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.