In the preceding months, the way paved by money looted from the successful offensive into Iraq, there were careful transfers of each jihadist across the border.
All fighters had been carefully screened and selected for the mission. Thousands of foreign fighters had joined the ranks of ISIS, some of whom were frustrated with the increasingly conservative ways of Al-Qaeda. The leader’s main criteria for selecting his jihadists for this mission: their willingness to die in jihad, a rigorous vetting back to their birth, and numerous references to ensure that not one of them was an agent or traitor infiltrating from the West.
They had to demonstrate a near-perfect ability to blend into the western world. It amazed him how the attackers of 9/11 were, upon reflection, far too obvious. That risk would not be run this time. Their command of English had to be near flawless. They had to be able to put on a business suit, walk through a crowd, and no one would take a second look. If need be, they could even mimic adherence to an infidel faith and speak warmly of their love for Jews. This was no violation of faith, of course. The renowned scholar Al-Bukhari explained such logic when he commented on sura 3.28 of the Koran that, “We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.” And, of course, there was sura 3.54, which declared that the best deceiver of all was Allah himself. Such words were armor for the hearts and souls of his jihadists to infiltrate the evil heart of the West.
Those who actually at some point in their lives had lived in the belly of the beast, the world of the infidels, attending western schools, he personally checked as to their faith and willingness to die as holy warriors. They had to show him their ability to fight and kill without second thought or mercy. During some of the thousands of executions in Iraq, he had made sure that those being considered for this attack took part in them: they were required to wield the knife for beheadings and drive the nails for crucifixions. No double agent would do this. If they blanched, they were no longer considered. Those who failed the tests were dead before the sun set.
They were required to shave their beards, their clothing tailored by experts, learn to speak in the latest dialect of decadent America, and drill relentlessly on their created identities. In public, they would gossip about the latest game or whorish starlet, even drink a beer with dinner in a barbecue restaurant. If offered forbidden food, they were to eat it without hesitation. He reinforced the rulings in the Koran that those on jihad were exempt from all sins. Only in the privacy of their heart would there be prayers, until the final hour before the assault began. Until then, blend in with your foe so adroitly that he will not question. If there is a question, he will fear to ask it because that is their culture.
None of the targets was within fifty kilometers of a major city. That was another strength of their plan: to avoid the major cities where the random chance of passing someone on a street might trigger a recognition by someone trained well enough to recognize the wolf moving silently amongst the sheep. The caliph reinforced that the slightest failure or lapse in the United States would result in damnation and execution and, if shown to be egregious, their families would pay the price as well.
Of course there was always the random chance of something going wrong: a traffic accident, a drunk driver, perhaps an American veteran of Afghanistan or Iraq who just might take a second look. And such an event did happen. An angry American veteran claimed he recognized a jihadist. The jihadist left the fast food restaurant with his American handler, the vet following and shouting a challenge. The handler reacted brilliantly and as trained, shouting back that the American was a racist, even as he thanked him for his service to our country. His cries of racism prompted those who were standing nearby and watching to back off and to even offer apologies, warning the veteran to leave the two innocent men alone.
Gradually the thirty-plus teams came together around the country, going to ground several hundred miles or more away from what would be their final targets. The teams were made up of three to seven jihadists, depending on their target and mission. The cover of some was to attend a trade show or convention. Others were on vacation, such as the team assigned to the state of Maine, which stayed for a week in Atlantic City where they gambled and play-acted that they were rich Dubai bastards out for a little fun, while waiting for the count-down, waiting for the coded message that would not even be sent via the internet.
The message that the attack was to be unleashed was actually a news story about one of their leaders being executed as a traitor. After weeks of staying well-hidden in the midst of the enemy, the news story came. It was first broadcasted by Al-Jazeera that one of the top commanders of ISIS had been denounced as a CIA spy and beheaded. It was picked up by the American media within the hour, Fox News had experts on within three hours, speculating that a breakdown was occurring within ISIS, and perhaps the enemy was turning on itself. ISIS even released footage of the execution to lend credence to the story. The man executed had been marked by their leader for termination anyhow; his faith was wavering. The execution was the signal to initiate the attack two mornings later, just before noon, eastern time. No transmission, no internet, a news story as the only signal.
The team assigned to Maine left Atlantic City that same day, skirting wide around New York City and staying within the speed limit, looking like five businessmen traveling to a conference, and always speaking English. They purchased cell phones at convenience stores but turned them off. They stowed golf bags in the back of the SUV for their vacation jaunt to Maine while other teams headed to a beach house party in Daytona, a family reunion in Marietta, Georgia, a conference in Springfield, Illinois, a trip to see friends in Oklahoma City, and a trip to buy a boat outside of Seattle.
