Terrorist Dispatch

Prologue (#ulink_502a1961-342b-57ae-80f4-9d5067ec8124)

Lincoln Memorial, National Mall, Washington, DC

The choice was obvious, when Oleg Banakh thought about it. Six million tourists viewed the shrine each year, according to the pamphlet he had studied while preparing for his final day on Earth. That averaged out to—what? Well over sixteen thousand visiting on any given day, year-round.

He had to kill only a fraction of that number to secure his place in history.

The homemade vest that Banakh wore beneath his thrift-shop raincoat made his neck and shoulders cramp, but it was fleeting, temporary pain. Each of its six hand-stitched pockets contained five pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, bristling with old rusty nails, screws, nuts and bolts added to serve as shrapnel. A nine-volt battery hung between his shoulder blades. Its wires snaked out to half a dozen detonators, twin leads trailing down his left sleeve to the simple detonator switch that dangled from Banakh’s cuff. Add the Mini-Uzi slung over his right shoulder, also beneath the coat, with extra magazines filling his pants pockets, and Banakh was packing more than forty pounds of sudden death on this bright autumn afternoon.

The detonator, he had been assured, was considered foolproof. It had two colored plastic buttons: green to arm the system, red to detonate the charges Banakh carried, blasting him to smithereens and Paradise, while any enemies within the killing radius received a one-way ticket to their special place in hell.

It was intended that he use the Mini-Uzi first, exhaust the magazines he carried if he had the chance, without allowing Secret Service agents or police to take him down before he had unleashed the C-4 storm. Gunshots would scatter any tourists who survived the first ferocious fusillade, but they would also draw in law-enforcement officers, ranging from street patrolmen to the special units that abounded in the nation’s capital, protecting the fat, decadent servants of the Great Satan.

Folded inside the raincoat’s deep interior breast pocket was the manifesto of his cause, three pages typed, meticulously spell-checked, all inserted in a plastic sleeve designed to keep the message safe amid the storm of battle.

Those who came to kill Banakh would be dealing with the other members of his team: five seasoned fighters armed with automatic weapons, each man prepared—make that expecting—to be killed before the sun went down.

A loyal member of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, Banakh knelt before the huge statue of Lincoln, mouthed a silent prayer, then rose and set the manifesto carefully in place, well back between the giant’s shoes, where it would not be damaged by the detonation of his vest or gunshots fired into the monument by officers outside. The message would survive, and if no one took heed, their foolishness would only bring more grief upon their heads, upon their families.

Banakh turned to face bright sunshine on the steps where Martin Luther King once stood and spoke of dreams unrealized. His hands trembled as he unfastened the buttons of his raincoat, drawing back the right flap so that he could grasp the Mini-Uzi on its shoulder sling. A woman standing nearby had watched Banakh curiously as he’d prayed. Now she clutched her male companion’s arm and shouted, “He’s got a gun!”

“I do,” he told her. “And you haven’t seen anything yet.”

* * *

EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAM lieutenant Rick Malone was wolfing down a meatball sub at a sandwich shop on 18th Street Northwest when his radio squawked to announce shots fired at the Lincoln Memorial.

Malone left his lunch on the table and ran to his cruiser, then gunned it from his parking space with the rooftop light bar already flashing, his siren winding up before he palmed the dashboard microphone and cut into the storm of chatter.

“ERT Malone responding to the shooting from the eleven hundred block of 18th Street Northwest. My ETA is ten minutes, with any luck.”

“Copy that, Lieutenant,” the dispatcher answered back. “Your team’s en route.”

Ten minutes if his luck held, and how many tourists would be killed or wounded in that span of time? Malone knew that depended largely on the shooter’s choice of weapons, his—or her—proficiency with firearms, and the quantity of ammunition he—or she—was packing. In the country’s present state, its fever pitch of anger, coupled with an obsessive love of lethal toys, Malone knew damn near anyone could snap at any time, for reasons only a psychiatrist could grasp.

Traffic was typically congested on the route Malone had chosen to the Mall, yielding reluctantly to lights and siren, slowing his progress toward the scene where people might be dying, even as he swerved around slow-moving trucks and buses, startled rubber-necking tourists, and sent cyclists clad in racing outfits veering toward the sidewalk. Three blocks out, with his window down, Malone could hear the loud snap-crackle-pop of automatic weapons fire. And not a single weapon, either, but a full-blown symphony of death.

* * *

OLEG BANAKH HAD watched two of his comrades die and wished them rapid transit into Heaven. The other three had found a measure of concealment—two in shrubbery around the monument’s retaining wall, the third behind one of its massive Doric columns. Banakh was inside, crouched between the giant seated statue and one of the columns that divided the memorial’s interior into three distinct chambers. Half a dozen bodies lay unmoving where they’d fallen when he’d gunned them down, and more were draped upon the marble steps outside.

Not bad for one day’s work, but Banakh and his team were not finished yet.

He had already put the manifesto in its place. Now all he had to do was to wait for reinforcements to arrive, with television crews, before he took his last walk in the sun.

