“I don’t know,” her husband replied honestly. “But I got a feelin’ there’s a shitstorm comin’…and we won’t be able to deny our way outta this one.”
CHAPTER 2
Hamed al-Bashar finished entering the data into the file and saved it, then clicked on the next item in the list and opened a new window to enter more information. The office around him was quiet on a Sunday afternoon. He was the only one who had come in today. Everyone else was home watching football on television.
Not Hamed, though. For one thing, he hated American football, just as he hated everything else about America. But football held a special place in his hatred, and had ever since he had seen news footage on French television of Arab mobs celebrating the deaths of thousands of infidels on 9/11.
One image he had witnessed on that glorious day remained seared in his brain. An Arab man was laughing and dancing for joy in the street in Baghdad or Damascus or some other city; Hamed didn’t remember exactly where, and it didn’t matter. Perched on the man’s shoulders was his son, a boy of seven or eight years old.
And that boy wore a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt.
The satanic influence of the Americans had wormed its insidious way so far into the Arab world that a child could wear a symbol of the infidels’ national sport and not think anything of it. It was at that very moment that Hamed had known that peace was not possible, that Islam could never coexist with such evil. The only way to truly save the world was to cleanse it of all Western influences.
Europe was no threat to that glorious goal. The French? That thought made Hamed laugh. He had been around the French enough to know that they would never successfully resist anything for very long, not without someone else coming to their rescue. The Germans were not much better, and the Spaniards and Italians weren’t worth even thinking about.
The British, though, might pose a bit of a problem, but they were already showing numerous signs of giving up. And nowhere in subequatorial Africa or South America was there enough cohesion to represent a threat to the march of Islam. As for China and Russia…well, oil and oil money could always buy them off. Anyway, they would be happy to be rid of America, too.
So America—and its godless infidel football—had to go.
There was another reason Hamed was working on a Sunday afternoon. He was a go-getter. That was what his supervisor called him. His instructions were simple—blend in and wait for the summons that would call him to perform the work of Allah.
When that summons would come, and the exact details of the mission he would be given, were unknown to Hamed, but he, like the other members of his group, was patient. Whether it took months or even years, he would be here, in Kansas City, Missouri, working in the transportation division of one of America’s largest corporations, helping to coordinate the movement of goods throughout the nation by truck.
His passport, his work visa, and all his other papers were the finest money could buy. The paper trail, a mixture of fact and fiction, stretched back years and showed him immigrating from France to Quebec, where, according to documents in his possession, he had lived and worked for five years before applying for permission to enter the United States. His record was clean and beyond reproach.
Of course, he hadn’t entered the United States by legal means, as all his phony paperwork indicated. He had come across the border from Canada in a remote location, along with several others from his cell. The rest of the group had been smuggled across the southern border from Mexico.
Homeland Security…what a joke! And the Americans’ so-called crackdown on illegal immigration was equally amusing. None of the American politicians, especially those currently in power, really wanted to stop the free flow of illegals from Mexico. Doing so might cost them Hispanic votes. As for the Canadian border, that was just too long and porous to even pretend that any sort of enforcement was possible.
What sort of country was it, Hamed had often wondered, that not only allowed its deadliest enemies to enter it, but practically invited them in?
And the answer was…a country of fools.
No wonder the United States would soon be nothing but a bad memory.
“Why, Hamed, honey, what the hell’re you doin’ here on Sunday?”
The voice took him by surprise and brought him out of a very pleasant vision of America in flaming ruins. He turned and saw a woman standing by the office door. She wore shorts and a shirt with no sleeves and a pair of those rubber sandals Americans called flip-flops. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Hamed secretly burned with shame at the sight of so much female flesh and an uncovered female head, but he forced himself to smile back at her.
“I just thought I’d get a head start on those bills of lading for tomorrow morning’s shipments,” he said.
“Honey, you’re just a workin’ fool,” the woman said. Her name was Mandy Armitage. She was one of his supervisors, and Hamed burned with shame because of that as well. In an Islamic America, females would have no such positions.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, knowing that he had to make small talk with her so she wouldn’t be suspicious of him. Americans chattered incessantly.
“Would you believe it? We’re goin’ to Arrowhead to watch the Chiefs play the Colts this afternoon, and I went off and left the tickets in my desk.” She went across the big room to her cubicle, which was smaller than some but larger than most, to retrieve the tickets. When she had them, she turned and gave him another smile. “Don’t work too hard now, hear?”
“Don’t worry about that,” he told her.
She paused in the doorway. “Say, maybe you’d like to go to a game sometime. We can always get tickets through the company, even when the stadium’s sold out.”
She was looking at him with lust in her eyes again, he thought. He knew he was not unattractive to American women, with his olive skin and his thick dark hair and his neatly trimmed mustache and beard. He was in superb physical shape. With the least bit of encouragement on his part, Mandy Armitage would lie with him, and she wasn’t the only one.
That was out of the question, of course, and even considering such a thing was sinful. But Hamed managed not to show the revulsion he felt as he said, “Sorry, I don’t know anything about American football. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.”
“That’s right, where you come from people play soccer, don’t they? That’s what you call football.”
That’s what 90 percent of the world calls football, you stupid American cow, he thought, but with your typical arrogance you believe that you’re right and everyone else is wrong.
“I could explain the rules to you,” Mandy went on. “I’ve got four brothers who played varsity, and I was head cheerleader. I’d have you knowin’ the difference between a blitz and a post pattern in no time.”
“I’ll think about it,” Hamed promised, with no intention of wasting even a second’s thought on such worthless drivel.
“All right, honey. See you tomorrow.”
Hamed smiled and waved as Mandy went out, then turned back to his computer. “And I’ll see you in hell, you foolish infidel bitch,” he said to himself as he went back to work.
CHAPTER 3
McCabe saw the woman as he rolled the big rig into the truck stop parking lot. She was a lot lizard—a hooker, of course. The tight, cutoff blue jean shorts, the equally tight tank top, and the high heels told him that much.
But it was the middle of the night and she was running and she looked scared. McCabe brought the truck to a stop with a hiss of air brakes, opened the door, and called to the woman, “Lady! Over here!”
She hesitated, as if she thought she might