by Dalton Fury
TJ responded bitterly, “You don’t know that. Fifty SAMs was just a CIA guess based on the size of the container that left Benghazi. Could have been fifty-one, fifty-five, or even sixty-five. Be careful with your assumptions.”
Kolt knew his friend was right. This could be just the beginning.
Timble and Raynor sat quietly in their own homes and watched the televised success of their enemy into the morning hours, like two beaten men.
THIRTY-EIGHT
In the early afternoon of the next day, Miguel, Tim, and Jerry watched aircraft take off from San Francisco International Airport’s two Runway 28s — 28L and 28R. The planes flew north, rising over the city, before departing their runway heading and banking to the east toward Oakland or to the west, which took them out over the Pacific Ocean.
The three terrorists had positioned themselves on the northern side of Golden Gate Park. They’d parked their Explorer alongside North Lake, and they had taken an Igla launcher, wrapped in a large blanket, into the trees at a secluded section of the park near Chain of Lakes Drive, where foot traffic was light this hot afternoon.
At 1:40 p.m. Miguel decided the time was right. He would take the next wide-body jet that flew overhead. He sent Jerry back to the Explorer to wait behind the wheel, while he and Tim readied the weapon to fire.
A steady procession of smaller aircraft took off, frustrating both Tim and Miguel. Finally, just before two p.m., an American Airlines Boeing 777 wide-body aircraft rose skyward over the southern half of San Francisco. “Inshallah, we will kill three hundred more infidels,” Miguel said with a determined smile.
Miguel shouldered the missile launcher while still deep in the trees, and he put his hand on the grip to hold it steady. He knew he’d have to step out into the open to launch, but he wanted to wait until the last possible moment.
Tim stood at his side; his Kalashnikov rifle had been hidden in a garbage bag, but he brought it out and to his shoulder.
As the 777 passed overhead, Miguel waited a few seconds more, and then stepped out into the bike path rimming North Lake. All his senses were focused on the aiming reticule of his iron sights as he centered them on the jet above.
The aircraft was still too close for Miguel to fire; he’d need to wait a few more seconds to be certain his missile would have time to acquire its target’s heat register after launch.
“Hurry,” said Tim next to him.
“One moment. Yes. Now is good,” Miguel said confidently.
Just then, from behind, Miguel heard shouting.
“Hey! Hey!”
Miguel took his eye out of the sights for an instant, just as Tim spun around, raising his rifle toward the shouting. There on the bike path, not fifty feet away, two San Francisco Police Department bike patrol officers leapt off their still-moving bicycles and began drawing their sidearms. They shouted in English as they drew their guns.
“Drop the fucking weapon!”
Tim fired his AK, missing with his first two rounds, but his second burst hit the nearest bike cop in the thigh and spun him to the ground.
The second officer got his gun out of its belt holster and he raised it to fire. A long spray from Tim’s rifle cut him down, but not before he’d squeezed off two rounds from his.40-caliber Smith & Wesson service pistol.
Shouts and screams came from the road to their left and from across the tiny lake. More police on bicycles hurried around the path to come to the aid of their friends. Miguel looked up again at the aircraft, but he knew he would have to start the targeting sequence over, and he did not want to wait around for the ten seconds or so necessary to accomplish this.
The white Explorer screeched to a stop on Chain of Lakes Drive, just twenty feet from the two men. Miguel shoved the forty-pound launch system off his shoulder and let it fall to the bike path, and he and Tim ran for the safety of the vehicle.
Jerry pushed the barrel of the AK out of the driver’s window of the SUV and fired a burst at a group of people running toward the wounded policemen, killing a young woman, and Tim spun around to spray the remainder of his magazine indiscriminately across the lake at the traffic on John F. Kennedy Drive.
Both men were back in the Explorer in seconds, and the big vehicle spun out of the park, turning right on Fulton Street, heading across the city for the Bay Bridge.
“Dammit!” Miguel screamed, furious for failing to knock down the jet, but even more angry with himself for leaving the Igla behind. He pounded on the dashboard with his fist.
Jerry shouted back at him, “Calm down and help me navigate!”
“Keep going east! East to the bridge!”
Behind them, in the back of the SUV, Tim shouted, “Police! Following us!”
Miguel looked back over his shoulder and saw several patrol cars, their lights flashing, racing through the afternoon traffic on Fulton in hot pursuit of the Explorer.
“Dammit!” Miguel said again. He handed his rifle back to Tim, who wasted no time in opening fire out the back windshield, firing past the four crates of missiles stacked next to him.
* * *
Twice the three men in the Explorer managed to lose the police in traffic, but soon a California Highway Patrol helicopter appeared overhead and began overtly tracking them as they made their way east across the city toward the Bay Bridge.
The three men had not anticipated the amount of traffic they encountered getting across San Francisco in midafternoon. Multiple times Jerry was forced onto the median in order to keep moving, and twice he had to stop completely before bumping other vehicles to encourage them to get out of the way.
All the while Tim bounced around in the back of the vehicle, desperately trying to unpack and assemble another SAM. The CHP chopper flew directly behind them, and Miguel ordered Tim to shoot the cursed thing down, hoping it would keep other eyes in the sky off their tail.
