Heroes Proved
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CONTENTS
Prologue: Houston, We Have a Problem
Chapter One: Duty Calls
Chapter Two: Wanted
Chapter Three: In the Shadow
Chapter Four: Flight Delay
Chapter Five: Storm Warning
Chapter Six: Hideout
Chapter Seven: Those in Peril on the Sea
Chapter Eight: Fatal Error
Chapter Nine: Operation Coyote
Chapter Ten: Loyalty Test
Chapter Eleven: Quest for Freedom . . .
Chapter Twelve: Committees of Correspondence
Chapter Thirteen: Chaos Theory
Chapter Fourteen: Run!
Chapter Fifteen: The Senator’s Story
Chapter Sixteen: Good to Go
Chapter Seventeen: Lights Out
Epilogue: Freedom Alliance
Glossary
Acknowledgments
“America the Beautiful”
Freedom Alliance
About Oliver North
For Betsy,
“Draw me after you and let us run together”
SONG OF SOLOMON I:4
PROLOGUE
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
NASA HILTON HOTEL
3000 NASA ROAD ONE
HOUSTON, TX
SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2032
0100 HOURS, LOCAL
Only six of the sixteen expected to live. The other ten, all volunteers, did not intend to survive the experience. That’s just one of the things that make them different from us.
Two of them, aboard the Venezuelan tanker moored at the Exxon Mobil facility in Baytown, died precisely at one in the morning when their suicide bombs detonated and ignited the ship’s cargo of benzene. Nine unwitting crewmen aboard the vessel and twenty-three refinery workers ashore were killed in the conflagration.
Thirty seconds later, two others perished in a ball of fire when their sixty-ton truckload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with diesel fuel exploded as planned on the East Loop bridge over the Buffalo Bayou–Houston Ship Channel. Seventeen motorists in eleven cars also died in the explosion or when their vehicles plunged into the water, more than 130 feet below.
The four who disembarked from two cabs in front of the Hilton NASA hotel at three minutes after one all anticipated dying within the hour. Though it actually took longer, they did succeed in taking seventy-nine innocent guests, eleven hotel workers, thirteen Houston police officers, and eleven fire and rescue personnel with them. Among those killed were twenty-one women and fifteen children; six of them, babies in their mothers’ arms.
* * * *
When gunfire and grenades erupted in the lobby, the three men, who had checked into the hotel as guests on Monday, immediately set the “e-cell” microcircuit timers on the explosive charges they previously planted in their rooms on the second, fifth, and seventh floors, then headed for the stairwells and raced to the penthouse level. Dressed in gray slacks and blue blazers with matching lapel pins, they arrived at the twelfth-floor Presidential Suite just seconds after the hotel emergency alarm began.
As he saw them coming, the identically attired security guard, an off-duty Houston patrol officer posted at the front door of the suite, reached for the phone on the desk instead of reaching for his weapon. It was his last fatal error.
The first of three silenced .25-cal bullets hit him in the chest, instantly reminding him of another deadly mistake: before going on duty at midnight, he decided the heat and humidity were too high for wearing his police-issue ballistic protective vest.
The shooter bent over the inert body, pulled the dead security guard’s police credentials out of his wallet, glanced at the name, picked up the desk phone, and dialed 71201. When the phone was answered he said, “Sir, this is Officer Vargas at the security desk. There is an emergency in the hotel and we need to get you out of here, quickly. Please put on some clothes. We’ll be waiting at your door.”
As his two colleagues prepared to drag the security officer’s body down the hall to dump it into a housekeeping closet, the shooter removed the dead man’s badge, weapon, and holster and fastened them to his belt. Finally, he grabbed the policeman’s Personal Interface Device—a clear plastic membrane, less than a millimeter thick, about twice the size of an old-fashioned credit card. Using the dead man’s thumb and forefinger, he pinched the thin ceramic strip along the edge of the card and a piezo-actuator instantly illuminated the screen to the downloadable media the officer was watching an instant before the first bullet struck.
