Insurrection: Appalachian Command

"INSURRECTION: APPALACHIAN COMMAND"

Frightening, realistic and exquisitely well-told!

Insurrection: Appalachian Command is a frightening apocalyptic read about America's nightmare come true-the destruction of our governmental infrastructure and the take-over by Al Qaeda terrorists. It reminded me a bit of the movie Red Dawn but it's better, and Dan Santos has the military and government service background that enables him to write this story. A gripping read that I finished in two sittings. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the state of our world today and the threats facing America. A must-read!

Mark Rubinstein

Award Winning Author of Love Gone Mad, The Foot Soldier and Mad Dog Justice

Almost all too real ...,

I loved this book, the characters, and the setting. Taking place in the near future, it seems, on one hand, to be unreal. On the other hand, it is so real that it is truly scary. I would recommend this book to everyone and especially those who follow current events.

Barbara A. Zimmerman

Author of Sunshine: A Love Story

A Real Thriller

This is quite a roller coaster ride of a book. A very imaginative story line and sure to keep you engaged from start to finish.

Christopher Datta

Author of Touched With Fire and The Demon Stone

INSURRECTION:

APPALACHIAN COMMAND

Dan Santos

Copyright © Daniel Santos, Jr., 2013

ISBN print edition 978-0989678216

Revised Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher, except short excerpts used in reviews.

Under legal requirements, the US Department of State and other government agencies reviewed this novel. As a result, the United States government requested the following disclaimer: The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

To Ofelia, the love of my life.

Acknowledgements

This novel would not have been possible without the love, support and hard work of my wife Ofelia. She’s an amazing woman. During my Army service I dragged her through a string of Army posts, like Fort Polk, where she kept the family together during ‘the night of 13 tornadoes’ in DeRidder, Louisiana. Later, she braved earthquakes, food penury and terrorist threats at seven overseas US diplomatic posts. She was always the perfect wife and the perfect mom to our daughters.

My friend Jaime Posada shared his extensive Potomac River kayaking expertise, in particular the capabilities of the versatile Klepper kayak. I used his insights in Jude’s kayaking sequences.

Our country owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to the men and women of the US Secret Service, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. Their professionalism and love of country foiled many terrorist operations and lessened the impact of others.

My heartfelt appreciation goes to the selfless women and men of the US Armed Forces and the American Foreign Service. Our country will survive thanks to them, not the politicians. May God bless and protect the United States of America.

Chapter 1

Maryland, January 8, 6:27 pm

He was about to kill again.

The moonless night concealed him on the knoll at the Billy Goat Trail.

In happier times tired hikers would step down from the rocky knoll on their way home from a beautiful walk. Times had changed.

Tonight, the trail would turn into a killing ground. There was a sniper under a Ghillie blanket. Militia patrols on the Maryland side of the Potomac River would not see him until it was too late; maybe not even then.

Jude took a deep breath to still his pounding heart. He hadn’t moved a muscle since darkness set in, but his physiology knew it was almost time to kill again. His heart always sensed approaching death. That’s why it beat hard, to let him know it was time to stop another heart.

He was cold. His muscles ached. The surrounding silence was so intense that he imagined hearing parts of his middle ear vibrate in their natural sequence…hammer, anvil, stirrup…hammer, anvil, stirrup. And then, there was also his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest.

The river breeze rustled. His alertness went up several clicks. He drew in another deep breath, this time to check out smells. Deodorant, soaps, tobacco, food and booze can betray the fighter in the bush. Jude once joked that the perfect guerrilla would be a dieting teetotaler. He smiled under the camouflaged face paint.

His eyes were glued to a bend on a deer trail. That’s the route he would use if he were leading the patrol. Others would discount the Militia’s military skills. He respected the enemy. That’s why he was so successful.

Militia patrols ran on a predictable schedule because of its poor training. Well trained soldiers would never set patterns. They were botching up their mission of providing early warning of attempted Rebel incursions from the Virginia side of the Potomac. Despite its bad training, you had to fear their religious zeal. They didn’t fear death, but neither did he.

Normally he would have harassed them just for the hell of it. Tonight was different. He would kill someone to create a diversion. Wasn’t it terrible to think of killing a man as just a diversion?

He thought the bend on the deer trail would funnel tonight’s Militia patrol into the cross hairs of the ATN PS22 night scope. Jude had mounted it himself on the newest sniper rifle, the XM-2010. He had also mounted the long silencer, but forgot its nomenclature. Did the Army really need so much nomenclature? He sighed silently in resignation. The Army is the Army and it would never change.

