Day of Wrath

by William R. Forstchen

  She looked at the two wistfully, eyebrows raised, head tilted to one side, and with a trace of an impish smile, the look that could always nail Bob and leave him a bit weak in the knees even after all these years. He realized she was actually half serious and that if he said yes, she’d dash off to the bedroom, slap some makeup on and be out the door with Wendy, telling their principal that she was his sub for the day.

  Wendy looked at her mother with sympathy but her glance indicated that she also thought her mother’s appeal must be insane.

  “Intellectual conversation? Seventh grade? Come on Mom, you gotta be kidding.”

  “Next year,” was all Bob could offer, not sure if she was really lamenting or just trying to make them feel guilty as they headed out for another day in the world.

  Kathy smiled, that same winsome smile that had caught him on the day they met when he could have sworn that her eyes actually sparkled with light the first time he gazed into them. She brushed back an errant wisp of red hair from her face, leaving a smear of chocolate pudding on her jawline and neck, which made him laugh softly and half kiss, half lick it off her.

  “Don’t do that,” she whispered so that Wendy, standing expectantly by the door would not hear, “You'll get me thinking and I’m stuck here alone without you.”

  “Maybe tonight,” he whispered.

  “Come on Dad, we’re late!”

  The two peeked over at their twelve-year-old standing at the doorway who gazed at them with a look of exasperation and judgmental embarrassment at parents who act too affectionately.

  Kathy pushed him away.

  “Get going…"

  He paused, drawn to the television screen on the kitchen counter.

  “Today’s lead stories we’re covering after the break. The shooting incident yesterday at Robert Morrison High School outside Syracuse, New York, that left four people dead and ten wounded is drawing increasing scrutiny with the report released at seven this morning by an anonymous official that the gunman had a letter on his body in Arabic that proclaimed that the time of the jihad promised by ISIS had come. Federal officials on the scene are dismissing the report and urging calm. All schools in the Syracuse area are closed for the day…"

  Across the bottom of the screen, the ticker tape was providing a brief account of the deaths of three border security guards the night before near Austin, Texas, in what one witness claimed was a professional attack and not just a random shooting incident.

  He took it in, saw the look of worry in Kathy’s eyes. Anyone who taught in a public school, especially couples who taught in the same school, talked about “what if it happens in our school?” He gingerly leaned over to kiss Shelly on the top of the head, making sure she didn’t smear him with pudding. He wrinkled his nose. The kid stank, and he suppressed a gag. It was definitely one aspect of fatherhood he was an utter failure at and he was glad that he was heading out the door rather than being called up for diaper service.

  “You little monster, love you,” he sighed and gazed back at Kathy and smiled lovingly. Wendy was already at the car.

  “I’m late,” was all he could say as an excuse, and was out the door into the chilly Maine October morning. He looked back again and blew a kiss to Kathy, a tradition they had followed ever since the first night they had spent together.

  It was the last time they would see each other alive.

  Near Raqqa, Syria

  #diesirae631: Sword One: Four hours, Sword Two: Four and a Half Hours, Allahu Akbar.

  CHAPTER TWO

  7:45 a.m., Near Portland, Maine

  Bob parked the car that he and Kathy called “the indulgence” in his usual spot at Joshua Chamberlain Middle School. The red 350Z seemed a bit extreme for someone getting by on the pay of a high school teacher, but they had purchased it used years ago before Wendy was born, in fact just a couple of weeks before finding out Kathy was pregnant. The car had remained, even though it was totally impractical for a new family. The more utilitarian Subaru SUV took the parking place alongside it in the driveway of the small three bedroom home they had purchased eight years ago.

  It was not the existence they had talked about when they first met and had fallen in love. The plan had been, after they married and landed their jobs at the middle school in a suburb of Portland, that after several years he’d go back to grad school, then leave teaching for a far better paying job in the corporate world. She would then pursue an advanced degree in math and teach at the college level. With that accomplished, perhaps his writing would even take off some day. Making it as a writer was, as they called it, a “Cinderella Fantasy,” but it had sounded nice at the time.

  Then Wendy came along, and as is so typical of life, the game played out with the two teaching and saying to each other that in twenty-five years, when they could collect retirement and Wendy was off to college, they would resume those dreams. And then the mid-life surprise of Shelly put that plan on further hold.

  As he made the motions of opening the car door to get out, he caught a few seconds of eye contact with Wendy, and he had no complaints. He and Kathy had a loving marriage, a rarity, it seemed, in this world, and two girls who were blessed with good health. Sure it was a grind, going in early and staying late at school, and finances were tight with Kathy staying home. But at this moment, on this peaceful autumn day in Maine, his daughter flashed him a shy smile and he felt blessed and grateful for it.

  “I’m late, Daddy,” Wendy complained as she opened the door and started to get out. Gone were the days of walking her into primary school, holding hands, and sharing a hug. Perhaps she sensed his disappointment because she glanced back at him and gave him a toothy grin, a reminder that the big expense to come this year would be braces.

