Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  Finally, Scalese stood up and looked around. All in all, not a bad night’s work, he reflected. He had snipped off two of Mr. D’s loose ends, permanently — Bentley and Bobby Joe — and soon he would add Greenway to the list. He walked back to the Lexus with a broad smile on his face, and drove away.

  While Linda removed the small screws on the back panels on both of the notebook computers, Bob tried the flash drive in one of Travers’ desktop PCs. He inserted it into one of the USB ports, but when he clicked on the drive, a screen came up asking for a user password. That was what he expected would happen; so he tried some of the other automatic Windows features, and finally “Run,” “Search,” and “Internet Explorer,” so that he could at least find a “File Directory,” all to no avail. The same screen requiring a user password came up each time. Frustrated, he sat back and wished Charlie were here. Bob knew a few rudimentary computer tricks, but Charlie was the Grand Master. In his absence, Bob hoped the decryption software on Charlie’s hard drive could be made to do the job. Even though his notebook had a neat, three-quarter inch hole through its center, if the bullet missed the hard drive, it might still be usable in another machine. Sure enough, after Linda removed the last screw, he pried the case open, and saw that while there was a hole through the motherboard, the keyboard, the screen, and numerous circuits, the bullet had missed the hard drive, barely.

  “Linda, while I’m switching out the hard drives, get me the cable to one of Ernie’s printers and make sure it has plenty of paper.”

  From that point, the work began to move quickly. He switched the drives, closed the case with all those little screws, and powered the new one up. Like Frankenstein’s monster with its new brain, the new Asus booted up thinking it was Charlie’s old machine. “It’s alive!” Bob cried out, imitating Colin Clive’s exultant voice in the old 1931 movie. Unfortunately, when he tried the flash drive, he received the same response he got on the desktop, asking for a user password. He sat at the computer for a few minutes more, trying all the usual ones like “Password,” “123456,” “abcdef,” and a few others, to no avail.

  Frustrated, he leaned back in his chair and looked at Linda. “Before I start banging away with some of Charlie’s decryption routines, did Eleanor give any hints about a password?”

  “No, and I don’t know much about computers.”

  “But she did, and she must’ve said something.”

  “I didn’t think to ask,” she shrugged helplessly.

  He stared at her. “When she gave you the keys and told you about the cereal box with the note inside, what did she say? What were her exact words?”

  “Well, she gave me the keys to her house and office and told me there was an envelope in the Cocoa Puffs box in her pantry, and something about it was the key.”

  Bob sat back and thought for a moment. “She didn’t have any kids did she?”

  “No, only Ellie and me.”

  “And she said, ‘it was the key,’ ” he repeated and suddenly turned back to the keyboard. “Wait a minute. Sometimes things need to smack you right in the face before you see them. She meant the password key,” he said as he typed in ‘Cocoa Puffs’ and hit Enter. The screen suddenly changed and a file directory opened up. “I’ll bet the farm that Cocoa Puffs is Ellie’s favorite breakfast cereal, isn’t it?’

  Linda’s mouth dropped open as she stared at him. “God, I feel so stupid.”

  “Don’t. Eleanor was very clever, that’s all,” he told her as he looked at his watch. It was already 9:15 and time was running out. The directory of the documents in the files was long. Most of them contained CHC in the title or related to the medical services company in one way or another. Some appeared to be monthly Excel spreadsheets and financial reports dating back over the past twelve months. There were also Word memos and letters with titles or names and dates, as well as copies of scanned documents that looked very much like monthly statements and records of deposits in banks, mostly foreign banks.

  That was when Ernie Travers came back carrying several bags of food and drink. “You got it open?” he asked.

  “He did it, not me,” Linda laughed as they dove into the burgers and fries.

  “There’s a ton of stuff on this flash drive, way too much for us to go through right now,” Bob said as he pulled it out of the Asus notebook computer, plugged it into Ernie’s secretary’s machine, and used the password to reopen the files. “Linda, this one is already connected to Ernie’s printer. I want to get a good cross-section, enough to scare the hell out of Scalese’s people; so go through the directory and pick out anything that sounds good, but isn’t too big, particularly if it has a recent date — financial reports, spreadsheets, bank statements, and any correspondence that sounds incriminating. Print them out. Time’s short, and I have to find some terrain maps before my guys get here. There’s some good sites online, and…”

  “Man, I’ve got a ton of that stuff right here, like aerial photos of the area and USGS maps,” Travers interjected. “We need it in case of a crash or a ground search or anything like that.”

