True Faith and Allegiance

69

Tears streamed down the eyes of Dr. Olivia Ryan, older daughter of the President of the United States, and she fought hard the need to sniff, because it was a sound she did not want to make at the moment. She held her hand in front of her mouth, covering a small amount of the shock and surprise on her face.

And then she nodded quickly, blinking away more tears.

For several seconds she couldn’t take her eyes off the ring in the little box in front of her, and she pried them away only to look into the eyes of her boyfriend, kneeling before her.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I will!”

Davi stood and they kissed for a long moment, promised each other their undying love, and then she put the ring on her finger. Holding each other they turned and looked out over the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that played out in a perfect vista behind the big log cabin: the sunset behind them lit the sky in orange and bathed the green hills below them in soft light.

Olivia squeezed Davi hard, and said, “It’s perfect. Everything… is… perfect.”

As they gazed on at the incredible view through tears of joy, both of their heads swiveled suddenly to the sight of a man in a parachute dropping through the evening air not fifty yards from the rear of the cabin.

The parachutist hit the rolling grassy pasture hard and tumbled head over feet several times, and then his rectangular canopy collapsed on top of him. He crawled up to his knees, tried to control the lines and the chute as it re-formed, and then it pulled taut and started to drag him with it.

Olivia muttered softly, “Is this… part… of your proposal?”

Davi just said, “Uhh… I don’t know what this is.”

A second man appeared in the sky just above the first, and he landed expertly on the struggling man’s parachute, collapsing it and arresting the first man’s slide across the hill below the cabin. The second pulled out of his harness, helped the man on the ground out of his own rig, and then both men noticed the two standing by the swing on the back porch of the log cabin.

Davi stared back at them. “What on earth am I looking at?”

As one, the two men down the hillside drew submachine guns from packs harnessed to their bodies.

“Oh my God!” Olivia shouted. “Back inside! Lock the door!”

Jack Ryan, Jr., recognized his sister as she ran off, and his blood went cold. As Chavez began collecting the chutes he said, “She’s not supposed to be here.”

Ding said, “Get them in a car and on the road in the next five minutes!”

Jack raced up to the back porch of the cabin and pounded on the door. “Sally? Sally? It’s me! It’s Jack! Open up!”

The door opened slowly, and standing in front of him with wide eyes and a baffled expression on his face was Dr. Davi Kartal.

His sister’s boyfriend.

“J… Jack?”

Olivia appeared in the doorway behind Davi, saw her brother, the gun in his hand, the gear on his body. “What the hell is going on?”

Jack looked back out to the trees in the fading light. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Olivia said, “Well, I’m not pulling guns on my sibling!”

“Sorry… I didn’t recognize you at first.” He looked around some more. “Where’s the team? Where is your Secret Service detail?”

“We left them in D.C. It was a pain in the ass to get them to agree to it, but we wanted to be alone.” There was a note of frustration in Olivia’s voice, but it was clear she was astonished that her brother and another man had just dropped from the sky. “Seriously? You parachute? Since when do you know how to parachute?”

“It’s kind of a work in progress. Listen, we have to—”

Olivia held up the ring on her finger. “Davi just asked me to marry him. We were enjoying the moment, and then you dropped in unannounced.”

Jack took Davi by the shoulder quickly. “Welcome to the family.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Davi looked like he needed to sit down. Olivia just looked annoyed. She didn’t know what Jack did for a living, only vaguely that he was in corporate intelligence and worked enough with the government that she wasn’t supposed to ask any more questions. She was a strong-willed woman, so if she really had been interested she would have peppered Jack with queries — her mom and dad as well, for that matter — but she left it alone. She saw it as her brother trying to live up to her dad’s legacy in some small way, and she totally got that part of it.

Before his sister could ask him a third time why he was here, he said, “I’ve got to get you both out of here. I don’t know how much time we have. I can’t really explain but something bad is about to happen, and you need to get in your car and drive off. Get to a hotel and—”

Davi said, “My Nissan broke down coming up the mountain. It’s in a shop down in Etlan. They gave us a lift up here.”

Jack realized he hadn’t noticed a vehicle at the cabin as he parachuted down, but he’d been a little too worried about breaking his legs on landing to pay much attention at the time. “Shit,” he said.

Olivia grabbed him by the shoulder harness of the chest rig full of ammunition he wore on his body. “You are going to tell me right now what is happening!”

Jack said, “There is no other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. The ISIS attacks going on in America?”

Olivia cocked her head. “What about them?”

“Well… I have a strong suspicion some of those terrorists are on their way here. Now.”

“You mean, here to the cabin?” Olivia asked, shock in her voice. “Why on earth would they—”

Jack shrugged sheepishly. “Because I invited them. Kind of a long story.”

Just then, Jack’s radio chirped. He hadn’t put his earpiece in, and he had not answered his buzzing phone in the pack on his chest, so Clark overrode the mute feature on the UHF radio strapped to his chest and his voice blasted. “Jack, I’m in position on overwatch. How copy?”

Olivia looked at the walkie-talkie. “Is that Uncle John? He’s with you?”

Jack took the handheld unit and pressed the PTT button. “I read you five by five.”

“Why aren’t you up on comms?”

“Uhhh… we’ve got a bit of a… complication. My big sister is here.”

Olivia, still standing just behind Davi, pursed her lips and jerked her head toward Davi. Jack saw the expression and knew it well.

“Oh… along with her boyfriend… I mean, fiancé.”

Clark didn’t skip a beat. “Well, we’ll have to toast to their future some other time. For now you need to get them the hell out of there. I’ve got movement on the road. Three vehicles.”