  “Love you, Dad,” she offered and then was off, running to the side of one of her friends. Wendy began showing a text message on her phone, which she’d have to shut down once inside the building and both of them giggled. He sighed.

  Once she was out of sight he opened the compartment between the seats. Something about the news today… No, not just today, the news every day of late, had forced a decision that only Kathy knew about. He pulled out a Ruger .380 from the glove compartment and slipped it into his pants pocket.

  Even though he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, he was now in felony violation of both Federal law and the laws of the State of Maine. If discovered, he would lose his teaching license and face up to five years in prison.

  If found out? If found out by someone simply seeing the pistol, if it slipped out of his pocket as he squatted down to pick something up, if the pants he was wearing were a bit too tight and some sharp-eyed coworker got suspicious and ran to tell the principal… The principal would summon him while calling the police, who would then come and pat him down, handcuff him and take him to jail. If found out, he would be in prison, license to teach revoked for a lifetime, and pay fines. The national media would show a viral video of him being led out in handcuffs. The only crime more reprehensible in a school: to sexually stalk or use a student, which he felt did indeed deserve capital punishment rather than prison with rehabilitation therapy and a sentence that was likely shorter than the one he would face.

  Caught by a student wandering into his classroom after-hours to find him having an affair with another teacher? Embarrassed dismissal. Embezzling? Perhaps a fine and quiet termination.

  Incompetence in the classroom, which he also felt was a crime worthy of punishment? As long as the incompetent teacher’s students jumped through the hoops of testing, no big deal. When he did complain once about another faculty member who, as he said, “could not figure out his I.Q. unless he looked at the bottom of his shoe,” the response was, “Mr. Iverson retires in six more years, so just let it go for now. Besides, the union would kick up a fuss.” Being a teacher, Bob was at least able to force the issue with his own daughter by insisting on a transfer to another teacher, but for the other hundred kids stuck in Iverson’s class day after day? Wel
l, at least in six more years he would be gone.

  The gun? Why the gun?

  He did not buy the years of administrative instructions, coming from "experts" in the main office, while day after day he looked into the eyes of his students and inwardly asked, “What do I do?” if the nightmare came to Chamberlain Middle School. He did not buy the counterintuitive logic that if there were a gunman in the building, to lock the door, lie on the floor, and pray. Well, not actually pray, for after all this was a public school, but he could at least insist upon a moment of silence as they waited to get shot.

  In whispered conversations with only a few other teachers and Kathy, the conclusion returned again and again to the same point. Up until 9/11 all were drilled that if on a hijacked plane, sit back, relax, take a Xanax, listen to those in charge, and all would be well. (Unless you were Jewish and the hijacker a Muslim. If so, ditch your passport and say your name is Smith.)

  And then there was United flight #93: the fourth hijacking on that black day of days. The cell phone calls informing the passengers on that doomed flight that it was time to fight back. They fought and died, and in so doing likely saved thousands on the ground.

  After that day, he believed that it wasn’t just the billions spent on security that had resulted in not a single hijacking in American airspace since 9/11. It was the fundamental realization that if anyone tried to take a plane, two hundred ordinary Americans on that plane would fight back. That, more than any other factor, deterred the enemy who now sought other targets, in the same manner that so many had once learned that rather than whine about a bully in an elementary school yard, the final and most convincing answer was to fight back on the spot. A comparison of the hijackings in the thirteen years prior to 9/11 versus after 9/11, to Bob, was proof enough of how to respond.

  So he broke federal and state law this morning: the law that experts had said for years was the only answer. To be defenseless? To lock a door, to wait and pray? He could no longer believe that argument. In whispered conversations with others he argued that he was a teacher, and, above all other considerations, his first duty was to protect his students no matter what. If need be, he would face prison for doing that duty. Better that than to be passive as a sheep and watch as the lambs in his charge get slaughtered.

  He had not taken his decision lightly or in a cavalier manner as some macho idiots would do. He had legally purchased the weapon and taken the required course to carry a concealed weapon (though of course it was illegal to do so on school property). Kathy had as well, for she was a teacher at the time they had made the decision. They then took the advanced courses offered by a local firearms store regarding safety and how and when to use the weapon he was about to carry into the school in violation of the law. In his mind, it was a moral choice. If ever the children in his charge were threatened, he believed that the first responsibility of a teacher, transcending all other responsibilities, was to protect.

  He popped the magazine, double checking that no round was actually chambered in the weapon, slipped it back in, and pocketed the gun. It carried six hollow point rounds and resided in a holster pocket that Kathy had sewn inside the right pocket of his jeans. That done, he exited the car, opened the back hatch for his book bag, and, in what was now an unconscious gesture, ran his hand down his right side to make sure the weapon was properly holstered and not visible.

  He walked into the school, ignoring the warning signs posted on all school doors that Joshua Chamberlain Middle School was a gun-free zone, and smiled a genuinely warm and friendly greeting to Charlie, the sixty-year-old security and resource officer who smiled a greeting in return. The two paused as Charlie asked about “Miss Kathy” and they joked about the diaper he had avoided changing. He then traveled the short distance to his classroom and office in the IT wing, kids rushing past him laughing and locker doors slamming. It was the start of another typical day at Joshua Chamberlain Middle School just outside of Portland, Maine.

