Okay, here’s the beheading proper. It’s emerging everywhere. There he is, casually sawing away, totally unhurried. Like “another day, another head.”
And there’s the colonel’s head on the move again, from his body to the front seat console, the camera focused once more on the colonel, sans skull. I’ve had enough. I don’t need to see any more blood spurting from his open neck. What I want to see is the guy doing the sawing, and he’s not giving us a glimpse of that.
But this… this is interesting. I’m back where I was earlier today, when I discovered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, trying to hack the Pentagon, NBC News, a navy shipyard, and one of the giant sump pumps trying to drain the last floodwaters from the Washington Mall. AQAP hasn’t made much headway in its intrusion attempts. I could give them a helpful nudge in the right direction — it’s obvious to me and I’ve done it before — but I won’t, not yet anyway.
I have more critical nudges in mind, so I look once more at ISIS’s social media campaign. ISIS does know how to inspire Muslim youth, and they’re at it 24/7, displaying photos and videos of testosterone-driven young warriors waving AK-47s and their black flags from the barricades and backs of trucks racing to battle. “Hear the commands of Mohammed in your heart and join us” scrolls across the screen in one language after another.
Farther down, I find them urging those “blessed with courage” to become lone wolves. “Our enemies are your enemies, and they are all around you.”
There are so many lone wolves out there they could form packs at this point, at least in cyberspace.
Maybe not only there, though.
I’ve made numerous forays into both AQAP and ISIS online. They have their individual strengths. What they’ve always needed to do was come together to form one big pack. But to accomplish that they needed a persuasive voice that could coordinate their actions to advance their effectiveness.
They’re both Sunnis, after all. They both hate Shias. And they both belong to the branch of Islam that claims eighty-five percent of all believers. They have so much in common. It was only a matter of time before ISIS and AQAP recognized that they had more to gain by cooperation than competition. And wouldn’t a reconciliation that began right here, in the heart of America, prove most fruitful?
That time is now.
I certainly can claim my role. Chainsawing Lana Elkins and her daughter to death will be a tangible demonstration of what can be accomplished when ISIS and AQAP join forces. The khilafa, caliphate, will grow exponentially, for if AQAP and ISIS can cooperate here in the harsh land of unbelievers, they can kill at will anywhere at all.
Chapter 19
Jimmy McMasters cracked open the door of his hospital room. Guards armed with automatic rifles stood at each end of the long corridor, eyes on anyone seeking access to the patients. They were there to keep the quarantined inside, but looked ready to repel an invasion.
He swore softly to himself. He was dressed and ready to roll, and they were still there. Don’t they ever take a damn break? The hospital was in lockdown, a prison term that sounded painfully appropriate to Jimmy. If he could just get out, he could start rehabilitating his name, if not his health. But he wasn’t feeling too bad. No worse than some epic hangovers he’d known, and he’d managed to race Sexy Streak almost two hundred miles per hour during one of them.
As he eased the door shut and backed away, he glanced again at the mirror in the small bathroom. Not as bad as most of the cases he’d seen on TV, or on his now-dead roommate. But Jimmy had been a good-looking piece of work; he wasn’t so sure of himself now. Dozens of women — he was pretty certain he’d passed the half-century mark — had thought enough of him to show their appreciation. Piccolo — the one who really knew how to play a flute — had said he’d “rocked her world.” Now she’d probably like to stone him to death.
He wanted to feel like a hero again, and he had a plan, a risky one, admittedly, but he’d go for it — if he could just get the hell out of there.
Jimmy was on the third floor. The old bedsheets ploy wouldn’t work. By the time he tied them to a radiator — the hospital had been built in the 1930s — and ran them across the room to the window, he’d be lucky to make it to the top of the second floor. Jumping twenty feet in his condition was not a cool idea.
He thought about tackling a nurse and stealing her baggy blue clothes, but the one who breezed in and out of his room every hour outweighed him by a good eighty pounds and looked pretty frickin’ angry about having to come anywhere near him. She called him “Matt killer,” even though Lauer wasn’t dead yet, a point that Jimmy had made to her more than once.
“But he’s dyin’ and you’re lookin’ like you got nothin’ but a couple of zits,” she’d said on her last visit, shaking her head as she left. It was as if she’d just discovered there really wasn’t any justice in the world if Matt Lauer might die and Jimmy McMasters actually got to live.
He peeked out the window. Starting to get dark, for all the help that might bring him. At least he spied no guards on the hospital grounds.
Christ!
He heard the XXL nurse in the hallway just as he caught sight of a possible way down.
Jimmy rushed to his bed and in seconds had his eyes closed, gown over his pants and shirt, and the sheet over everything but his face.
A moment later she barreled in. “You dead yet?” she asked, sounding far too hopeful for Jimmy’s comfort.
He cracked an eyelid. Yeah, XXL all right. “No, but I feel like I’m dying.”
She promptly stuck a thermometer in his mouth. Pulled it out seconds later. One of those fast-acting ones.
“Don’t be such a wimp. Ninety-nine degrees. You’re no worse for wear. Not like my boy, Matt,” she humphed. “Not that you care.”
“Hey, I liked him, too.”
“Yeah? With friends like you, Matt sure don’t need no enemies. And don’t be talkin’ like he’s already dead. That’s disrespectin’ him even more. Makes me wonder if you’ve been workin’ with those terrorists the whole time.”
“If I was working with them, I wouldn’t have let myself get sick.”
She humphed again. “They got sick and now they’re dyin’, so it seems if you was workin’ with them, you’d be sick, too. And there you are, a waste of space and fresh as some damn peaches and cream… for a supposedly sick man. Tell you what, though, we’re bringin’ in someone in a few minutes who’s sweatin’ blood he’s so gone. See how you’re doin’ with him around.”
“That sucks.”
She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes. Sendin’ up the orderlies. Be seein’ you soon.” She smiled at him for the first time, then slammed the door.
Jimmy swore to himself again, burst from the bed, and raced back to the window. What he’d spotted before XXL showed up was a drainage pipe about five feet from the edge of a six-inch-deep windowsill.
He cranked the handle for the window and watched it open sideways. Might give him just enough room to squeeze by.
Nope.
His pecs wouldn’t compress enough. All those incline presses and drop-sets had left him a little too pumped, even after days of sickness.