The tools they needed had been carefully moved weeks earlier, one piece or several at a time. For the Maine team, an American handler who had been positioned far ahead of the jihadists who would carry out the attacks went to a famous mail order house in Freeport for fishing supplies and then purchased additional equipment. American handlers, so called “sleeper agents,” had infiltrated into America long before the plans for the attack were laid out and trained for. They were men with clean records who purchased guns across several months at gun shows or on the used market. Never in bulk, just one or two at a time, and paid for with cash. Ironically, a number of weapons originated from the infamous Fast and Furious scheme, gleefully given to them by the cartels helping to transport jihadists across Mexico to the American border.
The Kevlar bulletproof vests and other equipment were purchased one at a time from a number of different sources so as to not draw notice. Some were found on Craigslist. They moved the weapons to the more than thirty jump-off points for attack by tucking them under suitcases, inside golf bags, and among the overloaded vehicle of a family with several children in tow going on a vacation trip. The jihadists who would actually do the killing, until the day before the attack, were free of the encumbrance of a weapon in case of the random chance of being stopped. The handlers would be their drivers on the day of the attack and if random chance resulted in their being caught prior to the attack, they would appear to be either gang members moving weapons for M-13 or some other cartel gang, or just lone lunatics.
But none were caught. Security had held so far. Each team worked in isolation; only a few in ISIS knew the entire plan. If any one team was stopped prior to the day, the confession was the intent to shoot a plane down as it took off, thus focusing the typical American media panic on airports.
They were forbidden under threat of eternal damnation to breathe a word of what they knew of the plan. But two broke that rule: one with a team north of New Orleans, the other, in Las Vegas, who got drunk and slipped up in public during an argument with an equally drunk marine who was on leave and made a comment about “damned ragheads.”
Las Vegas, which, as the heart of America's decadence, was one of the most ideal of targets and was coveted by all while in training. However, it was decided the attack in that region would hit in the a
rea of Reno, sticking to the plan not to strike within any major city. As the brawl erupted, the fool had spoken in Arabic that soon the infidel would truly learn to fear, for the day of wrath was at hand. His comrades uttered apologies as they dragged him back to his room. The next day at a cheap hotel on the far side of town, he died from an injection to simulate a drug overdose. The same was done to the too-loquacious one in New Orleans. Speedball overdoses were, of course, part of the American scene. Overdosed bodies, even Middle Eastern ones, rarely drew notice beyond a local news report. So far there had been no wider reaction. Such things surfaced in the news for a single cycle then as quickly disappeared.
In the final forty-eight hours, the teams moved to their strike positions. After months of planning, tensions began to run high, as they always do before battle. One team member had actually gone off half-cocked in Syracuse. For reasons the rest of his unit did not know, he had driven away from the hotel where they had rendezvoused that morning with the handler who had transported their weapons and equipment. He had slipped out, taking the handler’s car, and hit their target on his own. This had sent out a ripple of warning. Before he was killed, he had murdered four and wounded ten.
They had been trained for the possibility that one of their team might be spotted and captured, but not for one of them going off on his own crazed spree just hours before the real attack was to take place. The group immediately split up, going underground to sweat out the final twenty-four hours and not breaking silence. Each would now have to act on his own as best he could, but their main target was abandoned.
As to the activity of the team south of Austin, which the American media was reporting as the murder of three border security guards, it had been a random pullover by border patrol that had resulted in the three agents being shot within seconds and the team fleeing. Disciplined, they had slunk into the desert to sit out the final hours before resuming the mission.
So two out of the thirty-plus teams were in some state of disarray, but those in a hotel off the Falmouth exit near Portland, Maine, were ready. The cell phones had been activated. The twitter account, long dormant, was activated and the one lone tweet came in, time-stamped 7:45: #diesirae631: Four hours, Sword One. Four Hours and a Half Hours, Sword Two. Allahu Akbar.
There were three hours to go. The Falmouth, Maine, team contained units of both Sword One and Sword Two. Each now sat on his bed and prayed in silence, for today would be his last day on earth and tonight he would sup in paradise.
9:30 a.m, United States Central Command Office of Electronic Counter Surveillance, McDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida
“Diesirae631 back on line, 11:45 hours Zulu time. Message: “Four hours, Sword One, Four and a Half Hours, Sword Two. Allahu Akbar.”
Tech sergeant Quentin Younger, sipping his third cup of coffee of the morning, sat up in his chair and gazed at the screen. The endless scrolling of data which, on occasion, would suddenly highlight a tweet and color-code it for level of concern and need to report. This one was coming up red-flagged, meaning it needed a human review and not just a computerized review. It was a message plucked out of the hundreds of millions of monitored tweets flooding the world every hour.
Quentin scanned the identifying information attachment to the message. It was an account set up nearly a year ago, some innocuous text messages back and forth, the last one a complaint about a lost bet regarding the World Cup. World Cup tweets were drawing some notice when originating out of Syria as coded messages, but there had been silence on the account since the games had ended.
Someone up the food chain had pegged diesirae631 as a source of concern. He punched in a query to trace the followers. Several dozen were in Syria; there was talk several months back about the games and one complaint about a failed encounter with a Belgian woman working in a medical aid station. Curious… there were new followers in the States as of this morning, all with hashtags of diesirae with higher numbers. No responses though. He checked those points of reception: all were accounts that were activated within the last two weeks, purchased as cheap convenience store phones. Very curious.
