THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  Gulzhan ran a camp in a small valley between two mountains northwest of the town of Taraz, a training farm for terrorists from throughout the Middle East and Africa – Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon and the Occupied Territories; Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Somalia – made popular after the camps in Afghanistan and Iraq had been closed by the Americans. Whenever the Islamic Jihad or Hamas, whenever the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Iraqi insurgency had a need for extra training for their swelling ranks – generally following a heavy blood-letting surrounding an Israeli or American offensive – Gulzhan was there with cots and trainers. It was lucrative work for one who’d been cast out.

  As they traveled in two battered Mercedes-Benz 814 diesel trucks to their destination, Gulzhan thought about his old friend El Aqrab. They knew the risks they ran each day, but El Aqrab’s arrest was still a cold awakening for Gulzhan. They had planned for it, of course, with the meticulousness with which El Aqrab drew each of his designs, years ago, the two of them, while hunting in the mountains, under the stars. If either of them were ever captured, the other would mount this mission. It was their insurance policy.

  * * *

  The train moved slowly through the mountain pass, chugging through the snow-flecked slopes, transporting a turbine and a shipment of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the BN-350 fast breeder reactor at the Mangystau Atomic Energy Combine in Aktau for long-term storage at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kurchatov City. Inside the first car, a member of the Aristan secret police, Vladimir Petronov, was thinking about his sorry career, how everything had gone downhill since his wife had left him for another man – a schoolteacher, of all people. It wasn’t fair. He’d always been a good husband, faithful and understanding. A good provider. But she had left him anyway. And all that she could tell him was that she did not love him anymore. As if, somehow, that really mattered.

  As he ruminated, Petronov spotted a tall bearded man, one of the soldiers, Shafir, ambling down the aisle. There was something about him today – the way he walked, the way his eyes darted about the car. Petronov had been working this run for over a year now. He knew all of the soldiers . . . better than he knew his own wife, it appeared. Shafir was likeable enough, quiet, a bit shy. He was unmarried and a devout Muslim. His mother had died recently after a short illness.

  Petronov yawned, got up from his uncomfortable wooden seat, and followed Shafir back through the car. The train was practically empty. In addition to the engineer, only a dozen soldiers guarded the shipment, and seven were dozing in the first car, waiting out the journey to Kurchatov City. Three guarded the rear car in which the HEU was stored. And then there was Shafir and Altynbayev, the old cook.

  Shafir retreated down the aisle, and vanished through the door that led into the dining car. Petronov followed, glancing down at the sleeping soldiers as he walked. They were kids mostly, barely old enough to shave. They were dressed in heavy woolen coats, pea green, drawn tightly around their bodies to ward away the cold. Petronov opened the rear door of the car and felt a frigid wind cut through him. He shuddered. The noise of the old diesel was deafening. It was amazing the train moved at all, given the condition of the engine. She had been overhauled so many times that it was fair to say none of the parts had been together very long. Like a new brigade, he thought. The pieces grated against each other. They heaved and groaned, trying to find their proper place within the jumble of machinery.

  Petronov stepped into the dining car; it was really more of a baggage car with a makeshift galley in the rear. Altynbayev, the old cook, lay on the counter, a pair of dirty towels stuffed underneath his head for a pillow. He was snoring so loudly that Petronov could hear it over the groaning of the engine. His huge belly heaved and jiggled as the train climbed through the pass. Petronov looked down at him for a moment, at the stubbly beard, the bushy eyebrows, and resisted a sudden urge to heave him from the counter. This is where the men ate their meals. It was disgusting to see the old cook sleeping on this surface, with his filthy boots and grimy hair. Petronov had reported Altynbayev so many times that it hardly seemed to matter anymore. Nobody cared. Nobody gave a damn, so why should he?

  He looked up and noticed Shafir only a few feet distant through the door. He was standing on the flatbed car, directly in front of the turbine, looking down at something by his feet. Then Petronov heard a dull explosion. The train rocked underneath him. He almost lost his footing for a second. He looked up and saw Shafir look back . . . and grin. The flatbed car began to pull away. Petronov cursed. He opened the rear door and almost tumbled from the train.

