“Okay, Jared. All right, we’re going,” she said, still unconvinced. “I’ll call you whe-”
The truck in front of Nordstrom broke through the red brick facade, sending a blinding orange fireball in all directions. It took a full second for the roaring boom to reach Roberson’s ears. In an instant, four stories of steel, mortar, and glass vanished behind a mushroom of greasy black smoke. The initial blast tossed row after row of cars across the parking lot like so many pitiful toys. The screaming pulse and honk of car alarms followed the superheated wave of hurricane-force wind.
“Jared, tell me what’s going on…” Amazingly, Molly was still on the line, her voice hushed, fragile.
Roberson clutched the corner of his patrol car to keep his feet, leaning into the hot wind. “I love you, Molly-” he whispered as the two remaining trucks detonated.
Tornadoes of fire and flaming debris shot skyward. Curling dragons of black smoke completely obscured the mall. A searing pressure wave slammed into Roberson’s chest, driving him to his knees and burning the scar on his face. Bits of shattered glass, shot skyward by the blasts, fell now to rattle off the hood of his patrol car in a constant rain. Three columns of inky smoke twisted upward from what had been Fashion Center Mall, blotting out the sun.
Roberson pressed the phone to his blistered ear, heard nothing but static, and began to weep.
Ash and debris were still falling like dirty snow when Nimble Rock Fire and Rescue screamed onto the scene eight and a half minutes after detonation.
Spot fires hissed among the twisted piles of steel and brick, looking more like war-torn Beirut than a Colorado suburb. An entire section of escalator rested in the middle of one parking lot, perfectly intact, along with a charred baby stroller and assorted empty shoes strewn up and down the metal steps. The explosions that had reduced three huge department stores to smoking pits tore away half the center portion of the mall leaving all four levels crumbling, naked and open to the outside air.
Through the acrid smoke, arriving rescuers were treated to the grizzly sight of the mangled bodies of mall patrons thrown in pieces on top of counters and upturned clothing racks. Computers and cash registers dangled by sparking electrical cords. On the top floor, along what was left of the food court, a bewildered teenage girl, still wearing her bright red and yellow Corn-Dog-on-a-Stick uniform hat, staggered to the jagged edge of concrete and support steel in front of her store and collapsed, clutching a bleeding stub where her left arm should have been.
Children, blown from their clothing, stood blinking in wide-eyed shock, waiting for parents who had simply vanished. The pitiful screams and cries of the wounded and dying drowned out the wailing sirens of approaching rescue units from Denver. Panic-stricken mothers and fathers stumbled through the rubble and smoke on each sagging floor, their frantic searching exposed to the rest of the world as if they were inside a giant ant farm. Some, deafened by the explosions and unable to hear the shouts of arriving rescue personnel were driven by desperation in areas still on fire and jumped to their deaths on the jagged concrete three and four levels below.
Two of the first firefighters to arrive, both hardened professionals, well accustomed to sights of human misery and gory auto accidents, turned away to vomit.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Sanchez stood ankle-deep in a pool of greasy water and gray ash, wondering if he’d ever get the smell of cooked human flesh out of his head. Midnight had come and gone hours before, and his eyes felt as if he’d rubbed them with a handful of sand. The caffeine from five cups of coffee and the sea of strobing emergency lights combined in the predawn darkness to drive a spike through his aching head.
More than fifteen hours after the three vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices-VBIEDs in the parlance of the Global War on Terror-had flattened a Colorado shopping mall larger than four city blocks, Sanchez still had no firm body count-at least not one firm enough to give to the President. Someone from FEMA had come up with the bright idea of counting the cars in the parking lots and doubling that number for an estimate. Mall shopping, they reasoned, was rarely a solitary pastime.
Sanchez looked at a tiny green cube of shatterproof glass smaller than a dime in the palm of his hand. It came from a literal ocean of the stuff, inches deep, in what had only a day before been a busy American parking lot. It would take days to sort through the twisted bits of plastic, metal, and broken glass to figure out the number of cars. It was like trying to guess the number of rocks it took to create the sand in a desert.
