter-ton of Semtex made for one hell of an explosion, and the cruise ship was rocked, shuddering like a mortally wounded whale. Water flooded into the jagged, blackened holes. Almost immediately, the Norwegian Gem listed to port as it began to sink toward the bottom of the Atlantic, dragged down by the invading water as surely as if sucked into the murky depths by the giant tentacles of a prehistoric squid.
With the bridge destroyed, there was no com left to call for assistance, and this far out to sea, there was no cell service. Stranded, sinking, and under attack, the passengers were on their own. Eventually, they figured out how to release the lifeboats, but without a captain to lead them or anyone stepping up to take charge, the boarding was absolute mayhem, a chaotic mess of pushing and shoving. Fueled by desperation, their survival instincts causing their primal, more bestial natures to slip through the fissures, people fought each other. Fistfights broke out as passengers tried to battle their way to the front of the mob. More people ended up in the ocean than in the boats. Wailing children floated in their lifejackets like little bobbers while anguished parents screamed their names.
Once the ship had almost completely sank, two more speedboats appeared, nearly identical to the ones that had committed the suicide run earlier. Not knowing if they were friend or foe, the desperate passengers still waved furiously for help. Two of the lifeboats capsized, dumping even more people into the Atlantic. Spitting, sputtering cries echoed across the unfeeling water as the bombing victims struggled to keep from drowning, flailing arms reaching out toward the incoming speedboats, begging to be rescued.
Instead, the boats surged forward as the throttles redlined and plowed straight through the survivors. In addition to the pilot, each boat held three men dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garments and armed with submachine guns. As the vessels ripped through the mass of floating victims, propellers shredding flesh, the gunmen opened fire.
It was the proverbial fish in a barrel slaughter.
This far out to sea, there was no reason for the terrorists to use suppressors. The chattering of the submachine guns cutting loose on full-auto drowned out the passengers’ horrified screams as bullets chopped them into bloody chum for the sharks. Hot brass casings spewed from ejection ports and sizzled when they hit the water, floating on the waves like all the other death debris.
The boats circled like predators, picking off the flailing, screaming, splashing people desperately trying to swim away from them. The terrorists killed as many as they could, and when their magazines ran empty, scores of corpses riddled with gaping wounds bobbed grotesquely on the waves.
The two boats raced away from the carnage before the fast-sinking cruise ship could suck them down in its vortex. They were murderers, not martyrs. Those who wished to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah had already done so, in glorious fashion, no doubt already reaping their rewards in paradise. The gunmen in the speedboats had merely wished to kill for the cause. They felt called to spill infidel blood, not shed their own.
When they got back within signal range, one of the terrorists took out a burner phone and typed out a two-word text to a contact named Johnny.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
He hit “Send.”
La Guardia Airport
New York City
The Bombardier Learjet 31A raced down the runway and lifted off into the sky. The two-man flight crew had filed a flight plan that would shuttle the family of six on board down to the Florida Keys for a weeklong vacation. The eleven-year-old girl with the pink bow in her ponytail was very excited. Her father had promised to take her swimming with the dolphins.
As the Learjet banked over Bowery Bay, a man stood up in a small motorboat and braced his feet for balance as he shouldered a surface-to-air missile launcher. He did not have extensive training with the weapon, but he had enough to send the missile rocketing up into the sky where it chased down the h
eat signature from the Bombardier’s engines. The jet exploded in a brilliant orange fireball, streams of burning aviation fuel shooting in all directions like a deadly starburst.
As the flaming debris and mangled body parts rained down into the waters of the bay, the man dropped the launcher over the side of the boat. He watched it sink for a second, then pulled out his burner phone, thumbed through the handful of contacts until he found Johnny, and hit “send” on a pre-typed text.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
He tossed the phone overboard. It made a small splash and then sank like a stone, vanishing into the water’s depths. Then he waited. This close to the airport, escape would be impossible. Already emergency vehicles were racing down the runway toward him, sirens sounding their banshee wail. Not too far in the distance, a blue-and-white police boat raced toward him, foam churning in its wake. He could see officers bracing themselves against the chop, AR-15 carbines bristling in their hands. After what he had just done, their trigger fingers would be itchy.