The former Ranger was counting on the Militia to overreact and make a lot of noise. It would give the Sibley Hospital snatch team a chance to cross MacArthur Boulevard unnoticed.

The Rebel National Headquarters out in Colorado agreed kidnapping the Provo Intelligence Chief would be a significant blow against the American dictator.

Maryland, January 8, 6:29 pm

There was a sound on the trail. A soft boot crushed dry leaves and cracked the frost on the ground. His vigilance went up. He shuddered as all senses came alive. His skin crawled.

Jude scanned the night with urgency. He moved his eyes rapidly from left to right and right to left, the Ranger technique to penetrate the darkness of the night. There might be something there. Was that a vague outline shifting slowly?

The chill night breeze carried two scents: soap and garlic. The odors were faint, but there. Put the scents together with the shifting outline. Add those factors to reports the Militia was fielding night patrols to protect Carderock. Bingo, a Militia patrol had just become more real.

The round outline of a helmet rose from behind a bush on the right side of the bend. The helmet’s owner displaced the ragged outline of leaves and branches and stood still for a moment. He seemed to be alone…or a man walking point. He was about to pay for bad training. The cross-hairs landed on the man’s forehead. Jude exhaled and squeezed the trigger. Puff!

Chapter 2

Maryland, January 8, 6:29 pm

The rubber soles gripped the ground. They stopped at the bottom of the gradient, not far from a bend on the deer trail. The patrol leader tensed up but controlled his breathing. There was something wrong tonight. He could feel it.

He cursed the pebbles and the frozen dirt under his feet. Everything conspired against him and his patrol, even pebbles, twigs, dried leaves and frozen dirt. There was fire in his eyes and anger in his soul. His face muscles were tense; not even the moonless night could hide their tension. And now, that fucking Yazid had dropped once more.

This was the fourth time tonight the dirty Arab had stopped the patrol. Mohsen regretted letting him take point. There were good reasons Persians like him distrusted the Arabs. They all wanted to take point to prove how brave they were. Yazid had begged Mohsen to let him take point. Taking point on a night patrol on the Potomac was a rite of passage, a way for a green trooper like Yazid to ‘make his bones.’ Fine, but maybe he should have chosen Omar.

The point’s job was to ensure the way was clear of the enemy and his damned booby traps. The drill was that the whole patrol would stop and drop when the point did.

He tugged twice on the string that tied him to the men behind him and dropped on one knee. The nine men dropped but slower as if tired of all the useless dropping. Mohsen was sure they too were pissed at Yazid. If only he could see their faces!

Mohsen knew his men were not ready to take on the Rebs. Neither was he. He was no soldier. The Army had deployed him to Afghanistan as a Farsi translator, not a soldier. That was a lot different than fighting, but he had seen enough patrol action to get an idea of how to do things. That was why the Militia made him a patrol leader; just because the infidels had trusted him to work for them in one of their wars.

The patrol leader was more afraid than he would admit. The Rebels were dangerous and unpredictable, much more so than the Taliban. Greco’s intelligence people said they were using Viet Cong guerilla tactics. That stuff was so old no one even knew how to deal with it.

Earlier that fool Yazid almost stepped into a punji stake pit. During last night’s patrol a sharpened branch impaled and killed a guy from Boston. Last week, a patrol leader walked into a trip wire and detonated a grenade that killed him and three of his men. The Rebs smeared the stakes and sharpened branches in human excrement. Even if they only scratched you, you could get a bad infection.

That was OK if all you wanted to do was to die fighting and go to Paradise. It didn’t win many battles though.

Provo technology could not counter primitive methods. His iPhone had no Apps to show him trip wires attached to a grenade, or a hole in the ground full of ‘punji’ stakes. Those traps killed and maimed. The pain was horrible. They terrified his men.

What was that? It sounded like a hiss. Now, that fucking Arab was sighing!

Mohsen’s mouth twisted into a smirk. He couldn’t run this war on guesses. Now he ought to find out why Yazid’s string went slack. For all he knew, he had stopped to relieve himself behind a tree. Yazid’s not responding to the string tug was bad news…and what with the sudden silence?

