Within seconds, Omar and officers of the Mabahith — all in gas masks — converged on the disabled guards as the children ran toward their parents in the distant fields. Candace wasn’t worried about the villagers; Saudi intelligence said they were farmers, not fighters, and many were angry that their hamlet had been overtaken by jihadists.
With chilling efficiency, the Saudis slit the throats of the guards and swiftly dragged the blood-soaked bodies deep inside the building.
Omar, who had secured Candace’s capture from the American computer jockeys in the desert, studied a smartphone and said, “They are close.”
He had been tracking the chip in Ruhi’s leg on their chopper flight here. The Black Hawk helicopter had put down behind a low range of hills a mile from town. Running in the heat had been grueling for Candace in her chador. Now, with the mask stripped away, she forced herself to breathe evenly, despite her urge to gulp air. While the parents of the soccer-playing children did not pose a threat, Ruhi Mancur and Lana Elkins would be arriving shortly with the heavily armed jihadists who had killed the SEALs and Saudi officers in Sana.
As the van drove closer to what appeared to be a community center, Lana guessed they had arrived at their destination.
The end is coming.
She felt flushed with fear, as if it might seep from her pores as easily as sweat.
The driver braked. Dust rose from the wheels and floated away. They had stopped by a flagpole, about fifty feet from the center’s open doorway.
“You will walk from here,” Ahmed announced to Ruhi.
Ruhi’s guard placed the muzzle of his gun back to the soft spot under his jaw, where a thin beard had sprouted since the first cyberattack.
Ahmed snapped at the gunman in Arabic. The man lowered his weapon. Lana did not know what Ahmed had said, but it possessed the cadence of “Not in here. Not yet.”
Maybe the gunman appeared too eager, even for Ahmed’s taste.
“Cousin,” he said to Ruhi, “I want you to go first.”
The side door of the van swung open, and they all climbed out. Lana kept her eye on Ruhi, subtly adjusting the veil to keep him in view. She worried that each second might provide her last glimpse of him alive. In an unspoken way, she felt she was honoring a man who had suddenly found himself immersed in a violent realm that he’d never sought.
“Walk to the door, cousin,” Ahmed said, racking the slide on his semiautomatic pistol.
Lana heard the rush of metal and remembered the way the chamber accepted the small brass cylinder of death.
“You will die for this, Ahmed,” Ruhi replied with surprising equanimity. He shook his head and went on: “Maybe not today or tomorrow, but you will die. They will hunt you down like al-Awlaki, and they will destroy you.”
Ahmed pointed his pistol at Ruhi’s face. “She was struck for speaking out. See what happens to you. Go!”
The jihadists with Lana lined up on both sides of her. There would be no escape.
Up ahead Ruhi walked closer to the entrance with his shoulders pulled back, his head held defiantly high. She adored him for that, for the spit it offered to Ahmed’s eye.
Ahmed lowered his gun, but called to Ruhi, “Keep going, cousin. You’re getting closer to your destination.”
Holmes turned to one of the screens with a German news report. That country’s communications systems were now the most dependable for the few people capable of receiving signals in the U.S.
He’d studied German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and had used it daily in Berlin, where he was stationed until the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lifetime ago. But he didn’t need all that background to translate the word now blazoned across the screen: “Cybergeddon.”
It appeared as the German announcer enunciated it with great care. Satellite video of the U.S. then showed thousands gathered in half a dozen city centers in spontaneous prayer vigils. Rumors of imminent nuclear devastation had spread. The faithful were no doubt praying for deliverance. For forgiveness. For the Lord’s will to be done. But mostly, Holmes thought, they were praying for the most human desire of alclass="underline" to survive.
He felt deeply for them. He believed that he had failed them all. But the most heart-sickening news that he’d received this morning came from a Russian operative in Sana who had passed along news that two SEAL units had been wiped out in an ambush. What an ignominious end for such gallant young men, killed without a country that could even grieve them properly, that might perish as readily in the coming hours.
The array of screens kept Holmes, McGivern, and others abreast of developments throughout the nation. They saw throngs trudging north through New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, trying to escape to Canada.
The Canadians were accepting all comers, but so much of their grid had gone down when the U.S.’s was attacked that they were poorly prepared to save their American friends. Fuel distribution had ceased in the U.S. and throughout much of southern Canada. Only that country’s most northern regions remained wholly viable — remote villages and a handful of smaller cities. Radiation would eventually eat them alive as well, if the worst came to pass.
As for Chicago, the only good Holmes could muster about the Veepox epidemic was that over the past decades the city had lost more than a million residents for lack of jobs and other opportunities. The next Detroit, it had often been called. But where had all those former Chicagoans gone? Somewhere safer? Not likely. Not with the whole country now a target.
But the most repulsive display he saw on those screens was the joyful response of Iranian leaders, and their Shiite brethren now ruling Iraq, over an America brought to its knees — the Great Satan of their theology about to be reduced to rubble. He knew those fanatics had thoroughly penetrated Yemen’s Political Security Organization, leaving it riddled with terrorist sympathizers, some of whom likely had the blood of those SEALs on their hands.
Tehran’s long shadow fell over much of Yemen, and Holmes found himself suspecting more and more that Iran had played a role in the cyberattacks on the U.S. Those zealots wanted nothing but the complete collapse of Western power. Was there a deal they wouldn’t make for that outcome? It had Holmes thinking about where the Iranians might have turned for help.
Holmes had never loathed even the most ruthless Muslim leaders on sight. He had an understanding of the long history of Middle Eastern colonization and its attendant crimes. He could quote Edward Said as readily as Noam Chomsky or Norman Podhoretz. But now he and his countrymen had their backs to the wall, and he could not bear the sanctimony coming from Tehran and Baghdad, much less the murder of those brave young men in Yemen.
There could be no room now for the nuances of reason, for the values of philosophy alone or the redemptive worth of forgiveness. It was far too early for any of that. There was only winning the race to stop the wholesale murder of his people: Americans of every stripe.
His eyes returned to one screen in particular, where a satellite lens was trained on a truck stop in New Jersey.
Hamza straddled Emma in the aisle, looming over her face. His gun barrel felt as if it were drilling into her stomach, his murderous gaze boring just as deeply into her eyes. She was certain he would kill her right now. Instead, he seized her hair with his free hand and pounded her head onto the floor, oblivious in his rage to Tanesa still clawing his face. But Tanesa’s fingernails, though leaving bloody trails across his chin and neck, didn’t register nearly as much as the nail file of a twelve-year-old choir member. The girl pulled it from her purse and stabbed him in the cheek. Only the tortoiseshell handle stuck out.