by Ted Bell
Really hurting now, and wondering if she’d made a mistake turning down that spinal, that epidural, or whatever, but determined to gut it out just like she’d always done ever since she’d been a little girl. One tough cookie, that’s what they’d said about Heather Hintzpeter, and, goddamn it, they were right. Take your spinal and shove it, pal….
She was suddenly surrounded by masked faces. The anesthesiologist was right beside her head, whispering things to her, things that were meant to amuse and relax her, but she had no earthly idea what he was talking about. At the other end of her was her doctor, a young guy just starting out but she had really liked him and trusted him right from the start so everything was going to be okay…
“Push!”
“Okay, good…push on three…and one and two and three—PUSH!”
Heather took another breath—God, it hurt—and got ready to give it another push and then—well, then—
THE WHOLE ROOM SHOOK and there was this loud, horrible noise, like an explosion just outside the delivery room. She saw the doctor’s eyes dart up over his mask, looking at his team, silently urging them to be calm at this critical moment…
“What the hell was that?” one of the nurses asked, clearly afraid.
“Gas main,” another one said. “Or a boiler in the basement. Relax.”
A fried electrical noise inside the walls somewhere, zzzzz-tttt…zzzzz-ttttt.
The lights suddenly went out. There was a deep intake of breath around the table and everyone held it until the lights flickered a few times and finally came on again.
“Generator?” someone asked. “The main power is out?”
“Wait, didn’t that explosion sound like it came from above?” another nurse asked. And there did seem to be dust falling through new cracks in the ceiling…she could see it, feel it on her cheeks.
“Push!” Dr. Sabatini said and by God almighty she pushed like she’d never pushed before for what had to be the thirtieth time . . .
The nurse at her right foot screamed.
The baby? Something horribly wrong with her baby?
No. Someone had just come into the delivery room.
She tried to raise her head to see, but the male anesthesiologist put a hand on her forehead and pushed it down. But she’d already seen him—she’d seen a man all in black. Face hidden by some mask with only eyeholes.
He had a large black gun, held at his waist, and he screamed something unintelligible and then opened fire, a horrible staccato sound, and the people surrounding her delivery table were simply shredded, holes spouting blood in every direction, falling away from the table or sprawled across her body.
Then, silence.
She used her elbows, forced her torso upward, straining, wanting to see, see who would do this, who would come into such a sacred place of childbirth and slaughter, who would…she looked into the black eyes in the black holes of the ski mask and instantly understood that all of it, everything she cherished, all she knew, was lost.
He saw her now, seemed to react to this single head raised from the table, eyes fixed upon him, and he lifted his weapon, aiming to kill her, she knew that, but she didn’t flinch, or defy what fate had decreed; she waited to die. He sighted the gun at her face and now this nightmare would end, and all the while her baby was struggling to be born and so still she pushed, pushed with everything she had, screaming in agony, barely seeing the killer drop his weapon, reach for a cord that dangled from some vaguely recognizable contraption strapped around his waist.
The black figure yanked the cord downward, and the room and all the dead surrounding her, lying across her legs, sprawled upon her belly, inert on the floor, all simply disappeared in one blinding white moment when all was erased and she was hurled backward into a solid wall of pain and then unwanted darkness, even as the bomb’s enormous concussion expelled her child into the new world.
IN ADDITION TO COUNTLESS VICTIMS AND THE BODIES OF THE SEVEN RECENTLY ESCAPED TERRORISTS, ALL MEMBERS OF A RADICAL ISLAMIC GANG CALLING THEMSELVES THE “SWORD OF ALLAH,” POLICE AND RESCUE DOGS ALSO FOUND A LONE FEMALE SURVIVOR AMID THE TWISTED RUBBLE OF WHAT HAD BEEN JACKSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL—AND, THEN, ONLY BECAUSE OF HER NEWBORN BABY’S CRIES.
