The room went silent. Everyone saw the blood flushing Diele’s face as he stared thoughtfully at his hands clasped in his lap. He was famously ill-tempered. Eyewitnesses swear he cussed out Bush 41 to his face in a PDB one time, and even threw a punch at Alexander Haig when the retired general was President Ford’s chief of staff.
But instead of the expected tirade, Diele surprised everyone.
He simply smiled.
“As you say, Madame President.”
Jeffers knew full well what was behind that withered, grinning mask. Diele had just declared war on Myers.
53
I-30 East, Arkansas
Traffic was backed up for miles.
The Arkansas State Police had set up a sobriety checkpoint about halfway between Hope and Arkadelphia, stopping every car in both eastbound lanes for inspections. Of course, they were actually looking for possible terrorists and their weapons.
A federal judge had recently blocked the governor’s antiterror stop-and-frisk policy, but no court had ever held against sobriety checkpoints, given the scourge that drunken driving had become, taking thousands of innocent lives every year. The governor, a huge Myers supporter, had suddenly become “quite concerned” about drunk driving in his state, particularly on I-30, one of the most heavily traveled highways in the nation.
The Arkansas state troopers required drivers and passengers to exit their stopped vehicles and perform sobriety tests, the famous finger-to-nose exercise among them. Of course, the real reason why people were forced to exit was in order to get them out from behind the metal shield of their cars and trucks. Using recently acquired terahertz imaging detectors, technicians were able to measure the natural radiation emitted by people and detect when the energy flow was impeded by an object, such as a gun. State troopers also ran sniffer dogs and handheld Geiger counters around the vehicles while the drunk tests were being performed. Vehicles occupied by Hispanics were given special attention.
An unmarked panel van was racing along eastbound I-30 at 12:05 a.m. when the driver caught sight of a ten-mile-long string of red brake lights shining in the midst of a great curtain of pines. Traffic was already beginning to slow. The Spanish-language news station broadcasting out of Little Rock announced the traffic delay due to the fact that state troopers were stopping all eastbound vehicles at a sobriety checkpoint.
The Spanish-speaking driver tapped his brakes and eased left into the broad grassy median strip, then made a sharp U-turn and bounded back on the westbound side.
That was exactly the kind of maneuver someone wanting to hide something would do. Two Arkansas State Police officers on big Harley bikes who were lurking in the dark on the westbound shoulder blasted their lights and roared after the van as soon as it had made the illegal median crossing.
When the two motorcycles had pulled within a hundred yards of the van, the two panel doors in back flung open and an AK-47 flashed from inside. The blistering 7.62 rounds shattered the windshield of the first bike and the trooper slid his Harley into the grassy median. The other trooper broke off the chase with bullets gouging the asphalt around her, and threw her body and her bike between the fleeing van and her downed partner to protect him from any more gunfire.
She instantly called in the attack and within minutes a helicopter-based sniper was putting rounds through the van’s roof as a dozen squad cars joined the chase. More gunfire erupted from the van, but a second later it ran over a police spike strip that blew out all four tires. The two men in the back of the van were tossed onto the pavement and skidded like hockey pucks across the asphalt, skinning them alive while the van cartwheeled end over end until it slammed into a pine tree just off the shoulder and erupted in flames.
The Arkansas State Police had just killed three Bravos and the fiery explosion had destroyed the weapons they’d been carrying. The identity of the fourth man couldn’t be determined, but if they could have run an instant DNA test or found fingerprints on the charred remains, they might have been able to identify him as Hamid Nezhat, Ali’s most senior Quds Force commando.
One by one, the Bravos were getting picked off by the relentless efforts of courageous LEOs all over the country. Good police work was winning the day. Broken fingers, cracked skulls, and a couple of unauthorized waterboarding incidents loosened up a few tongues, too, along with the vigilance of ordinary citizens. Even the Russian mob helped out a time or two when it suited their interests.
The Arkansas incident confirmed Donovan’s suspicion that the Bravos had broken up into smaller groups, though how many was still unknown. The attacks also were growing less frequent, probably because of the full- court press the DHS was putting on, or so Donovan hoped.
Known Bravo and Castillo drug houses were raided and then later staked out, sometimes by citizen volunteers because there weren’t enough uniforms to cover them all. Two Bravos were killed that way, and three more were wounded before they escaped.
There were a few setbacks. A Claymore mine exploded on a popular camping trail in Yosemite, killing a newlywed couple. An empty one-hundred-pound bag of rat poison had been found adjacent to a water reservoir near Birmingham, Alabama. A car racing past Temple Emanuel in St. Louis, Missouri, fired an RPG and hit the building, but fortunately it did little damage and no one was inside at the time of the attack. However, a U.S. Marine private at home on leave from active duty in Afghanistan saw the attack and chased the vehicle as it raced up I-270. St. Louis police units joined the chase and shot out the tires, slamming the car into the guardrail. The three Bravos inside came out shooting and were killed by a river of lead.
The LEO community began to suspect that a significant corner had been turned in the hunt. They didn’t know how right they were. But Ali Abdi knew. His rogue teams were required to report in on a regular basis by means of a covert encrypted cell-phone network that the Iranians had deployed throughout the United States. Fewer and fewer teams reported in, and fewer and fewer media reports about terror acts were going out. That was all Ali needed to know. His latest plan to provoke an American invasion of Mexico had failed.
The Iranian commando had just two more cards to play, then he’d have to resort to last-ditch measures. He prayed it wouldn’t come to that, but he was more than willing to pay that price since the reward would be his triumphant entrance into heaven.
Washington, D.C.
Senator Diele hung up the phone, fighting the desire to shout for joy. His Democrat counterpart, Cleeve Gormer from Ohio, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had eagerly agreed to Diele’s proposal and guaranteed he could deliver a majority vote on the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee if they acted quickly.
Gormer hated Myers’s guts. She had sided with the Pentagon when the army requested the Lima Army Tank Plant to temporarily quit manufacturing M-1 Abrams tanks that it said it no longer needed for wars it had no intention of fighting anytime soon. Gormer was furious. It didn’t matter to him that the army estimated it would save the taxpayers over $3 billion to shutter the facility for just three years. The LATP provided hundreds of highly paid jobs in Gormer’s district. Like most politicians, he viewed military spending as another source of constituent employment and, hence, his own source of job security. Luckily, he’d managed to defeat the generals on this issue, but he swore retribution on Myers if he ever got the chance and Diele had just offered it to him.
There was a soft knock on his door.
“Come.”
Diele’s personal assistant, a pretty young freshman intern from Brown, entered with a tray larded with fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and coffee, and set it in front of him at his desk. She was a beautiful girl and his eyes raked over the curves of her body. But the era of incriminating Facebook and Twitter posts had curbed Diele’s animal appetites for volunteer staff. Instead, he thanked her politely and she left.
Diele’s mouth watered. This was a real workingman’s breakfast. Not like the prison fare of oatmeal mush
