True Faith and Allegiance

64

Back in the stairwell Dom was glad to see that the three women from the counter had left. He began moving up the stairs, covering high, and Adara moved up beside him. He whispered into her ear as he ascended.

“We have less than three minutes to engage on the fifth floor. Unknown number of shooters. They think al-Matari is there with Hembrick, along with hostages.”

Adara nodded and the two of them increased their rate of climb.

On the door out to the fifth floor they paused. Dom brought a hand up and with his fingers he reminded Adara the room number was five-one-four. They opened the door and spun out into the hall, Dom to the left and Adara to the right. In front of them they saw the devastation of the suicide bombing, as well as the explosion that took place at the far end of the hall at the stairwell there. Olive-clad men with black body armor lay all over the place, blood and body parts were strewn on the blue and gold carpet, and the walls were ripped, burned, and bloody.

There were dead men and women in plainclothes as well, and Dom suspected some, perhaps all, were FBI.

But there was no one moving in sight.

Dom led the way to room 514, passing bodies along the way. Each body he saw had a gunshot wound to the head, indicating someone had made sure there were no wounded left out here in the hall.

He saw the door to 514 was propped open before he got there. Adara was just feet behind him, and she noticed 515 also had its door open.

Dom arrived first, spun right in front of the door, and saw a single black man on his knees behind the bed, a submachine gun in his hand. He’d obviously not heard anyone coming up the hallway, and he snapped his gun up in surprise at the movement.

Adara spun left, and she saw two men there, both armed and barricaded behind a desk and a bed, on opposite sides of the room. To their right on the floor were several SWAT officers facedown, with their hands cuffed behind their backs.

The two Campus operators engaged their targets simultaneously.

Dom shot David Hembrick through the forehead before the terrorist managed to fire a single round. He then spun to help Adara when he heard her shooting, and he dropped to his knees and leaned right to try to get a line of sight around her.

Adara fired over and over again, hitting the man behind the desk in the shoulder and hip. He dropped his weapon and fell, so she spun to the second shooter, crouched behind the bed.

Before she could fire she lurched back and fell, tumbling backward over Dom and down to the carpet.

Adara had taken a bullet through her thigh, but as she went down, she continued pumping rounds at the barricaded man’s position.

She landed on her back as Dom began engaging the man behind the bed, but as Adara looked forward, she could see under the bed, and she realized she had eyes on the man’s knee, shin, and foot.

As pain jolted up from her thigh wound she fought through it, aimed under the bed at thirty feet, and shot the man straight through the kneecap.

Her target lowered behind the bed, stopped firing, and screamed.

Adara saw her pistol locked open, meaning she’d fired eleven rounds at the two targets.

“He’s wounded!” she shouted to Dom.

Caruso rose to his feet, raced into the room, leaping onto the bed. He emptied his magazine straight down into the wounded man’s back.

Quickly he snatched the Uzi that had fallen on top of the bed when the man went down; then he leapt from the bed and ran back to Adara. She had already begun applying direct pressure on her bloody thigh.

“I’m fine! Secure the scene!” she shouted, knowing that his first thought would be to take care of her.

Dom began checking bathrooms and blind corners, worrying about Adara and hoping like hell everything had gone according to plan downstairs.

Thomas Russell stood at the back of one of the JTTF mobile command centers, listening to the sounds of gunfire just a block away, while simultaneously listening to the SWAT transmissions coming through speakers around him.

There had been ten seconds of sustained shooting, emanating both from the broken windows on the fifth floor of the Drake and from the SWAT team engaging in the lobby. The sounds echoed around the high buildings on all sides of him.

Then the shooting stopped, and a transmission came over the speakers.

“This is Delta One. All targets in the lobby down. Explosives are secure. Moving up to begin room clearing. We’ll need CPD blue units to assist with hostage evac.”

The SWAT team commander stood near Russell, and he replied, “Copy all, send the hostages out the front with their hands up and we’ll start moving patrol officers in to frisk them. Get to the fifth floor and assist FBI assets there. Find our men and confirm you have al-Matari’s body.”

As the order was acknowledged, Russell’s mobile phone vibrated on his hip. He rejected the call, then spent a minute more listening in to police transmissions at the Drake. It sounded like everything was under control, and Russell decided to head over to the Drake himself. He went out onto the portable steps in front of the command center, where his phone buzzed again. This time he snatched it and answered it quickly.

“Yeah?”

It was the same voice he’d heard before on the line in the JTTF command center. “Did you really think it would be that easy?”

Shit. It was al-Matari. “Where the hell are you? Your men are dead and your bomb is defused.”

“The bomb was a distraction, nothing more. I doubted my mujahideen would even get as far as they did.”

Russell did not understand. Before he could say anything, Special Agent Jeffcoat met him on the back steps of the command center and said, “Fifth floor secure. Al-Matari is not, repeat, not there.”

Russell spoke into the phone slowly. “What do you want?”

“Director Russell… what I want is simple. I want a war. My side and your side. We’ve had skirmishes for weeks, but tonight was the first major battle, and you have lost.”

“You might have slipped out, but you have won nothing.”

“Haven’t I? A question for you. Right now, where are all the cameras pointed in America? Where is the attention, and where are over one hundred U.S. government soldiers and spies, infidel enemies of the caliphate?”

A wave of terror washed over Thomas Russell’s body, because he understood almost instantly. His eyes rose to the rooftops around him.

At the top of his lungs he screamed, “Incoming!”

Before anyone, Russell included, could move, sounds of broken glass came over the heavy sustained din of the JTTF command center. And before anyone could identify the source of the noise, flashes of rockets erupted from the windows high in four tall buildings on the south side of East Delaware, and smoke trails streaked down, all converging on the two trailers and the men and women around them.

