Esteban, only two lanes over from Rafael’s truck, had been waiting for the order. He glanced briefly at the message for confirmation, then deliberately dropped the phone in the river of gasoline. He put a foot up on the rear crash bar that kept cars from submarining under the back end of the truck in the event of an accident, and hoisted himself up. He quickly pulled open the latch and then lifted the roll-up door. Lining the sides of the trailer’s interior were over a hundred cages. Esteban pulled the handle on a steel cable that sequentially unlatched all those doors.
The doors of the cages had springs, so once the latches were released they sprang open, one after another. Over a hundred dogs, most pit bulls, bolted from their cages and spilled out of the back end of the truck. All the dogs had been bred and raised in Mexico to be vicious. They had all been trained for one thing: to attack anyone in a border agent or highway patrol officer uniform. They had been trained to ignore gunfire and loud explosions.
All the dogs were also wearing bomb vests packed with high explosives, ball bearings, screws, and nails.
Some of the dogs began fighting each other, but most single-mindedly charged toward border agents and highway patrol officers. The dogs storming around all the standing trucks at the border checkpoint created confusion and disarray. Tactics used in the training of border agents and police for gaining control of a situation suddenly became worthless. While prepared for an assault by men, they were not prepared for an attack by dozens of vicious dogs.
Some of the dogs raced in and latched on to a leg with their powerful jaws. The dogs would never release the leg they had in their jaws, so the men now had a heavy dog anchoring them. Men drew guns and shot the dogs clamped on their leg, but the damage had already been done.
Other dogs clamped on to arms held up defensively. Once they had that arm in their teeth, they shook it for all they were worth. The stocky dogs had powerful neck muscles, and when they shook their prey it tore muscle from bone. Other dogs, running at full speed, leaped up at the men, knocking the wind from them as they knocked them down. Once they had their prey on the ground they went for the throat or face. There was no effective way to physically fight them off. Only guns could stop them.
One dog leaped onto and grabbed a female officer by her breast. As she toppled back with the dog on top of her she drew her gun and shot it, only to have another dog race in and clamp her face in his powerful jaws. When he shook her head, it tore neck muscles and ripped flesh from her face.
People everywhere, both agents and truck drivers who had gotten out of their trucks, screamed in terror or pain. Some of the drivers who had been waiting at booths saw the erupting chaos, put their trucks in gear, and took off to escape before they were caught up in the attack. Men in other trucks leaped out and ran, leaving their trucks blocking the lane between booths.
While some dogs attacked the same man, most of the angry animals raced throughout the facility, looking for people in uniforms to attack. They spread out as they ran, going after any uniformed officer they saw.
It only took seconds for guns to be drawn. Officers everywhere began shooting at the dogs. A few took down a dog, but many shots missed the racing animals as they zigzagged through all the trucks and people. The shooting diverted their attention from the true danger.
As officers tried to shoot the dogs, the timers on the vests the dogs were wearing ran out and the bombs exploded. Everywhere throughout the entire facility the dogs’ bomb vests started going off. It didn’t matter if a dog had been shot dead. The vests had already been armed, and they exploded by their internal timer, sending shrapnel streaking out in every direction.
People close enough but not directly taken down by the explosion were shredded by the ball bearings and nails. People farther away were hit with shrapnel and went down. Others were wounded but still able to run. They did their best to stop the bleeding of injuries as they ran. Many ran directly into another explosion, where they were blown limb from limb.
While some detonators went off almost immediately after the attack started and created mass confusion, others had delays of anywhere from ten to sixty seconds, adding to the confusion. As bombs were going off, the dogs left alive continued their attack, until their bomb vests in turn exploded. Those explosions spread the pandemonium and death out to those who had not been in the original danger zone.
Several of the officers around Javier’s truck turned to shoot at the dogs that raced in toward them. Others held their weapons pointed up at Javier, since he was the driver of the truck dumping thousands of gallons of gasoline all over the ground. They yelled at him to get out of the truck or they would shoot.
Javier was holding a dead man’s switch.
Rafael knew that Javier yelled “Allahu Akbar” back at them. They grasped the meaning and immediately began retreating even as they opened fire.
A few seconds later Javier’s truck exploded with a ground-shaking thud.
The men in close, climbing up to open the driver’s door to the truck, were vaporized when the massive bomb in the sleeper compartment of his truck cab detonated. The huge explosion sent debris flying in every direction. The expanding shock wave from the explosion knocked people from their feet. It rocked all the trucks trapped at the checkpoint. Rafael’s truck rocked in turn as the blast wave raced past.
The catwalk above the booths came apart and parts of it blew high into the air. Half of the booths and personnel in them were blown to pieces, adding to the flaming debris flying through the air. The big axle and tandem wheels off a truck sailed out over the row of booths and into California.
A massive ball of red flame laced with orange and yellow tendrils expanded from the initial explosion. Rafael squinted at the bright blast. Fire boiled over the surrounding trucks. Black smoke swelled up into the air.
