“Holy shit,” Brock said, looking over Sam’s shoulder at the security system monitors in their basement panic room. Whatever had detonated in their front lawn just seconds earlier had left a crater four feet across and several feet deep. The trees and shrubs were all either scorched clean of foliage, or missing altogether. A car parked on the street was windowless and on fire. Their white picket fence was flattened.
There was no sign of the DHS security detail that had been posted at the corners of their property. Had they known about the attack in advance and fled? There was no carnage visible on the video feed, so Sam didn’t rule out that hypothesis.
She gritted her teeth and began assessing the damage to their home through the surveillance feed. The heavy stone and mortar construction had held up remarkably well, and it didn’t appear that the house was in danger of collapsing on top of them.
But even on the camera monitors, it was obvious that the blast had taken large chunks out of the stone and strewn shrapnel across a wide swath of their homestead. There wasn’t a window on the front of the house that wasn’t shattered.
Camera views of the interior of their home showed that most of their things in the front two rooms nearest the explosion were a total loss. Blast, heat, and bomb fragments had redecorated. It wasn’t a good look.
“Holy shit is right,” Sam said. “Half an hour earlier, and we’d still have been upstairs when it exploded. We’d have been minced.”
Brock put his arm around her and kissed her cheek. She shook with rage, fear and adrenaline. “Have I mentioned that I have some concerns about your work environment?” he joked. Brock and his fighter pilot buddies always seemed to have a way with gallows humor. She laughed, and a tear escaped, which she quickly wiped away. She hated her human moments, but Brock loved her all the more for them.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m no cop or spy catcher, but I’ve spent my whole adult life dropping bombs and making explosions. That was at least twenty pounds of Tritonal, or an equivalent amount of blast power in another type of explosive material. And I can tell even in the monitors that those fragments aren’t screws or nails, like a poor man’s anti-personnel weapon. Those fragments are from a steel bomb casing.”
Sam connected the dots. “Professional.”
“Military,” Brock said. “No doubt about it. Or at least paramilitary.”
“So we’ve been attacked by a foreign military on US soil?” Sam asked, incredulous.
Brock shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I just said that it’s obviously a military weapon. And whoever detonated it on our front lawn didn’t care about disguising that fact.”
Motion caught their eye, and they both turned to the video surveillance monitors. A police cruiser rolled to a stop in front of the house, and a fire truck stopped near the burning car at the curb. Seconds later, water doused the smoldering car.
A patrolman got out of his cruiser and made his way tentatively toward the front door, which hung ajar on wrecked hinges.
Sam zoomed the camera in on the patrolman’s face. She squinted. “What is it?” Brock asked.
“I can’t figure out why that cop’s face is familiar,” she said.
Then she remembered.
She dialed Dan Gable, and while the phone rang, she ordered Brock to lock the basement vault door. He started to ask why, but she shushed him impatiently.
“Dan, I need your help,” she said when her deputy picked up. Gable started a sarcastic retort, but she cut him off. “Shut up a minute. A bomb blew the shit out of my house a minute ago. I think our three Homeland stooges took a powder right before it happened. And do you remember the cop with the Taser I told you about earlier, the one who jumped out of John Abrams’ bushes? He’s walking in my front door.”