by Chase Austin
“I hope he doesn’t do something stupid,” Eddie muttered just before the line was disconnected.
Chapter 39
Helms picked up the phone and called the White House Chief of Staff.
“I need to talk to the President.”
“Who’s this?”
Helms clenched his fists. This was outrageous. Time was running out and the White House Chief of Staff apparently didn’t even have his number.
“William Helms—Director of the NSA. Get me the President, this is an emergency.”
“The president is on his way for a game of golf with the President of North Korea. You will have to wait for it to finish.”
“Listen, you piece of shit, either you get me the President right now or I will make sure that your career is over before today ends.” Helms thundered.
The White House Chief of Staff sniggered at the attempt at bullying him. “The President has specifically asked me to keep morons like you away from him, so you can try, but I think it will be you who will be facing the ax.”
This was unprecedented in all of Helms’ career. The President had asked his minions to block calls from the NSA director! He saw no point in arguing with the gatekeeper. He needed someone with a sound mind and the authority to act. He disconnected the call.
His next call was to the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. His personal assistant took the call and promised her boss would get back to Helms soon.
Helms then tried Raborn twice, only to have his call disconnected twice. Helms was getting the feeling he was fighting a lonely battle, but he had to keep trying. His next call was to the United States Secretary of Defense, Patrick Mattis, who answered on the third ring.
“Hello Bill, how are you?” Mattis sounded chirpy.
“We have a situation. My sources in Afghanistan have intel about an attack on American soil today. The president is incommunicado. You need to take this to him and request an urgent meeting. I am flying to DC in thirty minutes.”
“Bill, hang on a second. I’m sure this is just another hoax. America today is not like the America of 2001. There is no 9/11 happening on our soil, ever again. I heard you were on leave so just relax for a day. I’m heading out to my office. I’ll see if I can reach out to the President. You know he is busy with the North Korean President.”
“Hoax or not, we need to take every threat very seriously. I’ll worry about my vacation. At a bare minimum, we should begin checking all pickup trucks, box vans, and semi-trucks headed into the major cities. We should also consider shutting down the Metro.”
“Which cities?”
“All the heavily populated cities, starting with New York, Washington—”
“Don’t be stupid, Helms,” Mattis interrupted him. “We can’t just shut our cities without any credible intel.”
“This is credible intel and an emergency. You need to tell the President that this is happening today, whether he likes it or not. If you want me in DC, I can arrive in an hour.”
“No need Helms. I hear you, let me talk to the President. I’ll call you back.” Mattis didn’t wait for Helms’s response. It took Helms a few seconds to realize that Mattis had hung up on him. Was he really going to talk to the President? He decided it was better to deliver a summary report to Mattis just in case.
His phone rang. It was the FBI director. “Bill, I checked with my sources, there is no intel on any attack. Are you sure that your source is credible?”
“Yes, we need to dig harder.”
Suddenly Helms’s office door opened. It was Andrew. “Sir, you need to see this.” He switched on the television.
The newscaster was hysterical. “A minute ago, two near-simultaneous explosions have been reported at Manhattan and Houston.”
This was much worse than what Helms had estimated. The attacks had begun, and the world’s most powerful nation wasn’t the least bit prepared for it.
WICKED BLOOD
Sam Wick Series Book 4
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WICKED BLOOD
Sam Wick Series #4
Chapter 1
0100 hours, a deserted airfield in Texas
“You’ve sinned, Mahfouz.” Abdul Rahman Yasin’s voice reverberated in the abandoned hangar. Standing on a platform, Yasin looked down on a young man in his late teens. The man was Otis but, in the camp, people knew him as Mahfouz, and Mahfouz was on trial for his sins. “You’ve violated the sacred pact between yourself and Allah. You have betrayed your brothers. You’ve broken their trust, but Allah is kind. He wants you to choose your own destiny. So, what will it be Mahfouz? What’s your destiny?” Yasin’s black eyes gazed at the impressionable young man.
“I deserve death.”
Twenty-nine other young men in three straight lines watched Mahfouz choosing his destiny with a certain defiance.
“Speak to everyone about your sin.” Yasin was the judge but the twenty-nine others were the jury.
“I broke the sacred pact when I asked one of my brothers about his family. The family that we have forsaken.”
“Mahfouz, why did you do that?” Yasin’s voice was pained.
