Total Mayhem

by John Gilstrap

  “You want to tell me just what the hell that was about?” Kramer asked.

  “I’d love to,” Jonathan said, “but I can’t. But I know this, gentlemen. Sometime in the next week or two, that asshole is going to bring violence to Fisherman’s Cove, and we need to be ready for it.”

  “Come on, Dig, you’ve got to give me more than that,” Kramer said.

  “Boxers will beat me up for having told you too much as it is.” Jonathan had known Doug Kramer since they were kids, and while the chief didn’t know the specifics of Security Solutions’ covert side, he had to be aware that it existed, if only through osmosis.

  Something changed in Kramer’s face as a thought dawned. “Does this have anything to do with that string of shootings and bombings all over the country?”

  Jonathan took his time as he considered the wisdom of answering. The only way to truly keep a secret was to keep the damn secret. He threw a look to Big Guy, who offered a little nod. “You’re in this deep, Boss,” he said. “A little deeper can’t hurt but so much.”

  “Okay, here it is,” Jonathan said. “Officially, I have no idea if Mr. Vitale, or whatever his real name is, has anything to do with . . . the terrorist incidents.” He thought it unwise to reveal the name Retribution, though he could not articulate why. “Unofficially—and all of you need to keep this close to your vests—I suspect he’s involved.”

  “How?” Kramer asked. “How is he involved, and how do you know?”

  “I said I suspect, Doug, not that I know, and I’m not being difficult.”

  “Yet you know he’s bringing violence to town.”

  “That’s a suspicion, too,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s not what you said.”

  “Call it a strong suspicion.”

  “Dammit, Digger,” Kramer said, not a shout, but close to it. “It’s my job to protect this town. If you’ve got information—”

  “I just told you everything I can tell you,” Jonathan said. “Damn near everything I know.”

  “Look, Dig, I can’t get the county or state boys here to reinforce us without some kind of details.”

  “You won’t get them,” Jonathan said. “I’m not being obtuse, here, Doug. If the violence comes, we’ll be on our own for the first shots. After that, you can call the cavalry. I just can’t give you any more than that. When I can, I swear to you that I will.”

  “You know I’ll be there, sir.” This from the first guard at the door, Rick Hare.

  “I do know that, Rick, and I appreciate it.”

  The second guard to arrive from inside, Charlie Keeling, said, “Me, too.”

  The third guard, Oscar Thompkins, threw his hat in the ring, as well. He was a supervisor of the security team up the hill at RezHouse. “What do I tell the rest of the team?” he asked through a Tennessee accent as think as honey.

  “Tell your security teams the truth, just as I told you,” Jonathan said. “I’ll ask Father Dom to explain it all to the faculty and staff. We’ll sell it as heightened security precautions.”

  “What’s our time frame?” Keeling asked.

  Jonathan shook his head. “When I know, I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” Kramer said. His face had reddened, and he’d pressed his lips into a thin line. It was his mad face, and Jonathan knew from experience that a mad Kramer could become a bad Kramer. “You and I need to talk,” he said. He glared at the rest of the crowd, then added, “Privately.” He turned and started walking toward the marina across the street.

  As Jonathan moved to follow, Boxers stepped out, too, but Jonathan waved him off. Doug Kramer was one of those guys who needed to vent when he was angry, the sooner the better. Jonathan knew he was going to get a stern talking-to, and if Big Guy was there, he’d get offended by proxy, and everything would turn ugly.

  Kramer walked all the way down to the end of what locals called Millionaires’ Row, the long dock with extra clearance to allow for the kind of yachts that common folk rarely see, let alone sail in. As Jonathan followed, he was reminded yet again how much he wished that he didn’t hate boating.

  Kramer never looked back to see if Jonathan was following as he led the way past the few vessels that were moored and on to the very end of the dock.

  “You’re not gonna try to drown me, are you, Doug?” Jonathan quipped.

