They didn’t bother with pulling the little RIB to shore, anchoring it to the ocean floor, or fixing it to a dock with a line.
No, they would not need the small watercraft again.
Each man carried an H&K submachine gun with several extra magazines, and all three carried a suicide vest, double-sealed in plastic garbage bags. The gear had been provided to them by the three ISIS operatives already living in Europe, and they’d guarded it with their lives since picking it up in Slovenia.
Together the three Syrians scanned the shore in front of them, saw no one around, and then waded out of the water, ran up the sand, and dropped down in the deep grasses by the side of the road. On the other side they saw just what they were expecting to see: a quiet community of one- and two-story homes with tiled roofs.
The nominal leader of the three men, so appointed because he carried the mobile phone with Google Maps on it, pulled the device out of a waterproof bag and looked it over. It took him a moment to orient himself, and when he did he realized they’d drifted too far south on their approach in the RIB. Softly he pointed to the right, and to the others he said, “Two blocks that way.”
They donned their vests and checked one another to make sure everything was set up correctly. And then they stood and set off up the beach road.
On a street called Via Pesce Falco the small kill team turned left, began running along fenced and gated front yards, making an effort to stay out of the streetlights but sacrificing pure stealth for speed. The last in the group was the man with the mobile phone to his face; he searched the map on the device for just the right house.
Halfway up the street he stopped abruptly, and the men ahead of him ran on a dozen meters before realizing their mistake and returning to take a knee next to him on the darkened sidewalk.
There was nothing special-looking about this house on his right; it was one of dozens on Via Pesce Falco. The property next to it was just a sandlot with tall sea grasses, so they used this to make their way around back. Here they jumped the rear fence, and the first gunman arriving at the sliding glass door at the rear of the property waited till his two colleagues caught up to him. He tried the door, found it to be locked, and then he wiped sweat from his brow.
With a nod to his partners, he turned his MP5 around in his hands and used the butt of the weapon to shatter the glass by the door latch.
He unlocked the door, and the three terrorists moved into the darkness of the home.
This house was a four-bedroom rental property. At present it was rented as off-base living quarters for four United States Naval officers, all lieutenants in their twenties. They were all bachelors, and all pilots of the F/A-18 Hornet.
It was against Italian law and Navy regulations for personnel to carry a firearm off base, but twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Mitch Fountain always snuck his nine-millimeter Beretta M9 home with him. He knew he’d get a serious reprimand if he was ever caught, but he did it anyway. He was from South Dakota, he’d grown up around guns the way many grow up with footballs, and the thought of fighting a war against terrorists without so much as a pistol next to where he laid his head at night rubbed him the wrong way.
Mitch was the only one of the four in the house who did this, and consequently, when he woke at four-thirty a.m. to the sound of breaking glass downstairs, he knew it was up to him to investigate. He grabbed the Beretta from his nightstand, flipped off the safety, and ran out of his little room and toward the stairs.
As he arrived he saw three men coming up the steps, illuminated by a night light plugged into a wall socket there.
When he realized they were carrying shoulder-fired weapons, he did not hesitate.
Fountain fired three rounds at the sight of the ascending attackers, hitting one man squarely in the throat, the chin, and the top of the head.
And then Navy Lieutenant Mitch Fountain was killed by a fully automatic burst of the second gunman’s MP5.
The second gunman then stopped on the stairs, turned, and chased after his dead colleague, who was now sliding down the stairs back to the ground floor. He began taking the man’s suicide vest off him, while the third terrorist ran into the second-floor hallway.
The three other Americans were still in the process of waking up; the initial crash of broken glass had happened less than twenty seconds earlier, after all, but they grabbed a ball bat, a tennis racket, and a folding combat knife, and they all came running out of their rooms.
The ISIS gunman in the hall saw the three men pour out of their rooms at once, he let go of his sub gun, and he reached for the pressure switch swinging freely from the cuff of his left arm.
A quick toggle of the safety and a press of the plunger, just as the first American swung a baseball bat at the side of his head, and his job was done.
The second floor of the little villa erupted in fire, killing all four men instantly.
Downstairs, the one remaining ISIS operative fell onto his dead comrade, knocked there by the blast above, then he finished retrieving the vest. He held it in his left hand as he darted out the front door of the home, out into the street, where he turned to his right and took off to the west.
Many of the homes on the street were employed as off-base housing for the air station, this he had been told, although he’d been given no specific secondary target. He ran alone through the dark as lights came on in houses all around, car alarms blared from the explosion, and he looked for more U.S. Navy to kill.
Forty-five seconds after leaving the target home he settled on the largest villa on the street, ran up the drive, and arrived at the front door just as it opened. A man in a bathrobe stood there, searching for the origin of the explosion, but he was knocked down by the young terrorist.
Both men fell to the floor, more people came down the stairs next to them, and the terrorist put a thumb on the detonators of both suicide vests, and jammed down on the plungers simultaneously.
The President of the United States sat in the conference room on Air Force One and looked at the four computer monitors on the wall. As Nebraska crept by, 38,000 feet below him, he conferenced with the secretary of defense on one monitor, the secretary of state on another, the attorney general on the third, and the director of national intelligence on the fourth.
And here in the conference room on the 747, Chief of Staff Arnie Van Damm sat off to the side.
SecDef Bob Burgess continued his rundown of events. “Nine innocents dead in all, including seven Americans. Five junior Navy officers, four of whom were Hornet pilots in a squadron currently flying ground support operations in Libya and Syria. And a lieutenant commander who was killed along with his wife. He was the new chief of air traffic control at the base. He’d just arrived at Sigonella three days earlier and didn’t yet have housing set up, so he was staying in a bed-and-breakfast near the beach, a few doors down from the pilots’ off-base rental.”
After a pause, Burgess said, “Two more dead were Austrians on holiday, a husband and wife. Two Italians dead as well. Five wounded, two of these seriously.”
Mary Pat Foley added, “An Islamic State website we’ve deemed credible announced the attack five minutes after the first reports, put up testimonial videos of the attackers, even mentioned the name of one of the dead American F-18 pilots. There is no doubt that this was an ISIS operation, and no doubt they had specific targeting information.”