First Strike: Loudoun County E-Book

A.W. Guerra

• Herausgeber: BooxAi
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Retired Army Delta Force operator Luke Ellis, 17-year-old teen Annie Dedham and her 12-year-old brother Darren, along with young Loudoun County deputy sheriff Alec Holman, are in a race against time to prevent the destruction of humanity. To succeed, they need the help of a mysterious woman scientist. Only she can stop Armageddon from taking place. There's a huge problem, though: Terrorists are rampaging through the small Loudoun County hamlet of Lucketts and they're after the same scientist. What Ellis and his little band do over the next several hours will decide the fate of humankind.
 

Leseprobe

FIRST STRIKE: LOUDOUN COUNTY

A.W. Guerra & Kelly Hoggan

First Strike: Loudoun County

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2022 by A.W. Guerra & Kelly Hoggan

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by BooxAi

ISBN: 978-965-577-940-0

FIRST STRIKE: LOUDOUN COUNTY

A.W. GUERRA

KELLY HOGGAN

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

1. Luke

2. Dominoes

3. Luke

4. The Market

5. The Woman

6. Baradar

7. Allies

8. Reunion

9. Holman

10. Eyes On

11. Futility

12. Revelations

13. Retribution

14. Night Flight

15. Seek Battle I

16. Seek Battle II

17. Baradar

18. Endgame I

19. Endgame II

20. Baradar

21. Countdown

22. Departure

Epilogue

About The Authors

There are so many people to whom I owe gratitude and thanks for a life well-lived, but none more so than my wife Kristie, without whom this novel would not have been possible.

– A.W. Guerra

This book is dedicated to my father, who was an avid reader and introduced me to many books of this genre.

– Kelly Hoggan

PREFACE

This novel is entirely a work of fiction and is not a fantasy of any future that either of us – nor anyone with even just an ounce of sense – would either want or desire. Fiction, though, requires several elements, no matter the genre or style. To us, a decent work of fiction should be complete with heroes, villains, major and minor players, and stories both grand and intimate.

Are some of our novels pulled from today’s headlines? Of course they are. To deny that would be to deny reality, which all good fiction must in some way or another rely on at least in small measure.

The question to ask then is this:

“What if?”

PROLOGUE

The Year Before

The analyst worked in a drab room in the sub-basement of an anonymous building, one with an extensive array of innocuous-looking security bollards and barriers disguised as large planters and ornamental bush holders. They were meant to keep car and truck bombs at a safe distance, though their placement had never really been tested for effectiveness. The structure itself sat in an equally anonymous business park in one of the ring suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C.

In the room, which had an impressive bank of exceptionally large OLED monitors mounted on one wall, the man watched a satellite feed nourished by a surveillance drone orbiting in a figure 8 pattern high overhead. It was of the action taking place at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The chaos and struggle for survival occurring among and between the players on his wall of monitors held him with sick, utter fascination.

No way this isn’t going to blow up in our faces, was his frequent thought, usually after seeing one player or another in real life do something that would have gotten said player a long, even permanent, stretch in a federal prison had the action played out back here on the Auld Sod, so to speak.

Just why it was all falling down in so messy a fashion was a bit complicated, the analyst knew, but what wasn’t so complicated was the impetus for the chaotic drama now being depicted on his screens.

The US president, newly sworn in just seven months back, had finally had enough of a war-that-wasn’t – one that had cost the nation in blood and treasure for far too long, he often remarked. He was pulling what remained of the nation’s military forces out of that benighted place after nearly 20 years there. Naturally enough, many Afghans, not eager to once again experience the tender ministrations of the fundamentalist death cult known as the Taliban, wanted out and they were determined to climb into any US or British or other plane leaving the city. The French – a de facto part of NATO, though they took great pains to constantly announce to the world that they really weren’t – were as always loathe to leave any locale where they were making good money, but even they had seen the truth of things. They were getting their own people out as quickly as they could and tossing onboard their planes any of the local native population that had been aiding them in their endeavors.

As the remaining days of the US withdrawal wound down, many Afghans – along with thousands of American citizens and green card holders also intermixed among them or hiding out from Taliban forces -- were becoming seriously desperate to get out and had proven themselves willing to do anything to escape.

