by Ted Bell
The supersized Pakistani, suddenly magnified, was instantly more interesting. The guy kept his dark eyes moving constantly, in the rearview, side to side. Looking, or waiting, for someone? Harry felt himself go from simmer to low boil. The Pakistanis, with their unstable government, loose nukes, and Taliban–al Qaeda connections, were giving Iran a run for its money at the very top of the CIA’s shit list over the last couple of years.
And a lot of Pakistani émigrés like the chubby legal eagle up there, in the United States either legally or illegally, still officially TBD, were kept under close surveillance these days. Especially since the tragedy at Jackson Memorial Hospital, spearheaded by this puke’s two Sword of Allah clients, sprung from Gitmo, who’d escaped prison and killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
What you were seeing were immigrant terrorist gangbangers doing hard time in the prison system, joining or starting Muslim Brotherhood gangs, and then recruiting non-Muslims in the joint and getting the brothers radicalized before they were released into the community.
At this very moment, Stoke’s sole employee, Luis Gonzales-Gonzales, a one-armed Cuban he called Sharkey, was one of many who had been sent undercover inside Florida and other state prisons like the Glades, aka the Florida Correctional Institution, trying to penetrate the Sword of Allah.
S.O.A. was one of the newer Muslim gangs to take power within the American prison system, after only two, maybe three years of existence in the United States. It was a group that had already proven itself extraordinarily capable of any atrocity. Scary thing? Harry told him CIA estimated the total American S.O.A. prison membership already at over five thousand and climbing. That’s five thousand suicidal terrorists sitting around in the slam every day thinking up new ways to kill Americans.
When Stoke told Shark it was a crappy job but somebody had to do it, he meant it. American prisons had quickly become America’s own little madrassa hothouses, taxpayer-funded terror training schools where budding Islamic fanatics learned little tricks of the trade like how to blow up major hospitals.
See, you didn’t need a 767 full of jet fuel to be a terrorist anymore, he’d told Sharkey right after Jackson Memorial blew sky-high. All you needed was enough suicidal gangbangers wearing backpack bombs and whacked out on meth and religion to take out a whole damn hospital. All you needed was a small sleeper cell school-bus driver in Poughkeepsie bringing his AK-47 to work one day in a pillowcase. And on and on.
What was your run-of-the-mill prison con learning in the joint these days? Not the finer points of vanity license plate production. No. It was how to embrace a hijacked religion, learn how to hate America and kill civilians, that’s what, and it wasn’t good. You couldn’t even trust an ex-con to be patriotic anymore.
“Whaddya see up there, Stoke? Anything unusual? Any action between these two dickwads?”
Stoke shook his head slightly while still looking through the small binoculars. Nothing. But something weird was going on. He couldn’t shake the odd feeling that there was more to this than they were seeing.
Yeah.
Definitely feeling jumpy, all of a sudden.
But why?
ELEVEN
THE BAD HUNCH MADE STOKELY JONES scan the beach area away from the blue Chevy several times but, aside from a skinny Jamaican Rasta guy, wearing nothing but his jockey tighty-whiteys and matted dreadlocks, doing a one-handed handstand on his skateboard, he saw nothing remotely out of the ordinary.
He shook off the jitters, grabbed a little handheld radio off the dash, and called the CIA Miami field agent sitting two blocks north.
“Armando, you see anyone or anything out of place around here, hombre?”
A raw, tobacco-cured voice came back. “Nope. I gotta say, guys, this is one weird neighborhood for arms deals. What, are those two getting ready to move, you think?”
“No, just checking.” Stoke knew Armando Hernandez, the older Hispanic agent, alone in a low-key Jeep Cherokee, was probably happy just to have some time to sit and do that Sudoku stuff he loved so much. Filling in little squares with numbers for hours at a time? What was up with that? Stoke couldn’t understand the attraction, but what the hell, the whole damn planet was suddenly flooded with stuff he didn’t understand.
