Chapter 31

The situation board showed the results of their efforts to clear out terrorists from the country. There was one large patch of green in Los Angeles, but it was isolated with a death zone surrounding it. There were a lot of little green patches left, but they were far apart and surrounded by the watchful eyes of Americans who didn’t trust them. The support network was gone.

Mike looked at the board and said, “It looks to me like we’ve about worked ourselves out of a job.”

Shirley looked up at the board and said, “I’d say you’re right, but we’re going to have individual radicals crop up from time to time.”

“I fear that you’re right,” Mike said with a sigh. A line that shouldn’t have been crossed had been crossed.

Jim shook his head and, while his fingers operated the keyboard in front of him, said, “Let me show you something interesting.”

Little orange dots appeared on the situation board. All of them were in the small islands of Muslims. Curious, Mike asked, “What are the orange dots?”

Jim said, “Those are locations where non-Muslims have foiled attempts by calling law enforcement with their suspicions.”

“Oh,” Mike said.

Jim worked on the keyboard for another second and thousands of little red dots appeared on the screen. Smiling, he said, “Those red dots show where plots were foiled as a result of Muslims turning in radical elements of their neighborhoods.”

There were far more red dots than orange dots. Mike sat back and studied the board. He asked, “What do you make of that?”

“I’d say that the moderate Muslims have gotten tired of Jihad. They are now working with us, to end it,” Jim said with a smile.

After his conversation with Mike about the hope that moderate Muslims would turn against the radical elements of their communities, he had spent a lot of time seeing if there was any chance of that hope ever becoming a reality. He had been pleasantly surprised by what he had learned.

Cathy delivered a cup of coffee to Mike with a very nice smile. As she set the cup down, she said, “Here’s your coffee, Mike. It’s just like you like it.”

“Thank you, Cathy,” Mike answered giving her a smile.

Everyone in the room chuckled at the formality that existed between the pair and then turned to look innocently at their computers when Mike looked around. Mike took a sip of his coffee and turned back to look at the situation board. He had ten minutes to kill before it was time for the weekly teleconference with all of the sites that worked for him.

Shaking his head, he asked, “What are we going to do when the situation in Los Angeles is finished?”

“I don’t know. It sure is going to be boring around here,” Shirley said. After the San Diego battle, things had been real quiet in the office.

Mike had six sites that had been monitoring radical Muslims within the states. Communications between individual enclaves had come to a halt. The chatter among supporting Muslims had dropped to nothing. Mike’s teams were now sitting around watching monitors that showed nothing happening. The occasional flashes of activity along the border were routinely investigated by locals. America had turned xenophobic and that made it virtually impossible for foreigners to spy.

He said, “I guess we just might be able to take a few days of vacation.”

“That would be great,” Jim said.

The only time off he had taken since the rail gun attacks had been a medical leave after the Jersey City fiasco. Everyone there had been ordered at one time or another to take a week of medical leave by the psychologists so he didn’t feel too embarrassed about that.

Mike penciled in a note on the agenda for the conference call to discuss vacations. He’d have to clear it with his boss, but he was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be a problem. He glanced over at Cathy and wondered if he should ask her to schedule her vacation to coincide with his. He shook his head thinking that asking her to do that was moving too fast.

Sanjay reeled in another bass. It was his third of this particular fishing expedition. Tim scooped the fish up in the net and brought it into the boat. As he lifted it out of the net, he said, “That’s a real beauty. I think it’s the biggest one of the day.”

Mike looked over at the fish. It was a beauty weighing in at around five pounds. Grinning, he said, “That’s nothing. Earlier this year I caught a beautiful five inch bass. You should have seen it.”

“We did,” Tim said.

“So you know what I mean,” Mike said in a deadpan voice. His comment sparked the appropriate laughs. Mike asked, “So what’s the score?”

“Sanjay three, Tim one, and Mike zero,” Tim answered while Sanjay waved his fists in the air saying, “And the crowd goes wild for Sanjay.”

Mike reached down and popped the top on a can of beer watching Tim take care of the fish. Sanjay, his leg still in a cast, looked over his fish with a pleased smile on his face.

Once Tim had deposited the fish in the live well, Mike asked, “Who is ready for a beer?”

