by Brad Taylor
He sat stunned for a second, then looked away and stood up. When he returned her gaze, he was all business, but she got one last glimpse past the portcullis into the man. She saw a brief flicker of fear. Real, true fear in a man she thought incapable of the emotion. A fear of her leaving.
It was enough.
He said, “Jennifer, I can’t make you do what I want. I can only ask that you hang on until this is over. You know the history of this operation, know the terrorist by sight, and know the team. I don’t have any way to prove I’m not a monster, but even if you think I am, stay on to save American lives. This isn’t over, and we need you and your capabilities.”
She pretended to consider the request for a moment, but she already knew her answer.
“Okay, Pike,” she said. “Because you asked. No other reason. But when this is done, we need to talk about the future. About our company and the Taskforce.”
He nodded and said, “As you wish.”
He was ten feet away before the meaning of the quote from The Princess Bride sank in.
61
K
eshawn sat in the passenger seat, sweating in the heat, Carl behind the wheel, the engine of the old Delta 88 idling roughly on the dirt road facing Highway 301. Crammed around him were five other men, all waiting for the cleaning van to pass. Keshawn rolled down his window to release the stench from the collective body odor of the group. The men had conducted a reconnaissance the day before and confirmed Carl’s information while Keshawn had driven all night to New York City and back again. He’d managed to link up with a mutual friend who had obtained what he wanted from inside Attica.
He could see Rafik fidgeting in the rearview mirror, and knew he was having second thoughts.
He has no qualms about sending a bum to my door for me to butcher but now acts like a kid about to shoplift.
Keshawn knew it was simply because Rafik was no longer in control. That now he was at the mercy of the men around him.
Rafik said, “How sure are you that they’ll let us back on base?”
Carl answered, “Pretty sure. The van got searched on its way in this morning. We stop it right after it leaves, keep the driver, and go right back through the gate, saying we left something. We’re only two minutes from the gate, and they’ll remember the van leaving and probably just wave us through. If they don’t, we simply haul ass when they direct us to the search area.”
“What if they don’t let us leave? What if we’re stopped and searched right there? They’ll see the guns.”
Carl turned around to face Rafik. “Hey, I know what the fuck I’m talking about. The guards are hired security at a backwater post. They won’t—”
“There’s the van,” Keshawn said.
Carl swung around and hit the gas, causing the car to jump out into the two-lane highway. Keshawn looked to the rear.
“You’re clear. No cars coming behind.”
Carl rode right up on the bumper of the van, flashing his lights and waving his arm out the window. The van tapped its brake lights and slowed, then continued on at the reduced speed.
Keshawn said, “Need to get them to stop before we reach the town of Bowling Green.”
Carl swung into the left lane and pulled abreast of the driver. Keshawn leaned out the open window and frantically pointed at the rear of the van, as if something catastrophic was about to occur. He saw the driver, an obese woman of about fifty, look wide-eyed at him for a second, then nod with understanding.
“Get back behind her before she rolls down the window and asks what’s wrong.”
Carl slowed, letting the van continue on. It traveled for about a quarter mile before pulling into a dirt road threading its way into a swamp.
Carl pulled in behind it, blocking any exit back to Highway 301.
Keshawn said, “Everyone take a weapon, but only the two silenced ones can shoot. Understood?”
The men, now grim at the coming task, nodded. Rafik started to say something when Keshawn cut him off. “Let’s go.”
All four doors swung open, the attackers boiling out quickly, two on the left and three on the right. Keshawn ran straight to the driver’s-side door, stopping it before it could open. He dropped any pretense of a charade, pointing his suppressed Ruger Mark II at the driver’s head.
“Get out of the van. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She threw her hands in the air, stuttering nonsense.
“Shut the fuck up or you’re dead.”
She lapsed into silence, her eyes wide and wet. He moved her to the rear of the van and turned her security over to another man. Walking back to the front, he saw four men on their knees with their hands behind their back. Looking closer, he saw they were really just boys. None over the age of twenty. Three black and one white. Two of them were looking around with grins on their faces, apparently unaware of what was occurring.
Carl said, “Let’s get them tied up and into the woods.”
Keshawn pulled him out of earshot of the boys, Rafik following close behind. “We can’t just tie them up,” Keshawn said. “They’re not going home.”
“Huh? Keshawn, those two are simple. They didn’t do anything. We said we’d tie them up and do the robbery. No unnecessary killing.”
“It’s necessary. They’ve seen our skin. They’ll blow our getaway.”
Carl grew agitated. “These guys are the people we’re trying to help. They’re not a bunch of rich fat cats. They’re the people getting fucked over. The reason we’re stealing the explosives in the first place.”
Keshawn said, “I don’t want to do it either, but your plan is the only way we will succeed now, and the plan is based on the police chasing a ghost. They’ve seen us. They’ll be able to break the deception we want. I’m sorry.”
Carl paused for a moment, then said, “I’m not killing a bunch of kids. You want to do it, you do it.”
Rafik spoke for the first time. “Keshawn is correct. Sometimes the good must be sacrificed along with the bad. That’s just the way of it.”
