Bin Osman would have to let the man and his daughter live long enough to ensure that the device Maurstad had assembled would work, which irritated him because his session with Mrs. Maurstad had whetted his appetite. He knew that normal people might consider his need to torture and kill sick; his college psychologist certainly had when she'd threatened to have him diagnosed as a psychopathic personality — but she hadn't lived long enough to carry out an official diagnosis. She had been bin Osman's last victim for nearly thirty years, until he'd signed on with Jemaah Islamiyah. Being part of the al Qaeda affiliate had afforded him ample opportunity to engage in his favorite pastime, and he was now making up for lost time.
Bin Osman helped Maurstad into the NBC suit and led him to the container, but once there, the scientist again became catatonic. Clearly he needed to be motivated. He needed what the Americans called a pep talk. "Dr. Maurstad," bin Osman said, "you really must compose yourself. You must think of your daughter."
"You bastard!" Maurstad shouted. "You touch my daughter and I'll kill you."
"Like you killed me when I touched your wife?" bin Osman asked. "I think not. You will sit there and watch me reduce her to nothing, one small slice at a time. And then she will be dead and it will be your turn. No, you cannot prevent this from happening by threatening me. You can only prevent this by completing your task."
"How can I be sure that you won't torture her even if I do finish this device?"
"You can't, but you must have complete faith that I will do to your daughter much worse than what I did to your wife if you do not complete the device or if it fails to go off."
"What if I make a mistake and the bomb is a dud?"
"For your daughter's sake, you had better hope that you make no such mistakes."
Bin Osman watched as Maurstad forced himself to begin the final assembly of the nuclear device. The man worked from diagrams that ' he'd sketched out earlier. Bin Osman had taken the opportunity to have his own explosive expert study the diagrams, and his expert had suggested some changes that would make it difficult for anyone to disable the device even if someone discovered it.
When Maurstad began the final assembly, the Malaysian said, "No, Dr. Maurstad, that is not how I want you to wire the timer. You must do as I say." Bin Osman instructed the scientist on how he wanted the wiring to be completed.
While Maurstad finished wiring the timer, bin Osman received a phone call. It was from Botros. "Musa, I have a present for you," Botros said.
"What is it, Jameed?"
"It's the young American. Shall I entertain him until you arrive, or should I have him leave immediately." Botros spoke cryptically in case someone was listening to the conversation, but he already knew the answer — bin Osman would want him to keep Anderson alive until he returned from San Francisco so he could torture the young rider. Botros wanted to dispose of him immediately, which is what any sane person would do.
As Botros had expected, bin Osman said, "Keep him entertained until I return." Bin Osman smiled inside his own NBC suit as he watched Maurstad complete the final assembly procedures on the timer, exactly as he had ordered him to do. While he would have to wait until after they had fled the country to practice his art on Maurstad's daughter, the Anderson boy would provide that night's entertainment.
* * *
Bolan knew he had to act quickly to stop Randy from alerting the men in the turkey shed to his presence. The only way to do that would be to get Lee Ann close enough so that he could overpower her. It was clear the emaciated shell of a woman was barely able to form a clear thought. Bolan simply smiled at her. It worked. Instinctively she moved closer to him. He held out his left hand and she moved in toward him. As soon as she was close enough, he gave her jaw a sharp jab.
He'd tried to control his punch and just apply the minimum amount of force to knock her out, but the Executioner had no way of knowing the toll years of drug abuse had taken on her bones and he felt the woman's jaw collapse under his blow. She fell hard, hitting her head on the edge of the bed. She wasn't moving, but Bolan could see she was still breathing. Given her fragile state, he feared he might have seriously hurt the woman, but at that moment he couldn't worry about that — he had to try to rescue Eddie Anderson. Her drug abuse had turned her into the walking dead already.
The entire encounter with Lee Ann had taken less than half a minute so Randy couldn't have gotten very far. Bolan ran from the bedroom to try to intercept the addict. He looked out the filthy living room window and saw the scrawny drug fiend standing alongside a building that once must have been a pump house for a well. His back was turned toward the trailer. Judging from the position of his hands, he'd stopped to urinate.
Bolan took the sound-suppressed Beretta from the shoulder rig he wore beneath his blouse and crept to the trailer door. He slowly made his way toward the oblivious drug addict. As he approached, Randy turned and the Executioner struck him hard on the temple with the Beretta. Randy collapsed to the ground, his penis still in his hands.
Bolan went back to the building that housed the meth lab and retrieved the binoculars he'd dropped when the dog had attacked him. The dog's carcass had already started to attract flies. Bolan crouched in the tall weeds that covered the entire compound and put camouflage grease paint on his face. The sun was beginning to set and in the twilight he was just able to make out the men inside the derelict cars guarding the building. From his position he could see three corners of the building, and one car had been placed at each corner. There was likely at least one such guard placed behind the building, at the farthest corner from the Executioner's vantage point. Even with a suppressor, his Beretta still made a fairly loud crack, so he'd either have to try to snipe at the men from far enough away so that they couldn't hear the shots or else sneak up on them and take them out one at a time with his Fairbairn-Sykes knife.
