Terror Rising: Book 0 – The Insurgence (13 page)

Closing In

Angela was patient despite her imminent
departure for a mission she knew little about.

“So help me God, if we find Captain
Martinez, I’ll hang up my badge and become a housewife, I don’t
care,” she said to herself. She was due to meet the FBI outside
near the landing pad in ten minutes, with tactical gear, a helmet,
and her pistol.

Fewer Border Patrol agents were gathered
outside the holding area as she passed, but she didn’t linger. She
went straight for the locker room to grab her gear and take one
last look in the mirror before facing unknown and threatening
circumstances.

She arrived at the empty helicopter pad
behind the Border Patrol building to find the assistant director
waiting with her team, backpacks over their shoulders. The sun was
setting in a tangerine glow. Daytime was quickly fading, and she
worried that hadn’t even left yet, but perhaps that was exactly
what the FBI had in mind.

“
Just in time,” Sutherland said as
Angela approached them, carrying a helmet and a backpack over her
shoulder.

“
Welcome,” Thaxton said. “Did you
bring a vest?”

Angela stopped and set her bag on the
ground. “A vest, ma’am?”

“
A
bulletproof vest
,”
Thaxton repeated slowly. On closer inspection, Angela could see
that Lynch, Sutherland, Hopper, and the assistant director each
wore vests under their dark-blue windbreakers.

Angela looked around as a few loose strands
of her brown hair fluttered in the wind. “No, I didn’t bring
one.”

Hopper, wearing a pair of aviator
sunglasses, tapped his vest with a smile. “Well, you’re probably
gonna need one.”

Angela stared at him blankly and then zeroed
in on the assistant director. “What exactly are we going to be
doing out there, ma’am?”

“
These are just precautionary
measures,” Thaxton replied, touching her vest.

“
Think of it as a sort of
reconnaissance mission,” Sutherland added while putting on a black
helmet with a headset microphone built into it.

Angela didn’t understand the FBI’s own
reluctance toward backup. They had even fewer agents than they had
for their earlier raid, which had been less risky.

“
Shouldn’t there be more of us?” she
asked. “A SWAT team? I mean, these are terrorists,
right?”

“
Relax,” Hopper said. “We may not even
have to get out of the helicopter.”

Not convinced, she asked the group how they
planned to find Martinez and bring him back, especially considering
that he didn’t seem to want to be found.

“
This is how it’s going to go,”
Sutherland said, stepping forward. A slight rumbling came from the
sky. Angela looked up and saw a helicopter in the distant purple
sky flying toward them, with its main and tail rotors beating
through the air.

“
As we fly over the coordinates, we’ll
examine the scene using an onboard thermal video camera,”
Sutherland continued. “We should be able to pick up whoever is in
or around this location easy. From there, we make our
decision.”

Thaxton zipped up her jacket and then looked
up at Angela. “We want you to try to get in contact with Martinez
again once we get close.”

Their assumptions about Martinez stunned
Angela. “Ma’am, can I ask you a question?” she asked, moving closer
to the assistant director. “Why hasn’t he contacted you yet? You
are friends, right?”

Thaxton smiled, but her wide eyes showed
irritation at the question. “As you know, he’s grown quite
paranoid. Perhaps you’re the only one he trusts.”

Not wanting to push the issue, Angela let it
go as their helicopter got closer and closer. The agents began
backing up, clearing the way, as Hopper spoke into his headset
mike, directing the pilot. The more Angela thought about it, the
more she could see why there were so few of them. There was only so
much space in the helicopter.

As she walked back to the cement partition,
she pulled out her cell phone to try Martinez again. If anything,
she hoped to give him a heads-up.

But there was no answer. Once again, an
automated message told her that the recipient’s mailbox was full.
The helicopter closed in and hovered over the platform at about
five hundred feet.

Massive gusts of wind swirled as Angela put
on her helmet to keep her hair from flying in her face. She was
glad they had moved away. The helicopter dipped lower and then
gently landed in the center of the large slab of concrete, directly
over a painted circle.