Almost simultaneously the gasoline vapor from all the fuel that had poured out across the area caught fire with a chest-pounding thump, igniting the gasoline that had poured across the ground.
Trucks to the side couldn’t even attempt to escape by driving around, because they were hemmed in by natural terrain that rose up in most of the area around the checkpoint. Where there wasn’t a natural obstruction, massive cement barriers had been placed to prevent anyone from trying to drive around the checkpoints to get into the United States. Those barriers now created a tightly confined trap that was rapidly becoming a killing field.
All the while more of the vests on the dogs kept exploding in a deadly drumbeat, creating a continual cacophony of earsplitting booms. The air everywhere was filled with shrapnel. Men still standing went down.
With the dogs released, Esteban started into his truck to detonate the bomb in the front of his trailer.
He only made it two steps before he was brought down by a hail of bullets from a few of the California Highway Patrol officers still alive.
Rafael had been expecting it. They had planned and trained for it. He picked up another waiting phone and immediately pressed the send button. As he did so, he ducked.
Almost instantly, Esteban’s truck blew apart in another massive explosion, bigger than the first. But this one was to a large degree a shaped charge meant to expend most of its energy to the right side. The blast blew apart the truck beside it, and the one beside that one that had been sitting at the gamma ray detector in front of Rafael’s truck.
Flaming debris ripped down poles and power lines. The metal siding off one of the trucks spiraled up into the air. A massive chunk of metal hit the hood of Rafael’s truck with a bang and bounced over the cab. The air was filled with smoke trails left by burning, unrecognizable bits of wreckage sailing through the air.
Trucks that were trapped and unable to move were engulfed in flames from the burning gasoline that had spread under them. Blazes whooshed to life all throughout the standing vehicles. Men screamed as they were burned alive in the cabs of their trucks. Others tried to escape by running through the rivers of burning gasoline. As they ran, their shoes and then thei
r pants ignited. Flames roared up to engulf their shirts and then their hair. Screams came from faces inside swirling columns of fire.
Many of those running figures succumbed to the smoke or breathed in the flames and collapsed in the inferno. People ran in every direction, trying to skirt flaming trucks and flying debris, trying to find safety. There was none.
Acrid, thick black smoke rolled across the scene, obscuring the lines of trucks. Orange flame licked out from the wall of inky smoke. Throughout it all, the bomb vests on the dogs with delayed fuses continued to explode. Explosions shocked the air.
If ever there was a scene of hell, this was it.
Trucks at the front up near the booths that were not caught up in the fire or destroyed by the explosions sped away to escape the mayhem. Most of the border agents were dead. The few that weren’t were tending their own wounds or trying to find a way to fight back. They were not worried about trucks that began fleeing in a panic from the death and destruction. As they picked up speed going for the few openings in the debris and wreckage, they collided with other trucks also trying to escape. Other drivers tried to maneuver between the damaged vehicles, or around crippled trucks, driving over smoldering bodies and leveled border check booths.
The explosions from the dogs’ bomb vests finally trailed off. Rafael checked his watch to make sure the timers had all run out. He didn’t want to get caught by an explosion from a dog running from the scene. The dogs were trained to be unafraid of gunfire and explosions, but in some their natural instincts took over and they were panicking to get away from the flames. He didn’t see any of them still around the immediate area.
Finally, the time had arrived. Rafael jammed his truck into gear and released the brake. With the truck in front that had been blocking his way at the neutron and gamma detectors now mostly obliterated, Rafael began gathering speed and plowing aside torn pieces of the trailer. An axle with tandem wheels still attached spun like a top as it was knocked off to the side. Large sheets of metal siding toppled as he crashed through remaining pieces of the truck beds.
All around trucks burned and people screamed—some in pain and some for help. Some of the other drivers and the border agents tried to rescue people trapped in burning trucks. Fuel tanks continued to rupture and pour diesel fuel on the fire, creating thick clouds of black smoke. Even though he had rolled up the window, Rafael could feel the withering heat radiating from the fires.
As he gathered speed, he rammed into what was left of one of the truck cabs that had been in line ahead of him. The shell of the body and tires had been mostly blown away in the explosion. He used his truck to push it, trying to get it out of the way. Instead of being pushed aside, it rotated sideways ahead of Rafael’s grille, sliding sideways on bare rims in front of his truck. With no bodywork left, the dead driver could be seen hanging in his seat belt, his left arm blown off from the explosion.
Rafael kept pushing the skeleton of the truck cab until they were past the booth area. Once clear he spun the wheel to turn his truck to push the smoldering wreck of a truck cab off to the side.
Throughout the entire attack and aftermath, Cassiel had sat quietly watching. He said nothing and took no action. Fortunately, he didn’t attempt to lift his gun to shoot out the window at the enemy when he had a chance. Rafael had told him beforehand that their job was to play the part of innocent victims caught in a terrorist attack.
The last thing they needed was to have anyone who was still alive, or any of the officers rushing to the scene from nearby areas, see someone shooting an AK-47 out of the passenger window of an escaping truck. That would instantly tip them off that Rafael’s truck was part of the attack. It would ruin years of planning. The plan was for Rafael to look like one of the many innocent trucks frantically fleeing the scene of death and destruction.
