Midas reached out and slapped Jack on the arm. A show of kindness that nevertheless unsteadied him. “No worries. I heard about what happened. Well… in a general sense, anyway.”
“Really?”
“I heard you and your mates did your jobs and did them well, but still something bad happened.”
Jack said, “Something bad happened. I don’t know that I did my job well.”
Midas said, “There’s an old saying you’d hear around Delta. All skill is in vain when an angel pisses in the flintlock of your musket.”
Jack cracked a smile at this. “Yeah… I guess that’s true.”
“I personally know some great dudes spending eternity napping just up the road at Arlington Cemetery. They didn’t do a damn thing wrong other than pick a profession that kills the exceptional just the same as it kills the unexceptional. Whatever happened, you did your best on the day, and you survived, which means someday you’ll be around to have the opportunity to do even better. I hope you can shake it off.” Midas did a neck roll, then spoke with nonchalance. “Because you’re right, you’ve been acting like a little bit of a tight-ass.”
It was a weird pep talk, Jack acknowledged, but it was exactly what he needed to hear. He laughed and the two men shook hands, and seconds later Clark sent everyone on a four-mile run.
As Jack Junior ran in the predawn along the Potomac River, his father was getting dressed just a couple miles to the north in the White House. Jack Senior had been woken an hour before usual this morning to take a call from Dan Murray. After their quick conversation, the President asked for his senior national security staff to be contacted and summoned for a seven a.m. meeting in the Situation Room.
The President arrived in the underground conference room at exactly seven to find everyone else already seated. Though they stood at his appearance, he immediately motioned for them to sit back down, and he turned the floor over to Dan.
The attorney general stood and walked to the end of the conference table, where a large screen on the wall displayed the presidential seal. He said, “It appears Islamic State operatives have been conducting attacks in America for thirty-six hours.”
There was a murmur of confusion at the table, although many of those seated, the President included, knew about some of the incidents already. Murray clicked a button on a remote control and the DIA departmental headshot of Barbara Pineda appeared on one of the screens. “As I’m sure you all know, a young woman was murdered with a bomb the night before last in Falls Church. She was, in fact, an analyst for the DIA, working against Islamic State as an area officer.”
Everyone knew about the incident, but the fact the police had not immediately identified her as the actual target of the bomb had slowed down associating her with her work against ISIS.
Murray clicked the button again. The picture of Barbara Pineda was replaced by the image of U.S. Navy SEAL Todd Braxton wearing his khaki and black service dress uniform and his black garrison cap. Everyone in the room knew Braxton instantly. There wasn’t a bigger American celebrity to come out of the military in a decade. He made the rounds on the news as a talking head, and on adventure reality shows, and his book had been at the top of the bestseller lists. There were gasps of surprise around the table, because no one had heard anything about his death. “Some of you might be aware that yesterday morning in Los Angeles, the television actor Danny Phillips was shot dead along with his bodyguard. What has not been widely reported is that Phillips was with former Naval Special Warfare Chief Petty Officer Todd Braxton at the time of the assault. The two were making a film version of Braxton’s book. Even though Braxton was uninjured in the attack, we are confident he was, in fact, the intended victim. We think the assailants mistook Phillips for Braxton, which would have been easy to do because Phillips was playing Braxton, and Braxton himself had adopted a different appearance to play in the same film.”
The secretary of homeland security said, “How do we know that—”
Dan Murray held a polite hand up. “Andy, just a second and I’ll answer that.”
Now Murray clicked his remote again, and a Department of the Army image of a clean-shaven man in his twenties appeared. “Last night, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Michael Robert Wayne was shot dead at the front door to his private residence.”
Some in the room had been up late and seen news of the shooting and police chase on CNN, although neither the victim nor the perpetrators had been identified.
Murray turned to Bob Burgess, the secretary of defense. “Bob, Staff Sergeant Wayne was…”
Burgess spoke with sadness tinged with unmistakable anger as he turned to the President. “He was Delta, assigned to Charlie Squadron. They just got back from ops in Turkey and Syria eleven days ago.”
No one in the room had ever seen the President’s nostrils flare in anger like they did now. Ryan said, “And the killers?”
Murray answered. “The assassins were stopped on the highway twenty minutes after the first nine-one-one call described their vehicle. They were heading north, out of Fayetteville. Like they were going to Virginia, up to the D.C. area, but that’s just speculation. Their vehicle was rented in Baltimore, so it’s possible they were heading there. Both of the killers detonated suicide vests, killing two North Carolina State Highway Patrol troopers in the process, and injuring four more.”
“Son of a bitch,” Ryan said.
Now Murray turned back to the secretary of homeland security, Andrew Zilko. “Three incidents in the three states over twenty-six hours. How do we connect the dots? How do we know this was part of a coordinated ISIS operation?” He nodded to the monitor. “This was broadcast less than two hours ago on an ISIS Global Islamic Media Front website.” Murray took a chest-filling breath and then let it out. “I warn you in advance… this will be hard to watch.”
Again he tapped the remote operating the audiovisual equipment, and a video began playing on the monitor. The setup was familiar to all in the room. It was an Islamic State — produced video; a recruiting plea dressed up like news. But as ISIS PR devices went, this one wasn’t particularly slick, well scored, or cleverly edited. It appeared to be something of a rush job.
But there was no question about it. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in raw, authentic content.
There was some music at the beginning, a title card wholly in Arabic, then the footage, clearly taken from a medium-quality camera zoomed in to the point of distortion. Still, anyone watching would be able to identify a woman with dark hair pulled back in a bun wearing business attire. She walked down a short driveway as she dug through her purse. She opened a mailbox, and then the entire conference room recoiled in shock at the sight of her death. Some words were superimposed over the frozen image of the carnage in Arabic, English, and French. In English it said, BARBARA PINEDA. AMERICAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE AGENT SUPPORTING THE BOMBING OPERATIONS AGAINST THE MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN OF THE CALIPHATE. NOT ANYMORE.
The image switched to a dimly lit Starbucks counter and a large group of individuals there. The video wasn’t well centered, so a circle had been superimposed on one man standing in the group off to the side as he stirred sugar into his coffee.
Suddenly the shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” and two figures armed with pistols opened fire, their faces shaded out electronically. The man indicated by the animated circle stood flat-footed, and a large black man tackled him to the ground and began pulling him out of the way, but the two of them were riddled with gunfire.
More men and women cowered in terror, and a white man dove over the counter and out of view.