For his part, the analyst had personally seen several clashes among those vying to leave as quickly as possible for fear of permanent sanctioning by a Taliban death squad. Those fights had likely resulted in the deaths of several Afghans each time they occurred, though the bodies were often quickly ground into the dust and dirt and oily grime of the roads and crowded streets encircling the airport. Some of the departed had even been innocent noncombatants, a point that saddened the analyst just a tiny bit, though he also knew it was the way of the world whenever empires tossed their expendables and other trash over the side as they sailed – or flew, as in this case -- off into the sunset.

Certainly, what remained of the Afghan security forces that hadn’t already melted away in the face of impending Taliban domination couldn’t have cared less what happened to those doomed men, women and children, focused as they themselves were in getting out while they could, fellow Afghans be damned to the deepest depths of Jahannam, the Muslim version of Hell. US troops were also under strict orders to not interfere with or aid those outside the now-locked airport gates, under pain of court-martial if they did.

These cold, hard facts on the ground made the fight by the unwashed masses to get into the airport and on a departing flight more like a gladiator-like struggle for survival than something commonplace in the supposedly “civilized” 21st century.

Or like something out of the Hunger Games, the analyst thought to himself as he continued to stare at his monitors, unconsciously shaking his head as he did so.

Blowing out a long, slow puff of air, the man swiveled in his chair to look at his boss, the senior analyst and director of the Afghanistan desk for his nameless, anonymous government intelligence organization. After a pause, he summed up his feelings about the entire debacle.

“We are so screwed on this one, boss.”

His voice was low and meant only to be heard by his superior. Within it, though, a casual listener would have easily recognized complete certitude accompanied by a healthy dash of dread.

The junior man’s leader accepted the truth of her subordinate’s verdict. However, she also knew orders were orders and that all of what was often called “blowback” or “second-order effects” – which were sure to follow in the wake of this disastrous cut-and-run act – would take place after she’d left government service, which would be very soon.

The bloody writing was clearly on the equally bloody wall as far as Afghanistan went.

She’d been around long enough and was tired enough of the whole thing to understand that retirement followed by more lucrative employment with a government contractor, or even a lobbying firm a few years down the road, was preferable to hanging around for what was to come. Many thousands of Afghans were fleeing their country ahead of the Taliban taking over once again, and the United States was going to take all of them in.

In the main, accepting refugees from Afghanistan was the right and proper thing for the US to do. This, the analyst and his boss knew and they were fine with that. Many Afghans had thrown their lot in with America, after all, oftentimes working either directly or indirectly for various American agencies or organizations such as State, Defense or the CIA. In fact, you name the US agency or non-governmental organization working over in Southwest Asia and chances were pretty good that some of the host nation’s citizens were earning a paycheck from Uncle Sam, one way or another.

The brutal truth was that if those Afghans stayed in the country, after their benefactors and protectors had left, they would eventually be swept up for execution by the Taliban once that gang of cutthroats, or any other fundamentalist group such as ISIS-K, or the “Islamic State – Khorasan Province,” learned of their names. The two American intelligence analysts also knew the Taliban and various other assorted terror organizations were certain to get their hands on those names, too.

No, those Afghans had nowhere to run other than to the United States. The US had to take them in or it would suffer severe damage in the eyes of other people in many other countries that were providing vital intelligence, not only because of lucrative payment but also resettlement in the Land of the Free once they were discovered or their usefulness had otherwise ended.

Unfortunately, both government intelligence analysts also knew the race to supply sanctuary in America to those who legitimately deserved it would also let in a legion of those who most certainly didn’t. Long and bloody, this list included Taliban infiltrators, terrorists among several different ISIS groups, and remnants of Al-Qaeda and a multitude of other non-state terror organizations as well state actors such as Iranian Quds Force special operations fighters. All of them wished nothing less than the complete and utter destruction of their mortal enemy, the United States. The analysts were absolutely sure a host of unsavory types and outright terrorist killers and suicide bombers would end up being washed ashore along with the huddled masses of deserving Afghans soon to make landfall.

Upwards of 67,000 refugees -- many of them unvetted or otherwise unverified as having legitimate reason to be let in -- were likely going to be brought to the Washington, D.C. Beltway area alone. Multiply that number by at least ten, scattered all over the country, and a serious security problem for the nation was in the offing due to the Great Pullout, as the two of them called their country’s Afghanistan exit.