Maryland, January 8, 6:30 pm

The puff of the silenced shot tore through the night. It stilled the night critters. The sudden quiet was unnatural, and the leaves stopped swaying in the rustling breeze. The flight of the brass jacketed bullet cut through the grayness over the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. It was a catalyst of doom.

Jude knew what would happen next. Every fiber of his being knew what was coming. He wanted to start exfiltrating right away but his overwhelming wish clashed with sniper tradecraft. There were things he had to do before taking off.

For a split second Jude remained prone. Everything felt right. The Ghillie blanket made him warm and invisible. He cradled the sniper rifle just so. The green camo patterns on his handsome, rugged features felt right. No one could see the twitch on his right eye; the one that showed up after each kill.

He gazed once more at the formless clump slumped beside a distant oak; a clump that used to be a human being. It hadn’t moved. He had never dehumanized his victims. Jude thought it helped his psyche to absorb the whole meaning of ‘killing one of them.’

He listened, he looked, and he sniffed the air. There was nothing beyond the stillness of the night. No sounds came from the patrol after they lost sight of their point man. It was all just as it should have been.

There was nothing. The enemy was still motionless and remarkably silent for Militiamen. He knew that wouldn’t last. The question was ‘how long?’

One last comforting thought as he tensed his muscles to move: gunpowder. His freshly burned cordite differed from the enemy’s. The enemy’s shots smelled like crushed, burnt pepper; the stench of factory loads. He loaded his own rounds mixing in tiny amounts of wild mint. His shots left a minty smell. Provo intelligence had tagged the minty smell as his trademark. He was glad they knew it was him, and that they knew he was paying them back.

Maryland, January 8, 6:31 pm

Mohsen knew that Yazid was not too bright, but if the point man had hit the ground it was because he had seen or sensed something. If he was just unsure of what was ahead, he would have just dropped to one knee, just as Mohsen had done. Wouldn’t he?

Earlier, Mohsen thought he had heard what sounded like Yazid exhaling hard when he dropped. The fat slob must have been out of breath. He had to get these guys to do their daily exercises and get them in better shape.

Mohsen whispered into his microphone breaking the radio silence he himself had imposed. He had to try one last time hoping Yazid’s radio was on. No answer. He waited a few more seconds and crawled towards the point man’s position.

Yards of dust and deer droppings later he reached Yazid’s prone figure. Mohsen angered and shook the man’s boot. The least the idiot could do was turn his head and look at Mohsen over his shoulder. Not a thing. Yazid just lay there.

He crawled to the man’s head. A paralyzing fear gripped him when he felt squishing brain matter under his hands. There was liquid too; dark, sticky and smelly. Oh, Allah! Yazid was dead. Yazid was a real dead man; the first dead man Mohsen had seen up close.

An uncontrollable fear gripped Mohsen. Yazid hadn’t dropped. Someone had ‘dropped’ him.

Oblivious to the danger the patrol leader jumped up, yelling for Allah and emptying his magazine against the brush; at an enemy he could not see. His troops followed suit. Kalashnikovs sprayed bullets that pierced the darkness above and the trees and the bushes below. They ricocheted against the rocky trail. The hope and the anger and the need to fight an invisible enemy took over. They were scared shitless.

With friendly fire miraculously missing him, Mohsen’s radioman brought up the PRC-155 and handed him the handset. Remembering bits and pieces of the hurried training he called a fire mission: one of the predetermined 81mm mortar missions to be fired from Carderock.

Chapter 3

Maryland, January 8, 6:32 pm

The standard military response to an ambush was to hug the ground and return massive fire toward the enemy as the fire teams covered each other’s counterattack. It was anyone’s guess how the poorly trained Militia would react.

Jude embraced his sniper rifle and rolled out from under the Ghillie blanket down the slope that would end on the C & O Canal.

This was the route he had pre-smoothed and tested for his exfiltration. Prior to setting up on his sniping position the night before last he had walked the exit chute to ensure it was clear of stumps, jagged rocks, and rustling vegetation that could draw attention to his downward roll. He had made sure the route would get him down to the canal fast.

He heard the patrol open fire with their small arms, but since they could not pinpoint the source of the silenced shot that killed their advance man their shots went wild. Its fire teams either remained glued to the ground or were jumping up and down in frenzy instead of advancing toward the enemy by fire and maneuver.

Greco’s line units had given the Army of God only three hasty weeks of the most basic military training, so Jude didn’t expect them to return fire in an effective manner. But the patrol was only about 150 yards from the knoll. It was only a matter of time before its leader guessed where the sniper had been and redirect the patrol to fire at the knoll.

