True Faith and Allegiance

The old man shot the woman once in the chest, and once in the face, and while the first round merely rocked her back on her heels, the second shot killed her instantly. The civilian himself took a round through his shoulder and a second in his right hand. He fell to the ground clutching at his wounds, dropping his gun in the process.

A kid stocking shelves helped drag the wounded senior citizen to cover, and then through the market to escape out a back door.

The Air Force major bolted out the front door of the supermarket, chased by screaming nine-millimeter rounds. A store security guard, armed with a .38 revolver he hadn’t fired since qualifying with it, emptied his weapon at the would-be assassin, missing with all six rounds before he was hit in the throat by return fire. He bled to death quickly in front of the ATM just inside the doors.

A police car had been idling in front of the convenience store adjacent to the market while two LVPD officers inside the vehicle drank coffee, and they heard the gunfire even with their windows up and the AC running. They rolled up in front of the market within forty-five seconds, just as the deli and bakery employees passed by, running for their lives.

One officer grabbed his shotgun and the other pulled his Glock 22, and they rushed inside toward the unknown threat.

The surviving terrorist had been trying to revive his female partner, and he was surprised by the quick arrival of the police. He ran back deeper into the large store, but not before he was hit in the back by four pellets of buckshot. He kept his footing, shot and wounded a civilian who stumbled into his path in panic, and emptied his magazine over his shoulder toward the police while he retreated all the way to the stockroom.

He made it to the loading dock, and could have escaped out into a rear alley, but he saw employees ducked behind cars back there: men and women who could have pointed out his direction to police. Instead, he returned to the storage area of the grocery store, found a darkened corner behind pallets of breakfast cereal boxes, and collapsed in pain, exhaustion, and grief.

Kateb knew that he and his wife, Aza, had failed to kill their target, just as they had failed to kill the Navy SEAL two days earlier in L.A.

And now Aza was dead and Kateb was fucked.

* * *

Those first two police officers on the scene did not pursue the armed man into the stockroom, chiefly because when the cop with the shotgun knelt to check the body of the female attacker, he saw something horrifying. Her face was covered in blood from a ragged wound just to the left of her nose, and he found it odd she had a wire hanging out from the cuff of her shirt. At the end of the cord, he saw the detonator with the black swivel safety cap turned to expose the red button below it.

The young cop stumbled back onto the floor, then leapt to his feet and shouted to his partner to get the hell out.

As more law enforcement arrived the entire shopping center was evacuated and sealed off. The injured were hauled out by other civilians while the police held their pistols at the low ready, still coming to the slow realization that a couple minutes after enjoying their morning coffee and talking about their kids’ baseball tourney that weekend, they had rolled up on a terrorist attack with international implications.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s SWAT team is called Zebra; they are known as one of the best forces in the nation, and they made the scene within twenty-five minutes. No one on scene could tell them whether they were facing a hostage situation or simply a barricaded suspect, so the commander of the Zebras called for a robot.

The Zebra unit was not going through the front entrance of the market until the bomb squad checked the vest on the body fifty feet from the door, so they moved around back. They formed at an open loading dock and an unlocked employee entrance door, and waited for the negotiator on the scene to give the word to breach.

A small tactical robot run by the Zebra unit was sent through the automatic doors of the market. An officer with a controller watched the monitor in front of him and followed a blood trail all the way back into the stockroom.

* * *

Kateb sat propped against a pallet of cereal boxes, his blood soaking into the cardboard. His phone was to his ear, and his pistol hung between his knees in his other hand.

“I am sorry, Mohammed. Aza and I have failed you. I am wounded and she is dead. A stupid old man had a gun, like he was a cowboy in a movie. We did not expect trouble from the civilians. After she died and I shot the old fool, I turned back around to kill the major, but he was running out the front door. I tried to hit him, but I failed.”

Mohammed said, “I know, Kateb. It is on the news. They have you surrounded, my brother.”

The wounded man was not listening. Instead, he said, “She died right in front of me.”

“She was martyred in front of you. She was a warrior, as are you, my brother.”