When both of them answered in the affirmative, he tossed a beer each to them. There were the dual sounds of cans of cold beer being opened. After a sip of his beer, Sanjay said, “This is the life. The wind is gentle, the water is tranquil, the beer is cold, and the fish are hungry. You can’t ask for a better day for fishing.”

“You can say that again,” Tim said.

Mike took a sip of his beer and said, “Well, it’s going to be a couple of weeks before I’ll be able to go fishing again.”

“Taking a vacation?” Tim asked.

He had heard that Mike had told all of the people working for him to take two weeks off over the next six weeks. A third of his people were going to be out of the office at a time.

“That’s right,” Mike said setting his beer down.

“Where are you going?” Tim asked.

“I was thinking about going to the Adirondacks,” Mike answered.

“Are you taking Cathy with you?” Sanjay asked. He knew that if he didn’t come home with that information that Teva would kill him.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure about that kind of stuff,” Mike answered.

Looking over at Mike with a smile, Tim asked, “What’s there to know?”

“Well, we’ve only had three dates. Don’t you think that taking a two week vacation together after three dates is kind of rushing it?” Mike asked.

He had taken Cathy out the night before to a nice dinner and a movie. He wasn’t even sure if he was supposed to take Kim Sung along. She deserved a vacation as well.

“I suppose,” Sanjay said. He cast his line and then added, “Of course, don’t tell Teva that I said that. She’ll kill me.”

Tim laughed before thinking about Mike’s problem. Being an old married man, he didn’t know that much about the dating scene. He said, “I suppose it’s a little early in the relationship to go on a two week trip with a woman.”

Mike cast his line. Almost as soon as it hit the water, he had a strike. He reeled the fish to the boat. Tim grabbed the net and went to scoop it out of the water.

Mike lifted the little fish out of the water and said, “I caught that little fellow again. I think he grew a half an inch since our last trip out here.”

Laughing, Tim took the hook out of the fish’s mouth. He held the fish up for everyone to admire. He said, “Another beauty.”

Sanjay was laughing at the little fish. Mike just shook his head and said, “Throw it back. At this rate, it’ll be a keeper about twenty fishing trips from now.”

Tim released the fish back into the river. As it swam off, he said, “Grow little fellow, grow.”

Mike sat back and said, “Why don’t you fish for a while Tim? I’ll just sit here and enjoy the sun.”

“Thank you, Sir. I think I will,” Tim said picking up his rod.

“Sanjay, should I take Kim Sung with me on my vacation?” Mike asked.

“No. Just give her the time off,” Sanjay answered.

He knew from experience that if Mike took her along that she would continue to take care of him. He and Teva had made that mistake once. Kim had stayed in the hotel room the entire time taking care of their clothes and keeping the room neat and clean.

Mike was scheduled to go on his vacation three days after the Los Angeles sweep had taken place. This would allow him to watch the event and prepare the after action briefing. The Los Angeles action was a repeat of what had happened in San Diego. There was massive fighting as the terrorists resisted. American forces took the area one block at a time. Mike watched the entire thing, taking short naps when the forces finished one block and prepared to enter the next one. Watching the action, Mike was once again impressed by the discipline and quality of training the terrorists exhibited.

Everyone who had watched the action were teleconferenced together to come up with the after action assessment.

Mike led off the discussion when he said, “Los Angeles was the last large urban enclave of radical Islamists. Although we may not have to face that again in this country, I’m pretty sure that we’ll have to do this overseas at some point in time. I think we should leave a report that helps future operations of this kind. I know that we all observed different things. Did anyone notice anything really exceptional or unusual?”

For a long moment no one said anything and Mike was about to go on when one of the analysts from another site said, “There is one little thing that caught my attention. The weapons were basically stored in the homes of people who didn’t fight. Before the battle started, some middle ranking person ran there and distributed the weapons to the lower ranks. It seems to me that if we can identify the places and hit them at the right time, we’d take out a lot of them.”

Listening to the description of what happened, Mike said, “Let’s go back to the San Diego raid for a moment. Is it possible that some of the people who we observed not fighting had stored weapons in their homes?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Shirley said frowning. The layouts of the two areas were very different. One was tract houses while the other was apartments. Shaking her head, she said, “We were watching them pretty closely.”

One of the men said, “That’s what Hezbollah does in Lebanon. They pay people to store weapons in their houses. When the terrorists need something, they go over and get it.”