Hell, he couldn’t even think of a single TV show he’d liked since Redd Foxx died and Sanford and Son went off the air.
One thing he had come to realize was just how many freaking third worlders had invaded the Miami metro area. As a New York City Police detective, he’d been assigned to the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, which was a great town if you were a bullet. He had spent so much time on gangs that were either Hispanic or black that he never paid much attention to groups like these radical Muslims. One reason you had that first attack on the World Trade Center in ’93?
Nobody gave a damn.
Now, seemed like the whole intel community had Pakistan under a microscope. That pissant, dicked-up country of mass confusion was up to its ass in radicals who wanted to kill Americans. Up in the Northern Territories, the Taliban and al Qaeda were taking turns, blowing shit up every other day. Plus, the fifth-largest country in the world population-wise had a dangerously unstable government, run by a crooked president who got in on a sympathy vote when his beautiful wife was assassinated.
On top of that, there was a whole shitload of loose nukes just sitting there about a mile from the Islamabad airport. Just imagine, Harry said, what would happen if the Taliban/al Qaeda axis of weasels managed to start a war between Pakistan and India. A war that took down the already shaky Pakistani government and put it in the hands of the radical Islamists in the Pak military? Now you’ve got the world’s first Islamic rogue country with nuclear weapons, that’s what.
That by itself had gotten Stoke’s attention.
So, given all that, the racial profiling part of this current assignment he could understand. Maybe this Hassan guy was a Paki loose-nuke specialist, who knew? Maybe he was doing a drugs-for-weapons deal with Mr. Country Club. But, without more information, it was hard to get excited about stalking the guy’s fat ass every damn day.
Brock, borderline bored to tears himself, said to his partner, “How’s Fancha doing these days?”
“Been in a bad mood ever since her first solo CD album went out.”
“Why?”
“Well, it didn’t exactly go platinum.”
“Yeah? What did it go?”
“It went plastic.”
“Not good.”
“No. And now she wants me to give up my beautiful penthouse over on Brickell Key. Move in with her on Key Biscayne. Get married or something.”
“So?”
Stoke hated this subject. The whole marriage thing was beginning to spook him a little. Normally, he’d call his pal Hawke about it. But Hawke wasn’t giving advice these days. He was still hurting big time over the loss of his fiancée and their baby. Stoke, at one point, had been so worried he’d flown over to Bermuda to surprise him. See if he couldn’t get him to snap out of it. But Hawke had already snapped. And he was already completely out of it. After a few heartbreaking days, Stoke left Bermuda fairly sure he’d never see his old friend alive again.
Stoke hefted his binoculars. After a few seconds of holding them aloft, he rested them on the steering wheel and looked at Harry.
“Whoa, do you see that?”
Brock was still watching the two men yakking in the old blue Chevy. “What is it?”
“Chick on Alton now walking straight toward us. More hookers looked like her they’d change the Constitution and make prostitution mandatory.”
Brock allowed his larger, high-powered binoculars to veer just far enough to see who his partner was talking about.
She had tight white jeans and long blond hair, but dark features. Her low-rider top exposed plenty of cleavage and her body had the movement and musculature of an athlete. For some reason she didn’t really strike Harry as a prostitute. Dead wrong area of town for working girls in the middle
of the day. She obviously had no bearing on whatever deal they were watching go down in any case, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Stoke refocused his binoculars on the two guys in the Chevy. They were speaking with a whole lot more animation and intensity now. Lots of hand gestures from the Pakistani Maltese Falcon–looking guy. The bosomy babe was still half a block away as he started to wonder why she would be dodging cars, walking down the middle of the damn street instead of over on the sidewalk.
Brock, eyes glued to his binoculars, said, “If hookers were horses, this chick would be frickin’ Secretariat.”
“Yeah, and if all the women in Texas are as ugly as your mama, the Lone Ranger’s gonna be alone for a long, long time.”
Predictably, Harry fired off a single-digit salute.
