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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I wake up at 2:59 a.m.

There are two or three inches of snow at this point.

Tux/I do/Lasagna/Cake/Dancing/Bedtime.

At around 4:30 a.m., the ISIS bastards crash through the door of my father’s house. According to Ingrid, it takes the terrorists fifteen minutes to tie them all up and transport them to the basement boiler room.

They leave, at the earliest, at 4:50 a.m.

By this point there are five, maybe six inches of snow.

Depending on what car the terrorists are driving — there’s a big difference between a Honda Civic and a Ford Explorer in a half foot of snow — they might not have made it very far.

Of course, theoretically, they could have driven directly to a private airstrip and hopped on a plane, but this would be easy enough to track. Plus the snow was already beginning to surge. Flying might not have even been possible by this point.

No, whether or not they wanted to, they would need to get out of town by car. Which is easier said than done in a blizzard.

Snowpocalypse was blanketing the entire east coast, from Delaware down to North Carolina, so it would have been difficult to go north or south. And east was the Atlantic. The only option was to head west where, even going at a crawl, eventually the terrorists would have pushed through the storm and into West Virginia.

And from there, they could have gone anywhere.

Either way, by 9:00 a.m., Sullivan had missed a meeting with his Chief of Staff and been declared missing. The entire nation would be on an unparalleled level of alertness and lockdown. There would have been roadblocks and checkpoints set up on every highway and interstate in America. Possibly every street.

The terrorists would have had to hole up somewhere.

“Where are you guys?” I say.

Then I realize I don’t even know who they are.

I don’t even know what ISIS stands for.

I do a Google search.

It is 3:17 a.m.

::::

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

That’s what ISIS stands for.

I read for twenty minutes, and basically this is what I come away with:

  • ISIS is a terrorist group that follows an Islamic ultra-fundamentalist ideology and controls a vast region across Iraq and Syria.
  • They consider themselves at war with all nations and with all people who do not meet their standards for “true” Muslims.
  • ISIS’s first obsession is the apocalypse. They believe their mission is to bring on the apocalypse as foretold in scripture.
  • Their leader is a little-known and deeply pious Iraqi named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
  • For the past two years, they’d been wreaking havoc. They were responsible for sixty attacks in over twenty different countries, most notably, killing one hundred and thirty people in Paris this past November.
  • They’d kidnapped the President of the United States and Billy Torelli, and they were doing God knows what to them right now.