Destiny in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “You want to make twenty bucks?” Jersey asked.

  The boy thought about it for a moment, looked around to make sure no one else was with Jersey, and then walked back up to her.

  “Sure,” he said, his eyes roaming over Jersey’s body and his voice becoming a bit more cocky.

  Jersey pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket and held it out in front of the boy.

  “Let me borrow that pizza and your hat and car for five minutes,” she said.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes widening at the craziness of her request.

  Jersey smiled her most seductive smile. “I want to play a trick on my boyfriend,” she said in a conspiratorial tone of voice. She turned and pointed at the Madisons’ house just down the street. “He lives right there, and I want to go up to the door carrying a pizza and give him a surprise.”

  “But . . . what about these people who ordered this pizza?” the boy asked. “If they complain I could get fired.”

  “It’ll only take a minute, then you can have the pizza back,” Jersey said, moving a little closer to the teenager. “And I’d be ever so grateful,” she added, raising a hand and patting his cheek.

  “Uh ... I guess it’d be okay. But you got to hurry so the pizza don’t get cold.”

  He handed her the pizza and she gave him the twenty dollars. She reached up, took the paper hat with the Domino’s insignia on it off his head, and placed it on her head.

  “Wait right here and I’ll be right back,” she purred, and he grinned.

  “All right.”

  She got in his car, made a U-turn, and drove the three houses down the street to the Madisons’ house.

  Getting out, she opened the pizza box, put her Beretta on top of the pizza, and laid her K-Bar assault knife next to it.

  She took a deep breath and walked up the sidewalk to the front door. Reaching up, she unscrewed the lightbulb in the porch light, and then she rang the bell.

  When she’d checked out the house through the windows, she’d noticed the front door opened onto an alcove that couldn’t be seen from the living room. With any luck, she’d be able to get one of the men there, and then take out the other two before they became suspicious.

  The front door opened a crack and Colonel Madison stuck his face out. “Yes, what can I do for you?” he asked, looking over her shoulder at the pizza delivery car parked in front of his house at the curb.

  “I have a pizza delivery,” Jersey said in a bored tone of voice.

  “We didn’t order any pizza,” Madison said in an aggravated voice.

  “Look, mister,” Jersey said, letting a little anger into her voice, “all I know is I was told to bring this pizza to this address.”

  “What’s going on here?” one of the men from the living room asked, stepping into the doorway and shouldering Madison aside.

  Jersey noticed he had his hand over the butt of the pistol in his belt.

  “Nothing’s goin’ on, I’m just tryin’ to deliver this pizza,” Jersey drawled in her best imitation of a Midwestern accent.

  The man glanced at Madison suspiciously, and then back at Jersey. “What address were you looking for?” he asked, taking charge of the conversation.

  Jersey made a show of trying to read the receipt on the front of the pizza box in the darkness. “Uh . . . I don’t know, I can’t read it in the dark. Could you turn on the porch light?” she asked, trying her best to look helpless.

  The man reached up next to the door and flipped the switch several times, to no avail.

  A voice called from inside the house. “Hey, Bud, what’s going on out there?”

  The man looked back over his shoulder. “Nothin’, we just got a lost delivery girl. I’ll take care of it.”

  He turned back to Jersey and stepped back into the alcove. “The porch light’s out. Come on in here where you can read the address.”

  “Gee, thanks, mister,” Jersey said, and stepped into the doorway.

  As she moved past him, she slipped the box open, grabbed her K-Bar, and as she turned around she buried it in his throat.

  His eyes popped open and he reached up to his neck, but the blade had severed his vocal cords so he couldn’t cry out.

  In one fluid motion, Jersey shoved Madison, who was standing there with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide, aside and pulled the Beretta out of the box as she dropped the box on the floor.

  Three quick steps and she was in the living room, her arms outstretched before her, the Beretta held in both hands moving back and forth, covering both of the men in front of her.