The problem with trying to snipe at the men from a distance was that the subsonic rounds would lose velocity and fall off at longer distances, meaning he'd have to use a fair amount of Kentucky windage. But even if he did hit his mark his bullets might not have the velocity to take out his targets. It looked like he was going to have to do this the hard way, with his knife.
Bolan slowly crept toward the vehicle nearest him.
The sun had set by the time Bolan closed in on the junked Chevrolet Caprice placed at the corner of the turkey shed nearest the meth lab. The soldier had crawled on his belly through the tall weeds, taking his time to avoid upsetting the weeds and giving away his position. Now he waited near the edge of the road that ran through the property, looking for the best way across.
He didn't see one. Even with the sun now below the horizon, there was no way to cross the road without alerting the sentry in the car. He was within less than fifty yards from the man, within range of the powered-down subsonic ammo in his suppressed Beretta, but Bolan wanted to be sure. In the flat twilight it was often hard to judge distances accurately. He studied the distance, looked at a couple of objects in between him and the target for scale, and estimated the range to be a bit less than forty yards. He set the selector to single-round fire and sighted the man's face in the center of his night sights. He squeezed the trigger and even with the sound suppressor, the gun seemed to roar in his hand.
But his aim was true and a large crater appeared right at the bridge of the man's nose. His head snapped back in the seat and his sightless eyes stared up at the rotting roof of the car.
To Bolan the shot from the Beretta sounded like cannon fire, but he hoped the sound hadn't carried to the other sentries. He took out his binoculars and checked the other two sentries he could see from his position. The man at the far end of the shed on the side of the building that faced the road seemed oblivious to the shot, but the man at the near end on the opposite side of the building seemed to have heard something. He sat in a wrecked early 1970s Oldsmobile convertible and had a good view of the area from which Bolan had taken his shot. He had become alert and was looking around.
The man at the far end of the building was too far away for Bolan to get a shot off, but he estimated that the man in the convertible was still within sixty yards — a long shot with the powered-down ammo, but doable for someone as familiar with his equipment as the Executioner was. He'd taken longer shots with the 93-R and made them, even using subsonic ammo.
The man in the Oldsmobile couldn't see the sentry Bolan had just shot because of the position of the cars, but Bolan had a clear view of the man sitting in the front seat of the enormous convertible. When he saw the sentry raise a walkie-talkie to his lips, he quickly drew a bead on the man and squeezed the trigger. He aimed for the very top of the sentry's head but because of bullet drop, the round hit the man just between his nose and top lip. His head flipped back and the Executioner put another round into the top of his throat, at the base of the skull. Bolan saw the top of the man's head explode in a spray of bone, hair and gray matter as the bullet exited, and then he fell backwards and out of sight.
The man at the far end of the building hadn't moved. Bolan scoped him out through his binoculars and saw that he was in the middle of enjoying a cigarette. He, too, sat in an Oldsmobile convertible, but in his case he sat in a smaller model. The top was up and remained relatively intact. Bolan could see that wires ran from buds in the sentry's ears down toward his lap, most likely to an MP3 player. They could have been connected to some sort of communications equipment, but judging from the way the man was bobbing his head, the soldier doubted that was the case.
Bolan crept in the tall weeds alongside the road. The building angled away from the road, so by the time he was parallel with the man, his target was more than sixty yards away from the soldier. Because of the angle, Bolan couldn't see if there were any more guards behind the building or at the corner, but he guessed there was at least one. He didn't want to chance alerting a sentry he couldn't see or stop before the man might alert others in the complex, but because the sentry in the car near him was rocking out, he had an opportunity to sneak across the road undetected.
Bolan watched the sentry singing along and noted that at regular intervals he threw his head back, closed his eyes and seemed to sing a repeated chorus. Bolan counted out the beats between these episodes and timed his dash across the road to coincide with the man throwing his head back. He ran low across the road and ducked behind an overturned wooden skiff with a hole in its side big enough for Bolan to crawl through. He ducked under the skiff and peered through the hole at the singing sentry. He had just finished his chorus and was opening his eyes. He'd seen nothing when Bolan ran across the road.
Tall weeds had grown up between the turkey shed and the road, giving Bolan cover as he crept toward the sentry. Because the convertible's top was up, there was a fairly large blind spot between the turkey shed and the car, which was placed so that it faced the road. The car looked almost drivable — the tires even still contained air and fake spoke hubcaps still covered the two wheels that Bolan could see. Best of all, the sideview mirrors were still intact. Bolan used the mirror on the passenger's side of the car to ascertain the location of the blind spot for the man singing away in the driver's seat. The soldier looked in the mirror and when he was in a position where he couldn't see the driver, he was almost certainly in a position where the driver couldn't see him. Using this method he got to the car's rear bumper.
Bolan crawled around to the driver's side of the car and made his way to the driver's door. The guard finally spotted him and reached for his weapon. Gripping his Fairbairn-Sykes in his right hand, Bolan lunged up and in one fluid motion grabbed the man's hair with his left hand, tilted back his head and cut his throat, slicing through the cords that ran from the ear buds.