There were trucks that, once past the carnage, pulled over. Drivers jumped out to render assistance to the scores of injured. But many more trucks simply fled in a panic, too horrified by the carnage to want to stay.
Rafael wanted to be in among those innocent people fleeing the scene. He wanted to look like any other Mexican truck driver racing away for fear of his own life.
THIRTY-FIVE
As they drove north, away from the carnage at the Oeste Mesa border crossing, flames leaped up from the carcasses of dozens of trucks burning in the distance behind them. Thousands of burning embers floated through the air. An ever-growing mass of black smoke rose into the air until the higher-altitude winds tore the top off the sinister column in a long dark smudge against the bright blue sky.
Emergency vehicles on the other side of the divided highway raced south toward the scene. Rafael could see flashing lights converging from roads to either side. It looked like every police car in Southern California was streaming toward the border crossing, creating a river of flashing lights. They were too late. They always were. They only showed up after an attack.
Ambulances in ever-increasing numbers sped toward the massacre. They would not be able to save many lives. They would have to search through piles of burned bodies to find anyone still alive. There would be some they could help, but they would waste their time taking the large numbers of gravely injured to hospitals, only to have them die on the journey or over the next few days while ones still undiscovered expired.
Rafael smiled to himself. The relatives of all the infidel dead would weep this night and for many more. They would think it was over.
They would think this was one of biggest terrorist attacks ever. They would have no idea that this was not even the real event. The time was rapidly approaching for all the nonbelievers to die.
Several times Rafael had to pull his truck over onto the shoulder for police cars racing down the wrong side of the highway in their urgency to get around traffic and to the scene. But every time, once they had passed, Rafael quickly pulled back out and kept going. He needed to be lost in the mass confusion to escape the scene.
Cars and trucks had pulled over all along the highway. People stood beside their vehicles, a hand shielding their eyes from the late-afternoon sun, as they stared southwest to the fire and smoke. None of them could possibly imagine what had just taken place. They would all be following the news for days and weeks to come as they gossiped about what they had seen.
Other people in cars, SUVs, and pickups continued heading south, following the emergency vehicles, to see for themselves what was happening at the Oeste Mesa border crossing. The determined, ghoulish sightseers would slip through the confused police lines or go around overland to take countless photos and videos of the wreckage, the fires, and the smoldering bodies. They would rush breathlessly to post them on the Internet.
Those photos and videos would also find their way to all the Islamic jihadi websites. Many would wrongly take credit for the attack and promise more to come. Those images would spread across social media, and in a matter of hours people all over the country—all over the world—would be able to see the results of the attack. Everyone would express shock at the number of dead.
People all over America would get a sobering taste of how weak they really were, how blind, how foolish.
What no one realized at the moment, though, was that there were simultaneous attacks being carried out all over the United States and even in a few countries overseas. Bodies would be left after every kind of attack, from stabbings at malls, to trucks used to run over pedestrians, to bombs at airport checkpoints, to poison-gas attacks in three different subways. Cities from Seattle to Las Vegas to Chicago to Miami to New York would all be caught up in the grip of terror.
Everyone would remember this date … at least for now.
Everyone would think that this day that cities burned and victims bled and died was the big event, the biggest strike ever against the Great Satan. Even as the dust settled there would be demands for investigations to find out where so much had gone wrong. There would be hand wringing. Every intelligence agency would blame a lack of adequate fundi
ng.
But it would all be about what had happened, not about what was going to happen. Everyone was blind to that. America itself had helped Rafael and his team keep the secret of what they planned. Rafael had used the tools, both the physical tools and the political tools, that America had so willingly provided, to get him, his team, and their supplies into the country.
Authorities across the country would be kept investigating the attacks and trying to identify those involved. They would be focused on peeling back layers and networks. They very likely would eventually trace information on everyone involved. They would come to know the names of those who were captured, or killed, or who had escaped and were being hunted, and the names of their organizations. It would be all over the news.
They would collect all the surveillance data of conversations from people involved in those attacks. They would scour all the social media postings of everyone involved. As always, it was after the fact and too late to make a difference.
There would be endless reporting about how these people had somehow escaped scrutiny, or had been on watch lists but not arrested, or had slipped into the country on visas or as refugees and no one had done anything about it. They would get mountains of intelligence from informants. They would analyze the chatter and discover the scope of it all.
They would also find pieces of the bodies of Javier and Esteban, but it would do them do good, because they wouldn’t be able to identify the charred remains or link them to any group.
Unlike all the other groups involved in all the other attacks, Rafael and his group were unknown to any intelligence agency. Over the decades of their training, they had never interacted with any terrorist group or movement. They were ghosts.
Many of the people who were also part of that ghost group and who had helped give logistic support to the mission were long since on their way out of the country. They would vanish in the wind.
That kept Rafael and his in-country team, unlike everyone else in the many attacks, not only undetected, but completely unknown.