  Shafir had blown the coupling. The last two cars were slowing down. Without even thinking, Petronov leapt across the chasm, across the glistening rails, and landed roughly on the open car.

  The wind almost threw him from the train. It was blisteringly cold. Petronov turned to see the engine and the first two cars speed off, climbing through the narrow pass now at a startling speed. Then he felt a sharp blow on his back. He stumbled to his knees. Shafir was standing over him, a shovel in his hand.

  The bearded soldier swung at him again, but Petronov shimmied to the side, and the shovel deflected off the surface harmlessly. Petronov kicked, connecting with Shafir’s stomach. The soldier staggered backward, tripping on one of the metal cables that held the giant turbine in place. Then he went down.

  Petronov leapt to his feet. He felt the wind propel him, toss him like a piece of paper across the flatbed car. He crashed against the soldier and Shafir punched him hard in the face – once, twice. Petronov punched back. Suddenly, a second explosion, much louder than the first, reverberated through the pass.

  Petronov caught a vague glimpse of flames as first the engine, and then the first car and the dining car skidded from the rails. There was a mighty crash as they ground against the stone embankment.

  Shafir staggered to his feet. He started running but Petronov caught him by the ankle and the bearded man went down. Petronov leapt on top of him. He pummeled his back, his neck. He grabbed him by the chin. Shafir began to crawl away but Petronov wouldn’t let go. He rode him like a horse. He twisted the mighty neck, one hand around the soldier’s forehead, the other clasping his beard. He pulled and pulled until he heard a brittle snap, and the soldier slumped to the deck.

  Petronov collapsed on top of him. They had only fought for a minute or two, but he was completely exhausted. He felt his chest heave, struggle for gasps of freezing air. He pushed Shafir aside. The dead soldier’s body rolled across the flatbed car, over the edge, and vanished out of sight. The car began to crawl. Without the engine, the steep grade of the mountain pass was acting like a break. Petronov sat up. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, then turned and saw another bearded man beside him standing on a rock, immediately beside the train.

  The man was short and squat and held an automatic weapon in his hand. Petronov opened his mouth to shout something but the sound never made it past his lips. Before it had even formed inside his throat, a bullet had entered his mouth, passed through his neck, and blew out the back of his head. Petronov collapsed onto the flatbed car, remembering his wife, at last, remembering the blue and yellow dress she’d worn that first day he had seen her in the market square, the way she’d turned her head and looked at him, with the conception of a new world in her eyes.

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, January 27 – 6:18 PM

  Queens, New York

  Jerry Johnson, Decker’s boss, was furious. He had been dragged away from Otto Warhaftig’s lecture – which had been cut embarrassingly short. He’d rushed across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, all the way to Long Island City, without any direction from headquarters, mind you, to check out the situation personally. And he’d arrived just in time to see Bartolo being hoisted up into the Coroner’s meat truck.

  Special Agent in Charge (SAC) for the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, Johnson was the kind of boss who believed that each mistake his agents made was a personal affront to him. H
e had no patience for imperfection, least of all in himself. And his penchant for intolerance had only grown worse since 9/11. The stakes were higher now, he told his men. Sloppiness was a greater enemy than Al Qa’ida. It was “the enemy within.”

  So it came as no surprise to Decker when the SAC began to reprimand him publicly, in front of Williams and Kazinski, in front of Warhaftig too, as Bartolo’s body was being lifted up into the meat truck. “What the fuck happened?” Johnson kept saying.

  Decker didn’t know where to begin, so he didn’t. He was pondering why meat trucks were always made to look like ambulances. No hospital could ever fix their grisly occupants.

  The Coroner was anxious to get going. He wanted nothing to do with Jerry Johnson. The SAC looked as though he would lash out at anyone who happened across his path. The Coroner slammed the doors of the meat truck shut, muttered something indecipherable, and scurried back into the cab. A moment later, the meat truck disappeared around the block.