A police helicopter swooped overhead, then swung around to hover about fifty meters off his port bow. The rotor wash whipped up spray from the river. The terrorist felt like he was standing in the rain, his clothes getting soaked. Not that it mattered; he wouldn’t need them much longer.
The police boat arrived on the scene, zagging to his right to take up position off his starboard. The three officers on board had their rifles trained on him. He didn’t need to see the selector switches to know none of the guns were on “safe.”
The time had come.
He reached down into the bottom of his boat, flipped back the tarp laying there, and picked up the AK-47 that had been concealed beneath. A thirty-round banana clip protruded from the weapon like some obscene, deadly growth. As he raised the rifle, he heard one of the officers on the police boat yell, “He’s got an AK!”
As he pulled the trigger and fired a salvo up toward the helicopter, he shouted, “Allahu Akbar! Bin Laden rises!” He shouted the phrase again as his bullets sparked off the chopper’s landing struts, forcing it to bank away and retreat to a safer distance. And then he shouted it again as the cops cut loose with their AR-15s and punched him full of holes with controlled bursts of fire.
Even as the bullets slammed into him, he stretched out his arms in a cruciform martyr’s pose and continued to scream his battle cry, until finally one of the 5.56mm projectiles ripped through his head, silencing him forever.
Central Park
New York City
On a warm, sunny June lunch hour, it was expected that hundreds of people would gather at Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, many of them spreading blankets and settling down for a picnic feast. Others flew kites, read books, or played Frisbee. It was a place folks came for a respite from the sometimes-choking congestion of the city.
Nobody paid the two interracial couples—Middle Eastern men and Caucasian women—any mind when they leisurely strolled into the southeast corner of the meadow, each of them carrying a large wicker picnic basket with wooden handles. They were young, non-threatening, and appeared to be college students taking a break from their studies to soak up some sun. The men were handsome, the girls were pretty, and by most standards, they would be considered attractive couples. They laughed as they walked, feet swishing through the lush grass, and nobody around them sensed anything out of the ordinary.
That all changed when the foursome dropped down on one knee beside their picnic baskets, flipped open the lids, and pulled out matching .45 caliber MAC-10 submachine guns. No suppressors; they couldn’t care less if anyone heard the guns’ killing chatter.
As the weaponized quartet began shouting, “Allahu Akbar! Bin Laden rises!” nearby park visitors started scrambling for their lives and screaming in horror. They stampeded for safety, but for many of them, it was too late.
Elbows braced on their supporting knees for better control, the terrorists opened fire, fingers clamping down on the triggers as they unleashed auto-fire hell.
In addition to delivering .45 caliber rounds at 1,080 feet per second, the MAC-10s featured a notoriously rapid cyclical rate. They cooked off a thirty-round magazine in 2-3 seconds on full-auto, among the fastest SMGs on the planet. But the four killers had prepared for that; instead of bread, wine, and deli meats, each picnic basket contained a dozen fully-loaded, max-capacity magazines. There might not be any lunch in the baskets, but there was a buffet of bullets. As the mags emptied, each terrorist performed a quick exchange and resumed firing. It would be quite some time before they ran out of ammunition. They had come stocked to kill.
The MAC-10s were not precision weapons, and the gunners did not attempt to use them as such. Knowing the limitations of their firepower, they went for the “spray-n’-pray” method of saturating the target area with as many high-velocity slugs as possible. The goal was maximum death, maximum carnage.
The bullets scythed through soft flesh, ripping into the mob of fleeing people with a brutal lack of mercy. The lethal projectiles made no distinction between men, women, and children—all went down like stalks of wheat before a threshing machine. Not even baby strollers were spared the full-auto fusillade as the four terrorists gunned down innocents in the name of their unforgiving god. Parents screamed as the newly-born became the newly-dead.
Blood flew everywhere as the terrorists smiled cruelly, relishing the slaughter. Hot brass spewed in metal streams from the SMGs’ ejection ports, sunlight gleaming on the spent casings as they scattered all over the grass.
