"Well, what next?" asked Col. Marstoni.
"Hell, I don't know. I can only guess just like you. But damnit, I'll tell you one thing. Although people are Jihad's targets, he has to also be planning on more military action. He has to show how weak we are. Killing non-combatants is for terrorizing the American people. But to impress the rest of his world, he must strike at the heart of our power, the military. It's not enough to go after our companies or our economy. He must strike real targets too."
"But they ARE terrorists, not a military assault team" interjected the Colonel.
"Don't be so sure" replied Carlisle ruefully. "Obviously they are terrorists but that doesn't preclude them from striking miltary targets or forces. Take the club incidents, Germany a few years ago, and here a couple of months ago. Who knows what is in the minds of Terrorists?"
"Criminals" interjected Jud, a look of disgust on his face.
"...huh right, thanks Jud. Criminals. The rocket attack in the OSH parking lot, was more of a success than the club bombings. Could have easily been worse. But you see people seem to react to more random violence. Military men being killed is somehow more acceptable. The press splashed the OSH attack all over the world, pictures of the wreckage on Sunnyvale- Saratoga Road has put the street on the map. It is a household word. People are already saying we must have our revenge. 'Remember Sunnyvale-Saratoga'. The hue and cry for the world to hear from our nation. Now combine that with the killing of men in the military, the very same people we expect to exact our revenge, and you have a pretty good days propaganda."
"But it's not enough" interrupted Jud again. "There will be more. We haven't seen the big splash yet."
"So it's us then, is it?" asked the Colonel.
"Eventually, if they continue around here. They will lie low for awhile, then when they think our guard is down, they'll come running in the front door and make a nasty weekend for you as well. Don't think it will be otherwise. These people haven't even gotten started yet."
"Oh wonderful."
Fredricks said a little loudly, "How do you hear us, General?" and they sat down around Marstoni's desk to begin their conference with General Jamison, who was calling from the Pentagon.
"Sounds great Jimmie. Okay, how's it look out there?"
"Well my men are in place here, and the 1st Special Forces Group from Ft. Lewis are bivouacked at Hamilton. We expect the folks from Ft. Benning in by dawn. Commander Special Warfare Group Two, Detachment 220 at Alameda NAS is awaiting orders, and 5th Special Forces Group from Bragg is ready for 15 minute delivery from Travis. The ANG commander has his pulled in all his people on base at Moffett, and my Night Hawks are ready and waiting there as well."
"Okay. Any word on the attack at the CPO club?"
"No Sir. Carlisle, want to report on the van?"
Ray cleared his throat, thinking quickly about previous briefings of military brass back at Vandenburg.
"What Van?" asked the General, a slight bit of white noise on the squawkbox.
"From the CPO Club hit. It was a blue on white 65 Econoline. Had two bullet holes in the right side panel, six shots in the front window, two which pierced the passenger compartment but not found. There were eleven shots in the rear cargo door, eight spent rounds found inside the cargo area. Also a goodly amount of three different bloodtypes were found in the cargo area, and of course the blood of the driver was found in the drivers compartment."
"From this information we surmise that beside the driver, three other individuals were hit by the Marine Sergeant's fire, but none of the wounds being mortal. The van itself was not important, having been stolen only an hour before the raid. The targets of the raid were at random, and the strike was carried out with "fire-for-effect" tactics, no single target identified. Of course this is beyond the obvious involvement of U.S. military personnel we have seen throughout the world in the last ten years."
"Now I move from the strictly factual to the mostly theoretical. We believe the attackers are from the same group interrupted at the Hewlett-Packard Mountain View site by our Civil Liaison, Capt. Jud Tyler, Palo Police, and his companion Capt. Able Stanton of the Mountain View Police who was killed in the abortive raid."
"If our theory is correct in this connection, then we know the leader of the group as Jahlbad Ramir Kehochi, alias Jihad, alias "The Angel of Vengeance".
He has been identified by Captain Tyler, not doubts there. Angel, his codename amongst terrorist groups, is leader of the nimr billail' or Tigers of the Night organization. Their express purpose is to bring fear into the decadent western civilizations which imprison their members, their families and their brother moslem nations."
