Some awkward writing right off the bat.

Skids to  halt works for the car, for Yuusuf if conjures up an almost cartoonish image It would also be good to change things up a bit so as to avoid the repetition.

The writing seems rushed and unedited, lots of mistakes that would have been easy to spot on a read through.

A few characters along the way that require all caps on introduction.

There is no way for us to know the girl is a teachers aid. The writing needs to be visual.

I would have given the receptionist a name, I think it would have made for a better read.

A fair portion of the dialogue is on the nose.

I think knowing the theme telegraphed the ending, I supposed that might be the case for a lot of the scripts.

The final exchange between the brothers is really out of place for me.

Pretty straight forward story with some hard criteria to use, I think you handled it relatively well, but the writing as a whole needs a fair bit of work.

I liked this. Theme is present, and the elements are used well (thank you for that, writer!). In fact, the dodge ball as a weapon is brilliant.

What would take me from very good to great on this is a little more understanding - did his wife stay in Somalia and if so why? Couldn't he have taken both kids with him?

And if someone besides the writer can weigh in on this - would we keep captured foreign terrorists in a building that also houses a day care center?  I don't want to penalize for that and listen, I know we need to accept that for you to get all your elements in place here, but it was ringing in my head throughout the read.

Also, the receptionist - she's kind of a bad ass, no? Her actions belie her title. And I love that you made her 59. That was awesome - like, she's one away from the big 6-0 and she's pissed off about it.

A little confusing at times on who was speaking on the phone and what they knew and who they were to the story, but that's to be expected in 5 pages.

Loved the ending. 15 year olds would absolutely say that to each other, without missing a beat and picking up where they left off.

AJR

Thank you everyone for the feedback.

My first thriller, so I was expecting to get dinged for not being "thrilling." But no, that was too obvious for SS... you had to go find lots of other holes in my entry

Granted, the level of OpSec failure at this federal building is comical and there's no indication that Al-Shabaab could mount such an operation in the US. So, no, this was not meant to be realistic. Only picked Al-Shabaab (and by extension Somalia) because they had a civil war at a time convenient for my story.

Yuusuf's air-marshal-ness is used to make him an armed agent who's not part of the organized response, so he gets to be a lone-wolf cowboy. His kids are in a federal building's daycare because he's got bizarre hours, and they have to be somewhere after school. Presumably, Yuusuf's new wife in America (Bilan didn't come from a stork) has her own career.

Yuusuf isn't supposed to be that familiar with the Receptionist (who does deserve a name). That was just my awkward attempt to get his name in dialog.

The dual-dialog was meant to convey Bilan pestering her dad while he was talking. It also saved some space

I have no problem believing that some typos made it into the script. Calling Mark "Mike" is one of them, but "fife" is not. In military and paramilitary protocol, where they can't assume great radio clarity, the digits are:

Zee-roe, Wun, Too, Tree, Foe-wer, Fife, Six, Seh-ven, Ate, Nine-er

Yuusuf hears the Receptionist pronounce her callsign correctly and leaps to the conclusion that she's a veteran or something, only then he hands her a weapon. Actually, she's just someone who's been through emergency drills since Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in 1995. Without a tight space constraint, I can make that clear in dialog. She is, however, admirably cool under fire. Probably married to Kaleb in From the Light to the Sheyd

Another thing that I would have like to make clear is that she's the only one in the daycare with a radio, so they have to go check on everyone else before she can give a final check-in for Section E25. This gives her a reason to prod Yuusuf onward when his own kids are safe(ish). It's not unusual to have only one radio-toting office manager per floor in a normal office building; here I'm making up whole-cloth that a federal building has one per "section."

A little more back-and-forth between them can have her assume he knows how to clear room-by-room, and he can remark "They didn't really cover that in air marshal school."

She drops her radio near the end because (1) I want to show that she's not combat-trained, and (2) I needed an excuse to shut up that damned radio. Speaking of the radio, the dispatcher should have warned them of two hostiles before the door was opened.

I'm not entirely happy with the very end. The Somali proverb isn't some kind of punchline, so I don't like it being the last thing said. Maybe just put subtitles as Yuusuf says it?

I'm glad most of you appreciated how these two boys, seeing each other for the first time in ten years, greet each other with their childish epithets for one another.