Sutherland shouted over the engine for the
team to move, but Angela wasn’t ready. She hadn’t grabbed a vest
yet, but there was little time to react. The FBI team, led by
Sutherland, had already begun to file toward the helicopter with
their helmets on and backpacks in place. She slung her backpack
over her shoulder and ran after them across the pavement. The wind
grew even stronger as she approached the side where Sutherland had
opened a door.

Hopper, Lynch, and Thaxton climbed in and
sat in one row in the back as Sutherland held the door.

“
I don’t have a vest,” Angela said to
him before getting in.

Confused, he leaned closer to her. “You
don’t have a mess?” His breath smelled like coffee.

“
A vest!” Angela repeated.
“Bulletproof vest!”

Sutherland nodded in understanding. “Don’t
worry! We should have a spare on board!”

She thanked him and climbed inside, hunched
down and moving toward the row across from where the agents were
sitting. There was no denying the lack of room.

As Angela sat down, she already felt
constricted and nearly out of breath before Sutherland climbed in
and shut the door. The agents buckled up, placing their backpacks
at their feet. Angela followed suit and strapped herself in just as
the helicopter lifted up in the air, rising high above the Border
Patrol station.

She watched as the top of the building got
smaller and smaller. Gravity pushed against her, and she could feel
a sinking sensation in her stomach, reminding her again of
Panama.

Rolling desert hills and sporadic patches of
forest came into view as they ascended. She could hear little
except the thick reverberation of the engine that kneaded the back
of her seat like a massage chair. Her disposable earplugs were
pressed tightly inside, and she could hear nothing of what the
agents were saying to each other through their headset mikes.

For Angela, the mission ahead was unclear.
And as they flew west, with El Paso an hour away, she hoped they
would be able to bring her partner back quickly and that she would
see her family by the end of the night.

***

Salah Asgar sat at a desk in a small, dimly
lit underground room with his personal confidants, Bosra and Nabil,
standing by, weapons at the ready. With their beards and bulky
builds, the two men looked remarkably similar, but they weren’t
related.

The small room and its concrete floor and
walls were nearly empty aside from Salah’s table desk, a
military-style cot, and a fully-loaded AK-47 machine gun against
the wall behind him. The sound of Salah’s fingers flittering across
the keyboard of his laptop was the only thing to be heard.

The light from his MacBook glowed on his
thin, bearded face. His dark eyes scanned the screen, carefully
looking over a set of blueprints from an encrypted file sent to him
just hours prior. He studied the floor plan with great interest,
scanning the various floors of the Dallas Nuclear Power Plant, one
of the two plants located in the state of Texas.

He scribbled on a pad, noting the specific
locations of the plant’s reactors. The rush of excitement he felt
was immeasurable. They were very close to launching a major attack,
years in the making.

“
This is wonderful…” he said to
himself.

Bosra and Nabil kept their
eyes forward, paying Salah little mind. They rarely said anything,
and when they did, it was generally to shout orders at one of the
men under them. Bosra pulled a
USA
Today
from his jacket pocket and unfolded
it, reading the day’s latest.

There were other rooms within the
underground facility stocked with weapons, food, and supplies. As
the primary leader and strategist of Texas ISIS cells, Salah spent
most of his time twenty feet belowground. Several of his
lieutenants were positioned throughout the state along with
recruits who, unlike Salah, lived in homes or apartments, blending
in with their neighborhoods the best they could.

When called, lieutenants, advisors, and
other ranking fighters would meet up in the desert, far from
potential spies or the authorities. At one time, such a meeting
house and resupply point was their hideout in El Paso, Texas, one
of three clandestine locations throughout South Texas. Salah now
operated out of this main hub, completely underground, its location
known only to a few.

For three years he had been building his
network, constructing the hideouts, establishing their perimeters
and means of communications. Many of the tunnels and underground
rooms had already been hollowed out and constructed decades ago by
various cartels. But all of that had changed with the arrival of
Salah Asgar.

