His other brother looked at the ringing phone.
“What is area code 207?” he asked.
“I think Boston. Why?”
“Someone named Kathy.”
The man holding the phone laughed and clicked it on.
“My God, Mary, are you okay?” a voice cried.
“Oh, so that was her name?” he replied tauntingly.
A pause.
“Who is this?”
“Your bitch American whore friend is dead. We sent her to hell as she cried for your Jesus.”
Kathy actually recoiled, pulling the phone back, gazing at it, the horror of the seconds before transformed into rage. “Burn in hell, you bastards. We’ll kill you all!” she screamed.
There was laughter on the other end, so enraging that she threw the phone against the wall, shattering it. To merely speak to one of them, to curse them without any hope of effect, filled her with disgust. Even as she destroyed her phone she raged at herself. She had cut herself off from reaching out to Bob and Wendy.
Those around her turned to look at her.
“I was talking to one of them!” she cried, breaking into sobs and pointing at the television screen. “That was my friend you saw killed. I spoke to the bastard who killed her. God, where is God?”
The parish priest pushed his way through the crowd as she started to collapse, grabbing hold of her.
“What happened?”
“That woman on the television. She was my friend,” and then she pointed to where she had thrown her phone against the wall, shattering it. “My God, I spoke to her killer just now. He laughed, he just laughed.”
The priest drew her into his embrace.
“Let’s pray, please let’s pray.”
“Nooo! I want my husband, I want my daughter…”
She broke free and pushed her way through the crowd to the door.
Near Austin, Texas
The three jihadists resumed their mission. The one with the broken arm took on the job of grabbing the weapons that were emptied, handing back one that had a fresh magazine. In less than the hour that they had been engaged, their supply was beginning to run low. They had fired off nearly three quarters of their ammunition in the gleeful opening moments of their killing spree.
He shouted a warning to the other two. They had less than four hundred rounds left. It was time now to make every shot count. One shot, two at most, to kill as they had been trained.
He had a second job as well, one given to all of them in case an injury incapacitated his ability to fire a weapon accurately. He was to have a pad up, Blue-toothed to miniature cameras on their headbands, and monitor the sending of the live video to receivers back in Syria and ISIS-controlled Iraq. Receivers who, within minutes, would turn it around for upload to the internet.
Within minutes their glorious accomplishments would be fed to hundreds of millions who would cheer them on and offer prayers to Allah for their continued success. Surely with so many praying for them, Allah’s shield would bring them even greater triumph before the last bullet was fired.
The killing here had become absurdly easy. The southbound lanes had come to a near crawl. The Americans called it “rubber necking.” The fire from the truck carrying acetone which had burst into flames on the northbound side had stalled traffic. It was now a matter of simply driving along at little more than twenty miles an hour and popping a couple of shots into each car they passed. The local news feed dutifully reported that they had reversed direction. Cars ahead of them were slamming to a stop, drivers and passengers leaping out and running.
They had been warned, and received extra training over the fact that this was the American state of Texas. It was filled with cowboys and therefore they expected to face more opposition than the far more tamed sheep that other teams were facing in states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California, and most of New England.
A bullet suddenly shattered the passenger side window, the .45 caliber round nearly striking the driver. He cursed, pointed out the cowboy who was shooting at them: a man with a heavy revolver braced on the hood of his Ford truck. The jihadist in the rear seat, expended half a magazine of rapid fire to bring him down. There was a cry of exaltation.
Another cry of delight escaped as they came upon a bus trapped in the traffic. They emptied an entire clip down its length while their wounded loader scolded them to conserve ammunition. Nevertheless, they made sure to capture both the bus and the cowboy on video.
Up ahead, the pad's news feed was showing that the police they had blocked off earlier when they struck the truck that exploded into flames had been alerted to their approach and were running across the highway, the fools in the helicopter news camera keeping pace with them to capture the potential road block and film their demise. There were essentially trapped on this stretch of road.
The camera shifted from the highway back toward Austin. A Blackhawk was approaching. It looked military. Would they use it? With their American obsession of avoiding injuring their own and even avoiding injuring civilians on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, would they actually use it?
The noose might be tightening but the mayhem, the glorious attack, would continue on to the bitter end. He switched the camera on the pad so that his face could be seen.
“Allahu akbar! The infidels are dying like sheep waiting to be slaughtered.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Near Raqqa, Syria
There was a wild exaltation in the room, a well-concealed bunker created beneath a mosque on the edge of that war-tortured city. It had been activated that morning as the nerve center for this day. A pad, Blue-toothed to a flat screen mounted on a concrete wall, was the active receiver of the moment for twitter account #diesirae631. The messages were scrolling across the screen so fast that at times they could hardly be read. #diesirae654 Allahu Akbar, many infidels now in hell, school burning. #diesirae673 our killing police on their national news Allahu Akbar… #diesirae654… #diesirae644… #diesirae627…
All were proclaiming victories, boasting, joyous with how easy the killing was, as he, their leader, had promised it would be. Before the last of the jihadists died, the Americans would be tearing themselves apart yet again, screaming at each other to change the document that some worshipped as if it were a God, regarding their right to buy and carry guns while others would scream about the source of some of the weapons which dated back years to a surreal plan by their own government. It would be one of many additional benefits of their attack that he had spoken of to his inner circle.
