Terror Rising: Book 0 – The Insurgence (2 page)

Bosra and Nabil nodded back, holding Mahir
by his arms and legs, spilling blood along the floor as they moved.
Salah then turned to the crowd without an ounce of remorse in his
eyes.

“
All part of Allah’s plan. This is
where we are at, my brothers. No room for error.” He stepped
forward with a deadly serious glare from his dark coal eyes. “And
if any of you decide to betray me, the very same will happen to
you.”

The men said nothing. Their frightened faces
were all that Salah needed to see. Having made his point, he
continued in a much calmer tone. “In one week, we deliver our first
full-scale attack. Those are our instructions. The moment we’ve
been waiting for has arrived. If there is a man among us not ready
for the task, raise your hand now.”

Salah stopped and looked into the rows,
finding no objections. “Good,” he said, smiling. “Let us prepare
for battle.”

Standoff

It was in the high eighties in Del Rio,
Texas, a small border city one hundred fifty miles west of San
Antonio. The United States Border Patrol had a busy presence in the
area, and their hands were often full with long hours and meager
assistance from the federal government and Homeland Security.

From her first year on the force, Angela
Gannon had seen many disturbing trends in drug and human
trafficking. She had heard the stories about terrorists sneaking
across the border. She had seen the waves of migrant children
apprehended and held in limbo at the border station. She'd seen a
lot of things. But nothing could have prepared her for the day
ahead.

She sat in the passenger seat of a white
four-door Chevy Tahoe, parked atop a hill overlooking a desert
valley along the Mexican border. She raised the binoculars to her
eyes. The day was already warm, and she wore a dark-green,
short-sleeved Border Patrol uniform that fit snugly against her
thin, athletic frame.

She scanned the fourteen-foot fence a half
mile beyond the valley, conducting a line watch as her partner,
Captain Jorge Martinez, in the driver’s seat beside her, munched on
a small bag of Fritos.

They had been on watch the past three hours,
in a state of heightened alert. But their intense readiness had
waned in the last hour as they saw little more than tumbleweeds
roll by and coyotes skitter from afar. They were both starting to
wonder if they had been called to another false alarm.

Angela had longed to work for the border
patrol, but the path to her burgeoning career hadn’t come over
night. In high school, she had joined the ROTC program, followed by
four subsequent years in the army that had shaped her for a future
in law enforcement. At twenty-seven, married with two children, she
was astonished to think about how much had changed in her life.

Like most days at work, Angela sported a
blonde ponytail, minimal makeup, and exhibited a calm demeanor.
Relatively new to the profession, she took her job very seriously.
Sometimes, it seemed, more seriously than did Martinez, who had
been on the force for six years.

“How about we call it a day?” he asked with
his hands on the wheel. The open bag of Fritos rested over his leg,
nearly emptied. “My legs are asleep, and there’s nothing out here
that we didn’t see yesterday.”

“We’re on high alert,” she responded,
lowering the binoculars. “And I didn’t hear anything from
headquarters yet saying otherwise.”

Martinez sighed. He then ran one hand across
his trim black hair and scratched the back of his head. He was
pushing forty but looked young for his age, tan with a boyish face
and warm brown eyes.

He had gotten rid of his mustache recently,
which had become just one of the changes Angela had recently
noticed about him. He had been fidgety and distracted the entire
week. She wondered what was wrong but didn’t want to pry.

“Headquarters has their heads up their
asses,” he said, in response to her insistence that they stay on
watch.

“Sure. But it’s been two weeks since we’ve
seen some activity. I’d say we’re about due.”

Martinez thought to himself and then leaned
closer to her, turning down the crackling dispatch radio. “Lemme
let you in on a little secret, Agent Gannon.”

Angela looked over at him, all ears.

“You’re green,” he continued. “I mean,
you’re good, but you’re still green. I’ve been on stakeouts that
serve no rhyme or reason to anything. They tell us, go here. Watch
this sector. Sit and wait. Meanwhile, we leave a gap open over
there. Drugs get in. People get in. It’s all political.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, genuinely
perplexed.

