Day of Wrath (14 page)

The media prefaced the brief clips that they did show with words such as “an alleged execution near Mosul,” “a purported execution,” a “supposed execution.” It was as if the film that his organization had created had its own Hollywood special effects team at work to fake the actually killings. How the Americans loved their fake violence in their perverted movies of sex and killing, but could not stomach it for real.

They could not hide what was happening now. Their technology had leapt forward in the years since September 11. Every one of their citizens was armed with a cell phone camera and instant access to the entire world. In less than two hours, tens of millions of videos showing the carnage were flooding into the global media, to be forwarded by hundreds of millions more. Allah be praised, they were now wallowing in their terror for the whole world to see. This glorious chaos created by little more than a hundred of his holy fighters.

He had a dozen highly-trained technicians at work in the command bunker. One had been educated at Oxford, another had attended classes at M.I.T. It was a team of expert video editors who, the moment the Sword operations began and the first uplinks flooded in, were sorting through the traffic, capturing the best images and creating near instant, well-crafted media for the global internet. Their productions were designed to instill terror in their enemies and joy for true believers. Even now the first videos were being fine-tuned and soundtracks added, their songs singing of the glory of the prophet, about to be uploaded to news sources across the Middle East and the internet in general.

“We have a good one here,” one of his technicians announced and pointed at the screen.

It was a live feed from a news helicopter circling the school near Portland, Maine, where a highly successful attack was taking place. Though there had been a report that one of the fighters had been killed, what one of them was now doing was being broadcasted by the local affiliate and picked up by the national feed. This was the moment that would notch it up even further.

Near Portland, Maine

Standing on the roof of Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, one of his courageous fighters was looking up at a circling news helicopter. It was the local Fox station, its logo clearly stenciled on the side, circling tight, camera aimed straight down.
 

His fighter was holding what looked to be a girl of about twelve years or so who continued to struggle as he held her tight against his side.

And then he did exactly what was done at the school in Chechnya, starting by yanking her skirt off…

New York City

“Kill the feed! Kill that feed!”

The New York anchor was out of his chair, screaming to his program director. The huge, oversized screen behind him went dead but the monitor facing him, not visible to the national audience, was still showing what was being done to the young girl, and he stood silent, shaking. The studio went silent; they were not broadcasting the image of the rape, but monitors inside the studio were still receiving the images being sent down from Portland, Maine.

Discipline, the long years of discipline which had held up even during the darkest moments of 9/11 broke inside the studio at the sight of the torturing abuse of the child. Screams of shock, rage, and anguish filled the room. The anchor just stared at the screen, his features going pale, his fists clenched in impotent fury. America was not directly seeing the rape, except in the Portland area where the program director had gone into a state of catatonic shock and had not switched the signal off. But the rest of the world was seeing it nevertheless in the reaction of the anchorman, who stood transfixed, tears streaming down his face.
 

There was the flash of the knife, held up high so the circling helicopter could see it, even as the chopper started to dive down toward the roof of the school. The pilot was unable to bear what he was witnessing and decided to land, to try and intervene with his bare hands.

The knife slid so easily across the child’s throat, ending her agony.

The anchor, finally aware that he had been standing silent in front of a national audience for a minute or more, looked back at the camera.

“Are we on?” he muttered. “Are we on live?”

“You are, but the video feed is not,” a cameraman announced, his voice shuddering.

“The child is dead, thank God,” he whispered. “Dear God, we implore You, please still her pain and grant her peace.”

He could not speak for a moment, tried to, then knowing he could not control his emotions he lowered his head, his shoulders shaking. He finally raised his gaze to the camera with a cold, icy stare.

“Are we on?” he asked again. A voice off-camera responded that they were going out live, but only from the studio.

“If there are police seeing this, listen to me. In the name of God, end it now. Storm the schools. They are not taking prisoners. They are now raping and torturing the children trapped within. Storm the schools, save our children and then…" He paused. "And then kill every one of the animals doing this. Kill them all!”

He turned his back to the camera, his shoulders shaking as he cried uncontrollably. He knew his appeal to the police had, without doubt, ended his career, but he no longer cared. The image of what he had just seen done to a child…? If he did not cry out in protest then what kind of man was he?

Inside Joshua Chamberlain Middle School

The killer just missed him, bullets peppering the wall mere inches over his head. Bob pretended that he had been hit, went limp, and laid still for long minutes, not daring to move. Shooting continued from down the hallway, but not in his direction.

How long had it been? Bob was feeling increasingly light headed, his mind blanking out, and forced himself to focus. He finally dared to crawl the last few feet to the man he had killed, grabbed the M-4 from his grasp, and pulled out the 9mm strapped to his shoulder harness. He tried not to take in the horror of the classroom. They were all dead, there was nothing he could do here. He could hear long bursts of volleys from the administrative wing and further on from the area of the gym and dining hall.
 

He decided to try and crawl down the hallway, perhaps ambush one of them from behind. He dragged himself out the doorway, made it half a dozen feet, and then the black, covered head appeared again. The terrorist saw him and fired a burst, a round striking his shoulder and the floor. Bits of torn linoleum sliced his face. He feigned that he was dead yet again, and the gunman turned back to keeping the police outside at bay.

Bob rolled in tight against the wall, kept the M-4 poised and aimed down the corridor. He no longer had the strength to move. Waves of pain from his back and shoulder slammed him every second or so. He sensed that if he tried to get closer, they would finish him off for certain. But he could still do something. If the teachers in the classrooms behind him had not yet pushed their children out the windows and fled, if one of the attackers came this way, he would wait until the last second, mimic death, then kill him.