  “Don’t make a move!” she growled at the two men standing there. When they saw her, and the gun she was pointing at them, they both took an involuntary step back and squared around to face her head-on.

  They stared at Jersey for a moment, and then looked back at each other. Finally, both men made the fatal mistake of grabbing for the pistols in their shoulder holsters, one of them diving to the side as he drew his gun.

  Jersey didn’t hesitate for a second. She squeezed off four quick rounds, two to the chest of each of the men, driving them backward to land spread-eagled on their backs, their eyes still wide open but staring at nothing as scarlet blood pumped out onto the Madisons’ beige carpet, turning it an ugly shade of brown.

  The acrid smell of cordite hung in the room as Jersey whirled and covered Madison with her pistol, just in case he wanted to get involved. She still wasn’t sure of just how committed he was to the Osterman program. He wasn’t even looking at her; he was staring at the couch where his wife and children were sitting.

  At the sight of the two men being killed, the girl and her mother both screamed and threw their arms around each other, while the teenage boy dove to the floor, covering his head with his hands.

  Madison, after a quick look at Jersey, ran to their sides and put his arms around their shoulders, hugging them tight to him.

  Jersey, seeing he would be no problem, ran back to the front door to check on the man she’d stabbed. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his legs outstretched in front of him, as dead as yesterday’s news.

  As Jersey pulled her K-Bar from his throat and wiped it on his shirt, the pizza boy burst into the doorway.

  He took one look around and said, “Aw, shit. Look at that mess.”

  “What?” Jersey asked.

  “You got blood all over the pizza box. Now what am I gonna do?” he asked, making no mention of the dead man on the floor or the shots he’d no doubt heard.

  Jersey laughed out loud. It seemed nothing fazed teenagers these days.

  She bent over and picked up the box. “Rinse it off with the hose out front,” she said.

  “But then it’ll be all wet,” he complained, taking the box from her.

  “Hell, tell the customers you got caught in a rainstorm,” Jersey offered, pushing him out the door and shutting it in his face.

  Twenty-two

  While Madison comforted his wife and children, Jersey got on the phone and called the base, asking to be put through to General Raines.

  “Yeah, Jersey, what’ve you got?” Ben asked, knowing Jersey wouldn’t’ve bothered him with a routine report.

  “Madison’s wife and children were being held hostage by three men, probably FFA members,” she answered.

  “What’s the current status?” Ben asked.

  “The three hostiles were terminated with prejudice,” she answered, “so we’re gonna need a cleanup crew over here at the colonel’s house, and maybe some counseling personnel to be with the family while we debrief him.”

  “Roger,” Ben said. “I’ll get the general and his Chief of Intel and some help and we’ll be right over. Any ... uh ... injuries among the family?”

  “No, just the hostiles,” Jersey said, and hung up the phone.

  She stepped into the living room and stood before Colonel Madison.

  He glanced up at her, fear in his eyes and on his face.

  “Y
ou’d better make some coffee,” Jersey said to the wife, knowing that getting her back to her normal routine would help to keep her from becoming hysterical. “We’re fixing to have some company from the base.”

  The colonel’s wife wiped her eyes and nose, straightened her shoulders, and smiled wanly at her teenage daughter. “Come on, Janine. You can help me in the kitchen,” she said, standing up and taking her daughter by the arm.

  Jersey cut her eyes back to the colonel, and he dropped his gaze and stared down at his hands clenched between his knees. “I had to help them,” he said, his voice taking on a whining quality as he spoke. “They said they would kill my family.”

  Jersey shook her head. “Don’t tell me your story, mister,” she said, absolutely no sympathy in her voice. “Save it for your commander, who’s on his way over here.”

  She hesitated, then couldn’t resist adding, “But while you’re waiting, you might be thinking up something you can say to the families of the hundreds of men you got killed to save your own family. I’d be interested to hear how you try and justify it myself.”