The senior analyst could do nothing but shrug her shoulders noncommittally and dissimulate slightly, though her subordinate knew it was really just an act.

“It probably won’t be as bad as you think, Andy.”

It was all she could muster and there was a complete lack of conviction or confidence in her voice. Inwardly, she was honest enough to admit it was probably going to be worse than they could imagine.

“I know you don’t believe that Sandy.”

More dread in her junior analyst’s voice crept out. He knew what was probably going to happen once the assorted bad people among the wave of refugees got to America and then sorted themselves out, complete with access to resources most of the civilian populace would never in a million years be able to possess.

Automatic weapons and all the ammunition a terrorist could ever want? Check. Grenades, ordnance and plastic explosives? Double-check.

Those weapons were bad enough, but there were also worse things, up to and including MANPADS, or “man-portable air-defense systems,” and maybe even the Devil-spawns of the terrorist world: radiological devices -- better known as “dirty bombs” – and possibly an array of bioterror weapons such as anthrax and other organisms that would have turned even Adolf Eichmann’s stomach. Then there was the unholiest of the unholy: Nuclear weapons.

The intelligence pair knew on an intellectual level that the worst of their fears – dirty bombs, bioweapons and nukes in the wrong hands -- was a stretch, especially given the lack of knowledge and skill among the killers or wannabe killers soon to make their way to America’s fair shores, but they also had gained more than enough bitter experience to never put anything beyond the realm of possibility when it came to terrorists and their mindset. They were often doggedly determined and certainly not afraid to die; that much was for sure.

Silence once again reigned briefly between the two. What more could be said that they didn’t already know they couldn’t say? Doubtless, their conversation was also being immortalized by several listening devices placed in undetectable spots throughout the room in which they worked. Neither wanted such talk either picked apart by those far higher up the intelligence food chain or leaked to some congressional oversight committee or, worst of all, to the news media. In this day and age, they’d likely as not find themselves and their little talk splashed all over some website not entirely friendly to the idea of a Deep State intelligence organization – vital as they may or may not have believed an actual “Deep State intelligence apparatus” to be in the real world, where a nation’s ability to gather intelligence could mean the difference between its survival and its extinction.

The man turned to look at his monitors briefly. Another fight had broken out among terrified Afghan civilians massing near one of the airport gates.

Incredibly, it was obvious Taliban “security forces” had been allowed in close to “maintain order.” The trouble was, they were far too close to American Marines and Soldiers on the airport side of the gate. The fundamentalists were gleefully breaking up the fight with extreme violence and fatal result, swinging the butt ends of their AK-47s and American-made M4s with wild abandon, in the process trampling children underfoot in the melee. To the analyst, the entire scene was a bit depressing, not least because there was absolutely nothing he could do to alleviate the problem.

The truth was, no one among the throngs of people trying to get into the airfield should have been allowed closer than three hundred meters from the airport fence line until they’d been thoroughly searched and screened by American or other Coalition forces, and certainly not by the Taliban.

Unfortunately, both the State and Defense Departments had at once nixed the recommendation to set up an effective security perimeter and to exclude the kind of Taliban “assistance” being splashed across their monitors. Hamid Karzai International Airport was also situated in some of Kabul’s most-crowded neighborhoods, which was another big, flashing red light no one in the federal government wanted to acknowledge.

The tragic fact was that there simply wasn’t any way to push a security perimeter out very far, if at all.

End result? Hordes of desperate Afghans -- no doubt with Taliban, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Quds Force infiltrators mixed in --were pressing right up against various airfield entrances, including gates that led to the American operational and airplane evacuation areas. US military personnel responsible for keeping an effective security presence were largely at the mercy of Taliban security forces when it came to maintaining an orderly flow of hopeful refugees, and both analysts knew that was simply insane.

Once again, though: What could they do?

The answer? A big, fat nothing.

“Time to wrap this up, Andy,” the woman said to her subordinate. She took solace in and was even buoyed by the fact that this time next week it would become someone else’s problem. She already had two firm offers of employment, one from a well-resourced D.C. think tank and the other from a government intelligence contractor whose C-suite members she knew well and was very friendly with. Happily, that offer also came with an executive vice-president’s perks, including a corner office and a car complete with a driver. The salary on tap from either job offer far exceeded what she was earning as a federal civil servant.