  8:45 a.m., Portland, Maine

  They had driven up from Atlantic City, New Jersey, the day before and stayed at a fairly upscale hotel just off the Falmouth exit of Interstate 95, arriving just after eight in the evening the day before. They had been admonished repeatedly in their training to make sure they had a good eight hours' sleep when the final hours came. But none had done so. Regardless of their faith, how could one sleep soundly when knowing it was the last night they would spend on this earth, and, come the following day, they would die as holy martyrs?

  Regardless of all they had seen in their years of holy war, regardless of just how many they had killed, from putting the round of a Kalashnikov into the forehead of a grandmother who had closed her eyes in the final seconds whispering a Christian prayer as she waited for death, to a screaming woman who knew her fate after being raped, to an infant whose throat was so easy to cut when asleep in the cradle, this they knew for certain: their own time had come. The last hours of life were drawing to an end, their fears stilled by the promises of their caliph of what awaited them in paradise.

  How painful would death be? They had seen men and women burned alive and the first time they had witnessed that, even though it was an infidel, there was a moment of flinching and wondering how one’s own flesh would smell if fate determined that they would die trapped in flames? How intense would be the pain? The caliph promised them that if trapped in fire as a holy martyr, the flames would feel as cooling as a mountain stream as they winged to paradise.

  Some had even driven the nails to crucify Christians, a most fitting death for those of that absurd faith. The infidels were too weak to do the same to them but the thoughts did linger about the moment of their death. Would it hurt? Rather than pain would it become bliss unlike any they had known upon earth, and be a foreshadowing of the eternal bliss given to one who died in jihad? All pleasures denied to them on earth would at last be theirs: pure women, ever virgin for their desire to never be taken before them and thus soiled by another man. If the woman given to them was not pleasing and submissive in all ways, they could be cast into oblivion at any time, for such women in paradise existed solely for the pleasure of holy jihadists. Awaiting them would also be boys with soft pliant bodies and the faces of angels to be used as desired. There awaited every fruit to feast upon and fountains of strong drink as promised by the prophet and his living envoy, the caliph. Such thoughts now strengthened their hearts for the task ahead and stilled their fears, filling them with the joy of anticipation.

  The journey had begun six months ago starting with a container ship out of a Middle Eastern port. No one involved in this plan had traveled by air. Thus they avoided the random chance of a database check, face recognition software, or a capture. Instead, over a hundred jihadists had departed their homeland on random dates, never in a group, using a roundabout journey to finally arrive at Vera Cruz, Mexico.

  With all of the attention focused on airlines, the obvious alternative was container ships where chances were less than five percent that the ship would even be checked. During the spring offensive of ISIS into Iraq, over half a billion in hard currency had been captured: not just useless paper but actual gold. Bin Laden had boasted that his day of glory had been purchased for little more than half a million in American currency. What could half a billion buy? Most certainly the cooperation of the drug cartels of Central America to help pass along, at a cost of two million each, the jihadists from the port of Vera Cruz to the “mules” and “coyotes” who would take them across the porous border of America. Half the fee on signing, half on delivery to their handlers in America. And, unlike some financial deals engaged in by the cartels, even they were fearful of the wrath of ISIS if there were a betrayal or a failure.

  Only two conspirators had been waylaid while traveling through Mexico to the border. To show their good faith to the Middle Easterners, the cartel had cut the throats of those responsible, along with the “federal police” who had refused to accept the bribes to look the other way.

  All el
ectronic chatter was to be silenced except for the final moments. All of the jihadists had their plans, their marching orders, their pickup points, their transfers, and their final missions. They knew whom they would link up with and where all was laid out and memorized before leaving the training center in eastern Syria. Nothing was in writing. Nothing was transmitted. All had absolute faith in their leader, that they would bring their vengeance to America. Those who had doubted, those who had voiced concerns, or who had tried to back away once initiated into the secret, were already dead and buried in unmarked graves in the desert.

  For nearly thirteen years there had been hundreds of boasts by other groups, other so-called jihadists, but no successful attack had been launched within the United States since 9/11. The few attacks planned and initiated had been intercepted because of their own foolish mistakes.

  But the boasting had served a purpose. It had lulled the enemy. It had lulled those who kept watch but were not allowed to tell the American media of their successes. Even more so, it had lulled the sheep of their society. The absence of a successful attack in more than a decade had lulled them to believe they actually were safe.

  Even if the enemy did see something suspicious, it had been drilled into them for years not to be rude, to be politically correct, not to point and shout a warning, out of fear that they would be called phobic or racist.

  At the same time, the jihadists had learned from the mistakes of the once-respected bin Laden and those who followed him. They learned from the victories of their enemies, because those victories often resulted in a repeating of the same actions over and over. Yes, they did have strengths with all of their technology: their drones and their cell phone call intercepts. Therefore, infiltrate the target as low-tech as possible. Approach with utmost stealth, like a shadow in the desert at night, and not brazenly, walking under the noonday sun.