  “You have USGS maps?” Bob beamed. “I’m in Infantry heaven! Show me the Quad Sheets with Parker Woods Forest Preserve on them.”

  Travers went to his storage room, which held a large horizontal-drawer file cabinet with two dozen wide, flat drawers. They held aerial photos, maps, and blueprints of the airport. He opened one of the lower drawers, thumbed through the sheets and pulled out three green-toned, multicolored USGS maps covering the area east of O’Hare. Ernie laid them on his conference table and they saw that Parker Woods slopped over onto two of them. “Here,” he said as he pointed to the center of the park. “But why’d you tell Scalese you’d meet him in the picnic area?”

  “One of our vendors held a company picnic there last summer, and I saw most of it.”

  “And an old infantryman never forgets a good piece of ground, does he?" Ernie asked, but Bob just smiled. "Actually, it’s a pretty smart choice. If they come in from the north lot, like you told them to do, and we come in from the south…”

  “Ernie,” he smiled. “I told him a lot of things, but one thing’s for certain. He isn’t going to do what he said, and neither am I.” That was when Bob’s cell phone rang. When he pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the display, he saw an incoming call from area code 910. “Excuse me for a minute, Ernie, but it’s my favorite storm door and window company in North Carolina… “Hey, Ace,” he answered.

  “Reporting in as ordered, Sir. We should be wheels down and ‘ready to rumble’ in… forty-eight minutes.”

  “Roger that. See you then,” Bob replied as he rang off.

  While he was on the phone, Ernie Travers stepped across the room and scanned the accumulated messages on his teletype machine. He tore off two of them, read them more closely, and walked back to where Bob was standing. “There’s something else I need to show you, Bob,” Travers said as he handed him one of the pages, his expression turning serious. “This came across the Metro police wire while I was out. There’s no easy way to put this, but this report says your wife’s dead.”

  Bob read it and paused a moment to absorb what it said.

  “The Winnetka police found her by her swimming pool earlier this evening, murdered,” Travers continued. “They’ve got your name linked to it, of course, with an APB out, but you were with me the whole time. If we live through this business tonight, I can clear that up. It appears there was a fight and someone cut her throat.”

  “You missed the interesting part,” Bob said. “They found an Italian stiletto lying next to her. Isn’t that what Tony Scalese likes to use?”

  Travers nodded. “Yeah, that’s his ‘rep,’ but I’m having a hard time believing he’d be stupid enough to leave his own knife behind like that.”

  “Unless he’s sending me a message,” Bob said as he turned and looked at the other man. “You’re probably wondering why I’m not more emotional about this. Well, truth is Angie and I started breaki
ng up a long time ago. Not that it matters, but I’m not the type to get angry or emotional about much of anything. Instead, I’m the kind who gets even. So, whether it was Scalese, Greenway, Bentley, or one of their other pals, tonight’s going to be payback.”

  “That’s the other thing,” Travers said as he held up the other piece of paper. “Bentley and his ‘nephew’ Bobby Joe were found shot to death in the parking lot next to the Indian Hills water tank a little while ago — small caliber, three head shots each, execution style.”

  “I suppose they’ll try to pin those on me too?”

  “Probably,” Travers shrugged. “But anyone with a brain in his head knows that’s how Salvatore DiGrigoria and his brothers terminate an employee.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The private airfield was located twelve miles north of O’Hare Airport, outside the small town of Mount Prospect, Illinois. In rush hour, even that short distance could take thirty minutes to drive. At 9:50 p.m., the short convoy of two of Ernie Travers’s black, oversized Chevy Suburbans, complete with low-profile, red-white-and-blue light bars, trailed by an old, rusty Ford Taurus, took less than half that time. Ernie Travers and Bob Burke drove the two SUVs, while Linda tried to keep up in the aging Taurus. The airfield was located in what used to be cornfields to the west of Mount Prospect decades before. Since then, the small towns had grown and closed in around it. For a private airport, it was surprisingly modern and busy, even that late at night, due to its ease of access to major expressways and the growing Northwest suburbs. It was home to many corporate jets, private charter companies, privately owned propeller planes and helicopters, fractional ownership airplanes, flight schools, police and rescue helicopters, sightseeing companies, and even the traffic-copters for three local radio stations.

