Against All Enemies

41 IMPACT

The agency wanted Moore and Sonia out of there immediately, and Towers received the same directive from his BORTAC senior administrators. While the operation had been a success, Soto, along with seven of his men, had been killed. The Black Hawk pilots and crew chiefs were also lost. Terrible news, but these were men who had known the risks and accepted them.

Sonia was a bit shaken when they’d picked her up at the hotel, but within five minutes she was talking rapidly and thanking Moore for saving her back in San Juan Chamula.

“And yes,” she said, “I do owe you coffee.”

“And I will collect,” he said with a wink.

Once on the plane, she folded her arms over her chest and buried herself in her seat, losing herself in her smartphone. Moore appreciated the sacrifices she had made, giving all of herself to Miguel in order to get close to Rojas, a man who had so well protected himself that her mission had become nearly impossible. She was young, though remarkably professional, having understood the ramifications of what she was doing and the toll it would take on her emotions. Her level of commitment had never wavered, and early on, she had seen that her mission could lead to familial collateral damage: Rojas had condemned his son to years of investigations and probes. Who was going to believe that Miguel Rojas didn’t know what his father was doing? Sonia could not come to his aid. There was no way the CIA would compromise itself and allow her to testify in any court, open or closed. She might be allowed to testify in a “closed” session before a congressional intelligence committee, but that would never help Miguel. She knew this, knew the full extent of her betrayal. Her strength thoroughly impressed Moore.

Towers had allowed the Mexican medics to bandage him up, and they’d stopped the bleeding, but as soon as he and Moore arrived in San Diego, he was going to the hospital for some additional care. He needed X-rays, an MRI, and stitches, since the exit wound on his shoulder was not pretty, but he insisted on having that work done back in San Diego. And so he was resting easy at Moore’s side.

For his part, Moore had only a few bruises on his chest, new additions to a collection that had been growing since the start of the operation. With his computer balanced on his lap, he watched the Mexican news coverage of the raid on Rojas’s mansion and snickered over how the media billed it as the “shocking discovery of a secret life led by one of the world’s wealthiest men.” As they’d planned, the Mexican Navy was given credit for the raid with no mention of American assistance. Moore couldn’t believe it, but the Mexican authorities had already allowed the media to get footage of the vaults. The walls of money were long gone, having already been “taken care of” by the FES troops. The Mexican government was no doubt torn between being grateful and being furious over a rogue FES mission that had received no clearance from anyone but had turned into a remarkable find and a great public-relations story of the Mexican president’s war on drugs.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press had picked up another story, of a government raid on the jungle warehouse of Juan Ramón Ballesteros, reputed leader of one of Colombia’s most productive and profitable cocaine cartels, with direct ties to the Juárez Cartel of Mexico (as revealed to them earlier by Dante Corrales). Ballesteros had, quite surprisingly, been captured alive, and Moore accessed a CIA report to learn that fellow agents had been the ones leading the raid on Ballesteros’s camp. Hooyah. Another small battle won.

True to his word, Towers handed over the name of every corrupt Federal Police officer that Gómez had given them, twenty-two names in all, including a surprising if not depressing revelation: The secretary of public security in the federal cabinet was also on Rojas’s payroll. The names were not only delivered to the Federal Police but deliberately leaked to the media and e-mailed to the president of Mexico himself. Rioting of the kind that Gloria Vega had described outside the Delicias station would soon occur all over Juárez and in cities throughout Mexico, as local officers demanded the ousting of their corrupt bosses. Towers had said he wanted to force the issue, and, oh, yes, they were forcing it, all right. Gómez, who believed he was getting a plea bargain, would be extradited to the United States to face conspiracy-to-murder charges and everything else the attorneys could throw at him. Small battle number two won …

Turncoat sicario Dante Corrales was going to be placed in the witness protection program as he continued to name names and help tear apart the cartel. His intel regarding the cartel’s connections in Afghanistan and Pakistan was, however, dated, with the leads he’d given them on Rahmani’s whereabouts yesterday’s news, according to Moore’s colleagues operating in the region. Moore had already sent a text message to Wazir to see if he’d learned anything more about the Hand of Fatima pendant and the group of Taliban that Moore so firmly believed had entered the United States. The Agency still had no leads on Gallagher’s whereabouts (he’d obviously had his shoulder beacon surgically removed), although he had been identified as the man who’d hired the kid to paint the police cars. As a field agent, Gallagher had been trained to find people who didn’t want to be found and was an expert at dropping off the grid himself. Over the years, he’d studied all the different methods people used to conceal themselves — and he’d learned which ones had worked and which had not. Finding him would cost money, time, assets, and, Moore contended, a feverish obsession.

