Excerpt: Untitled Sequel to 24 Hours With Spencer Field

It was a common thing for it to rain in Indianapolis on race day. The Indianapolis 500, “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” was held every year on Memorial Day weekend – at the late end of May, when spring had not quite turned to summer, and the only break from the rain was blistering heat.
The gates to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had been open for four hours, and the ingress of race fans had been steady for much of the past two hours. There were those trying to get the best spot in the track's infield where they could hold tailgate parties and still get a good view of the race, and those who simply took their place in the stands and waited, arriving early to beat the mad rush that would come down on the small town of Speedway, Indiana, in the next ninety minutes or so.
As fans gathered under the partly cloudy skies and enjoyed the relatively comfortable seventy-five degree weather, a much smaller group of people gathered in the parking lot of Huntington North High School, in the small town of Huntington, Indiana, some eighty-five miles north of the famed Indy oval.
Ten men and one woman huddled in the center of what is best described as a modern day wagon train, encircled by four shiny new twenty-four-thousand pound Penske rental trucks that had been picked up two days before at the small Penske rental office just a few short miles from the school. Shiny and new, and never used before, the trucks would suit their purpose beautifully, though the shiny newness of the trucks was less a necessity and more of an irony to the men of the United American Jihadi Alliance – a small terrorist cell sympathetic to the Iranian government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The men, all natural born American citizens and veterans of the first Gulf War, had taken a collective vow to fight the Infidels in their own land. With no outside support from Iran – and likely no outside support from the government of Iran – the UAJA used their back woods origin to their advantage. Most people who saw the group would never consider the possibility that they were an extremist threat, but rather that they were likely a band of hicks out for a day of hunting or fishing. Ike, the self-appointed leader of the group, liked that just fine.
“We got about four hours. That gives us plenty of time to make the drive, get into place, and blend in before the crowd reaches peak capacity. ..."