“Three?” Jack said. He’d hoped that if he made it clear in the targeting information that he would be alone, al-Matari would just send a couple of his soldiers after him. But three vehicles sounded like more than a couple soldiers.

“You have a read of the number of pax involved?”

“Negative. Too far out. But they are pulling off the road, out of my view. I think they are going to debus there and move into the woods to approach. Don’t go into the woods, you need to hunker down.”

“Roger that. I’ll figure out what we’re doing in here.”

Chavez came through the front door now. “Jack, three doors to this building, lots of ground-floor windows. Say a dozen access points in all. We need to bunker on the second floor and engage them in the bottleneck of the stairs.”

He saw Olivia. “Hey, kiddo. It’s been a while.” He looked to Davi. “You Secret Service?”

Olivia answered for him. “He’s my fiancé, Davi.”

“Oh. Congratulations. Sorry to ruin your day, Jack didn’t tell me this was going to turn into a family affair.”

Jack said, “Didn’t know. She left her Secret Service detail in D.C.”

“Too bad,” Ding said. “We sure as hell could have used a couple more guns.”

Jack shuffled everyone up the staircase off the main room. As he did so, Davi took his new fiancée by the hand.

“Tell me this doesn’t happen every day.”

Olivia said, “I swear it doesn’t.”

Jack said, “Davi, do you know anything about guns?”

The young doctor almost stammered his reply. “Well… uh… I did my two years of mandatory service in Turkey. Fifteen years ago. I was a medic, but they gave us some firearms training.”

“On pistols?”

“Yeah, a little, and rifles.”

“Well, I’m not giving you my SMG, so you get my Glock 19.” He held it out for Davi.

“Is it loaded?”

“Yes, no safety, so keep your finger off the fun switch till you’re ready to go bang.”

Sally and Davi stepped into the upstairs bathroom. Jack tried to get Sally to get into the tub for her protection, but she refused.

“Sal… that’s a cast-iron tub. It’s the safest place in this whole damn cabin. You will get in it.”

“I’m not sitting in a damn tub!”

“Mom and Dad will kill me if something happens to you.”

“Well, that doesn’t really matter, because I’m going to kill you for screwing up Davi’s proposal.”

Jack sighed, and looked to Davi. “Dude, I’m powerless with her. It’s up to you. You need to lock this door behind me, both climb into that tub, and point the gun at the door. Unless you hear me, Clark, or Ding calling your name, don’t unlock it, and shoot at anything that kicks or shoots the door.”

Davi nodded; Jack saw he would play ball. He just hoped he had some ability to control his iron-willed sister.

And with that Jack headed out of the bathroom and back down the stairs.

Abu Musa al-Matari parked far enough away from the GPS coordinates programmed into his phone that he knew it would be pitch-black before he and the other teams arrived at the cabin. Including al-Matari himself, there were eight: one from the Atlanta cell and two from the Santa Clara cell, as well as Omar and one more man from Detroit, and longtime ISIS operatives Tripoli and Algiers.

The leader of the Atlanta cell and one of her team had been killed just hours earlier in D.C. This left al-Matari with fewer attackers, but he felt confident in pressing on.

They all carried Uzis or AKs, as well as hand grenades, with the exception of Tripoli, who had an RPG-7, along with a Glock pistol shoved into his waistband in the small of his back.

Along the side of the road they turned on their walkie-talkies and put on headsets. They broke into four groups of two, with al-Matari taking Omar along with him.

The woods here were thick, oak and pine mostly, but each team had a phone that gave them their distance to their target pinpointed on a map. From the satellite view it showed the front and rear of the cabin had large open grassy areas, but the north and south sides both had wood lines within twenty-five meters of the walls of the large two-story building.

Al-Matari and Omar, along with the Atlanta man and the other Detroit operative, went to the north. Algiers took a Pakistani member of Santa Clara and would approach from the southwest to get a view of the cabin. Tripoli took the other Santa Clara member, and they would come up from the woods on the south.

Algiers and a twenty-year-old engineering student from Caltech named Jamal crawled on knees and elbows alongside a hill due west in the fading light. Algiers led the way, because he had one thousand times more combat experience than the young college student who, other than three successful bomb and grenade attacks in the past week and his three weeks at the Language School, had none.

After twenty minutes of advancing, they finally had a view of the front of the property, still across a gravel road and some two hundred meters away. Algiers knew al-Matari and the second team hitting from the north would still be several minutes from their position, and the team approaching from the southeast would be so deep in the thick woods there they wouldn’t have a view of the target until they were almost on top of it.

So he decided to set up here on a hill to lead the rest of the teams to the target and provide covering fire if necessary. He peered carefully through binoculars, noticed lights inside the building, but he also noticed something else. “There is no vehicle. How can someone get here without a car?”

Just then, the front door opened, and a man stepped out with a beer in his hand. He walked along a wooden porch, looking casually out at the wooded hills to the west.

Algiers held his radio to his mouth. “Yes. It’s him. I see him. It’s the President’s son. Drinking a beer on the front porch. He is not alerted at all.”

Al-Matari replied quickly. “Can you shoot him from there?”

“Possibly. I… have an AK, and I might hit him. But there is no optic on my weapon. If I miss he will flee inside and it will be harder for us to take him by surprise.”

“Wait, then,” al-Matari said. If the American was sitting around with a beer, then they should have no problem getting closer. “Do you see anyone else?”

“No one. There isn’t even a car in the driveway.”

“All other teams keep moving closer.”