  The terminal and service facility normally closed to the public at 9:30 p.m., but Ernie Travers’s CPD detective badge and O’Hare report credentials allowed them inside the terminal. From the loudspeaker in the lounge, they soon heard the conversation between a Gulfstream G-5 private charter from Windimere, North Carolina and the tower. The G-5 was on final approach. With the distinctive upward flip of its wing tips and sleek, needle nose, it was the current undisputed king of civil aviation. Fast, efficient, and economical, it could carry sixteen passengers up to 6,300 miles at 600 miles per hour. In less than a minute, the G-5 touched down on the runway, slowed, and taxied to the transient parking spaces located to the left of the terminal. The pilot turned its nose so the small jet faced back toward the runway and powered the engines down.

  With Ernie Travers’ badge, they received permission to drive the two Chevy Suburbans through the airport security gate in order to park next to the airplane and unload. By the time they returned to the SUVs, drove them around to the airplane and parked, the pilot had blocked the G-5’s wheels, opened the passenger door, and pulled down the exit stairs. Five men emerged from the airplane and stood on the tarmac, stretching and laughing. Two of them displayed beards and shoulder-length hair, one wore a ponytail and a droopy handlebar mustache, and neither of the other two had anything even close to a military haircut. Their clothes were a random collection of blue jeans, nylon windbreakers, sweatshirts, sunglasses and baseball hats. What they had in common, however, was that they all appeared to be around thirty years old, were in excellent physical condition, wore beige “desert” combat boots, and had ‘that’ look.

  Linda frowned as she walked over to Bob. “You said these guys are Army?” she asked skeptically, folding her arms across her chest. “Whose army?”

  He smiled too, as the co-pilot opened the G-5’s cargo hold and the passengers formed a chain to unload a half dozen metal packing crates and a number of large, nylon carry bags from the airplane, and throw them in the back of the two SUVs. One of the passengers left the others and walked up to Bob Burke. He appeared a little stockier and a little older than the others, wearing a Washington Redskins baseball hat above a long, tightly braided ponytail. “Reporting as ordered, Sir,” he saluted and broke into a toothy grin. The two men greeted each other with muscular, shoulder-grabbing, backslapping, man-hugs.

  “Ace, it’s been too damn long,” Bob began.

  “Since that fiasco you called a wedding.”

  “Fiasco? That was only the beginning.”

  “Like they always say, ‘If the Army wanted you to have a wife…’ ”

  “…‘they’d have issued me one.’ Anyway, tell the pilot and co-pilot to stay here. You should be back in three, maybe three and a half hours, probably with a few more passengers, but we’ll give them a call. Then, it’ll be wheels up in ten minutes.”

  “Roger that. I’ll tell them,” Ace said as he walked back to the airplane.

  When Ace returned, the others gathered around for introductions. “Okay, Major, what’s the Op? Who do you want killed?” one of them grinned as he gave Bob a bear hug bigger than Ace did, lifting him off the ground. “God, I miss the old days.”

  “Guys,” Bob began. “This is Ernie Travers. He might look like an offensive with tackle with Bears, but he’s a Chicago Police detective and runs security at O’Hare.”

  “The police?” Vinnie laughed. “When I saw those big, black SUVs with the light bars, I wondered whether we were being arrested by the FBI or getting a Secret Service escort.”

  “Don’t worry, he’s on our side. And this is Linda Sylvester. The guys we’re going after tonight kidnapped her daughter, so she’s on our side too.” He turned back to the five soldiers and said, “Ernie and Linda, meet Ace, Vinnie, Chester, Koz, and the Batman. As unusual as they may look, they are some of the top ‘operators’ in the business,” he said as he looked at his watch. “We need to be in position in less than an hour, we have an operations plan and some maps to go over, and we need to gear up, fast.”

