Day of Wrath Read Online Free PDF Page B

being shot within seconds and the team fleeing. Disciplined, they had slunk into the desert to sit out the final hours before resuming the mission.
    So two out of the thirty-plus teams were in some state of disarray, but those in a hotel off the Falmouth exit near Portland, Maine, were ready. The cell phones had been activated. The twitter account, long dormant, was activated and the one lone tweet came in, time-stamped 7:45: #diesirae631: Four hours, Sword One. Four Hours and a Half Hours, Sword Two. Allahu Akbar.
    There were three hours to go. The Falmouth, Maine, team contained units of both Sword One and Sword Two. Each now sat on his bed and prayed in silence, for today would be his last day on earth and tonight he would sup in paradise.

    9:30 a.m, United States Central Command Office of Electronic Counter Surveillance, McDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida
    “Diesirae631 back on line, 11:45 hours Zulu time. Message: “Four hours, Sword One, Four and a Half Hours, Sword Two. Allahu Akbar.”
    Tech sergeant Quentin Younger, sipping his third cup of coffee of the morning, sat up in his chair and gazed at the screen. The endless scrolling of data which, on occasion, would suddenly highlight a tweet and color-code it for level of concern and need to report. This one was coming up red-flagged, meaning it needed a human review and not just a computerized review. It was a message plucked out of the hundreds of millions of monitored tweets flooding the world every hour.  
    Quentin scanned the identifying information attachment to the message. It was an account set up nearly a year ago, some innocuous text messages back and forth, the last one a complaint about a lost bet regarding the World Cup. World Cup tweets were drawing some notice when originating out of Syria as coded messages, but there had been silence on the account since the games had ended.  
    Someone up the food chain had pegged diesirae631 as a source of concern. He punched in a query to trace the followers. Several dozen were in Syria; there was talk several months back about the games and one complaint about a failed encounter with a Belgian woman working in a medical aid station. Curious… there were new followers in the States as of this morning, all with hashtags of diesirae with higher numbers. No responses though. He checked those points of reception: all were accounts that were activated within the last two weeks, purchased as cheap convenience store phones. Very curious.
    It was coming up on break time and he yawned. Another curious item cropped up. Someone had code-named the surveillance file for this account as Dies irae. What the heck?
    He punched in a Google search on the term. What was it, French, Spanish? Nothing significant. He scanned the line of possible alternatives. Dies irae was the third item, a Wikipedia article. Strange, something called a Gregorian chant. Latin. “Day of Wrath,” a hymn from the thirteenth century that became associated with the Great Plague of the fourteenth century.
    Great Plague? He had some memory of a high school history teacher talking about that.  
    It was break time; the coffee had worked through him and he needed to go. Creepy stuff. Why would someone in Syria be sending messages around in Latin? They hated anything to do with that language, still cursing the Crusaders of a thousand years ago as their excuse to commit murder today. Regardless, the hashtag was coded as a high priority and he hit the send button to circulate a message received, warning that it was being followed by receivers within the States, and therefore would be bounced to NSA for further review. His job done, he got up for the restroom and silently cursed his hangover.  

    10:30 a.m., the White House
    Dale Hinman took a second look at his screen, not sure if he was actually seeing it for real. “Dies Irae.” He didn’t know what it really meant other than the fact that he was to kick the word up to the very top. He attached the email