THE OTHER TWO black Expeditions had continued south on the 710 freeway to the twin oil refineries in Carson, California. They were imposing sights—massive towers connected by miles of pipe and lit by spotlights and flashing red anticollision lights.
Security at the main entrance was tight, with thick retractable bollards blocking the gate, but like water flowing down a mountainside, the terrorists followed the path of least resistance. In this case, one that was scouted weeks earlier by an advance team. The SUVs turned into a neighboring parking lot and accelerated hard, their V8 engines straining as they smashed through a chain-link fence and into the complex. The first truck sped past the refinery, but the second SUV screeched to a halt. Abdel and Aataz, two hardened guerrillas from Hezbollah’s Revolutionary Justice Organization, jumped out with Kalashnikov automatic rifles.
Two others leapt from the rear of the SUV with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They quickly destroyed several key structures, with only superficial injuries to themselves. The men were preparing to drive to another target when a pickup truck stopped two hundred feet behind them.
The four men in the pickup were members of the plant’s security team, and each had seen combat in Iraq or Afghanistan before working at the refinery. They instantly recognized the backblast from the rocket-propelled grenades.
The guards leapt from their vehicle and fanned out behind cover, unseen by the terrorists. Plant policy dictated that they were not to engage unless fired upon, but Jaquon Jackson had been a U.S. marine in western Mosul. The RPGs and hundred-foot-high flames told him that this was no robbery. These folks had come to play.
I’d rather be tried by twelve than carried by six, he thought.
Jackson opened fire with his 5.56mm rifle. The other guards followed suit and the two RPG gunners went down with fatal wounds. Jackson crawled behind the engine block of the pickup truck and inserted a fresh magazine into the AR-15. He took two deep breaths and rolled onto his stomach, firing a dozen quick rounds from under the pickup. The high-velocity bullets shattered glass and punctured metal as they tore through the terrorists’ SUV. The driver and front seat passenger died in their seats, but Jackson was forced to roll back behind the engine block as incoming fire kicked up the gravel around him.
Abdel and Aataz, combat veterans themselves, ran behind their SUV and returned fire. The exchange soon took on a resonance familiar to both groups. The sharp crack of the American rifles on one side, and the throaty staccato of the fully automatic AK-47s on the other.
Jackson’s teammates leapfrogged along an eighty-foot-long building, providing covering fire for one another as they moved, until they’d flanked Abdel and Aataz. One of the guards stepped out from behind the building and drew a bead on Aataz, but not before Abdel spotted him. The terrorist put a round in the guard’s forehead and the man collapsed like a rag doll.
The other two guards came around the building, one high and one low, and unleashed a hailstorm of fire, driving Abdel and Aataz backward . . . and straight into Jackson’s sights. The marine had put the terrorists in a classic L-shaped ambush, and it was time to execute.
Literally.
Jackson fired a total of eleven rounds at the two terrorists and Abdel and Aataz were dead before they hit the ground.
Jackson sounded the all clear as he rose from behind the pickup. One of the guards radioed the plant fire department that it was safe to enter and that they had one “friendly KIA.” He didn’t know how else to say it. The three survivors knelt down beside their dead teammate, when a brilliant flash in the distance caught Jackson’s eye.
It wasn’t lightning.
Half a second later he heard an explosion and saw flames lick the sky. Only then did he realize that there was a second group of terrorists at the other complex. The three guards jumped into the pickup, but the second refinery was already ablaze by the time they arrived. Geysers of burning liquids spewed into the air, setting fire to everything nearby. Thousand-degree heat and twisted steel blocked the guards’ path, forcing them to take a circuitous route outside the plant to reach the terrorists.
But an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy had no such problem.
The police car stormed through the facility’s northern entrance with its lights and siren blazing, but nothing in Christie Alexander’s decade-long career as a deputy had prepared her for what she saw: enormous clouds of thick black smoke, towers of flame reaching hundreds of feet into the sky, and thick steel torn apart like tinfoil.
It looked like the Apocalypse.
She killed the lights and siren and unlocked the Colt patrol rifle mounted between the front seats.
Deputy Alexander drove through the adjacent tank farm, searching for the cause of the destruction. When she spotted the terrorists’ SUV silhouetted against a wall of flames, she grabbed the rifle and advanced on foot.
She braced herself against the side of an enormous fuel tank and opened fire. The report from her rifle was lost amid the roar of the flames, and the RPG shooters fell before they realized they were under counterattack. The remaining two terrorists saw their teammates go down and, with their night vision ruined by the fire, started spraying bullets with their AK-47s.
But the deputy had chosen her spot well. She saw the muzzle flashes and rolled up a third terrorist with a shot that shattered his pelvis.
The last of the Hezbollah fighters picked up an RPG and aimed at a storage tank, but Deputy Alexander spotted him and put two rounds in his chest. His last act among the living was to pull the trigger as he fell to the ground. The antiarmor grenade leapt from the launch tube at almost one thousand feet per second. A trail of smoke, tinted orange by the flames around it, followed the warhead through the air.
HOURS EARLIER, THE hot summer day had caused much of the fuel inside the nearly empty tank to evaporate. Some of the vapor had settled back into liquid as the tank cooled after sunset, but what remained aloft were billions of droplets of jet fuel surrounded by air. It was the perfect explosive.
The RPG’s warhead detonated inside the vapor cloud, triggering a blast more powerful than the entire conventional payload of a B-52 bomber. In a fraction of a second, the tank itself ceased to exist. A massive shock wave radiated outward, sending the terrorists’ SUV flipping backward over the earth like a tumbleweed. A mushroom cloud of thick, caustic smoke billowed into the air.
The explosion knocked Deputy Alexander unconscious, but the storage tank she’d been using for support protected her from the lethal overpressure wave. Yet she was far from safe. Burning fuel from the explosion had splashed on the tank’s exterior skin and caused the temperature of the ten million gallons of high-octane gasoline inside it to climb rapidly.
Jackson and the other guards reentered the plant in their pickup truck, bouncing over the ground as they raced toward the clouds of smoke rising into the sky. The truck’s thermometer was pegged at 130 degrees and Jackson was about to turn back when one of the others spotted the empty sheriff’s car. Jackson edged closer until they found Deputy Alexander lying on the ground. Two of the guards leapt out, shielding their faces from the heat as they ran to the fallen officer. Coughing uncontrollably from the toxic fumes, they carried her back to the truck and drove for the exit.
They were half a mile away when the gasoline tank exploded. The shock wave sent the back of the six-thousand-pound pickup briefly into the air before slamming back onto the road. Jackson gunned it back to the northern gate, where a dozen fire engines and three ambulances from the L.A. County Fire Department were already waiting. Paramedics administered oxygen and cold packs to the fallen deputy while the three guards sat on the liftgate of their pickup and watched the world burn.
They thought they’d left this shit behind them in the sandbox.