Sometime later, Moore fell asleep and was awakened by the single attendant who asked that he sit up and fasten his seat belt.

Once on the ground, Sonia said she was catching another flight back to Langley, where she’d be debriefed by her people.

“You did a great job,” Moore told her. “I mean it.”

She smiled tightly. “Thank you.”

Moore drove Towers over to Sharp Memorial Hospital, a level 1 trauma center. When the nurses learned that Towers was a law enforcement officer, they treated him like royalty, and he was seen by a doctor within ten minutes. They told Moore their timing was fortunate. In a few hours, all of the rush-hour car accident victims would begin pouring in — just another day at a trauma center in a big city.

While seated in the waiting room, Moore read an e-mail from Slater’s assistant, who said they were hoping to schedule a video conference later in the day. Moore had already spoken at length with his bosses during the plane ride back.

As he was about to doze off yet again, a gunshot echoed as though through mountains. Moore cursed and shuddered awake. That wasn’t a gunshot, but his phone was vibrating: a call from Wazir. Moore rose and stepped out of the waiting room and into the hallway. “How are you, my friend?”

“I know it is early there, but I had to call. I thought I would leave you a message.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Some of the informants your men recruited have brought trouble. Another drone launched missiles yesterday, killing one of my best sources of information. You need to stop this.”

“I’ll make a call as soon as we’re finished.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t help me. Your agency is directing the strikes on the people I need most.”

“Wazir, I understand that.”

“Good.”

“Do you have anything for me?”

“Bad news. A group of seventeen men entered the United States through a tunnel between Mexicali and Calexico, just as you feared. Samad, the man who is Rahmani’s fist, is with them, along with two of his lieutenants, Talwar and Niazi. Samad has been known to wear the Hand of Fatima.”

Moore balled his hand into a fist and held back the curses. “I need everything you can get on those men, all seventeen of them. And I need to know where Samad and Rahmani are …right now.”

“I’m already working on that. Rahmani is here, but he keeps moving, and as I said, it’s getting very dangerous for me. Stop the drone attacks. Tell your people to back off so I can work for you.”

“I will.”

Moore immediately called Slater, who was en route to his office. Moore conveyed what Wazir had said and added, “I need you to stop the drone attacks. Let ’em run recon, but no bombing. Not now.”

“I need actionable intel.”

“You won’t get it if you kill my sources. I just got confirmation. Samad’s already here. He’s got a team. Gallagher helped him.”

“I’ll get with DHS and see if they’re willing to step up some operations and raise the terror alert status.”

Specific government activities related to specific threat levels were not fully revealed to the public, and often the Agency was not made aware of every other department’s activities (no surprise there), given that deep-cover operations like Sonia’s were not disclosed to the rest of the Agency itself. Certain measures had already been challenged in court as being illegal, and the courts had yet to rule on many of those issues, even as the current system suffered accusations of being politically manipulated (threat levels being raised before elections, et cetera).

Moore thanked Slater, then added, “It’s imperative now that we hold fire, all right? My guy Wazir is a good man, the best guy I’ve got. He’ll help us find these bastards. Just hold fire.”

Slater hesitated at first, then said, “Keep me informed on how Towers is doing. I’ve got a full plate today, but I’ll talk to you later.”

Kashif Aslam, a forty-one-year-old Pakistani immigrant, dreamed of one day owning his own 7-Eleven, but for now he managed the store on Reynard Way, barely a mile from the airport. By popular demand from a small group of Pakistanis living in the immediate area, Aslam started selling pakoras, a Pakistani finger-food snack consisting of potato or onion or cauliflower deep-fried in a chickpea batter. Each morning his wife would get up early to make the batter, alternating between the potato, onion, and cauliflower, and Aslam would bring the pakoras to work and complete the fritters in the store’s deep fryer. The snacks were such a success that the owner began paying Aslam for all the supplies and for his wife’s labor.

After six years of managing the same location, Aslam was very familiar with all of his local customers, especially his fellow Pakistanis. Just before noon, three strangers in their early twenties had come in and rejoiced over the fritters. They were all countrymen, who had spoken in Urdu and had cleaned him out of every last pakora. Of course they had roused his curiosity. Aslam had asked them how they’d heard about him and the snacks, and they said that they had a friend who worked at the airport, but they had, oddly enough, been unable to give him a name, saying it was another friend who’d made contact. That could very well be true, but there was something troublesome about these men, their nervous reaction when he’d asked, their unwillingness to discuss how long they’d been in the country and exactly where they were from in Pakistan. Aslam decided to eavesdrop on their conversation outside the store, where they’d stood, eating heartily. He pretended to be taking out the trash, walking around the back toward the big Dumpster, when he’d heard one of them talking about flight numbers and flight patterns.

