by By Jon Land
Ben held up three fingers, then pulled his hand back a yard to indicate how far they were behind the lead gunmen.
Danielle nodded toward Ben before tripping the flare’s fuse. Instantly, it burst into a glowing orange flame, which she pushed through the mail slot and tossed forward.
From his perch, Ben watched the flare bounce once on the porch and begin rolling down the stairs. A fan of flames erupted as soon as the flare touched the ground, soaked with homemade napalm. Three of the men who had approached the cabin so stealthily were transformed into fiery specters in the night, screaming in agony as the flames devoured them.
The fire’s backdraft of air hammered the front door, pushing Ben and Danielle away from the wall across the floor. The sound drew Sayeed’s attention away from the rear window just before a barrage of bullets shattered the glass near him and poured into the cabin.
Sayeed went down, covering his head with his hands. Ben dove behind a chair, while Danielle moved to the car battery and touched a wire to the negative connection.
Outside, at the cabin’s rear, the fertilizer bomb packed into the old skiff exploded, sending jagged shards of wood, acting as shrapnel, in all directions. In the dazzling burst of light, Danielle saw a pair of dark figures caught in the deadly rain of wood, struck down where they stood halfway between the thin shoreline and the cabin. The brightness of the initial blast receded, but stubborn flames clung to the remnants of the dock, yielding the only light.
Ben moved for Sayeed, afraid he’d been hit by the initial barrage that had shattered the rear window. His own ears ached from the percussion of the blasts, his head full of what felt like heavy air pushing itself through his ear canals. He reached Sayeed to find him unharmed, though frozen in terror. Ben dragged his brother away from the center of the room just before fresh bursts of automatic fire tore into the front of the cabin on both sides of the door.
More glass burst inward, and the shadow of one of the gunmen flashed by the window as he moved for the door. Danielle saw the big iron knob rattle, the gunman’s hand closing upon it. He never saw the puddle of water at his feet, or the wire extending under the door into it. Never heard the sizzle of electricity when Danielle jammed the cord into the socket.
The gunman lurched up to his toes, unable to release the doorknob, as he shook and spasmed. His hair caught fire in seconds, and the stench of it filled the small cabin, overpowering even that of the homemade napalm still flaming on the front grounds. A moment later sparks flew from the outlet, and the breaker feeding from the generator tripped. The man’s body hit the porch still writhing, his spasms continuing even after he was dead.
Danielle did a quick count in her head. Three in the initial fire, two more when she blew the skiff, another at the front door. How many men had they come with? How many more could there be?
At least two, she thought, in the moment before fresh staccato bursts of gunfire tore into the walls and the remnants of the window glass. Danielle crawled across the floor over the shards to her former perch by the window, where one of the two fire extinguishers she’d drained and refilled with her homemade acid compound lay.
She had just taken the extinguisher in hand when a figure leaped through the window, tearing the frame away as he plunged inward, opening fire wildly while he was still in the air. Danielle held fast to her senses, grabbed the extinguisher hose, and in one motion aimed it and squeezed the handle on the extinguisher’s top.
The gunman hit the floor on his feet but stumbled on impact, one of his legs sliding out from under him. Danielle hit him with a burst of her homemade acid before he could resteady his gun. Instantly he began to scream. His rifle dropped from his hands, which flailed for his face, tearing at the flesh that hissed and burned beneath his touch.
The screams pierced Ben’s still-throbbing eardrums, the worst sound he had ever heard. But the smell was worse, an acrid stench as the man’s face literally melted away.
His wails turned to dying rasps when another gunman hurled himself through the window on the other side of the cabin. Danielle rolled across the floor, going for the dying man’s assault rifle. But his fall had pinned it beneath him and she couldn’t free it before the second gunman sprayed the cabin with fire.
Ben focused on the fire extinguisher Danielle had laid aside for him, realizing it was too far away to make a try for. One of the kerosene-filled glass lanterns, though, lay directly before him and he snatched it up.
Fifteen feet away, Danielle had finally managed to yank the assault rifle from beneath the faceless man’s corpse when the final gunman twisted his rifle on her.
Ben hoisted the lantern overhead and heaved it, watching it soar, watching the gunman’s hand close on the trigger an instant before the glass shattered over the back and side of his head. He keeled over to the right, a burst from his rifle blasting into the ceiling to dig fresh leaks in the roof.
Danielle leaped to her feet, sweeping the cabin with the M-16 she’d salvaged as if unsure whether any more gunmen were about. She heard a car engine rev, followed by tires screeching through mud and dirt.
She charged through the front door, leaped off the porch, and charged through the flames starting to burn out and the cabin’s front yard. Once on the dirt road, she steadied her barrel on the shape of a van struggling through the woods. She saw sparks erupt as her bullets pockmarked its side, the M-16 clicking empty by the time she finally steadied her aim on the cab.