From the card came the voice of an announcer, covering the highlights of the afternoon’s college football games. “Vargas” grunted, deactivated the fingerprint security option, pinched the ceramic switch to mute the device, and shoved it into his trousers pocket. All three men were arrayed like statues, facing outward when the door behind them opened and the occupant of the Presidential Suite shouted over the din of the emergency alarm, “I’m ready. Where are we going?”
The shooter turned and said, “We cannot use the elevators. We must use the emergency exit fire escape. There is apparently some kind of altercation going on downstairs. We need to get you out of here.”
The tall, thin man in the doorway, clad in a lightweight exercise suit and running shoes, didn’t look his age—seventy-seven. He held a flat leather case in one hand and a small gym bag in the other. Neither his eyes nor his short, gray hair offered any sign of whether he had been asleep or awake when the alarm started less than four minutes earlier. Over the incessant Klaxon he said, “Perhaps we had better call in to the duty officer at the NASA conference center before we leave.”
“No time!” shouted the shooter. “There is a fire and gunshots from the front of the hotel. We’re going down the south side, toward the marina. We have to get out of here to safety.” With that he gestured to follow him, turned, and headed down the hallway toward the illuminated exit sign.
The four men raced down eleven flights of stairs, the older man following “Officer Vargas” and one of the “security guards.” As they neared the ground floor, the stairwell filled with thick, acrid smoke and other frightened guests, all fleeing some unspeakable horror. Several women were weeping and children were wailing as they stumbled down the stairs.
When the crowd of refugees burst out of the building onto the deck above the marina, “Vargas,” now brandishing a badge in one hand and an automatic pistol in the other, yelled, “Follow me!” and headed east toward the finger piers and boat slips, past knots of frightened guests huddled with nowhere to go. Outside, with the interior alarms muted by the walls of the structure, the sound of gunfire and explosions seemed dangerously close.
As the four men hastened past the hotel restaurant toward the stairs to the dock, there were screams and a sudden burst of gunfire from inside. An instant later, an armed man wearing a black jumpsuit burst out a door in front of them and nearly bumped into “Officer Vargas.”
The gunman looked stunned, lowered his weapon, and said what sounded to the older man like “Ahmad . . .” Without hesitating a second, “Vargas” pointed his pistol at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The old man recoiled in horror and said, “What the . . .”
“Vargas” spun, grabbed the old man’s warm-up jacket, and snarled, “Come, now, to that boat,” and pointed with his weapon to the end of the main dock. There a long, low, dark-hulled craft with a
blue flashing strobe on its foredeck was idling.
When their “protectee” seemed to hesitate, the other two “security guards” in blue blazers came up on either side of the old man and took his arms as if to assist him. Traumatized guests, some prone on the deck, others peering from behind tables outside the restaurant, watched as they hustled the man in the warm-up suit out to the pier and then into the cockpit of the dark-hulled boat.
Once aboard, things suddenly changed. The man who called himself “Vargas” shouted to the two visible crewmen waiting in the cockpit, “Take him below! Go! Now! Hurry!”
The man at the helm immediately shut off the flashing blue light and pushed the throttles forward to their blocks. The two water-cooled, turbocharged racing engines spun up with a roar and the boat leapt forward. In seconds the black, Kevlar-reinforced, fiberglass hull was racing east without lights across Clear Lake at better than 25 knots.
Below, in the tapered, low-ceiling cabin, the two “security guards” and a third man he hadn’t seen before ripped the leather case and the gym bag from the old man’s hands, pinned his arms behind his back, snapped handcuffs on his wrists and ankles, and pushed him onto a narrow bunk.
Just before they covered his mouth with duct tape, he asked, “Who are you? Where are you taking me?” He received no answer. Instead his “protectors”-turned-captors proceeded to wrap his entire body in heavy aluminum foil and then duct-taped him to a long board they shoved beneath him. Completely immobilized, he stopped struggling and was only somewhat relieved when one of them poked two holes in the foil beneath his nostrils. Less than fifteen minutes had elapsed since he picked up the phone and heard “Officer Vargas” tell him there was “an emergency” in the hotel.
WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM
1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE
WASHINGTON, DC
SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2032
0227 HOURS, LOCAL
If twenty-one years—five of them as senior watch officer—in the White House Situation Room had taught Ben Carver anything, it was that the “red phone” never chirped with good news at this hour of the morning. He adjusted his headset, made sure the lip mike was in front of his mouth, and glanced at the “DNI” icon flashing red on the flat plastic panel on his console serving as his computer screen.
He touched the plastic pane and said into the mouthpiece, “Sit Room, Carver.”
“Ben, Bill Vincent, DNI SWO.”
“Go ahead, Bill,” Carver replied.
“We have multiple ongoing events in Houston. Looks like a vessel moored at the Exxon Mobile Baytown facility blew up, damaging the Fred Hartman Bridge. There was also a very large explosion on the East Loop I-610 bridge, which may have brought down a span. There is also an ongoing Houston PD and Texas DPS police action with an apparent hostage/barricade situation near the Johnson NASA Space Center. We don’t know if these events are related—”
“Any imagery up?” interrupted Carver.
“Yeah,” Vincent replied. “A Global Hawk border surveillance UAV out of Dyess Air Force Base picked up the infrared flares from the explosions. We’re up with DHS and have reprogrammed the bird for Houston. It should be overhead in ten minutes or so. I’m sending you the Houston TranStar traffic camera grabs of both detonations and a live feed of the ongoing effects. The Coast Guard is transmitting IR from one of their Galveston Bay aerostats and they are getting ready to launch a helo with a FLIR pod. We also have a download from the security cams at the Space Center, but they don’t show much, just a lot of police activity—the usual flashing lights on the highway. We’re picking up lots of chatter on social media about casualties.”
Carver reached to touch the plastic screen, bringing up the imagery, and asked, “Are there any threat-warns or foreign indicators? Anybody claiming credit?”
“Nothing new,” Vincent responded. “Last year, leading up to the thirtieth anniversary of the 9-11-01 attack, we had lots of ‘threat-warn’ and of course, nothing happened. This year all we’re seeing and hearing is the usual anti-American garbage from south of the border and typical ‘Anark’ right-wing trash talk up on ‘Radio-Free Montana,’” Vincent responded. “We aren’t picking up anybody overseas mentioning a specific attack, nobody here calling home, as it were—but as you know, the jihadis have been very quiet lately.”
“What is Houston Emergency Management Center telling DHS? Do they think it is domestic, international, or just three coincidental events?” Carver asked.
“Hard to tell,” Vincent responded. “The folks at HEMC have their hands full right now. We’re monitoring all of their encrypted comms and they don’t seem to know who or what is responsible. There are apparently lots of casualties from the two explosions and whatever is going on across the street from the Johnson Space Center. Just between you and me, we are tapped into the hotel’s internal security cameras and there are a lot of bodies.”
Carver simply grunted at the DNI watch officer’s admission that they were monitoring and recording a private security/surveillance system without a warrant. Turning to another screen, he glanced down a checklist and asked, “Any indications of radiological, biohazard, or hazmat release?”
“Air sensors say no to the first two,” responded Vincent. “There is a large petrochemical smoke plume drifting southeast on the offshore breeze from the Baytown fire. Houston EMC has alerted all first responders and will post a public warning once they get a better handle on things.”
Carver pondered this for a moment and asked, “If this is a 9-11 anniversary attack, why Houston? Is there any connection?”
“Not that we’re tracking,” Vincent answered. “According to the Houston PD they have a bunch of their off-duty cops doing security work for some kind of energy conference coming up at the Space Center, that’s about it.”
“Energy conference,” said Carver aloud, as he touched the electronic pad on his desk and brought up a calendar on a screen titled “2032 SIG EVENTS.” He scrolled to September and found:
11 SEP:
31st Anniversary Ceremony of 9-11-01 attacks.
