The Enemy Within (33 page)

The minutes ticked off slowly, almost interminably. Crouched beside Khalizad, Tomcic felt the sweat pooling under his ski mask. After the cold outside, the enclosed van felt like a steam bath.

“One block!” Barakat called out over his shoulder.

The Iranian reached up and unlocked the back doors. Soon.

Tomcic muttered a short prayer under his breath. The mullahs had said that he and the others were the very hands of God in this war guided by the will of the infallible and incapable of error. They had said that none of the innocent blood that must be shed would fall on his head that all who died sinless were necessary martyrs in the struggle against the Great Satan and assured of a place in heaven. He earnestly hoped the mullahs were right.

The van braked sharply and came to a complete stop.

“Now!” Khalizad shouted. He threw open the doors and leaped out onto the pavement, with the two Bosnians right behind. All three moved rapidly, spreading out to take up carefully rehearsed positions.

The Iranian team leader went to the left, toward the curb. Tomcic went with him. Hodjic spun right, covering an arc behind the van. On the far side of the narrow two-lane street was a row of small, decrepit shops: a check-cashing center, a shoe store, a little grocery, and a liquor store on the corner.

On the near side was the Anthony A. Settles Elementary School.

It was precisely 11:35 A.M., five minutes into recess on a sunny day, and the playground was filled with children, laughing and running and jumping in noisy, gleeful fun. Almost all were AfricanAmerican or Hispanic. The playground was separated from the sidewalk only by a chain-link fence.

Tomcic dropped to one knee at the fence and poked the muzzle of his Russianmade
AKM
through one of the gaps. Khalizad moved in beside him but remained standing.

Only seconds after the van squealed to a stop, and before anyone even consciously noted their presence, the Bosnian pulled the trigger. All his doubts vanished in the sudden, hammering pulse of the assault rifle against his shoulder. He was here, deep in the heartland of a nation that had let his people and his Faith be crushed by their foes, striking back.

It was an instant where fierce joy and blood-red rage met and mingled.

Tomcic’s face, hidden by the mask, matched the intensity of his emotions his eyes gleaming, his lips pulled back in almost a rictus of anger. He remembered to aim low.

His first long burst caught a cluster of children on a merrygo-round, knocking them off the ride in a welter of blood. Sparks flew wherever his bullets slammed into metal. He walked the burst to the left, toward the entrance to the school building. Halfway there, his first thirty-round clip ran dry. With a practiced motion, the Bosnian switched the empty out, slid in a new clip from a pouch at his waist, and yanked the AKM’s charging handle back, chambering a round and cocking the hammer. In seconds, he was firing again.

Settles Elementary, only blocks from the crime-ridden Cabrini Green housing project, was no stranger to gunfire, and the teachers tried to do as they were trained screaming at their students to lie flat or duck inside the building. While that might have worked against a random shooting or a gang gunfight, it was utterly useless against trained special warfare troops.

As Tomcic tore his targets to shreds with 7.62mm rounds from his
AKM
, Khalizad scanned the schoolyard, shooting adults anyone who looked as though they might interfere. He had a better view of the carnage the Bosnian was inflicting, not only because he was standing but because his vision was not focused over the muzzle of his weapon.

Children screamed hysterically and wept, crouching behind anything or nothing at all as they tried, instinctively, to escape the deadly fire. Older kids tried to help younger ones to safety. Some, too young to understand what was happening, simply stood and cried, and were cut down. Many teachers tried to bring the children inside to safety, or shield them with their bodies, and died at Khalizad’s hand.

The second Bosnian, Emil Hodjic, heard the firing and screams from the playground, but kept his attention and his own
AKM
locked on the street in front of him. His job was to protect the team. He had to keep the road open for their planned escape.

There were cars crowding the intersection half a block away. Hodjic began shooting, firing short, precisely aimed bullets into windshields and tires. He was the team marksman and sniper. As a teenager he had practiced his trade a hundred times in the deadly hide-and-kill games played amid Sarajevo’s artillery-shattered high-rises.

