Chapter 25

“Ladies and Gentlemen, you have stood with us through nine years. We have accomplished much, enjoyed great improvements across our landscape. Life in our cities and towns has changed as our needs and wants changed.” Hawk was really on fire as he talked about our recent successes against ISIS. His speech was peppered with God, Home, and Country like any good whistle stop campaign should be.

“Our enemies mistook our hand of fellowship as a weakness they could exploit. American citizens were injured and killed by savages claiming to follow God. In our cities people felt fear and insecurity as these psychopathic killers attacked our churches, malls, streets and members of our government.

“America is not a place where you are free to come and slaughter our people while trying to destroy our way of life. Freedom to live is not freedom to kill. Former General Mattis used to say that if you kill Americans in America, we kill you back and do a far better job at it than you can. I stand here blessed to have been your president for over nine years. My first months on the job were as the replacement for a great friend, a great man and a great President. My time as President comes to an end soon and I look forward to using the remaining days in office to thank you for your trust, your support and your love...”

From my seat, alone, far behind the stage and out of sight of the thirty-thousand plus people screaming in appreciation of their Chief Executive, I watched. With my ever-present Secret Service detail, I could see people literally bouncing in the seats anxious to give Hawk a standing ovation. It was truly that obvious.

“Our America is a place where good men and women work together to solve the problems of our time, not a place where angry, self-centered, politicians fight to take everything away from those who earned and built it, to use for vote buying from those who live off of the rest of us.

“We may fight among ourselves, but we come together like a family when one of ours is threatened, or injured. If you bring violence, hate and terror here, we will teach you lessons you prayed to never learn.

“It is the intention of my presidency to bring security and safety to every American citizen, not to cater to those who wish us ill. We will not offer handouts to terrorists, illegals, or criminals. If you came here to work, save, raise a family in peace and harmony, we are your family. If you came here to destroy, burn, kill, or terrorize, we will be your executioners...” The crowd went wild. Having another president with the guts to speak the truth plainly, instead of political correctness was like a drug to these folks. They LOVED his speech, his tone and his character.

As I sat behind the stage, away from the speech and watched how working Americans responded, my thoughts drifted back to how I responded to the terrorist bombing that changed my life. After recovering from the death of Angela and using much of the resources of the Department of Defense, our forces had driven the final large enclave of Islamic radicals out of their stronghold and managed them neatly into an ambush of epic proportions. When the first reports flooded in from the battlefield, it looked like the enemy dug in and put up a furious defense, which only hardened the resolve of our joint military forces to annihilate them once and for all. The death toll was astronomical. Of the estimated ten-thousand radical Islamic terrorists that started that day, only a little more than four-hundred lived through the battle.

The media was all over us, claiming that I was using the armed forces to take revenge on Angela’s murderers. Some went as far as to demand impeachment hearings and my replacement until such hearings could be held. Not a single sitting elected official took that bait. The polls showed a serious bi-partisan support for the campaign to wipe out Islamic terror in the west. Even supposedly safe congressmen feared losing their re-election after two of their brethren attacked our response and promptly lost their seats to poorly funded opposition.

The first attack on ISIS following Angela’s murder came on a Sunday morning. We had ironclad intel of an ISIS camp buried in Syria where we’d thought no terrorist activity occurred. The fighters were poorly trained even though they were rather well armed, but they were so seriously deficient in tactics that the first wave of bombers was able to cut off their escape route. The second wave cut off their power, while the third obliterated their vehicles and fuel dumps.

By the time the helicopters swooped in using night vision and smart firing technology, there was nothing but confusion, panic and destruction all around the stronghold. When our ground troops burst into the midst of the rag tag army of hysteria, the shooting lasted only a few minutes before completion of the attack turned the camp into a morgue.

In the hours following that mission, three more ISIS camps were turned into funeral pyres where the fanatics chose to stand and fight rather than surrender and live. The cloud of dust, dirt and ashes of immolated extremists floated up like a deadly warning to other villages, about the cost of harboring the enemy. In each case no buildings were left standing, no machinery operable or repairable and no fighters left breathing. The uncontained wrath of the United States military was unleashed with a fury not seen since September eleventh, two-thousand and one.