The thirty-one-year-old woman staggered two steps back into the street, and then she fell onto her side, dropping her purse and the keys as she collapsed, still enveloped inside the massive cloud of smoke.
The woman walking her dog across the street fell to the ground herself, half propelled back by the detonation and half affected by the incredible sound made by the explosion.
When she looked back in the direction of the noise, she saw the woman by the mailbox rolling onto her back, her chest heaving up and down rapidly, and her face all but gone.
Ghazi had pressed the button on his phone that triggered the bomb, and Husam had held his phone on the scene, his camera zoomed in to provide a distant but clear moving image of the incident. The man they called Mohammed had been watching in real time, and he congratulated the men as they drove out of the neighborhood slowly and carefully, and headed back toward their safe house in Fairfax.
They had placed the bomb here instead of at Pineda’s home because the targeting data they received just hours before said she would come here each afternoon to check the mailbox, and Pineda’s condo had tiny mail slots, meaning they wouldn’t have been able to use the device there.
The two men had no idea who was providing the intelligence they used. They assumed their leader, the man they knew only as Mohammed, had teams of spies working in the area.
The cell had discussed simply shooting the woman the moment she pulled into her driveway, but cell leader David Hembrick and Abu Musa al-Matari agreed that the information about the mailboxes gave them the opportunity to use the relatively low-risk remote-explosive option for their first attack. It was crucial that it worked, that the Fairfax cell remained intact, and although al-Matari didn’t say anything to Hembrick on the matter, frankly he was worried Ghazi and Husam would fuck up anything that got too complicated.
The police, fire, and ambulance crews arrived on scene almost simultaneously, but Barbara Pineda had already stopped breathing. She still wore her DIA identification card around her neck, but it was too damaged in the blast to be read. The contents of her purse were retrieved, however, and her name was run through the police system. It took no time at all for homicide detectives to find out that she worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, but this raised no red flags, because it seemed most likely to detectives in those first hours that the actual homeowners had been the intended recipients of the attack, and not the poor woman who had stopped to pick up mail for her friend.
The bombing made the D.C.-area news at eleven that night, of course, but Pineda’s name and employer were not mentioned. The reporter referred to the victim only as a “family friend” picking up the mail of the homeowner.
This meant that the first salvo of the Islamic State’s attack against the U.S. military and intelligence communities on U.S. soil came and went without any immediate recognition of the importance of the event.
The second salvo came very early the next morning, on the opposite side of the country. This was by design, of course. Al-Matari had spent months discussing his plans with the Islamic State’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau, and its crucial public relations division, the Global Islamic Media Front. All his acts were chiefly for the benefit of the GIMF department and their slick propaganda, and both the FIB and the GIMF knew a truly nationwide attack would give them the most impact.
To that end, the team leader of the Santa Clara cell, Kateb, and his wife, Aza, sat in the Starbucks on the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Riverside Drive in Los Angeles, each with a cup of tea in front of them. They’d arrived in town the night before, and they’d slept in their car in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store, waiting till the coffee shop opened at five-thirty a.m.
At five-forty they entered, ordered their drinks, and sat at a table in the far corner of the room by a glass-door emergency exit. Aza had her back to the entrance and the counter, but Kateb could see everything in the store. She carried a purse and he a small shoulder bag, both of which they put on the floor under the table. Inside both bags, loaded Glock 17 pistols stayed within reach.
The couple said little to each other, but they both checked their phones. Aza just wanted to know the time from minute to minute, but Kateb was connected with the man they knew as Mohammed, on an encrypted link that allowed Mohammed to see real-time through Kateb’s camera.
A few men and women on their way to work entered the Starbucks, ordered drinks and food, and left. By six o’clock, however, Aza and Kateb were the only customers in the shop.
At ten after six Kateb saw a large black Cadillac Escalade pull up and park by the front door and a group of five climb out. His dossier from the man he knew as Mohammed told him the Escalade came here every morning, shortly after six, and a man named Todd Braxton would be among the occupants.
Braxton was their target, and while he would not be alone, none of his group should be armed.
Softly he whispered to his young wife. “They are here. It is almost time.”
Aza began breathing shallowly, a show of stress bordering on panic, but her husband saw in her eyes that she was still in control of her emotions.
She was ready, and he was proud of her.
Former U.S. Navy SEAL Todd “T-Bone” Braxton could have played the lead role in the movie about his life, and this was exactly the point he stressed to his agent every time the two men spoke. It was also a point he had hinted at to the producers of Blood Canyon, the actual film being made about his feats of heroism while on operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
But T-Bone’s agent didn’t have the juice to make it happen, and the producers said the film needed a well-established star.
Braxton knew he could have nailed the role. Hell, he’d lived it, minus all the artistic flourishes written into the movie. And he sure looked the part of himself. He possessed the confident attitude, a chiseled jaw, spiked black hair, and tats ringing his muscled biceps.
T-Bone served on SEAL Teams 10 and 3, achieving the rank of petty officer first class before leaving the military to write a book about his exploits. The book had been a bestseller, propelled by his numerous TV appearances and paid speaking engagements, and then a screenwriter friend had turned the book into a screenplay.
The Navy had been supportive of both the book and the film, and Braxton had secured himself an advisory role on the set, which basically meant he went to the studio each day, or on location in the Mojave Desert, where he hung out with the actors and filmmakers, and made sure their gear was squared away before the director yelled “Action!”
Although he would rather have been the star of the film, Braxton did have to admit that the studio had found a good actor to play him in the lead role. Danny Phillips was relatively well known for a hugely popular cable TV series he’d starred in, and although he was eight years younger than Todd Braxton, the two men looked like they could have been brothers. Phillips had put on muscle and grown his sideburns into huge muttonchops, just as Braxton normally wore, and Phillips had gone out of his way to wear his ball cap in the same manner Braxton did, even when not shooting.