If Rick hadn’t been focused on getting upstairs, he would have found good humor in the professional wrestler’s motivations.
As Rick turned the corner off the escalator, the damage was appalling. The windows in the area leading to the parking garage were shattered. Blood was everywhere. There was a riot of people trying to get away. Some were injured. Many were crying.
Shattered glass, a terrorist favorite. As he forced his way through the mass of humanity trying to get away, he found himself in the midst of what looked like a boys’ basketball team.
“You. All of you!” He pointed at them. “We need triage, right now. We need people to put pressure on wounds, stop the bleeding, and save lives.” Rick turned to go, but the boys remained where they were. “Chicks dig heroes,” is all he said as he ran toward the carnage.
He checked people as he went. Most were alive, stunned and bleeding, but still alive. Something must have deflected the majority of the blast. Rick worked his way through, identifying people with the worst wounds as he passed.
The boys had joined him, and they got others to help. Soon, the helpers outnumbered the injured.
Rick made it through the doors and understood why the explosion hadn’t caused more damage. The man had blown up in the parking lot. It looked like ground zero was about thirty feet outside the door. Vehicles were destroyed and burning. The concrete was cracked and buckled. Anyone outside when the bomb detonated would probably have been killed. The concussion of the blast in the inner area of the parking garage would have been immense.
Besides car alarms, Rick didn’t hear any voices calling for help. He walked around, but he figured the area was unstable. He finally heard sirens approaching, many sirens.
How much time had passed since the explosion? Three minutes?
Rick walked back inside through the blown-out doors. He felt sick to his stomach.
In his mind, he saw the walls of a tent ripped apart. Tables were thrown about, people bleeding as they lay on the ground among the trays and remains of their lunch. He saw a soldier as he leaned down to put on a tourniquet.
He blinked himself back to the present. A tourniquet would not save this young woman. He found a shirt in a nearby package, maybe a gift intended for someone’s dad. He used it to cover her face as he held her hand and cried.
Aftermath
A fireman peeled their hands apart. Rick hadn’t known her and couldn’t help the firemen identify her.
Rick stood and moved through the wreckage as other firemen and paramedics went to work. He walked as if in a trance until he saw over the railing that the terrorists were in the hands of the police. Rick waved at the officers and signaled that he’d be right down. Rick realized that he’d absentmindedly put the two remotes in his pocket. Moving in slow motion, he carefully pulled them out. He found two ceramic coffee mugs, chipped, but intact. He put one remote in each and resumed his trip to the escalator.
When he made it to the courtyard, he saw two remotes on a table near the men. Rick was uncomfortable with that. He added the two remotes to his mugs, button facing away from their identical mates.
Rick put the cups on another table, a little further away from Mohammed and his boys.
“Mohammed Marsook ibn al Mohammed. Is that your real name?” Rick asked. The man glared at him, pupils still dilated from Rick’s knock on his head. Rick didn’t care if he had a concussion or not.
“You failed, big guy. I hope you like the Caribbean as your next stop is Gitmo. Get used to wearing chains, and I hope you like orange; it’ll be your new color. All of you!” With a barely perceptible tilt of his head, Mohammed signaled Rick.
“Bring him over here, please.” Rick walked toward an empty area. The plain clothes officer guided Mohammed toward the escalator, out of earshot and sight of the other two.
“What?” Rick asked gruffly. It gave him the creeps being this close to a real terrorist. He thought about it, and it made him angry. He wanted the man to die for this.
“I know things. I know people. I will tell you everything if I can get a deal.” He said.
Rick wanted to hit him. Red swam before his eyes. It took an extreme effort to pull his phone from his pocket. He felt like he was moving in slow motion. “Becky?”
She said that she was still there and heard what Mohammed had said.
Rick turned away from Mohammed and took a few steps. “What the hell do I do now?” He asked.
“You wait. The HRT is inbound. EOD is coming. You’ll have all the help you ever wanted in just a few. By the way, Rick, we heard it. We heard it all.”
Afterward
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Thank you for reading People Raged and the Sky Was on Fire! The Rick Banik Thrillers continue as Rick takes his action to the next level, getting put on the front lines of the next intelligence crisis.
Source Materials
United States Information Classifications & Guidelines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information_in_the_United_States
Basic Arabic Terms and Phrases http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/arabic.php
Maps.google.com – places and locations in the story were verified using Google Maps, Wikipedia, and for many places, their own website.
Quotes from the Quran were sourced from The Islamic Center (http://theislamiccenter.com/), The Quran Solution for Humanity (http://thequranthesolution.webs.com/)
Special Access Programs - http://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ar380-381-old.pdf
Special Access Program Naming Convention - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_access_program
The Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations - https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/docs/guidelines.pdf
About the Author
Craig is a successful author, on track to publish ten books in 2016. He’s taken his more than twenty years of experience in the Marine Corps, his legal education, and his business consulting career to write believable characters living in a real world.
Although Craig has written in multiple genres, what he believes most compelling are in-depth characters dealing with real-world issues. Just like Star Trek, the original series used a backdrop of space, the themes related to modern day America. Life lessons of a great story can be applied now or fifty years in the future. Some things are universal.
Craig believes that evil exists. Some people are driven differently and cannot be allowed access to our world. Good people will rise to the occasion. Good will always challenge evil, sometimes before a crisis, many times after, but will good triumph?
Some writers who’ve influenced Craig? Robert E. Howard (the original Conan), JRR Tolkien, Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Lin Carter, Brian Aldiss, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Anne McCaffrey, and of late, James Axler, Raymond Weil, Jonathan Brazee, Mark E. Cooper, and David Weber. Craig learned something from each of these authors, story line, compelling issue, characters that you can relate to, the beauty of the prose, unique tendrils weaving through the book’s theme. Craig’s writing has been compared to that of Andre Norton and Craig’s Free Trader characters to those of McCaffrey’s Dragonriders, the Rick Banik Thrillers to the works of Robert Ludlum.
It is humbling, but never the intent. Craig only wants to tell a good story about real people, keep readers engaged, leave them with something to think about – “What would I do in that situation?”
Through a bizarre series of events, Craig ended up in Fairbanks, Alaska. He never expected to retire to a place where golf courses are only open for four months out of the year. But he love
s it there. It is off the beaten path. He and his wife watch the northern lights from their driveway. Their dog has lots of room to run. And temperatures reach forty below zero. They have from three and a half hours of daylight in the winter to twenty-four hours in the summer.
It’s all part of the give and take of life. If they didn’t have those extremes, then everyone would live there.
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