His words brought back a memory of Beth, sending a bolt of rage through Keshawn. He whirled and jabbed his pistol at Rafik, holding it by the barrel.
“You keep talking about sacrifice like we don’t know what the fuck that is. You’re so pure, you fucking kill them.”
Rafik grew rigid, staring hard at Keshawn for a moment. He took the pistol and held it in the air, the barrel pointed in between the boys on the ground and Keshawn himself, as if he were making a decision. Keshawn felt a trickle of fear, but didn’t back down. Abruptly, Rafik turned and walked back to the group, kicking the nearest boy in the back.
“Get up. All of you get up. Start walking down the road.”
Carl remained quiet until the group was out of sight around a bend.
“Man, I don’t know about this,” he said. “This isn’t what the chaplain talked about.”
Keshawn kept his gaze down the road where the boys had disappeared. “It’s exactly what he talked about. I’ve sacrificed too much already. We’re on the path now. No turning back.”
62
S
itting in the back of the van, Rafik felt his adrenaline rise as he saw the approaching gate, feeling exactly like he had at the Alexandria airport only days before. On the short drive to the post, Keshawn had managed to get the men back under control and back on the mission. Rafik himself had wisely said nothing. He was pleased that his prison recruitment had provided so many unintended benefits, such as the knowledge of A.P. Hill, but he was growing increasingly concerned at their commitment. They had no sense of the history of Islam, no inherent belief in its righteousness, and appeared to be straddling their old world and his new one. Having not grown up in a Muslim society, they were unlike Adnan and other recruits who inherently knew Islam was the path, only needing to be convinced of the merits of jihad. It was a complication he hadn’t fully considered before. On top of that, every one of these American dogs had a rebellious streak, as if they were s
erving at their own pleasure instead of God’s. It made him rethink the need to keep everything compartmented, even within this cell.
As the van pulled abreast of the gate guard, Rafik lowered himself behind the driver’s seat, where it would be hardest for him to be seen, keeping his eyes on Keshawn in the passenger seat.
He heard the guard speak. “What’re you doing back?”
The driver said, “Hey, Bill, one of my boys left his Nintendo DS at the headquarters building. Can I run back up there? We just left five minutes ago.”
Rafik heard her voice quaver and warble, sounding to him about as disingenuous as possible. He wondered if she was sweating and wide-eyed at the thought of Keshawn’s pistol in her belly. He tensed up, gripping his own pistol in preparation for the coming fight. Instead, he felt the van begin to roll forward, hearing Carl say, “All right! Head to the police station.”
They took their first left and wound up a hill, driving past the headquarters building before stopping in front of a squat, one-story brick structure that housed the post police. In a rehearsed move, Carl and Rafik exited the rear of the van, bringing along two mop buckets and mops.
They entered the building with Carl leading the way. Ahead, Rafik could see a woman manning a central desk. Behind her he could see a man in the room Carl had described as the JSID alarm monitoring station. Otherwise, the place appeared empty.
The woman said, “We’ve already been cleaned today. You guys can go home.”
Carl stopped with his bucket while Rafik continued past the desk to the room beyond.
“Hey, I said we’ve already been done today. Stop.”
Carl reached down into his bucket and pulled out the other Mark II, shooting her in the back of the head, the hollow-point.22 long rifle mushrooming in her brain but not exiting the front. She dropped like a stone, the loudest noise from the assault occurring when her equipment belt cracked onto the hard floor.
Rafik continued straight ahead, entering the far room. The man inside stood up, saying, “You guys aren’t supposed to clean in here. It’s a controlled area. Someone should have told you—”
His words were cut off by Rafik’s suppressed pistol spitting out two rounds, one cratering the man’s nose while the other entered his forehead.
Rafik didn’t bother checking the body. He locked the door from the inside, leaving the mop bucket and returning to find Carl moving the woman’s body to a closet.
“We need to haul ass,” Carl said. “Anyone comes in here while we’re at the ASP and we’ll be in a world of hurt.”
Rafik helped him fold the body into the closet, saying, “How long?”
“No telling. Let’s go.”
Racing back to the van, Carl ordered the woman into the back, taking the wheel himself. Reaching the main road, he took a left instead of a right, driving deeper into A.P. Hill. Winding through the woods, they came upon an open area, where Rafik saw row after row of what appeared to be enormous dirt mounds covered in grass, the face of each buttressed with large concrete shielding. The bunkers.
They drove right up to the front gate, repeating the ruse they had used at the police station, leaving behind another two dead bodies. Minutes later, Rafik stood inside one of the enormous concrete structures, marveling at the treasure trove of death around him. Artillery rounds, anti-tank rockets, and case after case of other types of explosives. If we only had something larger. It’s not fair to leave this to the infidels.
He was brought back to the present when Carl said, “Hey, they got claymore mines in here. We can use the M57 to command detonate whatever you’ve got. You want that instead of time fuse?”
Having left Farouk—his remaining explosives expert—behind at the apartment, Rafik was unsure how to answer. “What do you mean, ‘command detonate’?”
“With the time fuse, you set it and wait for the fuse to burn down. The longer the fuse, the more time it takes. It requires a little precision cutting if you need the explosives to go off on a set schedule. With the M57, you set off the cap by electricity, letting you basically press a button for it to go off.”