Jude rolled on the cold mud into the canal’s murky, icy water. The canal was only three feet deep. When he touched bottom, he crawled under the slimy water to the other side.

He came up next to a clump of bushes. The bushes would hide his crossing. The hard-packed dirt trail built as a towpath centuries before would muffle his footsteps.

Still unseen and unheard, Jude cut through sparse vegetation and rocky outcrops toward the river’s edge. He gripped the rope he had left in place and rappelled down the rocky ledge to the Potomac cove where he had hidden the Klepper kayak. He had left the kayak’s gray skirt on to hide the brilliant blue exterior. It seemed undisturbed.

He threw the sniper rifle into the cockpit, retrieving from its depths his more manageable M-4 carbine, and hung that around his neck. The Ranger shoved the Klepper into the water and slid into the cockpit, pushing away from the shore bushes with his right hand. The left hand retrieved the paddle and sunk it into the icy current. In no time he was speeding up into the treacherous but welcoming rapids that could carry him to the relative safety of the Virginia bank of the Potomac.

He had chosen this route because the roar of the rapids to the north would mask the paddle’s noise and the current would take him behind a big boulder on the Virginia side where he could stow away the kayak. He remembered how Angie had hated his kayaking in these rapids with a bunch of friends from Rockville.

As he negotiated the rapids, the Militia patrol on shore was reacting just as he had predicted. He heard the whistling of incoming mortars and shuddered. They would destroy the knoll he had fired from. But the way was clear for the Sibley snatch team.

Landing with well-rehearsed dexterity he hid the Klepper and went up the Virginia shore into the welcoming woods.

Five years before…

Chapter 4

Texas, 2305 hours, June 13, five years before…

Ahmed Alawi’s blue-green eyes pierced the darkness on the American side of the Rio Grande. The body of his Mexican ‘coyote’ lay crumpled at his feet. Alawi’s hands were gooey from the carotid blood that coated his blackened blade. He clicked the springy metal of the toy clacker in his left hand, piercing the night air with what sounded just like another bug living in the thick and thorny river brush. His team froze into the stony stance they had mastered at the Algerian camp. The jihadists’ breathing was silent and controlled, despite the recent sprint across knee-deep water.

Irregular moonlit shadows on the Mexican side formed a backdrop to their dark clad figures. The shadows’ irregular pattern made the Al Qaeda operatives almost invisible to the US Border Patrol’s 4x4 that shone its spotlight not twenty meters north of them.

That spotlight from had pinned down the decoy group of braceros to the Migra’s left, just as Alawi had planned. The real ‘braceros’ would keep the Americans just busy enough for Alawi’s group to breach the border and infiltrate the Texan countryside. The group of ‘braceros’ would also explain the remote ground sensors going off in the Border Patrol Command Center during the last few minutes.

Charlie Owens jumped off the Tahoe just as the real illegal immigrants made a move to escape. The tall Texan fixated on the more obvious prey and missed the jihadist group crouched only yards to his right. Charlie drew his Beretta 96D, holding it in a two hand stance in the general direction of the ‘pollos.’ Sometimes Mexican cartel drug dealers and other such vermin would hide among the illegal immigrants, so Charlie was not about to take any chances.

The spotlight’s beam glued the undocumented to the ground just like deer caught in a car’s headlights. Some of them had spotted Ahmed’s group, but they would say nothing to the ‘Migra.’ Maybe those ‘compañeros’ would get lucky. Maybe they could get to Los Angeles. Why mess up their chances to get a good job in America?

As for the real Mexicans, the gringos would take them back and hand them over to the federales. The federales would collect an appropriate ‘mordida’ of $100 from each of them and then set them free. The ‘pollos’ would try to sneak in again as soon as their friends and family could put together enough money to pay a different coyote to take them across the river. Such was the eternal monotony of the majority of illegal migrants who risked their lives to feed their families.

Texas, June 13, 11:20 pm five years before…

The Palestinian fighters remained as still as the barrel cacti on the dark ground around them while the approaching Bureau of Prison’s bus moved closer and packed in the ‘pollos.’ The whole thing took place in a matter of minutes with an eerie economy of words and sounds.

It was routine. The Mexicans and the Migra had been doing it for a long time. The ‘pollos’ remained calm and compliant as the Migra tied their hands with plastic restraints and