—MIAMI HERALD
NINE
MIAMI
SERIOUSLY, HARRY, WHAT IN HELL DOES Langley brass think they’re doing, wasting a precious resource like me? And hell, you, too?” Stokely Jones said to Harry Brock. “Whole town is blowing up and every damn day they send us out on these dipshit stakeouts? We’re overqualified for this kid stuff, man. Must be twenty feds down here from D.C. working the Memorial Hospital case.”
“Try forty,” Harry said. He knew the president.
America had a new president now, Tom McCloskey, the tall, rugged, former Colorado rancher who had been the vice president in President Jack McAfee’s administration. McCloskey had been elected in a squeaker against longtime Senator Larry Reed. Reed, for reasons seemingly unknown to anyone but himself and his head-in-the-sand backers on the Hill, wanted to defang America. To withdraw funding for missile defense systems at home and overseas. To slash military budgets and bring the boys home, wherever they were. To close Gitmo and send all the terrorists back home so they could make more baby terrorists to send back to America.
A major component of the campaign platform of Reed’s opponent Tom McCloskey, and McCloskey’s veep candidate, ex–Naval Chief of Staff David Rosow, had been countering the mounting terror threat from within America’s borders as well as from without. McCloskey believed homegrown terrorists posed America’s biggest threat at the moment. And that only eternal vigilance and military might at home and abroad could save an increasingly fragile Republic.
America, President McCloskey had asserted in his stump speeches, was in the midst of what he called “The Third Wave” of domestic terrorism. The first wave occurred on September 11, 2001, the culmination of years of attacks on America and the west by al Qaeda, a group consisting of Saudi, Yemeni, and other identifiably Arab men. Bin Laden soon realized the United States would guard against such foreigners in the future. Future attacks would have to draw on a new talent pool.
To circumvent added security measures, bin Laden recruited terrorists with French, British, and other passports. Men like “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, traveling on a U.K. passport. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the infamous “underwear bomber.” Or the U.S. Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood who murdered American soldiers, and the “Times Square” bomber who’d been removed from an Emirates airliner just before it pulled back from the gate. This, McCloskey asserted, was the “Second Wave” of terror. The “Third Wave” consisted of U.S. citizens and residents, legal or not, who can fly under the radar of new security measures created to thwart first-and second-wave operatives.
He cited the direct link between 1960s radical H. Rap Brown and the twelve men charged with felonies in connection with the fatal firefight of a Detroit imam with FBI agents. Brown converted to Islam while in Attica prison and was allegedly running a terror network from his prison cell in Colorado. Criminals, McCloskey said, were undergoing Muslim prison conversions at the rate of thirty-five thousand a year. All potential “street operatives” who could and would support the terrorist agenda. Plainly, he said, the fundamentalist ideology has sunk deep roots into American society.
The tight presidential race had ended suddenly on the night of the last nationally televised debate. Responding to yet another sarcastic question about his “cowboy qualifications” from Senator Reed, McCloskey had squared his big shoulders, looked directly into the camera, and said, “Frankly, Senator Reed, I think Americans voting for you are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.”
Senator Reed never recovered.
And, after what had happened at Jackson Memorial in Miami a couple of weeks ago, it was beginning to look like McCloskey had been right.
“Okay, forty feds, Harry. And are we assigned to that task force? Biggest terror attack on American s
oil since 9/11? No, not us, we’re sitting out here day and night doing frigging stakeouts.”
Harry, who’d heard this rap many times in the prior week, couldn’t even be bothered to shift his gaze to Stoke from the half-naked blonde currently sashaying across the crosswalk with a teacup dog at the end of a pink leather leash studded with zircons as big as the Ritz.
Brock was wondering how the hell either of them, dog or woman, could walk upright with all that weight up front.
“I could live in that bra,” Harry mused. “Very happily. I’m dead serious. I hate my apartment.”
“What?” Stoke said.
“The crosswalk, are you blind, the crosswalk.”
Stoke, who, according to their mutual pal Alex Hawke, was about the size of your average armoire, was wedged behind the steering wheel. He pressed forward, peering at the woman through the Suburban’s grimy windshield as he polished off what remained of his Whopper. One sure way to commit suicide? Put yourself between Stokely Jones Jr. and the pickup counter at a Burger King.