“I mean that, according to the powers that
be, sometimes to do the job right, we’re not supposed to do it at
all.” He paused and looked out the windshield into the barren
valley below.

Angela wasn’t naïve, but she also wasn’t
nearly as cynical. “Sounds like you’re suggesting that we’re
wasting our time out here.”

He looked at her and smirked. “Not entirely.
You’ve seen what we do. How hard you and I and all the agents work.
What I’m saying is that there’s a weird priority to things as of
late. And it has me a little concerned.”

Angela then asked him to elaborate. In turn,
he waved her away and turned the dispatch radio back up. “I’d
rather not be responsible for instilling low morale in fellow
agents.” He then switched the subject quickly to something else.
“How’s your Spanish coming along?”

She gave him a raised brow. “It’s decent. I
mean, I wouldn’t have gotten this job without learning it.”

“Of course,” he said. “And are you teaching
your children? Bilingualism is important to learn at a young
age.”

“Yes, professor,” Angela said with a
laugh.

Martinez whipped his head in her direction
with a mock frown. “Excuse me?”

“Professor Captain Sir,” she responded.

“That’s better,” he said.

Angela glanced up. Her smile disappeared.
She pointed in the distance to a white box truck driving along the
empty dirt road in the middle of the valley, a billowing cloud of
dust trailing behind it. She immediately went to the binoculars as
Martinez grabbed the hand mic from the dispatch radio under the
dashboard.

“What do you see?” he asked, holding the
mic.

“Standard cargo truck. No license plate,”
Angela answered. She kept careful watch as the truck barreled along
at top speed, headed west. It was a suspicious sight to be sure,
almost too alarming to be believed. Any trafficker in his right
mind would be foolish to drive along the southern border without a
licensed vehicle. Whoever was behind the wheel was asking for
it.

“Two six, we have a box truck spotted in the
valley. Driving at top speed. No license plate visible. How do you
want us to proceed? Over.” They always had to ask permission, which
frustrated the hell out of Angela.

“They’re getting away,” she said with a hint
of impatience.

Martinez turned the knob on the radio up
while clutching the hand mic. “Truck is going fast. Requesting
permission to engage,” he said. However, all sense of urgency
seemed lost on the responder.

“Negative, Bravo eight.
Stay in position. Backup is on its way. Be on alert for suspects on
foot.”

Martinez and Angela glanced at each other in
confusion. Martinez held the hand mic to his mouth as his eyes
followed the truck quickly fading from their field of vision.

“There are no suspects on foot,” he said,
“but we have an unlicensed vehicle driving toward Route 83 toward
Los Villareales. What’s the word on that backup, over?”

There was a pause, as
though the dispatcher was distracted.
“Stay in position,”
he said.
“Possible diversionary tactic. Keep your eyes on
that fence.”

Martinez held the radio, dumbfounded,
as his thumb hovered over the clicker.

“We need to follow them,” Angela said,
conviction evident in her bluish-green eyes.

“I know,” Martinez said. “But if someone
slips under that fence with a pound of junk on our watch, it’s our
asses.”

“
Unlicensed vehicle
,” she said
slowly, enunciating each syllable. “If that’s not a red flag, I
don’t know what is.”

Martinez looked around, growing frustrated.
He slapped the steering wheel with his free hand. “Where the hell
is that backup?”

“Probably east of Starr County. We don’t
have time for this,” Angela said.

The truck had disappeared under a mountain
ridge—vanished. The only way to trail it was to drive down their
steep lookout hill and try to catch up with the fleeing truck the
best they could. Even if they were to follow, the truck would see
them coming from a mile away.

Martinez looked past Angela’s shoulder out
the window in deep concentration. There was another way down on the
other side, where they could possibly cut the truck off before it
emerged onto Route 83.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I have an idea.” He paused and then shifted
the Tahoe into reverse. “We can still keep an eye on our spot and
track this truck down. Hit ’em up before they get to the
highway.”

