If the trumpet give an uncertain sound,
who shall prepare himself to the battle?
Corinthians
Not a sound littered the gently moving air in the packed conference room. The general’s thoughts, and those of many in the room, instantly went to the seventeen Americans and scores of Europeans killed in the jihadi terror pandemonium that followed the faked murders of a small village of Iraqi civilians.
The cover story Xavier Cloud’s bosses had asked he submit to made him fully despised and thus attractive to certain circles, foreign and domestic, about which U.S. intelligence services wanted to know more.
“It was a tricky setup,” McCandless said. “I’m betting most of you in this room are too young to remember the My Lai massacre that occurred in Vietnam back in 1968. Soldiers went crazy and killed a village of civilians, more than five hundred people. Some soldiers were punished, even some generals, and it left a stain on military service during the Vietnam Era that still hasn’t subsided. We set up the same atrocities, but faked this time.
“We used satellites to find a lost town in the Iraq desert. CIA para-military special forces and military intelligence operators descended on the place far enough away from other settlements that even most locals had forgotten it was there. Under strictest secrecy, a special unit of soldiers and local fighters shadowed ISIS killer teams before they could do their work. We obliterated those killer teams, of course, and added them to our ghost cast. Then the deceased, and sometimes just their parts, were used to populate the ghost town.
“Photographs were made of the carnage, videos were recorded, and then our B-1 bombers annihilated the place. Staged photos were made of our guy and his ‘battle buddies’ holding aloft horrible trophies of war. Not all the trophies were captured weapons or flags.
“At no time did it seem to occur to anyone that only our guy’s face was identifiable in the imagery.”
The general reached for a bottle of water on the podium, cracked it open, and took a small drink. He and the rest of the room were lost in thoughts about the aftermath of the faked war crime.
Innocent civilians had been caught in punishing extremist reprisals in Europe, mostly tourists killed by a single terrorist with an AK-47 and some hand grenades on an Italian passenger train. It had wadded up in spectacular fashion just as it entered a mountain tunnel, splattering train cars full of screaming people into the rock face and then spilling them down the mountainside into a fast-moving river hundreds of feet below.
Other deaths, the worst ones, were American military, captured or kidnapped, despicably mutilated alive and then beheaded on video, the results distributed throughout the world. Real and horrible deaths, in angry retribution for faked ones.
Anyone who witnessed the video execution of Navy SEAL Chief Special Warfare Operator Atticus John writhing and screaming obscene death threats in handcuffs, held down by four jihadis as he still fought them and bellowed out the National Anthem while being slaughtered, was never the same.
“Yes,” McCandless said quietly. “We did not foresee the terrible unintended consequences. For that I shall pay dearly when accounting for my actions one day to my Maker. We compensated the families of the victims—our own martyrs—but no compensation substitutes for a human being, a family member, a spouse, a father. They are American heroes all. Each gave their lives for their nation, even while not knowing they were doing so. May God continue to bless and keep them.”
The general surveyed the crowded room. The expressions on many faces were uniformly melancholy. People in this line of work, clandestine work, were sometimes forced to confront the terrible ethical ambiguities of their profession. They were just as important to protecting the nation as a Marine lance corporal standing an embassy checkpoint in Kabul, or an Army military intelligence officer interrogating a terrorist prisoner—but the nature of clandestine service is necessarily not above board, open to public scrutiny for neither blame nor acclaim. They answer to their bosses, like any other government employee, but when they go home for the day, they answer to their consciences.
Sometimes, to Jack Daniels.
And just like a lance corporal who mistakenly kills a civilian in the dead of night when a car approaches his checkpoint too fast, the spooks too sometimes made mistakes, hidden behind glowing computer screens and the polished glass eyes of armed robots patrolling skies half a world away, or dissecting plans of action in fortified conference rooms.
They were usually estranged from the carnage they caused, these “chairborne commandoes” as other, dustier warriors referred to them from the ground in sandy places. But they were not disconnected from the suffering they caused, nor from the consequences.
Nor the bad dreams.
“So, the asset, formally U.S. Army Ranger Sergeant First Class Xavier Cloud, was pilloried, publicly scorned for war crimes he did not commit, and following a show trial, sent to federal prison just so he could ‘break out’ and go underground to find a connection to domestic terrorism. We helped get word around that his highly
desirable skill sets were for lease to the highest bidders. We stumbled into the kidnapping plot, and we had Cloud offer to pay for the rescue out of the hundred million. That got us closer to the Chinese, who seem to know about a terror attack plan on American soil. But Cloud indeed is neither a war criminal nor an international fugitive. He is one of ours.”
The on-screen photo changed to Cloud in his Army dress blue uniform.
“His mission was to get next to these Chinese folks, to see if he could first employ them in his recovery of the girl and the hundred million, thus gaining their trust. He succeeded in this. And yes, that is real money. Cloud and his former Ranger team stole those dollars from us—the taxpayers—back when we were cementing our deals for OIF support from Iraqi warlords literally with cubic money. I was in-country at the time as a young battalion commander, and I can tell you we were slinging those pallets of money around like hash browns at a Waffle House—smothered and covered—all the cucamarangas. The accounting was sometimes theoretical. If the helos went out with a team and the money, and they reported it delivered when they returned, we wrote it down that way. Some random warlord might complain about not getting his, but we either wrote him off as greedy, or sent out more friggin’ money.”
McCandless gestured a knife-hand to Benedict, who rose. “We are letting Cloud keep the money, by the way. Whatever is left after his ordeal is over. It is long off the books now, and I think he has earned a bonus from his country for what we put him through.”
The general waved Benedict forward.
