Barnett nodded his head in agreement, but there was a look of sorrow on his face.
Barry picked up on it. “What’s the matter?”
“There aren’t enough available agents to protect everybody we need to protect, Barry. You know that. We can’t cover his aunts and uncles and cousins. The Bureau and Treasury and, hell, everybody is stretched thin as it is.”
“We tried to warn George and Bonnie. I tried, Cutter tried.”
Barnett buttered a piece of toast and spread jam over that. He munched for a moment. “I hate you tell you this, Barry. But,” he sighed, “the terrorist groups have put a contract out on your dog.”
Barry’s face hardened so quickly it startled even the combat-hardened Barnett. “Anybody hurts Dog, I guarantee you, it will take them three very long days to die. And like certain Indian tribes use to say: ‘They will not die well.’ ”
Sergeant Gale said, “I think anyone who would deliberately hurt a pet—whether it be a canary or a dog—is a low-down, no-good, sorry son of a bitch.”
The others around the table nodded their heads in agreement. Barnett filled his cup from the carafe and smiled sadly as he stirred in sugar. “I had a little dog when I was a kid. Name was Stinky. Just a mutt. He wandered up when I was about seven, and he was mine and I was his until the summer of my tenth birthday. He was a good dog. But we had a neighbor who didn’t like dogs. Real mean bastard. Liked to poison dogs and cats. He was a real lowlife. I went off to visit my aunt and uncle that summer before I was ten in the fall. My momma wrote me a letter; I hadn’t been gone a week. Old Man Glascow had killed Stinky. Stinky was walking across the man’s backyard and he just stepped out with a club and hit my dog on the head. Hit him so hard it crushed Stinky’s skull. Said that was one more goddamn dog he wouldn’t have to put up with.”
Barnett sipped his coffee. “Stinky never had done the man’s yard any damage. Never dug up any flowers or anything like that. I think Stinky was even afraid to crap in the old bastard’s yard. I say old. Glascow was about the same age as my dad. Maybe forty. But he was sorry. That October was my tenth birthday. I got me a new bike and all sorts of stuff. But I also got me a brand-new twenty-dollar bill from my granddad. Two dollars for every year of my life. I had found what I wanted out of a sportsman’s catalog, but didn’t have the money to buy it—until then.
“It was one of those survival type slingshots. Steel frame and with enough power to kill somebody at long range. Providing you could hit them. I waited for a damn month for that thing to come in. It was a beauty. And I’d had enough money to order me some spare rubber for it. And all that month I’d been scrounging around gathering up ball bearings and just the right-sized rocks and buying a bag of marbles here, two bags there, so on. I must have ridden my bike all over half of Dallas gathering up materials.”
He sipped his coffee and smiled in satisfied remembrance. “It was good winter time I got started with my plan. I’d buried Stinky right on the edge of our property, way in the backyard, right where that son of a bitch had to see it every time he looked out his kitchen window. And it pissed him off, too. He told my dad it did. My dad told Glascow if he didn’t like to look at it, he could damn well move.
“My dad liked Stinky too.” Barnett chuckled. But there was precious little humor in it.
“I made life miserable for that son of a bitch. From my upstairs bedroom window, I got so good I could knock out every friggin’ window in the back of his house. I busted his car windows. All of them, at one time or the other.
“Of course, he knew it was me. He told the cops it was me. But the cops measured the distance between our houses and told him there was no way I could sling a rock two hundred feet. And nobody knew about my slingshot. No one.
“I put sugar in the gas tank of his car, sugar in his power mower. Ruined both engines. I understood terrorism at an early age, boys. I invented it in my neighborhood.
“It went on all winter. All spring. All summer. I’d skip two/three weeks, he’d slack up in his vigilance, and then I’d let him have it again. Cops talked to me so many times I became an expert in interrogation at age ten and a half. But they never could catch me.
“I cost him some money. Dad said his insurance rates went up sky-high. He had to finally put shutters on all his back windows, floodlights in his back yard—and then I’d promptly shoot them out. I even improved on the slingshot and when I was eighteen, long after Glascow moved away, I had it patented; still get a nice monthly check on that.
“I got brassy about it. I’d call out to him from our property, asking if I could have some of the broken lumber from his window frames so’s I could keep a fresh cross on Stinky’s grave.
“Took me thirteen months, but I made that son of a bitch move. On the day he moved, he stood on his property, in his backyard, and cussed me and my dad. After he’d gone, my dad said to me, ‘I worry about you, boy. Your mind works in a strange way’.”
Barnett waved his hand at the other members of the special ops team. “All of them can tell you similar stories, Barry, and you probably have one to tell yourself. I think we understood terrorism at a very early age. Takes a special kind of mind to deal with it.”
“Yeah,” Barry agreed. “You’re right. Did you ever see this Glascow fellow again?”
Barnett shook his head. “Naw. I don’t even know where he moved off to. Somewhere in Dallas, but I don’t know where.”
“Anybody that would hurt an innocent pet deserves whatever comes at him in the night,” Sergeant Gale said. “And I might tell you that story sometime. Over a few beers.”