Aslam was a true believer in America; the country had been very good to him, his wife, and their six daughters. He did not want any trouble, and, more important, he did not want anything to interfere with his new life and promising future.

While he couldn’t prove anything, Aslam thought the men might be criminals — smugglers perhaps — or in the country illegally, and he did not want the authorities to associate him or the store in any way with them. He did not want them coming back. They were driving a dark red Nissan compact car, and Aslam had been careful to record their tag number. After they’d left, he’d called the police and reported the incident to one of two officers who had come to take his statement. Then, thirty minutes later, a man who identified himself as Peter Zarick, an FBI agent, arrived to interview him. He said they would follow up on the tag number and assured him that he would not be associated with them in any way.

“What happens now?” he asked the man before he left.

“My boss will pass this information on to all the other agencies.”

“That’s very good,” said Aslam. “Because I don’t want any trouble for anyone.”

FBI Agent Peter Zarick got in his car and drove away from the 7-Eleven. When he got back to the field office, he’d turn in his 302 report to Meyers, the special agent in charge, who would fax it to Virginia, to the National Counterterrorism Center. The NCTC hosted three daily secure video teleconferences (SVTCs) and maintained constant voice and electronic contact with major intelligence and counterterrorism community players and foreign partners.

Ever since that BOLO (Be On the Lookout) alert had gone out for terrorists in Calexico, and the field office had learned that a fellow agent, Michael Ansara, had been killed, Zarick had been working his tail off, canvassing the area for any leads — and this was the first good one they had. He could barely contain himself when he reached the Field Intelligence Group Office on Aero Drive. He charged out of his car and ran.

By two p.m. Moore and Towers had left the hospital and returned to the conference room. Towers was feeling great after having his shoulder and arm treated. The GSW (gunshot wound) had appeared a lot worse than it actually was, and the doctor had spent some time telling Towers just how lucky he’d been, that he could have had a collapsed lung and so on. They wanted to give him a sling, but he’d refused. Moore had been around many operators who’d been shot, and sometimes even the meanest badasses turned into crying thumb-suckers when they were injured, but Towers was a tough and obviously thick-skinned bastard. He’d wanted no sympathy or special treatment, only a chicken sandwich with french fries, so they’d hit the drive-thru of a KFC. Moore had ordered the same, and while they ate, they watched CNN to see if it had picked up anything else on the Rojas story. At the same time, Moore scanned the intel gathered thus far on the hunt for Samad and his group. The trail ended abruptly at the Calexico airport. They’d checked all the records of all the flights from all the airports within the range of a variety of aircraft. It was needle-in-a-haystack time, and as Towers had pointed out, the FAA had docs for only about two-thirds of all small planes. Witnesses were few and far between, and even if the group had been sighted, Moore figured they’d disguised themselves as migrant workers, who were a common sight and always on the move.

Part of Moore wanted to believe that Samad and his group were just sleepers, that their mission was to live secretly in the United States for years until they would be called into action, and that would give him and the Agency the time they needed for the hunt …and the kill. He could reassure himself with that, but in the next thought he’d imagine what they’d been carrying in those rectangular packs: rifles, RPGs, missile launchers, and, God forbid, nukes? Of course, the Agency’s analysts — in conjunction with more than a dozen other agencies, including DHS, NEST (the Nuclear Emergency Support Team), the FBI, and Interpol — were scouring the planet for evidence of recent arms sales, especially between the Taliban in Waziristan and the Pakistan Army. After dozens of false leads, the trail in that regard had gone cold, and Moore suddenly cursed aloud.

“Take it easy, bro,” Towers said. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a plastic prescription bottle. “You want a painkiller?”

Moore just gave him a look.

At about 4:45 p.m., Moore received an e-mail that took him aback. Maqsud Kayani, the commander of that Pakistan patrol boat and nephew of the late Colonel Saadat Khodai, had written to share some important information he’d been given via an ISI agent who’d been a friend of his uncle’s. The ISI had recently questioned a group of Taliban sympathizers up in Waziristan, one of whom revealed that his brother was on some kind of mission in the United States. The more ironic or perhaps fateful part of the e-mail followed:

The brother was in San Diego.