Mahfouz remained silent.
Yasin looked at the sky and closed his eyes. “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. (We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return).” He opened his eyes and observed his students. “Laqad han waqtuh. (His time has come.)” He spoke with a finality in his tone and twenty-nine pairs of feet moved towards Mahfouz.
Mahfouz turned around facing his executioners. In their eyes, he could see a multitude of emotions—hate, fear, shock, rejection...sympathy.
“La tuqaliq, Allah sayakun latif (Don’t worry, Allah will be kind),” Mahfouz spoke to his executioners in Arabic. These boys were his brothers and he wanted them to be strong.
Shahrukh, who was closest to Mahfouz heard him speak and dealt the first blow. Mahfouz saw it coming and his natural instincts forced him to block it with both hands. “Forgive me.” The two words immediately escaped his lips.
The first blow was the initiation. Body blows and kicks rained on him. He took them all without putting up a defense. But his young, vulnerable body could only take so much. He fell to the ground, but none of his executioners stopped.
Yasin remained on the platform watching Mahfouz being beaten to his death. His pupils had just passed the last stage of their six month-long training magnificently. He now had twenty-nine merciless, trained soldiers who would do anything he wanted them to do. And today, he wanted the USA to b
urn.
Chapter 2
0150 hours
Yasin was in his private room, sitting on his knees, his hands placed flat on his thighs.
“O Allah, forgive me, have mercy on me, strengthen me, raise me in status, pardon me and grant me provision.”
Shahrukh, a twenty-year-old young man and one of his star pupils, stood silently at the open door, waiting for Yasin to notice him. His eyes were alert, posture tense, gaze fixed on his commander. He didn’t have the courage to interrupt Yasin during his Namaz. No one did.
“Subhanna rabbiyal a'laa. Subhanna rabbiyal a'laa. Subhanna rabbiyal a'laa.” Yasin turned his head, first to his right and then left. He opened his eyes unhurriedly and noticed Shahrukh at the door, watching his every move like a loyal servant.
Yasin got to his feet and put on his slippers. He gave Shahrukh a nod to let him know he was ready. Shahrukh nodded in return and turned around to alert others.
Yasin smiled to himself, thinking of the fidelity Shahrukh and others had towards his words. From the day this had started, Yasin had vigorously sought boys like Shahrukh to be part of his army. Loyal to the core and impressionable. What they had lacked was training, and Yasin had polished them to be effective and efficient. Each one of them. Thirty in total. Now twenty-nine. Ready to plunge into anything with everything they had, at Yasin’s word.
Today was the day to test their mettle.
Yasin replaced his kufi skullcap, worn during the Namaz, with a white Islamic turban. Military green fatigues completed his getup.
He left from his private room and entered a large space. The hangar of the deserted airfield was on the outskirts of Texas. No hum of traffic or buzz of streetlights. Just crickets. Companions Yasin didn’t mind.
In fact, “hangar” was a very loose description for the space. It was more like a warehouse—high ceiling, cracked floor, rust eating away at the walls. The roller doors were up, and the entire structure seemed like it wouldn’t take more than a slight breeze to collapse it. The building was illuminated with flickering overhead lights. Outside overgrown weeds snaked through the cracks. A field of dead grass stretched out in all directions revealing nothing but flat ground as far as the eye could see. But there was something else. Three Bell 205As and a Cessna sat outside, ready for take-off.
The air was lighter compared to the heaviness of the city, but it was still hot and wet. The night breeze failed to give any respite. Yasin sweltered in the heat, but he paid scant attention to it. He had seen worse.
He observed his mentees, waiting silently in three straight lines next to a makeshift platform at the far corner of the hangar, the very platform from which he had sentenced Mahfouz to death.
Chapter 3
The cadets bowed their heads as Yasin walked up to the dais. He turned to face twenty-nine pair of eyes. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing muscular forearms. His face was thoughtful and intelligent, but it betrayed no emotion. A warrior’s look was in his eyes. They all recognized the intensity—a mix of determination and ruthlessness.
For strangers, he was as normal as one would expect a person to be. He had a full head of thick black hair and a tanned face with a trimmed beard and a sharp mustache. People knew him as Ed McCarthy, a mild-mannered security guard at this deserted airfield, employed by an obscure North Dakota facilities management firm. On paper, his job was to take care of the airstrip and the hangar. The nearest town was fifteen miles to the north and he rarely visited it. Whenever he did, it was always for groceries, which were always paid for in cash. The cashier never looked at him twice. No one ever did.