That made the final count nine. Seven dead, one gone, and one still alive to tell them about Hollis Buchert.
* * * *
Chapter 70
I
can’t see!” the man shrieked, his hands bound behind him to a chair.
“Would you like to know why?” Danielle asked him quite calmly.
“I can’t see!” he repeated, instead of answering.
“Your eyes hurt, don’t they?”
“Please, please, don’t do this. . . .”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know anything! I can’t tell you anything!”
“That’s a shame. Would you like to know why?”
“I—I—I. . .”
Ben stood by the window, standing guard, all too familiar with the interrogation technique Danielle was using. He’d heard of Israeli soldiers using the very same one on the worst Palestinian prisoners they captured, the ones who refused to break. He had sent Sayeed to the back bedroom to join his family, told them not to come out no matter what they heard, in order to spare them at least the sight.
Minutes before Ben and Danielle had finished a sweep of the surrounding area to make sure no more of Buchert’s People’s Brigade soldiers had been left behind. His post by the window was an added precaution.
“Where can I find Hollis Buchert?” Danielle asked the man tied to the chair.
“I don’t know! I swear, I don’t know!”
“How do your eyes feel?”
“They hurt.”
“That’s because I’ve tied a compress soaked in a mixture I cooked up myself. Little battery acid, some lye, and just a touch of chlorine thrown in for good measure. The pain’s probably getting worse, isn’t it?”
Ben listened, chilled by the matter-of-fact tone to Danielle’s voice. All business, as if she had done this before.
“Yes,” their hostage said meekly.
“There’s a reason for that,” Danielle told him. “See, my mixture is starting to soak through the compress now. Any moment it’ll start to seep into your eyelids. The pain’s nothing compared to what it’s going to be like in ten minutes, and ten minutes after that your corneas will be memories and you’ll be blind for life. So we don’t have a lot of time here to wrap up our discussion. I’ll ask you again: Where is Hollis Buchert?”
“If I tell you—”
“Try to imagine him doing something worse to you than this. Just try.”
“—he’ll kill me.” The man bit his lip, a grimace starting to stretch across his face.
; “Not if I kill him first. He’s going to release the smallpox, isn’t he?”
“Yes, yes! That’s the plan. That’s why we had to track down the Arab who fled here,” the man said, obviously referring to Sayeed. “Make sure he couldn’t tell anyone anything.”
Ben felt a realization strike him, everything at once falling into place. “You thought Sayeed was a part of this. . . .”
The man turned his head unseeingly toward Ben. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember? You held me hostage too. At Pine Valley.”
“You? No, it can’t be!” The man twisted back toward the front and Danielle’s general position, as if he were trying to spy her through the compress. “It’s all true, the things I heard. A single woman killing our soldiers. A ghost. You!” he finished in a raspy, terror-filled voice aimed toward Danielle.
“All the more reason for you to tell me where I can find Hollis Buchert.”
“My eyes,” the man moaned, his face starting to curl in agony.
“I know. It will get much worse, believe me, unless I take the compress off.”
“Minnesota!”
“Minnesota?”
“The Mall of America,” the man said, then shrieked in pain. “That’s where Buchert’s going to release his smallpox.”
Ben and Danielle locked stares, the truth they had suspected now confirmed. Before Danielle could speak, Ben lurched in front of her. She reached out to stop him, but it was too late. He had grabbed the People’s Brigade survivor by the lapels.
“Where else?” Ben demanded, shaking him.
“My eyes. . . Please, the pain . . . Make it stop!”
“Where else are you going to release the smallpox?”
The man shrank away from Ben as much as the chair allowed him. “I don’t know what you’re—”
“The rest of the smallpox that was delivered to you—where else are you going to release it?”
“Delivered?” The man twisted his head, trying to recall Danielle’s position. “Get him away from me. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Ben grabbed the arms of the chair and leaned over him. “Do you know who I am?”
The man shook his head.
“You killed my mother. And I want to kill you. Don’t make it so easy.”
Danielle picked up a glass of water and tossed it into the face of the People’s Brigade soldier, soaking the bandage covering his eyes. “That feels better, doesn’t it?”
The man’s shaking stilled. “Yes.”
“It won’t last. The pain will be back soon unless you tell us the truth.”
“I have! I swear I have!”
“I’m talking about the smallpox. How did you get it?”
“A boat!” the man screamed. “I was with Buchert when we picked it up. A boat in the middle of a lake five days ago.”
“How much?”
“A canister, a small tank . . . I’m not sure. It looked like a can of hair spray.”