  With that, Madison put his hands over his face and began to cry. Jersey, disgusted with his gutless behavior, snapped, “Why don’t you go get a couple of sheets or something and put them over the bodies so your son doesn’t have to stare at them all night?”

  The son was sitting next to his dad, giving Jersey the same insolent, sullen look he’d given their captors a few minutes before.

  “Come on, son,” Madison said, getting to his feet and heading down the corridor toward the bedrooms.

  After the cleanup team had removed the bodies, and while some female psychologists were talking with the wife and kids, Ben, General Goddard, Colonel Joshua Currey, who was his Chief of Intel, and Jersey sat at the kitchen table facing Colonel Ralph Madison.

  Ben took the lead in the questioning. “Ralph, we’re not going to get into reasons why you did what you did, but we do need to know if you’re aware of any of the other officers on the senior staff who may be giving information to the enemy.”

  Madison began to speak, but his voice broke and he had to cough and clear his throat. “Uh, not to my knowledge, General Raines, but I wasn’t given any information, just asked to give them times and dates and locations of intercept teams that were being sent out.”

  His face screwed up and tears welled in his eyes. “I swear I didn’t know they were going to ambush the teams,” he groaned. “I thought they would just tell their people to avoid those areas and our men would come home after finding no terrorists where they thought they were.”

  “Can you give us any information about who your captors’ contacts were?” Ben asked.

  Madison shook his head. “No. I gave them what I knew about our schedule of flights, and they would go into the other room and talk on their cell phones for a few minutes. I don’t even know the phone numbers they called.”

  Ben glanced at Josh Currey. “Any chance of tracing those numbers and perhaps getting a location?”

  Currey shook his head as he glanced at one of the cell phones he was holding, which had been taken off one of the dead men. “Not a chance,” he said. “The phones are coded . . . that is, the transmissions are scrambled and don’t go through the routine channels most normal cell phones use.”

  Ben smiled slightly. “Yeah, I know. It’s the same technology my people are using to keep in touch with the teams. It’s pretty much intercept-proof.”

  “We can’t even use the phones’ redial button since it takes a special code to activate the phone,” Currey said. “They’re completely useless to us.”

  Ben leaned back in his chair. “Well, I think to make sure no other officers are being blackmailed in a similar fashion, I’d recommend that all of the senior men and their families be moved onto the base until this war is over.”

  “That’s gonna take some doing,” Goddard said.

  Ben shrugged. “It’s the only way I know to protect your men and your information from coercion. That still won’t keep someone from selling information to the enemy, but judicious and frequent use of lie detectors and such should keep that sort of treachery to a minimum.”

  “What do you suggest we do about Colonel Madison here?” Goddard asked Ben, wondering what the SUSA man would say.

  Ben looked at Madison, his face a mask. “That depends on how useful he is to your war effort. I’m not much one for punishment for punishment’s sake. The man was put in an impossible situation. If he’s good at interpreting intel, then I’d continue to use him, after some suitable slap on the wrist like losing some rank and pay. But if this war lasts as long as I think it will, you’re gonna have need of all the good men you can find.”

  Goddard slowly nodded and looked at Madison. “You think you can pull your shit together and get back to work, Ralph?” he asked. Though his words were harsh, his voice was not unkind and his expression was more one of sympathy than censure.

  Madison nodded eagerly. “Yes, sir!” he said.

  “Good. Then get in there and pack your family up for a trip to the base.”

  Ben cleared his throat. “Uh, General, I have a suggestion to make if it’s all right.”

  Goddard laughed. “Now, don’t go getting shy on me now, Ben,” he said.

  “Why don’t we leave a couple of men here just in case some of the FFA types pay a visit?” he asked. “That way, we might just be able to catch a couple of live ones we can question.”

  “Good idea, Ben. And I’ll have my men in Intel keep these cell phones close in case a call comes in from their boss. Maybe we can fool him enough to set a trap.”