0945–1045 POTUS Wreath-laying Ceremony, Pentagon
9-11-01 Memorial. POC: WH COS MUNEER MURAD
12–14 SEP:
International Alternative Energy Conference, Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX.
12 SEP:
1130 EDT POTUS DEP S/LAWN ENR AAFB: MARINE 1
1200 EDT POTUS DEP AAFB: A/F 1
1510 CDT POTUS ARR EFD
1530 CDT POTUS DEP EFD ENR SPACE
CTR: MARINE 1
1600–1800 POTUS Welcomes Conferees & Attends VIP Reception POC: WH COS MUNEER MURAD. PRESS CLEAR: USSS CRED.
VIPs Attending:
U.S. Energy SEC Donald Colbert
UK Energy Min., Sir Reginald Smythe
OPEC Oil Min., Sheik Adnan bin Faisal
CAN Energy Sec., Donald Gregory
MEX Energy Min., Rafael Hernandez
RUS Energy Min., Viktor Lebed
PRC Energy Min., Xiong Guangkai
UN Energy Coordinator: Amb. Sun Lee [PRC]
Dr. Franklin Pfister: Cal Poly [US]
Dr. Martin Cohen: MIT [US]
Dr. Melvin Larsen: Copenhagen Royal Acad. [DEN]
Dr. Davis Long: Univ. of Calgary [CAN]
Dr. Steven Templeton: S. Alberta Inst. [CAN]
Dr. Bern Vaclev: Petersburg Scientific Inst. [RUS]
Dr. Lu Weiying, Qinghua Univ. [PRC]
Dr. Shimizu Yoshiaki, Tokyo Inst. of Tech. [JPN]
Carver’s mouth was suddenly dry and he sat upright in his chair. With a flick of a finger on the desktop pad, he copied the file and sent it to the DNI watch officer. As he did so, Carver said, “Bill, I’m sending you our SIG Events file. Take a look at who is due in Houston tomorrow.”
The file, labeled “WHSR-SENSITIVE,” was transmitted instantly over the secure fiber-optic network connecting all of Washington’s government agencies—and every major U.S. military command. When the DNI senior watch officer lo
oked at it, he sucked in his breath, as Carver continued: “All of these people must have PERTs. Check their ident codes and find them. Don’t bother with Energy Secretary Colbert, he’s here in town, I’m showing him on my succession locator and he is scheduled to accompany the president on Air Force One to Houston. See if any of the people listed are already in Houston. And if they are, stop the presses on the PDB. Let me know if I have to wake up POTUS.”
JENNINGS ISLAND CHANNEL
CLEAR LAKE, TX
SATURDAY, 11 SEPTEMBER 2032
0145 HOURS, LOCAL
It took the black-hulled speedboat less than thirty minutes to reach the narrow, winding Jennings Island channel at the east end of Clear Lake. At the helm in the cockpit, the pilot slowed the craft to a crawl and negotiated the passage by getting in line behind two other powerboats headed out on the tide. While the kidnappers wallowed in the wake of the craft in front of them, “Vargas” reached into his pocket, pulled out the PID he had removed from the police officer he killed in the hotel, pinched it to switch it on, and placed the plastic rectangle on the cockpit dashboard.
The man at the helm looked at the device and asked, “Why did you do that?”
The killer smiled and replied, “The authorities may be checking who we are. This will tell them we have one of their local police officers aboard.”
As the vessel made the final turn to pass beneath the power lines and the RFID panels beneath the Bayport Boulevard bridge, two very loud, nearly simultaneous explosions ashore lit up the horizon to the left and right of the bow.
The first, at the intersection of Bayport and East NASA, forty gallons of gasoline mixed with kerosene and accelerated by a canister of nitrous oxide, was detonated in the back of a rented SUV by a hand grenade. It spread flaming debris across all four lanes of traffic.
Seconds later, south of the bridge, six propane tanks, vented into a rented panel truck at the intersection of Bayport and Marina Bay Drive, were exploded by a cigarette lighter. In both cases, the perpetrators died instantly. So did nine innocent Americans who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.