True Faith and Allegiance

68

Sami bin Rashid listened to the phone ring several times, until finally al-Matari answered on the other end.

“Yes?”

“Congratulations, brother. Chicago was a crippling blow. A masterpiece.”

Al-Matari did not share the jubilance of bin Rashid. “The President spoke at the White House today. He still refuses to put more troops in the Middle East. Even after last night. What kind of fool is he?”

“Patience. It will happen. And I think I know how to make it happen even more quickly.”

“How?”

“I am sending you another folder. This one is the best of them all. It will stick a knife right into the President’s heart, and there is no doubt we will have our war after this. He will bring his armies into the quagmire, your leadership will raise a call to arms, the believers will come from all over the world, and the caliphate will grow across the land.”

Abu Musa al-Matari didn’t buy into the flowery language of the Saudi. He merely said, “I’ll read what you send me.” And hung up the phone.

Fifteen minutes later he called back. His demeanor had changed completely. “This is authentic? This is real?”

“Of course it is real, brother,” bin Rashid said. “It is the truth. The son of Jack Ryan is alone in the woods, a lamb awaiting slaughter.”

“Incredible,” al-Matari said.

“But don’t delay. As the file says, he will be in that location for less than a day. By tomorrow morning he will return to Washington, D.C. You have to do this now.”

Al-Matari did not discuss operational details with the Saudi, and he was not about to change that now. He just said, “I will see what can be done.”

But right now Musa al-Matari himself was in a car with Algiers, and just behind them Omar and Tripoli followed. They were in central Pennsylvania, and with a check of the vehicle’s GPS, he saw they could be at the location in less than four hours.

He had two more operatives in D.C. right now, about to begin an operation within an hour, and four more en route from other areas. He could bring them all to meet him near this cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and together they could attack.

If the targeting information was correct — and the Saudi had sent good information thus far — then he and nine others should have no problem assassinating the son of the President.

He gave the order to his vehicle and the vehicle behind them, and then he sent the coordinates to the Atlanta cell.

They would all go after Jack Ryan, Jr.

With a little makeup, civilian dress, and hair blown out, Carrie Ann Davenport didn’t much look like the captain of an attack helicopter, and standing here in the sun at a backyard party with a drink in her hand, no one would have guessed that just a few days earlier she had been fighting on the front lines in Iraq.

She drank tonic water with lime and picked at finger food on a table as she chatted at the party in College Park, Maryland, at the home of a former commanding officer. Though the afternoon temperature was sweltering for most Marylanders, Carrie Ann found it pleasant. At the moment she wore a skirt with a sleeveless blouse, a far cry from the flight helmet, body armor, aircrew battle dress uniform, boots, and gloves that normally kept her roasting in the heat of Iraq.

She forced herself to focus on the now and not on the fact that in exactly one week she’d be wheels-up again, heading back toward the war zone.

Around her at the party were mostly Apache and Chinook pilots, both present and former. She’d served with many of them on deployments, and trained with many others stateside. A couple of senior officers here at the party worked at the Pentagon, as did her former commanding officer, who was now a lieutenant colonel and worked in strategic planning.

Carrie Ann was with the 2nd Battalion, 159th Aviation Regiment (Attack Reconnaissance) of the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade. She was stationed at Katterbach Kaserne Army base in Germany, which meant she was the only person here from her own unit. But she made friends easily, and was having an especially good time talking to a group of nonmilitary in the mix: a half-dozen liberal arts students from the University of Maryland, here at the lieutenant colonel’s house because they rented the house next door and her former commanding officer had invited them over for drinks and food.

None of the U of M students believed her at first when she said she was an Army officer. She looked just like another coed to them. When they asked her to prove it with an ID, she instead reached down the front of her blouse and pulled out her dog tags, then spun them around to the laughs of all around her, male and female alike.

A good-looking guy about her age who said he was in grad school working on an MA in history offered to go fetch her another vodka tonic, incorrectly assuming she was drinking alcohol, but she demurred. She wouldn’t mind talking to the guy some more, when there wasn’t a group of his friends standing around, but instead she went by herself to the picnic table set up with beers, booze, and mixers and fixed herself another tonic and lime.

Carrie liked the fact that, right now anyway, she didn’t feel much like the copilot-gunner of Pyro 1–1. She loved the Army but didn’t mind stepping away from it once in a while to remind herself of her past life, her other identity. This would all change next week, when she donned her ABDUs, packed her 5.11 backpack, and headed to the airport from her parents’ house in Cleveland for her flight to Germany. She’d be at Katterbach less than a day before returning to the battle zone, although she did not yet know where, exactly, she would be sent.

