his weapon, aiming to kill her, she knew that, but she didn't flinch, or defy what fate had decreed; she waited to die. He sighted the gun at her face and now this nightmare would end, and all the while her baby was struggling to be born and so still she pushed, pushed with everything she had, screaming in agony, barely seeing the killer drop his weapon, reach for a cord that dangled from some vaguely recognizable contraption strapped around his waist.
The black figure yanked the cord downward, and the room and all the dead surrounding her, lying across her legs, sprawled upon her belly, inert on the floor, all simply disappeared in one blinding white moment when all was erased and she was hurled backward into a solid wall of pain and then unwanted darkness, even as the bomb's enormous concussion expelled her child into the new world.
IN ADDITION TO COUNTLESS VICTIMS AND THE BODIES OF THE SEVEN RECENTLY ESCAPED TERRORISTS, ALL MEMBERS OF A RADICAL ISLAMIC GANG CALLING THEMSELVES THE 'SWORD OF ALLAH,' POLICE AND RESCUE DOGS ALSO FOUND A LONE FEMALE SURVIVOR AMID THE TWISTED RUBBLE OF WHAT HAD BEEN JACKSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL-AND, THEN, ONLY BECAUSE OF HER NEWBORN BABY'S CRIES.
– MIAMI HERALD
NINE
SERIOUSLY, HARRY, WHAT IN HELL DOES Langley brass think they're doing, wasting a precious resource like me? And hell, you, too?' Stokely Jones said to Harry Brock. 'Whole town is blowing up and every damn day they send us out on these dipshit stakeouts? We're overqualified for this kid stuff, man. Must be twenty feds down here from D.C. working the Memorial Hospital case.'
'Try forty,' Harry said. He knew the president.
America had a new president now, Tom McCloskey, the tall, rugged, former Colorado rancher who had been the vice president in President Jack McAfee's administration. McCloskey had been elected in a squeaker against longtime Senator Larry Reed. Reed, for reasons seemingly unknown to anyone but himself and his head-in-the-sand backers on the Hill, wanted to defang America. To withdraw funding for missile defense systems at home and overseas. To slash military budgets and bring the boys home, wherever they were. To close Gitmo and send all the terrorists back home so they could make more baby terrorists to send back to America.
A major component of the campaign platform of Reed's opponent Tom McCloskey, and McCloskey's veep candidate, ex-Naval Chief of Staff David Rosow, had been countering the mounting terror threat from within America's borders as well as from without. McCloskey believed homegrown terrorists posed America's biggest threat at the moment. And that only eternal vigilance and military might at home and abroad could save an increasingly fragile Republic.
America, President McCloskey had asserted in his stump speeches, was in the midst of what he called 'The Third Wave' of domestic terrorism. The first wave occurred on September 11, 2001, the culmination of years of attacks on America and the west by al Qaeda, a group consisting of Saudi, Yemeni, and other identifiably Arab men. Bin Laden soon realized the United States would guard against such foreigners in the future. Future attacks would have to draw on a new talent pool.
To circumvent added security measures, bin Laden recruited terrorists with French, British, and other passports. Men like 'shoe bomber' Richard Reid, traveling on a U.K. passport. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the infamous 'underwear bomber.' Or the U.S. Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood who murdered American soldiers, and the 'Times Square' bomber who'd been removed from an Emirates airliner just before it pulled back from the gate. This, McCloskey asserted, was the 'Second Wave' of terror. The 'Third Wave' consisted of U.S. citizens and residents, legal or not, who can fly under the radar of new security measures created to thwart first-and second-wave operatives.
He cited the direct link between 1960s radical H. Rap Brown and the twelve men charged with felonies in connection with the fatal firefight of a Detroit imam with FBI agents. Brown converted to Islam while in Attica prison and was allegedly running a terror network from his prison cell in Colorado. Criminals, McCloskey said, were undergoing Muslim prison conversions at the rate of thirty-five thousand a year. All potential 'street operatives' who could and would support the terrorist agenda. Plainly, he said, the fundamentalist ideology has sunk deep roots into American society.
The tight presidential race had ended suddenly on the night of the last nationally televised debate. Responding to yet another sarcastic question about his 'cowboy qualifications' from Senator Reed, McCloskey had squared his big shoulders, looked directly into the camera, and said, 'Frankly, Senator Reed, I think Americans voting for you are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.'
Senator Reed never recovered.
And, after what had happened at Jackson Memorial in Miami a couple of weeks ago, it was beginning to look like McCloskey had been right.
'Okay, forty feds, Harry. And are we assigned to that task force? Biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11? No, not us, we're sitting out here day and night doing frigging stakeouts.'
Harry, who'd heard this rap many times in the prior week, couldn't even be bothered to shift his gaze to Stoke from the half-naked blonde currently sashaying across the crosswalk with a teacup dog at the end of a pink leather leash studded with zircons as big as the Ritz.
Brock was wondering how the hell either of them, dog or woman, could walk upright with all that weight up front.
'I could live in that bra,' Harry mused. 'Very happily. I'm dead serious. I hate my apartment.'
'What?' Stoke said.
'The crosswalk, are you blind, the crosswalk.'
Stoke, who, according to their mutual pal Alex Hawke, was about the size of your average armoire, was wedged behind the steering wheel. He pressed forward, peering at the woman through the Suburban's grimy windshield as he polished off what remained of his Whopper. One sure way to commit suicide? Put yourself between Stokely Jones Jr. and the pickup counter at a Burger King.
'I mean it, Harry. I got serious shit to do,' Stoke said, using his napkin, watching the blonde jiggle by.
'Yeah? Like what?' Harry said.
'Like getting my damn GTO detailed, for starters. Okay? Maintain its high CDI factor.'
'CDI? What the hell is CDI?'
''Chicks Dig It.' Critical.'
'Funny. What else?'
'Hell, who knows? Have a Thai massage. Learn Spanish. Finish reading Shogun. Stuff like that.'
'Shogun? When did you start reading that?'
'Hell, I dunno. When did it come out?'
Harry looked at him and sighed. 'You know what? I should have just stayed with the Corps. I don't know why the hell I ever left.'
'Once a Marine, always a Marine. Why did you bail?'
'I dunno. I was standing on a street corner one night in Baghdad smoking weed. I thought I had the world by the balls and then I looked down and saw the balls in my hand were my own.'
STOKE AND HARRY WERE PARKED on Ocean Drive over in South Beach, with a nice view of the wide sandy beach, swaying palms, and rolling blue ocean to their right. To their left, an unbroken line of art deco hotels, shops, and restaurants. It was pretty early in the day, and most of the local SoBe residents were still sleeping it off.
Miami was definitely not 'the city that never sleeps.' Hell, it was the city that never woke up, least till round midnight. Unless, of course, you had huge buildings blowing up smack-dab in the middle of town. That was an attention getter.
Jackson Hospital was a real wake-up call, Stoke thought, in a lot more ways than one. According to the latest intel reports, Sword of Allah had combined forces of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan to become the most powerful terror network on the planet. And now they'd proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that