They made a series of turns, desperate to avoid traffic as well as dodge police coming at them from the other direction, and this turned them to the north and then back again to the west.
Miguel realized where they were from the quickly moving GPS device he kept attached to the windshield. He also realized the folly of trying to make it back around to the Bay Bridge. He’d studied the street map of San Francisco to some degree in Yemen, but they were already traveling in an area he had not studied, as his plan had been to head to Oakland.
But the GPS showed him another escape route out of the city. The Golden Gate Bridge was just to the north, so he ordered Jerry to take the next right. The Pakistani driver swerved across two lanes of traffic to do so, causing a multicar collision on Geary Boulevard and a near-miss with a gas truck on Park Presidio.
Within a minute they had made their way into the MacArthur Tunnel, over a dozen police lights flashing in the traffic behind them. They shot out the other side of the tunnel onto Doyle Drive, and passed the Presidio on their left at speeds approaching eighty miles an hour, the helicopter and the police cars still tracking their every move.
Tim had been beaten and battered by Jerry’s evasive driving, and he still had not managed to assemble the Igla-S launcher. Miguel looked back and saw the futility of his efforts, so instead he said, “Pick up the rifles and fire at everything behind us. Make them back off!”
In seconds Tim had opened fire on civilians and police alike. As they raced up Doyle Drive, the vehicles around them skidded left and right to avoid the flying lead.
A minute later they shot through the FasTrak lane onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Tim reloaded and dumped another magazine into the traffic.
They made it a fourth of the way across the bridge before Jerry screamed, “Roadblock on the bridge!”
Miguel looked ahead and saw a line of SFPD squad cars, CHP cars, and even an armored vehicle, along with dozens of armed police, completely blocking traffic in both directions.
He knew there was no way they could escape. “This is the end, my brothers. Prepare yourselves for martyrdom.” His voice was solemn. He lifted th
e Beretta pistol from the center console of the SUV and he slid it into his jeans.
Jerry hit the brakes and turned the wheel, and the Ford Explorer swung violently to the left. As it came to a stop, Miguel opened the passenger-side door, away from the roadblock ahead, and he rolled into the street. Behind him, both Tim and Jerry elected to remain in the SUV. He heard the booming fire of their rifles chattering in unison, as together they raked the police cars ahead of them.
The cops must have known that behind the terrorists’ vehicle were dozens of civilian cars, and they would all be in the line of fire. As the two al Qaeda operatives dumped 7.62 rounds into the police cars fifty yards ahead on the bridge, the return fire was hesitant. But when the first cop fell, dropping his pistol and falling dead on his back, his brothers- and sisters-in-arms poured more and more fire into the SUV ahead of them.
Miguel crawled away from the SUV, keeping himself shielded behind the vehicle and his body low to the ground to avoid the bullets whizzing overhead. He was heading for a bright red four-door full of college-aged adults who were huddled down in their seats and screaming in terror.
Behind him he heard the Kalashnikovs of his fellow jihadists fall silent. He did not know if the men were just pausing to reload or if Tim and Jerry were dead.
It did not matter, he told himself, as the fear of his impending death tightened the muscles in his back and squeezed his heart nearly shut. Tim and Jerry had fought bravely in Yemen and Mexico and now here in the United States. They were lions, and they would be rewarded in paradise.
Just then the Explorer’s tires squealed. Miguel looked back as he ran away, and he saw the big truck fire across the bridge, slam into the pedestrian rail, and smash through. The truck hit the side of the bridge itself at speed, and the force of the impact sent the Explorer headlong over the side. The truck tumbled from view, leaving smoke and dust and metal and glass behind as it fell hundreds of feet down into San Francisco Bay.
Miguel turned away and kept running.
Though the thirty-four-year-old Kuwaiti was fleeing, he had no illusions about surviving this. Along with the roadblock that stopped him, the police who had chased him here were still on the bridge as well. He was surrounded and there was no way he could commandeer one of these vehicles and punch it through the traffic jam between here and freedom.
No, the al Qaeda operative was running from the roadblock, toward the red car, because he wanted to pull out his pistol and shoot the infidels there. One last act of defiance against the Great Satan just as he was cut down.
The shooting behind him slowed as he arrived at the college students covering their heads with their hands inside their car. Miguel pulled the 9mm pistol from his jeans and lifted it toward the windshield, and he rose with it, standing erect as he slipped his finger on the trigger and shouted, “Allahu Akhbar!”
He fired twice, the gun cracked and jolted, and his bullets pocked the windshield and struck the driver in the chest. He started to pull the trigger a third time, but instead he felt himself spinning, out of control, the gun toppling out of his grasp, and he saw the asphalt roadway rushing to meet him.
He’d been shot in the stomach, he felt the burn there, and somehow he knew it was a fatal wound.
He fell to his side, reached out frantically for his gun, and found it with his fingertips. He brought it back into his grip and sat up quickly, keeping the weapon on the ground in his hand. As Miguel looked around, he found himself surrounded by too many policemen to count. They had closed to within ten meters, holding their guns on him and screaming bloody murder in all directions.
