And there it was, his target, a Southwest twin-engine jet roaring into the sky, its blue-and-red fuselage glinting as the landing gear began folding away.
Moore observed this in the span of two breaths before he screamed, “The van!”
As he charged toward the group, the snipers across the street at the Coast Guard Station opened fire, hitting one of the terrorists brandishing a machine gun while his partner whirled and directed fire toward the rooftops across the street. The first guy’s head jerked to the right, and a fountain of blood, flesh, and pieces of skull arced in the air.
Moore focused on the launcher guy, running and firing, striking the guy in the arm, the chest, the leg, as the terrorist lost his balance, turned — and a white-hot flash swelled from the launcher’s barrel, which had drifted down toward the rows of parked cars.
With a gasp, Moore threw himself onto the grass median to his right as the missile raced across the lot and banked hard, finding the nearest heat source: the idling engine of the terrorists’ own yellow van. The missile’s warhead contained HE-fragmentation, the high explosive detonating on impact with the van’s hood despite the minimum-distance arming sequence. Jagged pieces of steel, plastic, and glass flew in all directions as the van lifted six feet off the ground, the blast wave knocking Moore’s SUV onto its side and doing likewise to the car on the other side of the van. At the same time, the van’s gas tank ruptured, sending a pool of burning fuel spreading outward as the vehicle crashed back onto the ground with an echoing thud and a clatter of more glass. The stench of that burning fuel and the black smoke rising in thick clouds caught the attention of drivers out on the highway, and as Moore clambered to his feet, a taxi plowed into the back of a limousine, bumpers crunching. With ringing ears, and squinting against the smoke burning his eyes, Moore rushed to the launcher guy, who now lay on the ground, clutching his wounds, the green Anza launcher still hot and smoking, abandoned near his leg.
Moore dropped to his knees beside the man. He grabbed the guy by the shirt collar, ripped off his balaclava, and spoke through his teeth in Urdu: “Where’s Samad?”
The guy just looked at him, his eyes full of red veins, his breathing more labored.
“WHERE IS HE?” Moore screamed.
Shouting erupted around him — the SWAT unit converging and trying to rescue someone from the car that had been blown over.
Towers hustled over to the other two terrorists, one lying supine on the pavement, the other on his side.
The launcher guy’s eyes went vague; then his head fell limp. Moore cursed and shoved him back to the ground. He groaned his way up to his feet. “This was just one team!” he shouted to Towers. “Just one! There could be more!”
Samad smiled tightly.
Every airport in the entire world was about to be shut down, nearly fifty thousand of them.
Every pilot in the sky, every last one of them, was about to receive orders to land immediately—
Even the fateful six, who would, of course, be unable to comply with those instructions.
Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and San Antonio …all major American cities whose first responders would confront sheer horrors unlike any they’d experienced before, airports whose TSA employees were about to realize that their “layers of security” policies had been ineffectual, that Rahmani’s teams knew exactly how to act so as not to alert the behavior-detection officers. With flawless documents and nothing suspicious in their luggage, they’d been allowed onboard. Airport security teams, police, and local law enforcement authorities would be reminded that they could not secure the ground beneath so many flight paths.
Most of all, the American public — the infidels who polluted the holy lands, who endorsed leaders of injustice and oppression, and who rejected the truth — would turn their heads skyward and bear witness to Allah’s power and might, fully alive before their eyes.
Samad opened his door and got out. He held the iPhone up to the airliner in the distance, which was cutting through the sky with a deep and breath-robbing rumble. Confirmation.
He returned to the van, pulled on his balaclava, received the AK-47 handed to him by Niazi, then cried, “Yalla!” and swung around and wrenched open the van’s back door.
Talwar climbed out with the Anza on his shoulder while Niazi came around, holding the second missile.
The woman in the Nissan Pathfinder with the flag of Puerto Rico hanging from her rearview mirror glanced up from her cell phone as Samad raised his rifle at her and Talwar turned to sight the airliner.
They were seconds away from launch, and while others in the lot began to look up from their phones, not a one of them made a move to get out of his or her car. They sat there, sheep, while Talwar counted aloud, “Thalatha! Ithnain! Wahid!”
The MK III tore away from the launcher, leaving a dense exhaust cloud in its wake. Before Samad could take another breath, Talwar and Niazi had counted down again, and Niazi was helping his comrade reload the weapon.
Torn between watching the missile’s glowing trajectory and covering his men, Samad shifted around the van once more, swinging the weapon wildly on the cars in a show of force. The sheep began to react: mouths falling open, utter shock reaching their eyes.
Samad glanced back at the plane, at the ribbon of exhaust sewn across the sky, at the missile’s white-hot engine a second before—
Impact!
42 DEVASTATION
Joe Dominguez was at the airport to pick up his cousin Ricky, who was flying in from Orlando to spend a week’s vacation. Dominguez was twenty-four, an admittedly scrawny kid who made up for it with a keen wit and argumentative nature. He was the only son of Mexican immigrants who’d come legally into the United States back in the late 1970s. Both parents had eventually become citizens. Joe’s father was a framer and drywall installer with a crew of ten who worked for a half-dozen commercial homebuilders in the Tucson metropolitan area. His mother had started her own maid service when he was a boy, and she now managed more than forty employees who cleaned both commercial and residential properties; they even had their own fleet of cars. Meanwhile, Joe had finished high school with little desire to attend “regular” college and had instead moved temporarily to Southern California, where he’d enrolled in Ford Motor Company’s ASSET (Automotive Student Service Educational Training) program to get his AA degree and become a certified Ford Automotive Technician. After two long years of taking courses in engine control systems, brakes, steering/suspensions, transmissions, and fuel and emission control systems, he’d graduated with a 3.3 GPA. He returned home to Tucson, where he’d been hired by Holmes Tuttle Ford Lincoln Mercury. He loved being a grease monkey and had eventually saved up enough money to buy his dream ride: a black Ford F-250 FX4 pickup truck with six-inch lift kit and BFGoodrich Mud-Terrain T/A KM2 tires. His friends referred to the truck as the “black beast,” and those brave enough to come along for a ride found they needed either a ladder or good flexibility to climb into the cab. Sure, the truck intimidated the girls he dated, but he wasn’t looking for timid women, anyway. He wanted an adventurous girl. He was still looking.
As he sat there, the diesel engine thrumming, the radio set low so he could hear Ricky’s call, he did a double take at the three men getting out of their Hampton Inn shuttle van parked across the lot in the next row of angled spaces. They were dressed like Mexicans but were taller, and all three wore black ski masks. While two guys argued with each other, a third went around the back to open the rear doors.