The Brit was sitting at headquarters and steaming. He had begged the man in the suit to give the order to nab the Lutton cell members they knew about. He heard the same tired argument. \u201cWe haven\u2019t identified any additional members. If we snag the ones we know about know, the rest will simply go into deeper cover. They might even stop communicating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, the cell hadn\u2019t sent an email in over a week. Whatever was going to happen was already too far along to need any further communication unless the cell ran out of money. The Brit didn\u2019t know which was pissing him off more, the silence or the apathy.<\/p>\n
He had done covert work long enough to know that when a team went silent, they were moving in on the kill. The Lutton cell was either too tiny to carry this operation out or the most patient cell he had ever seen. Sales of fertilizer were monitored at all of the retail locations in and around Lutton. Nobody was buying more than two bags at a time and it didn\u2019t seem as though there were any repeat customers, according to the surveillance team. There were only three possibilities as the Brit saw it:<\/p>\n
The last possibility had the Brit really worried. Libya had managed to smuggle in tons of C4 explosive to the IRA under the rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi. That one shipment showed the world what a car bomb could do. It ushered in a new age of terrorism. Most people seemed to forget it was the IRA that made the bombing attacks famous. Once the car bombings started, terrorists weren\u2019t satisfied with a simple plane hijacking anymore. They were all looking for bigger and bigger spectacles.<\/p>\n
Muammar was a real problem. The French didn\u2019t realize it. When the U.S. Wanted to fly an air strike over France to get to Libya they made the Americans promise not to kill Muammar. Silly French. That one single demand brought out the dark side of America. They kept to the letter of their promise and didn\u2019t kill Muammar. Instead, they killed his family.<\/p>\n
One thing the Brit had learned during his years of covert operations was that terrorists didn\u2019t have any rules of engagement. If you were going to fight them, you couldn\u2019t have any rules yourself. Rules of engagement and due process were causing this war to become a meat grinder for civilians. The Americans caught a lot of flack from the international community about killing off Muammar\u2019s family, but they achieved their objective. Muammar quit being such a major backer of terrorists. Oh, he still funded them, but he was a lot more careful about it after that. Weapons shipments were smaller and dramatically less frequent. He knew the next time war planes flew over, they wouldn\u2019t have made a promise to keep him alive.<\/p>\n
Wars fought without rules tended to put a lot of civilians through the meat grinder. The English knew this all too well. World War II was a war fought with few rules. The Geneva Convention was more of a guideline than a rule book. Both sides had taken to bombing whole towns and cities. Granted, the Germans started it, but the carnage reigned pretty freely from both sides once it got going.<\/p>\n
Nothing symbolized the desperation of it all more than the evening of November 14, 1940. That was the evening Coventry was bombed. Much of the town was in ruin and the bodies were stacked like cords of wood. What made this particular bombing stick in everyone\u2019s mind wasn\u2019t just the still photos and newsreel footage, but the story behind it. The English had managed to acquire an Enigma code machine and the corresponding codebooks for it. Two days before the bombing, Churchill had the translated message in his hands. Rather than let the Germans know the most top secret code (Ultra) they had was broken, they let Coventry be bombed. The Brit often wondered how Winston Churchill managed to sleep once he\u2019d seen the devastation he\u2019d allowed to happen. The look in his eyes when he visited the scene some days later seemed deeply haunted, even in the still photos. Almost as though he wasn\u2019t really alive anymore.<\/p>\n
Some say the Allied bombing of Dresden many months later was payback for Coventry. The city had a population of around 650,000 before all of the refugees started pouring into it. The firestorm from the bombings burned so hot it was able to burn concrete. Since nobody had any method of counting or tracking the refugees, the body count will forever be disputed. Some put the count as low as 40,000 while others put it over 300,000. A fire as hot as that vaporizes an entire human body, including the bones. There really is no way to get an accurate count.<\/p>\n
What the Brit feared most is that it was happening all over again. He feared there was some reason the Lutton cell was being allowed to continue other than the reasons he had been given. He feared the higher-ups were willing to sacrifice English citizens again to achieve some other objective.<\/p>\n
One thing the Brit knew was that the Americans weren\u2019t going to win this war, at least not the new Americans. The old Americans would have already solved this problem. The old Americans didn\u2019t seem to exist anymore. Today\u2019s Americans were overweight mall dwellers interested only in watching sports on television, drinking beer, and otherwise living the \u201cgood life.\u201d They had little in the way of commitment or ethics.<\/p>\n
