Terror Rising: Book 0 – The Insurgence

by Roger Hayden

“No, sir. But they’re just getting up, so I’ll see them when I get home.”

  “Okay then. You’ve got your marching orders. I want a full report after you get some rest. We’ll get to the bottom of this, Agent Gannon, if it’s the last thing this department does. Dismissed.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She slowly rose from her chair, her body sore and aching. On her feet, she stopped and glanced at the disheveled gray hairs and the wrinkles that creased his face.

  “What about you. Are you planning on getting any rest?”

  He paused, looked up at her, and smiled faintly. “One day, when you’re in my position, you’ll understand.”

  Angela smiled and went to the door, opening it and pausing. Other agents walked by and glanced at her as she hesitated to leave.

  “Chief Drake,” she said, turning back to him.

  He looked up with a curious expression. “Yes?”

  “About the recovery. Well, the raid didn’t go exactly like they said it did…” She couldn’t believe her words as they came out. But a battle with the FBI was inevitable, she believed, no matter what she did.

  “What are you talking about?” Drake asked.

  “The terror cell. We…”

  Suddenly Drake’s office phone rang. He held a finger up, asking her to wait, and then picked up the receiver.

  “This is Chief Drake, how can I help you?” He stared ahead, listening, while Angela waited with her hand holding the doorknob. She looked down the hall, thinking that it was her moment to leave without facing any questions and forget that she had brought anything up. The longer she waited, the less chance she had to reconsider exposing the truth behind the FBI raid.

  “What?” Drake said, suddenly rattled, his mouth wide open.

  Angela grew nervous. Perhaps he was learning the truth already. What would she say then?

  “What do you mean live web stream?” He grabbed his MacBook and flipped it open, typing wildly, with the phone wedged between his shoulder and ear. He looked up in a panic at Angela and waved at her to come inside and shut the office door.

  Confused and worried, she walked in and gently closed it.

  “Yeah, send me the link, okay?” he said with urgency.

  Angela pulled her chair closer to his desk and sat. Whatever the conversation was about, it didn’t sound good.

  “Okay, I’m on,” Drake said. “Yeah. Some kind of live leak site. It’s loading…” He froze as his eyes locked on the screen. “Oh my God…”

  Angela couldn’t take the suspense. She stood up and walked around the desk to see what all the commotion was about. The phone fell from Drake’s shoulder as he stared at the screen, petrified.

  “Chief? What is it?” Angela asked.

  He tried to answer her, but seemed to be in a state of shock. “Terror cell. ISIS video. It’s real-time shit here.”

  Angela walked behind his chair and squinted her eyes to see the screen as her heart seized with fear. There was streaming video of a person on their knees in an orange jumpsuit with a burlap sack over their head. Standing behind them was a man with a tan face mask, eye slits, and an ammo vest over his camouflaged clothing. Behind him hung the black flag of ISIS mounted on the wall.

  The masked man then spoke with a muffled British accent.

  “Americans… today is the day of your reckoning. We are on you streets. We are in your neighborhoods, and we will only attack if provoked. Today, you provoked us. You killed our brothers. Attacked our home. Slaughtered us like animals. And now we must strike back.”

  The man stepped forward and pulled off the hood of the person in the center of the first group. Angela grew dizzy as the room began to spin around. It felt like a dream or some kind of out of body experience. The exposed man looked eerily like her husband, Doug. But his normally neat hair was all messed up, and besides, it couldn’t possibly have been Doug.

  “We have the family of one your agents,” the masked man said, pulling his captive’s head by the hair and holding the knife to his throat.

  He then pointed at the camera with his gloved hand. “You have twenty-four hours to meet our demands, or we will kill Doug Gannon and his two daughters.”

  Chief Drake whipped his head around to see Angela quickly losing color in her face with tears already streaming down her cheeks. She couldn’t breathe. She grabbed the side of his chair as her vision became more blurry.

  Drake jolted up from his seat. “Angela!”

  For Angela, the room went black, and before he could catch her, she was on the floor, briefly safe from the new nightmare that was now her world.