His mission was already a success for the most part. That was obvious from the wailing sirens, the flashing lights, the vehicles and personnel from half a dozen law-enforcement agencies gathered outside, below the memorial’s staircase. More cars and vans, more uniforms and guns, were rolling in each moment. Banakh welcomed them, hoping a fair percentage of the officers would find their way inside the C-4’s lethal zone.

So far, only a scattering of shots had been directed toward his hiding place, the shooters swiftly chastised by superiors. Banakh knew that his enemies revered their monuments to fallen leaders, drawing vicarious pleasure from the heroism that eluded them in daily life. Most would never join a righteous cause or fire a shot in anger, but it pleased them to recall that others of their species, long since dead and gone, had done great things.

This day, that changed.

Banakh glanced at his watch and saw that it was time for him to die. Smiling because his destiny had nearly run its course, he rose, clutching the detonator in his left hand, the freshly loaded Mini-Uzi in his right. His bullets might not reach the cars below, or any of the officers crouched behind them, but he hoped to keep their heads down, with some help from his surviving comrades.

All he needed was one final, shining moment on the stage, before he vaporized and vanished into history.

“Slukhay mene!” he shouted as he cleared the shadows, blushing with embarrassment before he caught himself and translated from Ukrainian. “Listen to me!”

Downrange below him, scores of faces watched from behind a hedge of weapons. Banakh started down the marble steps, ignoring calls for him to drop his weapon.

“Today,” he bellowed, “you have an opportunity to learn from past mistakes!”

The first shot struck low, an inch or so above his groin. Banakh began to fall, grimacing as he pressed the detonator’s bright red button and his world dissolved into a blast of white-hot light.

* * *

FIVE MINUTES LATER it was done. The three remaining shooters rushed the Secret Service line, spraying full-auto fire, and died without inflicting any casualties. Rick Malone moved up among them as the echoes faded, breathing the burned-powder smell of battle with an undertone of copper from the terrorists’ blood spilled on the steps.

Or make that sprayed, where their apparent leader had been vaporized as he went down.

The blast had partially deafened Malone. Shouting orders to his ERT team, hearing them answer as they stormed the monument to clear it, he had time to worry whether that would be a permanent condition. That would mean restricted duty, if it didn’t bump him off the job entirely, and he gladly would have kicked the bomber’s lifeless ass if any part of it were left intact.

One of his agents stepped back into sunlight, calling down to him. The muffled voice announced, “Got something you should look at, Lieut.”

“What’s that?” Malone called back.

“Looks like the crazy bastards left a note.”

1 (#ulink_63484689-45e8-53ef-b852-e964cac8e710)

Lincoln Memorial, One day later

What a difference a day made. Twenty-four hours after what the media was calling “the worst massacre in the capital’s history,” Mack Bolan saw few traces of the carnage that had taken place. There were a few chips in the marble columns, which the reparation crew had yet to patch, but otherwise the monument appeared pristine: no blood, no scorch marks from a C-4 blast, no lingering stench of explosives or offal to send tourists scurrying off to the next attraction. An untrained eye would never guess that nineteen people had been killed here, terrorists included, or that fifteen more were suffering at hospitals around the city, four of them unlikely to survive.

The monument had changed, however. There was no denying that.

Throughout the day and night preceding his arrival, Bolan saw that visitors had thronged the place, likely eclipsing any turnout for a single day since it was dedicated, back in 1922. Many had come, he knew, to capture photographs before the site was purged of bloody residue, although the Secret Service and the United States Capitol Police would have restrained the ghouls and kept them at a distance. Later, with the cleanup done, a pilgrimage had started, lasting through the night, not finished yet.

The signs were obvious. Along the rising steps, flanking a path left clear for any visitors who felt a need to go inside, mourners had left floral bouquets and wreaths in wild profusion, many bearing cards. Besides the flowers, other tokens had been left, as well: a dozen teddy bears in different hues and sizes, for the children who had fallen; Bibles, some of them left open to highlighted passages; sealed letters that would be removed, likely unread, expressing sorrow, rage and empty promises of retribution; several pairs of baby shoes; and standing tall amid the jumble, wholly out of place, a plastic pink flamingo.

Who could truly claim to understand the human heart?

It was approaching twelve o’clock, a normal workday, but there was still a crowd in front of the memorial. They stood in silence, for the most part, several of them gently swaying as if caught up in some private rapture, most just staring at the scene where people they would never know had died under the gun.

It struck Bolan that this was now a double monument of sorts. In the short run, before the public’s brief attention span expired, it represented both a martyred President who sacrificed himself to save a fractured nation, and a group of strangers who, by accident, had stained a page of history with their life’s blood. Their memory would fade, of course, as new atrocities demanded airing in prime time. The previous day’s slaughter would be relegated to a thirty-second sound bite aired on anniversaries, for the next three years or so, until it lost all relevance to anyone except the wounded and immediate survivors of the dead.

“Bitchin’,” a voice said, almost at his elbow. “Man, I wish we’d seen it.”

Bolan half turned, taking in a pair of pimply teenage boys who should have been in school. They would have ditched to taste a bit of modern history, unmindful of its import. Raised on mindless action films and video games, they had no concept of mayhem beyond what they saw as entertainment value.