Now he searched for pedestrians, for customers coming out of stores, and for car drivers. Witnesses. Those who fled, he generally ignored. Hodjic was after the ones who watched.

Still firing on the playground, Khalizad heard one long beep on the rental van’s horn. One minute gone. Thirty seconds left. There were no immediate threats in his field of view, so he consciously widened his search beyond the corpse-strewn asphalt. There were shocked and stunned faces pressed up against the windows of the school. The Iranian shot them out, pumping a steady stream of 5.56mm rounds through glass and brick and flesh.

Hodjic also heard the horn the first of the signals the sniper had been waiting for eagerly. The past sixty seconds had seemed like sixty years. To his victims, he was a fearsome figure dressed and masked in black, firing into the cityscape like some nightmare come to life. Only he and his teammates understood their vulnerability and the risks they were running by taking direct action.

During the planning for this attack, the likely law enforcement response had been carefully measured and assessed. The police would not be halflhearted, but every calculation showed the attackers should have enough time to strike fast and flee. The nearest Chicago police station was more than two minutes away, and it would take several minutes more to assemble a reaction force. No, Hodjic was more worried about the possibility of a roving patrol car or an armed response from some unexpected direction. He’d already killed one shopkeeper who appeared at his door with a shotgun.

Many in America’s cities owned weapons. At this point in the campaign, one unexpected bullet could smash General Taleh’s grand design beyond repair.

The Bosnian sniper searched the area carefully, trying to suppress the fear and excitement surging through his body, trying to keep a clear head so that he could spot any movement, any possible threat. By now, the intersection half a block away was a jumble of abandoned cars, their windshields starred or shot out altogether. Bodies dotted the pavement along with shattered glass. He pivoted, sighting over the AKM’s muzzle. There. He saw someone crouched behind a car that had driven up over the sidewalk and plowed into a storefront. He fired twice. An elderly black woman slumped forward and sprawled, unmoving, on the sidewalk.

The van’s horn beeped again twice this time. It was time to go.

Hodjic stared hard along the muzzle of his assault rifle, making sure it was safe to turn his back for ten seconds. He whirled and dove through the open rear doors.

Khalizad heard the horn too and turned, but Tomcic showed no signs of leaving. He was still firing still flailing away at the heaped corpses on the playground. The Iranian had to grab his shoulder to break his fierce concentration.

The Bosnian turned his head slightly, but his expression was unreadable under the mask.

Khalizad yanked on his shoulder again, stabbing a finger toward the van. He said nothing. Except in dire emergency, their standing orders prohibited speech during a mission. No one must hear the accents that would give them away as foreign-born.

This time, Tomcic shook his head as if coming out of a trance. He rocked back slightly. Then, without another look at the schoolyard or his victims, he rose and dashed into the van.

Khalizad was the last one in. He pulled the doors shut and shouted over his shoulder to their driver, “Go! We’re clear!”

Barakat took off with a screech of tires, peeling out into the street and away at high speed. As soon as the van started moving, the three men in back stripped off their masks and began shoving their weapons into the duffel bags. Reaction to the enormous stress left them utterly exhausted, and only their training carried them through the routine now. Both Khalizad and Tomcic were actually trembling, shaking uncontrollably.

Tomcic slid his
AKM
out of sight and sat down heavily, emerging fully now from his murderous daze. His emotions were running wild, cycling through deep satisfaction and unappeased fury. He’d had his revenge, but he still felt unsatisfied. America’s crimes against his people and his homeland were too great to be expunged with just one punishment.

They were back at the other minivan in five minutes, still apparently unnoticed and unpursued. While Khalizad and the others threw their gear into their own Dodge minivan Barakat made a fast, thorough search of the rental vehicle. He found no traces, not a shell casing or any other evidence. All they left behind was the stink of powder.

