True Faith and Allegiance

Two minutes later all eighteen SWAT officers were up on the fifth floor. Three groups of four quietly evacuated the rooms where guests had answered their phones to respond to the survey. The officers did not take the time to check the rooms where no one had answered.

When this was done, a half-dozen officers stacked up a few yards from the door to room 514, and six more men approached slowly, their M4 rifles pointed at the door. The last six took up positions by the stairs but trained their weapons on the entire floor.

The six FBI agents who had checked into the rooms on the floor opened their doors, drew their weapons, and stayed well behind the action, but ready to help, if needed.

A breacher and a security man moved up to the door. The security man kept his weapon up while the breacher gently attached a small water-tamped charge next to the door latch, then stood back with the shock-tube detonator in his hand.

The team leader, back in the stack along the wall, whispered into his mic. “Bravo One has positive control. Breaching in three, two, one.”

The door to room 514 blasted inward, and the team flooded into the room.

As they did so, the door to room 515, directly across the hall, opened inward, and just as the fourth man in the stack recognized the movement on his right and turned toward it, twenty-year-old Maria Gonzalez, the lone female of the Chicago cell, took one step out into the hall.

Without a word she detonated her suicide vest in the center of the team of SWAT officers.

The door to room 501 opened as well, and Ahmed, another member of the Chicago cell, slung a C-4 bomb the size of a briefcase toward the SWAT officers standing by the stairwell on the south side of the hall. The case landed in the middle of the group, but not before they shot Ahmed to death, riddling his body with bullets.

Even though the would-be bomber was shot, the device exploded in front of the stairwell, killing everyone there and blasting out windows throughout the several floors on the southern side of the building, spraying glass down onto East Walton Place.

Two floors down, three Chicago cell members and two from Santa Clara left their third-floor room armed with grenades and AK-103 rifles. They wore body armor and suicide vests, and together they took the one flight down the main lobby stairs. As soon as they opened the door they saw the police, and while three men fired their AKs, three others hurled grenade after grenade into the lobby.

61

Two massive black mobile command trailers, each with a full array of technical and communications gear, rolled to a stop out of view from the Drake on East Delaware. Instantly the street was reclosed for the block and the entire command post was surrounded by CPD police cars.

Inside and around the vehicles were over forty members of the JTTF, all senior members of the FBI, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Naval Intelligence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, the Illinois State Police, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division, as well as the antiterrorism division of CPD.

Assistant Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell was not only the local head of the FBI office, but also the director of the JTTF in Chicago. He stepped out of a black Chevy Suburban parked in a fire zone and darted into the trailer labeled on the sides as Mobile Command Unit One the moment the steps had been placed by the side door.

They’d all heard the explosions a block away and five stories above, and now the radios were alive with reports of officers down on the fifth floor. Transmissions squawked into transmissions, the flow of information to the command center deteriorated, but within seconds of the first bit of bad news, the sounds of fully automatic weapons fire crackled up the street.

Again the radios screamed. “We’re taking fire in the lobby! Man down! Active shooter!”

“What the fuck is going on in there?” Russell demanded.

A CPD communications and dispatch specialist said, “I’m getting reports of multiple explosions and a gun battle on the fifth floor. Tangos in multiple rooms. And multiple shooters are in the lobby, with S-vests and assault rifles. All our elements from the fifth floor have evacuated, but there are dead and wounded.”

“How many civilians in that hotel?”

“Hotel management said five hundred seventy-three rooms at an eighty percent occupancy. Figure an average of two per room, that’s nine hundred sixteen people, but no way to know how many are in there right now, and how many in the bars, restaurants, and conference rooms.”

“Good Christ.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He and his entire outfit had just performed a full-scale drill on a terrorist attack of Soldier Field six weeks earlier, and the operation had gone off without a hitch, so Russell had been confident in his and the local police department’s ability to see this arrest through.