Destiny in the Ashes Read online

  Though he was a fundamentalist firebreather when it came to religion, he saw no problem in using El Farrar and his men to help achieve his ends. He told his followers, “Sometimes you have to get in bed with demons to defeat the devil.”

  He fully intended, once Farrar had helped him overthrow Osterman, to be able to easily wrest control of the country from the rag-heads. In truth, he didn’t credit Arabs in general and Farrar in particular with any great military sense. “After all,” he often said, “millions of Arabs couldn’t even defeat tiny Israel even though they outgunned and outmanned them a hundred to one.”

  When Farrar and Kareem got to U.S. 90, they took a right and proceeded to Albany, New York, where Waters had his headquarters on a farm outside of the city.

  Waters stepped out on the porch and greeted his new friends when they pulled up outside the rambling eighteenth-century farmhouse. They’d been in contact for over six months planning for this meeting, though they’d never met in person.

  “Mr. Farrar, Mr. Kareem,” Waters said, grinning and sticking out his hand when they got out of the car.

  Farrar and Kareem inclined their heads and shook his hand as they glanced around at the farm and its surroundings.

  “Come on in and we’ll get started,” Waters said, leading them into the house.

  They gathered in the kitchen, where Waters’s wife served them all coffee and fruit juice before she left them alone to talk business.

  “It is good to meet you in person after all our discussions in the past,” Farrar said.

  Waters nodded. “Yes, it is good to finally start the process of freeing my country from the oppressive regime of President Osterman. I’ve been planning and waiting for this moment for more years than I care to think about.”

  “It should not be long now, Mr. Waters,” Mustafa Kareem said in a serious voice. “At this moment, our troops are making their way across the country, hitting the targets you so generously pointed out to us.”

  Waters took a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it across the table to Farrar. “Here is a list of my people and their locations in the Northeast. They’re waiting to make contact with your people at your convenience.”

  Farrar handed the paper to Kareem without reading it. “We will inform our leaders of their names and locations,” Farrar said, “so they may join forces.”

  “How are you gonna do that?” Waters asked. “Osterman’ll be monitoring all the radio transmissions as soon as she hears about the invasion.”

  Kareem took a small cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. “We have coded cell phones that cannot be monitored or intercepted by her security forces. Each of our commanders in the field has his own number, so we are able to keep in constant contact without fear of interception.”

  “You were kinda sketchy in our previous conversations about your plan of attack,” Waters said. “You want to fill me in now?”

  Farrar drained his coffee and looked at the cup approvingly. “This is very fine coffee. Could I have another cup, please?”

  “Sure,” Waters said, standing up and taking the cup to the maker on a counter in the corner. “I bought a Turkish brand, knowing you probably liked it stronger than our local brews.”

  “As for our plan of attack,” Farrar said as Waters handed him his cup back, “it is very simple. I have divided my men up into hundreds of small groups of fifteen or twenty, each of whom will be acting independently in concert with the men of your organization.”

  Waters smiled. “Will there be a language problem? I’m afraid very few of my people speak Arabic.”

  Farrar shook his head. “No. We have made certain that at least one or two men in each group speak passable English, which our schools have been teaching for over fifty years.”

  “That’s great,” Waters said, leaning back in his chair. “Each of the men on that list I gave you has specific targets in his area that need to be taken out.”

  “And these targets, they are important to President Osterman?” Kareem asked.

  “Yes. For the most part, they’re power plants, bridges on roads her troops will need to use, and police stations and Army outposts. When we destroy them, it will not only make retaliation by Osterman’s troops next to impossible, it will also cause widespread dissatisfaction among the populace of the region, helping us to find recruits who will agree to fight with us against her government.”

  Farrar looked at Kareem and grinned. “You seem to have thought this out very well, Mr. Waters,” he said.

  “As I told you, I’ve been planning this for a very long time. When you contacted me with your offer of assistance, it was like a dream come true.”

  Farrar held up his cup in a toast. “Then let us drink to all of our dreams coming true, Mr. Waters, for I too have been waiting for a very long time for this day.”

  Osama bin Araman halted the convoy of HumVees and transport trucks just past Worcester, Massachusetts. After speaking on the phone with Mustafa Kareem and getting the list of contacts with the Freedom Fighters of America, he gave the leaders of each of the teams their contact persons and the locations where they could meet with them.

  Once all the preparations were made, he saluted the men and they divided up, each taking different roads to the west and south to meet with their contacts and continue their reign of terror against the United States.

  The leader of the Vancouver Island contingent of Farrar’s terrorist army, Achmed Sharif, held a similar meeting with Samuel Jensen in Olympia, Washington, after their invasion of the state met with very little resistance.

  “Mr. Sharif,” Jensen said as they stood alongside U.S. Highway 5 just south of the city, “here is a list of men and women who are committed to the destruction of the Osterman regime. They have agreed to work with your men any way they can to insure the defeat of President Osterman.”