“I mean it, Harry. I got serious shit to do,” Stoke said, using his napkin, watching the blonde jiggle by.
“Yeah? Like what?” Harry said.
“Like getting my damn GTO detailed, for starters. Okay? Maintain its high CDI factor.”
“CDI? What the hell is CDI?”
“‘Chicks Dig It.’ Critical.”
“Funny. What else?”
“Hell, who knows? Have a Thai massage. Learn Spanish. Finish reading Shogun. Stuff like that.”
“Shogun? When did you start reading that?”
“Hell, I dunno. When did it come out?”
Harry looked at him and sighed. “You know what? I should have just stayed with the Corps. I don’t know why the hell I ever left.”
“Once a Marine, always a Marine. Why did you bail?”
“I dunno. I was standing on a street corner one night in Baghdad smoking weed. I thought I had the world by the balls and then I looked down and saw the balls in my hand were my own.”
STOKE AND HARRY WERE PARKED on Ocean Drive over in South Beach, with a nice view of the wide sandy beach, swaying palms, and rolling blue ocean to their right. To their left, an unbroken line of art deco hotels, shops, and restaurants. It was pretty early in the day, and most of the local SoBe residents were still sleeping it off.
Miami was definitely not “the city that never sleeps.” Hell, it was the city that never woke up, least till round midnight. Unless, of course, you had huge buildings blowing up smack-dab in the middle of town. That was an attention getter.
Jackson Hospital was a real wake-up call, Stoke thought, in a lot more ways than one. According to the latest intel reports, Sword of Allah had combined forces of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan to become the most powerful terror network on the planet. And now they’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that their reach extended deep inside the United States. What was frightening? They were turning American prisons into terrorist training camps.
Stoke had thought he was moving out of the terrorists’ crosshairs when he left Manhattan.
Stokely Jones had finally said good-bye to his hometown of New York City for this beautiful stretch of ocean, and it seemed like he couldn’t get enough of it. When his sainted mama had passed, the sale of their old house in Bayside, Queens, and an apartment in LeFrak City had paid for Stoke’s penthouse condo in the sky over on Brickell Key. He loved having the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay for his new front yard.
Fancha, his fiancée, a well-known singer and a pretty good song-writer from the Cape Verde Islands, said he loved the ocean because water, all water, even the water he drank, was nature’s way of “purifying his soul,” whatever the hell that meant. He didn’t like her equating his soul with tap water. Mess with my mind, he had told her, but don’t go disrespecting my soul.
Stoke hadn’t been listening, but apparently Harry had been talking awhile because he now heard the CIA man saying, “. . . so, anyway, I can’t sleep, I’m channel-surfing, and I get this cable show called Black Gay Men Speak Out, which is fine, no problem. God bless ’em. But I’m thinking, why don’t they ever, I mean ever, have a show called Straight White Guys Speak Out? Y’know what I’m sayin’, Stoke? Think about it. Hell, maybe I’ll get some guys, pals of mine, do a pilot. See what happens.”
“Can I be on the show? I ain’t white, but I’m straight. That’s 50 percent. Just shoot me, you know, from the waist up when I come on the set.”
Harry looked over at him, shaking his head.
“Why don’t you come up with your own show, Stokely? Huh? Is that an idea?”
“I already came up with my show and believe me, you won’t be on it.”
“Let me ask you a serious question. If you have sex with a prostitute against her will, is that considered rape or shoplifting?”
Stokely looked over at Brock, thinking: In Nam, in the godforsaken brown-water Delta, back in the day, in or out of combat, Harry would have been just the kind of guy Stoke and the other black dudes in his outfit would have seriously avoided.
A good soldier, just one too many shades too white for the brothers. Orange County white is how Stoke saw Harry. From some semi-ritzy development called Santa Rosita, if Stoke remembered it right. “The Town That God Forgot,” Harry always called it, making some kind of joke about the place.
You just couldn’t completely trust a guy who’d grown up in a gated community.