  Kramer whirled. He looked ready to fight. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Jonathan kept his distance. “I need more than that.”

  Kramer planted his hands on his Sam Browne belt, and for half a second, Jonathan wondered if they were going to have a gunfight. “Look, Dig, I know that you do crazy shit through your business, and I know that most of it involves violence. You’re the only guy I know who returns from every business trip with bruises and a new limp. I don’t ask questions because I respect your privacy, and frankly, I don’t think I want to know the answers.”

  “But you think I owe you this one,” Jonathan said.

  The comment seemed to knock Kramer off-balance, as if he had a speech prepared and wanted to deliver his own punch line. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think you do. And if you think you can’t trust me with a secret that can save this little burg from harm, then you’re not the friend I thought you were.”

  The words hit hard. Jonathan wanted to push back, but when he put himself in Doug’s shoes, he knew he’d be furious. Like Jonathan, Doug had grown up in Fisherman’s Cove, and the better part of three generations of his family still lived here. They were the ones who would be placed in danger if Retribution came.

  Jonathan heaved a deep breath and walked closer so he could speak as quietly as possible. “Doug, you are about to be the fifth person in the world to know what I’m about to tell you, and right up front I warn you that I cannot and will not tell you how I obtained my information.”

  “Let me guess. And after you tell me, you’ll have to shoot me.”

  Jonathan wasn’t in the mood. “We think we’ve found a way to track one member of this terrorist group. Not the guy who was just here, but another one.”

  “Where is he now?” Doug asked.

  “Not here,” Jonathan said. “Beyond that, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “You said you think you found a way,” Doug parroted. “That means maybe you haven’t.”

  “Maybe we haven’t. But I’m confident that we have.”

  “Why haven’t you told the police? Are they following him, too?”

  “Let’s say that the authorities are aware and leave it at that, okay?” To open up the can of worms about warrantless searches and illegal interdiction would be a step too far.

  “So, what about the guy who was just here? Vitale? Should I arrest him?”

  “If you can think of a charge, knock yourself out,” Jonathan said.

  “How about fomenting terrorism?” Doug said.

  “Is that even a thing?” Jonathan asked. “And when I play back the conversation in my head, I don’t remember hearing him say the T-word.”

  “Then what the hell was he doing here?”

  “Trying to intimidate me, is my guess.” Jonathan took a deep, noisy breath and rubbed the back of his head. “Let me ask you this, Doug. On Black Friday, how many terror attacks were there, do you remember?”

  Kramer scowled as he thought about it. “Six, right? All simultaneously.”

  “Right,” Jonathan said. “And for the second attack there were only five. My team and I had something to do with that reduction in number. And when one happens in the future, there will be only four. We had a lot to do with that, too.”

  Realization bloomed in the chief’s face. “You’ve been hunting them down? Killing them?”

  Jonathan rocked his head noncommittally. “Not exactly, but that’s close. My concern is that only two people outside my immediate team could possibly know that, and at least one of them is beyond reproach. I have no idea who Vitale really is, but he wanted me to know that he knows what I’m doing. If
I let him do his thing in peace, he’ll leave Fisherman’s Cove alone.”

  Kramer looked at his feet and then out at the river. “You’re not going to do that, are you?”

  “I can’t Doug. I can’t stop all of them, but I’ll do what I can. If they come here, they come here. And we’ll fight them off.”

  Kramer’s head snapped up as another thought occurred to him. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re using this town as bait. You’re trying to draw them here.”

  “That wasn’t even on my mind a half hour ago,” Jonathan said. “But now that you mention it . . .”

  Kramer’s shoulders sagged, and he closed his eyes as he looked at the sky. “Oh, goddammit, Digger. Maybe I should arrest you.”

  Jonathan chuckled. “Do you really want Boxers to blow the walls of the jail?”

  Kramer fell silent for the better part of thirty seconds as he stared out over the water. “Okay, then” he said. “Sounds like this thing is inevitable. So, what do we do?”