  “Won’t hurt to give it a shot,” Ben agreed, though he knew the higher-ups in the FFA, if they were smart enough to have remained undercover and undetected by the U.S. counterintelligence agents for this long, were not going to be fooled by any plan as simple as that.

  He got up from his chair at the table and smiled at Jersey. “Come on, Jersey. It’s time we got back to the base before our Scouts take off on their missions.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Jersey answered.

  Twenty-three

  Achmed Sharif, the leader of Abdullah El Farrar’s western contingent of terrorists, stood up in the passenger seat of his confiscated HumVee as it stood idling on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho. His second in command, Mohamed Omar, was in the driver’s seat, and his FFA contact, Billy Wesson, sat in the backseat cradling his AK-47 in his arms.

  It was just before dawn and the sky to the east was beginning to lighten with the coming of the sun, clouds on the horizon starting to color with brilliant oranges and yellows signaling the coming arrival of morning.

  Scattered along the interstate highway behind the lead HumVee were over thirty trucks containing Sharif’s original twenty Arabs and another 150 men and women of the FFA who’d joined up with the caravan as it made its way south and east from the coast.

  All of the insurgents were armed with a variety of weapons that had been confiscated from Army depots, National Guard armories, police stations, and even gun shops that had been overrun and taken by the terrorists on their journey across the U.S.

  “What do you suggest as our plan of attack, Mr. Wesson?” Sharif asked as he peered at the buildings of downtown Boise, barely visible in the early morning light.

  “We have two objectives here, Achmed,” Wesson said, making Sharif’s teeth clench at the overly familiar tone. “The most important is to take control of the airport without doing too much damage to the fields, so we can bring in more men and weapons when we’re ready. The second objective is to take out the local authorities, consisting of the police station and the highway patrol headquarters.”

  “And how do you propose to do this?” Sharif asked, sitting back down on his seat and turning to look at Wesson over the back of that seat.

  “Well,” Wesson said, rubbing his chin. “The airport ain’t gonna give us no real problem. Other than a few rent-a-cops, they ain’t gonna have much security.
”

  “Rent-a-cops?” Sharif asked, not being familiar with the term.

  “Yeah, you know. Hired guards from a security company. They’ll only be armed with pistols an’ maybe a rifle or two. Nothin’ we can’t handle.”

  “What about the police and highway patrol?”

  “There we’re gonna have to be a mite more careful. Both the cops an’ the highway patrol offices will have plenty of firepower, but it’ll most likely be locked up. If we hit ’em fast an’ hard, we should be able to get ’em ’fore they can open up the arms lockers an’ get all their men armed with the heavy stuff they have on hand.”

  Sharif nodded slowly. “So, you would divide up our forces, with the strongest going to the police and highway patrol, and send a smaller unit to take the airport?”

  “That’s the way I’d handle it if I was in charge,” Wesson said.

  Sharif smiled slightly. At least the man was finally learning his place, which was in fact very low on the order of importance.

  “Good, then that is how we will proceed,” Sharif said, turning back around to face the front of the vehicle. He pulled a map of the Boise area out of the glove box of the HumVee and opened it on his lap.

  Mohamed Omar leaned over and shined a small flashlight onto the map, watching Sharif’s finger as he traced out the locations of the airport, the police headquarters, and the offices of the highway patrol.

  “Mohamed,” Sharif said, “I will command the attack on the highway patrol and you will lead the attack on the police station, since those are the two most dangerous assignments.”

  “What about the airport, Achmed?” the second in command asked. “Who will take command of that unit?”

  Sharif glanced into the backseat. “Mr. Wesson, of course.”

  “Who, me?” Wesson asked.

  “Yes. I want you to take a number of your FFA friends and go to take control of the airport while Mohamed and I attack the other two targets.”

  Wesson pursed his lips, and then he finally nodded. “Okay, no problem,” he said.