Alabama Jihad

By Calvin Poole III

Terrorism. We hear about it on the news, happening in other countries, in other cities. Happening to other people. No one really expects it to happen to them. Here in America. In Alabama.

John Crenshaw was a normal guy, going about his normal day, when the unexpected happened. Terrorists launched a coordinated multi-city, multi-state attack across the south-east United States. From mass-shootings in public places to the detonation of an improvised atomic bomb, John wound up in the middle of the action.

With the help of his closest friends, and the unsolicited assistance of the CIA, John and his friends do what any American hopes they have the fortitude to do - they fight back. Not as vigilantes. As patriots. As citizen-soldiers.

Can they defend themselves, their families, their homes, their country?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calvin Poole III
• Release date: Dec 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311120243

Calvin Poole III

Calvin Poole is an attorney who lives in Greenville, Alabama. He is married and has three sons, all grown. He is a general practitioner, trial lawyer, and former criminal prosecutor. During his tenure as Assistant District Attorney, he organized and coordinated a multi-jurisdictional Drug Task Force. He earned Business and Law Degrees from the University of Alabama. He has previously published articles dealing with topics such as long-range shooting and sniper concealment tactics in Tactical Shooter magazine.

Book preview

Chapter One

Up until three weeks ago, John Crenshaw had never killed a man. Never had a reason to. Small town lawyer, school board member, church deacon and Sunday school teacher. That kind of guy doesn't usually kill people. However, over the course of the past three weeks, John had killed ten men. He was about to kill number eleven.

Number eleven had a name. His name was Abdul. John Crenshaw had received a phone call giving Abdul's exact location. A trailer. Really just a camper with electricity, telephone, and water hookups, out in the corner of a cow pasture. A remote and isolated location, in rural Alabama. Ten miles from the nearest town, which was just barely a town. A few houses closer together than usual, a store, a gas station and two Baptist churches were all it took to make a town in this part of Alabama.

Abdul's trailer was dark except for a dim glow coming from the window. A sheet had been hung on the inside of the window to prevent light from leaking out or eyes from looking in. There was no outside lighting at all. Very little sign of life on this dark night. The nearest highway, connected to the camper by only a dirt trail through the pasture, was a mile away. An occasional vehicle could be heard in the distance. No other sounds. No other sights. No other people. More importantly, no other people who might interrupt John's plan for how Abdul would die.

John had four accomplices. Steve was a dentist. Fred ran a clothing store. Curtis worked for the telephone company. Joe was a city street superintendent. They were all upstanding citizens, all church-goers, all family men. Like John Crenshaw, they had all recently become killers.

John and his men had been watching the trailer from a tree line five hundred yards away. They had been there since eight o'clock that morning, and it was now ten o'clock at night. They had observed the light blue pickup truck arrive, and they had seen one man exit the truck and go inside the camper. That had been five hours ago, and there had been no activity since.

Are we sure he's alone in there? asked one of the men.

Pretty sure, but we need to stay focused in case there are more inside. Y'all ready? asked John.

Somber nods all around. They were getting restless and were ready to complete the mission. Game faces on. No light-hearted banter. They checked their weapons, which by now they had learned to do in the dark, by feel. Round in the chamber, safety on. Finger outside the trigger guard. Gun held in low ready position, not pointed uselessly up at the sky, as in the movies.

A neutral observer might have mistaken this activity for a night-time military maneuver. Five men walking silently through the darkness in single file, ten yards between them. Plenty of weaponry, but with their equipment taped down so that nothing rattled. No clacking of metal against metal. None of the noises you might expect from a bunch of hunters traipsing through the woods in pursuit of a hapless critter. These men moved with the discipline of an elite military unit, although none had served in the military. Their discipline had been acquired over the past few weeks, and they were surprised at how quickly the survival and killer instincts had become ingrained into their behavior. It was like a door had been opened, introducing them to a side of themselves which they hadn't known before.

John, Curtis, Steve, Fred, and Joe were all hunters and accomplished marksmen. They had all spent large portions of their lives sneaking around in the woods with guns. They had grown up in a culture of hunting and shooting. Shooting targets and game animals, that is. Not shooting people. Not until Al-Qaida attacked their home town.