“You know what I think?” Angela said. She
continued, without waiting for his response. “I think you want to
catch these guys yourself.”

He turned to her with a nod. “Yeah. Don’t
you?”

Angela reached for her seat belt and buckled
up. “I have to admit, because hoping that the Starr County PD
catches them instead of us seems like a pretty flawed
strategy.”

“Exactly,” he said, backing out.

The Tahoe crunched over deeply embedded
rocks and pivoted to the side. Vast rolling hills of the Texas
desert were in view. The chipped, faded pavement of a two-lane road
nearly hidden under a layer of sand awaited them at the bottom of
the hill.

Angela gripped her armrest as they descended
the bumpy terrain, past rocks and trees whose arched branches and
green leaves provided bits of welcome shade. Patches of weed
growing in the cracked asphalt and faded brown were flattened by
the Tahoe’s large tires as they continued down the hill, gaining
momentum.

The vehicle shook and rattled as the
dispatcher called over the radio, reminding them that backup was en
route.

“
We’re still here,”
Martinez replied, winking at Angela. An unsettled feeling brewed in
her gut. Martinez was right. She
was
green, in that she had only been
on the force for a year. Breaking the rules so early-on was not a
good precedent to set. But she
did
want to follow the truck, and if it was okay with
Martinez, it was okay with her. She told herself this, as they
reached the bottom, sailing over a dirt mound and hitting the road
with turbulent force.

“Wooo!” Martinez shouted out, clearly
enjoying himself.

Angela looked ahead nervously as he floored
it, racing down the road. Their earlier focal point, in the
distance past Martinez’s window, was fading quickly. It was
doubtful that she could keep an eye on the fence much longer. The
southern ridge disappeared as they drove alongside a high
mountainous slab of jagged rock that lined the road like a
guardrail.

Martinez kept his eyes forward, focused on
his pursuit. Angela said nothing for fear of distracting him. The
speedometer reached well past one hundred. The visible portion of
the road raced under them like lightning. Ahead, the road was
empty. The formerly sunny sky had clouded into gray. Another
afternoon shower was near.

“We’re close,” Martinez said. “I can feel
it.”

“What do you want to do when we catch up
with them?” Angela asked. She hadn’t thought that much ahead and
hoped that he had a plan. Her trust in Captain Martinez was second
to none on the force.

He smiled, as though she
already knew the answer. “I say we follow them as far as we can.
See where they’re going.
Then
we call for backup again.”

If that ever
happens
, Angela thought to herself. They
reached a fork in the road, and Martinez went left without
hesitation.

“
Bravo
Eight, what’s the status of the truck?”
a different voice said on the radio.

Angela recognized it as belonging to Agent
Dawson, a young, eager recruit like herself. A few weeks earlier,
on a night out with the team, he’d had a little too much to drink.
He had hit on her, ignoring Angela’s wedding ring, and then
apologized profusely the next day. She’d long since forgiven him,
but he had been avoiding her ever since.

Her husband, Doug, was ten years her senior,
a fact that surprised many of her coworkers but not her. She didn’t
see the big deal. Doug was an engineer for Harris Corporation, a
smart, caring man who had supported her in everything she did. The
sound of Dawson distracted her for a minute, but then she snapped
out of it. The mysterious box truck was still ahead of them,
careening to the left shoulder and driving off the road just as a
hill obstructed their view.

“
He’s going off-road,” Angela
said.

“
I know,” Martinez replied, still
deeply focused. No one had answered Dawson’s call yet.

Martinez turned toward the hill and launched
up a bumpy path marked by deep tire tracks. They weren’t the first
travelers to consider the shortcut.

They continued up the hill and found a spot
where they could still keep an eye on the box truck when it came
back into view. Once they had repositioned, Angela took the hand
mic and finally answered Dawson. “Roger. We still have eyes on the
vehicle.”

Martinez parked next to a giant boulder that
concealed their position. Angela looked out her window to see the
small town in the far distance like some kind of miniature
model.