Waleed Nayef, aka Miguel, looked at the policemen for a brief moment. Then he lifted the Beretta off the roadway and every man and woman in sight with a gun and a badge shot him dead.
THIRTY-NINE
While members of the California Highway Patrol and the San Francisco Police Department stood over Miguel’s bullet-ridden corpse, David Doyle parked his car in an empty lot at Barr Lake State Park, just north of Denver, Colorado. He’d been driving for nine hours straight, and he wanted to take a nap, but he did not allow himself the luxury. He knew all about Los Angeles the night before, and he also knew Miguel would be heading up the West Coast with his men now, so Doyle wanted to act here, many hundreds of miles away, as soon as possible, in order to take a small measure of the heat away from his partner. If America knew there were two missile crews loose in the country, they might worry there were three, or ten, or more. It could remove some of the focus from California.
David knew it would be many hours before he could rest easily. He might get an hour somewhere between here and his intermediate destination, but only there would he be able to call himself safe enough to sleep for any significant amount of time.
It would be another day at least before comfort. Now was time to work.
He climbed in the back of the minivan, and took his time readying a missile for launch. When he was finished, he cracked the back door, slid the Igla-S system to the edge of the door, and then crawled back into the front seat.
He climbed out of his Toyota minivan, taking his backpack with him. He pulled his high-powered binoculars out of the bag, and looked off to the southeast. There, five miles across the flat landscape of farmland laced with straight roads and dotted with simple farmhouses, lay Denver International Airport.
Through his binoculars he saw a plane, a big fat Delta Boeing 757, begin its takeoff roll. David knew that, depending on the variant, the aircraft in front of him could carry somewhere up to 250 passengers and crew.
It would be perfect.
The 757 raced down the runway, picking up speed, though through his optics and the heat coming off the ground between his position and the airport, to David it looked almost as if the huge machine in the distance were moving like a gentle wave.
Farther down the runway now, seconds from takeoff, and David lowered his binos and opened the rear hatch of the minivan. He checked the area around him, found it clear, and hefted the big weapon.
He labored to get it on his shoulder, then he turned back around toward the airport.
The plane was still there. Still on the runway, although it was down near the end of the runway now. It had slowed to a crawl, and soon it taxied off the runway at the last taxiway.
David lowered the weapon back to the rear of the Toyota and closed the door.
Why did it not take off?
Doyle grabbed his binoculars and waited for the next aircraft in line for takeoff at the far end of the runway, but it just sat there.
For ten minutes Doyle watched through his binoculars as first one, and then three, and finally all of the aircraft on the long taxiway rolled slowly down the runway, taxied back onto the taxiway, and then returned to the gate.
He had his suspicions early on as to what was happening, but it was not until he climbed back into the Toyota and headed back to the highway that he knew for certain. He turned on the satellite radio in the car and listened to the news.
A complete ground stop over the entire United States of America had just been enacted following a second terrorist attack involving a shoulder-fired missile, this time in San Francisco.
Doyle listened as early reports were broadcast about the event in San Francisco. Fragmented half-truths and wild assumptions were espoused by the news anchors, but one thing was certain. A group of men with a shoulder-fired missile had dropped their weapon before launching, and then led police on a twenty minute chase through the city.
Although the reporter said no planes were actually struck by SAMs, and it was likely the terrorists had been killed or captured by the authorities, the ground stop would go in effect and last until the FBI had determined that there was no continuing threat to aircraft in the United States.
Doyle wished he could pull over somewhere to watch raw footage of the scene on television, but instead he kept driving to the east. He looked out his passenger-side window at the airport as he passed to the north a few minutes later, and marv
eled at the dumb luck of those 250 infidels on that 757.
* * *
Raynor’s first day back at the compound since Mexico was supposed to include nothing more than a visit to Doc Markham, followed by a drive to the hospital with some mates to look in on Slapshot.
Instead, he, and most everyone else who could fit, sat in the briefing room, watching the television reports from the West Coast.
It was a somber and angry mood in the briefing room, in the entire Delta Force compound, as news report after news report broadcast each and every facet of the ongoing terrorist threat to the nation. The operators and support personnel all felt a sense of responsibility for the loss of the aircraft and the nationwide shutdown of air traffic. Even more than this, they all felt an incredible sense of impotence, knowing they were now out of the hunt. U.S. military forces would not be operating on U.S. soil, so all these men and women could do was sit and watch.
Gangster and his alert squadron were still in the hunt for more MANPADs, of course. ST6 had successfully recovered a dozen shoulder-fired missiles in Sirte, but all intelligence indicators had pointed to that cache being three or four times as large, so it seemed quite likely that another big shipment had made its way out of Libya. The Delta alert squadron, like ST6, was literally crawling the walls waiting for intel that would earn them an opportunity to go find the munitions, get them back, and smoke anyone who tried to stop them.
But Kolt and his squadron could do nothing now but train for their next time at bat. Raynor had sent much of his force off for training around the U.S., but Kolt himself was in no condition to do much more than walk up and down the Spine from his office to the briefing room with a constant grimace on his face while he fought through the pain from the injuries received in Mexico and the anguish he felt about the failure of his mission.