The men approached the front door of the trailer, staying low so as not to be seen by anyone who might be looking out the window. John put his finger on his nose and then looked around at other members of the team, silently asking if anyone smelled gas. They needed to make sure they were not walking into a trap. One of Abdul's friends had been surrounded in a mobile home, so he turned on the propane gas valve and allowed gas to fill up the trailer. As the tactical team had approached, he ignited the fumes with a Bic lighter. The resulting explosion had either killed or injured just about everyone on the scene.

All men gave the thumbs down signal indicating that no one smelled gas. Fred and Curtis took up positions at the far corners of the trailer where they could observe anything that might happen behind the trailer, including an attempted escape out the back window. Joe assumed a prone position underneath the trailer, watching for a possible escape from a trap door in the floor of the trailer. John Crenshaw crouched just beneath the front door, with his shotgun aimed at the center of the door, the barrel almost touching the door. Steve, the dentist, took off the backpack he was wearing and laid it on the ground underneath the trailer. He then pulled out an old rumpled tan-colored work shirt and put it on, along with a John Deere cap, trying his best to look like a harmless country boy. He knocked on the door of the trailer very loudly and then called out in his best redneck accent, Hey, is anybody home? I was walking home from the Thompson place and got turned around. I am as lost as I can be. Can you tell me the way back to highway twenty-one?

Steve backed off a few feet from the door so the occupant would be able to look out the window and see him. John remained crouched, below the line of vision of anyone looking out from inside the trailer. His shotgun was pointing upwards at a 45 degree angle, still pointed at the center of the door. His finger was on the trigger.

After a brief wait, Steve rapped on the front door again and called out, Hey, is anybody home? I need to know which way it is to highway twenty-one.

The door did not open, but a man's voice from just inside the front door responded loudly with an Arabic accent, I do not know where this highway twenty-one is, but the main road is...

John pulled the trigger. The boom of the shotgun blast interrupted and ended Abdul's sentence. The load of buckshot had blown a hole through the front door and through Abdul on the other side. Without hesitation, Crenshaw racked the slide of his shotgun and placed the muzzle two inches from the door latch and pulled the trigger again, destroying the door knob and lock in a spray of aluminum, wood, and plastic. He immediately pulled the door open. With his shotgun now leading the way, he jumped inside the door to make sure that Abdul was incapacitated and that he held nothing dangerous in his hands, such as a weapon or a detonation device.

The man was certainly incapacitated. The blast of the 12 gauge had hit Abdul dead center in the chest. At a range of only two feet, the shotgun had produced massive, non-survivable trauma. The dead man had been holding an AK-47, which dropped to the floor at the same time that he did. Actually, it was not a real AK-47, but a commercially available version of the firearm so ubiquitous in terrorist circles. The 30-round magazine was fully loaded, with a round in the chamber. The safety was in the off position, ready to fire. The wire stock was folded underneath the rifle. With the stock fully extended, the weapon was a rifle, capable of aimed fire. However, with the stock in its folded position, the weapon became a very large and unwieldy pistol, hard to aim but still very deadly at close range. It was always interesting to watch these guys in a fire fight, shooting from the hip rather than aiming, spraying rounds down range as fast as possible. This was probably a theological rather than a tactical decision, as the true followers of Muhammad would pull the trigger, close their eyes, and pray that Allah would guide the bullets to the infidels.

Crenshaw and his men were nearly certain that the dead man on the floor was the sole occupant of the trailer. However, having learned that complacency could get a man killed, they conducted a thorough search to make sure that there were no other occupants. They quietly and methodically looked under beds, behind the shower curtain, inside the closets, and in every conceivable hiding place for a human being. They found no one. They then conducted a more detailed search for weapons and means of communication between Abdul and other members of his terrorist cell.

No explosives were found. The men did find a Glock 9 millimeter pistol and several boxes of 7.62 x 39 ammo for the assault rifle. They found some maps, with some notes and highlighted marks. All of these were collected and put into one of the men's backpack.

