The Hammer of God

He keyed his mic. “Front gate, all clear.” Jamal’s post this morning was at the front gate. He barely took notice of the two white vans parked on each side of the street adjacent to the embassy’s gate. As the Cadillac limo pulled through the gate, on time as Jamal had indicated, twelve men each emerged from both vans with weapons and one with a video camera. They immediately opened fire. There was a lead car and a chase car, each with three security officers inside. The lead car was pummeled by Kalashnikov fire and two of the three men inside managed to get out and return fire. Jamal watched and did nothing as two assailants came around and fired on the men from behind, eliminating them. The limo and chase car were under a hail of bullets. An RPG hit the chase car and it exploded, flipping over on its side. A former Mujahedeen ran up to it and sprayed the car and its inhabitants with three full clips of ammunition. The limo’s bulletproof windshield eventually caved in from the unrelenting torrent of lead coming from ten automatic weapons. The instant it was breeched, the driver and the bodyguard disappeared in a blood red plume. The Ambassador was inside the “cage,” a reinforced armored compartment behind the driver’s seat. This survival space could take a dead hit from a mortar round and keep its occupant alive.

Jamal walked over to the smoking limo as five of the assailants approached it. One tried the door on the far side. Frustrated he then fired his weapon into the lock. The door would not give. Five guards from the embassy were running down the driveway firing as they approached. Jamal hitched his head in their direction and six other men started laying down a curtain of lead that decimated the reinforcements coming to the Ambassador’s aid. Jamal reached into his pocket and simply removed a duplicate set of keys. He pressed the remote and, with a click, the door of the Ambassador’s compartment was unlocked. The diplomat was unceremoniously shoved into the back of one of the vans. Jamal rode with him and was the last person the Ambassador, the embodiment of American foreign policy, saw as one of the men jabbed him with a needle that would knock him out for an hour or so. The two vans then sped off in opposite directions leaving 13 security officers, all co-workers and associates of Jamal, dead or seriously wounded.

The men in the truck shouted, “Allah Akbar.” God is great.

At 7:30, Bill entered his office. The big news of the day was a videotape of a captured U.S. Ambassador kneeling before an Islamo-fascist flag as a hooded man held a gun to his head. In a halting, clouded voice, the armed man spouted a string of invectives against the country his captive represented. Obvious to anyone, except the anti-American crowd watching on Al Jazeera, was the fact that he was drugged, beaten, and under some duress. The Americans were threatened with the usual time limit to stop doing something that this group thought violated the sanctity of their beliefs, or the Ambassador would be beheaded. Unfortunately, everyone in the world except the “true believers” and the family and loved ones of the captive, were already bored with this brutal, theatrical bloodletting.

Like millions of Americans, Bill placed the horror of the man’s plight in a corner of his mind and made way for the challenges of the day. Today that meant three staff-level meetings and a presentation to the Department of Transportation on the impact magneto-electric hover technology for high-speed trains would have on the environment and U.S. energy supplies. Real exciting stuff… but at least someone wasn’t holding an AK-47 to his soon-to-be-severed head.

Bill remembered that, in his or her country of assignment, an ambassador outranks any other American official, resident, or visiting government types, even outranking the Secretary of State or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, everyone, except the President himself. Move on, Bill commanded the little committee meeting of all the voices in his head.

Joey Palumbo knocked on the doorjamb. “Cheryl wasn’t at her desk, so I invited myself in.”

“No problem. How are you today?”

“Good,” Joey said as he flopped into the chair opposite Bill’s desk.

“Any idea how they got the Ambassador?”

“I hear there’s a security tape that shows it was an inside job.”

“Some local worker?”

“No, one of ours.”

“No shit!”

“That’s the only way to grab an ambassador without a full company of marines.”

“A double agent?”

“Fucking traitor. Must have masterminded the whole thing.”

“Et tu brute.”

“Et tu-xactly. Listen, I ran the Ensiling thing. All my sources are coming up natural causes — and these guys are good! You’ve got the Viennese Prefect of Police, Interpol, and a guy I know who’s working private security for an oil company over there. They all agree — no funny business.”