Several other screens in the room showed live feeds coming straight from the jihadists traveling the highways and from the schools under attack. The technologies of the infidels were being turned against them.
A broadcast from Austin, Texas, coming from one of their major networks showed his team there shifting vehicles after their first one was disabled by police fire. His fighter actually made a point of arrogantly and cheerfully waving to the camera before executing the American whore who had owned the high-priced German car. The mere fact that the blonde was allowed by her husband to drive a vehicle on her own was a clear enough sign to all of the moral decadence of the enemy and, for that sin alone, she deserved the punishment received. He hoped her husband saw the just result of his spineless folly.
A feed sent by his team assigned to Interstate 75 working south from Valdosta, Georgia, were enjoying an absolutely open killing ground on the broad highway, traveling at over one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour on the flat open interstate, having already left behind them a hundred kilometers of wreckage.
The signal had gone dead from the teams assigned to Interstate 40 in North Carolina and the Knoxville, Tennessee, area. The final video sent from the Knoxville unit was of their approaching an overpass where at least half a dozen armed men and women were waiting, firing down on their vehicle. In contrast, on the Interstate 91 going north along the Vermont, New Hampshire, border, the holy warriors were having a joyful killi
ng spree.
The team assigned to the tangle of interstates southwest of Boston at the 495 and 95 interchange were now caught in a massive traffic jam, had finally abandoned their car and were simply walking among the vehicles, executing trapped drivers who, sheep-like, were too terrified to get out and run. They were reporting that once they saw an opening they’d grab another car and continue their run toward Rhode Island.
All of this information was flooding in, along with the news media feeds from the United States. Their major networks were now reporting that cell phone networks were overloading and going down, and the most popular internet social media site servers were overloading as well. The fact that millions could not cling to their crutches of cell phones and social media was increasing the level of panic.
He laughed at that one. Every American was so self-centered that he viewed his own slightest crisis as an emergency, ready to call 911 if he spilled a cup of hot coffee on himself. In their panic they would not listen, jam the highways, and the chaos would continue to spread.
When ISIS released their one-hour video back in June of their triumphal advance into Iraq, the reaction in the West had been fascinating and revealing. All of the American news media sources, both general broadcast and print, had picked up on it within an hour. But then they censored it. They culled out excerpts: the execution of several dozen traitorous collaborators lined up in a ditch, the individual executions with a pistol to the back of each man’s head, a ten-year-old hero shooting several traitors, all of it was censored. Their media would show the moment leading up to the kill, but then stop there. Far too upsetting for the infidels with weak stomachs to see. They might become ill and switch to their favorite reality show rather than see their fate if they did not submit to the will of Allah.
The media prefaced the brief clips that they did show with words such as “an alleged execution near Mosul,” “a purported execution,” a “supposed execution.” It was as if the film that his organization had created had its own Hollywood special effects team at work to fake the actually killings. How the Americans loved their fake violence in their perverted movies of sex and killing, but could not stomach it for real.
They could not hide what was happening now. Their technology had leapt forward in the years since September 11. Every one of their citizens was armed with a cell phone camera and instant access to the entire world. In less than two hours, tens of millions of videos showing the carnage were flooding into the global media, to be forwarded by hundreds of millions more. Allah be praised, they were now wallowing in their terror for the whole world to see. This glorious chaos created by little more than a hundred of his holy fighters.
He had a dozen highly-trained technicians at work in the command bunker. One had been educated at Oxford, another had attended classes at M.I.T. It was a team of expert video editors who, the moment the Sword operations began and the first uplinks flooded in, were sorting through the traffic, capturing the best images and creating near instant, well-crafted media for the global internet. Their productions were designed to instill terror in their enemies and joy for true believers. Even now the first videos were being fine-tuned and soundtracks added, their songs singing of the glory of the prophet, about to be uploaded to news sources across the Middle East and the internet in general.
“We have a good one here,” one of his technicians announced and pointed at the screen.
It was a live feed from a news helicopter circling the school near Portland, Maine, where a highly successful attack was taking place. Though there had been a report that one of the fighters had been killed, what one of them was now doing was being broadcasted by the local affiliate and picked up by the national feed. This was the moment that would notch it up even further.
Near Portland, Maine
Standing on the roof of Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, one of his courageous fighters was looking up at a circling news helicopter. It was the local Fox station, its logo clearly stenciled on the side, circling tight, camera aimed straight down.