There was no small talk as the men conducted the search. Underneath the mattress, Fred found a laptop, still connected by wire to the telephone jack.

Curtis, see what's on it, said Joe in a stoic voice which betrayed absolutely no enthusiasm, and which made the assignment sound rather mundane. This was a practiced effort to avoid any display of emotion. Curtis sat down on the bed and opened the laptop, punched a few buttons, and then frowned at the words as he read them on the screen.

He just finished sending a message. I think I will add a P.S. to his letter. Curtis began typing, his lip betraying a slight hint of a smile. He pushed send and then waited for confirmation that the message had indeed been sent. Upon receiving confirmation, he immediately turned off the laptop and unplugged the wires, stuffing the bundle into his backpack. We'll study this later. It's time to go.

The men walked out the front door, carefully sidestepping the pool of blood on the floor. Once outside, John asked, Everybody got everything he came with? Each man checked his own gear and then nodded, and the group departed in single file, quietly easing back across the pasture through the fog. They did not hurry, as men escaping the scene of a crime might have done. Had they been murderers, they would have attempted to hide the body, conceal the evidence, and perhaps destroy the crime scene. But they were not murderers; they were warriors. They were fighting a war they had not started. They had been drawn into a conflict on their own Alabama soil. The man they had just killed had been one of the instigators, one of the aggressors in this war. They left his body to be found, knowing that whoever found it would not think of calling the local sheriff to the scene of a crime. They knew that whoever found the dead man with the AK-47 would immediately know that, Here lies one of the terrorists who started the Alabama Jihad.

There were no high-fives. And the men didn't really feel like celebrating, anyway. They didn't enjoy killing. They hated the fact that killing had become a necessary part of their lives.

The men carefully and silently approached the SUV which they had parked on an old logging road, one half mile from the paved highway. They inspected their vehicle for signs of sabotage, and finding none, climbed in. The driver then cautiously drove down the logging road, negotiating stumps and ruts, not getting in too big of a hurry, until the vehicle was at last back on the paved highway. Their primary extraction point had remained secure, and everything had gone according to plan. Now they needed to retrieve the second vehicle which had been stashed at a secondary rendezvous point; a backup in case the first had been compromised.

Chapter Two

At approximately 11:00 p.m., on the same night, a computer at the National Security Agency recognized certain combinations and patterns of word usage and sentence structure, and printed a transcript of an email which had been intercepted by a domestic intelligence-gathering initiative which would have been considered unconstitutional in the days before the attack. Now, the southeastern United States was considered a war zone, and rules against domestic spying in this region of the United States had been suspended.

The email was awarded top priority status and was forwarded to the Counter Terrorism Operations Center of CIA, as well as to the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The email read as follows:

To my brothers in the Jihad, I am still trying to make contact with some of you so that we can resume our fight to bring down the infidels who control this wasteland of Christianity. We are all filled with such zeal that we were finally doing the will of Allah. Our great leaders in Pakistan are to be infinitely blessed for their wisdom in obtaining the nuclear weapons which our brothers successfully detonated. Our boats bringing freedom fighters up from Mexico were able to land on the beaches of Florida and Alabama without any opposition and make their way inland where they could evaporate into the local population. Cells such as ours descended upon the shopping centers in groups of five, and began shooting. The element of surprise was with us, for we were not choosing high profile targets but rather soft unprotected targets. Our expectation was that they would be totally unprepared, but perhaps we miscalculated. They were not so unprepared as we had thought, and I am writing this to my brothers so that we can regroup, learn from our mistakes, and regain the momentum which, at least for a time, we have lost. These are the mistakes which I believe we have made:

I believe that we underestimated the number of civilians who have guns and are skilled in their use. We made the mistake of listening to the politicians, who spoke of gun control and we assumed the politicians and the people were of the same mind. This is not the case. We have run in to very strong resistance from men who are very well armed and who are expert marksmen. I recall one of my visits to a gun shop, laughing to myself about a hunter who requested a telescopic sight for his rifle. I thought to myself, Here is a man with so little faith in his god to direct his bullets that he must rely on a telescope. I realize now that I underestimated the skill of these hunters. Many of my brothers have fallen to shots fired from so far away that we could neither see the shooter nor tell exactly which direction the shot came from. This was very disheartening to watch a brother's head explode before we ever heard the sound of the gun.