Now Carlisle paused for a moment to let the point sink in. He obviously had everyone's attention now, except perhaps for Jamison and Fredricks who had already been briefed by both the FBI and CIA back in Washington, D.C.
"Now according to our intelligence, and I mean combined intelligence under the Director of Central Intelligence..." and here Jud made a gesture of confusion.
"If I may explain that for Capt. Tyler..." and as Carlisle heard no objection, he began,
"The Director of Central Intelligence is not only the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. That is a strict misnomer as well as coincidental. The 'Central' in his title is because he is just that, the Director for all of the Combined Intelligence Agencies in the U.S., a central point for intelligence coordination. We have one up on the British Secret Service, because there is one man in the U.S. who supposedly knows all that is going on. For instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Force, Navy, and Army Intelligence all report to the Director. As well as do the Director of the FBI, State, the National Security Agency, the Treasury, and even Energy under the NEST operation."
"Now continuing. We have ascertained that although the group is fairly new in the terrorist business, its members are lead by a rather well known core of experienced terrorists who individually can be linked to just about every major terrorist action against the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and of course Israel, in the last twenty years. Jihad or Angel, has himself been very visible in almost every anti-U.S./anti-Israel action. But even discounting his personal involvement though, still leaves us with a terrifying cross section of terrorists. I will brief by way of hardcopy on each of the suspected core members later."
"Suffice to say that the members of this core group are the survivors. They enlist young zealots from the usual countries to do the suicide missions, and apparently because of their leadership's experience and audacity, many of them have lived to conduct more operations. As such, the current membership is thought to be composed of twelve core leaders, each with at least 50 followers who are bonded in what might seem to be religious fervor. In other words, these are solid units, all of which owe a major portion of their allegiance to Jihad himself, and to a lesser degree to one of the twelve 'nabi', their prophet or teacher."
"We will not be able to break these people then" said the General by way of confirmation.
"No Sir, I expect not. Our only hope is to return what is given...we must beat them on their terms. This, of course, is difficult. We do not have a nation to hold them to, we rarely have enough information to permit going after them other than directly. Even if we did have personal information about them we cannot attack in the 'black' as they are. Thus if we cannot fight 'black' with 'black', we must resort to sheer force and determination. Outwill them, out number them, and out think them. "And this is where we have our major problem..." resumed Colonel Fredricks.
"Yes, I know Jimmie" interrupted General Jamison, then continued "You don't believe we can win at this because the American people are weak, untrained, and decidedly undisciplined."
"Yes Sir, that is it exactly. Let's take a typical Montana boy. He grows up with rifles, both a thirty-odd-six as well as a 12 gauge shotgun. He is familiar with the weapons, and may even have handled a pistol or two. In fact, he rides around with a 30-30 Winchester lever action rifle hanging on a rifle rack in the back of his Dodge Pickup."
"But Sir, this is nothing more than Cowboy and Indian stuff. The Winchester comes off the rack and winds up in a saddle holster. It goes everywhere with the Montana boy, and shoots varmits when they trouble him. He most likely has never been disciplined on the use of weapons to kill men, and knows little of how to follow strict and at sometimes seemingly stupid orders. He has never killed a man and doesn't know the first thing about strategy or tactics."
"You place this fellow in the situation of defending his family, and you get bullets flying everywhere until there are no rounds left, and the attacker waltzes in with little resistance left."
"Right. So let's talk about Silicon Valley" broke in Jud. "You take the fellows here. There are basically seven types of gun handlers in the Bay Area. The Saturday night special club. These are the street people who pack a small weapon. Why the small weapon? Cuz we, the Police, don't like to see people carrying weapons, so the fellow must carry a weapon easy to hide. Mind you, these are not the guys who carry weapons for real protection, like say a drug dealer or a drug gang."
"That's the second gun handler, the drug folks. Now we have a totally different animal there. These folks pack big armament. After all, they may be protecting several million dollars of cargo, or packing along a couple of hundred-thousand dollars of cash every day. They think nothing of blowing a thousand dollars on an UZI, or any one of ten semi- automatic weapons converted to automatics."
