True Faith and Allegiance

Her target lowered behind the bed, stopped firing, and screamed.

Adara saw her pistol locked open, meaning she’d fired eleven rounds at the two targets.

“He’s wounded!” she shouted to Dom.

Caruso rose to his feet, raced into the room, leaping onto the bed. He emptied his magazine straight down into the wounded man’s back.

Quickly he snatched the Uzi that had fallen on top of the bed when the man went down; then he leapt from the bed and ran back to Adara. She had already begun applying direct pressure on her bloody thigh.

“I’m fine! Secure the scene!” she shouted, knowing that his first thought would be to take care of her.

Dom began checking bathrooms and blind corners, worrying about Adara and hoping like hell everything had gone according to plan downstairs.

* * *

Thomas Russell stood at the back of one of the JTTF mobile command centers, listening to the sounds of gunfire just a block away, while simultaneously listening to the SWAT transmissions coming through speakers around him.

There had been ten seconds of sustained shooting, emanating both from the broken windows on the fifth floor of the Drake and from the SWAT team engaging in the lobby. The sounds echoed around the high buildings on all sides of him.

Then the shooting stopped, and a transmission came over the speakers.

“This is Delta One. All targets in the lobby down. Explosives are secure. Moving up to begin room clearing. We’ll need CPD blue units to assist with hostage evac.”

The SWAT team commander stood near Russell, and he replied, “Copy all, send the hostages out the front with their hands up and we’ll start moving patrol officers in to frisk them. Get to the fifth floor and assist FBI assets there. Find our men and confirm you have al-Matari’s body.”

As the order was acknowledged, Russell’s mobile phone vibrated on his hip. He rejected the call, then spent a minute more listening in to police transmissions at the Drake. It sounded like everything was under control, and Russell decided to head over to the Drake himself. He went out onto the portable steps in front of the command center, where his phone buzzed again. This time he snatched it and answered it quickly.

“Yeah?”

It was the same voice he’d heard before on the line in the JTTF command center. “Did you really think it would be that easy?”

Shit. It was al-Matari. “Where the hell are you? Your men are dead and your bomb is defused.”

“The bomb was a distraction, nothing more. I doubted my mujahideen would even get as far as they did.”

Russell did not understand. Before he could say anything, Special Agent Jeffcoat met him on the back steps of the command center and said, “Fifth floor secure. Al-Matari is not, repeat, not there.”

Russell spoke into the phone slowly. “What do you want?”

“Director Russell… what I want is simple. I want a war. My side and your side. We’ve had skirmishes for weeks, but tonight was the first major battle, and you have lost.”

“You might have slipped out, but you have won nothing.”

“Haven’t I? A question for you. Right now, where are all the cameras pointed in America? Where is the attention, and where are over one hundred U.S. government soldiers and spies, infidel enemies of the caliphate?”

A wave of terror washed over Thomas Russell’s body, because he understood almost instantly. His eyes rose to the rooftops around him.

At the top of his lungs he screamed, “Incoming!”

Before anyone, Russell included, could move, sounds of broken glass came over the heavy sustained din of the JTTF command center. And before anyone could identify the source of the noise, flashes of rockets erupted from the windows high in four tall buildings on the south side of East Delaware, and smoke trails streaked down, all converging on the two trailers and the men and women around them.

* * *

Algiers and Tripoli had removed panes of glass in their room at the Raffaello Hotel the moment it was confirmed where the mobile command post would deploy in the neighborhood. With their ninth-floor view of East Delaware, they merely had to fire their AT4 launchers down and to their right.

Musa al-Matari himself and Omar, the Detroit cell leader, stood in separate rooms of an unoccupied condominium on the eighth floor of a residential building two doors east of the Raffaello. They had to smash out sections of glass with hammers brought along for the job, then simply heft and point their AT4s down and to the left, a simple shot for both men, even though neither had ever fired the American portable antitank weapon.

Al-Matari and the two North Africans had debated for a day about where they needed to position themselves for the least amount of movement before the main thrust of the evening’s attack. They’d reserved and checked into two other hotels within three blocks of here, and had been prepared to move to any number of different buildings, although they knew the JTTF had a limited number of options, and this made al-Matari and his men’s jobs easier.