Everything that Arzee knew told him that Reaper should have done exactly what they wanted, let go of the weapons and delivered more, all to get his family back. The plan had even accounted for the police or other authorities, removing any support for Reaper from that source. The situation should have completely subjugated Reaper to their control, and it hadn’t.
That Reaper’s family would be the control for the ex-SEAL was something that Arzee had been counting on. Paxtun had approved of his plan, indeed had been enthusiastic about it. It would not only replace the weapons they needed—there was a delicious irony about using the man that had cost Paxtun so much, and costing him even more.
Paxtun had been so certain of the plan that Reaper’s family had been sent on to the facilities on South Wolverine Island. It was the most secure site they had available to them and was where Paxtun could keep a personal eye on the hostages. Paxtun was already on the island and Reaper’s wife and kid had arrived there the night before.
Arzee had already contacted Paxtun that morning—calling him over a prepaid cellular phone that had been part of a bulk purchase made elsewhere in the country. Speaking in Arabic and in coded phrases added security to a point that seemed extreme. But nothing was too extreme for the group of operatives that had been sent over by the overseas investors that were backing Paxtun’s and Arzee’s enterprises.
Just the existence of the operatives, and especially their leader, had been kept a very closely guarded secret. Amman and Nicholas were Arzee’s cousins and he trusted them for his most sensitive operations. Along with two more family members, his cousins Hadeed and Joseph, they were the only ones who had a direct hand in the kidnapping of Reaper’s family and the extortion of the guns. But his cousins knew only that the operation had been done partly for revenge—something they could understand very well. But they hadn’t been trusted enough to know the significance of Ishmael or his men.
The leader of the action group had taken the kunyah Ishmael for his name during the operation. Historically, Ishmael was the son of the biblical Abraham and Hagar. Hagar was the handmaiden of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. According to Islamic heritage, Ishmael was considered the father of the Arab people. It was a fitting name for someone who felt that he was going to help lead the true believers of Islam into a new world free of the infidels and their influence.
This modern Ishmael considered his planned operation to be a sacrifice to Allah. He had a twelve-man crew of hand-picked men to help him complete his mission. For their kunyah names, the men of Ishmael’s group had taken names of the sons of the legendary Ishmael. The whole group was known as the Sons of Ishmael and preferred to be addressed as such by Paxtun, Arzee, or anyone else in Paxtun’s organization.
The Sons of Ishmael were an action cell of al Qaeda, and they had a significant operation coming up in the United States. Arzee knew none of the details of the mission, target, or timing of the operation, and he didn’t want to know any. The eyes and faces of every member of Ishmael’s cell that Arzee had met had shone with a dedication that bordered on the fanatical. It would not be safe to cause any difficulty at all to such people.
The only thing that Arzee was certain of was that Ishmael was terrifying. He considered his mission to be like the sacrifice of his namesake, the biblical son of Abraham. According to Islamic legend, it was Ishmael who Abraham had been going to sacrifice on God’s order, not Isaac. Legend further stated that Ishmael had been spared through God’s intervention, and that his sons and their descendants became the first true Arab people.
Ishmael had told Paxtun and Arzee that he felt he was going to help re-create the Arab people as a major power in the world. The United States would be forced to leave the Islamic world and the Middle East. Free of the influence of the infidels and the Great Satan, the Islamic world would soon grow to become the dominant culture of the entire planet.
That level of fanaticism was hard to face. If Ishmael considered someone a threat, or even a possible threat, to the cell or their mission, he would kill them without hesitation. Right now, Ishmael was up at the mansion on the island with Paxtun. The more than 250 miles that separated Detroit from that island in Lake Michigan still felt far too close for Arzee’s mental comfort.
Both Paxtun and Arzee had converted to Muwah-hidan, what the West and many Arabs called Wah-habism, in Afghanistan. The austere, conservative form of Islam was what their rescuers had believed and it had appealed to Paxtun over the months he had spent in the mountains of that desolate country. Paxtun had in his turn convinced Arzee that conservative Islam was the way, though Arzee may have also been swayed by the appeal of the huge amount of money offered by Paxtun and his proposals.
Arzee considered himself a true believer in Islam. He knew that the path to righteousness required adhering to the dogma of his chosen faith. But he was not a religious fanatic. His years on the streets of Dearborn and Detroit had influenced him greatly. His religious convictions were not as solid as he thought they were.
There was an unbelievable amount of money to be made in the various criminal activities of Paxtun’s organization. The drug distribution network Paxtun and Arzee had developed was making huge profits with relatively little personal risk to either man. The money had proven worthwhile to everyone involved. Even the Taliban had been happy to take a cut of the profits from the product of the Afghan poppy fields.
Now the military actions of the United States had taken the Taliban out of the picture. But it had not eliminated al Qaeda as a functional organization. Paxtun and Arzee had been told that they would support Ishmael and his men—and the demand could not be refused.
So the organization had been hard at work bringing in Ishmael and his men to the United States. A training and staging area had been prepared and set up at the private island in Lake Michigan. The most recent group of cell members, Ishmael’s “sons,” had been sent up north to the island some days earlier. Not having them hiding out at the Factory, acting as janitorial and maintenance staff for any onlookers, was the only good thing that had happened to Arzee in the last few days.
