PROLOGUE

S TARING AT THEIR screens in disbelief, millions across the world watched a shocking video. An American reporter was struggling to get off his knees as the black-hooded killer sawed at his neck with a knife. The defenseless victim, clad in orange, was being beheaded. His name was James F oley.

The date was August 19, 2014, and terror in the world was taken to the digital level.

On September 3, 2014, another journalist, Stephen Sotloff, was also beheaded for the world to see. He too, clad in orange, struggled to get off his knees when the hooded executioner cut off his head in barbaric fashion. The executioner, known as Jihadi John, spoke with a British accent in a chilling, menacing tone. I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy toward the Islamic State and your insistence on continuing your bombings. Just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knives will continue to strike the necks of your people.

The United States and the British prime minister David Cameron confirmed the authenticity of the video, and the Free World went on high alert.

Within days, a law enforcement bulletin went into immediate circulation, warning that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for lone wolves to bring their war and hatred to American soil. The bulletin emphasized that this tactic of radicalizing individuals, psychotic or not, was a significant threat to this country and that those who believed otherwise had better think again. Of the different types of terrorist structures, lone wolves were the most difficult to apprehend. Commanders and cadres and armies, because of their corporate structure, were capable of the most damage, but because of their organization, they were the easiest to identify. Lone wolves, on the other hand, because they act alone, with or without direction, brought terrorism to another level. The memo emphasized that America’s military was strong abroad, but we have never faced the consequences of a lone wolf strategy or an internal mass revolt.

Real wolves move in the night and are deadly predators, gnashing their teeth and baring their fangs. They attack without notice—sometimes alone, sometimes in packs coming from all directions—and the end for their prey is always a bloody, painful death. The lone wolf memo declaring that ISIS was unleashing lone wolves on to American soil was a warning to their intended prey—the American people. The recent video release by ISIS of their beheadings was their howl, and it was heard around the world.

* * *

September 10, 2014

President Barack Obama, dressed in a dark blue suit and solid blue tie, took to the podium to address the American people and the world. It was a prime-time speech for America’s response to the beheadings and promised terror by the Islamic State, known as ISIS. No one believed that this was a political move by President Obama. Both parties in Congress were united and supportive. His presentation was prereleased to the House and Senate, and his endorsement was unanimous. The president began his address as follows:

My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak to you about what the United States will do with our friends and allies to degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIS.

As commander in chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people. Over the last several years, we have consistently taken the fight to terrorists who threaten our country. We took out Osama bin Laden and much of al-Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’ve targeted al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen and recently eliminated the top commander of its affiliate in Somalia. We’ve done so while bringing more than 140,000 American troops home from Iraq and drawing down our forces in Afghanistan, where our combat mission will end later this year. Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.

The president continued in his prepared remarks with calm and assurance, and his signature articulate cadence never wavered. He made it clear that ISIS is not Islamic, for no religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of their victims have been Muslim. He described that organization as a former al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq that has taken advantage of sectarian strife and Syria’s civil war to gain territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border.

He impressed upon his captive audience, mesmerized by the subject matter, that these terrorists are unique in their brutality. They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape, and force women into marriage. They threaten with genocide. President Obama promised that we will degrade and ultimately destroy these savages through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

CHAPTER 1

BLACK FRIDAY

November 28, 2014

Macy’s Department Store

Manhattan, New York

I T WAS THE Friday after Thanksgiving, known in the retail world as Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

At 9:00 a.m., Macy’s Thirty-Fourth Street Department Store on Herald Square in Midtown Manhattan was bustling with anxious shoppers taking advantage of the sales, discounts, and huge inventory. The towering Christmas tree on the first floor was decorated with blinking lights and red ribbon and adorned with a star. The walls garlanded with tinsel and wreaths and the sound of Christmas carols resonating in every department added to the festivity and frenzy. Cash, credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, electronic transactions, prepaid checks, layaways, and deferred-interest financing were being processed at every counter.

Christmas was four weeks away, and there was no time to waste. Outside, the streets of Manhattan were already crowded. Subways were jammed with more shoppers, cabs were lined up at every terminal, and buses were filled to capacity. Wall Street would be open until 1:00 p.m. Business was good, the economy was back on track, and with the election recently over, it was politics as usual.

And then it happened.

At exactly 9:15 a.m., the first bomb detonated on the first floor of Macy’s, shattering windows and glass counters and human lives. A series of three more bombs exploded in quick succession: one more on the first floor, another on the second floor, and a final one on the fourth. The elevators went into lockdown, the escalators stopped, and the screams and panic triggered predictable pandemonium. Those who were not killed or seriously injured rushed to fight each other for the exits.

The familiar sirens of fire trucks blared from every direction. Every ambulance in the city was summoned to Herald Square. Police cruisers rushed in with armored personnel carriers, and SWAT teams arrived within moments. Within seventeen minutes of the explosions, the streets of Manhattan were teeming with black-uniformed operatives carrying AK-47s. New York was an experienced city, having lived through the horror of September 11, 2001. Forever known as 9/11, that was the day when two commercial airliners struck the World Trade Center towers at the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists, the day when another commercial airliner struck the Pentagon, when a fourth commercial airliner, destined for the White House, crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, all of which claimed the lives of over three thousand innocent people. Yes, New York City was, indeed, an experienced city.

