Authors: William R. Forstchen
The white car, Mary’s treasure, a BMW she and Ted had purchased the year before, was now in the hands of the murderers as they pulled onto the shoulder, running over Mary’s prone body and then speeding off.
“Cut this feed now!” someone was shouting from off-camera. The local Austin reporter broke into sobs, unable to continue.
She looked back up at the camera, stifling her tears.
“Don’t cut it,” she cried. “Let everyone see what they are. We will not hide it this time as we did before. Keep that feed open, damn it! Are you seeing this? My God are you all seeing what they truly are? What they are doing to us?”
The Austin news anchor stood up, pointing to someone off camera.
“Do not cut this feed!” she cried.
She was cut though, by the national network which switched back to the studio in New York, the main anchor for the network during this hour, obviously struggling to remain calm. But in a side box, the images from Austin continued to air.
“I agree with her. We are not going to censor what is happening across the nation in this hour of tragedy,” his voice trembling.
He paused, pulling off his earpiece to block out the shouts of the program director to not comment further.
“I was embedded with our troops when they went into Iraq in 2003 and saw up close some of the horrors of war, but never anything as we just witnessed. I am asking our teams out in the field, our affiliates in their studios in cities under siege, to remain calm, please stay calm even as you report this nightmare engulfing us.”
Stay calm? Irrationally, Kathy whipped her cell phone back out and hit Mary’s contact photo. No carrier. She tried a second time, nothing. A third time, and finally it started to ring.
Near Austin, Texas
The cell phone lying on the console of the BMW began to ring, the ringtone a popular song in America that summer about being happy, though he did not recognize it. They had just shot up three more cars as they raced along the shoulder of I-35 northbound. The helicopter overhead was following them, his brother in the back seat commenting in Arabic (they were again free to speak openly rather than in the detestable English), how the fools were giving them more than enough warning of police attempting to create a road block up ahead. As he spoke, the camera zoomed out for a quick shot of several civilians armed with rifles lining up on an overpass, complete to a scrolling map marking the GPS locations of the helicopter, of their vehicle, and of the attempted road block.
Three miles ahead there might be serious resistance. Police were running about, pushing civilians out of their vehicles then jumping into them to maneuver the cars to form a complete road block across the entire width of the northbound side of the highway. Civilians were joining them as well and the police were not stopping them now. Men, and, to the disgust of the jihadists, women as well, were pulling out rifles and pistols from their cars and falling in alongside the police.
The training and orientation they experienced before they came here was correct. This was a cowboy state, something like the damned Kurds who were not sheep but tough fighters. It took only a few seconds of the news feed to show that the way ahead was turning into a trap.
The Americans, though, were fools compared to the Kurds, with their need for everyone to be told the latest news up to the second. If not for the news broadcast that they were monitoring on their computer pads, they would have driven straight into the ambush. The driver scanned the side of the road ahead. There was an opening in the highway crash barrier, even a paved crossover lane to the southbound side.
“I’m taking this,” he announced in Arabic, slamming on the brakes, skidding to a stop, scraping the fifty thousand dollar BMW against one side of the barrier, cutting across to the southbound side, and turning to now run in the other direction.
His other brother looked at the ringing phone.
“What is area code 207?” he asked.
“I think Boston. Why?”
“Someone named Kathy.”
The man holding the phone laughed and clicked it on.
“My God, Mary, are you okay?” a voice cried.
“Oh, so that was her name?” he replied tauntingly.
A pause.
“Who is this?”
“Your bitch American whore friend is dead. We sent her to hell as she cried for your Jesus.”
Kathy actually recoiled, pulling the phone back, gazing at it, the horror of the seconds before transformed into rage. “Burn in hell, you bastards. We’ll kill you all!” she screamed.
There was laughter on the other end, so enraging that she threw the phone against the wall, shattering it. To merely speak to one of them, to curse them without any hope of effect, filled her with disgust. Even as she destroyed her phone she raged at herself. She had cut herself off from reaching out to Bob and Wendy.
Those around her turned to look at her.
“I was talking to one of them!” she cried, breaking into sobs and pointing at the television screen. “That was my friend you saw killed. I spoke to the bastard who killed her. God, where is God?”
The parish priest pushed his way through the crowd as she started to collapse, grabbing hold of her.
“What happened?”
“That woman on the television. She was my friend,” and then she pointed to where she had thrown her phone against the wall, shattering it. “My God, I spoke to her killer just now. He laughed, he just laughed.”
The priest drew her into his embrace.
“Let’s pray, please let’s pray.”
“Nooo! I want my husband, I want my daughter…”
She broke free and pushed her way through the crowd to the door.
Near Austin, Texas
The three jihadists resumed their mission. The one with the broken arm took on the job of grabbing the weapons that were emptied, handing back one that had a fresh magazine. In less than the hour that they had been engaged, their supply was beginning to run low. They had fired off nearly three quarters of their ammunition in the gleeful opening moments of their killing spree.
He shouted a warning to the other two. They had less than four hundred rounds left. It was time now to make every shot count. One shot, two at most, to kill as they had been trained.
He had a second job as well, one given to all of them in case an injury incapacitated his ability to fire a weapon accurately. He was to have a pad up, Blue-toothed to miniature cameras on their headbands, and monitor the sending of the live video to receivers back in Syria and ISIS-controlled Iraq. Receivers who, within minutes, would turn it around for upload to the internet.
Within minutes their glorious accomplishments would be fed to hundreds of millions who would cheer them on and offer prayers to Allah for their continued success. Surely with so many praying for them, Allah’s shield would bring them even greater triumph before the last bullet was fired.
