Although they were a cell totally separate from Hakam’s, they shared the same agenda. They were now soldiers in the eyes of Allah — six men who had fought admirably with the Republican and Revolutionary Guards, and later surrendered their national birthright and prejudices to fight under the one true banner of their God as jihadists, the only true soldiers.
However, not all were content with their station as combatants. Young and fit and full of the determination to fight, most kept a silent countenance with the exception of al-Rashad who, like Hakam, was an American-born Arab who gravitated toward the radical side of Islam. He was tall, six four, with broad shoulders and thick limbs. The slope of his brow and the massive muscle development gave him a simian appearance which was brought on by chemical evolution rather than ancestral inherency. By taking steroids he had become addictive to its fallout, the results unmistakable. And nobody dared to contest his often aggressive nature or cantankerous moods.
Through his own due diligence al-Rashad was tagged as the team leader of five men, all experts, each man with the commitment to surrender his life for Allah, which he respected. But to serve in the capacity to babysit a mother and her heathen offspring seemed humiliating. But al-Rashad was assured by the clerics from the Ponte Felcino Mosque that the service of his team would prove to be a great service to Allah. And that his team would impose a serious and heavy blow upon the United States and its Zionist ally, Israel.
How a woman and her children were tantamount in such an event was lost to al-Rashad. But he adhered to the cleric’s claim, believing his team to be a true instrument serving their God in a most important way.
As night was beginning to close over them, al-Rashad normally walked alone through the vacant warehouse, his footfalls echoing with a hollowed cadence that often gave the impression he was not alone when, in fact, he was. His men were stationed elsewhere on the second floor next to the holding chamber, a room fashioned with sheets of corrugated tin, steel framing, and a welding torch.
His captives, for the most part, were passive and quiet with the exception of the female child who cried on occasion, her sobbing a soft and haunting melody that carried throughout the warehouse like the moan of something long dead, of something caught in void between life and death. Hearing such noises often prompted him to take these measurably long walks. And for al-Rashad, these walks had become medicinal.
He never deviated from his path or course, always walking down the same dark warrens, listening to the same perpetual drip of water, smelling the same rancid odor of mildew and waste, but always ended up at the same grated stairway that led to the second floor balcony which gave him a westward view.
In the distance and beautifully lit by a semblance of lights was the Ponte Felcino Mosque. Its dome was perfectly rounded and its color, even in the shadows of the coming darkness, seemed to be emblazoned in gold. It was the home of his God. It was the House of Allah.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, al-Rashad relished the moment.
He would do Allah’s bidding, he considered, and he would do it without question. And when it came time to kill the woman and her children, he would do so as an integral part of the movement and wield the cutting blade himself. There would be no underlying guilt or warring of conscience. Since the easiest thing for man to do was to justify any act no matter how heinous the act may be, he saw that killing non-believers was an ordained task expected by Allah.
Taking one last look at the mosque, al-Rashad soaked everything in with an appreciative eye.
The man was completely at peace.
While the sun had already descended in Perugia, Italy, it had yet to settle on the eastern side of the United States.
Raven Rock was located on more than twenty thousand acres of federal land with its exclusive retreat situated on a plateau-like rise accessible only by helicopter. In the camp’s leveled base area, a single cabin was positioned in the center with three helipads located to the north, south and east points of the cabin’s central position. Aerial towers mounted to the rooftops maintained surveillance dishes capable of intercepting non-legitimate aircraft from several miles away. Anything remotely hostile would be targeted by predators, which were computer-manned by a military defense team from inside the cabin.
The landscape was completely unadulterated as the grass swayed with the direction of a light breeze, giving the terrain a constant undulating motion that rippled across the mountaintop, as if the land was alive. In communion with nature the conifers danced in performance, the concert of their limbs moving in a slow, hypnotic grace as the wind traced a cool breeze over the summit. Everything moved in perfect harmony.
From the east Marine One made its way toward the compound, the thumping of its rotors growing louder as it neared. When the helicopter poised itself over the north heliport, the down draft of the whipping blades caused the grass to ripple in tumultuous waves and the limbs of the pines to thrash about wildly in playful sparring.
After Marine One landed and the rotors stilled, the hatch door lowered and the president and his team took solid footing on the compound.
From a distance the quarters appeared rustic like a log cabin should, the wood bucolic in its appearance and the surrounding air pastoral. But the cabin wasn’t a cabin at all. It was a high-tech bunker. The building had blast-mitigation windows and a logwood veneer that covered the underlying walls of concrete casting and three-inch steel, rendering the stronghold impermeable to assault.
Inside, the interior was without standing walls to partition off rooms. Instead, it was a single large area with a security station manned by the defense team who could navigate the predators and maintain surveillance from their seated positions along the console. In the room’s center was a large cylindrical tube emanating from the floor, the huge cylinder not quite reaching the building’s ceiling, with stainless steel doors. As the president and his team neared the doors, an electronic eye caught their images and immediately processed the landmarks on their faces with facial recognition software, and automatically opened the doors, giving them access to an elevator spacious enough to hold them comfortably.
As soon as the doors closed behind the president and his team, the elevator descended two hundred feet into a hollowed cavern that served as the Comm Center.
When the doors parted they were met with a subterranean coolness, a vestige reminder that the air was constantly being filtered, purified, and re-circulated back into the atmosphere by computer-powered fans.
The room itself was large, circular, the ceiling above them a perfect rotunda of carved rock. In the room’s center was a large table with tracks of lighting suspended above it by metal framework. And positioned along the length of the walls hung several large viewing screens and display monitors.
Taking a seat at the table, President Burroughs was joined by his staff and other leading principals, who were transported to Raven Rock from other points of the country on earlier arrivals.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” stated the president.
Within moments the viewing screens attached to a flat wall of colored shale winked on, proposing pictures of extraordinary quality from technology that has yet to land on the public market.
What surfaced on the minimal-sized screens were the boasted images of the Presidential Seal. On the large multi-pixel screen hanging down from the metal framework and separate from the other monitors, was the image of CIA Intelligence Liaison Jaxson Wilhite.