She wouldn’t miss this windowless room, in other words, nor its ability to consistently depress her as it revealed the state of the world as well as what was to come. Tomorrow, she planned to let her prospective civilian employers know her decision and then take a well-deserved month off before she jumped back into the fray.

Time to get paid, she secretly thought to herself, though she revealed none of this to her subordinate. No doubt, he had his own opinion on the matter.

“Yeah,” he said in a tone showing both that he could read her thoughts at that moment and also that he knew the deal, including what their ability was to affect the eventual outcome of this disaster: Precisely none.

Snapping out of his reverie, the man slowly exhaled once again and then spoke: “Let me log off and shut the system down and we’ll walk out together.”

“That’s fine, Andy.”

He moved to his keyboard and began ending the connection to the satellite feed, powering down the ultra-powerful computer system that ran it all. He felt like he’d just ended the lives of countless people in the process, as if his watching the tableau in Afghanistan had somehow been keeping all those people alive.

They’re in for it now, he thought.

Another anonymous office in this equally anonymous building would pick up where they were leaving off, with another anonymous pair of analysts, junior and senior, taking up the slack. That new pair would produce the final intelligence report later in the week, after the entire sad tragedy of Afghanistan came to its inevitable and predictable conclusion.

Of course, that document would be stamped Top Secret (“Eyes Only for So-and-So Highly-Placed Government Intelligence Official”). It would also, of course, go absolutely nowhere and affect absolutely nothing in terms of the nation’s homeland security policy.

Though he knew he shouldn’t let it get to him, the junior analyst still had just barely enough humanity left inside to feel a tiny bit saddened by what it all was going to lead to.

CHAPTER1

LUKE

Present Day

“Blam! Blam! Blam!”

The report of the seriously tricked-out Daniel Defense DDM4 V11 5.56mm semi-automatic carbine briefly echoed through the surrounding woods before the verdant green and brown trees deadened the noise completely. The slightly acrid, though not unpleasant, odor of bullet propellant from the ejected cartridges wafted momentarily through the pleasantly warm and clean air before the late-summer breeze carried it away. It greatly pleased the man holding the carbine and brought forth memories of gunfights in faraway places over in “the Sandbox,” as he and his fellow service members called Iraq, or over in Afghanistan, which went by various slang names, including “the ‘Stan.” There were also a few far more profane utterances used to describe the two countries, but they rarely escaped from the shooter’s lips these days.

Luke Ellis – a now-retired Special Forces Green Beret and Delta Force operator who’d also served a brief post-military stint as a private military contractor, or “PMC” -- was mostly just a civilian these days. Right now, he was enjoying the fruits of two decades of hard and often lonely service to his country by concentrating on picking off the collection of targets he’d erected about 100 meters from the rear of his nondescript single-story ranch house. His homestead, all 50 acres of it, was located just north and west of Lucketts, Virginia, a largely rural and semi-rural – as well as tiny, though increasingly trendy – hamlet in Loudoun County, Virginia, which was just a stone’s throw from Washington, D.C.

Nourished by a vast array of D.C.-based government agencies, private contractors, and law as well as lobbying firms, “Loudon” – as the locals called it – was officially the richest county in the entire country. The region surrounding Ellis’ property, however, was known as the Catoctin District. It probably housed the last remaining large collection of politically conservative people in the four-county Northern Virginia D.C. Beltway region.

“Noh-Vah,” as the area was called by supposedly astute political pundits and other assorted know-it-alls, could be counted on as a motherlode of votes for Democrats, or the “Blue team,” in other words.

For his part, Luke himself had little interest in such political or ideological goings-on, and he rarely voted anyway. He’d fought for and defended his country, sure enough – and oftentimes with devastating effectiveness -- but that was also through an alternating succession of Republican, or “Red Team,” and then Democrat, or “Blue Team,” administrations and Congresses. At the levels at which he and his fellow special operations professionals had worked, partisan politics hardly ever reared its ugly head. He and his comrades were given mission sets or developed them among themselves through Army Special Forces Command or Joint Special Operations Command – known as JSOC and pronounced “Jay Sock” -- and then executed them and that was all that mattered. Just which political party would get to claim credit for their work mattered little to men like Luke.