  Jonathan hiked his shoulders to his ears and arched his eyebrows. “We develop a plan,” he said. Most obvious thing in the world.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Fred Kellner pondered his latest instructions as he strolled among the tourists and passersby that packed the park at the end of America Avenue. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, this strip of land on the Potomac River was a little-known nothing of a largely unoccupied swamp called Oxon Hill, Maryland. Now, it was called Capital Harbor, and the swamp had been transformed into a pretentious little city. Grass and trees had been transformed into concrete and steel, and rental rates were astronomical—for reasons that made no sense because the place was impossible to get to during rush hour, and in their infinite wisdom, the developers had decided to block the most impressive views of the river with views of other buildings.

  Even the buildings with the best view really had no view at all. The second favorite tourist draw in Capital Harbor was a God-awful monstrosity called the Potomac Eye, a two-hundred-foot-tall Ferris wheel that provided none of the thrill of the amusement park original yet cost fifteen dollars for a once-around.

  When Iceman’s text specifically mentioned Capital Harbor as the site for the next launch, Kellner was at first concerned by the proximity to his own backyard, only one state away. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was the perfect venue for maximum impact. Tomorrow, on Halloween night, the area would be packed with revelers of every age. When the shooting started and the panic spread, they’d crush themselves. The bullets would be only a small part of the damage inflicted.

  At one level, Kellner hated himself for admiring the images such carnage brought to focus in his mind, but it was a thing he could live with. His spot in hell had been reserved a long time ago, so moral trepidation was not in play. Killing one person was fundamentally no different than killing dozens. And after having left over a hundred corpses in a steaming crater in Bluebird, Indiana, now was not the time to turn soft. He had a job to do, and it paid really, really well.

  Kellner shifted his stance as he read the information on the plaque at the base of the Eye. He was getting used to his new look. No fat suit this time, nothing like the costume he wore to kill the girl in Culpeper. This look would have to get him through a couple of days, while at the same time be easily changed out of when the op was completed. Disguises were never his expertise—in fact, Claude had expanded his lifetime knowledge manyfold—but he thought he’d hit the highlights. The bridge of his nose was thicker, his jaw pointier. Rather than wearing a wig, he opted to bleach his hair blond and cut it down to an old-school crew cut, complete with the flattop. The wig would come later during exfil. The sunglasses were old-school technology, but he couldn’t do without them. Even if they did no good in the long run, they made him feel hidden.

  He was to meet someone here in just under an hour. According to the message he’d received, his asset—no mention of man or woman—would be wearing a green jacket and a red Washington Nationals hat. He would ask a specific question and receive a specific answer, and from there, they would work together to plan the Halloween operation.

  Kellner wasn’t sure how he felt about stepping beyond the lone wolf paradigm, but he was never asked. At this stage, his choices were literally to do or die. Or, on a really bad day, both. Historically, he wasn’t known for working and playing well with others.

  While he waited for the meetup, he thought he’d take a ride in his future target. He paid his money at the ticket gate and walked right up to the waiting gondola. With no crowd to speak of, he wondered how they could afford to run the attraction all day. A pretty young girl named Molly, according to her name tag, met him on the loading platform, which was little more than a diamond-plate strip of decking that linked two sets of metal stairs, one on each end.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” she said. “Please watch your step.”

  Kellner smiled. “Thank you,” he said. The gondola had a lot in common with its cousins at ski resorts around the world. It was a perpetual motion machine, never stopping its oh-so-slow progress. As it moved through the loading zone, the double doors on the opposite side of the platform slid open of their own accord, presumably to let passengers step off, and a few seconds later, the doors on his side opened.

  “Please watch your step,” Molly repeated.

  “I’ll do my best,” Kellner said. He wondered how many times she spoke those words in a day and whether she could turn them off in her sleep.

