The American Terrorist - Book One: Vengeance Rising

Saturday, September 14

A radioactive dispersion bomb, also known as a dirty bomb, isn’t a weapon of mass destruction; it’s a weapon of mass disruption. Hasan Muhammad Ismail didn’t care about the name, but he cared about his mission. It was Allah’s mission for him, and his destiny of seventy-two virgins awaiting him in gardens of rippling streams inspired his work and provided significance to his life. Sweat dripped off his brow, and he wiped it away as he loaded another box of TNT into the RV.

The day of reckoning had arrived. Ismail was the keystone in his terrorist cell. Most people thought of a terrorist cell as a group of Muslims located in one place at one time, plotting to bring down another landmark. Few understood the reality: a cell in time, constructed by people working together over time and dispersed over distance, sometimes without ever communicating. His cell, a component of Universal Jihad (UJ) had planned and prepared for this attack for several years. Their exalted leader, Mansur Ghazali, devised this scheme to strike a signature blow at the Great Satan, and it had worked to perfection so far.

The original cell member bought a warehouse in the border town of McAllen, Texas, with a simple mission: build a small, specially insulated room under the floor of the warehouse to store radioactive material. A second cell member bought a modest home in an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Miami, also with orders to build an insulated room for the storage of explosives.

The McAllen cell and its successors easily accumulated the radioactive material. Several Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah officers provided all the necessary material from a stock of rubidium, cesium 137, and strontium 90. The House of Saud had collected as much of the material as possible to construct a grid of destructive power covering their vast oil fields as well as their refineries and ports. The reason for the grid: to trigger remotely all their oil assets if invaded. The royal family thought it better to contaminate the area rather than allow an invading army, particularly an American army, to steal their oil. If they couldn’t have it, no one else could, and the royals, confident their supply of radioactive material would pollute the fields for decades, left plenty around.

Hispanic or Latino-featured people smuggled most of these materials across the Mexican border at will in various quantities over the years. The brief exchange between the warehouse owner and the smuggler, apparently an ordinary business transaction, was the only contact these terrorist brothers and sisters would ever have.

The warehouse owner eventually sold his operation to a dark-skinned man, who sold to another Hispanic-looking couple after eighteen months. These conveyances looked so innocent no one ever suspected all these people had ardently devoted themselves to Universal Jihad.

The Miami cell operated in the same manner. The home sold several times over the years, nothing unusual for the neighborhood. No unusual activity, no unusual noises, just normal people successively living in a diverse Miami neighborhood. But inside the insulated room, they had incrementally accumulated a massive store of TNT and Semtex.

Mansur Ghazali had appointed Hasan to complete the mission and bring glory to Allah and Universal Jihad. Another bead of sweat dropped to the concrete floor as Ismail placed his final box of explosives in the RV. He wiped his brow again and then considered the task at hand. Connecting several boxes of explosives would be simple; he just needed to finish it in thirty minutes so he wouldn’t fall behind schedule. As he reached for the first wire to attach to the detonator, he thought of all the other members of his cell. They had vanished long ago, and he hadn’t met a single one. Once they had obtained their required accumulations and then sold the property, they moved to random places in the US and ultimately slipped quietly out of the country back to their homelands. Ismail could feel their prayers for his success; he was the chosen one.