Yasin had appeared in this town, seven months ago with three men. For the next thirty days, they had worked on creating makeshift living spaces for thirty more people, a soundproof space that covered one third of the hangar, a simulation room and a makeshift kitchen.
All this required cash. The money found its way to him through Irfan-Ul-Haq, aka the Great Cleric, a Pakistani religious leader with a shrewd expertise for diverting American aid sent to countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, for terrorist operations.
On the twenty-eighth day the three men left, leaving Yasin alone. Two days later the first lot of fifteen men arrived and three later, the next fifteen.
These were not some randomly selected trainees. They were recruited by Yasin based on their age, mixed parentage and citizenship. –They were all in their early twenties, had one Muslim parent and were American citizens with valid social security numbers. Some of them were from affluent families, several had parents who commanded wide respect in their communities, almost all had gone to good schools and been at the top of their class for most of their academic lives. But the most important thing they had in common was their extreme abhorrence for America’s broken system.
And now they were going to spend the next six months of their lives on that airfield, right under the American government’s nose, plotting the country’s downfall.
Over six months, Yasin trained them in hand-to-hand combat, the use of different kinds of firearms—assault rifles, submachine guns and pistols—in the soundproof cabins. They learned to handle grenades and worked with every known kind of explosive. The training also covered a detailed lowdown of guerilla warfare and the deadly Palestinian terror strategies of deep insertion.
The target cities had already been identified. They were code-named Alpha, Beta and Gamma and broken down to their bare basics—subways, police station locations, sewer networks, train systems, electric grids, water supplies, government institutions, schools, malls, theatres. Weekly simulations augmented familiarity with the terrain. Mock battles in which different ground situations were replicated gave the young men a real feel of covering their bases quickly while taking care of any obstructions.
The cadets were given a new identity. None of them could ask anyone else about anything except what they were learning there. Talking about old identities or families or girlfriends or past life was forbidden; breaking this pact meant a death sentence. The mission was more important than small talk about one’s past. All thirty of them had been reborn on that airfield.
The last stage of the training was to assess if they would hesitate to kill a fellow American and that was why, when Yasin came to know about Mahfouz’s breach of trust, he waited till the last day of the training to order his death at the hands of his mates. By sacrificing Mahfouz, he had made sure that his six months of regimented training was successful in weeding out any vestige of humanity from every cadet’s conscious. Now, not a shred of emotion or doubt would cloud their minds when the time came for them to kill.
Still Yasin knew that no training could prepare them to take on the FBI and the CIA and that’s why the attacks were not aimed to seize control but to inflict maximum damage and then immediately withdraw to avoid retaliation. The assault’s sole objective was “destroy and move”.
America wouldn’t even know what had hit her.
Wicked Blood - Coming Soon
Wicked Blood
A Nation Under Attack
About Wicked Blood
America is under attack and the world’s most powerful nation isn’t the least bit ready for it. Can Sam Wick save his motherland?
Sam Wick is Task Force 77's best. Master Extractor. Perfect Assassin. Where the government cannot and will not go, he will.
Task Force-77 (TF-77) is a black ops team of NSA and the US Military. This is the team the U.S. government calls when it needs to get people out of the most dangerous places on earth.
A juggernaut of espionage & action.
What Readers are saying about Sam Wick's Adventures;
★★★★★ "One heck of an entertaining and intense ride... Fast, entertaining, suspenseful and action-packed… you will find yourself flying through and it will be hard to let it go!" - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Fast paced read with a Kick-Ass hero you can’t help rooting for." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Full of awesome action. I can't
wait to read the next book" - Amazon Review
★★★★★ " I did not put this book down for any reason other than to eat." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Fast paced, lots of thrills. Highly entertaining." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "I'm ready for Sam’s next assignment." - Amazon Review
Part 1
Chapter 1
Zangabad, Afghanistan
The unnamed shooter, code named ‘Z’, was glued to his glass, scrutinizing the vast terrain that lay in front of him. His target was a sniper named Eddie, a short and wiry El Paso stock with a boyish grin, black hair, and vital green eyes, lying on his belly and covered with foliage, some hundred yards away.