Hodjic met them near the rental van’s rear doors. “Gloves!” he reminded them sharply.
The Iranian and his two companions nodded and paused long enough to pull on thin, flexible leather gloves usual enough wear against the biting November winds blowing westward off Lake Michigan. More important, wearing the gloves should make sure they left no damning prints for later investigators to find.
Barakat slid behind the wheel and took a moment to familiarize himself with the controls. Behind him, the other three got to work.
Stripping off their winter jackets, they opened the duffel bags and pulled out body armor, black coveralls, and black ski masks. Each of the coveralls bore a white sword on the back, hilt upward to resemble a cross. The body armor went on first, followed by the coveralls and masks.
A weapons check came next. Each man carried a military style assault rifle and a pistol in a shoulder holster. Hodjic passed a tiny TEC-9 machine pistol up to Barakat, who laid it on the seat beside him and covered it with his coat. He was not expected to need it, but graduates of the harsh training at Masegarh learned early on not to take chances.
Khalizad snapped a thirty-round magazine into his M16 and glanced at Tomcic and Hodjic. The two Bosnians nodded back silently, tightly gripping their own weapons. They were ready.
Barakat put the rented van in motion, and the three men in back checked their watches. They were seven minutes away from their objective. Plenty of time. Like paratroopers preparing for a combat jump, they checked each other over, looking for loose gear or forgotten items.
Finally, they crouched facing the rear door. They had to brace themselves against the twists and turns of the van, but the Egyptian was taking the shortest route he could and driving as carefully as he could. A fender bender now would be an unmitigated disaster.
The minutes ticked off slowly, almost interminably. Crouched beside Khalizad, Tomcic felt the sweat pooling under his ski mask. After the cold outside, the enclosed van felt like a steam bath.
“One block!” Barakat called out over his shoulder.
The Iranian reached up and unlocked the back doors. Soon.
Tomcic muttered a short prayer under his breath. The mullahs had said that he and the others were the very hands of God in this war guided by the will of the infallible and incapable of error. They had said that none of the innocent blood that must be shed would fall on his head that all who died sinless were necessary martyrs in the struggle against the Great Satan and assured of a place in heaven. He earnestly hoped the mullahs were right.
The van braked sharply and came to a complete stop.
“Now!” Khalizad shouted. He threw open the doors and leaped out onto the pavement, with the two Bosnians right behind. All three moved rapidly, spreading out to take up carefully rehearsed positions.
The Iranian team leader went to the left, toward the curb. Tomcic went with him. Hodjic spun right, covering an arc behind the van. On the far side of the narrow two-lane street was a row of small, decrepit shops: a check-cashing center, a shoe store, a little grocery, and a liquor store on the corner.
On the near side was the Anthony A. Settles Elementary School.
It was precisely 11:35 A.M., five minutes into recess on a sunny day, and the playground was filled with children, laughing and running and jumping in noisy, gleeful fun. Almost all were African American or Hispanic. The playground was separated from the sidewalk only by a chain-link fence.
Tomcic dropped to one knee at the fence and poked the muzzle of his Russianmade AKM through one of the gaps. Khalizad moved in beside him but remained standing.
Only seconds after the van squealed to a stop, and before anyone even consciously noted their presence, the Bosnian pulled the trigger. All his doubts vanished in the sudden, hammering pulse of the assault rifle against his shoulder. He was here, deep in the heartland of a nation that had let his people and his Faith be crushed by their foes, striking back.
It was an instant where fierce joy and blood-red rage met and mingled.
Tomcic’s face, hidden by the mask, matched the intensity of his emotions his eyes gleaming, his lips pulled back in almost a rictus of anger. He remembered to aim low.
His first long burst caught a cluster of children on a merrygo-round, knocking them off the ride in a welter of blood. Sparks flew wherever his bullets slammed into metal. He walked the burst to the left, toward the entrance to the school building. Halfway there, his first thirty-round clip ran dry. With a practiced motion, the Bosnian switched the empty out, slid in a new clip from a pouch at his waist, and yanked the AKM’s charging handle back, chambering a round and cocking the hammer. In seconds, he was firing again.
Settles Elementary, only blocks from the crime-ridden Cabrini Green housing project, was no stranger to gunfire, and the teachers tried to do as they were trained screaming at their students to lie flat or duck inside the building. While that might have worked against a random shooting or a gang gunfight, it was utterly useless against trained special warfare troops.
As Tomcic tore his targets to shreds with 7.62mm rounds from his AKM, Khalizad scanned the schoolyard, shooting adults anyone who looked as though they might interfere. He had a better view of the carnage the Bosnian was inflicting, not only because he was standing but because his vision was not focused over the muzzle of his weapon.
Children screamed hysterically and wept, crouching behind anything or nothing at all as they tried, instinctively, to escape the deadly fire. Older kids tried to help younger ones to safety. Some, too young to understand what was happening, simply stood and cried, and were cut down. Many teachers tried to bring the children inside to safety, or shield them with their bodies, and died at Khalizad’s hand.
The second Bosnian, Emil Hodjic, heard the firing and screams from the playground, but kept his attention and his own AKM locked on the street in front of him. His job was to protect the team. He had to keep the road open for their planned escape.
There were cars crowding the intersection half a block away. Hodjic began shooting, firing short, precisely aimed bullets into windshields and tires. He was the team marksman and sniper. As a teenager he had practiced his trade a hundred times in the deadly hide-and-kill games played amid Sarajevo’s artillery-shattered high-rises.
Now he searched for pedestrians, for customers coming out of stores, and for car drivers. Witnesses. Those who fled, he generally ignored. Hodjic was after the ones who watched.
Still firing on the playground, Khalizad heard one long beep on the rental van’s horn. One minute gone. Thirty seconds left. There were no immediate threats in his field of view, so he consciously widened his search beyond the corpse-strewn asphalt. There were shocked and stunned faces pressed up against the windows of the school. The Iranian shot them out, pumping a steady stream of 5.56mm rounds through glass and brick and flesh.
Hodjic also heard the horn the first of the signals the sniper had been waiting for eagerly. The past sixty seconds had seemed like sixty years. To his victims, he was a fearsome figure dressed and masked in black, firing into the cityscape like some nightmare come to life. Only he and his teammates understood their vulnerability and the risks they were running by taking direct action.
During the planning for this attack, the likely law enforcement response had been carefully measured and assessed. The police would not be halflhearted, but every calculation showed the attackers should have enough time to strike fast and flee. The nearest Chicago police station was more than two minutes away, and it would take several minutes more to assemble a reaction force. No, Hodjic was more worried about the possibility of a roving patrol car or an armed response from some unexpected direction. He’d already killed one shopkeeper who appeared at his door with a shotgun.