The killing here had become absurdly easy. The southbound lanes had come to a near crawl. The Americans called it “rubber necking.” The fire from the truck carrying acetone which had burst into flames on the northbound side had stalled traffic. It was now a matter of simply driving along at little more than twenty miles an hour and popping a couple of shots into each car they passed. The local news feed dutifully reported that they had reversed direction. Cars ahead of them were slamming to a stop, drivers and passengers leaping out and running.
They had been warned, and received extra training over the fact that this was the American state of Texas. It was filled with cowboys and therefore they expected to face more opposition than the far more tamed sheep that other teams were facing in states such as Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California, and most of New England.
A bullet suddenly shattered the passenger side window, the .45 caliber round nearly striking the driver. He cursed, pointed out the cowboy who was shooting at them: a man with a heavy revolver braced on the hood of his Ford truck. The jihadist in the rear seat, expended half a magazine of rapid fire to bring him down. There was a cry of exaltation.
Another cry of delight escaped as they came upon a bus trapped in the traffic. They emptied an entire clip down its length while their wounded loader scolded them to conserve ammunition. Nevertheless, they made sure to capture both the bus and the cowboy on video.
Up ahead, the pad's news feed was showing that the police they had blocked off earlier when they struck the truck that exploded into flames had been alerted to their approach and were running across the highway, the fools in the helicopter news camera keeping pace with them to capture the potential road block and film their demise. There were essentially trapped on this stretch of road.
The camera shifted from the highway back toward Austin. A Blackhawk was approaching. It looked military. Would they use it? With their American obsession of avoiding injuring their own and even avoiding injuring civilians on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, would they actually use it?
The noose might be tightening but the mayhem, the glorious attack, would continue on to the bitter end. He switched the camera on the pad so that his face could be seen.
“Allahu akbar! The infidels are dying like sheep waiting to be slaughtered.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Near Raqqa, Syria
There was a wild exaltation in the room, a well-concealed bunker created beneath a mosque on the edge of that war-tortured city. It had been activated that morning as the nerve center for this day. A pad, Blue-toothed to a flat screen mounted on a concrete wall, was the active receiver of the moment for twitter account
#diesirae631.
The messages were scrolling across the screen so fast that at times they could hardly be read.
#diesirae654 Allahu Akbar, many infidels now in hell, school burning. #diesirae673 our killing police on their national news Allahu Akbar… #diesirae654… #diesirae644
…
#diesirae627
…
All were proclaiming victories, boasting, joyous with how easy the killing was, as he, their leader, had promised it would be. Before the last of the jihadists died, the Americans would be tearing themselves apart yet again, screaming at each other to change the document that some worshipped as if it were a God, regarding their right to buy and carry guns while others would scream about the source of some of the weapons which dated back years to a surreal plan by their own government. It would be one of many additional benefits of their attack that he had spoken of to his inner circle.
Several other screens in the room showed live feeds coming straight from the jihadists traveling the highways and from the schools under attack. The technologies of the infidels were being turned against them.
A broadcast from Austin, Texas, coming from one of their major networks showed his team there shifting vehicles after their first one was disabled by police fire. His fighter actually made a point of arrogantly and cheerfully waving to the camera before executing the American whore who had owned the high-priced German car. The mere fact that the blonde was allowed by her husband to drive a vehicle on her own was a clear enough sign to all of the moral decadence of the enemy and, for that sin alone, she deserved the punishment received. He hoped her husband saw the just result of his spineless folly.
A feed sent by his team assigned to Interstate 75 working south from Valdosta, Georgia, were enjoying an absolutely open killing ground on the broad highway, traveling at over one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour on the flat open interstate, having already left behind them a hundred kilometers of wreckage.
The signal had gone dead from the teams assigned to Interstate 40 in North Carolina and the Knoxville, Tennessee, area. The final video sent from the Knoxville unit was of their approaching an overpass where at least half a dozen armed men and women were waiting, firing down on their vehicle. In contrast, on the Interstate 91 going north along the Vermont, New Hampshire, border, the holy warriors were having a joyful killing spree.
The team assigned to the tangle of interstates southwest of Boston at the 495 and 95 interchange were now caught in a massive traffic jam, had finally abandoned their car and were simply walking among the vehicles, executing trapped drivers who, sheep-like, were too terrified to get out and run. They were reporting that once they saw an opening they’d grab another car and continue their run toward Rhode Island.
All of this information was flooding in, along with the news media feeds from the United States. Their major networks were now reporting that cell phone networks were overloading and going down, and the most popular internet social media site servers were overloading as well. The fact that millions could not cling to their crutches of cell phones and social media was increasing the level of panic.
He laughed at that one. Every American was so self-centered that he viewed his own slightest crisis as an emergency, ready to call 911 if he spilled a cup of hot coffee on himself. In their panic they would not listen, jam the highways, and the chaos would continue to spread.
When ISIS released their one-hour video back in June of their triumphal advance into Iraq, the reaction in the West had been fascinating and revealing. All of the American news media sources, both general broadcast and print, had picked up on it within an hour. But then they censored it. They culled out excerpts: the execution of several dozen traitorous collaborators lined up in a ditch, the individual executions with a pistol to the back of each man’s head, a ten-year-old hero shooting several traitors, all of it was censored. Their media would show the moment leading up to the kill, but then stop there. Far too upsetting for the infidels with weak stomachs to see. They might become ill and switch to their favorite reality show rather than see their fate if they did not submit to the will of Allah.