Day of Wrath (9 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

As they had so adroitly planned, so clearly understanding their enemy far better than the enemy understood themselves, the highways were now flooding with traffic. There were over seventy million children, attending nearly one hundred thousand public schools in America. Millions more were in private, church, and parochial schools. The targets had been carefully chosen: to hit outside of major cities and in geographical locations so that no part of the country felt safe. All of the targets were very close to interstate highways, the route that so many parents would flock to within minutes to speed to the schools their children were in, whether that school was under attack or not.
 

The fear of school shootings had been a running nightmare in the heart of every parent since Columbine. Endless rounds of arguments and debates swirled around the scenario. It was those lone, sick killers in American schools across the previous two decades that had inspired the caliph with his plan. Nearly all had been psychotic American males from teens to early twenties. All were loners. Nearly all had fantasized online and obsessively spent hundreds of hours with the endless outpouring of America’s entertainment media of shooter games and mass murder movies. Nearly all had played out a sick perverted fantasy in their final moments as they had became killers, usually vengeance for some slight from a girl, from a bully, or from the system. The killings were a power trip during their final moments that all would cower as they stalked the halls. And nearly all had ultimately proven themselves cowards in the caliph’s eyes, either fleeing when the police arrived, or killing themselves like Hitler in his bunker.
 

And so the pattern of response in American schools had evolved: a plethora of “this campus is a gun-free zone." Drills and more drills, usually just with teachers, of course; no one wanted to frighten the children, even though they saw the news every night and chatted about it on Facebook. Lock the door, lie down, wait for rescue. A few will die, maybe even a few dozen, but the vast majority will be saved by lying down and waiting for others to come to the rescue.

The brilliance of the caliph's plan was understanding the pattern of the infidels’ reaction, how they would respond collectively to a threat to their precious children. They usually had just one or two offspring, not six or eight with a willingness to see their progeny sacrificed to Allah’s will. No, for them each child was precious, doted upon, and coddled. The parents across the entire nation would react, the nation falling into mass panic. Unlike the fool bin Laden’s attack on 9/11, every American would feel personally threatened, not just those living in New York and Washington. Every American in those first moments would fear that their precious child was about to become a target as well. Though only a few out of nearly one hundred thousand schools were now threatened, millions of parents would rush out of their homes and their offices and flood onto the interstates.
 

The frenzy would build. The planners had calculated it well and had laughed over it. Thus it now unfolded and the time to launch Sword Two had come.
 

There was no need to send the final message, all who were trained knew the exact moment, but in his arrogant delight he ordered the message to be sent anyhow: "
Sword Two."
After sending the message, the transmitting phone was left active in the corner of a captured Christian church near Raqqa, the messenger laughing as he drove off.

Sword Two had already begun in some places such as Austin, Syracuse, and near Portland Maine, ahead of schedule. Attack teams began to pull out of hotel parking lots which, in less than a minute, put them on the American interstates, highways built as copies of the German autobahns, ironically ordered as a defense measure in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
 

Sword Two was made up of teams of two to three jihadist martyrs. There was a driver, armed with a 9mm pistol for a final defense, and one or two gunmen armed with AK-47s, each with thirty or more clips of jacketed rounds. Simply get on the highway, swing alongside cars, preferably those with a number of passengers, and shoot the driver. Tractor trailers were sweet targets: drive up, send several shots through the door, then speed on, hoping the truck jackknifes. Even better if it is carrying petrol or some hazardous material.

The team that roared onto Interstate 40 near Knoxville headed east for the connection to Interstate 81 and hit their jackpot in the first two minutes. A tractor trailer hauling petrol swerved out of control, the holy warrior laughing that he had hit the driver in the head with his first shot. All of the mayhem that ensued was created by a single 7.62 round fired from a Kalashnikov. That opening move proved how simple the plan was, how effective it was, and it created joyful anticipation of all that they could accomplish in the next few hours.
 

The truck crashed through the flimsy highway barrier into the westbound lanes, rolling over, gasoline spilling out, bursting into flames and seconds later exploding. Two more trucks were taken out by the Knoxville attack team in less than a minute, one on each side of the highway, sealing the road off in both directions.

Two hundred miles further east, on I-40, a Sword Two unit was now working in cooperation with the Sword One unit that had stormed an elementary school several miles to the west of Hickory. From the highway they could see that the school was burning and traffic was backed up on the exit ramp. The American parents were in complete panic; apparently an accident occurred at the top of the ramp blocking the exit. Vehicles were swinging on to the grassy berm to get around the bottleneck, but since it had rained heavily the night before, many were bogging down, wheels spinning.

The team of three actually broke their trained procedure for the moment, so rich was their target now. Coming to a stop, one of the killers shot the driver of the car behind them and triggered a chain reaction accident involving several dozen cars.

The jihadists then exited their vehicle and stood along the side of the road, calling on their god, laughing as they turned the traffic jam at the exit ramp into target practice, one ordering the other to take aimed single shots and not waste ammunition on such easy targets. Several dozen frantic parents were slaughtered in little more than a minute. It was almost too easy, they thought, as they got back into their car and pressed on westward.

Nearly all of the other teams stuck to their training in those first minutes. On Interstate 287, the outer ring of New York City, thirty cars were taken off the road in the first five minutes. At a jammed exit ramp near the school under attack in Bakersfield, California, nearly as many parents were now dead as students in the school.

In reality, the casualty rate in the schools was just now beginning to soar as captive children were herded into the gym, to drag out the agony of what the response team thought would be negotiations. All negotiations were a sham of course; a knife could kill quietly, even gruesomely, while those surrounding the building outside heard nothing from the locker rooms where the slaughter was taking place, and thought they were talking their opponents into laying down their weapons.

Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wheeling, West Virginia, Birmingham, Alabama, Little Rock, Arkansas, Crete, Nebraska, Salt Lake City, Utah, Phoenix, Arizona, and along remote stretches of highway such as south of Valdosta, Georgia, and northward along I-77 into West Virginia, the thirty-plus teams of Sword Two were unleashing death. The roads were packed with parents bent on reaching their children, most not even seeing death racing up behind them or about to pass in the opposite direction.
 

Only one team of Sword Two had been completely stopped in those first minutes due to a random encounter with a county sheriff in an unmarked car near Kingston, New York. It was one of those “one in a million” moments, but all plans, even the best laid ones, are prone to a random factor. The officer had served four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with a military police unit. He, like nearly every police officer in America, was racing to secure a community school in the minutes after Sword One was unleashed. As he approached the entry ramp over the interstate, which at this location was part of the New York Turnpike, he saw the attack vehicle with its two gunmen who were heading to the Turnpike to start their attack.
 

A flash of recognition.
 

What drew his attention were the windows of the vehicle. All of them were down and the day was chilly. He looked closer. Could the man in the passenger seat actually be that particularly troublesome bastard from the prison near Baghdad, one who had taunted him back in 2009, when the administration decided to release thousands of such prisoners, that they would meet again, in America? There was a brief instant of eye contact and the way the man reacted caught him now as well. Even innocent folks would do a bit of a double take if they suddenly realized that a police officer was staring at them. But guilty of something? They would either try to brazen it out by staring back with an “I ain’t done nothing wrong so why in hell are you looking at me,” look or a quick furtive turning away of the eyes, acting as if they had not seen him, but then catching occasional sidelong glances to see if he was still studying them.

This one started the nervous sidelong glances, then turned to say something to the driver of the car, looking back over his shoulder as their car sped down the entry ramp. They were wearing black and it looked as if there were shoulder straps for vests, the type of vests used for combat gear.

Procedure as a county sheriff was to call the Turnpike police, but to hell with procedure on this day! He swung his vehicle about and raced onto the Turnpike in pursuit. They were already speeding up. Only months earlier, sitting up at two in the morning, he had watched the video released by ISIS showing them blowing cars off a major highway while music in praise of their god played. It was expert video, filmed with Go-Pro cameras, with laughter and taunts as background noise as they machine-gunned carloads of refugees.

And now the slaughter was about to happen here. It was confirmed by puffs of smoke, followed by a car that they were passing swerving off the highway, fragments of broken glass spilling across the road. He radioed in the report, what he was going to do, and, without throwing on his lights he accelerated quickly, ramming the back of the attacker’s car.

He eased back on the gas for several seconds; his car was loaded with a lot more horsepower than the jihadists', and then swung to their left. The gunman leaned out the open window to shoot him, but the former MP knew his game, ducking low as a couple of shots shattered his windshield. He floored the gas pedal, advanced to near parallel with the killers, cut hard across, and rammed the side of their car. The two vehicles spun out of control. The three jihadists and the sheriff were dead a few seconds later.

It was the only complete failure for ISIS in the opening minutes of Sword Two.
 

Near Portland, Maine

The incessant ringing of her cell phone finally jarred Kathy Petersen out of her hysteria. She had been leaning on the horn of her car for several minutes, cursing the driver in front of her for blocking the entry ramp to the interstate. The overpass to the entry ramp was packed with stalled traffic. The phone call was again from her friend Mary Browning; she ignored it, looking up to realize that the driver she had been swearing at was out of his car, walking back to her.
 

Instinctively she reached for the pistol tucked into her jeans pocket. Was he one of them?

She held the pistol up and the man slowed, raising his hands, actually appearing to smile nervously as he stepped backward several feet then slowly motioned for her to roll her window down.

“Hey look lady, don’t blame me, the road ahead is blocked. Can you back up so I can get out of this jam?”

He again motioned for her to lower her pistol, which she did, then pointed forward, repeating his appeal.

He was right, cars were backed up across the entire approach to the interstate. A state police car, just out of sight until now, blocked the road, lights flashing.

“I have to get to my daughter and husband’s school!” she cried.

“Which one?”

“Chamberlain Middle.”

“That’s where I’m heading too. Can you back up?”

She got out and looked to the vehicle behind her, the driver staring at her and shouting for her to move. Kathy went to try and talk to her but the woman refused to roll her window down, screaming at her to move it.

It was gridlock. And then she heard it, sirens approaching fast from the southbound side. They rocketed under the overpass bridge that she was standing on, one of them skidding to a stop while the other pressed on, banking his car across two lanes to block traffic.
 

Someone pointed to a plume of smoke that suddenly ignited a mile or so away, screaming that it was the school on fire. She knew the school was more to the right, on the south side of the highway, not the north side, but the hysteria took hold. Whatever was burning was on the highway.

Sirens again. The state trooper who had stopped down on the highway was out of his vehicle, carrying a rifle, bracing it across the hood of his car. Southbound, cars were moving fast, driven as if every driver were drunk. Flashing blue lights became visible and a dark blue sedan appeared, swerving across two lanes, moving to pass a green SUV. A crackle of gunshots sounded and the side window of the SUV shattered, the car swerving into a sideways skid, the blue sedan racing past it at over ninety miles an hour. The cop down on the highway opened fire, tracking the sedan, but his half dozen shots apparently had no effect. There was only gunfire flashing from the sedan’s rear passenger window in reply.