Ellis was proud of the fact he and his peers in SF and over at Delta almost never “did politics.” Such doings were for stiff-necked brass-hat generals and high muckety muck civilian leaders, he believed. He and his kind had lived at the pointy tip of a very lethal spear, where mundane concerns involving national strategy weren’t of much import or consideration.

When he’d been a leader at Delta, tactics and the best ways to take out bad guys most efficiently and quickly were what he’d focused on. Even so, Luke had always received glowing write-ups from his superiors about his own high-level strategic thinking abilities, though he’d more often been given the chance to show those skillsets back during his SF days, whenever he’d helped in training native insurgent forces in various hotspots around the world.

The groups he’d once trained had usually been interested in overthrowing the tyrannical regimes oppressing them. To succeed, they’d sometimes ask for and then receive help from Uncle Sam, which would detail one or even several 12-Soldier Green Beret Operational Detachment-Alpha, or “ODA,” packages to help out. Those ‘A’ teams had orders to turn often ragtag rebel forces into at least semi-professional fighting units. Aiding insurgents – or, conversely, training host nation military forces to get rid of them – were the specific roles played by ODAs, which worked in units known as Groups. Those were the classic mission sets for standard-issue Special Forces Green Berets. Ellis had spent plenty of time in ODAs doing just that before he’d been invited to try out for Operational Detachment-Delta, where he was selected on the first try and where his tactical abilities and strategic thinking stood out.

Tactical know-how and strategic thinking had been inculcated in Luke through his years of service in the SF community and only improved by his service with Operational Detachment-Delta and its various squadrons and troops. Collectively, though, they were more commonly known as either “Delta Force” or “The Unit.”

Within JSOC and among its planners they’d been called “Task Force Green,” a call sign he’d never personally used to describe his organization, whenever he admitted even being associated with it, that is. Generally, Ellis and his fellow operators almost never said anything to anyone about just who and what they were and the Army usually tried not to acknowledge the unit’s existence. Besides, he secretly considered the formal JSOC designation for Delta to be just a bit too long and too much of a secret squirrel-type nickname to suit his tastes, so there was that to consider as well.

All in all, though, Luke was satisfied with his life. Sure, maybe one day he’d leverage his skills to again land himself a lucrative gig with any number of State Department-approved “security consulting firms” or PMC companies, but not right now.

Today, he was just happy to be banging away with his favorite weapon system – which consisted of both him and his AR-15 carbine, melded together into one lethal unit. Shooting like this felt really good, to be honest. As good as the intense CrossFit session and five-mile run he also planned to do immediately after wrapping up this shooting session would feel, in fact

Pausing for a moment as he rapidly swapped out magazines, dropping the empty and quickly inserting a fully loaded one into the mag well of his carbine, Luke looked at the dwelling he’d had built to his specifications a few years ago. It sat like a stony silent Roman Praetorian guardsman, utterly intent on protecting his emperor. Ellis could even imagine himself with one hand firmly fixed on the hilt of his Gladius, the short stabbing sword of the Praetorian.

The fifty acres of land surrounding his home made for an ideal training area when it came to his shooting “hobby,” he had to admit. Why, it was even close to being a compound though not up to combat outpost or COP standards. Still, the nearest neighbor was a small Baptist community church more than a mile away through the surrounding forest, and they’d never complained about his makeshift outdoor firing range or anything else he did on the land. Knowing those congregants, they’d probably approved of it all, in fact. He’d inherited the land from his father some years ago and had gradually improved it whenever he could carve out some time between deployments as well as during his mandatory instructor tour at SWCS, meaning “the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center,” which was based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

There, he’d taught a wide variety of courses not only to Army special operations personnel but also to operators from every other branch of the armed forces and allied or friendly nations. This included members of the Navy’s SEAL teams. Looking back at that second-to-last tour, he audibly chuckled to himself.

During his time at SWCS, he’d sometimes jokingly referred to those SEAL teams as “Squeal Teams,” which is what he told their operators they did whenever they ran out of suntan lotion. It was always good for a laugh between them all, Army and Navy alike, and it helped promote a healthy level of competition, he believed. They were all also experienced enough to know both sides had been given unique mission sets and capabilities, and the back-and-forth never got more serious than easygoing ribbing and banter. At JSOC they’d all been playing for the varsity level pipe hitter units and they knew it, so at the end of the day it was a matter of professionalism and pride in one’s craft.