  Kellner helped himself to the padded bench seat on the left-hand side of the gondola. An identical bench seat lined the opposite wall. The rules he’d read outside on the sign mandated a maximum occupancy of twelve people. “It’s a long damn ride for the eight people who can’t sit,” Kellner mumbled.

  He’d been seated for a few seconds before the doors slid shut, and then he was off.

  He’d positioned himself to rotate backward, watching the harbor development fall away rather than facing the river and maybe revealing the DC skyline from above the trees. As he rose, he noted that the gondola had been built for maximum visibility. But for a strip of steel that ran around the belly of the enclosure and a substantial steel cap overhead that kept the roof attached, the entire enclosure was made of plexiglass—or some more modern version of it.

  When he rapped on the plexiglass with his knuckle, he was pleased with what he found. It was thick enough to be weatherproof, but nowhere near thick enough to be bulletproof. This made the task ahead many times easier.

  Shooting through glass was always something of a crapshoot. The crystalline structure of glass often rendered trajectory and penetration difficult to predict. Throw in the fact that the glass was installed at an angle—as car windshields are—and a carefully aimed shot could zing away ten or twenty degrees from the intended impact point.

  Plexiglass, on the other hand—or any other polycarbonate product—was composed of solid, poured, and molded sheets, and the molecules were happy to give way to the physics of a rifle bullet. This would be too easy.

  With his marksmanship guaranteed, now he needed a sniper’s nest. And a single glance at the Maryland skyline told him exactly the spot. Three blocks back from the water’s edge, one building was three stories taller than the buildings in front of it.

  With his phone, Kellner zoomed in on the building and snapped a couple of pictures. With the magnification, he saw everything else he needed to know.

  * * *

  Doug Kramer, Boxers, Gail, and Jonathan leaned heavily on the mahogany conference table that lined the wall opposite Jonathan’s desk, studying a map of Fisherman’s Cove. It wasn’t especially detailed—more the kind you’d get from an auto club—but they didn’t need to see details of the town they knew so well.

  “Let’s look at this from a tactical point of view,” Jonathan said. “These are hit-and-run teams. They want to come in, wreak as much havoc as they can in as short a time as possible, then get out in one piece. They’re not suicide bombers, a
nd I don’t think they’re interested in being occupiers.”

  “How much of what you said is what you know and how much is wild-ass guess?” Kramer asked.

  “More knowledge than guesswork,” Jonathan said. “We’ve been following these assholes for a while. There’s a pattern. One guy outright told us about the family threat, and the other guy cut his own throat rather than be caught. That suggests a lot of leverage.”

  He turned back to the map. “There are three basic routes of attack,” he explained. “Land, air, or sea. If they come in by sea, their exfil options will be limited to virtually nothing, so I think that’s unlikely.”

  “They could boost cars for exfil,” Boxers pointed out.

  “That’s a lot of extra time,” Gail said. “A lot of exposure.”

  “But it’s possible,” Jonathan conceded.

  “Do you really think an attack by air is feasible?” Kramer asked.

  “Drones,” Boxers said. “You can turn them into little bombers.”

  “But what’s the range?” Jonathan asked.

  Big Guy rocked his hand noncommittally. “Half mile for a civilian model, maybe a little more.”

  “So, that makes it a land attack.” Jonathan said

  “If and when they come, we assume they come in by the road,” Boxers said. “There’s only two of them into town. We can set up roadblocks.”

  Kramer recoiled from the thought. “What are we going to tell the residents? We don’t want to spark a panic.”

  Jonathan unbent from the table and stood tall to stretch his back. “Can we increase awareness without sparking a panic?” he asked.

  “You mean tell people that we’re going to be attacked, but not to get too concerned about it?” Kramer formed the question as an absurdity.

  “Not everybody,” Jonathan said. “But the right people. People who won’t run from a fight. You know who they are. Start with the vets who still salute during the Fourth of July parades.”

  “The people who’ve lived in Fisherman’s Cove their whole lives,” Gail said.