His fighter was holding what looked to be a girl of about twelve years or so who continued to struggle as he held her tight against his side.
And then he did exactly what was done at the school in Chechnya, starting by yanking her skirt off…
New York City
“Kill the feed! Kill that feed!”
The New York anchor was out of his chair, screaming to his program director. The huge, oversized screen behind him went dead but the monitor facing him, not visible to the national audience, was still showing what was being done to the young girl, and he stood silent, shaking. The studio went silent; they were not broadcasting the image of the rape, but monitors inside the studio were still receiving the images being sent down from Portland, Maine.
Discipline, the long years of discipline which had held up even during the darkest moments of 9/11 broke inside the studio at the sight of the torturing abuse of the child. Screams of shock, rage, and anguish filled the room. The anchor just stared at the screen, his features going pale, his fists clenched in impotent fury. America was not directly seeing the rape, except in the Portland area where the program director had gone into a state of catatonic shock and had not switched the signal off. But the rest of the world was seeing it nevertheless in the reaction of the anchorman, who stood transfixed, tears streaming down his face.
There was the flash of the knife, held up high so the circling helicopter could see it, even as the chopper started to dive down toward the roof of the school. The pilot was unable to bear what he was witnessing and decided to land, to try and intervene with his bare hands.
The knife slid so easily across the child’s throat, ending her agony.
The anchor, finally aware that he had been standing silent in front of a national audience for a minute or more, looked back at the camera.
“Are we on?” he muttered. “Are we on live?”
“You are, but the video feed is not,” a cameraman announced, his voice shuddering.
“The child is dead, thank God,” he whispered. “Dear God, we implore You, please still her pain and grant her peace.”
He could not speak for a moment, tried to, then knowing he could not control his emotions he lowered his head, his shoulders shaking. He finally raised his gaze to the camera with a cold, icy stare.
“Are we on?” he asked again. A voice off-camera responded that they were going out live, but only from the studio.
“If there are police seeing this, listen to me. In the name of God, end it now. Storm the schools. They are not taking prisoners. They are now raping and torturing the children trapped within. Storm the schools, save our children and then…" He paused. "And then kill every one of the animals doing this. Kill them all!”
He turned his back to the camera, his shoulders shaking as he cried uncontrollably. He knew his appeal to the police had, without doubt, ended his career, but he no longer cared. The image of what he had just seen done to a child…? If he did not cry out in protest then what kind of man was he?
Inside Joshua Chamberlain Middle School
The killer just missed him, bullets peppering the wall mere inches over his head. Bob pretended that he had been hit, went limp, and laid still for long minutes, not daring to move. Shooting continued from down the hallway, but not in his direction.
How long had it been? Bob was feeling increasingly light headed, his mind blanking out, and forced himself to focus. He finally dared to crawl the last few feet to the man he had killed, grabbed the M-4 from his grasp, and pulled out the 9mm strapped to his shoulder harness. He tried not to take in the horror of the classroom. They were all dead, there was nothing he could do here. He could hear long bursts of volleys from the administrative wing and further on from the area of the gym and dining hall.
He decided to try and crawl down the hallway, perhaps ambush one of them from behind. He dragged himself out the doorway, made it half a dozen feet, and then the black, covered head appeared again. The terrorist s
aw him and fired a burst, a round striking his shoulder and the floor. Bits of torn linoleum sliced his face. He feigned that he was dead yet again, and the gunman turned back to keeping the police outside at bay.
Bob rolled in tight against the wall, kept the M-4 poised and aimed down the corridor. He no longer had the strength to move. Waves of pain from his back and shoulder slammed him every second or so. He sensed that if he tried to get closer, they would finish him off for certain. But he could still do something. If the teachers in the classrooms behind him had not yet pushed their children out the windows and fled, if one of the attackers came this way, he would wait until the last second, mimic death, then kill him.
As he waited, the agony continued. He knew that his back was broken. The numbing shock of being hit not just once, but twice, was rapidly wearing off and the pain was building with each passing minute. The damn fire alarm was still screeching and the hallway fire sprinklers still soaking him. So much water was puddling that streams of pinkish slush washed around him. His brain started to register the heavy scent of spent gunpowder overlaying the metallic smell of blood.
One child, about twenty feet away, was curled up, shot in the stomach, and sobbed softly, calling for her mother. He managed to get her attention, motioned for her to lie low and to be still. He recognized her; she was one of his daughter’s friends.
“Help is coming, Jessica, just be quiet so they don’t shoot you again.”
She nodded and, biting her lip, she remained down.
Something outside sounded different and was getting louder. Was it a helicopter? It was thundering, as if it was directly overhead on the roof above.
My God, they’re doing something at last!
Day of Wrath Page 10