Knowing the man was dead, the soldier dove back into the weeds and crept to the corner of the building. Looking through the weeds he saw one more car, another aging convertible, this one an old Pontiac LeMans from the mid 1960s. Another sentry sat in the car, this one alert and scanning his surroundings. By the time he saw the Executioner it was too late. Bolan drew a bead on the man with his Beretta and with one gentle squeeze of the smooth trigger, he sent a bullet right into the man's temple as he fumbled for his own gun.
Knowing that he'd need as much ammo as possible when things turned ugly, Bolan replaced the partially spent magazine with a full one and moved to the building to position himself for a look around the corner. He saw one more guard, this one standing by the door of what once must have been some sort of washing room or cleaning room built on the side of the main structure. He studied the surrounding area but couldn't see any more guards or any likely hides for them.
Off in the area that once must have been the turkey's pasture, Bolan could see a drainage ditch that ran alongside the fence and terminated very near the barn entrance. Bolan moved into the ditch, crouched and ran toward the small cleaning room. When he reached the point where the ditch became too shallow to crouch without being seen, he crawled on his belly until he reached the end of the trench. A small pipe ran into the trench from the room built onto the side of the barn.
The final guard was only four feet from where Bolan hid in the ditch. He waited patiently and when the man turned his back, the soldier lunged out and attacked him. He had the man in a death grip before he'd had a chance to make a sound. Bolan twisted the man's head hard. The man looked at Bolan with a calm expression on his face, then fell face-first onto the ground, dead. Bolan moved quickly toward the door that led into the small lean-to built onto the side of the turkey shed.
The structure had windows on the three sides that weren't connected to the shed, but they were so filthy it was impossible to see through them. Bolan crouched down below the windows in case it was easier to see out than in and moved to the door. When he craned his head to look inside, he saw something he hadn't expected. A young girl was chained to an old, dusty cast-iron sink. A man with an SAR-21 battle rifle stood above her, the short barrel of his rifle trained on her head.
13
Botros hated the fact that his men were being drawn into the culture of decadence that was motorcycle racing. They had begun listening to popular music, and he suspected that some of them had even begun smoking marijuana since they had been working with the deviant Filipino gangsters from San Francisco.
He watched the Filipino-American swine pummel Eddie Anderson on the floor of the shed. His men still hadn't cleaned up the bloody lump of carved flesh tied to the chair near where the gangsters beat the young American. He knew he should stop the beating — his life might be worth no more than Anderson's if he let these thugs accidentally killed the little man — but he found he was taking too much pleasure in the young man's suffering to stop the proceedings.
Ultimately the beating stopped on its own. As more of the gangsters noticed the grotesquery tied to the chair, they lost interest in beating Anderson. Eventually they stopped altogether. The sight of Nancy Maurstad's remains even quieted the abrasive young American. It was the first time Botros had ever seen the man when he wasn't flapping his lips about something.
"Tie him up," Botros ordered the Filipinos, motioning to a chair not far from bin Osman's previous victim.
By this time the shock had worn off and Anderson resumed his tirade against both Botros and the Filipinos. The Filipinos began to punch the man again.
"Stop. We must keep him alive. Gag him with this." Botros tossed a filthy rag to the Filipino closest to him and the man stuffed the rag in Anderson's mouth, then secured it with a piece of duct tape.
Bin Osman had been pleased when Botros had called to tell him about the abduction of the American. Botros loathed the Malaysian, but it comforted him when his psychopathic boss was pleased. He looked at the hideous carcass tied to the chair in the middle of the room. It had been several hours since she'd died and most of the blood had drained from her body, leaving her looking like a beached manatee. While he thought bin Osman's actions were despicable, he was glad that the Malaysian was going to practice his art on Anderson
rather than him.
He was further relieved that the big American had not found them yet. Perhaps he would never find them. Botros didn't know who he feared more — bin Osman or Cooper. Even though the depths of bin Osman's depravity knew no bottom, he thought perhaps he feared Cooper more. Bin Osman was a man — a twisted, emotionally stunted excuse of a man, but still a man. He wasn't so sure about Cooper. He had begun to believe that the American really was Iblis made flesh.
But the more time passed without their being attacked by the big American, the more relaxed Botros became. The plan would succeed; it had to. The Muslim world needed to be rid of the traitorous bastards who spoon-fed their people Western decadence disguised as moderation.
They would strike what may well turn out to be a death blow to the United States. By destroying a major U.S. city like San Francisco, the United States would likely become a police state, as it nearly had after the glorious attacks of 9/11. The Americans were so cowardly that after one attack on their own soil they had gladly handed over their freedoms to the government. Their president at the time had claimed that the attackers hated America because of its freedom; in reality, Botros thought, they had hated America for its presence in the Middle East and its support of Israel. Its citizens' so-called "freedom" was just an aspect of what they hated, a symptom of the disease just as a sneeze was a symptom of a cold.
Botros knew al Qaeda did want the American government to curtail the freedom of its citizens, not because they hated that freedom but because the discontent such action would create would in turn create much internal strife that al Qaeda could manipulate to achieve its own ends. They had almost accomplished this after 9/11, but as time went on without further attacks, the American people had slowly begun to reclaim their freedoms.
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