As his terror network gradually embedded
themselves throughout Texas and along the southern border, the
message to the cartels was clear enough: territory claimed by the
Islamic State belongs to the Islamic State.

A lieutenant of the Mexican Knights of
Templar cartel named Juan Manuel Marquez had once been dispatched
by his bosses to kill whoever had taken over their smuggling
tunnels. But Salah was ready. A dozen suicide bombers had descended
upon Marquez’s house and on many others belonging to Knights of
Templar cartel members in the city of Juarez. It was over before
the cartel even had time to assemble against the ISIS invaders.
There was a new army in town.

As Salah continued taking notes, someone
knocked at the door. He stopped writing as Bosra and Nabil
exchanged glances and came to attention. Bosra folded his newspaper
back up and went quietly to the door, as Nabil pointed his rifle
ahead. Bosra asked who it was.

“
Mohammed,” the voice outside the door
said.

“
Mohammed who?” Bosra asked with a
booming voice while peeking through the tiny door slot.

“
Mohammed Abdelslam. The driver,” the
man said.

Bosra turned to Salah for approval. Salah
looked up from his notes and nodded. Bosra unlocked several
deadbolts set into the thick, metal door and then pulled it open,
revealing a man wearing a striped flannel shirt tucked into tight
blue jeans and cowboy boots. His jet-black hair was disheveled and
the mustache had been trimmed into a perfect arch.

He was hesitant to walk inside until Salah
waved him in. Mohammed thanked Bosra and sheepishly walked toward
Salah’s corner workstation to the right. Salah’s eyes went back to
the screen as the man stopped ten feet away, arms folded in front
of him.

“
Did you get it?” Salah asked,
typing.

Mohammed hesitated while shifting around
uneasily with his head lowered. Salah quickly caught on that the
news wasn’t good.

“
What happened?” he asked.

Mohammed raised his head, and a stricken
look crossed his face. “I don’t know. We had trouble. American
agents. They interfered.”

Salah’s eyes widened as he slammed his fist
onto the table, startling Mohammed in the process. He then stopped
and backed away from the desk, scraping the legs of his chair
against the concrete floor. He looked past Mohammed and began
rubbing his forehead in frustration. “How many times have I told
you to stay alert for the Americans? You have to plan your meeting
spot days in advance. You have to check it first. Have I not said
this?”

“
Yes, my leader. I don’t know where
they came from. They—”

Salah stood up, cutting Bosra off. “Where
are you parked?” Salah asked.

“
In the port,” Mohammed answered.

“
How did you get here?”

“
Assad drove me in the
Gator.”

Salah nodded and then signaled to his men,
who went to the door. Bosra unlocked the bolts and opened it. Both
men stepped out, scanning the area.

“
Let us go,” Salah said.

Mohammed turned and
nervously faced the door. “I
am
sorry, my leader. We had no control of the
situation.”

“
Tell me once we get
there.”

He guided Mohammed to the door with a hand
on his shoulder. They stepped outside the room, where a long
tunnel, six feet high and ten feet wide, waited them. Several doors
were arrayed along both sides of the corridor. There was a
gas-powered Gator mini-truck parked to one side with Assad, the
driver, at the wheel, staring down the long tunnel, where a single
ceiling bulb provided light every twenty feet or so.

Assad wore a black robe with white taqiyah
cap. He turned around slightly to notice Salah’s approach as Bosra
and Nabil sat in the Gator behind him and started the engine. Salah
went to the passenger side of the Gator and sat next to Assad.
Behind them was a small, flat cargo bed that Salah pointed to while
looking at Mohammed.

“
Climb in,” he said.

Mohammed nodded and hoisted himself in back,
holding the sides as Assad started the engine and pulled out.

They reached a double-door entrance at the
very end of the tunnel, both doors made of thick steel and only
accessible through a concealed combination lock. Assad served as
the watchman between entrances. In time, Salah hoped to build a
larger security team, but at the moment, he needed his men spread
out as far apart from each other as possible. That way, they would
be harder for the authorities to find.