“Yes. That will be perfect. Let’s load them up as well.”
“How many?”
“Can they be used only once?”
“No. Over and over again.”
Rafik paused, knowing that giving the answer would be giving away the number of teams. He decided to lie. “Load ten.”
He helped the men with the explosives, sweating in the oppressive heat outside the bunker. Minutes later, they were driving away from the ASP, staying clear of the main road by winding through the various camps located within the post. Passing through one such camp, Rafik saw a flash reflect off the windshield. Looking to his rear, he was shocked to see a police car following them, its light bar flashing red and blue.
“Shit,” Carl said. “Stay cool. I was in a ten-mile-an-hour troop zone. Probably just getting me for going too fast. I forgot how trigger-happy these fuckers are about speeding.”
He continued on as if he hadn’t noticed the police car, pulling over only after he was through the camp and back into a wooded section, out of view. He rolled down the window, asking Keshawn, “How many in the car?”
“Just one,” Keshawn said. “If he comes out with his pistol drawn, we’ll know it’s not for speeding.”
They waited, the fight-or-flight response building palpably. The police officer opened his door and began to saunter toward the driver’s side, weapon still holstered. Carl leaned out and said, “Is there a problem, officer?”
Still walking, the officer said, “You work here long? You know the posted speed limit is ten miles an hour through our camps?”
When he reached the door, Carl said, “You know how stupid that fucking speed limit is, asshole? My van won’t even idle that slow.”
Before the officer could react, Keshawn leaned over and shot him in the face, the van jerking forward at a high rate of speed as his body folded to the ground.
They raced through the woods, avoiding all other camps, Rafik once again relieved that his recruit knew where he was going and what to avoid. They reached the back gate at the northern reach of the post, now chained shut and abandoned because of security procedures following 9/11. Keshawn exited the van and made short work of the locks with a bolt cutter, then swung open the chain-link gate. Carl drove through, winding along a dirt road until he reached the clean van they had stashed earlier.
While the vans were cross-loaded, Keshawn and Rafik took the woman into the woods, Keshawn assuring her that they were just going to tie her up like the others. She blubbered and sobbed, but walked in front of him to her death. Rafik could not understand why. He had seen it before when executing prisoners. They went meekly as kittens, preferring to believe the paltry lie they’d been told instead of the truth staring them in the face. It was why Islam would always defeat the infidel. When faced with overwhelming odds, the kafir simply didn’t have the strength of faith to fight back.
Keshawn told the woman to kneel with her hands behind her back. Rafik saw that his eyes were watering, and wondered again about the man’s own strength of faith.
The woman, only now beginning to realize her fate, began to wail, begging for her life. A hitch in his voice, Keshawn said, “I’m sorry for the sacrifice you must make. Allahu Akbar.”
Keshawn pulled the trigger, the small caliber of the.22 punching a pencil-size hole in the woman’s forehead. She toppled over with a look of surprise on her face, as if she still couldn’t believe he would kill her.
63
S
itting inside the underground parking garage in Clarendon outside of Washington, D.C., Jennifer and I had to wait until Buckshot successfully badged in through the key-card access on the first door, followed by Retro or Decoy using the retinal scan at the second door, before we could sprint through the double barrier, using their precious seconds of authorization to get inside. It had taken longer than I’d wanted to get back home. Waiting to trans
fer the captured pilot, we’d been forced to spend a night in Shannon, Ireland, which would ordinarily have been an opportunity to kick back a little, but this time it felt like I was giving the terrorists an edge with every passing second. I was itching to see what Kurt and the Taskforce had learned while we were twiddling our thumbs over a Guinness, which is where this building came in. The parking garage ostensibly serviced a firm called Blaisdell Consulting but in reality was the headquarters for the Taskforce. A block long and four stories tall, it housed the brain trust of all Taskforce activities, from the hackers and analysts we leveraged while conducting operations, to the headquarters of the commander himself.
Since I was no longer an active-duty member, I technically wasn’t allowed inside, but since I also used to be a team leader, we figured I could sneak in without anyone freaking out. At least, that’s how I’d convinced the team to bend operating procedures. Stretching it further, I figured Jennifer had heard enough stories about the place that actually seeing it wouldn’t be a breach. Jennifer, of course, felt like I had an elastic sense of the rules.
Sitting in the Suburban, moments before we entered, she said, “Pike, there’s a reason I’m not cleared for this. I don’t mind staying here.”
“Fuck that. Come on. You’ve earned it.”
I saw Buckshot open the first door, allowing Retro inside to the second door and the iris scanner. Decoy signaled us.
“Let’s go. Stick right behind me.”
Buckshot began a hand countdown, then swiped the card reader again. Hopefully, Retro was synchronized inside, or we’d be caught. Buckshot opened the outer door, and I dragged Jennifer through, seeing the second door held open by Retro. We made it into the hallway beyond and waited for the three to catch up.
Minutes later, we entered the Ops Center, looking for Kurt. I found him talking to a couple of analysts. Or more correctly, he saw me and went ballistic.