True Faith and Allegiance

They all agreed the mobile command center wouldn’t park on Lake Shore Drive or Michigan Avenue, as both of these streets were too congested to close off without additional chaos to an already chaotic scene. They decided East Delaware would therefore be the most likely choice.

The four men had waited as late in the JTTF operation to retake the Drake as possible, allowing more time for any JTTF officials in the area to arrive on scene, and for more law enforcement to be occupied at or around the Drake, so al-Matari and his men could escape.

And their patience had paid dividends.

When the scene was secure at the Drake and al-Matari made the call to Russell, the four men launched their weapons near simultaneously, sending four eighty-four-millimeter high-explosive dual-purpose rockets down into the JTTF command post below.

After the four launches, the men tossed their spent tubes onto the floors of their respective rooms, then hefted RPG-7 launchers. They fired a second salvo closer to the police vehicles on the perimeter of the command center, creating four smaller explosions than the AT4s, but killing many of those who would have soon been on the way looking for them, keeping other first responders pinned down and terrified, and adding to the real estate of the chaotic scene.

* * *

Twenty seconds after Director Russell screamed his futile warning, thirty-seven top members of the Chicago JTTF were dead or dying, Russell and Jeffcoat included. Other top local officials from FBI, CIA, DIA, ICE, and Secret Service, along with thirteen CPD officers, were among the dead. Another seventy-one in total, including police and civilians in the surrounding buildings, were wounded, many by falling debris.

* * *

After the explosions on East Delaware, confusion on the fifth floor of the Drake hotel reigned for minutes, as the SWAT men called into their radios, but could not get clear answers on whether they should hold or come back down. Transmissions crackled over one another and it seemed as if one hundred sirens wailed outside.

Dom and Adara had worked together to bandage her leg. She fought the pain and the nausea, and he got her up to her feet with her arm around his neck. He then tried to call Jeffcoat back, but the call rolled into voice mail.

The five surviving SWAT officers were unbound and the bodies of their fallen brethren were reluctantly left right where they lay for the investigators, then everyone began moving down the stairs slowly. Dom helped Adara along, still unaware of what had happened outside, but sure as hell certain he needed to get his girlfriend to the hospital.

Other SWAT units and regular police were clearing the other floors, civilians came down from above, and law enforcement, along with other first responders, tried to go up, and it became a chaotic logjam in the stairwell, principally because, for some reason, there didn’t seem to be anyone coordinating anything from the top down.

* * *

The four terrorists left their rocket launchers in their rooms and descended quickly. They wore suits and ties and they carried only their Glock pistols under their coats, sacrificing firepower but fitting in with shocked civilians out in the streets.

There was no getaway vehicle close by for the men. By design the four ran and walked individually down streets and back alleys to the south, and hailed taxis seven to ten blocks away.

As al-Matari sat in the back of his taxi twenty minutes after the attack, he thanked Allah for his victory, then thought of the smug Saudi who had conceived the plan to attack in America using special intelligence to target military, espionage, and counterterrorism officials. Yes, his mysterious benefactor had passed on the intelligence about Thomas Russell of the JTTF in Chicago, and this was how the Yemeni had gotten the original idea for the attack as well as the man’s phone number. He then spoofed the landline inside room 514 of the Drake with a simple piece of software to solidify to Russell that al-Matari was, indeed, there inside the Drake.

But the rest of this mission al-Matari had planned on his own. He’d done the research of JTTF operations here, he’d watched videos of their mobile command posts outside Soldier Field during their mock exercise weeks ago, and he’d come up with the plan for the ruse to get JTTF deployed to lure the area’s top men and women into one small place at the same time, so he could ambush them.

He’d lost ten of his remaining Language School members in this glorious attack, and the loss of life at the Drake ultimately wouldn’t be what he’d hoped, but at the moment he was not concerned about this at all. The Islamic State Foreign Intelligence Bureau would send him a hundred new recruits from abroad, and he’d get a thousand more local self-radicalized recruits here in the U.S. after the video he made of the attack from his mounted phone was cleaned up and distributed by the Global Islamic Media Front.