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"Who they gonna believe," Manny said with a shrug, "us or some jaybird-naked pogue out for a walk in the moonlight? That guy was lucky he was a civilian."

  "Sure. You're right."

  "Damn right, I'm right, my brother," Manny shook his head. "We came, we saw, we stripped his ass so the world could see his shortcomings."

  "Had it comin'."

  "All these jackasses who take the SEALs name in vain have it coming. I have more respect for a guy who quits the first day. I have more respect for the poor skinnies they send us to waste. At least they earned something. They didn't steal it. They didn't make it all into pure bullshit."

  "Maybe we oughta head over to Hollywood then," Heath said. "Straighten their asses out."

  "Yeah," Manny beamed. "Find out how much tiger blood Charlie Sheen really has."

  The actor played a SEAL in what was generally considered to be a total candyass movie--Navy SEALs--by anyone who wore the trident. It was often screened as a comedy in the barracks.

  Manny and Heath reached the checkpoint in high spirits. The Marines at the gate knew them and waved them through onto the base, even though the pair were giggling like school kids.

  CHAPTER 2

  OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

  Danni Fleener looked at the time on her cell phone again.

  2:49.

  The twins would be getting out of school in ten minutes and she was stuck in the slowest line imaginable at the Target. She was never good at picking a checkout aisle. She either got behind the pokiest cashier ever or someone with a stack of coupons three inches high. The young girl at the register was moving slow, and engaged in an animated conversation with a young Marine buying beer and chips ahead of Danni. She'd leave the cart and walk out, but that would mean stopping again at another market after picking up the twins, and that would delay getting them to her sister-in-law's and make her late for showing that condo in San Clemente. And she needed that commission to make the last three payments on the car or the bank was going to come get it.

  For the hundredth time that day she wished Bill was here to take up the slack. But Bill was deployed in Afghanistan with the 2nd Marines, and she was left behind to take care of their twin girls and the bills and the worries. Danni shook her head to herself. Here she was bitching about the day-to-day while Bill was downrange facing God knows. Take a breath, Danni. You can hang till he rotates back to Pendleton in August. Or September. Or, please God, at least by Christmas.

  She looked at the check-out lanes on each side of her. There were lots of men and women in uniform; most in Marine digital desert camo. Among them were women about her age, with kids in the carts, or standing close. The Marines joked; mocked each other's purchases. Two Marines behind her were making comments about the covers of magazines on the impulse rack over the conveyor. Lots of wives stood with an expression she recognized in herself; tension held down, hands tight on the shopping cart push handle, maintaining, waiting. Always waiting. Danni was struck again by how relaxed the young jarheads could be, even though they were either off for the first time, or just back from, or off for the umpteenth time to the ass-end of the world to face deprivation and danger.

  She recalled the last time she saw Bill. He was walking out to a waiting taxi with his bag over his shoulder. They lived off base and he was proud of that, though she bore much of the burden of making the payments when he was away. He turned to her and smiled that goofy, little-boy smile of his. She stood with arms around the girls to keep them from running down the walk to him. Bill didn't like the farewells. He wouldn't let her drive him to the base. "Daddy's just going for a long cab ride," he'd say each time. Bill said they should save the tears for tears of joy when he came back. She'd saved up a lot of tears. August was so far away and she was so tired.

  The young Marine took his change and the girl at the register turned from him, greeted Danni with withering enthusiasm, and began sliding her items over the scanner.

  The cashier's hands slipped on the counter and then her full weight crashed down on the items there. She dropped the carton of milk she was scanning and it fell to the floor at Danni's feet.

  Danni heard the boom but didn't register it at first. The Marines behind her pushed her to the floor into the spreading puddle of non-fat. As she dropped, she caught a glimpse of a young man standing in front of the Starbucks counter at the front of the store. He wore an unseasonable black coat, and held a smoking shotgun in his fists and was pumping it to chamber a fresh round. He was shouting something she couldn't hear. A second and third boom, and the Marine who'd been pointing at a People cover featuring Kate Beckensale a few seconds before fell heavily on top of her. She felt a warm, wet sensation spread quickly through her silk blouse.