  He wanted to hear it all, SAC Johnson said. Every last fucking detail. And so Decker told him. When he had finished, Johnson continued to rail. “What a fucking mess, a fucking disaster. Why didn’t you shoot the prick before he stabbed your partner? Jesus Christ. My grandmother would have handled this better. It was a simple stakeout. Mark my words, Decker, there’s going to be an inquiry on this. I ought to take your gun and badge right now. Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Decker could feel himself grow angrier by the second. When he’d finally had enough, he said, “Well, perhaps, sir, if you hadn’t ordered Williams and Kazinski to attend that lecture this evening – no disrespect, Warhaftig – this might have been avoided. We were shorthanded, sir, and now I’ve lost my partner and a friend . . . ”

  Johnson looked at Decker with a look of such penetrating venom that Decker felt the words stick in his throat. Decker had only just gotten out of the doghouse for sending those photographs of the PC wallpaper to Washington without apprising Johnson first.

  Tall and thin, with pale gray eyes and even grayer hair, Jerry Johnson had a handsome, suntanned face, a black and gray mustache, well coiffed, and a polished nut-brown tonsure. His forehead was furrowed by meditation. He wore a jaunty brown tweed cashmere blend with natural shoulders, and a rust cravat in his breast pocket. His raincoat was Aquascutum. He cultivated the look of the 1960s British character actor typecast as “the Colonel,” home from the Raj. But his chin was surprisingly weak. It tended to slip into the warm folds of his neck and all but disappear.

  Despite his affectations, Johnson had risen through the ranks with startling speed, earning three special commendations in the last year alone. His handsome, well-shaped lips quivered as his eyes bore into Decker. He shifted from one foot to the next, glanced at Warhaftig, the Intel specialist on loan from the CIA, and bit his tongue. After a moment of unbearable silence, he looked up at the falling rain. It had grown heavier in the last few seconds. He raised the collar of his coat and started up the street. “Let’s take a look at the apartment,” he said over his shoulder.

  Someone alerted the landlord and he let them into the apartment without a fuss. Johnson had brought along a search warrant from a local federal judge based on the tax evasion charges linked to the cigarette heist. The suspects had yet to be categorized as foreign agents under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

  The team picked their way through the apartment fastidiously, finding dozens of cell phones and hundreds of badly printed radical Islamic tracts but nothing conclusive. Williams did, however, uncover pay stubs for three men, including presumably the third suspect, Mecca.

  His “real” name was Salim Moussa. He drove the night shift at the Imperial Taxi Company of Queens – the same cab company where Ali Singh worked – and labored as a handyman at a place called East Village Jukebox, on Broadway and Eleventh Street in Manhattan. They photographed everything. Johnson still huffed and puffed. When Decker asked to examine the hard disk of the PC, the SAC denied it. The search warrant didn’t permit them to scan or copy any hard disk, Johnson said. Decker noticed that a standard Windows background had replaced the PC wallpaper he’d spotted earlier. He pointed this out but Johnson was adamant; he didn’t want to overstep his bounds. “Fruit from the poisoned tree,” he kept on saying.

  “Well, I took some photographs before,” said Decker. “It was raining pretty hard but they should come out.”

  Warhaftig, the CIA Intel specialist, was mildly interested. “What did you see?” he asked.

  Warhaftig looked like an ex-Sergeant. He was fifty, with a tough but friendly face, large brown eyes framed by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a nose that appeared to have been broken more than once, and a grim no-nonsense kind of mouth. But he’d grown a bit of a paunch the last few years. He was always chained to his desk, and if he did get out, it was generally to the choicest restaurant, drinking or dining with someone with expensable tastes. Veal was his principle weapon these days.

  “Some kind of Arabic calligraphy,” said Decker. “Bordered by an arabesque design.”

  “You may be some kind of genius with languages and cryptoanalytics,” Johnson cut in, “some kind of wunderkid, but you’ve got a lot to learn about field work, Decker. This was a simple stakeout.” He then told Williams and Kazinski to set up additional surveillance teams where they knew the suspects worked. “Decker,” he continued, “you go back across the street and keep your eyes peeled.”

  “They’re not coming back! With your permission, sir, I’d like to break the news to Bartolo’s family. I know them.”

  “So do I, you may be surprised to learn. You have your orders. Try not to fuck them up this time.”

  And then Warhaftig said, “Sir, if you wouldn’t mind. I’d like to accompany Agent Decker. Keep an eye on things.”