The old Americans had the mettle to leave 51,000 of their own on the field at Gettysburg. This was back when the entire population of the entire country was far less than the current population of New York City. The old Americans had the mettle to leave roughly 209,000 Allied forces lying on the field during the battle of Normandy and keep going. Hell, they lost around 10,000 on D-Day alone. The old Americans had the mettle to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they had learned the Japanese emperor had organized nearly every citizen with whatever hand tool or weapon they could find to hurl themselves at the oncoming American military. (It wasn\u2019t much of an Allied military at that point.) They had the mettle to realize sacrificing the populations of those two cities would be a big enough shock to end the war and save millions of lives. Today\u2019s America could barely scrape up 50,000 people without felony convictions willing to join the military under any circumstances. It was little wonder to the Brit that the WWII generation was referred to as \u201cAmerica\u2019s Greatest Generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
No, the Americans had too many lawyers and too many fat cats lining their own pockets to win this war. The Brit knew that all it took was a coward or a stupid individual to lose a war. On the first day of Gettysburg, General Ewell was ordered to take the ridges south of the city \u201cif practicable.\u201d He didn\u2019t bother to take the hill which overlooked both the town and Cemetery Hill. There were only a handful of Union troops who had stumbled up the hill as part of their mass confusion and retreat. Some accounts have him outnumbering the forces occupying that hill by fifty to one. As a result, the Confederates lost not only the battle, but the war. Yes, there were other battles, but the Confederate Army was broken at Gettysburg. One coward in the wrong place at the wrong time could set in motion events which changed worlds.<\/p>\n
The man in the suit and Hans were at headquarters finishing packing up most of the equipment. When they finally chose where to set up a new headquarters, the equipment would be shipped to it. For now all that remained was their two machines, the Internet link and the satellite TV service. The building had only had one phone line and it never seemed to work. Everybody on the team used either a cell phone or a satellite phone, sometimes both.<\/p>\n
Hans had sent the rest of the team on to other assignments. The first group went to find the apartment where the training was happening. Their orders were simply to obtain some place where they could continually monitor the comings and goings of the place. Until a headquarters was established for the purpose of taking down the trainer, they were not to pursue or tail. All they needed to do for now was keep a record of the people who went in and out.<\/p>\n
A destination was needed for the second team. Vladimir had informed them the original trainee had gone silent again. It was the estimation of all that this operative had gone somewhere to show someone what he had learned, then was given a place to go and set up shop. They had all agreed to wait up to two weeks before allocating that part of the team to another assignment. Until then, that part of the team was given time to go home and take vacation.<\/p>\n
It had been three weeks since the reporters had outed Nedim to the world. During this time the email flow to Nedim\u2019s machine all but vaporized. Both men had little doubt al-Qaeda members watching cable or satellite news had seen the story. Some other means to communicate a new email address to the field operatives must have been used, because the message didn\u2019t come through Nedim\u2019s machine.<\/p>\n
At least Vladimir had been paying attention and looking for the next opportunity,<\/i> thought Hans. He was aware that the man in the suit and Vladimir didn\u2019t get along, or more accurately that the man in the suit didn\u2019t like Vladimir and it mattered not to Vladimir. He simply continued doing what he always did. Hans had actually read many of Vladimir\u2019s reports. When it came to analysis, the guy not only looked at the whole board, he looked at the two boards sitting at the tables beside him, too.<\/p>\n
Hans had been the one who had found the IT people for this team. The Brit had been rated very good for what he did, but Vladimir was almost impossible to find. The various Russian mafia organizations he wrote identity theft systems for hid him like the lost city of Atlantis. When Hans finally exploited a covert contact who gave up the name of Vladimir\u2019s handler, the man in the suit took over. He could tell the man in the suit doubted Vladimir\u2019s reputation from the start.<\/p>\n
In Hans\u2019 mind, nobody could doubt the wisdom of hacking one\u2019s way into the machines of those training to become communications hubs for al-Qaeda. That Vladimir had already set up the next leg of this operation before anyone knew they needed it spoke volumes to Hans. He had not known what to think about Vladimir\u2019s fingering of India as the next hotbed for al-Qaeda operations. One\u2019s first thought was there is too much American money flying around in that country for anyone to strike back,<\/i> but Hans hadn\u2019t thought forward to the inevitable pullout. The thing which had stopped al-Qaeda from being highly successful in that country would now become the thing which opened all doors for them. As soon as the American money stopped flying around there would be a backlash.<\/p>\n
Hans had sent this information on to Nikolaus. He sent along his thoughts on the subject, then asked Nikolaus to put the party\u2019s \u201cthink tank\u201d people onto determining how the backlash and rise of al-Qaeda in India would occur. Hans emphasized that this was too big of a groundswell to ignore.<\/p>\n
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You are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n