Ben and Danielle looked at each other, struck by the anomaly. If only one canister had been delivered to the People’s Brigade, what had happened to the remainder of the supply stolen from USAMRIID?
“What about the rest?” Ben shot at him.
“The rest? What rest? There was just the one canister.”
“You know nothing of Fort Detrick?” Danielle probed.
“Fort what?” The man’s head flopped about, trying to pin down Ben’s location. “I don’t know anything about your mother. Buchert’s got the smallpox. The Mall of America—that’s where you’ll find him. That’s all I know. Please, one of you, my eyes, they’re starting to hurt again.”
“When?” Danielle demanded and dropped some more water on the compress wrapped around the man’s eyes. “When is Buchert coming?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, starting to shake again. “I swear, I don’t know!”
“You’re lying. Buchert wants to bring down the government, not kill a bunch of shoppers. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes plenty,” Ben said, his voice quivering slightly, remembering an item that had crossed his desk a few weeks before. “The National Governors Conference is taking place in Minneapolis this week, and the governors are scheduled to visit the Mall of America. Tomorrow.”
* * * *
Chapter 71
L
ayla Aziz Rahani sat on the veranda of her hotel suite in Madain Salah, overlooking the shoreline where tourists, even women in bathing suits, frolicked on the beach. She had spread the information obtained from Israel on a wrought-iron table before her, all of it concerning the official doggedly investigating the murder of an Arab-Israeli woman named Zanah Fahury.
Danielle Barnea, currently commander and acting head of Israel’s National Police.
Layla had been scrutinizing the material since her arrival here from London, allowing herself barely a glance at the world beyond, a world Rahani Industries had helped to create. Located in northwest Saudi Arabia, Madain Salah’s sole claim to fame until recent years had been the ancient tombs carved into surrounding hillsides by the Nabateans, who were also responsible for building the city of Petra in Jordan.
That is until hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Rahani Industries had been pumped into new hotels, cafés, hotels, shopping malls, even amusement parks and cable cars built to ferry guests up through tree-covered mountains to the palatial resorts in Abha. There, even in summer the breezes stayed cool. Guests could step out onto their balconies and watch falcons swoop through the nearby ravines or wild monkeys playing in the valleys.
There was so much about this country the world didn’t know and never would, unless efforts were focused toward changing the stodgy image of Saudi Arabia as a vast desert wasteland dotted with steel and glass skyscrapers. Layla wanted her country to open itself more to the world, even while assuring the influx of tourists would not disturb the delicate balance set by Muslim order. As such, all female tourists were supplied with abaiyas, black gowns, and head scarves, and requested to don them where tradition required.
But at the Madain Salah’s beachfront resort little attention was paid to such formalities. Here Western tourists could feel they were at Club Med when a half-day’s drive could take them to a crumbling Ottoman fort that stood over one of the world’s largest oases. Where else was it possible to swim at a resort in the morning and have Bedouin guides escort you to pristine desert encampments by night?
Most important for Layla Aziz Rahani, Madain Salah offered sanctuary. None of those Saudis she commonly did business with would ever be seen here, making it the safest spot to hold meetings and accept delivery of sensitive material like Danielle Barnea’s file. Equally important, it was a place where she was safe from scrutiny by her brother Saed.
The breeze off the sea ruffled some of the pages, and Layla added a few more stones to the veranda table to hold them in place. Those pages detailed various parts of Danielle Barnea’s life, an entire biography culled from a collection of file folders. But it was the simplest part of the dossier that interested Layla Aziz Rahani the most.
The Israeli’s father was the late General Yakov Barnea, a hero from the establishment of the Jewish state until his death six years before. A man who had served the Israeli Defense Forces in virtually every capacity, including director of strategic planning.
The various pictures of Yakov Barnea included in the files were of him accompanied by his daughter, Danielle, at various ages. Layla Aziz Rahani flipped through the photos and stopped when she came to one picturing Yakov Barnea holding a very young Danielle in his lap, a pair of older boys, her brothers, standing on either side of him. Layla focused on Yakov Barnea’s face, the flatly placid expression.
She knew that face, had seen it once before, years and years ago.
At the London Hilton. The night her mother had intended to escape back to the West with her daughters in tow until Layla had called her father from the phone in the bathroom.
Yakov Ba
rnea was the man who had climbed out of the cab and rushed to the front of the hotel!
Layla remembered seeing his face through the glass, grim and intense. Remembered watching him take Kavi from the arms of the wounded governess Habiba after Layla had broken free of her mother’s grasp and rushed across the lobby.
She remembered how much the gunshots had hurt her ears. Glass everywhere. Her sister crying. Blood spraying against windows and walls. Then her own screaming.
Everything else from that night was a blur, a bundle of memories without reason or order.
Her sister was dead. Her mother had as much as killed her.