  Sharif didn’t have much use for traitors, even if they were on his side, and he especially didn’t like the fact this Jensen man hadn’t had the courage to meet them at his own home, but had insisted they meet at a roadside park along the highway. Sharif had always found traitors of any stripe to be cowards, and Jensen’s actions merely confirmed this for him, but he tried to keep his feelings from showing.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jensen,” Sharif said, taking the list. “I will give this to my team members and we will be on our way.”

  “What are your plans now, Mr. Sharif?” Jensen asked, looking over his shoulder as if he were afraid someone might see them together.

  Having no intention of giving any useful intel to such a man, Sharif just shrugged. “We will spread out over the countryside and begin to do what our leader brought us here to do, Mr. Jensen.”

  Before Jensen could ask any more questions, Sharif gave a curt nod and began to move away toward his command HumVee, which they’d “liberated” from the Olympia National Guard base just up the road.

  “Uh ... good luck,” Jensen called before he scurried back to his five-year-old Chevy pickup truck and raced away into the night.

  Sharif snorted through his nose and handed the paper to his second in command. “Give these names to our team leaders and assign them each a place to go and a man to meet. We must be on our way before the U.S. Army has time to respond to our invasion.”

  His second in command nodded vigorously, and ran back along the road to the row of trucks and vehicles they’d stolen to transport them across country. His teams were going to move southward down the coast through Oregon and California and eastward across Idaho and Wyoming. The country they would be moving through was ideal for their plans—heavily wooded, mountainous, and remote, with few major roads that could be used for the transport of a defending Army. Sharif had plans for those roads, which would be great places to set ambushes against anyone trying to stand in their way.

  He lit a cigarette and glanced back over his shoulder as he waited for his men to move out, admiring the way the flames from Olympia lit up the night sky and turned it orange
and red and yellow. It reminded him of the sunsets over their camp in Iraq where they’d trained for the past six years.

  In Portland, Oregon, Mohamed Omar and his FFA contact, Billy Wesson, crouched near the Police Headquarters Building in the downtown area. It was ten-thirty at night, and the evening shift was just coming in to make their reports and the late-night shift was arriving to go on duty.

  “This’ll be the best time to hit ’em,” Wesson said, peering through a Star-Lite night-vision scope at the building. “There’s always a lotta confusion at the shift-change time.”

  As Omar raised his hand to start the attack, Wesson whispered, “Did you tell your men to go easy on the explosives?”

  Omar nodded. “Yes, for as you say, there will be many weapons and boxes of ammunition we may use when the attack is over.”

  “God damn right!” Wesson said, nodding his head vigorously. “That there building is the center for the SWAT teams of the city, an’ they’ve got a ton of good shit to have in a fight.”

  Omar turned his head to hide his expression of distaste at the crudity of this infidel’s language. He and his men had been warned by Achmed Sharif they would have to deal with many unpleasant individuals in their war against the white unbelievers, but Omar hadn’t realized just how bad it would be until this moment.

  He whistled shrilly and stood up from behind the car he was hiding behind, his AK-47 automatic rifle to his shoulder.

  All at once, the darkness of the night was lit up by twenty-five men firing automatic weapons at the police station. Windows and doors shattered under the onslaught, and crowds of policemen caught outside were mowed down in seconds, their bodies dancing and jumping under the impact of hundreds of 9mm bullets.

  Screaming like banshees, half of Omar’s men rushed into the front doors of the building, while the remainder gave them covering fire, blasting out the windows on the first, second, and third floors of the building to keep the men inside from forming any kind of resistance.

  Flashes of light and booming echoes could be heard as flash-bang and concussion grenades were set off by the intruders.

  “Follow me, Mr. Wesson,” Omar said as he sprinted across the street toward the station.

  “But ...” Wesson began to say, not having intended to take such a personal part in the attack. He’d figured to let the Arabs take all the chances.

  Omar slowed when he noticed Wesson was not coming with him. He stopped and turned, his eyes narrowed at the American, who was still crouched behind the car.

  Omar cursed in Arabic and resisted the urge to kill the infidel on the spot. He knew they might have further use of his local knowledge later, so he turned and continued his run toward the battle still going on in the police building.

  Kicking the shattered remnants of the front door out of his way, Omar ran into the lobby of the police building. He whirled, his AK-47 cradled in his arms as a door off to his right banged open and three men dressed in blue rushed out, pistols in their hands.

  Omar shouted and pulled the trigger of the Kalashnikov, grinning at the wonderful feel of it bucking and jumping and exploding in his hands.

  The three cops were riddled with bullets without being able to get off a single shot, their bodies whirling and toppling lifelessly into a jumbled pile of blood and excrement as they died.

  Minutes later, all sounds except the occasional single shot of a wounded policeman being finished off ceased, and an eerie quiet descended over the building.

  Omar didn’t waste any time, for he knew there were still cops out on the street who would soon be responding to the carnage he’d engineered. He barked orders to his men, and they shot the locks off the weapons room door and began to haul away the heavy SWAT armament and bullet-proof vests and ammunition and explosives as fast as they could.

  His men outside pulled up alongside the curb near the entrance in their stolen military vehicles, and helped to load the stolen equipment on them.