The loss of the weapons shipment looked to have been a disaster for Arzee and Paxtun. Paxtun was going to have to explain to Ishmael how new security procedures were being put into place by the Office of Homeland Security. Those procedures and new technologies were intended specifically to find such shipments of weapons and ammunition as the one that had been seized. It was while Paxtun was explaining that to Ishmael that Arzee was supposed to be arranging for new firepower.
Right now, Arzee had their resident drug chemist hard at work making high-quality explosives to replace some of what had been lost. As far as the guns went, they already had the weapons from the gun shop. They still had Reaper’s wife and son as prisoners and could force the SEAL to do what they wanted. So more of the new weapons should be available by Saturday afternoon.
Paxtun had suggested that Arzee call Reaper and tell him that the clock was still ticking on the deadline for more of the Jackhammer shotguns. Arzee wouldn’t admit it to anyone, not even himself, but he was more than afraid of the SEAL who had chased him down. He wasn’t going to call the cell phone he had left with Reaper. His reason was to make the big SEAL sweat over the fate of his family even more by not hearing anything. The truth was, Arzee didn’t know how he would react if he heard the man’s voice on the phone any time soon.
Arzee believed that once Reaper realized he could do nothing about the situation, he would do what was demanded of him. But the pain Arzee felt in his muscles and bones lessened his faith in the plan. And his most trusted men, his cousins, were in much worse condition than he was.
Nicholas wasn’t too badly injured by his introduction to SEAL close-quarter combat. The private doctor had said that Nicholas should refrain from doing whatever it was that had caused his groin injury. He was lucky there was no permanent damage. But the small man was still walking very gingerly—and sitting very carefully.
Amman had been another matter. His left
forearm had been severely damaged by the knife that Reaper had used to nail him to that counter top. It had taken both hands for Nicholas to pull that knife out of the table, and he had done more damage to his cousin’s arm in the process. If Nicholas hadn’t used that same knife to cut a chunk of carpet to wrap around the wound, Amman might have bled to death before he had gotten back to the Factory.
As it was, Amman had a large bandage wrapped around his left arm and was taking pills for the pain. The two cousins were only good for standing guard around the offices until they healed up. But at least they could be trusted to watch the new project that was moving along well. The project looked as if it would be yielding a profit soon.
The offices and quarters Arzee used were on the sixth floor of the old auto plant. The bulk of the sixth floor, at the top of the building, had been the paint shop. That was where a clandestine laboratory had been set up in one of the old paint booths. The ventilation and filtering system prevented any of the fumes from the lab escaping into the atmosphere in a detectable form.
Fazul Daoud, the graduate student in organic chemistry from a local university, had been cultivated by Arzee and Paxtun in order to manufacture designer drugs for the organization. Having the young chemist and the laboratory available had proven a possible lifesaver when it had been able to produce a large amount of sophisticated explosives for the Sons of Ishmael.
Ishmael had thought that the ability to manufacture the explosives he wanted had been a very professional backup put in place to fulfill his possible needs. Now that the immediate demand for explosives had been satisfied, the lab was already back to producing more financially lucrative items.
Leaving his offices, Arzee went out the door and across the hallway to the old paint shop. Stairs led up to the offices, the entrance to the stairway being heavy steel fire doors secured with chains and padlocks. The building’s elevators could only be operated with a key—and all but one of them were kept shut down between floors for security.
The only other way to the top floor was to go up a ramp along the north wall of the building. A very heavy steel bar and lock sealed the ramp door. By the time a police raid unit could force access to the floor, any evidence would have been long destroyed. There were five such ramps, originally put in place to move racks of parts from floor to floor while constructing cars. At the top of each ramp were thick steel fire doors. Each door had to be penetrated before finally reaching the sixth floor.
Near the middle of the huge floor at the top of the building, surrounded by racks, conveyors, and the other refuse of heavy manufacturing, were several large steel rooms. The boxlike rooms had wall-sized doors at either end. The doors were kept as securely sealed as every other entrance to the floor. Whole car bodies had been moved in and out of the rooms on racks. Some of the rooms had been set up for painting, others serving as large ovens to bake the paint.
Amman sat outside of a standard door in the side of one of the steel enclosures. He was looking a bit the worse for wear from the expression on his face, and by the sling on his left arm. The big man stood a bit unsteadily as Arzee approached. Then he unlocked the door and opened it for his boss without speaking a word.
Arzee passed into the room, and listened to the sound of the air being sucked through the area by the ventilation system. Along one wall of the enclosure was a rack of bubbling laboratory glassware, tall assemblies of glass, rubber tubing, and metal clamps, all held to a framework of steel rods. There were a dozen of the same apparatus setups all running at once. The tall glass rigs were filled with liquids that bubbled and flowed. On top of each setup was a glass condenser, water flowing through the cooling jacket. The condenser was the only piece of apparatus that Arzee could name, the rest was a complete mystery to him.