“This is Poppy Benedict. Many of you have worked for him and with him in the past. I have put him in direct charge of Patient Anvil. It is a very short chain of command, people. Any order or instruction issued by him has my complete authority behind it, and the direct authority of the president of the United States behind that. Poppy.”
General McCandless took his seat and Benedict approached the polished wooden podium. He oversaw the crucial operation, but that didn’t make him nervous in the slightest. As a serial husband with four ex-wives—two drunks, one cheater, and one saint; he’d screwed up the good one on his own—he’d had tougher bosses before than this general.
“Thank you, sir.”
Benedict picked up his own laptop remote, nodded to the Army staff sergeant and the lights went back down.
“Someday you must tell us what cucamarangas are.” He punched the button that began the PowerPoint slideshow with a map of metropolitan Detroit.
“We believe a terror attack is being planned for somewhere in the metro Detroit area. We don’t know much more than that yet, but two possibilities assert themselves. The first option is an attack on the peaceful Muslim population in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the largest concentration of Muslims outside of the Middle East, and by far the single largest in the country.”
The map perspective dissolved into a video feed of the giant primary mosque in Dearborn. The feed was identified on-screen as being from an MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drone orbiting high above the American city. This was no recording. According to the geopositioning and timestamp data on screen, the video feed was live and in color and being streamed into the meeting in real time. Some in the room noted the sea change: For the first time, an armed American drone was surveilling an American city on a combat air patrol, and it wasn’t a drill.
“We have information of a credible threat that was dug up by someone we placed in the Department of Homeland Security, and DHS had him working undercover in Detroit. Regrettably, the guy was murdered a few weeks ago. We’re monitoring that investigation, but right now, it isn’t clear whether his murder is related to the undercover, a suicide, or just one of those random Detroit things, frankly. I’m still waiting on the autopsy.
“There are both foreign and domestic threats on the board. One domestic terrorist goal, apparently, is to kill large numbers of innocent Muslims, specifically targeting children, schools and heavily trafficked areas such as the Fairlane Town Center shopping mall”—the scene changed to several more video angles on the busy Dearborn shopping mall parking lot—“provoking an Islamic insurrection leading to a regional race war with far-right American militias who we know are preparing to respond in relative force. This is a plan by domestic extremists—Skinheads, basically Hitler Youth without the education. It’s intended to ignite a war both with moderate Muslims and secular Americans.”
Benedict grimaced. “That’s picking your targets.”
The screen changed to an overhead infrared view of armed, uniformed men spreading out through a forested area at night. The warmer human bodies glowed as white silhouettes among the cooler, darker trees and vegetation. Almost all the figures appeared to be overweight.
They were too bunched up to be tactically effective and, in the darkness, their weapons often were pointed at each other. One plump one seemed to trip and fall flat on his face. His cronies just flowed past him in the darkness, none offering to help.
“This is surveillance of a group of white nationalists calling themselves the Michigan Wolverines. Not the football team.”
In the back of the darkened conference room, a lone female voice piped up with Go Bucks.
“There is considerable evidence of American militias and far-right radicals performing these lame training ‘maneuvers’ in preparation for a confrontation. With our FBI colleagues, we’ve been watching these birds for some time. Someone or some group is rattling them with nonsense about an ‘Islamic break-out’ from Dearborn into the surrounding secular areas. I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, but there you go.
“Right-wing talk radio has been particularly shrill about it in recent weeks. The militias in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana are loosely coming together under Wolverines’ so-called leadership to literally fight it out with innocent Muslim-Americans over this bullshit. And while this plan is ignorant on its face, nobody ever joined an ultra-right militia because they were extra smart.
“We do not believe any such ‘revolution’ would be successful—but it would be very messy, and cause serious and persistent damage to relations with Muslim communities domestically and abroad.”
Benedict pressed the remote and the scene changed again to a high, real-time angle on Detroit’s downtown open-air baseball stadium from another drone.
“This is Comerica Park, the stadium where the Detroit Tigers baseball team plays. Incredibly, the Tigers are in the World Series this year, with the Cubbies again.”
A few weak yaaays came from around the darkened room.
“There is chatter out there suggesting an attack by foreign terrorists may be in the cards for the World Series this fall during the opening ceremonies there. Perhaps the revolution will be televised after all.”
If anyone understood the reference to Gil Scott-Heron’s famous rap rant, no one appreciated it out loud.
“And coincidentally,” Benedict said, “just to add some real excitement to the mix, we got word through a Mossad back door that ISIS assholes are trying to coerce Xing Jianjun”—a file photo of former General Xing in his PLA uniform returned to the screen—“to use his connections to the PLA to obtain a ‘Mad Gopher.’ It’s a small, modular, very clean Chinese nuclear device designed for large earth-moving needs, like dams and mountain highways.”
The screen displayed an aerial video of a mountain pass that suddenly rose into the air in slow motion, dropping dirt and rocks on both sides of a newly excavated trench two hundred feet wide and a mile long.
“That’s why ISIS kidnapped Xing’s wife and daughter, but the wife has been killed, and our guy and the Chinese Special Forces freelancers rescued the daughter, so we don’t know what they have up their sleeves now. We continue to prosecute these opportunities.”
The screen displayed a regulation Samsonite suitcase, one of the big ones, with stout wheels and a thick handle.
“This is not the device, but it’s the sort of container we think a Mad Gopher will fit into. The device will be light in weight and high in yield, configurable, throwing anywhere from a half kiloton to upwards of five kilotons. I’ll remind you that fifteen kilotons was the yield of the device the United States dropped on Hiroshima to end World War II—so five will make a big-ass dent in a city.”
The darkened room was deathly quiet, silence broken only by the soft whir of the cooling fan in the ceiling-mounted projector.
“Ladies and gentlemen, behold the suitcase nuke. Our worst nightmare.”