Captain Barnett grinned. “See what I mean, Barry? They all have their stories.”
“What would you do if this Glascow came through that front door right now?” Barry asked Barnett.
“After all these years?”
Barry nodded.
“Walk up to him, hold out my hand, and then when he took it, break his fuckin’ arm.”
25
Most of the men in the conference room wore unfriendly looks on their faces. And Barry had the feeling this run was about to end.
Jackson waved Barry to a chair around the long table and got right down to business. “This will be your last run for a while, Barry. There has been a very abrupt change of plans, necessitated by the number of unexplained bodies recently found along our nation’s highways.”
“Disgraceful!” a man said.
Jackson winked at Barry and Barry began to relax; politics was being played out.
A pinch-faced man with a mouth like a fish looked at Barry. “If news of your involvement with the present administration ever leaked out, the press would have a field day.”
“Most shocking news I’ve received since Watergate,” another three-piece suit said.
Barry listened to about five minutes more of the same rhetoric, then all the men got up and trooped out.
When the door had closed, Barry looked at Jackson. “What the hell was all that about?”
“Just a bunch of politicians playing the old game of CYA.”
Cover Your Ass.
“They’ve made their views known, so now if I’m uncovered, they’re clear.”
“That’s it.”
“What a bunch of crap!”
“That’s the way the Washington game is played, Barry.”
“Let’s get down to the real business.”
Jackson wrote two names on a slip of paper and pushed the paper toward Barry.
Ja and Bakhitar.
“I gather they’re becoming a real nuisance.”
“So I’m told.”
“Take them out?”
“With extreme prejudice.”
Barry smiled. “Since one is black and the other is an Iranian, that could be construed as a very racist remark.”
“When it comes to terrorism, I am totally color-blind.” Jackson laid a large manila envelope on the table, put on his coat and hat, and walked out.
Barry looked at the large co
lor blowups. The mangled bodies of men, women and children who had been caught up in a terrorist bombing. Ja was written on the top on that photo. The hideously tortured bodies of a man and two women filled another photo. Bakhitar was the name of that one. There were several more large photographs, all guaranteed to leave the viewer with a sour stomach.
Barry put the examples of terrorism back into the envelope, closed the hasp, and walked out into the cold air.
He spat on the ground a couple of times to get the bad taste out of his mouth, then stood for a moment, breathing deeply of the winter air. Someone had brought his rig around to the side of the building. He walked over to it and climbed up into the cab. All his clothing had been freshly laundered and pressed. The cabin had been spotlessly cleaned. He looked at his logbook and trip tickets. Everything was in order and up to date.
Everything from his room at the BOQ had been packed up, secured in the sleeper.
“What a quaint way of telling me to have a good trip,” he muttered.
He picked up his thermos. Filled with steaming coffee. A bag of sandwiches lay on the seat.
Barry dropped the Kenworth into gear and pulled out.
It was snowing.
“Merry Christmas to all,” he muttered. “And for Ja and Bakhitar, get ready for a long good night.”
He headed south on 73/75 and then turned west on highway 2. Fifty miles later, he rolled onto the super slab. The weather had warmed, the snow turning to rain. The slapping of his windshield wipers kept him company as he rolled on westward.
Cutter came into his thoughts. He rudely pushed her away.
Bonnie entered his mind. He told the little blonde to get lost.
But he silently cautioned her to be careful. The nuts and the flakes and the slime were after her, her family.
The highway called to him, the tires humming on the concrete, the big steering wheel under his hands, the rig responding smoothly.
Several times his CB speaker crackled with friendly voices, calling to the midnight-blue Kenworth, barreling westward.
He did not respond to the friendly calls.
He rolled on at a steady 65 mph. The Dog.
Kate slipped into his mind.
He pushed her away.
A one-man army. Carte blanche in dealing with terrorists. No rules. No Geneva Convention. Offering no quarter, expecting none. A lone soldier in a big 18-wheeler.
A wild, reckless, caution-to-the-wind feeling surged through him. He had nobody. No one at all. He was alone. And would be until the day his luck ran out and he stopped the bullet with his name on it. But he would not go into that long sleep easily. He would go out snarling and growling and biting.
He switched his CB to channel 3. By now it was common knowledge among the groups he sought that the Dog monitored channel 3.
He lifted the mike to his lips. “This is the Dog. Any of you assholes out there listening?”
Silence.
“I’ll find you,” Barry spoke to the loneliness of the cab. “I’ll find you. And I’ll destroy you.”
When he pulled into a truck stop at North Platte, his eyes had been watching the station wagon that had been following him for more than fifty miles. His eyes continued to watch as the station wagon pulled in and drove over to the gas pumps.
Two men. Dark complexion, dark hair, mustaches. Solid-built men. Hard-looking.
The electronics boys at the AFB had worked frantically on the rig while Barry slept, installing a warning system that would sound an alarm if anyone tried to open a door, crawl under the rig, tamper with the hood, or just leaned up against any part of the 18-wheeler. Barry didn’t really understand how it worked, only that he knew it did.