But the bubbling mass was not a mystery to Fazul Daoud, the white lab-coated wizard who managed the illicit laboratory. He turned as Arzee came in and raised the protective plastic shield he had over his face.
“Nothing dangerous going on that I should be concerned with, is there?” asked Arzee seeing the shield.
“Not really, sir,” Fazul answered. “It was much more dangerous when I was turning out that pentaerythritol tetranitrate you wanted.”
“The what?”
“I’m sorry sir,” Fazul said. “The PETN high explosive you asked for. The worst part of that was working with the formaldehyde and acetaldehyde to form the precursor. I had to wear a respirator for that. The nitration and purification was straightforward enough.”
“Speak English, Fazul,” Arzee said, “talking like this does not impress me and I don’t have time for it. Now is this procedure going ahead smoothly?”
“Yes, sir,” Fazul said. “Right now, this is just a straightforward extraction. The hydride and ether being used could be very dangerous if mishandled. They are quite flammable, even explosive.”
“You are trusted to prevent any mishandling from happening,” Arzee said. “Now, how long is the process going to take, and how much are you estimating the yield to be?”
“The extraction takes about sixty hours,” Fazul said as he warmed up to his subject. He was completely in his element talking about his laboratory work. “The balance of the process should be completed a day after that. Since this is being done in a laboratory and not on an industrial scale, these Soxhlet Extractors only hold a relatively small charge. I expect the yield to be about thirty-five grams per unit, so between 400 and 450 grams of pure Methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine.”
“That is pure MDMA?” said Arzee. “Raw Ecstasy?”
“Yes, sir,” Fazul said. “The process is much the same as that used by some of the biker gang cookers to crank out their crystal methamphetamine. But their process is crude at best. Our system is much more sophisticated and efficient. The product here is of much greater purity than any other brands available on the street. Once I have diluted the final product down with a buffer and pressed it into tablets, they will be ready for sale. The customers should be well satisfied.”
“These clubbers will pay well for their Ecstasy tablets,” Arzee said. “How long do you expect to take to manufacture the pills themselves?”
“Each thirty-five-gram batch should make about 580 tablets at the popular dosage,” Fazul said. “Using the press and dies does take some time to actually form the final pills. I expect to have several thousand tablets available for you in four days. They’ll be marked and shaped as double-stack white Mitz, a very popular underground brand.”
“Excellent,” Arzee said. He was happy something was working out according to plan for a change. “Do you need any relief or other support?”
“Nothing I can think of, sir,” Fazul said. “The process is pretty straightforward for the extraction. As you can see, the extractors run themselves for the most part. I can get what rest I need well enough as they run.”
Arzee looked at the rows of glassware bubbling away. The liquid would rise in the Soxhlet Extractors until it reached a certain level, then quickly be siphoned off into a large round flask nesting in an electric mantle heater. Each setup would make a quantity of Ecstasy, the popular club and rave drug, that would have a final street value of more than $11,000. And there were twelve setups running at once. Over $130,000 profit would be a good return for a few thousand dollars investment in chemicals and glassware.
Even wholesaling the drug would be more than profitable while minimizing the risk. Maintaining a pure product is how they had cornered the heroin trade. This would be no different. And the process, chemical, and equipment, could even be sold to some of the biker gangs that they worked with on other projects. Arzee had a smile on his face for a change as he headed back down to his offices.
Chapter Twelve
In northern Lake Michigan, almost twenty miles from the closest point of the mainland, is South Wolverine Island. About five miles to the northeast is North Wolverine Island. Covering more than 3,300 acres of ground, South Wolverine Island is shaped like an inverted fat banana with t
he stem end pointing due south and the other end curved over to point northwest. The island is a little over five miles long and about a mile and a half wide. North Wolverine Island, shaped like a straightened comma mark, is two and a half miles long and barely over a mile across at its widest point.
Both islands are covered with trees, brush, and grasslands. There are wide sand beaches at several points along the shoreline of South Wolverine, while North Wolverine is almost completely surrounded by a thin border of sand beach. The grasslands and trees offer good cover and grazing to the herds of deer and other game on the two islands. The only industry that had ever come to the islands was logging, as it had on most of the islands of Lake Michigan during the late 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s.
The logging camps were long gone, but there were still traces of man on both islands. North Wolverine Island had a few cabins along its west shore. On the widest part of the northern end of the island was a 1,000-meter-long grass landing strip for aircraft. The island was covered mostly with grasslands, broken up by patches of scrub brush and low trees. Some small hills rise up from the relatively flat island at its southern end.
South Wolverine Island holds a large area of trees and brush in the rolling ridges that cover over two-thirds of the island. At the southernmost point, separated from the main part of the island by 400 meters of sand, stands a single automated lighthouse. Near the metal-framed light are the remains of an old brick lighthouse along with a single-story structure that had been the living quarters of the lighthouse keeper almost a century earlier.
The decaying structures at the southernmost point of South Wolverine Island are not the only buildings on the island. A mile almost due north of the old lighthouse is a huge two-story mansion built decades earlier. Seeing the island as a summer refuge, a lumber baron had established a large estate on South Wolverine.
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