But nothing can prepare a city for the heartache and anguish that such evil can bring when loved ones are lost to such barbarism. A mother carrying her lifeless child from the fire and debris of a bombed building is not something one gets used to, no matter the city’s or a person’s history. To witness such an event is hell … To experience it is unspeakable.

And on that Black Friday, in Midtown Manhattan, the unspeakable was visited on a devastating number of innocent people—mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, the elderly and young, and too many children shopping for Christmas with their moms and dads. Their cries and screams could be heard throughout Manhattan … and the echoes would be heard in the darkness for years to come.

The statistics from the bombing at Macy’s were staggering. Of the one hundred and five people killed, thirty-two were children. Two hundred and forty were taken to intensive care, while scores more were treated and released.

The official investigation, known as MACBOMB, resulted in FBI agents conducting over thirty thousand interviews, amassing 3.5 short tons (3.2 t) of evidence and collecting nearly one billion pieces of information.

The result?

No arrests, no identified suspects. No one even claimed responsibility.

Most of the 2.5 million who attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade just the day before breathed a sigh of relief.

CHAPTER 2

OUT OF CONTROL

February 9, 2015, 1:30 a.m.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

T HOUSANDS OF SHIVERING people stood in the bitter cold on a hilltop in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, known as Negley Park, to watch the roaring fire across the Susquehanna River consume a city block at the base of Pennsylvania’s majestic Capitol Building. Thousands more watched from the west bank of that river as the relentless flames spread from one building to the next on State Street, and though the observers were separated by the wide river, the detonation of two bombs was deafening and frighte ning.

The fire started at about 9:00 p.m. on February 8, 2015, in the office and apartment buildings closest to the expansive steps of the Capitol. The historic brick and wooden buildings burned quickly, and in spite of the quick and heroic response of Harrisburg’s fire departments, with support from all departments in the contiguous counties—Cumberland, Lebanon, Lancaster, York, and Perry—the fire continued to rage. Its spread was aided by the city’s use of wood as a predominant building material in the early 1900s. The strong wind from the northwest carried burning debris everywhere, and within one square mile of State Street, an evacuation was ordered. Too many of those buildings in Downtown Harrisburg were topped with highly flammable tarred and shingled roofs. A major contributing factor to the fire’s rage was a meteorological phenomenon known as a fire whirl. As overheated air rises, it comes into contact with cooler air and begins to spin like a tornado. Those whirls on the night in question, with temperatures near zero, propelled glowing hot embers into the sky, with torchlike flames threatening the West Shore before falling into the Susquehanna River.

By daylight, Pennsylvania’s National Guard had arrived with tanks and trucks for security, support, and cleanup. Helicopters from the Pennsylvania State Police barracks and the First Army hovered overhead. Crime-scene tape, barricades, and armed law enforcement personnel turned Pennsylvania’s capital into a military takeover scene. The federal courthouse and the Capitol Complex were secured in rapid succession.

Because most of the buildings on State Street had been converted to offices, and two of them were Catholic churches, the death and injury toll was limited. Eleven apartment dwellers died, fifteen were taken to Baltimore’s intensive care unit, and twenty-two first responders were treated and released. The preliminary investigation indicated that the fire was intentionally set, remnants of a single bomb were taken into custody by the Federal Bureau of Investigation arson unit, and throughout the night, fire drones were activated by the CIA on a picture-taking mission.

The official investigation, taken over by the federal government’s antiterrorist agency, was known as CAPFIRE. It resulted in eighteen thousand interviews, many of which in Syria and Iraq; 2.7 short tons of evidence; and the collection of eight hundred million pieces of information. The fire and explosion destroyed or damaged eighteen buildings, all within one block of State Street; eleven burned to the ground. Together with the destruction of two parked cars, the cost of damages was conservatively estimated at $500 million.

The forensics bomb analysts confirmed that the perpetrators had used plastic jugs containing ammonium nitrate pills, liquid nitromethane, electric blasting caps, and high-octane gasoline that fed the fire from a crude, remote-activated pump. The source of these materials could not be determined.

On March 12, 2015, the United States Attorney’s Office in Downtown Harrisburg received an open letter claiming to be from ISIS, and the letter asserted that this fire on State Street was set by eight lone wolves who were radicalized individuals from Pennsylvania. The letter further asserted that the original intended target was the United States federal courthouse on Walnut Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but that plan had been aborted. The letter’s claim was dismissed as fraudulent based on its vague and erroneous details.

What wasn’t dismissed was the fear and anxiety that the American people would now awake to in the morning and go to bed with each night. It was like a cancer, malignant and malicious, coming from diseased cells that were spreading through the bloodstream of a civilized society. The letter’s claim may have been fraudulent and filled with inaccuracies, but the message in it