"The third group is your hobby plinker. He buys a .380 semi or a .38 revolver. He shoots wad cutters and goes out two or three times a month to blow holes in paper. Maybe one out of ten uses a silhouette target, if the range he frequents will allow it."
"Then the fourth kind of gun handler. This is the working gun handler, the cop. We have maybe three hundred licensed Federal officers, such as Agent Carlisle here. But this includes customs, INS, and all the others. Then we have what we affectionately call "The Seven". This is the police of the major seven departments in the area who have worked together from chases to drunk driving barricades. Actually more if you get right down to it, since four of the cities in the Bay Area have SWAT teams. Excluding the SWAT teams, though, the majority of the cops have never killed a man with their weapon, and only slightly fewer have ever discharged their weapon in anything other than mock combat. They are well disciplined but not necessarily soldiers."
"Now let's look at the SWAT teams. We have excellent marksman only in these groups. They are extremely well disciplined, but on the other hand they usually are so over-controlled, that in a real firefight, there chances are less than the average Marine."
"Now the sixth group. These are the cream of the marksman, and perhaps some of the best in the bay. These are the Steel Champions. Competitors in the shooting houses or Steel target competition. How many in the Bay area are Nationally competitive? Maybe three or four. Certainly there are say 50 or 60 aspirants to the Nationals, but not really competitive. Again, most likely they have never killed before, and few have been in real fire fights."
"The last group are the Vets. Now understand that a small percentage of this group are still active in one of the other six groups I have mentioned. But the majority of this vastly larger pool of weapons handlers are totally inactive. Maybe only one out of a hundred even own a weapon. As a rule, they are in a range of ages from 40 to 80. Of that group only five percent have the physical conditioning or even traces of skill left to be of any use."
"This leaves us with perhaps 10,000 people in the entire bay area even remotely capable of defending themselves from a terrorist. In other words gentleman, less than 1 hundredth of one percent of us stand a chance."
Now Fredricks resumed the explanation. "Now if we compare that with say a country like Israel. By the age of fourteen, each boy or girl has already served 6 months in the militia. They have spent summers learning how to assemble and disassemble every weapon prevalent in the region. Of every person aged 16 to 55, there is a one in ten chance that the person is a recently seasoned fighter, with the knowledge to kill with their bare hands still fresh in their mind. And every two years they serve again. It is so serious over there, that Israelis who are also American citizens visiting their home country, must show reason why they should be allowed to return to the U.S. without serving the required military time."
And then there is the resolve. These people live with the threat of invasion, terrorist aggression at any moment, and death on any given day. Their answer to this tragedy of living, 'Come, let us show you how well we can die.'"
Fredricks grew silent with that statement and they all contemplated the differences in their lifes.
"You place a terrorist in amongst those people, and his chances of success are so damned few, that of the ten to twenty monthly attempts, terrorist strikes are only successful three to four times per year."
Now General Jamison, obviously having heard this all before finally spoke up again,
"Okay, as I've said many times before, your reasoning is the very reason we hired you to do the job. So what can you tell me that's different about this setup?"
"Sorry Sir. Guess I got on the soapbox again. Well..." Fredricks took a moment to collect the information he had heard so far.
"Agent Carlisle said one thing that has me...well frankly scared shitless." His steely gaze fell on Carlisle, and Jud noticed that his partner did not shift under the weight of it, retaining his calm exterior.
"You said that each of the core members have a following of 50 terrorists. If the number of core people is 12, then that means they have 700 terrorists to pool from. That's a full battalion of combatants that they could field. We are no longer talking about a small raiding party here, this is big time. If I could sneak a battalion of Special Forces personnel into my enemy's backyard, spread 'em out in guerrilla warfare units, I could reek havoc for months. At the least, I would force my enemy to place the countryside under martial law. Inside of 24 hours, the civilian populace would be locked in their homes, production would stop, and my objective would have been met."
"Now if you add to that the information you have given me on the strategic importance of Silicon Valley, both in military supply considerations, as well as general U.S. economics, then the possibility of a battalion of terrorists in the Bay Area is a strategic event."