It was coming up on break time and he yawned. Another curious item cropped up. Someone had code-named the surveillance file for this account as Dies irae. What the heck?
He punched in a Google search on the term. What was it, French, Spanish? Nothing significant. He scanned the line of possible alternatives. Dies irae was the third item, a Wikipedia article. Strange, something called a Gregorian chant. Latin. “Day of Wrath,” a hymn from the thirteenth century that became associated with the Great Plague of the fourteenth century.
Great Plague? He had some memory of a high school history teacher talking about that.
It was break time; the coffee had worked through him and he needed to go. Creepy stuff. Why would someone in Syria be sending messages around in Latin? They hated anything to do with that language, still cursing the Crusaders of a thousand years ago as their excuse to commit murder today. Regardless, the hashtag was coded as a high priority and he hit the send button to circulate a message received, warning that it was being followed by receivers within the States, and therefore would be bounced to NSA for further review. His job done, he got up for the restroom and silently cursed his hangover.
10:30 a.m., the White House
Dale Hinman took a second look at his screen, not sure if he was actually seeing it for real. “Dies Irae.” He didn’t know what it really meant other than the fact that he was to kick the word up to the very top. He attached the email that was sent up from the NSA and forwarded it a very short physical distance, to the center of this very building.
Something was about to happen. The message was time-stamped 7:45 a.m. today. Whatever it was, Sword One would start at 11:45. He had done his job; let those down the hall in the Oval Office complex figure out what was next.
CHAPTER THREE
11:10 a.m., near Portland, Maine
Shelly was down for her morning nap, thank God. Wendy had been such an easy child, Kathy thought as she carefully closed the door to the nursery, or was it that she was now thirty-seven and no longer a new wide-eyed mom of twenty-five and still fascinated by every single thing her darling did?
The news was on in the kitchen. More about the shooting in Syracuse. A video surveillance tape had just been released; the police alerted this morning by a hotel manager, who, seeing the gunman's image from the school’s security camera had scrolled his own tape back and come up with a frightening match. The camera in the hotel was of the man leaving a back exit and it was time-stamped only twenty minutes before the killings at the school. But what was far more disturbing now was the fact that less than thirty minutes after the incident hit the news in Syracuse, five men, obviously Middle Eastern, had walked out the back door of the same hotel, gotten into a single car, and disappeared. One of them had shared the room with the gunman.
All schools in Syracuse were closed for the day and the city resembled Boston after the bombing of the marathon race, going into a full lockdown with every local and county officer in a manhunt along with a national guard military police unit being called in as well as federal officials. The hotel video provided at least a black and white image of the car that the other five had left in, but no license plate number. Syracuse was in a state of panic. An impromptu rally of angry parents was ramping up in front of one of the closed schools, denouncing the school system for inadequate security due to the failure to provide new security locks on classroom doors that would bolt the doors shut. A parent speaking for the group, demanding the new bullet proof steel security doors, was standing outside the glass window of the typical one story middle school building that stretched for a hundred yards.
The fact that the lone shooter was stopped in the first minute of his attack by an off-duty police officer who had come to the school early to pick up his son who was ill, did draw some notice and comment and the officer was posthumously hailed as a hero. No one had noted nor emphasized the point that i
t was an armed parent, already in the school parking lot, who by lucky chance was there to stop the tragedy from becoming far worse.
Kathy finally launched into loading up the dishwasher while the news shifted to the death of some reality show star. Disgusted, she clicked the volume down and logged onto her Facebook page to upload photos of Shelly’s first birthday party from the weekend. Why was it the kid just loved to smear food, especially anything with chocolate, all over her face and hair and then just sit there laughing as she and Bob groaned with disgust? Cute photos though.
Some new posts were there: friends from college and her own teaching days were discussing the incident in Syracuse. When Bob had told her of his decision several years ago to ignore all the rules and carry a concealed weapon, they had agreed it was wise to avoid any comment whatsoever on the issue on any social media and in any conversation that stood the remotest chance of being overheard, especially by Wendy who had the typical loud mouth of a twelve-year-old. One never knew when the bounce back might hit. A post could be reposted in self-righteous angst about protecting “our children,” and then forwarded to Bob’s principal with the demand that he be “checked out.”
The usual argument was raging between her friends. Mary Browning, her college roommate down in Austin, was in a fury over the entire ongoing immigrant crisis and was now upset over the killing of the three border patrol officers just south of where she lived. Another friend replied that Syracuse was proof that more trained security officers were needed in every school in the country.
A tweet from Mary popped up on Kathy's pad: “Just heard lots of sirens on Interstate 35.” Kathy looked up to the television on the kitchen counter. There was a helicopter hovering above a highway near downtown Austin and a line of police cars. A high-speed chase was in progress and she saw the caption read, “Shooting in Austin suburb.”
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