“Oh, shit. Oh, shit, man,” Brian whispered. With that, all the adrenaline evaporated from his bloodstream. His body became a vacuum, and his muscles slack.
The first firefighters raced in, wearing khaki turnout coats and carrying boxes of what had to be medical gear. One of them took command, directing his people into various directions. Two headed to where Brian was. The first of them took the body from his arms and looked at it briefly, then set it on the floor, and then he moved away without a word to anyone, leaving Brian standing there, with a dead child’s blood on his shirt.
Enzo was nearby, just standing and looking, now that professionals—mainly volunteer firefighters, actually, but proficient for all that—were assuming control of the area. Together they walked out the nearest exit into the clear noontime air. The entire engagement had lasted less than ten minutes.
Just like real combat, Brian realized. A lifetime—no, many lifetimes had come to their premature ends in what was relatively a blink of time. His pistol was back in his fanny pack. The expended magazine was probably back in Sam Goody. What he’d just experienced was the nearest thing to being Dorothy, sucked into a Kansas tornado. But he hadn’t emerged into the Land of Oz. It was still central Virginia, and a bunch of people were dead and wounded behind them.
“Who are you guys?” It was a police captain.
Dominic held up his FBI ID, and that was enough for the moment.
“What happened?”
“Looks like terrorists, four of them, came in and shot up the place. They’re all dead. We got’em, all four of them,” Dominic told him.
“You hurt?” the captain asked Brian, gesturing to the blood on his shirt.
Aldo shook his head. “Not a scratch. Cap’n, you got a lot of hurt civilians in there.”
“What were you guys doing here?” the captain asked next.
“Buying shoes,” Brian answered, a bitter edge on his voice.
“No shit . . .” the police captain observed, looking at the mall entrance, and standing still only because he was afraid of what he was going to see inside. “Any ideas?”
“Get your perimeter set up,” Dominic said. “Check every license plate. Check the dead bad guys for ID. You know the drill, right? Who’s the local SAC?”
“Just a Resident Agent here. Nearest real office is Richmond. Called there already. The SAC’s a guy named Mills.”
“Jimmy Mills? I know him. Well, the Bureau ought to send a lot of troops here. Your best move is to secure the crime scene and stand by, get the wounded people clear. It’s a fucking mess in there, Cap’n.”
“I believe it. Well, I’ll be back.”
Dominic waited for the police captain to walk inside, then he elbowed his brother and together they walked to his Mercedes. The police car at the parking lot entrance—two uniforms, one of which held a shotgun—saw the FBI ID and waved them past. Ten minutes later, they were back at the plantation house.
“What’s going on?” Alexander asked in the kitchen. “The radio said—”
“Pete, you know about the second thoughts I’ve been having?” Brian asked.
“Yeah, but what—”
“You can forget about them, Pete. Forever and always,” Brian announced.
CHAPTER 14
PARADISE
THE NEWS crews flocked to Charlottesville like vultures on a fallen carcass—or started to until things got more complex.
The next news flash came from a place called Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs, Colorado, then came one from Provo, Utah, and finally Des Moines, Iowa. That made it a colossal story. The Colorado mall hit involved six dead cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy—several more had been pulled outside to safety by their classmates—and twenty-six civilian deaths.
But word of Colorado Springs had gotten quickly to Provo, Utah, and there the local police chief, with a good cop’s instinct, had dispatched radio cars to every shopping center in town. At Provo Towne Center, they scored. Each car carried the mandatory police shotgun, and an epic shoot-out developed between four armed terrorists and six cops—all of whom knew how to shoot. That produced two badly wounded cops, three dead civilians—a total of eleven local citizens had joined in the pitched battle—and four very dead terrorists in what the FBI would later term a bungled attack. Des Moines might have turned out the same, except that the local city police were slow to react, and the final score there was four terrorists dead, but thirty-one citizens to keep them company.
In Colorado, two surviving terrorists were holed up in a retail store with a police SWAT team just fifty yards away, and a company of National Guard riflemen—activated with alacrity by the state’s governor—on the way and champing at the bit to live out every soldier’s fantasy: to use fire and maneuver to immolate the invaders and set their remains out for cougar bait. It took over an hour for this to come to pass, but aided by smoke grenades, the weekend warriors used enough firepower to destroy an invading army and ended the lives of two criminals—Arabs, as it turned out, to no one’s surprise—in spectacular fashion.
By this time, all of America was watching TV, with reporters in New York and Atlanta telling America what they knew, which was little, and trying to explain the events of the day, which they did with the accuracy of grammar-school children. They endlessly repeated the hard facts they had managed to gather, and hauled in “experts” who knew little but said a lot. It was good for filling airtime, at least, if not to inform the public.
THERE WERE TVs at The Campus, too, and most work stopped as the troops watched them.
“Holy Jesus,” Jack Jr. observed. Others had murmured or thought much the same, but it was somewhat worse for them, since they were technically members of the intelligence community, which had not provided strategic warning against this attack on their home country.
“It’s pretty simple,” Tony Wills observed. “If we do not have human-intelligence assets in the field, then it’s hard for us to get any kind of warning, unless the bad guys are really loose on how they use their cell phones. But the news media likes to tell people how we track the bad guys, and the bad guys learn from that. The White House staffers, too—they like to tell reporters how smart they are, and they leak data on signals intelligence. You sometimes wonder if they’re stringers for the terrorists, the way they give away code-word-sensitive information.” In reality, the staff pukes were just showing off to the reporters, of course, which was about the only thing they knew how to do.
“So, the rest of the day the newsies will be screaming about ‘another intelligence failure,’ right?”
“Bet on it,” Wills responded. “The same people who trash the intelligence community will now complain that it can’t do the job—but without acknowledging their own role in crippling it every chance they get. Same thing from Congress, of course. Anyway, let’s get back to work. NSA will be looking for a little cheering on the part of the opposition—they’re human, too, right? They like to thump their chests some when they pull off an operation. Let’s see if our friend Sali is one of them.”
“But who’s the big kahuna who ordered this one?” Jack asked.
“Let’s see if we can find out.” More important, Wills didn’t add at the moment, was determining where the bastard was. A face with a location attached to it was a lot more valuable than a face without one.
UPSTAIRS, Hendley had his senior people together in front of his TV set.
“Thoughts?”
“Pete called up from Charlottesville. Care to guess where our two trainees were?” Jerry Rounds asked.
“You’re kidding,” Tom Davis responded.
“No, I’m not. They whacked the bad guys for fair, without outside assistance, and they’re back at the house now. Bonus: Brian—the Marine—had been having second thoughts about his function. That, Pete reports, is a thing of the past. He can’t wait to go out on some real missions. Pete thinks they’re just about ready, too.”
“So, we just need some solid, targets?” Hendley asked.
“My people will be checking the feed from NSA. You gotta assume that the bad guys will be talking back and forth now. Their downtime in chatting back and forth should be coming to an end even now,” Rick Bell thought aloud. “If we’re ready to go active, then we can go active, and soon.”
That was Sam Granger’s department. He’d kept quiet to this point, but now it was time to speak.
“Well, guys, we have two kids ready to go out and service some targets,” he said, using a phrase the Army had invented twenty years before. “They are good kids, Pete tells me, and from what happened today I think they will be properly motivated.”
“What is the opposition thinking?” Hendley asked. It wasn’t hard to figure out, but he wanted additional opinions.