Enemies Within

And yet...

The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.

At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.

So what had happened to him, then?

The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?

If so, he had concealed it well until he’d followed Major Darby and four others in defecting from the Rangers and declaring war on the United States.

More questions lacking answers. So far, while the dossiers helped Bolan come to know his enemies, at least in part, the service photos staring back at him were blank, stone-faced, inscrutable.

Third up, in order of descending rank, was Captain Walton Tanner Jr., son of a Marine Corps veteran who’d won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the invasion of Grenada, code-named Operation Urgent Fury in November 1983. At age thirty-one, the captain seemed to be almost a carbon copy of his hero father, other than the service he had chosen as his military path. He’d won a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan, another in Iraq with an oak leaf cluster to denote additional awards, and claimed a Purple Heart on his third tour of duty in the sand, after he’d taken a sniper’s bullet to one leg. The Medal of Honor still eluded him, but there was every chance he might have earned one, with a fourth foreign deployment in the wings when he had suddenly and unofficially departed from the Rangers, trailing Major Darby and Lieutenant Colonel Knowlton into their small group without a name.

As with the others, Tanner’s file offered no clue to his defection, nothing to suggest he harbored any Muslim sympathies. He had been born and raised Episcopalian, and had earned a bachelor of arts in history from George Washington University in DC, then dropped out of its master’s program to become an Army Ranger. What followed was a virtual replay of the preceding files Bolan had scanned: Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a smidgen of variety, Operation Freedom Eagle in the Philippines, combating the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah Muslim militants. The latter tour had sent him home with a Distinguished Service Cross, Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal and a Purple Heart for minor shrapnel wounds.

If he had ever mentioned Islam publicly, no record of his comments was preserved in military files. He’d gone to chapel on most Sundays, when his scheduling permitted, and had showed no deviation from his faith or military oath until he went over the wall one night, with Darby and Knowlton. What drove him to that action, as with his companions, still remained a mystery.

One note and worth considering—Tanner had lost his mother and his only sibling, sister Lucie, in a random auto accident some eighteen months before his ultimate decision to defect. The good news: Bolan thought he could gain access to Tanner’s father, the true-blue leatherneck, and maybe get some kind of private insight missing from the dossier. MPs would have been after him first thing, Bolan presumed, but if they’d taken any notes from that interrogation, nothing showed up in Brognola’s file. Bolan would find out what he could, waste no unnecessary time, and then move on.

To number four, Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley, twenty-four, the rogue group’s only African American recruit. He’d been the designated “smart one” at his high school in Newark, New Jersey, taken a fair measure of shit for it, then learned to stand his ground, avoiding gangs and throwing hands effectively against the unaffiliated hallway thieves and bullies. A suspension for fighting prevented him from standing as his class valedictorian, but Moseley had still graduated second in his class of seven hundred. Eventually he’d found his way to Fort Benning and into Ranger school.

From there, his dossier was much the same as the others Bolan had perused, with private twists and turns that made no time for war abroad. Cancer had claimed his mother’s life during Moseley’s first tour in Iraq. His father, grief stricken, was made of weaker stuff than either of his sons, committing suicide with an unregistered firearm while Tyrone served a second tour in Iraq and brother Jesse pursued a bachelor’s degree from the Newark College of Engineering.

Could Bolan, a white stranger, hope to gather anything from Jesse Moseley? He had doubts, but reckoned it was worth a shot—perhaps his only shot at learning any more about the wayward elder son.

None of the Moseleys had professed any religion, least of all Newark’s Black Muslims, aka the Nation of Islam. Tyrone’s maternal grandmother had been a “Shouter Baptist” at a storefront church in Newark, but she seemed to have left no imprint of her faith on her late daughter, son-in-law or grandchildren. In fact, she had been gone so long, a casualty of the 1967 riots, that her only legacy was bitterness against police whose random fire had cut her down in her tiny apartment.

Could latent hatred of authority have colored Moseley’s ultimate decision to defect with Darby, Knowlton and Tanner? It seemed unlikely, given that he’d joined the Army and the Rangers voluntarily, served three tours in the sand, and never said a word to indicate he was dissatisfied.

No, Bolan thought. It must be something else.

But as to what...

Dossier number five revealed the rogue group’s only verified Muslim, Staff Sergeant Afif Rashid. According to a footnote in the file, his given name translated from the Arabic as “chaste,” “pious” or “pure.” That might have indicated a religious zeal, but nothing in his background seemed to lean that way.

Rashid’s parents had come to the United States as refugees from Operation Desert Storm, bringing their only child—then nine years old—in February 1991. With government assistance, they’d acquired a small convenience store in New Rochelle, New York, and died when skinheads robbed the place in June 2000, two weeks after Afif graduated high school and joined the Army, distinguishing himself in Ranger school after boot camp.