As he waited, the agony continued. He knew that his back was broken. The numbing shock of being hit not just once, but twice, was rapidly wearing off and the pain was building with each passing minute. The damn fire alarm was still screeching and the hallway fire sprinklers still soaking him. So much water was puddling that streams of pinkish slush washed around him. His brain started to register the heavy scent of spent gunpowder overlaying the metallic smell of blood.

One child, about twenty feet away, was curled up, shot in the stomach, and sobbed softly, calling for her mother. He managed to get her attention, motioned for her to lie low and to be still. He recognized her; she was one of his daughter’s friends.

“Help is coming, Jessica, just be quiet so they don’t shoot you again.”

She nodded and, biting her lip, she remained down.

Something outside sounded different and was getting louder. Was it a helicopter? It was thundering, as if it was directly overhead on the roof above.

My God, they’re doing something at last!

Then a long burst of shots sounded, followed by a loud crashing blow. Part of the roof above buckled as a chopper blade cut into the ceiling. Then there was a deafening whooshing explosion. The floor and walls shuddered. It felt like the building was about to collapse all around him. All went still. A trickle of burning jet turbine fuel began to rain down through a rent in the ceiling. From outside came a rising barrage of gunfire. The gunman out in the hall fired long, sustained bursts and shouted over and over the cry that Bob now found so sickening: Allahu akbar!

Though the national network had cut the feed from Portland, the local affiliate had not. And so the images of the horror played out on the roof continued to be broadcasted to the local community. It was followed by the crash of the helicopter which burst into flames, a final dizzying shot from inside the chopper spun around, then the signal was cut.
 

Police had been monitoring the broadcast as well. The dead officers outside the building had created the effect the murderers wanted. They had caused the responders to pause, evaluate, and wait for backup and the SWAT team to arrive from Portland. But the sight of what transpired on the roof had pushed them over the edge. A dozen officers, on their own and with no leadership, broke cover to charge the building. All died on the front lawn.

Kathy recognized the terrified face of the child. The girl lived, or had lived, just down the street. She was someone who, though a grade younger than her own Wendy, liked to hang around with “their crowd” of girls. That could have been her Wendy and now she, and everyone else in the room, truly snapped.

The recreation hall became a sea of bedlam, the shock compounded when the concussive blast from the downed helicopter rattled the windows.

Without the urging of any one individual, nearly all turned to the door and stormed out. There was no leadership, no direction, no plan. Each parent was filled with rage and terror. Nothing, no police line, no reasoning for calm, would stop them now. For that matter, the local police who were trying to maintain some semblance of crowd control while the professional SWAT team from Portland deployed out, were swept up as well. It was their children in there. If not their children by birth, nevertheless they were their kids.

Kathy ran with the crowd, tripping and stumbling, then was up again. They surged back to the main approach to the school, which was still jammed with stalled and abandoned cars.

The White House
 

“This is definitely the Dies Irae attack that we discussed back at the staff meeting in August.”

The room was silent with that.

“A statement will have to be made.”

There were nods of agreement. The press room down the hall was in chaos, jammed with every reporter who had a press pass and was already on the grounds. In the name of national security, every federal office, including the Capitol and White House were now in full lockdown. No one other than a designated few would be permitted to enter and no one was to leave. Panicked appeals of the staff on Capitol Hill and the White House of the need to get to their children’s schools and get them the hell out were met with the assurance, which was in fact true; that any school in the D.C. area and outer suburbs that had children whose parents were high-ranking officials had already been secured.

That scenario of protective response, at least for the children of those working the inner corridors of Washington D.C. had, of course, been thought out and planned years ago. The Quaker school, behind its most peaceful façade, was 24/7/365 a heavily armed and protected camp, even at two o’clock on a Sunday morning, to ensure no one could ever slip in to plant an IED. The President’s children had already been evacuated out, airlifted up to Camp David just in case. Just in case there was an additional component to Dies Irae that might involve the White House itself.

As for all the other children in the various private schools within the nation’s capital and out in the suburbs, the best of highly trained security personnel had already, in some cases, been airlifted in by helicopter.
 

The Press Secretary was sent out to calm and reassure and to announce that once the extent of the crisis was fully realized and resolved, only then would the nation’s leader speak.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Near Raqqa, Syria

“Do we cut it or keep it for this next upload?” the head video editor asked, looking away from his control board to their caliph.

The caliph looked around the room. It was not his nature to seek the advice and opinions of others, or to have someone publicly question him in such a manner. He felt that his four years in an American prison in Iraq had given him an intimate understanding of his most hated foes. But he could hear caution in the video editor’s voice, the one who had actually gone to America to be educated, had actually married an American-born woman, at least of a Lebanese Muslim family, whom he had divorced shortly after the call of jihad spurred him to return to his roots.
 

“Why do you ask?”

“For our own fighters yes, the footage of the child is priceless,” was his first reply. “Some though, their hearts are not yet as hardened as ours.”

The way the young man asked the question, he sensed, was carefully chosen. He wanted to make it clear that it did not trouble him; it was an act even sanctioned by clerics of their faith. The child was older than one of the brides of the prophet, and being an infidel, she had no protection under holy law, her rape was legal and an act she deserved. That she was infidel trash placed no sin upon the jihadist who did it. They had discussed doing thus, as their brothers had done on the roof of the school in Chechnya to terrorize the infidel Russians, both Orthodox and atheist. So why this questioning now?