Just as Stoke raised his tiny binoculars, Harry flinched in the front seat and shouted, “Jesus F. Christ.”
Then Stoke heard the shots. He saw the image a split second later in the lenses of his binoculars. The long-legged prostitute had a small machine pistol pointed at the blue Bel Air and was spraying the two cats they had under surveillance.
She fired in short bursts, controlling the weapon, and keeping the barrel of the small automatic right on target. Knew what she was doing.
Stoke had the passenger door to the Suburban open and was sliding out as he told Harry to call in their position and situation to Armando up the street. Then added, “Call 911, too.”
He drew his Glock .40-caliber pistol out of the holster on his hip and had it in his hand as he raced toward the Chevy. The shooting had stopped and he could see blood on the driver’s-side door.
The blonde looked up, scanning the area. Her eyes fell on Stoke and she automatically raised the machine pistol toward him.
He darted to one side and crouched behind a parked Volvo wagon. He heard the rattle as she fired off eight quick rounds. The tire closest to his head popped and hissed as it lost all pressure.
Stoke sprang up, looking to acquire his target, and sighted in where the woman had been standing. He saw nothing except the newly perforated Chevy and two newly dead men in the front seat. His eyes searching across the street with his pistol, he low-crawled up to the next car.
The street was empty.
He stood and moved quickly until the woman stopped at the corner of a run-down motel office.
Stoke had just started toward the motel when she turned and fired again in his direction, forcing him behind the Chevy and its silent occupants.
Then Harry rolled down the street in the blue Suburban. The brakes screeched and the big SUV came to a sudden stop right next to Stoke.
Harry yelled, “Jump in, she’s headed west.”
Stoke hesitated then decided his foot pursuit had not accomplished much. He kept low as he darted around the front of the Suburban and hopped up into the cab. They were west on the next block, Tenth, he thought, in a couple of seconds.
Harry, panting, said, “What the hell is goin’ on?”
“No idea, but that was no simple business deal.”
Stoke could hear sirens in the distance as they squealed around the corner and saw a new black Dodge Charger roll away.
Harry punched the gas and the lumbering Suburban closed the distance. When they were directly behind the smaller car, a heavily muscled arm popped out the passenger-side window with a machine pistol that Stoke could see was an old MAC-10. Without exposing his head, the man sprayed a dozen rounds. About half of them pinged off the big Suburban, causing Harry to jerk the wheel violently in every conceivable direction.
Stoke groped for the seat belt, hoping to secure himself as the truck swayed, hesitated, then flipped off the street, rolled once, and struck a utility pole. The Suburban came to rest on the passenger side, wheels spinning uselessly in the air. Worse than not wearing his own seat belt, his partner Harry was also unsecured and Stoke saw him become unwedged from the steering wheel and seem to float through the air for a moment before landing directly on top of him.
Not only was everything dark, it was pit-smelly as hell. Don’t you wish Harry used Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?
“Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you please remove your left elbow from my right eyeball?”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Hate to disturb you, my brother. But I have to leave now.”
TWELVE
MIAMI
STOKE SOMEHOW SQUIRMED HIS MASSIVE BULK out from under Harry Brock, who wasn’t exactly fighting featherweight division himself, and squeezed delicately out through the shattered windshield. He turned and tried to help Brock exit the vehicle, taking both of Harry’s wrists in his hands and pulling. Something was stuck. Seat belt wrapped around his leg?
“Are you hurt?” Stoke asked. Harry had a major gash above both eyes that gave him that bloody horror-movie look, only now the blood looked real.
“Naw, just a little embarrassed about that utility pole, thanks,” Brock said, using both hands to scoop the fresh blood from his eye sockets.
“Yeah, I thought they taught high-speed pursuit where you went to junior college.”
They both turned their heads as Armando in the white Jeep Cherokee screeched to a stop next to the Suburban currently wrapped around the utility pole. The beefy older agent popped out, fear etched on his face, a dead cigar jammed in one corner of his mouth.