Moore shared the e-mail with Towers, who nearly fell out of his chair as he spotted something on his own computer screen. “We got a good lead from the Bureau, right here on the 302. Three guys at a 7-Eleven, all from Pakistan. Guy who reported them was from Pakistan, too. He got a tag number.”

“They run it?”

“Yeah, came from a rental car place near the airport. Guy who took it fits the description of any one of the 7-Eleven guys. Looks like his ID was fake, though, and so was his address — whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on now. Holy shit.”

“What?” Moore demanded.

“Airport security just called. They spotted the car in the cell-phone lot on North Harbor. They have orders not to approach.”

Moore burst to his feet. “Let’s go!”

They were out the door in seconds, practically leaping into their SUV, with Moore at the wheel and Towers on his cell phone, talking to a guy named Meyers at the Bureau who already had his Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit en route.

“Tell them to hold back!” hollered Towers. “We don’t want them running. Keep them back!”

Moore had the airport programmed into the windshield-mounted GPS, so the unit began showing and calling out the turns: west on Viewridge toward Balboa, hang a left, get on to I-15, then merge later on with I-8. Freeway driving during rush hour left him white-knuckling his way around slower-moving vehicles. The airport was about fourteen miles away, a twenty-minute drive without traffic, but once they got onto the San Diego Freeway to head south, the ribbons of brake lights and hoods gleaming in the sun stretched to the horizon.

And that’s when Moore took to the shoulder and hauled ass, leaving a cloud of debris in their wake. They rumbled as long as they could over fast-food garbage and pieces of tractor-trailer tires until they were forced to weave back into traffic to make their next exit.

Samad’s mouth had gone dry as they pulled into the lot. He checked his watch: 5:29 p.m. local time. He glanced over to Niazi, seated in the van’s passenger seat. The young man’s eyes grew wider, and he licked his lips like a snow leopard before the kill. Samad craned his head back to Talwar, who had the Anza propped on his shoulder and was praying quietly. The van’s engine thrummed, and Samad tapped a button, lowering his window to breathe in the cooler evening air.

He reached into his pocket and unwrapped a piece of chocolate. He examined it as though it were a precious gem before popping it into his mouth.

The piece of paper lying across his lap, the one Rahmani referred to as the target report, had cell-phone numbers handwritten beside each of the cities:

The planes would be lifting off within minutes of one another, and all of Samad’s crews had finished checking in to say that their equipment was ready and that all of their flights were running on time, despite some earlier concerns about summer storms. Samad no longer had any uncertainties. He’d realized that even if he gave up, walked away, guided by the guilt imposed upon him by the memory of his dead father, that Talwar and Niazi would go on without him, that the others would go on without him. There was no stopping the jihad. He would die a fool and a coward. Thus before leaving for the mission, he had lit a match and had burned the photograph of his father, had left the ashes in the bathroom sink. They said their afternoon prayer, and then Samad had driven away from the apartment with narrow eyes and a clenched fist.

An airport police car cruised through the lot, the officers searching for unattended vehicles. Samad lifted his cell phone and pretended to speak. As he’d seen before, the other drivers were entirely consumed by their electronic devices, and there was an eerie calm that settled over the lot, broken momentarily by the next flight thundering on by.

5:36 p.m.

Samad brought up the iPhone app as their secondary source of identifying their target plane. He’d come to discover there was a thirty-second delay in the information the app gave him, but that didn’t matter. All Talwar needed to do was sight the target, and the missile would do the rest.

5:37 p.m.

The seconds were minutes, the minutes hours, as his pulse began to race. The sky had turned a bluish yellow, streaked by beams of the setting sun, with only a few finger clouds to the east. They would have a spectacular and unobstructed view of the launch.

His phone vibrated. And there they were: the text-message reports from their team inside the airport.

At the age of sixteen, Dan Burleson had soloed in a Cessna 150 over Modesto, California. He was flying planes before he had a driver’s license. He’d saved all of his lawn-cutting money for two years to take flying lessons. He’d grown up in the Salinas Valley and had been mesmerized by the crop-duster pilots swooping down to deliver their cargo. He knew that’s what he wanted to do. For the next three decades he pursued his passion for flying, spraying cotton fields in Georgia, serving as an airborne traffic reporter in Florida, and flying banking cargo and medical specimens out of the Southeast. He piloted single-engine planes, Cessna 21 °Centurions, and twin-engine cargo planes, Beechcraft Baron 58s. He’d experienced every conceivable equipment failure imaginable, flying on one engine and nearly crashing when his plane was flipped over during a storm. He could hear the rivets popping and felt certain he was going to die.

