Many in America’s cities owned weapons. At this point in the campaign, one unexpected bullet could smash General Taleh’s grand design beyond repair.
The Bosnian sniper searched the area carefully, trying to suppress the fear and excitement surging through his body, trying to keep a clear head so that he could spot any movement, any possible threat. By now, the intersection half a block away was a jumble of abandoned cars, their windshields starred or shot out altogether. Bodies dotted the pavement along with shattered glass. He pivoted, sighting over the AKM’s muzzle. There. He saw someone crouched behind a car that had driven up over the sidewalk and plowed into a storefront. He fired twice. An elderly black woman slumped forward and sprawled, unmoving, on the sidewalk.
The van’s horn beeped again twice this time. It was time to go.
Hodjic stared hard along the muzzle of his assault rifle, making sure it was safe to turn his back for ten seconds. He whirled and dove through the open rear doors.
Khalizad heard the horn too and turned, but Tomcic showed no signs of leaving. He was still firing still flailing away at the heaped corpses on the playground. The Iranian had to grab his shoulder to break his fierce concentration.
The Bosnian turned his head slightly, but his expression was unreadable under the mask.
Khalizad yanked on his shoulder again, stabbing a finger toward the van. He said nothing. Except in dire emergency, their standing orders prohibited speech during a mission. No one must hear the accents that would give them away as foreign-born.
This time, Tomcic shook his head as if coming out of a trance. He rocked back slightly. Then, without another look at the schoolyard or his victims, he rose and dashed into the van.
Khalizad was the last one in. He pulled the doors shut and shouted over his shoulder to their driver, “Go! We’re clear!”
Barakat took off with a screech of tires, peeling out into the street and away at high speed. As soon as the van started moving, the three men in back stripped off their masks and began shoving their weapons into the duffel bags. Reaction to the enormous stress left them utterly exhausted, and only their training carried them through the routine now. Both Khalizad and Tomcic were actually trembling, shaking uncontrollably.
Tomcic slid his AKM out of sight and sat down heavily, emerging fully now from his murderous daze. His emotions were running wild, cycling through deep satisfaction and unappeased fury. He’d had his revenge, but he still felt unsatisfied. America’s crimes against his people and his homeland were too great to be expunged with just one punishment.
They were back at the other minivan in five minutes, still apparently unnoticed and unpursued. While Khalizad and the others threw their gear into their own Dodge minivan Barakat made a fast, thorough search of the rental vehicle. He found no traces, not a shell casing or any other evidence. All they left behind was the stink of powder.
Barakat scrambled into the Dodge and started the engine. They drove off, taking the Kennedy Expressway north to the Edens and then on into Wisconsin on the Tri-State Tollway. They stopped only once, so that Khalizad could make a short call from a pay phone to other members of his command, reporting their success and triggering the message claiming responsibility for the attack.
By the time the police found the abandoned rental van, the four men were crossing the Wisconsin border. They had new orders.
News Bulletin, WBBM radio, Chicago “… Police have now set up barricades around the Settles School to reduce crowds and allow access for emergency and police vehicles. A helipad is being set up for the medivac flights needed to transport the most critically wounded to area hospitals.
“Parents are asked to please refrain from going directly to the school. All uninjured students and faculty have been taken to Fellowship Baptist Church. Officials at the church are maintaining a list of casualties and the hospitals where they are being treated.
“In another key development, police spokesmen have confirmed the written statement anonymously delivered to our sister station WBBM-TV as authentic. It matches one eyewitness account of the attackers wearing emblems identified as belonging to the New Aryan Order, the same hate group believed responsible for blowing up the National Press Club seven days ago. FBI agents arriving at the scene of the massacre have said they are proceeding on the assumption that the group is responsible.”
South Side Islamic Center, Chicago The words rang out, full of anger and loathing.” ‘We have begun the holy task appointed to us, the destruction of the Soldiers of Satan. The black race will be exterminated. We call on all true whites, all true Aryans, to fight for the purification of our Christian faith and race.’ ”
The Reverend Lawrence Mohammed lowered the paper from his thin, almost ascetic features. His face was purple with rage, but every word he spoke was carefully shaped and controlled.
Reciting the last of the New Aryan Order’s message from memory, he finished, ‘This is only the beginning of the decisive campaign to cleanse America of all impure races.’ ”
He paused, gazing out over the sea of appalled and outraged faces. The Islamic Center’s vast meeting hall was crowded packed with people far past any legal capacity. It was impossible to move in that space, almost impossible to breathe. No fire marshal would be checking the hall that night, though. The angry, grieving crowd would brook no challenge from anyone in authority. Thousands more, unable to make their way inside, jammed the streets outside the center, listening to the speech on loudspeakers.
All listened to Mohammed’s words in dead silence. He’d been speaking for half an hour, since seven in the evening of that horrible day.
The Black Muslim community had begun congregating at the South Side and other Islamic centers in Chicago almost as soon as the first reports of the massacre began airing on local TV and radio. Other crowds gathered at the city’s predominantly black Christian churches. Chicago’s AfricanAmerican population was shocked by the slaughter at the Settles School almost paralysed by its overtly racist nature, the most heinous in American history. Local, state, national, and even international leaders had issued statements all day, consoling the families of the victims. Some had promised justice, others reform. Most had urged calm.
But not all. The Reverend Lawrence Mohammed and the Black Muslim community were not calm. Some of the parents in the crowd before him wept uncontrollably with recent loss. Mohammed had spent much of the afternoon counseling and comforting them, before talking with confused, harried police who had told him what they could, which wasn’t nearly enough. They had nothing no hard leads, no clues nothing. Just an abandoned vehicle and a playground littered with dead children.
Mohammed scowled. His brand of Islam was not strong on conciliation or patience, and it drew a sharp line between black and white. For all their talk of “energetic investigations” and “methodical searches,” he did not believe the FBI and the police would find the schoolyard butchers. In his heart, he did not believe the authorities really wanted to find them. All his life he had seen the police for what they really were merely the slave-catchers of old in a new guise.
But now, perhaps, more of his brothers and sisters would come to realise the truth of his vision.
Already traumatised by the death of Walter Steele and other mainstream leaders in the press club bombing, America’s black community was on edge. Many had wondered openly whether that attack was the last gasp of a former racist era, or just the beginning of a new time of persecution and murder. For many, the Settles School massacre had answered that question.