Initial estimates of the dead were coming in between twenty-three and twenty-seven hundred. Surveying the slabs of shattered concrete and steaming support steel under the harsh lights, Sanchez was sure those numbers were far too low.
Concussive shock waves from the three blasts had broken the windows in virtually every building within a one-mile radius around the mall. A frantic elderly woman who lived almost two miles away called 911 an hour after the explosions to report that her pet dachshund had found a human foot in the backyard and refused to give it up.
Colorado National Guardsmen had secured the perimeter of the bombing site with sandbagged roadblocks. The state of Colorado and the nation as a whole now teetered on the nervous edge of dismay and twitchy terror, ever concerned with the possibility of delayed or secondary attacks. The President, as well as the VP and key members of the Cabinet, had bunkered up in secure and “undisclosed” locations. Sixty miles to the south, the four thousand cadets at the United States Air Force Academy were buttoned up tight with F-15s from nearby Peterson Air Force Base providing overhead security patrols. A half dozen AH-64 Longbow helicopters from Fort Carson flew close air support, lights out to guard against possible assault from the ground. All aircraft was cleared hot, ready to fire on any enemy they found.
Sanchez had called in a hundred and sixty agents from as far away as New York and Miami to assist. By order of the attorney general, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the U.S. Marshals Service had also responded, along with FEMA and Public Health.
The Pit, as they were now calling the place, was a hive of activity. Three FBI HRT-Hostage Rescue Team- helicopters hovered overhead, spotlights cutting white beams through the night as they played back and forth around the gnarled, smoking mess. Emergency rescue crews crawled in and out of the rubble, working under the blinding glare of portable flood lamps, borrowed from a Denver road construction company.
Five Labrador retrievers, highly trained as cadaver dogs, scrambled up and down in areas their handlers considered safe enough to send them. Teams of forensic scientists used ground-penetrating radar to look for anomalies that might be human under tons of debris. They’d found a few survivors at first, huddling near the center of the mall, miraculously shielded by the twisted remnants of an escalator. All were badly burned and at least two had died later at the hospital.
Since 9 P.M. the Pit had yielded nothing living-or even intact.
Sanchez took a sip of his coffee, then spit it out, sickened by the thought of anything on his stomach. His nerves were frayed and he jumped at a sudden female voice to his right. The speaker was backlit by the glaring headlights of a waiting ambulance. He couldn’t make out her face until she stepped closer, sloshing into his muddy pool to be heard above the pounding clatter of jackhammers and agonized whine of cable winches pulling up slabs of concrete.
“I think we might have an ID on one of the drivers,” the woman said, almost screaming to be heard. She was Carol Victors, the Denver Anti-Terrorism Task Force supervisor. In the past ten hours, she’d become Sanchez’s go- to agent in Colorado. No stereotypical Betty Bureau Blue Suit, Victors was tall, only an inch shorter than Sanchez at five eleven, and could hold her own in a battle of wit or muscle. Her dark hair was piled up under a navy-blue baseball cap with FBI emblazoned on the front in white letters.
“An ID?” Sanchez shook his head in disbelief. “No way. We don’t even have a solid lead on the type of explosives yet. Somebody claiming credit for this?”
“We got lucky,” Victors said, setting her otherwise full lips in a tight line. It was good news, but circumstances were too heavy for a smile. “There was a security camera at the Public Works garage. One of the drivers turned and looked directly at it after he killed the night watchman.”
“So we got a face or an ID?”
“I ran the video stills through the facial recognition programs at State, Homeland Security, as well as ours at Quantico.” She shrugged. “Again, we got lucky. State had a hit. Our driver was one Mahir Halibi, a Saudi student majoring in soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He was using the name of Samir Mohammed and was here under a Jordanian passport.”