“Jesus, are you guys okay?”
Stoke was already running for the idling Jeep. “Armando, help Brock climb out of that mess and tell someone I’m in pursuit of a late-model black Dodge Charger westbound over the MacArthur Causeway. They gotta be headed that way.”
He didn’t wait for a response and was in the Jeep pushing the sketchy 3.7 liter V-6 to its absolute limits right from the start. He felt the top-heavy vehicle tilt as he took a right turn hard. The CIA had bought the car for surveillance, not speed. Stoke felt the Cherokee shudder and tilt again as he took the turn onto the causeway, ignoring traffic signals and other vehicles just like he was racing down the final furlong at Hialeah.
Horns blared and he was aware of hostility from other drivers, but at least he was where he wanted to be.
He leaned forward and searched far ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of the black Charger with the deadly blonde inside. Star Island whipped by on his right, then Palm Island. The bay was just another detail he had to ignore as he weaved in and out of traffic, almost clipping a lawn service truck packed most likely with illegal Guatemalans.
Laying on the horn to get people’s attention, he finally started getting a clear view of the road ahead, the causeway rolling onto the little key that was home to Parrot Jungle. His heart raced as he took the long curve flat out. He saw the Charger. In addition to the blonde, there were three or four guys. They were cool, driving calmly, right at the speed limit.
Stoke gathered enough presence of mind to calm down, blend in behind them, and call in his position to Miami-Dade PD. He reached into his pocket. Empty. He patted his pants, then realized his phone was in the wreckage of the Suburban they’d wasted back at the beach.
His hand slapped his hip, and he was relieved to feel the weight of his pistol still in its holster. He tried to figure out how many rounds he had left and decided he was ready with the extra magazine he had clipped to the other side of his belt, hidden by a loose, unbuttoned Aloha shirt. The Miami Dolphins T-shirt he wore underneath was soaked through with sweat.
He waited as the black car rolled toward the mainland and the city of Miami. This was a good thing. If they got into a chase over there no one knew the streets better than he did. Not after three years of on-and-off patrols and dead-end stakeouts all over this tropical paradise.
Then things changed for the worse.
The driver of the Charger spotted him. Stoke saw the passengers inside all turn around at once, then the car swerved violently across a lane, cutting off a taxi, to take the exit onto Biscayne as the Charger rapidly picked up speed.
> He yanked the steering wheel and fell in behind them as they blew through the light at the base of the ramp and swerved south on Biscayne, causing two oncoming cars to squeal to a stop, fishtailing at the green light. Stoke took advantage of the traffic stoppage and rolled through the same light, jerking to one side on Biscayne to avoid a utility worker still yelling and giving the single-finger salute to the Charger speeding south.
As the Charger fast approached a railroad crossing, the big red lights started flashing and the gates started coming down. The driver accelerated, beating the gates and getting airborne as he crossed the elevated tracks. Stoke, who could see the Atlantic Coastline freight train speeding toward him out of the corner of his eye, had no choice. He floored it, crashed through the gates, caught air, and made it across the tracks just before the roaring train could clip his rear bumper.
At Bicentennial Park, the Charger suddenly took a sharp right to head west. Stoke now knew the driver definitely wasn’t local because he was headed into the hood and if you’d ever been there, you knew there weren’t a lot of ways out. Plus, I-95 would keep him from going farther west. Stoke was closing the gap, the guy behind the wheel unsure of himself now.
Then the Charger clipped a parked car when it took the next corner too sharply, and the guy spun out, tires smoking, careening into the parking lot of an abandoned office complex.
Keeping his tactical sense about him, Stoke pulled across the exit to the lot, blocking it, and stopped the Cherokee. Throwing the door open, he rolled out to one side, keeping an eye on the Charger’s occupants, especially the killer blonde.
The first burst of fire told him one of the others in the car had something much heavier than a MAC-10. The assault rifle rattled the tin can Jeep and forced Stoke to fall back to a delivery van parked out on the street.