  More booms and shouts and the sound of running feet and things spilling to the floor. She couldn't move under the weight of the motionless Marine. She couldn't bring herself to touch him or even to turn and look. She just made herself shrink; shrink away to be so small no one could see her. The young man in the black coat would walk on by. He'd pass her by because, in her mind, she was no longer here.

  She opened her eyes to see the area of tile just before her. Sneakered feet stepped into the puddle of milk. There was a metallic clack and an empty shotgun round tumbled into the spreading white pattern before her eyes. It trailed a wisp of smoke and seemed to splash into the milk in agonizing slow motion. She closed her eyes. She shrank smaller. She heard a voice; tinged with a serene tone of personal satisfaction.

  "We pray humbly and invoke the curse of God upon the liars."

  A trio of Marines brought the shooter down while he stood jacking fresh deer slugs into the cut-down Mossberg. They beat the living daylights out of him in the time they had before the local PD showed and took the guy into custody.

  But too late for Danni Fleener and four others. Too late for her little girls standing at the curb of Ronald Reagan Elementary on Gullway Drive. Too late for the couple in San Clemente waiting for a walk-through of the three bed, two bath third floor condo. Too late for Cpl. William Fleener, fast asleep in his bunk at Patrol Base Jaker, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, halfway around the world.

  * * * * *

  Malcolm Niles Tate was smiling like a double lottery winner in interrogation room three.

  A half-dozen cops stood on the other side of a one-way mirror, regarding the skinny kid in the bright-orange county jumpsuit. Local, county, and staties were all here. Tate was manacled, with a chain running through a ring bolt welded to the steel table, which was bolted to the concrete floor. But he wasn't going anywhere anyway; didn't want to go anywhere. He looked like a birthday boy seated on a pony at the state fair, waiting for the ride to start.

  Maybe it was the painkillers they gave him at Tri-City Medical. The jarheads who'd jumped him got a lot of punishment in before the responding uniforms pulled them off. He'd be pissing blood for a week or two. His left arm was in a cast where the Marines broke it in four places getting the shotgun off him. Two broken fingers, too. He had sutures running from the corner of his mouth, and one ear had to be mostly stitched back on. His left eye was swollen shut. Four front teeth were out. They had to suture his tongue where it ripped open on the jagged stumps of his own teeth. The smile didn't improve his appearance any.

  He told the cops his name was Abdul Majeed Muhammed. His fingerprints said otherwise. He was nineteen, and his parents thought he was going to UC Davis, majoring in earth sciences on a partial scholarship. Tate hadn't been attending classes since February and was, apparently, living out of his car, which they found in the Target lot. It was loaded with the usual student detritus: CDs, books, three weeks' worth of unlaundered clothes, and lots of Mickey Ds trash. Not so typical were three-gallon containers of gasoline and a handgun. The county cleared the parking lot and sent in a bomb squad to open up the '06 Kia Sorrento just in case.

  The beater didn't go boom. The feds arrived as the locals were stripping the car of evidence. FBI. Treasury. Some suits from DoJ. And a few guys who di
dn't say much and showed no ID, including an enormous black guy with a shaved head and a look that told the locals to back the hell down. The feds pulled the Sorrento up onto a flatbed tow truck and took it away intact; Foo Fighters CDs and all.

  They left the locals with Abdul (né Malcolm), whom the feds showed no current interest in. But they promised they'd be back for him. It didn't take long for the local bulls to find out why. The kid was a dead end. A dope. A perfect tool who answered all their questions with half-ass quotes from the Quran. When they asked why he wanted to shoot five innocent people, he had a ready answer from the text. The one he went to most often was: "We pray humbly and invoke the curse of God upon the liars." It didn't sound so impressive lisped through broken teeth and a tongue fat from swelling.

  His parents were driving in from Needles, and they already had a lawyer on the way. Their little Mal, a cold-blooded mass-murderer? There must be some mistake, officer.