  In less than twenty minutes from start to finish, Omar and his men had killed over 120 police officers, ransacked the building, and stolen almost a ton of weapons and high explosives from the building.

  They’d disappeared into the night mere minutes before squad cars from around the city screeched to a halt in front of the building, coming to see what had disrupted radio communications with headquarters.

  The first men to enter the building stumbled back outside, some in shock, others bending over to vomit in the gutter at the sight of what they’d seen inside.

  Within minutes after that, a Lieutenant Johnson was on a landline phone to Oregon State Troopers headquarters on the other side of the city, telling them what had happened and asking for help.

  Fourteen

  In the eastern U.S., Omar Sharak had met up with his FFA contact, John Duke, at a rest stop on U.S. Highway 90 near the city of Albany, New York.

  After Sharak had made the introductions to the other fifteen men in his team, Duke pulled him aside. “We’ve gotta get going, Omar,” he said.

  “What target do you have in mind for us, Mr. Duke?” Sharak asked.

  “Call me John . . . if we’re gonna be working together, it’ll make things easier,” Duke advised.

  “All right, John,” Sharak said, though the familiarity with an infidel made him just a bit nervous. In Sharak’s mind, it was all right to use the infidel traitors to kill their countrymen, but any sort of friendship with the unbelievers was out of the question.

  “We’re gonna head due west along 90,” Duke said, pointing down the highway. “We’re gonna take out the Falls.”

  “The Falls?” Sharak asked, not having any idea what the American was talking about

  “Yeah, Niagara Falls.”

  “You mean the big waterfall on the border with Canada?” Sharak asked, wondering how this would hurt the Americans.

  “No, not the waterfall,” Duke said, somewhat exasperated. “The power plant that uses the water to make electricity for the entire state.”

  “Oh,” Sharak said, nodding his head. “That I understand. To disrupt the power plants is one of our most important missions here.”

  “Good,” Duke said, glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one had seen the convoy of three HumVees stopped there. “Let’s get a move on. We should get there just before dawn.”

  Omar Sharak and John Duke, riding in the lead HumVee, pulled up in the parking lot of the Niagara Falls Power Plant at five-thirty in the morning. The lot only had about fifteen cars parked in it, since the late shift was the lightest manned of all the shifts due to the low demand for electricity at that time of night.

  Sharak looked around at the huge expanse of parking space. “Why is there such a large space for cars?” he asked.

  Duke glanced around, surprised at the question. “Oh, that’s ’cause of the tourists.”

  “Tourists?”

  “Yeah. During the day, the plant is opened up for tourists to take guided tours . . . though in the last few years there’ve been precious few people who could afford to go on tours since that bitch Osterman has ruined the economy.”

  Sharak shook his head, amazed at the stupidity of the Americans. In his country, such a valuable building would be guarded around the clock, and no one who was not authorized would ever be allowed inside.

  “How should we mount the attack?” Sharak asked.

  Duke shrugged. “Why, I’d send your men in right through the front door,” he answered.

  “Won’t there be guards?” Sharak asked.

  Duke laughed. “Guards? Hell, no. Just send your men in, kill all the workers, and then we’ll blow up the turbines with a few grenades. Should be duck soup.”

  Sharak didn’t understand the reference to duck soup, but he got the general drift of what Duke was saying. He spoke rapidly in a low tone to his men, and they took off for the front door to the power plant at a dead run.

  Bruce Watson, senior engineer on the night shift, had just stepped out of the door to have a cigarette, cu
rsing the rules that made the building “Smoke Free.”

  “God damn,” he said as he bent his head to light his butt. “Ain’t smokers got the same rights as everybody else?” he grumbled to himself.

  As he raised his head and blew a cloud of smoke from his nostrils, he saw a group of fifteen or twenty men running toward him across the parking lot, and they all seemed to be carrying rifles in their arms.

  “Shit!” Watson said, throwing his butt on the ground and running back inside the door. He stopped long enough to throw the dead bolt, and then he took off across the lobby toward the corridor leading to his office.

  He heard the pounding on the door as he jerked open his office door. He bent over his desk, picked up the phone, and dialled 911.

  A sleepy female voice answered, “Nine-one-one ... What is your emergency?”

  “There’s a goddamned bunch of terrorists attacking the power plant,” Watson screamed into the phone. “Get the goddamned police out here fast!”

  “How many men?” the female asked, her voice still bored.

  “Fifteen or twenty, an’ they’re armed to the teeth!” Watson said hurriedly before slamming down the phone. He knew he didn’t have long before the men would gain entrance to the plant.

  He ran to his door, and was about to open it when he heard the sound of screams and gunfire echo throughout the building.

  “Oh, shit!” he cursed again. He was out of time.

  He whirled around, rushed to the back of his office, and opened his closet door. He bent over and shoved some boxes around, rearranging them, and then he got down behind them and pulled an old overcoat off a hanger and laid it over himself after he closed the closet door. With any luck, he thought, they won’t find me here.

  Minutes later, he heard his office door being kicked open, and he held his breath. Light flooded the closet as the door was opened.