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 funding.
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.
He was the ghost who had slipped through the chaos, unknown, undetected.
All the other jihadist groups who carried out the other attacks around America also believed this was the big attack. Not even they knew the truth.
That secrecy was necessary to prevent anyone involved with the other attacks, if captured, from disclosing anything about Rafael’s group. They had never even heard rumors of Rafael and his group. They couldn’t reveal what they didn’t know.
Rafael kept his speed in check to match the other trucks leaving the scene. He didn’t want to give nervous, trigger-happy police officers any excuse to notice him or stop him for questioning. With all the traffic they were mingling into, the risk of discovery was continually melting away.
The big worry was that they would be stopped to have their load inspected. It would be a very bad thing if any of the authorities looked in the trailer he was hauling. That was the whole reason behind the destruction at the Oeste Mesa border crossing. There they had X-ray equipment, neutron detectors, gamma ray detectors, as well as very savvy border agents. Rafael and his group had just nullified all of those safety measures and the entire system behind them.
Although it was highly unlikely anymore that they would be stopped, it was always possible that Cassiel could handle them, but it was also much more possible that he couldn’t. Cassiel was an assassin, a killer, to be sure, but he was not a commando or soldier. It wasn’t his specialty. If the police started shooting, it took only one bullet for Rafael to be killed or disabled. That would end their entire mission.
They had to rely on their years of careful planning, not on Cassiel. As far as Rafael was concerned, Cassiel was just excess baggage he had to drag along.
Rafael took the first exit to the westbound connector into San Diego. Before long they merged into masses of heavy late-day traffic. In a little over an hour they reached the industrial area where the rest of the team would be waiting and they could at last ditch the truck that had been through the border crossing.
Rafael phoned Fernando as they turned off the main road into the maze of small office parks and warehouses. Streets lined with palm trees reminded him a little of home. As he pulled up to the building they owned through a shell company, the big overhead door rolled open. Rafael drove the truck right inside and parked at the far end of the building.
He sat for a moment after he shut down the engine, relieved to at last be hidden in a safe place.
Forklifts were standing by to begin transferring the material they were carrying to the smaller cargo van. Behind the important materials they would load into the van, they would place some household furniture to hide what they were carrying on the off chance a police officer opened the rear door. From a professional truck driver, Rafael was now to become a new immigrant with a used van, driving cross-country with a friend and their furniture to settle in another state.
The other members of the team would be in cars escorting them in a loose convoy. Alejandro, Rafael’s second-in-command, would ride in a car that would always be right behind him. The other team members would take a variety of other vehicles. No one would be able to tell, but it would be a convoy that would always protect the cargo van Rafael was driving.
Rafael had told Cassiel that he was to ride in the van with him. Rafael thought it best if he kept an eye on the man.
Members of their team broke the seal and opened the big swinging doors at the back of the semitrailer. Men climbed up into the truck to assist in off-loading the critical parts Rafael had been carrying.
“How did it go at the border?” Fernando asked.
Rafael held his head up a little higher. “Javier and Esteban became martyrs today. God has welcomed them home with rich rewards. Many infidels died. It was a good day.”
Fernando nodded and climbed up onto a forklift to start unloading Rafael’s semitrailer truck.
The first thing they loaded into the front of the small cargo van was the generators and batteries that would produce the five kilovolts needed to charge a high-energy capacitor to fire the detonators. They had already assembled platforms to anchor the most valuable part of the load.
Next, they carefully pulled the two cases, each holding a pair of half spheres of plutonium-239, surrounded by tungsten carbide bricks and beryllium reflectors, from the semitrailer and placed them on the platforms in the cargo van and secured them down.
Over those cases they placed the steel shells for the outer casing. They would help protect the cases should they have any kind of accident.
When the time came, the two halves of the plutonium spheres would be assembled along with a polonium-beryllium neutron initiator placed in their hollow centers. Those initiators would help kick-start the chain reaction to prompt criticality. The pit would be placed inside a heavy lead tamper several inches thick. That in turn would be surrounded by explosive lenses made of Semtex.
The Semtex explosive lenses, fired with the EBW, would create a shock wave designed to collapse the lead tamper inward. The tamper’s inertia would spherically compress the plutonium-239 pit to critical mass.
Miguel’s team had been in place for a while now and had been forming the Semtex into precisely shaped geometric pieces that later would be assembled into a sphere to surround the lead tamper and the inner shell. They had established their operation in a deserted industrial area that had proven to be a perfect source of the nearly thousand pounds of lead they would need for each bomb.
Their Iranian shell company had bought the entire building as well as another smaller building and machining workroom with old but workable milling machines. Once finished with the machining at the smaller workspace, Miguel’s men would move to the larger building to begin working the lead into the spherical tamper that would surround the plutonium pit.
Miguel’s team had also machined the brass chimney sleeves that would hold the detonators. Conventional detonators didn’t have the precision needed to make all the explosive lenses go off simultaneously.
To make those explosions highly symmetrical, the detonators would need to be connected by exploding bridgewire that had already been delivered to Miguel’s team by courier. When the proper voltage hit the EBW, the high current would melt and vaporize the wire in microseconds. The resulting shock wave would fire all the detonators in the same instant.
While precise yields were very difficult to determine, calculations done by Iran’s nuclear engineers along with the help of North Korean scientists suggested a little over one hundred kilotons.
Once Rafael and his team reached Miguel and his men, they could begin the final assembly.
The test of Iran’s first atomic bomb would not be conducted in some remote desert location.
It would be conducted in America.
This would be the Great Satan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki.