Drone

I-30 East, Arkansas

Traffic was backed up for miles.

The Arkansas State Police had set up a sobriety checkpoint about halfway between Hope and Arkadelphia, stopping every car in both eastbound lanes for inspections. Of course, they were actually looking for possible terrorists and their weapons.

A federal judge had recently blocked the governor’s antiterror stop-and-frisk policy, but no court had ever held against sobriety checkpoints, given the scourge that drunken driving had become, taking thousands of innocent lives every year. The governor, a huge Myers supporter, had suddenly become “quite concerned” about drunk driving in his state, particularly on I-30, one of the most heavily traveled highways in the nation.

The Arkansas state troopers required drivers and passengers to exit their stopped vehicles and perform sobriety tests, the famous finger-to-nose exercise among them. Of course, the real reason why people were forced to exit was in order to get them out from behind the metal shield of their cars and trucks. Using recently acquired terahertz imaging detectors, technicians were able to measure the natural radiation emitted by people and detect when the energy flow was impeded by an object, such as a gun. State troopers also ran sniffer dogs and handheld Geiger counters around the vehicles while the drunk tests were being performed. Vehicles occupied by Hispanics were given special attention.

An unmarked panel van was racing along eastbound I-30 at 12:05 a.m. when the driver caught sight of a ten-mile-long string of red brake lights shining in the midst of a great curtain of pines. Traffic was already beginning to slow. The Spanish-language news station broadcasting out of Little Rock announced the traffic delay due to the fact that state troopers were stopping all eastbound vehicles at a sobriety checkpoint.

The Spanish-speaking driver tapped his brakes and eased left into the broad grassy median strip, then made a sharp U-turn and bounded back on the westbound side.

That was exactly the kind of maneuver someone wanting to hide something would do. Two Arkansas State Police officers on big Harley bikes who were lurking in the dark on the westbound shoulder blasted their lights and roared after the van as soon as it had made the illegal median crossing.

When the two motorcycles had pulled within a hundred yards of the van, the two panel doors in back flung open and an AK-47 flashed from inside. The blistering 7.62 rounds shattered the windshield of the first bike and the trooper slid his Harley into the grassy median. The other trooper broke off the chase with bullets gouging the asphalt around her, and threw her body and her bike between the fleeing van and her downed partner to protect him from any more gunfire.

She instantly called in the attack and within minutes a helicopter-based sniper was putting rounds through the van’s roof as a dozen squad cars joined the chase. More gunfire erupted from the van, but a second later it ran over a police spike strip that blew out all four tires. The two men in the back of the van were tossed onto the pavement and skidded like hockey pucks across the asphalt, skinning them alive while the van cartwheeled end over end until it slammed into a pine tree just off the shoulder and erupted in flames.

The Arkansas State Police had just killed three Bravos and the fiery explosion had destroyed the weapons they’d been carrying. The identity of the fourth man couldn’t be determined, but if they could have run an instant DNA test or found fingerprints on the charred remains, they might have been able to identify him as Hamid Nezhat, Ali’s most senior Quds Force commando.

* * *

One by one, the Bravos were getting picked off by the relentless efforts of courageous LEOs all over the country. Good police work was winning the day. Broken fingers, cracked skulls, and a couple of unauthorized waterboarding incidents loosened up a few tongues, too, along with the vigilance of ordinary citizens. Even the Russian mob helped out a time or two when it suited their interests.

The Arkansas incident confirmed Donovan’s suspicion that the Bravos had broken up into smaller groups, though how many was still unknown. The attacks also were growing less frequent, probably because of the full-court press the DHS was putting on, or so Donovan hoped.

Known Bravo and Castillo drug houses were raided and then later staked out, sometimes by citizen volunteers because there weren’t enough uniforms to cover them all. Two Bravos were killed that way, and three more were wounded before they escaped.