As she stood there alone and sipped her drink she glanced in the direction of the good-looking grad student, hoping to catch his eye, and while she did so it occurred to her that America itself had turned into something of a battle zone in the past few weeks. The same ISIS monsters she’d been fighting over there were now over here — the Chicago massacre the evening before was naturally the main topic of conversation here at the party — and every day on the news there were new stories about a soldier or intelligence officer being targeted somewhere in the country.

It pissed her off, and made her eager to go back to work, where she might be able to have an effect on the war here at home.

She glanced up from her drink again to see the grad student looking her way, and then he smiled and began walking over, leaving his friends behind. Carrie Ann started to blush, and she hoped like hell the tan she’d picked up in Afghanistan would hide it, while she simultaneously wished like hell she had poured a double shot of gin in her tonic to calm her nerves.

Just as the guy approached he made a peculiar face. It suddenly did not look like he was interested in her at all, but almost immediately she realized he was focused on something behind her. She smiled at his expression and looked back over her shoulder.

And when she did, her own face took on a look of confusion.

An African American woman and a Middle Eastern man, both in their early twenties, walked up the driveway around to the party at the back of the house. There were African Americans and Middle Easterners all around the party, but these were the only two wearing black windbreakers that were clearly covering something attached to their bodies, and as they moved forward they separated, one going to the right along the fence at the far end of the carport, and the other breaking left along the rear of the house.

Their dead-set expressions, their dress, their movements. Instantly Carrie Ann knew something was seriously wrong.

The Middle Eastern man was just twenty-five feet away from Carrie Ann when he reached back over his head with both hands and then flung them forward. From each hand she recognized live grenades launching out, over her head and toward the dozens of men and women behind her. The woman standing on the driveway did the same, and one of her grenades arced through the air in the direction of the picnic table bar and Carrie Ann’s own position.

Carrie Ann Davenport turned around, took two steps toward the stunned master’s student, and she tackled him across the top of the table, knocking over bottles and cans and ice and stacks of Solo cups along with them. The two rolled off and over, and had just landed on the ground, he on top of her, as the four grenades exploded all over the garden party.

Screams and yells from the wounded and the panicked, and the chants of “Allahu Akbar” rang above it all, and then Carrie Ann heard the gunfire. From under the picnic table she could see both the attackers moving forward, pistols in their hands, shooting at men and women scrambling away in front of them.

Carrie Ann rolled off the U of M student, hiked her white sleeveless blouse out of her skirt, and reached to the small of her back. She drew a tiny Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380 pistol, reached over the top of the table, and aimed it at the body of the man walking toward her. She was just about to press the trigger when she recognized the man might have been wearing body armor under his big jacket, so she activated the Crimson Trace laser on the weapon and put the shaking laser dot on his forehead.

The Middle Eastern man fired at someone behind her running away, then he noticed her there, on her knees behind the table, just twenty feet in front of him.

United States Army Captain Carrie Ann Davenport shot the man through the left eye, dropping him to the ground and sending him writhing in shock and agony. She stood up and put another round in the back of his head, stilling him instantly.

A bullet cracked by her left ear and she looked up, saw the black female aiming at her, and then she saw the woman stumble to her right on the driveway and fall down on her side. She’d been shot by a party guest Carrie Ann had been introduced to earlier, a warrant officer and Chinook copilot. He held a Beretta M9 in his hand, one of the pistols given out to military personnel stateside in the last week, by order of the President, to help protect them from terrorists.

Carrie Ann looked back to the woman lying on the driveway, and saw her pistol out of reach; she also saw a small device in her right hand, hanging from a cable run under the cuff of her jacket.

Carrie Ann spun away, dove to the ground, and again tackled the good-looking grad student, who had just begun to climb to his knees. As she covered him a massive detonation erupted behind her, louder than all four grenades going off at the same time, and shrapnel ripped across the backyard. She felt the wind sucked from her lungs, the bits of debris cutting into her legs, and she heard nothing other than the ringing in her ears.

For a time, everything went still, then, over the ringing, she heard the cries and screams ring out anew.

Carrie Ann looked down at the man — she didn’t even know his name — and saw he was alive but out of it, dazed and disoriented.

He looked up at her and blinked. “Are you… okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She rose to her knees, felt blood on her legs, and then pulled herself up to her feet, using the picnic table to do so. There were easily twenty dead or wounded around her, and she staggered into the mass of carnage, hoping to help in some small way.

Somehow, even in the middle of this, she already knew the best way for her to help was to get back into her attack helicopter and wreak some righteous payback for what had happened here just now.