  “The airport supervisor said we can use his conference room, Bob,” Ace told him.

  “Bob? Bob? Who the hell is Bob?” Chester asked. “Oh, you mean Casper the Ghost?”

  “The clock’s running, guys, show me what you brought,” Bob told them.

  Ace led them around the back of the two SUVs, pointing at the metal cases and the canvass bags. “First, not knowing how big the party was, I grabbed a dozen of those nifty British SAS radios we started using, the ones with the earbuds and cheek mikes, which I’ve preset to a secure tactical net.”

  “Can anyone else listen in?” Ernie Travers asked.

  “No one this side of the NSA, and I’m not even sure about them,” Ace answered. “These are very low-power on a highly restricted tactical band, and the range isn’t more than a mile or two. That’s a long answer for, ‘not very damn likely.’ As for weapons, again, I guessed what you might want, so I grabbed a half-dozen Berettas with noise suppressors, two of your favorite M-110 sniper rifles, four of the new SCAR Mk 17 assault rifles with infrared night vision scopes and noise suppressors, and one of the ever-popular Benelli M-4 automatic 12-gauge shotguns. No noise suppressor there, but I also grabbed some night vision goggles, the latest ‘covert’ tactical body armor, some tactical knives, four ‘ghillie’ suits…”

  “What’s a ghillie suit?” Linda asked.

  “A huge camouflage suit that can even make someone my size disappear,” Travers said.

  Ace looked at him for a moment. “Well, almost anyone, but I also brought dark coveralls a couple of ‘poncho liners,’ lots of ammo, web belts and tactical harnesses, some small packs, canteens, two fully loaded Medic field packs, and… oh, and the Semtex and detonators you told Chester you wanted, and… Well, I guess that’s about everything.”

  “Automatic rifles and Semtex? Christ,” Travers laughed. “Is any of this stuff legal?”

  “Every damned piece. And I signed for all of it,” Ace answered. “So I need to get this stuff back, or I won’t have much of a payday next week.”

  “We’ll try, except for the bullets,” Bob told him. “One other thing: everybody wears the body armor, everybody! No exceptions, not
even you, Vinny. The new stuff is thin and lightweight, and you guys need to report back to Bragg in the same condition you left. Got that? Now, let’s go inside and I’ll show you the map and the plan. As I told Ace, we’re up against at least a dozen Gumbahs…”

  “Gumbahs?” the Batman asked. “Let’s see, we’ve taken on Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Chechens, Sunnis, Kurds, and I don’t know how many other tribes. What’s a Gumbah?”

  “The Mafia, from the DiGrigoria crime family here in Chicago,” he said as he laid several maps on the table in the small airport conference room. The others gathered around as he began pointing out locations on the map. “Anyway, Scalese and his people are supposed to be coming in from the North parking lot, we’re supposed to be coming in from the South one, and meet them in the picnic area in the middle, where we’ll exchange Linda’s daughter for some documents.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna do what they said they’re gonna do, are they?” Koz asked.

  “That’s a good assumption. There’s eight of us, so we’ll deploy in four two-man fire teams. Ernie, you come with me and take one of the ghillie suits. You’re too big to hide behind a tree. We’ll set up in the woods between the picnic area and the North lot. Koz, take one of the M-110s. You and Batman find a good firing position along the east edge of the North parking lot, where you can cover it and the trailheads there. Chester, you take the other M-110 and do the same on the edge of the South lot. Find a spot on the edge of the woods where you can cover the vehicles, the south trailhead, and the parking lot entrance. Linda will go with you, and I want the two of you in ghillie suits as well, since you’ll be by yourselves down there. Linda, if there are problems, curl up in a ball and don’t move. You’ll be invisible in that thing. Take one of the night vision goggles and you can spot for Chester. Sooner or later, they’ll make a play for our SUVs. When they do, Chester, take them out.”

  “But won’t they be bringing Ellie to the picnic area?” Linda asked. “I want…”