I did not realize that many civilians own weapons very similar to what the military uses. We have seen many of the infidels using M-16's, just like their army. We were surprised to find that many men walk around armed all the time. When we staged our initial attack, we were immediately met with opposing fire, and this disrupted our plans greatly.

The intelligence briefings I received in Pakistan portrayed the American people as soft and weak, with no will to fight. This is not what we have encountered in the province of Alabama. We thought that the American people were so preoccupied with entertaining themselves and enjoying luxury that they would not be willing to undergo hardships or engage in meaningful resistance once we began our attack. What we have found is that these people will undergo extreme hardships to protect their homeland.

We did not realize how well trained and aggressive local police and sheriff's departments would be. Their tactics and communication systems have made it very difficult for us. In truth, however, we would rather face the law enforcement officials than the private citizens. The law enforcement officials are accustomed to taking prisoners into custody, and so some of our more zealous brothers have been successful in pretending to surrender and then killing one or two of them before being shot to death. The local citizens, however, do not take prisoners. They do not allow themselves to get close enough to us to be killed by a suicide shooter.

We finally found a man who agreed to buy additional weapons for us in his name, but he turned out to be an informant for the law enforcement officials. We are suspicious that he was wearing a camera and that the police now have photographs of us. I must go. Someone is banging on my door, and it sounds like one of these dumb hicks, who has gotten lost. I will contact you again soon.

-Abdul

Thirty minutes later, the following email was also intercepted by the National Security Agency:

Dear Brothers, Abdul is dead. The god of Muhammad could not protect him because he is a false god with no power. Abdul is now standing before the throne of the true God, the Father of Jesus Christ and is receiving the judgment for his actions. There will be no virgins for Abdul, only eternal punishment because he followed a false god and took the lives of innocent men, women, and children. We have your names. We have photographs of you. We know where you live. We are coming to kill you. Your only hope is to repent of your unbelief, call on the name of Jesus for your salvation, and surrender to the local law enforcement authorities. They will protect you. If we find you first, you are dead men. Our bullets have been coated with the fat of pigs to make sure that when you die you will be unclean. But don't worry about how you will die. Worry instead about how you will spend eternity.

-The Alabama Boys

Chapter Three

Three weeks earlier Abdul logged into an internet chat room with the other members of his cell and confirmed that they would be meeting at the Wal-Mart in Graceville, Alabama, at 11:00 that morning. The American Jihad was scheduled to begin on a Saturday in April. Saturday was chosen because there would be less traffic around government buildings and there would be more shoppers in the stores. April was chosen because the weather was generally cool enough that the operatives could wear overcoats to conceal weapons without appearing out of place.

Abdul kneeled down on his prayer mat, faced eastward towards Mecca, and began his prayer ritual. He failed to see the fallacy of his plan to use religion to justify the killing of innocent men, women, and children. Al-Qaida is doing the will of Allah, Abdul said to himself.

Abdul then collected the weapons. He had an AK-47 which he liked because it reminded him of his homeland. This was the weapon he had trained with. He liked to keep the stock folded and shoot from the hip, praying for Allah to guide the bullets. He would wear the AK-47 on a sling over his shoulder, underneath the large overcoat. Slung across his other shoulder would be a book bag containing ten loaded magazines for the AK-47. He also had a small thirty-eight caliber revolver, which he would keep in his pocket. This is what he would use for his surrender. Although he was anxious to die for his beliefs and go to his reward, he also considered the possibility that he and his brothers would kill several hundred infidels and then escape to perhaps kill more on another day. So while this mission might wind up being a suicide mission, it did not necessarily have

Reviews for Alabama Jihad

[Charles Gaston · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Clear prose. Compelling plot lines. I look forward to subsequent works in the series!