The leader shot both of them in the back of the head as soon as they glanced away. As they lay sprawled on the ground, he put an extra bullet into each man’s brain.
When he was sure they were dead, he burst from behind the wall toward a line of police cars. He knew why the authorities had waited so long. He knew what they were doing, and he was too committed to the big picture and the greater good to allow them to derail it this quickly.
He’d been tortured once before by U.S. intel, and he wanted no part of another interrogation session like that. He much preferred a quick death over what would undoubtedly take many painful days to die. Besides, what was waiting for him on the other side was much more beautiful than this world. That’s what he believed, anyway.
He dropped his weapon and threw his arms up in the air in full view of the authorities. Then he began to jog straight at the center vehicle in the line of cruisers. He could see the faces and the expressions of the policemen who were stationed behind the line of cherry tops. They were confused by his actions. Where were his compatriots? What in the hell was going on? They had no idea how to react.
They should be shooting me now, he thought as he ran. I would be shooting me. But they are not trained well, and the chain of command has failed them. Some idiot five levels above these street soldiers still hasn’t made a decision on how to deal with this emergency, probably because it was being broadcast live for the world to see and they don’t want to be perceived as vicious and insensitive. So they are paralyzed.
Their hesitation allowed him to make it all the way to the center of the line before they finally raised their weapons and ordered him to stop. By then it was too late — and he pulled the cord.
The bomb in his backpack unleashed its fury, releasing a terrible blast that took eight policemen and women with him.
As Kaashif watched the man jog toward the line of police cars on television, he actually felt the exhilaration his brother in arms was experiencing. It was taking the form of a great rush in his chest and a tingling sensation that extended from his heart all the way to his fingertips and toes. The man on TV was doing the right thing. He was sacrificing himself rather than take any chance of giving away something during an interrogation. Of course, the cops had no idea what they were dealing with. They would in a second.
The bomb exploded, incinerating this brother as well as several police officers.
As the sound of it faded from the TV, Kaashif allowed his face to slowly fall into his palms, and he began to sob. They’d been planning this attack for almost three years. Now the first stage was complete, and its success had been nearly perfect. The Minneapolis squad was gone, but they hadn’t been apprehended, and every other team was back in hiding and accounted for. Seventy-three civilians were dead, and more than two hundred had been wounded. Even better, the United States population had run for cover. Reports were already coming in that with a week to go to Christmas, malls across the country were empty.
It was the greatest gift he could have received, and the tears would not stop coming. There were others in the house, and he could not have them see him like this, so he moved quickly to the bathroom and locked the door.
Then his tears flowed in earnest.
The rusty hinges creaked as Major Travers pushed open the wooden door of the tiny house he’d built deep in the woods of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains.
It wasn’t really a house. It was a shack, and not much of one at that. It didn’t have running water, electricity, or heat — not even a fireplace. The stove was nothing more than a crude burner that was fired by a natural gas cylinder, when he remembered to buy one. So he usually ate the soup cold out of cans, when he remembered to buy them. And not many of the up-and-down planks that formed the four exterior walls of the relatively square floor plan rested flush against each other, and he’d never bothered to install insulation, so the place was drafty as hell. But it served its purpose. It was remote out here in the George Washington National Forest, as remote as any place could be within a hundred miles of Washington, DC.
Most important, as far as Travers could tell, he was the only person on the planet who knew about the place. The closest farm was several miles away, at the bottom of the mountains, so it lay outside the national forest. And hunters weren’t allowed to take game within the forest’s boundaries. Which didn’t preclude poaching by the locals, of course, but he’d never had a problem with anyone using the place. He always set up a few inconspicuous indicators when he left so he could tell if it had been used or inspected when he returned. But they’d never been set off, just as he’d seen tonight when he’d gotten here. He’d checked even though he was exhausted after the steep climb through the cold, dark, wet forest.
He built the shack himself five years ago. He’d snared the lumber and other materials from a construction site down in the valley along the river. Then he’d lugged the stuff up the side of this mountain in the dark, without even a path to follow on his trips back and forth to the pickup he’d left on the logging road that night. He’d robbed the site so there wouldn’t be any record of him buying anything at a store. Even if he’d paid cash, someone might still have remembered him. He was ultimately paranoid, he knew. But that had always proven to be one of his most formidable weapons.
Roger Carlson would have built him something out here if he’d asked, Travers knew. Carlson would have done anything for him. But then at least one other person would have known about it. As sad as it was for Travers to understand and accept, he couldn’t completely trust anyone, even Carlson. And that hadn’t been the old man’s fault. Travers just had a terrible time with it. The only person who’d come close to that level of trust was Harry Boyd — now Harry was gone, too.
Travers stepped inside the shack, flipped on the tiny flashlight he’d dug out of his pocket, and played the beam around the small, mostly bare room. It was chilly in here, but it wasn’t wet. A cold, soaking rain had begun to fall on the Mid-Atlantic an hour ago, as he’d been driving around DC on I-495—and he was glad to be in a dry place after hiking up the mountain in the dark. He didn’t use this place very often, only when he desperately needed to go underground. Given what had happened three hours ago in Wilmington, this was one of those times. Shane Maddux wouldn’t be happy when he found out his two young soldiers had been killed.
Travers stripped off his boots and the drenched poncho he’d worn up the mountain, tossed everything in a corner of the shack, and grabbed a rolled-up nylon sleeping bag off the table by the burner. He untied the bag and shook it hard to get rid of any black widows or brown recluses that had decided to make it home since the last time he’d been here — which was six months ago. Then he spread the bag out on the wooden floor.
It wasn’t going to be comfortable, but then maybe he deserved some discomfort, maybe even some pain. He’d failed miserably in his job today. The United States was under attack. Hundreds of people had been killed and wounded, and the population was terrified, much more so than it had been after 9/11. People were cowering inside their homes with their doors and windows locked. Families who owned guns felt only marginally more secure than the ones who didn’t. The men who’d carried out the attacks today were maniacs, but they were good. Only one team had been stopped — and they’d committed suicide. His gut told him this was going to be a long, hard campaign that might never end unless the country took unprecedented actions. Despite the brutal and ferocious nature of the attacks, Travers still wasn’t certain the federal government would take those unprecedented steps, which would delve deeply into the personal privacies America’s population held so dear.