Fun and games over, he turned once again to look at his homestead, his critical eye quickly sizing up the tactical layout, including avenues of approach to his dwelling. For a fact, they were cleverly laid out to funnel anyone hostile to Luke into subtle fields of fire that wouldn’t be noticeable even if the attackers had a high level of skill in the special operations arts.

Also, the former Delta operator and Green Beret was never complacent, and he always lived his life in what was called “Condition Yellow.” Not fully on edge and ready to rock and roll, as “Condition Red” would have called for, “Yellow” was a happy state of being for Ellis. It featured mid-level intensity and good situational awareness, but not the wild-eyed berserker demeanor often needed to succeed whenever a Condition Red situation arose. Besides, “going Red” would have scared all the civilians living around him, and he liked those fine folks.

Okay, okay. He liked most -- or at least some -- of them.

Fine, then. Maybe he only really liked just a few. But he didn’t hate any of them -- for the most part -- and that was what counted, right?

Somewhat to Luke’s surprise, since punching out of the military special operations world he’d greatly managed to dial down the extreme intensity called for to succeed in his old line of work. He’d put his retirement papers in last year, after the Afghanistan screw-up had ended just as messily as everything else there had when it came to policy, rules of engagement, the way latrines in the field were dug… you name it, it had become screwed up over time.

That’s what happens when Big Army always gets its way, he’d thought to himself on more than a few occasions. Bureaucracies are bureaucracies wherever they’re found, including even in the US military.

Life was better now, though, and Luke felt much more relaxed about most things these days. He sighed contentedly at the way things were turning out.

As a result of his newfound mellowness – relatively speaking, of course -- he’d even declined to sign on to the long-term supervisor contract he’d been offered by the PMC company he’d joined up with not long after hanging up his uniform. Not that that gig had left a sour taste in his mouth – because it hadn’t – but during it he’d found himself becoming increasingly attracted to his place in Loudoun County than he’d ever been while he was serving in Special Forces or in Delta. He’d left the PMC world feeling at ease, at peace and eager for whatever came next in his newfound liberation.

So here he was now, out in the fine August summertime of Northern Virginia, happily firing away with his semiautomatic carbine and not having a real care in the world.

Life is good, isn’t it? He asked himself.

Yes, indeed. It sure was.

“Enough with the philosophical stuff,” Luke said aloud without knowing he’d done so.

He looked down to ensure his weapon was fully locked and loaded, with safety on, before he laid it down on the wooden bench he used whenever he shot his rifle in what he thought of as his “backyard.”

Turning to his target array off in the distance, he picked up a set of field binoculars and looked it over with a critical eye, admiring for just a moment the patterns he’d laid out on individual targets as he’d fired his weapon. All were center mass hits and -- whenever the mood had struck him – a little bit higher than that.

His trigger press was as smooth as ever. Absolutely no jerking or pulling, and he landed his round squarely in the middle of the chest or the head, even if that’s where he wanted to put it. Just like every other competent special operator, he’d also silently repeated the well-known mantra “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” to himself as he prepared to fire. That habit had been so long ingrained within him he was almost never even aware he repeated it constantly when he was target shooting.

Luke’s resolve and focus whenever he shot -- or did anything else involving use of his hard-won military skills – was formidable. That single-minded determination sometimes elicited chuckles and knowing shakes of the head from more than a few of the newer denizens in the area was, of course, known by him, but he simply didn’t care.

Usually, they thought he was some kind of survival nut or prepper, from what he could tell.

Generally, those people had moved into the area from nearby Washington, D.C. or similarly wealthy parts of the country to open up antique stores and other businesses designed to attract the well-moneyed and well-connected elite class of the region. Ellis had about as much in common with them as they had with a beggar on the streets of Mexico City.

Luke smiled again. He always looked forward to going out on his five-mile runs -- complete with weighted rucksack, long pants and his old assault boots -- just for the entertainment he knew he was supplying those folks. Almost none of them had any sort of uniformed military service, including Junior ROTC back in high school, he’d learned over time. At best, in their adult years some may have spent a very infrequent day or two running around with a paintball gun or with an Airsoft M4 or AK-47 imitation rifle at some simulated combat ranch, if that counted for something.

In Ellis’ eyes, it most definitely did not.