  “Good idea. Better to have someone along with some experience.” With that he turned and walked away.

  Decker and Warhaftig made their way back to the surveillance squat across the street. Decker ducked into the bathroom to clean up; he still had blood on his cuffs. When he returned to the window, Warhaftig was smoking a cigarette – a Camel. “Don’t take it too hard,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. You probably didn’t have the shot. And Johnson, if you don’t mind my saying so, is a bit of a blowhard. I’ve never heard of anyone not being sent home or to counseling after losing a partner. He’s just pissed off his unit’s down a man.”

  Decker sat down beside him and peered out through the camera at the apartment across the street. It was hauntingly empty now. Pitch black. The suspects must have turned the lights off before they left. Warhaftig said he was sorry that Decker had missed his lecture. “What do you know about El Aqrab and the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar?” he asked.

  “Not much,” said Decker, reluctant to start yet another conversation bound to blow up in his face.

  Warhaftig filled him in about the organization, and about El Aqrab himself. It was a quick synopsis from his humble birth in Lebanon. Trained in Kazakhstan with the renowned guerrilla leader Gulzhan Baqrah. Explosives expert. Implicated in a number of bombings, including the U.S. Marine barracks and U.S. embassy in Lebanon in ‘83. Blew up oil wells in Kuwait during the first Gulf war and was responsible for dozens of bombings in Lebanon and Israel, including the booby trap in Shiheen in ’93 that murdered twelve Israeli soldiers.

  Trained suicide bombers over the last decade during the intifadah, and then disappeared about three years ago, presumably killed after being targeted by an Israeli rocket strike.

  But Crimson Scimitar cells continued to blow up U.S. soldiers in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The organization never died. Israeli information was uncharacteristically sketchy, especially concerning someone of El Aqrab’s renown. One thing was legendary, however: Signature pyrotechnics were a featured part of each event.

  “If he was killed, what’s all the fuss?” asked Decker.

  “Well, that’s just it,” Warhaftig said. “After three years, he’s resurfaced. Acc
ording to our sources, he’s now in Israeli custody. Caught after slaughtering some family in Tel Aviv.”

  The two sat in silence, watching the rain fall on the window. Decker could still feel the incision of the wound in Tony’s back. He could not get the image of his partner’s . . . his ex-partner’s fingers out of his head. He kept seeing them open, splay apart, and then slide across the balustrade, just out of reach. Just gone.

  “Don’t worry,” said Warhaftig, as if reading his mind. “These things happen. I’m telling you, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t let Johnson get to you. It’s just part of the job. Won’t affect your file much.”

  “Look, Warhaftig, I don’t need babysitting. And I’m not worried about my file.”

  Warhaftig stubbed his cigarette out in the saucer by his feet. “I know you’re not,” he said, blowing out smoke. “What I mean is, you have a solid record. That thing in Iowa, for instance.”

  Decker was surprised. Warhaftig had just joined the team that afternoon. “What do you know about Iowa?” he asked.

  “You were born there, in Davenport,” said Warhaftig, “to a policeman father – John Decker Sr. – and a librarian mother – Louise Carrick. Lost both of your parents in a car crash when you were just fifteen. Spent fourteen hours in surgery, two months in a coma, and a year-and-a-half in physical therapy. Some said you’d never walk again, but I guess you proved them wrong. Raised by your mother’s older sister, Betsy, and her husband, Tom Llewellyn, in nearby Bettendorf. Your father insisted you take up martial arts since you were such a runty little kid, and you took several trophies in long-distance running and Kung Fu in high school, eventually becoming a black belt at seventeen.” He laughed. “Had a growth spurt senior year, I guess. Went to College at Northwestern on a scholarship, where you majored in mathematics; minored in foreign languages. Graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, blah blah blah. Did your thesis on neural network predictive modeling, whatever that is. Have a facility for finding patterns in seemingly random data. It was this skill that particularly impressed your instructors at Quantico where – after college and a two-year stint on the Bettendorf Police Force – you trained to become a Cryptanalyst Forensic Examiner with the FBI. Graduated at the top of your class. Then spent eighteen months with the Racketeering Records Analysis Unit in Washington, D.C., learning the ropes, before being transferred to Chicago.”