"Yes, we have agreed to that, Jimmie. Again that is why you are there. But what of it...I mean, now that we spent a half a million dollars to get you and you're people there, what are you going to do about it?"
The General's voice sounded a little exasperated, and Jud realized the man had probably not slept since the Force had been ordered to be airlifted from Ft. Bragg to Travis.
"You aren't going to like it, General."
"I rarely do, Jimmie."
"Yes Sir. We are going to depend on positioning, and sheer luck. For instance, Jud here can really pick the targets. Witness his uncanny ability to be in the one building in the entire bay area where the terrorists are expecting to hold say a thousand hostages. He parks his wounded ass at the Blue Cube, and not more than half a mile away, the CPO club is raided, probably by the same people who were so fortunate as to be missed by Jud the first time."
Jud began to rankle at the comment about missing someone he shot at and the Colonel recognized the fact as he said, "Don't get me wrong, Jud. You hit everyone you shot at. We just don't know how many were waiting outside to come in when the lobby was taken. Anyway, we are going to use the Chief's skills, Sir. We are going to ask him to help us pre-position our people where they can do the most good. And if it isn't too late, we will either find our bandits, find their cache of weapons, or if nothing else, screw up their timetable so bad that the won't be able to organize effectively."
"Sounds like wishful thinking" said the General over the speaker.
"I agree" said Ray Carlisle with an apologetic glance to Jud, who in turn just shrugged.
"Terrorists attack people. A battalion of terrorists attack people AND military targets."
The General chuckled and said, "Jimmie, have you been talking to the FIBBIE? He sounds an awful lot like you usually do!"
Fredricks grinned, as Ray now reacted to being called a FIBBIE, his red face coming up slowly. But Fredricks's normally steely eyes, either out of sheer political necessity, or because of real empathy for the agent, now sparkled with mischievousness as he said,
"No way, Sir. Our Agent friend has his own intelligence to thank for his good instincts. But in this case I disagree. For one, I need to be convinced the battalion of terrorists is here. Second of all, even if they are all here, why the Bay Area. Why not Beale AFB up near Sacramento. How about one of the other SAC bases. We have Castle near Merced, Mather has a small tenant SAC unit, again up next to Sacramento, hell there are dozens on the West Coast."
"No I believe that they are here in Silicon Valley for one reason. Economics. Remember, Jihad has a fine education. He understand politics, economics, as well as psychology. He knows that if he can turn this area into a war-zone for even a few months, that the overall effect on the American people is immense. He knows also that once he gets that kind of exposure, it will entice others to try. Even if other groups are not as successful, he knows he will have started something. And that in-of- itself is worth any risk he must take."
"And risk is, I believe, is what he is willing to do. I think he will take the best shot at the most luscious military targets he can, but only as diversions to his real targets, the people at work in Silicon Valley. I believe the HP hit was only one of a number of sites to be hit and a diversion at that. But when Jud broke it up, it took the wind out of their plans, at least temporarily."
"Well how effective can the terrorists be? Do you think their are smuggling in a nuke?"
"Well, Sir, that possibility is why I brought the NEST teams in, and why I wanted the three battalions of Elite in the area. I want to make sure Jihad's force is non-nuclear by insuring we have enough people on the ground to freeze nuclear material movement in the area. In fact, one of messages this morning was to shut down and seal up the weapons centers."
"What about that? What kind of numbers does that take?"
"Livermore Labs is just over the hill from the valley, less than 60 minutes away by car, only a few minutes by air. Alameda, Moffett, Mather, and McClellan all have nuclear capable storage. There are several nuclear plants within several hours driving, but they don't really have weapons grade shit. Of course a terrorist might choose to dump plutonium in the water supplys. There are essentially no guards on the water shed areas right now. Something I'm going to fix with some of the Rangers."
"But I also want to insure that the military targets are well protected, and I want to insure that his real target is so costly that he will make a mistake in approaching it."
Jud and Ray looked at each other, not knowing how the Colonel expected to accomplish all this, but intensly interested in finding out the details.