Personally, he believed such games did more harm than good in cultivating what he called a “warrior mindset” because that’s what those activities were: Games.

Get hit with a paintball or Airsoft pellet and your most serious injury would most likely be to your self-esteem. That was no way to train a Soldier or a Marine, he thought. Because if you took a live round in the field, meaning in the real world, there was a good chance that would be all she wrote and your new status would be nothing to write home to your folks about.

That is, it would be nothing for the ones assigned to write home to your folks on your behalf because you would be dead and unable to write. Combat was no game, and you didn’t train for it as if it were.

Even so, Luke’s personal equanimity about such matters was strong enough to allow him to let slide trivialities like Airsoft or paintball “weekend warrior” events. Those folks were civilians, after all. He and many others like him, in all the various service branches of the US military, had been paid and expected to do the hard things needed to ensure that the most serious thing the government drones flitting around D.C. had to worry about in the way of tough times was whether or not the next incoming presidential administration was going to increase government spending by ten percent or only by five. If the latter, said administration would proudly proclaim that it was actually a budget cut and gee, wasn’t it great they were so fiscally responsible?

This thought always caused Ellis to chuckle a bit.

Luke paused to look at his watch.

We’re burning daylight. Time to get serious again.

Picking his weapon up, he began firing off the fresh magazine he’d just inserted. After that, he’d give himself precisely five minutes – Ellis still referred to the time interval as “Five Mikes” – to gear up with his ruck and a concealed pistol from his extensive collection. He preferred a forty-five caliber 1911-style pistol because of its knockdown power, and it was what he normally had on his person when not out on a ruck run. Tooled up thusly, he intended to hit the rolling hills and roads and run, not jog, at a brisk pace, all just to give pleasure to those around him and to keep his fitness level up, of course.

Life was indeed good, wasn’t it? Ellis smiled broadly with satisfaction at the role he was currently playing within it.

CHAPTER2

DOMINOES

“KER-BLAM!!!”

The suicide bomb blast killed dozens of men, women and children, including the bomber’s intended target, the President of the United States. He and the others were the unlucky ones. Or perhaps they were actually of the lucky multitude, given a left-handed gift from the gods so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the horrible, life-altering injuries the campaign rally’s survivors had been dealt by the bomber? That man had, of course, been killed by the blast as well. Such was the way of suicide attacks, after all.

The killed and wounded in the packed crowd had all been within 50 feet of the nondescript man who’d triggered the bomb vest he’d been wearing. That device, which had destroyed wantonly and with an almost devilish abandon, had been underneath the unremarkable man’s equally unremarkable and completely Western-looking clothing.

In the aftermath, the air stank of explosive residue and its constituent chemicals as well as the sad detritus that’s always left behind when humans violently pass into the afterlife. The ground at the epicenter of the explosion resembled a charnel pit of flesh, bone, blood and gore. All the tragic remnants of an evil act were there, in other words.

The wounded, with eardrums ruptured by the explosion’s overpressure wave, staggered about on legs fractured and torn, with arms equally as destroyed, and in such a state of shock they weren’t even aware of how badly they’d been mauled. It was as if a man-eating tiger had rampaged through a village composed entirely of the defenseless, taking its fill of vulnerable human flesh before it melted away into the surrounding jungle. Yet there was no screaming or crying or moaning, though there were plenty of still, broken bodies strewn about as carelessly as a child might scatter her dolls in a fit of anger. Horrible, heart-rending sounds would come soon enough, of course, as they always did after any great human calamity, but for now the newly silent air was almost completely motionless in the aftermath of what the bomber had thought of as Allah’s vengeance.

The killer had set himself up perfectly along the rally’s barricade. The Secret Service were patrolling it, sure enough, and the bomber could easily pick out just who they were and where they were and thus made sure not to come too close to them or to just as obviously avoid them. His entire demeanor was structured so as to prevent any clear threat whatsoever, in fact, just as his trainers and handlers had intended. He also knew he’d managed to avoid landing on any sort of special-attention list during his time in America, which was a fortuitous circumstance or the will of Allah or whatever. He’d received no pre-rally visit from the Secret Service or FBI special agent sent to check him out. He was innocuous and completely unremarkable, in other words, and he’d trained long and hard with his Quds Force handlers to look just the part.