He flipped the switch and quickly got out of the cab. He had only thirty seconds to do so. He could deactivate the system by punching out a series of numbers on the cigarette-pack-size metal box he slipped into his jacket pocket.
The little box was practically indestructible, so he had been told. The system cost a lot of money, too—so he had been told.
“Wars are usually expensive,” had been Barry’s reply.
He walked across the parking lot, the empty thermos in his hand, and entered the warmth of the cafe. He would fuel up later; the oversized tanks enabled him to make much longer runs than any standard rig.
He wasn’t hungry, having eaten a couple of the sandwiches the mess had fixed for him. He had just wanted to see what that station wagon would do.
He chose a spot at the counter where he could keep an eye on his rig. The station wagon, filled up with gas, pulled around to the four-wheeler parking area and stayed put, the men remaining inside, the motor running.
He lingered over his apple pie and coffee, listening to the chatter of drivers, but taking no part in any of the conversations.
He watched the men in the station wagon and concluded they were pros. They were not in the least impatient. They just quietly waited.
Barry checked his watch. Several more hours until night. But the day was overcast and gloomy, creating a dusklike appearance.
He concluded that the men in the station wagon were going to try to take him out when he left the truck stop, and then probably kill themselves. These nuts believed that was a quick way to enter heaven.
Fine. If they wanted to exit this vale of tears, Barry would damn sure help them on their journey. Just be delighted to do so.
He paid for his pie and coffee and went to the restroom, then slipped out the back way. The silenced .22 auto-loader was nestled in his shoulder holster, ready to spit and snarl its lethal little loads.
He walked to the edge of the building and waved until he got the attention of the two men in the station wagon.
Then Barry gave them the finger.
He could tell they were getting angry; but still they sat in the wagon.
Barry turned his ass to them and walked swiftly out into the truck parking area. Behind him, he heard the sounds of car doors clunking shut.
He slipped under a trailer and knelt behind the rear right side tires, the silenced auto-loader in his hand. His lips were peeled back in a silent snarl. The Dog waited.
He heard one call out. In a language he could not understand but believed it to be Arabic. The other one replied in a stage whisper. Same language. At least it sounded the same.
“Speak English,” the one to his right called.
“He didn’t go to his truck. He’s hiding among these other trucks.”
“At least we know the bitch-dog was hurt. That is one less we have to deal with.”
“Pity. I would have liked to mount her like a dog. It would have been amusing to listen to her screams.”
“No more talk. Go around this truck here. We have him trapped.”
Barry smiled and shifted positions silently. The terrorist with pussy on the mind came into view. Barry shot him twice in the chest as rain began to fall. He slipped out as the rain began coming down harder and dragged the terrorist under the trailer and left him. He duckwalked the length of the trailer and once more crouched behind the rear wheels.
The one remaining terrorist was calling for his partner. His calls fell on dead ears.
Barry came out from under the trailer and shot the terrorist twice in the back as the rain began coming down in torrents. The terrorist stumbled and twisted on his way down. He lifted his pistol and Barry shot him again, in the face, the little hollow-nosed bullet going in one eye, and coming out above his ear on the other side of his head.
Barry punched out the right combination of numbers and deactivated the alarm.
Working very quickly, Barry put both terrorists in his trailer and resealed the doors. They’d both be gamey by the time he reached the coast, but with any kind of luck, maybe he’d have more bodies to deliver to Ja and Bakhitar by then.
In the big custom sleeper, he stripped, dried off, and changed into warm clothing. He dried off his little .22 auto-loader and loaded the clip up full. Back under the wheel, he pulled slowly
out of the parking area and rolled back onto the super slab, heading for Wyoming.
He turned on the radio and tuned into a country station, turning the volume up on a song by Dolly and Linda and Emmy Lou.
By the time the station wagon was reported to the cops and they ran the license plates, Barry would be well into the next state, and no one back at the truck stop would have any special reason to remember him.
Barry smiled.
All in all, he thought, it had been a very productive afternoon.
26
The rain changed to snow about fifty miles from the Wyoming border. Big, fat, wet flakes that were already sticking due to the rapidly falling temperature. By the time he’d rolled into the outskirts of Cheyenne, the roads were becoming icy and Barry said to hell with it and pulled over to get him a room at the first nice motel he found.
He could have traveled north a few miles and nighted at an AFB, but he thought to hell with that. He had all this super electronic warning gear, so let it work while he rested.
He patted the back of the trailer on his way to check into the motel. “Nighty night, boys. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Sometime during the night the storm blew out of the state and went roaring on eastward. But just to be on the safe side, as far as the weather went, Barry pointed the nose of the Kenworth south on Interstate 25, and stayed on it.
It was still slow going until he got south of Denver, and there, he began to make a little time. He spent the night in a motel in New Mexico and had not spotted any tails all day.
As it so happens this early in the season, the next day turned out to be shirtsleeve weather as Barry headed south, picking up Interstate 40 west at Albuquerque.
Those two in the back were really going to be ripe if Barry didn’t do something and do it quick.
18 Wheel Avenger Page 18