Algiers and Tripoli had removed panes of glass in their room at the Raffaello Hotel the moment it was confirmed where the mobile command post would deploy in the neighborhood. With their ninth-floor view of East Delaware, they merely had to fire their AT4 launchers down and to their right.

Musa al-Matari himself and Omar, the Detroit cell leader, stood in separate rooms of an unoccupied condominium on the eighth floor of a residential building two doors east of the Raffaello. They had to smash out sections of glass with hammers brought along for the job, then simply heft and point their AT4s down and to the left, a simple shot for both men, even though neither had ever fired the American portable antitank weapon.

Al-Matari and the two North Africans had debated for a day about where they needed to position themselves for the least amount of movement before the main thrust of the evening’s attack. They’d reserved and checked into two other hotels within three blocks of here, and had been prepared to move to any number of different buildings, although they knew the JTTF had a limited number of options, and this made al-Matari and his men’s jobs easier.

They all agreed the mobile command center wouldn’t park on Lake Shore Drive or Michigan Avenue, as both of these streets were too congested to close off without additional chaos to an already chaotic scene. They decided East Delaware would therefore be the most likely choice.

The four men had waited as late in the JTTF operation to retake the Drake as possible, allowing more time for any JTTF officials in the area to arrive on scene, and for more law enforcement to be occupied at or around the Drake, so al-Matari and his men could escape.

And their patience had paid dividends.

When the scene was secure at the Drake and al-Matari made the call to Russell, the four men launched their weapons near simultaneously, sending four eighty-four-millimeter high-explosive dual-purpose rockets down into the JTTF command post below.

After the four launches, the men tossed their spent tubes onto the floors of their respective rooms, then hefted RPG-7 launchers. They fired a second salvo closer to the police vehicles on the perimeter of the command center, creating four smaller explosions than the AT4s, but killing many of those who would have soon been on the way looking for them, keeping other first responders pinned down and terrified, and adding to the real estate of the chaotic scene.

Twenty seconds after Director Russell screamed his futile warning, thirty-seven top members of the Chicago JTTF were dead or dying, Russell and Jeffcoat included. Other top local officials from FBI, CIA, DIA, ICE, and Secret Service, along with thirteen CPD officers, were among the dead. Another seventy-one in total, including police and civilians in the surrounding buildings, were wounded, many by falling debris.

After the explosions on East Delaware, confusion on the fifth floor of the Drake hotel reigned for minutes, as the SWAT men called into their radios, but could not get clear answers on whether they should hold or come back down. Transmissions crackled over one another and it seemed as if one hundred sirens wailed outside.

Dom and Adara had worked together to bandage her leg. She fought the pain and the nausea, and he got her up to her feet with her arm around his neck. He then tried to call Jeffcoat back, but the call rolled into voice mail.

The five surviving SWAT officers were unbound and the bodies of their fallen brethren were reluctantly left right where they lay for the investigators, then everyone began moving down the stairs slowly. Dom helped Adara along, still unaware of what had happened outside, but sure as hell certain he needed to get his girlfriend to the hospital.

Other SWAT units and regular police were clearing the other floors, civilians came down from above, and law enforcement, along with other first responders, tried to go up, and it became a chaotic logjam in the stairwell, principally because, for some reason, there didn’t seem to be anyone coordinating anything from the top down.

The four terrorists left their rocket launchers in their rooms and descended quickly. They wore suits and ties and they carried only their Glock pistols under their coats, sacrificing firepower but fitting in with shocked civilians out in the streets.

There was no getaway vehicle close by for the men. By design the four ran and walked individually down streets and back alleys to the south, and hailed taxis seven to ten blocks away.

As al-Matari sat in the back of his taxi twenty minutes after the attack, he thanked Allah for his victory, then thought of the smug Saudi who had conceived the plan to attack in America using special intelligence to target military, espionage, and counterterrorism officials. Yes, his mysterious benefactor had passed on the intelligence about Thomas Russell of the JTTF in Chicago, and this was how the Yemeni had gotten the original idea for the attack as well as the man’s phone number. He then spoofed the landline inside room 514 of the Drake with a simple piece of software to solidify to Russell that al-Matari was, indeed, there inside the Drake.

But the rest of this mission al-Matari had planned on his own. He’d done the research of JTTF operations here, he’d watched videos of their mobile command posts outside Soldier Field during their mock exercise weeks ago, and he’d come up with the plan for the ruse to get JTTF deployed to lure the area’s top men and women into one small place at the same time, so he could ambush them.

He’d lost ten of his remaining Language School members in this glorious attack, and the loss of life at the Drake ultimately wouldn’t be what he’d hoped, but at the moment he was not concerned about this at all. The Islamic State Foreign Intelligence Bureau would send him a hundred new recruits from abroad, and he’d get a thousand more local self-radicalized recruits here in the U.S. after the video he made of the attack from his mounted phone was cleaned up and distributed by the Global Islamic Media Front.

And more important than anything else, there would be no way President Jack Ryan could avoid a full military deployment to combat the powerful force that had made Middle America look so unsafe, and made this nation of infidels look so impotent.

Al-Matari did not return to the Chicago safe house on North Winchester, nor did the other three men. No, they each took their own cab to the same bar in Pilsen, and then, when their drivers had gone, they walked into the bar, out through the rear exit, and climbed into two vehicles parked there.

Each vehicle contained four Uzis, one thousand rounds of ammunition, and two shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.

They were out of the city by two a.m. Chicago had been a success, but Chicago was behind them now.

Now it was time for all four men to converge on Washington, D.C., where more infidel victims awaited them.