It was those men – a pair of Iranians whose intense hatred of the United States easily matched his own – that had supplied his custom-built, plastique-laden and torso-fitted explosive device. It held a new type of extremely potent and highly stable plastic explosive his handlers had assured him was not yet known to the intelligence agencies of the US and its allies. It was also vacuum-sealed within its custom-made carrier vest to prevent its discovery by Department of Homeland Security bomb-sniffing dogs and handlers or any sort of infrared, millimeter wave, or other detection device known to be used by DHS.

As a final act of their demonic beneficence, the duo had also thoroughly instructed him in how to get close enough to the US president to use it. In his heart of hearts he knew he would soon deploy it to great effect. That’d he’d also die in the act if it was successful was of little consequence to him. He was a Taliban, a Pashto word used in both the singular and plural form. Simply put, he was a “student.” Personally, he’d been a Taliban been since he was a little boy barely able to speak. The ultra-fundamentalist Muslim religious movement dictated his entire life, in fact.

He’d first been instructed by his father and uncles in the great movement’s ways, and once they’d judged him ready, they’d sent him off to a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrassa, in neighboring Pakistan, which served as both a religious training academy and a finishing school in the more obscure, terrorism-related arts. Many young Taliban males had been educated and trained in this fashion, he knew, though he wasn’t personally acquainted with any of the others. All the better to keep operational security should he be discovered once he made it to America.

The young man’s entire 19 years of life to this point had been dedicated to the Taliban cause. For starters, the movement’s leaders had taken great care to ensure his “education” had never been discovered or noted by either US or Afghan as well as broader Pakistani intelligence, including his travel back and forth over the latter country’s borders.

He was an almost perfect cypher, in other words, and he took advantage of that fact by quickly aligning himself with US forces once he’d returned from his training. He’d proven himself helpful to American military forces and had never once given even the slightest hint of anything but absolute loyalty to the Afghan government and its US benefactor. He took care, as well, to never rise too highly lest he become the subject of heightened scrutiny driven by a curiosity about his helpfulness and reliability in a country where allegiances might shift on a dime, driven as they often were by a clan warlord’s directives.

Indeed, he worked to stay more a low-level asset than anything else, stolidly performing his duties to the best of his ability, to the point where he’d even avidly taken part in the capture of several Taliban fighters, detailing their locations and likely threat to his American masters. Thus, when the opening in the form of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan had presented itself, Taliban leaders quickly seized on the opportunity.

Just last year, for example, they’d ensured he and many of his comrades had successfully made it aboard a multitude of US Air Force C-17 cargo jets, all fleeing Kabul. Those planes had taken them to America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” For a fact, the man meant to illustrate to them all just how brave they would indeed have to be to defeat him and his compatriots and their blessed movement, for he knew they had the numbers on their side in this idolatrous, wicked nation.

Thousands and thousands of Afghans – some of whom weren’t quite so desperate as they made themselves out to be, and more than a few who weren’t Afghan but, rather, Iranian, Arab, and even some from Chechnya and Dagestan – managed to pile into those planes. As was always the case with the fat, overfed and overconfident Americans, they either didn’t know enough about the ethnic differences among them all or they simply didn’t care, focused as they were on helping their supposed “friends” escape the Taliban as their fighters took province after province, city after city, town after town.

At any rate, his paperwork and identity documents had long ago been perfected. They’d previously been surreptitiously entered into the Americans’ databases and security systems by skilled hackers working for a section of the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, which was extremely sympathetic to the Taliban. The entries included his electronic and biometric data, all of which was designed to withstand fairly rigorous scrutiny. Brilliant forgeries, they’d proved his bona fides sufficiently enough that the largely apathetic DHS and other US government three-letter-agency background checkers – who’d been looking into his past at the refugee resettlement camp he’d been transported to after landing in America -- had proclaimed themselves satisfied that he was who he said he was.

They’d then welcomed him with open arms and even helped support him while he was “integrated” – their word, not his – into his new country, complete with a small, subsidized apartment, cash payments, English lessons, and a decent and unexciting job that paid him more money than he needed, but which he’d carefully spent so that he could give the impression he’d bought wholeheartedly into what was called the “American dream.” He didn’t know about anything else, but his own dream had always been of the final, great use to which he’d be put. His entire reason for being was directed at that outcome and today would be the day.