Chapter 474

We were airborne with Marine One in sight a couple miles ahead of us. We were flying at a slower speed to allow the media to catch up and land first at the White House.

We had been airborne fifteen minutes when my phone went crazy with text tones. Robert was blasting them.

“We got the break this morning.”

“You need to see and this means NOW! It is going to be bad.”

“This could be worse than 9-11 for causalities.”

“My federal team will be there in a few minutes; we are coming up on the island now. You can run all this in the command center, correct?” I sent.

“Yes. Of course,” Robert replied.

I tapped pilot Kale Hopper on the shoulder, “Divert course, land in the grass field behind the gym.”

The next was a call, “Mr. President, I have had my JBG intelligence team working on Diya’s telephone information. They made a breakthrough this morning. Robert is telling me it could be worse than 9-11 in causalities. He has the data. We are diverting to my main office. There is room for your chopper to land there if you and your staff want the briefing first hand,” I said.

The chopper had made the turn towards the gym when Troy called to hear what I had told the President for him self. I heard Troy tell the President, “I agree, let’s go hear it.”

I called Marcy to have her send all the Suburban’s to the choppers after the rotors stopped turning. The next call was to the State Police barracks to send officers to guard the choppers while we were out of sight of them, with a word of advice, “Do not broadcast what their assignment is or who they are protecting. Just send them here quickly and no sirens.”

Five minutes later we were on the ground; ten minutes later Marine One was in sight setting up to touch down.

The engine from the Island Fire Company was standing by just in case there was a problem. I had called the Chief direct with the request and the no sirens and no public broadcast of the assignment. The four state police officers were there as well as four sheriff’s cars.

Marcy, Jenny, Ching Lee, and Jason all drove Suburban’s up to the choppers.

“BJ, you may want to go through the house entrance. There are a lot of customers in the gym today; it has really been busy,” Marcy said.

“Frank and Eric and a couple more are coming; they were at a meeting at the agency hangar. They should be here in ten to fifteen minutes. Bring them down when they get here, please. I told them to ask for you,” I said.

With everyone in the 4 car garage, I keyed the code to open the steel roll-up overhead door that hid the elevator and the stairs to the tunnel. A swipe of my card and a retina scan opened the elevator door, and the same procedure opened the door to the stairs.

Down in the tunnel, the next door closed the new tunnel at the 8x8 box - a swipe and a scan opened that one. Then there was the one on that closed off the original tunnel at the box. Those were the two doors that Marcy wanted - for security reasons - to lock out portions of the tunnel.

When we walked out into the brightly lit basement, the talking changed to complete silence as the group followed me to the command center. I held the door, “Take a seat gentlemen.”

I walked in behind them staring at the front wall. Robert and his group of spooks built it just like I had envisioned the command center should be.

In the center of the wall was one big flat screen; judging by the ten foot high ceiling it was six feet high and was at least ten feet wide. To the right of it were sixteen smaller flat screens in a crescent for easy viewing from the theater seating. One each for each the colleges, Morton Field and the gym above; all were flipping through the cameras at the sites.

To the left of the big screen were twenty more small flat screens for the embassy sites; each of them were flipping through the cameras, then all twenty would switch to twenty more embassies. It took four series to get through all eighty embassies.

“I guess the government is not the only one that has secrets,” Ben said.

“Looks like the NSA might be falling into second place. All this and you knew nothing about it,” the CIA guy said trying to get a dig in at Ben.

“I would not be saying that too loud, you were in the dark as much as they were.” Frank, Eric and Marcy, Ching Lee and Vicky had walked in and were standing behind the pair, and then they made their way to me.

“You know there are more surprises with you than a case of Cracker Jacks and more secrets than a soap opera plot,” Frank replied.

“A girl always has a few secrets! It is the nature of the gender and everybody loves a surprise; I’m glad you approve,” I replied.

Robert called me off to the side, “They made four different groups of calls today. There is one number that was called; it was an international call to an active satellite phone belonging to Crown Prince Sultan al-Zahab. It was not from the phone that we though was Saif’s. There was a 7th phone today”

“The money man; can you black out the Prince’s number?”

“I can put a black box on it. Do you want anything in the box?” Robert asked.

“Classified top secret; JBG/BJ,” I replied.

“Only take a moment then we can start. It will still show as a Saudi Arabia call,” Robert replied.

“You have the floor; just the facts, don’t give away any of your secrets,” I replied.

A few minutes later with Burt, Jay Rudd, and Christina Peete operating the control consoles, Robert began.

“When the numbers were removed from Diya’s phone, BJ tasked our department with breaking down those numbers, the same as the task force. We chose to concentrate on the inactive numbers and let the task force experts concentrate on whatever.”

“It has been our experience in law enforcement that serious criminals, pedophiles, and terrorist use burn phones exclusively for their activities. In our opinion tracking active numbers is a waste of time.”

“That said we began tracking those numbers two weeks ago. Ten days ago six of those phones went active within one minute and four minutes later went back inactive; the batteries were pulled to make them go that way. Four minutes was not long enough to establish location tracking but the computers saved all the data they collected.”

“Three days later they went active again and in the same fashion dead after four minutes. The computers and programs were within thirty seconds of completing the location process. We added a new piece to the program that would possibly record the conversations.”

“Today they made a four minute call again; we have the locations and voice recordings. To our surprise they waited ten minutes and called again a total of four times.”

Burt started with the 1st call; they were speaking in Pashto with a mix of Arabic. Then he played the next three.

When the four calls were over the plan was somewhat clear. They were going to do terror strikes on six Thanksgiving Day college football games. Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Indiana, South Carolina were to be attacked simultaneously. The games over-lapped and all would be playing at the same time on national TV.

The fifth call was the call that the number was blacked out. It was between Saif, Rafi Quastri and the Prince. It reveled more of the plan. The Prince was questioning his investment and the call lasted ten minutes, even with prodding from Saif to end it.

They were going to send ten suicide bombers into each game to detonate at the same time. When the crowd fled the stadium they were going to be mowed down by gunfire. Saif made the entire vest while he was in Minnesota. The group leaders already had them.

The call also confirmed that the farm was indeed heavily booby trapped.

The heavy automatic weapons had made the trip from Venezuela and were crossing the border from Mexico this week in six different SUV.