There had been times, over the years they’d worked together, that Stoke thought Harry Brock was just a complete waste of space. But Brock was a true patriot and a badass and he had saved Stoke’s best friend Alex Hawke’s life one time in the Amazon jungle. That overcame a whole boatload of Harry’s negatives.
TEN
I’M SERIOUS, HARRY,” STOKE SAID, GETTING back to the topic at hand. “We’ve had days and nights of this surveillance, and nothing to show for it. What exactly is the program?”
“You asking me?” Harry said, wiping a smidge of mayo from his chin.
“No. That other guy in the car.”
Brock, in the passenger seat, looked through the small CIA-issued binoculars to get a sharper image of their target. Big target. A rumpled fat man they had identified as Hamid Kassar, whatever kind of Indo-Pakistani name that was, sitting behind the wheel of a 1958 metallic-blue Bel Air bona fide pussy-magnet convertible. Top down, bald head back on the pleated white leather seat top, Chrome Hearts shades on, catching rays.
Hamid Kassar had been the lawyer for the two Pakistani guys who’d been released from Gitmo and headed straight for Miami. The ones who’d wasted no time getting themselves busted for a crime serious enough to send them out to the Glades. Hook up with the Sword of Allah gang. Six months later, they bust out with five other guys and blow up fucking Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Harry cursed the genius brigade on the Hill who’d voted to release Guantanamo prisoners. All you did was put hardened terrorists on the street. Or, almost worse yet, put ’em back into American prisons where they could recruit naive gangbangers with no education into believing in all this radical Islam “Hate America” crap.
It was like Washington believed we couldn’t import, or, worse, let in enough effing terrorists slipping across our unprotected borders, so that now, now, we had decided to start growing our own! And when they kill us, we get them lawyered up like they were American citizens!
Insanity? Ya think?
In the Bel Air’s passenger seat was this older, more refined lounge-lizard type, blue blazer, Bing Crosby straw hat with a madras hatband, and, if the chunky gold Rolex was real, maybe even affluent, but still unidentified. Looked druggy. Country Club druggy maybe, but definitely druggy. In his notes, Stoke had written WM instead of a name. White male was the best he could do right now.
Still looking through the field glasses, Brock said, “Contrary to what you may think, the quesos grandes in Washington don’t consult me on these sensitive matters, Stoke. Hard
to believe, I know. But, see, somebody at the Pentagon, or the White House, or on the Seventh Floor at Langley, they order me to do things. And I go do ’em. Or I pay you, or other people like you, to do ’em for me. Get it?”
“I get it,” Stoke muttered, letting Harry get under his skin, which was stupid.
“Good. I would think you were old enough and experienced enough in this line of work to understand that fairly basic concept by now.”
Harry Brock, handsome in a square-jawed Bruce Willis kind of way, was a ripped, hard-bitten CIA paramilitary officer, now a field agent. He played his assignments pretty close to the vest, but Stoke had always figured Harry for a guy who’d killed more people than most battalions.
Brock and the human mountain known as Stokely Jones, formerly of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the New York Jets, and the New York City Police Department, had enjoyed a lengthy and mostly rewarding working relationship over the years. First working directly with Stoke’s closest friend, British MI6 intelligence officer Alex Hawke, and, more recently, Harry’d been hiring Stoke’s small intel company, Tactics International, based here in Miami, to work cases in Florida and the Caribbean.
Tactics, jointly owned and operated by Stokely Jones and Alex Hawke, was now operating under government contract to do special ops in south Florida, working for the CIA. Since the federal agency was Tactics’s largest client by far, Stoke made nice to Harry even though his wiseass California sense of humor sometimes got on his nerves. Bit of a piss-artist, that’s what Alex Hawke had called Harry Brock one time. Right on the money.
“My eyes hurt,” Brock said. “Take these glasses for a while, all right?” Stoke shot out a hand the size of a Smithfield ham and palmed the tiny binos. Brock flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out a large pair of Zeiss high-powers. Less discreet, maybe, but easier on the eyeballs.