Had the double murder of his parents, still unsolved, jaundiced Rashid’s view of America and set a time bomb ticking in his gut, while he acquired the martial skills to look for payback, somewhere down the road? If so, he’d kept it to himself and uttered no complaint about three tours of duty in Afghanistan, plus one deployment to Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, where Rangers teamed with local forces to train antidrug units and counter transnational threats. On that leg of his journey through the hinterlands, Rashid had earned a Silver Star for aiding wounded fellow Rangers under hostile fire.

And through it all, no hint suggested that Rashid was a jihadist in disguise.

That left two dossiers on Brognola’s DVD, the next one for the Ranger outfit’s low man on the ladder in terms of rank. Sergeant Ernesto Menendez was twenty-four years old, a young man who’d enlisted after trying and rejecting one semester at a junior college in New Mexico. Like all the rest, his record with the Rangers was exemplary until he’d gone AWOL: two tours of duty in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a Commendation Medal with a bronze “V” device denoting heroism in combat, ranked at a lesser degree than required for awarding a Bronze Star Medal. Specifically, Menendez had covered the withdrawal of medical corpsmen with five wounded Rangers in Kandahar Province, sustaining a flesh wound that added a Purple Heart to his résumé. The file logged thirteen kills to his record that morning, holding his ground till the others withdrew and called in air support.

Raised Catholic, another orphan with no siblings, Sergeant Menendez seemed to have no more in common with Islamists than he did with the Man in the Moon. A note in his file said that he had recently become engaged and his fiancée was a woman named Juanita Alvarado.

What drove him to associate with Darby’s outlaw band remained, as with the rest, a mystery.

Reviewing briefly, Bolan noted that a common theme among the rogue Rangers was lack of living family. Among the six, Captain Tanner had a father still above ground, Lieutenant Moseley had a brother whom, according to the MPs and the FBI, he had not contacted in the past two years, and Menendez had a fiancée. Was isolation part of it, somehow? And if so, how could loss of loved ones drive a polyglot collection of career soldiers into the arms of militant Islam?

Bolan tried to make sense of it, got nowhere, and finally decided that his best hope lay within the final dossier, its icon labeled “Manifesto.”

Whatever he expected from that file, though, Bolan came up short. It read:

Declaration of War in the Name of Allah

Today, we former Rangers of the US Army stand united in a state of war against the Great Satan, America. We dedicate our skills and training to destruction of the country that has waged relentless war against Islam since 1953, with its coup restoring the corrupt Shah of Iran.

Additionally, decades of unjustified support for Israel has defied the will of Palestinians and other Muslims who comprise the vast majority of Middle Eastern residents, while bilking US taxpayers to bankroll Tel Aviv, its flagrant theft of native lands from the West Bank and elsewhere, falsely declared the result of “legitimate electoral process.” Without US financing, military support and favoritism in the United Nations, Israeli aggression would long since have ceased to exist, thereby eliminating impetus for freedom fighters waging their guerrilla wars against America, mislabeled “terrorism” by the media.

Accordingly, we hold these truths to be self-evident. The long American crusade against Islam must cease, forthwith. No further action on that front shall be permitted. We, the beneficiaries of elite training, shall use all skills and tools available to bring this resolution into being. As you read this, we have supplied one relatively minor demonstration of our power, to be replicated as required until our plain and common-sense demands are met. America must change its course, and quickly, to avert a holocaust at home beyond the scope of anything authorities at home have thus far faced or can effectively control.

We are the best. Ignore us at your peril from now on.

To victory!

* * *

And that was all. At first, Bolan thought a page had been omitted from the manifesto’s file, but it read smoothly, start to finish, even if it spoke in generalities and uttered only vague demands, impossible to quantify.

Reverse the course of US history connected to the Middle East since 1953, or even farther back, since Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948? Impossible. Indeed, ridiculous. The juggernaut could not be slowed, much less completely stopped, with strong support for Israeli in the White House, Congress and in nearly every state from coast to coast. Six Rangers couldn’t do it in a hundred lifetimes, and they had to know that.

So...what?

Bolan removed the DVD from his laptop, shut down the computer and retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. He had Jack Grimaldi’s number on speed dial and got an answer on the second ring.

“Big guy. Long time.”

“You heard from Hal?”

“I did.”

“So, how about a little hop?”

Chapter Three (#ulink_5bdca4ff-f427-51d4-b94c-7b8d5ba36b9a)

Barclay, Maryland

“Did I read that sign right?” Grimaldi asked. “One hundred twenty people? Can they even call a place that small a town?”

“It’s flexible,” Bolan replied. “I’ve been to smaller ones.”

“I guess this jarhead likes his privacy.”

“He won’t be getting much of it, considering the last couple of days.”

“You think he’d bail on us?”