Primary Directive. Don Pendleton

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      F ADIL B ARI WATCHED the crowd of American policemen through binoculars from his vantage point in the nearby foothills. A couple of times he had to caution his men to be silent as they waited. Additional reinforcements had arrived, and they were scouring the dry, dusty flatlands, probably looking for signs that would assist them in picking up Bari’s trail. They wouldn’t find any. The man hadn’t built his reputation by being careless and unthinking.

      Bari watched for another minute, then crawled behind a large boulder. Two of his crew waited there, watching him expectantly.

      “They are still down there,” he told them. “I’m concerned they might spot us if we attempt to leave, yet we cannot hold here indefinitely.”

      “What if we wait until dark?” one of the men asked.

      Bari considered that a moment, then shook his head. “This will only give them more time to bring in additional personnel and equipment. I may not like it, but we should move now. Waiting only increases our chances of being cut off from the base.”

      The men nodded, then all three of them crawled to another area where their six new arrivals waited.

      Bari hadn’t counted on the Americans moving their construction project along as fast as they had. Many of al Qaeda’s connections had done everything they could to delay it. They had lobbied or bribed every politician and every leader of every special-interest group from the American Southwest to Washington, D.C. They’d also tried to infiltrate the scientific community, figure out exactly what the secret project called End Zone had to do with the construction of the border wall, but those attempts proved unsuccessful. Even their contacts inside the American press couldn’t figure out exactly what was happening until recently.

      The cell leader and his men rallied the new arrivals and began the arduous trek over nearly half a mile of uneven terrain to reach the half dozen 4x4s that awaited them beneath heavy camouflage made with netting and natural elements. From that point, they would travel the twenty-odd miles to a natural lava flow along the area called Mt. Riley that had carved a belowground cavern converted to quarters for Bari’s cell.

      Nearly four hours elapsed before the terrorist leader and his tired crew entered the comparative coolness of the rocky operations center. He ordered his men to point out sleeping accommodations for the six new men, and then get them cleaned up and fed. That attended to, he walked across the cavern and into a separate antechamber carved by the movement of superheated lava thousands of years before.

      The chalky remnants of soot made it almost impossible to keep their computer equipment clean. Two of the men assigned to the operation were computer experts. The pair had hacked into a nearby cellular tower and used it to establish a wireless broadband connection. They had been using this to communicate with their support units around the globe via various Web site and e-mail servers used to deliver pornographic spam. Because those servers delivered thousands of e-mails an hour, it made it harder for U.S. security systems to sift through them to find the ciphers and other hidden code behind photographs. Al Qaeda’s specialists had found pictures of naked women and “legitimate” porn sites to be perfect methods for cryptic communications due to the sheer number of hits even one of those sites received in a single twenty-four-hour period. The computer specialists looked up when Bari entered. He nodded in way of acknowledgment.

      “What have you discovered?” he asked.

      Amer Rajiya, younger of the pair, replied, “It would seem the Americans are in the final testing phases of End Zone. It appears the system is designed to monitor the border wall and send information to their border patrol units. Additionally, the system also has some type of antipersonnel feature to it.”

      “What kind of ‘antipersonnel feature’?” Bari demanded.

      “We are not yet sure,” said Jainal Hapilon, a former member of the Abu Sayyaf. “But we know that it is capable of neutralizing our agents for an indefinite period of time.”

      The news was anything but good. The operation wouldn’t be any easier from this point, and without proper support they might not be able to execute it at all. Everything relied on an adequate number of personnel, since the attacks required split-second timing and they wouldn’t get a second chance if they didn’t execute the plan in the proper places and under the proper timing. Bari didn’t believe in contingency plans. Missions for God were typically one-way missions, missions of sacrifice, missions of martyrdom. Bari had planned this one to the last detail—he knew he most likely wouldn’t survive.

      “This is a disturbing development,” he told them. “We cannot move forward with our plans if we do not have everyone in place. We need to get word back to our people that we may experience a delay. As soon as you have done that, gather the team leaders together here for a conference.”

      “What are we going to do?” Rajiya asked.

      “What else can we do? We must destroy this technology and those who created it before it becomes fully operational. All else depends upon it!”