  CHAPTER 3

  The tiny Sorrento sat in pieces in the middle of a hangar in 13 Area at Pendleton. It was the closest facility that could be secured, and could house a dozen agents for the full-court press of finding out what, or who, sent a dumbass college dropout into a discount store with jihad in his heart.

  The Korean-built car had been expertly disassembled and its contents spread out on long tables borrowed from the mess hall. The books interested the agents most of all. A tattered paperback Quran with lots of highlighted passages. A few small press books on the construction of explosives. Some English translations of books by Syed Abul ala Maududi, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Najib abn Young-El. Jihad for dummies. There were many home-burned CDs featuring audio of radical Islam rock stars. Some in Arabic. Some in English. No evidence that Malcolm spoke or understood Arabic.

  There was no passport and no indication he'd travelled outside the country--or even to Mexico--in recent years. State had no record of foreign travel. This was homegrown terror, plain and simple.

  A laptop proved to be the prize. Two agents pored over his contacts and frequently visited sites. The usual porn and music sites. But the ones he hit most often were newworldofpeace.net and thefutureiscalling.co.ab. Two sites featuring the thoughts and teachings of Najib Abn Young-El. Here, the faithful could learn about Allah's special purpose for them and how to implement it; instructions for quick and dirty explosives, plans for disrupting public events, weapons maintenance, and toxic chemicals. The sites weren't as hot as the ones Awlaki ran from Yemen but they were growing. And less was known about Young-El. But his focus was clear. He wanted to build a following of the disenfranchised in the United States. The site included slick animations, music, and cartoons that were updated frequently. There were even interactive games. Someone put some time and money into the site.

  The writing in the frequently posted blog entries was simple and spiked with urban gangsta slang. The only element missing that might draw young wasetoids to the site was naked ladies. Allah frowned on that kind of content. God forbid you might see some chick's face.

  Young-El had a Twitter account as well, and either he or his associates updated it regularly. Little gems like, "Killing in the name of the Glorious Master is righteous and rewarding" and "Child or man, girl or woman, an infidel is an infidel, and grass before the scythe." But some of the tweets were hipper and commented on pop culture, like movies and music. Someone was trying hard to reach out to young westerners.

  Malcolm's email account showed, along with dozens of pleas to Mom and Dad for a few bucks, a record of thousands of exchanges with like-minded jihadis and even a few with Young-El himself. The emails led nowhere. The replies came from different sources but were always signed 'Young-El.' Probably relayed by flunkies from thumb drives created at the source. The two-day skip between question and response was evidence of that.

  And the email history showed that the exchanges ended almost a month ago. No more contact with anyone from the message boards by posts or mail.

  "We're seeing more and more like this guy," Waylon Griggs said, at the briefing the morning following the shootings. Griggs was one of two guys at the 13 Area facility with no name tag and no badge. The CIA didn't hand things like that out. His audience of agents and wonks listened attentively, tablets and laptops before them. Homeland Security made them all cousins if not brothers. The old inter-agency rivalries were frowned upon these days. In truth, any kind of chickenshit move like withholding intel or hogging a case to yourself, and Washington's full wrath fell on you from a great height. Griggs was the Big Picture. He'd be taking the intel and putting it into a global perspective.

  "Young-El is an Awlaki in the making," Griggs continued. "You know Awlaki if you watch the news. American-born, and runs some kind of mini-media empire out of Yemen. He directly inspired the Fort Hood massacre, the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, and about a dozen others you may have heard about in the media. And few you haven't."

  Griggs tapped at the tablet resting on the table in front of him. On the flatscreen set up behind him, an image appeared of a young man with a styled goatee and wrap-around shades under a shock of thick black hair with random strands braided with beads. He wore a dark blue t-shirt with the New York Yankees logo on it. The man in the image looked to be in his early twenties and was smiling, with plenty of straight white teeth. One hot-shit bastard with the kiss-my-ass attitude of a tyro.