All of which was to say that Mr. Dan Burleson was not your average commercial airline passenger. He had a keen interest in what was happening in the cockpit and could tell you when the pilots were switching command to the flight computer to literally take over the plane during the climb out to altitude. The pilot would input turns and altitude directions via keyboard tabulation or by rotating a dial to the direction desired. For example, Airport Traffic Control might call with “Delta 1234, turn right to 180 degrees.” The pilot would rotate a dial on the FMS (Flight Management System) to 180, and the plane would start turning in that direction to meet that instruction received from ATC while the plane was being controlled by the FMS computer. Every time he flew, Dan would sit there imagining what was happening in the cockpit. Call it force of habit.

On this particular evening, he was seated in 21J, the exit row, with the window at his right shoulder. At over six-feet-five and three hundred pounds, he never had much choice in seat selection. Exit row was the name of the game. He was on his way to Minneapolis for a weeklong fishing trip with two high school buddies who promised him trophy-sized smallmouth bass. The wife had given Dan the okay, and his grown son, who’d been invited, had been forced to work instead.

They were taxiing along toward the runway, and Dan leaned back and glanced across the aisle: a college-aged girl was reading a textbook with the word Aesthetics in the title, and beside her, a dark-skinned young man, perhaps Indian or Middle Eastern, sat quietly, his head lowered, his eyes closed. He looked scared. Pussy.

“Please slide your tray tables to their upright position …”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dan said with a groan.

The fifty-space San Park cell-phone lot was located across a tree-lined drive from the Coast Guard Station’s main gate and its rows of tiled-roof buildings. The lot was a rectangular strip of pavement with a single row of angled parking spaces set along tall rows of shrubs and a chain-link fence, beyond which stood hangars and other airport service facilities.

“Meyers split up his people. He’s got six across the street at the Coast Guard Station, and he’s got another four getting up on the roofs of the hangars to the north,” said Towers. “The red Nissan is parked at the far end, south side. We’re the team moving in.”

“Not you, just me,” said Moore, pulling into the lot and taking the nearest spot to their right beside a yellow Park-n-Ride van with dark tinted windows.

“I’m good,” argued Towers. “I’m coming.”

Moore winced. “You’re the boss, boss.” He unzipped his jacket so he’d have quick access to his shoulder holster, then hustled out of the SUV, keeping close to the shrubs, Towers tight to his shadow. A few SWAT team operators crawled catlike up the backside of the Coast Guard Station’s roof. Moore caught movement up on the roofs of the hangars to their right, and for just a second he saw a head pop up, then vanish. These SWAT unit guys were hard-core assaulters, breachers, and sniper/observers, outfitted for war with Kevlar helmets, goggles, bulletproof vests, MOLLE (Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment) gear buckling with attached equipment pouches, and H&K MP5 submachine guns — the standard-issue rifles for everyone but the snipers, who fielded the Precision Arms.308-caliber sniper rifle. One of Moore’s buddies from SEAL Team 8 had left the Navy to become an FBI SWAT team member, and he’d schooled Moore in their weapons, tactics, techniques, and procedures. He’d even tried to recruit Moore, who at the time was being heavily courted by the CIA. The point was, Moore felt comfortable supported by these determined and highly trained operators.

The sign posted at the lot’s entrance warned of a one-hour time limit and that vehicles must remain running — this to discourage long-term parking and loitering, and to create a sense of urgency in drivers all paying exorbitant fuel prices.

Consequently, as Moore and Towers approached the brick-red Nissan Versa, he saw immediately that the car was empty, its engine off. His shoulders shrank. The men hurried forward, and in frustration Moore rapped a fist on the driver’s-side window.

Two SWAT team operators, along with a third man, middle-aged, gray sideburns, came around the corner and jogged toward them. The only tactical gear this older man wore was a vest and a helmet.

“Towers? Moore?” he called. “I’m Meyers. We empty here or what?”

Moore whirled around, studying the lot, his gaze panning the long row of cars and empty spaces, like ones and zeros, bits and bytes. Why would these guys leave a car in the cell-phone lot? Were they coming back for it within the hour? Were they concerned that they’d get towed? Where were they now?

He was just checking his watch, 5:42 p.m., when the back door of the yellow Park-n-Ride van beside their SUV slammed open, and out stepped a man wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a black balaclava concealing his face. He was shouldering a missile launcher.

Two more similarly dressed men burst out behind him, carrying machine guns.

The launcher guy rushed back toward Harbor Drive, positioning himself between the street and a tree to his left. He lifted his weapon into the air—

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!