That might have indicated a religious zeal, but nothing in his background seemed to lean that way.
Rashid’s parents had come to the United States as refugees from Operation Desert Storm, bringing their only child—then nine years old—in February 1991. With government assistance, they’d acquired a small convenience store in New Rochelle, New York, and died when skinheads robbed the place in June 2000, two weeks after Afif graduated high school and joined the Army, distinguishing himself in Ranger school after boot camp.
Had the double murder of his parents, still unsolved, jaundiced Rashid’s view of America and set a time bomb ticking in his gut, while he acquired the martial skills to look for payback, somewhere down the road? If so, he’d kept it to himself and uttered no complaint about three tours of duty in Afghanistan, plus one deployment to Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, where Rangers teamed with local forces to train antidrug units and counter transnational threats. On that leg of his journey through the hinterlands, Rashid had earned a Silver Star for aiding wounded fellow Rangers under hostile fire.
And through it all, no hint suggested that Rashid was a jihadist in disguise.
That left two dossiers on Brognola’s DVD, the next one for the Ranger outfit’s low man on the ladder in terms of rank. Sergeant Ernesto Menendez was twenty-four years old, a young man who’d enlisted after trying and rejecting one semester at a junior college in New Mexico. Like all the rest, his record with the Rangers was exemplary until he’d gone AWOL: two tours of duty in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a Commendation Medal with a bronze “V” device denoting heroism in combat, ranked at a lesser degree than required for awarding a Bronze Star Medal. Specifically, Menendez had covered the withdrawal of medical corpsmen with five wounded Rangers in Kandahar Province, sustaining a flesh wound that added a Purple Heart to his résumé. The file logged thirteen kills to his record that morning, holding his ground till the others withdrew and called in air support.
Raised Catholic, another orphan with no siblings, Sergeant Menendez seemed to have no more in common with Islamists than he did with the Man in the Moon. A note in his file said that he had recently become engaged and his fiancée was a woman named Juanita Alvarado.
What drove him to associate with Darby’s outlaw band remained, as with the rest, a mystery.
Reviewing briefly, Bolan noted that a common theme among the rogue Rangers was lack of living family. Among the six, Captain Tanner had a father still above ground, Lieutenant Moseley had a brother whom, according to the MPs and the FBI, he had not contacted in the past two years, and Menendez had a fiancée. Was isolation part of it, somehow? And if so, how could loss of loved ones drive a polyglot collection of career soldiers into the arms of militant Islam?
Bolan tried to make sense of it, got nowhere, and finally decided that his best hope lay within the final dossier, its icon labeled “Manifesto.”
Whatever he expected from that file, though, Bolan came up short. It read:
Declaration of War in the Name of Allah
Today, we former Rangers of the US Army stand united in a state of war against the Great Satan, America. We dedicate our skills and training to destruction of the country that has waged relentless war against Islam since 1953, with its coup restoring the corrupt Shah of Iran.
Additionally, decades of unjustified support for Israel has defied the will of Palestinians and other Muslims who comprise the vast majority of Middle Eastern residents, while bilking US taxpayers to bankroll Tel Aviv, its flagrant theft of native lands from the West Bank and elsewhere, falsely declared the result of “legitimate electoral process.” Without US financing, military support and favoritism in the United Nations, Israeli aggression would long since have ceased to exist, thereby eliminating impetus for freedom fighters waging their guerrilla wars against America, mislabeled “terrorism” by the media.
Accordingly, we hold these truths to be self-evident. The long American crusade against Islam must cease, forthwith. No further action on that front shall be permitted. We, the beneficiaries of elite training, shall use all skills and tools available to bring this resolution into being. As you read this, we have supplied one relatively minor demonstration of our power, to be replicated as required until our plain and common-sense demands are met. America must change its course, and quickly, to avert a holocaust at home beyond the scope of anything authorities at home have thus far faced or can effectively control.
We are the best. Ignore us at your peril from now on.
To victory!
* * *
And that was all. At first, Bolan thought a page had been omitted from the manifesto’s file, but it read smoothly, start to finish, even if it spoke in generalities and uttered only vague demands, impossible to quantify.
Reverse the course of US history connected to the Middle East since 1953, or even farther back, since Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948? Impossible. Indeed, ridiculous. The juggernaut could not be slowed, much less completely stopped, with strong support for Israeli in the White House, Congress and in nearly every state from coast to coast. Six Rangers couldn’t do it in a hundred lifetimes, and they had to know that.
So...what?
Bolan removed the DVD from his laptop, shut down the computer and retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. He had Jack Grimaldi’s number on speed dial and got an answer on the second ring.
“Big guy. Long time.”
“You heard from Hal?”
“I did.”
“So, how about a little hop?”
Barclay, Maryland
“Did I read that sign right?” Grimaldi asked. “One hundred twenty people? Can they even call a place that small a town?”
“It’s flexible,” Bolan replied. “I’ve been to smaller ones.”
“I guess this jarhead likes his privacy.”
“He won’t be getting much of it, considering the last couple of days.”
“You think he’d bail on us?”
“The CIA says they’ve got eyes on him, up high. Nothing since the MPs came by, except his normal mornings at a local coffee shop and shopping one time at the Farmer’s Market.”
“Good old country living.”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
“I could get used to it,” Grimaldi said.
Bolan had trouble picturing the flyboy settling down, particularly at the outset of another mission. They were rolling north on Maryland Route 313, from where Grimaldi’s chopper had touched down at a private airstrip outside Goldsboro. The Stony Man pilot was at the wheel of a Ford sedan from Dollar Rent-a-Car, holding the four-door Focus at a solid 80 miles per hour, not a cop in sight. They had the rural home of Walton Tanner Senior spotted on the Ford’s GPS unit, no neighbors nearby and no idea what they’d be walking into when they got there.
Figure it would be a bitter pill for Walton Sr. to ingest, learning his son had left the