Barakat scrambled into the Dodge and started the engine. They drove off, taking the Kennedy Expressway north to the Edens and then on into Wisconsin on the Tri-State Tollway. They stopped only once, so that Khalizad could make a short call from a pay phone to other members of his command, reporting their success and triggering the message claiming responsibility for the attack.

By the time the police found the abandoned rental van, the four men were crossing the Wisconsin border. They had new orders.

News Bulletin,
WBBM
radio, Chicago “... Police have now set up barricades around the Settles School to reduce crowds and allow access for emergency and police vehicles. A helipad is being set up for the medivac flights needed to transport the most critically wounded to area hospitals.

“Parents are asked to please refrain from going directly to the school. All uninjured students and faculty have been taken to Fellowship Baptist Church. Officials at the church are maintaining a list of casualties and the hospitals where they are being treated.

“In another key development, police spokesmen have confirmed the written statement anonymously delivered to our sister station
WBBM-TV
as authentic. It matches one eyewitness account of the attackers wearing emblems identified as belonging to the New Aryan Order, the same hate group believed responsible for blowing up the National Press Club seven days ago.
FBI
agents arriving at the scene of the massacre have said they are proceeding on the assumption that the group is responsible.”

South Side Islamic Center, Chicago The words rang out, full of anger and loathing.” ‘We have begun the holy task appointed to us, the destruction of the Soldiers of Satan. The black race will be exterminated. We call on all true whites, all true Aryans, to fight for the purification of our Christian faith and race.’ ”

The Reverend Lawrence Mohammed lowered the paper from his thin, almost ascetic features. His face was purple with rage, but every word he spoke was carefully shaped and controlled.

Reciting the last of the New Aryan Order’s message from memory, he finished, ‘This is only the beginning of the decisive campaign to cleanse America of all impure races.’ ”

He paused, gazing out over the sea of appalled and outraged faces. The Islamic Center’s vast meeting hall was crowded packed with people far past any legal capacity. It was impossible to move in that space, almost impossible to breathe. No fire marshal would be checking the hall that night, though. The angry, grieving crowd would brook no challenge from anyone in authority. Thousands more, unable to make their way inside, jammed the streets outside the center, listening to the speech on loudspeakers.

All listened to Mohammed’s words in dead silence. He’d been speaking for half an hour, since seven in the evening of that horrible day.

The Black Muslim community had begun congregating at the South Side and other Islamic centers in Chicago almost as soon as the first reports of the massacre began airing on local TV and radio. Other crowds gathered at the city’s predominantly black Christian churches. Chicago’s AfricanAmerican population was shocked by the slaughter at the Settles School almost paralysed by its overtly racist nature, the most heinous in American history. Local, state, national, and even international leaders had issued statements all day, consoling the families of the victims. Some had promised justice, others reform. Most had urged calm.

But not all. The Reverend Lawrence Mohammed and the Black Muslim community were not calm. Some of the parents in the crowd before him wept uncontrollably with recent loss. Mohammed had spent much of the afternoon counseling and comforting them, before talking with confused, harried police who had told him what they could, which wasn’t nearly enough. They had nothing no hard leads, no clues nothing. Just an abandoned vehicle and a playground littered with dead children.

Mohammed scowled. His brand of Islam was not strong on conciliation or patience, and it drew a sharp line between black and white. For all their talk of “energetic investigations” and “methodical searches,” he did not believe the
FBI
and the police would find the schoolyard butchers. In his heart, he did not believe the authorities really wanted to find them. All his life he had seen the police for what they really were merely the slave-catchers of old in a new guise.

But now, perhaps, more of his brothers and sisters would come to realise the truth of his vision.

Already traumatised by the death of Walter Steele and other mainstream leaders in the press club bombing, America’s black community was on edge. Many had wondered openly whether that attack was the last gasp of a former racist era, or just the beginning of a new time of persecution and murder. For many, the Settles School massacre had answered that question.

And now they were here hanging on his every word, waiting for a call to action, a call to arms.

Mohammed leaned closer to the microphone, speaking quietly at first.