It took just three minutes to exhaust all the magazines. One hundred and eighty seconds of death and destruction and chaos. By the time the final bullet buried itself in human flesh, sixty-two people lay dead. The oldest was an eighty-nine-year-old great-grandmother; the youngest, a month-old infant.
The only person to fight back was the infant’s father, who held his dead daughter with one arm while he pulled a Glock and returned fire with anguished tears streaming down his face. He just barely grazed one of the female terrorists in the shoulder before her companions shredded him—and his child’s body—to pieces with converging lines of auto-fire.
Sirens banshee-wailed in the distance as they fled the scene. They took the MAC-10s with them but left behind the slew of spent cartridges. They had donned latex gloves while filling the magazines, so there were no fingerprints on the brass.
In their pre-staged getaway car—mocked up to look like a taxi in order to blend in with all the cabs clogging the city streets—one of the men palmed his burner phone and opened his messaging application. His hands shook so badly from adrenalin aftermath that he could barely type out the text to Johnny, the mastermind of the attack, the orchestrator of the carnage, the one to whom they had sworn allegiance.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
He hit send, and then they went back to their shared apartment and engaged in a fierce, primal four-way orgy, reveling in raw lust to celebrate their blood-soaked victory over the infidels as they awaited their next assignment. During the carnal indulgence of naked flesh, both women closed their eyes and imagined it was Johnny thrusting between their spread-eagled thighs, that it was Johnny’s mouth hungrily devouring their breasts. And in the end, when they screamed their release, it was Johnny’s name they cried out.
The object of their fantasies, the charismatic man known as Johnny Jihad, sat in his safe-house and smiled with every “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” text he received. He had let loose his dogs of war, and they had fulfilled his bloody vision. He had scarcely dared to believe that he could actually pull off his masterplan. And while the Quran warned against exalting oneself, he couldn’t help but feel a swelling of pride at what he had accomplished. Years of work, years of recruiting, years of planning… it had all come together, and it was goddamned glorious.
Johnny felt no shame, no sense of sinfulness, at saying—or in this case, thinking—the word “goddamned.” He was not your typical Mideast Muslim, the kind you see straight out of Hollywood central casting, all swarth
y-skinned with heads wrapped in turbans. Rather, he was as American as apple pie, baseball, and copping feels from short-skirted cheerleaders under the bleachers. His hair was blonde enough to qualify for Hitler’s master race back in World War II, his skin a well-tanned white, and the only thing on his head was a backwards baseball cap sporting the New York Yankees logo. He drank alcohol, used profanity, got laid when the need arose, and generally acted more like a frat boy than a true follower of Islam.
But while Johnny eschewed the rigid rules and regulations of the faith, his belief and devotion were absolute. He lived for one goal and one goal only—to raise Al-Qaeda to its former glory, to engineer the resurrection that would see the Al-Qaeda network once again publicly proclaimed as the premier global terrorism threat. No longer would they be old news, an afterthought, a tragic but brief page in the history books. They would yet again be a relentless force to be reckoned with, faithful jihadists holding merciless blades to the soft, vulnerable, infidel throat of the American way of life.
Following the death of Osama Bin Laden—or rather, the murder of Bin Laden—Al-Qaeda had crawled back into obscurity while ISIS started grabbing all the headlines. News agencies around the world declared them to be brutal, barbaric, and possessed by savagery that made them even worse than Al-Qaeda.
Johnny found the thought laughable. Fuck ISIS. They were a bunch of idiotic assholes who weren’t fit to carry Osama’s jockstrap. They were all brute force, no brains, no strategy beyond kill-kill-kill. Any numbskull barbarian could hack someone’s head off and stream the decapitation on the internet. All you needed was a sharp knife and the willingness to get your hands bloody. But to pull off multi-target strikes like he had to today? To synchronize a series of attacks within hours of each other? That took skill, planning, intelligence—and boulder-sized balls. The same skills, planning, intelligence, and balls that Bin Laden had exhibited back when he brought down the towers.