True Faith and Allegiance

Kateb looked at the dried blood on the back of his hand. Then he looked up. There was a sound echoing around the warehouse now.

“I can hear something. I don’t know what it is.”

“They will be coming now. It is time for you to become a martyr as well.”

“Yes, Mohammed. I did not kill the major. But I will kill these policemen.”

“Good! Very good! Allah be praised.”

Kateb put the phone down, fought his way up to his feet, and raised his pistol out in front of him. With his free hand he took the plunger of the suicide vest, and he held his thumb over it.

The noise became louder and louder, it was an electronic whine of some sort.

Then it stopped abruptly.

Kateb rubbed sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve, then raised the gun again. He could hear his own heartbeat.

Suddenly a voice called out from right around the corner of the row of pallets, just ten feet from where Kateb stood.

“This is the Las Vegas Police Department—”

Kateb screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” and spun around the side of the pallet, firing the pistol, and the instant he made the turn, he pushed the plunger down.

Three feet in front of him was the robot, smaller than a push lawn mower. Over its speaker the negotiator was telling the wounded man to throw out his gun as Kateb detonated his vest, destroying the robot and several pallets of cereal boxes.

* * *

Abu Musa al-Matari placed his phone back on the table now that the connection was lost, and he cursed.

The drone pilot operation had been a failure. These two from the Santa Clara cell had been a joke. Yes, they spread terror from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and killed some people along the way, but they’d failed in both of their objectives.

They’d even failed in another sense. The woman, Aza, had been wearing a suicide vest and a camera mounted around the vest with bungee cord inside her open zip-up jacket. Al-Matari had been watching the attack in real time, and when he saw the policeman standing over her, he placed the detonation text on his phone, but the bomb did not go off.

He could only assume that the old man who’d shot her had severed the control wires to the detonator.

Lucky shot for him. Lucky break for the cop.

Good riddance, number fourteen and number fifteen, al-Matari thought, still thinking of the cell members by their Language School designations. He had better operators out there, and they were still bringing the fight to the infidels. Better he spent his time working with the real warriors and not have to waste his days dealing with the fools.

On the previous evening, three more attacks by the men and women of Musa al-Matari’s cell had taken place across the country.

The wedding of a Marine Harrier pilot in New Orleans was attacked with a bomb placed in the reception facility. The Marine and his bride were uninjured, but three guests were killed and six more wounded.

A CIA case officer posted in Oslo, home visiting a sick mother in Flint, Michigan, was killed in a drive-by shooting, along with a Good Samaritan passerby who was run down by the getaway vehicle while trying to stop it from leaving the area.

And in St. Louis, Missouri, a firebomb destroyed the SUV of an executive with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The man was able to escape the flames, but suffered second-degree burns.

Of al-Matari’s surviving Language School students, the fifteen men and two women were now working at a fever pitch. They had conducted attacks all over the country, which forced them into hours, and in some cases days, of travel. They were constantly looking over their shoulders, and while the results of the operations were clearly mixed, the Yemeni knew the combined actions were having the desired effect. America was stunned by the abilities of ISIS, the scope and audacity of a dozen acts of terror in less than a five-day period.

On top of this, al-Matari was studying the reactions of the police and the government to each incident, watching everything possible on television, and he was working on a new plan. It would be big and bold, and like nothing done before, it would push the public to demand that their nation send troops into the fight against ISIS.

The killing of the CENTCOM commander had been, by far, the most consequential act to date, but al-Matari’s new op would be exponentially larger. Right now Tripoli was with three of the Chicago cell members and Omar, the leader of the Detroit cell. All of them were scoping out locations here in the city for the important mission. Meanwhile, David, Ghazi, and Husam were in Brooklyn, scouting for another operation that would take place in a day or two there. The four survivors from Santa Clara were down in Arizona and action was imminent on their next op, and the four remaining from the Atlanta group had split into two teams of two and were preparing for other missions.