He had to get closer. He made his two boys get down under the seats, then he started trying to crawl over people to get closer to the shooters, who were blazing away.
His chance came when the nearest gunman realized his magazine was empty and bent down to pop it out of his weapon and insert another. Vic Goldman had closed to ten feet. He took careful aim, using both hands on the hideout pistol, and shot the gunman in the chest. He half-turned and Vic shot him again.
That was when the gunman Vic hadn’t seen shot him high in the back. Vic went down on his face, fatally wounded. He was dead when police shooting from the portals killed all the gunmen still standing, and still dead an hour later when a paramedic team found him with his two sons, ages seven and nine, holding his hands.
Someone pulled the emergency cord on the Amtrak train, so the brakes locked on every car and it screeched to a stop. Mike Ivy and Scott Weidmann had killed the third shooter by then.
After the train stopped, the fourth gunman leaped from the train onto the gravel beside the tracks. He was on a dead run heading for Newark when Sergeant Mike Ivy dropped him from a distance of one hundred yards with one shot between the shoulder blades.
As Ivy and Weidmann stood in front of the locomotive looking down at the terrorist, Weidmann said, “Nice shot, Sarge.”
Ivy pointed the rifle at the dead man’s crotch and fired a shot.
“Bastard won’t be able to fuck his virgins in Paradise,” he explained.
“You believe that shit?”
“Hell, no, but they do. Send them cock-less.”
It was late afternoon in Arlington Heights when Assistant District Attorney Ronald Farrington walked into the room where Vinnie Latucca sat with two uniformed police officers and motioned to them. They stood and left, closing the door behind them.
The lawyer laid Vinnie’s .38 on the table and nodded to it. “If we get a bullet for comparison, are we going to find any bullets from old open cases that match it?”
“Of course not,” Vinnie said disgustedly. “That’s a clean gun.”
“Or you wouldn’t have been carrying it.”
Vinnie nodded and lit a cigarette.
“The nuns don’t allow smoking in the building.”
“I don’t think they’ll mind this evening,” Vinnie replied, and blew smoke around.
Farrington sighed. “How many guys have you hit, anyway? Off the record.”
Vinnie smoked in silence.
“We have you on a weapons charge if the DA decides to prosecute. I doubt if he will. You did good today. Saved a lot of lives.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything.
“Put your gun in your pocket and go home,” Farrington said.
Vinnie pocketed the piece and stood.
Farrington held out his hand. “I’d like to shake your hand,” the lawyer said.
Vinnie grinned, shook hands, and walked out. His daughter and granddaughter were waiting for him on the school lawn.
ONE
Occasionally people ask me, What were you doing that day? You know — that day, that Saturday the terrorists hit the United States hard? Again. Fifteen years after 9/11 had dropped the World Trade Center, more American blood had been spilled on the altar of global jihad.
My name is Tommy Carmellini, and the people who ask that question know that back then I worked for Jake Grafton. At the time he was the director of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. Perhaps I should tell you a bit about Jake Grafton, a retired two-star navy admiral, a former attack pilot, a genuinely nice guy, and the worst enemy you could imagine in an alcohol-soaked nightmare. He was a pretty good spook too. So-so shuffling paper. He had an uncanny ability to connect the dots, not just the ones you and I could see, but the ones that only a savant could have suspected might be there.
Yet Jake Grafton was pretty closemouthed. He never talked about his boss. He took orders and gave orders and you never knew what the man who lived behind those gray eyes was really thinking. Until the shooting started. Then… well, then you found out that Jake Grafton was the perfect attack pilot. Away up there in the blue going fast, out of sight of the people on the ground, he could roll in, draw a bead with his bomb, and turn it loose. To kill you. Then he pulled out and dodged the flak and pointed his ass at the blast and left the vicinity to get on with his life. While your doom was falling from the sky, toward you. That was Jake Grafton.
So… what was I doing that day, the day the old world came to an end? Well, I was in Colorado watching the windup to a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exercise, Jade Helm 16.
When I got back to my hotel, the television in the lobby said over a hundred people were dead and another hundred injured, some seriously, not expected to live, after the three terror strikes. At least three of the terrorists had been Syrian refugees, and several of the others were here illegally.
Around the world, the news was all bad, but especially in the Middle East, where it looked like the Sunnis and Shiites were well on their way to a Hundred Years’ War, each sect trying to exterminate the other, and any Christians who happened to be available. There were rumors of stray nuclear weapons, and there were definitely floods of refugees — and who knew, maybe terrorists among then — pouring into Turkey and Europe.
Back in the good old USA, we were already getting started on a presidential election campaign, and it was ugly. Both sides assured the voters that if the other side won, it was the end of civilization as we know it. And then there was the Soetoro government, getting ready for a civil war.
On Sunday I flew back to Washington. The airports looked like armed camps. Armed soldiers in full battle dress were everywhere, and there weren’t many people volunteering to be victims of an airliner bombing. My plane was less than half full.
On Monday I finished my report on the FEMA exercise at my cubbyhole office at the CIA facility in the Langley, Virginia, neighborhood. When I ran out of words I decided to print out my opus and proof it. I stamped the report secret using my desk inkpad, stapled it together, and read it through. Signed it.
I had spent the two weeks of the exercise in Colorado at exercise headquarters, the buildings that the Federal Emergency Management Agency occupied on the federal reservation on West Sixth Avenue in Lakewood, a suburb of Denver. The head dog was a Homeland Security career civil servant who had obviously impressed his political bosses with his zeal and commitment to the cause of federal supremacy against all domestic foes.
When my report was ready for prime time on Monday morning, I walked it and the classified summary down the hall to the director’s office. Admiral Grafton was in, the receptionist said.
I just had time to pour myself a cup of coffee before the receptionist sent me in. Grafton was sitting there behind his desk looking sour, and Sal Molina, the president’s man Friday, was sitting across from him. Molina looked sour too. I guess the view from the White House wasn’t much better than it was from my apartment.
Grafton motioned me to a seat. I handed him my report, with the classified summary attached, and he flipped through it. He was a tad over six feet tall, lean and ropy, with thinning, graying hair combed straight back. No one would ever call him handsome, not with a nose that was a size too large. When you looked straight at him, you forgot about the nose. It was those cold gray eyes that captured you.
Molina, on the other hand, was a middle-sized guy with a twenty-pound spare tire and a shiny dome. He looked as if he were about ten years younger than Grafton, in his mid to late fifties.