  "This is the face Young-El shows the world," Griggs said. "But it's a mask. This image, and others like it on his sites, is a phony. Pure Photoshop. Pure bullshit. We don't even know if there is a Young-El. Or if he's more than one person with a single public face. But what we do know is that he's a rising star. His site's membership is growing and most of that growth is in this country, Canada, and Western Europe. His Twitter account has close to half a million followers worldwide. And this latest incident is the third one we can trace back to him. That truck bomb in Miami you might have heard about two months back. And those two murdered nuns in Seattle that made the news as a hit-and-run traffic accident.

  "Our profile studies say he's an American, or possibly Canadian-born. Best guess from voice analysis of the audio samples we have is that he was raised in Michigan, Detroit or the Flint area most likely. Young-El is an alias; a nom de guerre or an avatar for public consumption, to go along with the rest of a fake persona. But there's someone real behind it.

  "You can squeeze the creep that OPD has in custody all day long and find he knows shit." Griggs turned from the screen to his audience. "He's a tool and can only tell us what we already know. He's a one-man cell. A cut-out volunteer.

  "We could shut down Young-El's sites. We've done it before, but he just crops up somewhere else under another domain name. And right now, the sites are the only breadcrumbs we have that can connect us with this guy. So, Young-El stays connected, and we all stay mum on this Malcolm punk and where he got his ideas about going on a killing spree. To the media, this has to look like a Columbine kind of deal for now. To Young-El it has to look like he got away clean again."

  "So how do we proceed, Griggs?" asked David Cummings, chief FBI agent for the Los Angeles office.

  "I'm sure the director will be pleased you asked that, Dave," Griggs said. There were a few chuckles. "You guys will monitor the sites stateside, and keep a weather eye for any kind of cells forming domestically that are of more than the Travis Bickle variety. Read the message boards and track frequent contributors. Assign someone to join one of the boards and keep on them 24/7. We'll keep watching from Langley to see what we can uncover on the international end. We will put together a profile that will help us find where this guy is sleeping nights. Then we kill him."

  "Sounds like a plan I can get behind," Cummings said.

  Griggs tapped his tablet again and the grinning Young-El blipped off the flatscreen.

  "And I got just the guys for the job."

  * * * * *

  At the Oceanside Police Department, Malcolm Tate's parents wanted to talk. They wanted to tell somebody, anybody
, that there'd been some kind of mistake. Isn't it possible their little treasure had been falsely accused?

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Tate," a weary uniform said. He'd been getting them coffee from the break room and listening to their woes for what seemed like hours. Tate was awaiting arraignment in a cell downstairs, and Mommy and Daddy were waiting in an interrogation room so they could drive over to the courthouse to see their son stand before a judge and hear the charges read. The uniform had been given the duty of seeing after the couple.

  "Are the witnesses sure of what they saw?" Mom asked for at least the hundredth time.

  "And did the cops have to rough him up like that?" the father asked. "He looks like hell."

  "That wasn't us, sir," the uniform said. "It was the Marines at the Target store who did that to your boy." The uniform was Army reserve and, for the first time in his life, he envied a Marine. They tore the dumb murdering bastard a new one.

  "I really thought he was changing," Mom said to herself. "Lately we saw a change in him. He was helping around the house more, taking an interest in things. He even cut his hair."

  "And the girlfriend," the father added. "We were both happy that he was getting out more."

  "Girlfriend?" the uniform asked.

  "Karina," the father said. "I think she's Mexican. Cute little thing with the biggest brown eyes. I'm surprised she's not here."

  CHAPTER 4

  DAM NECK, VIRGINIA

  You don't train. You re-train.

  It's called physical screening. The Master Chief gets another shot at you. He gets seconds, thirds, and dessert. Because you don't just pass through BUD/s (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs) training, then skate through your service till you're on civilian streets again. You earn your rating again and again and again, whenever the Master Chief says you have to. There are no easy days in the SEALs. And no SEAL looks for them.

  Heath was at thirty-nine for push-ups, and thinking that if he had any easy days they were way behind him. At twenty-five, six-foot five-inches, with the body of a mahogany god, it shouldn't be this damned hard. He was three years away from being an old man, and starting to hurt where he didn't know he could feel pain. And I could be dead tomorrow, he thought, so push on through.