“You got enough here for all that?” Banjo asked.
Schrueders nodded. “You’ll clean out the department, but there should be enough. The only thing I need to do is make it look like a break-in to cover my ass.”
“What about the CCTV?”
“They’re slack around here. It’s a backwater, we don’t get trouble.... Ironic, really. I can actually walk right into the office and wipe the files without anyone noticing.” He laughed bitterly.
“Man, this country deserves what it gets,” Mummar muttered.
* * *
BOLAN HAD HEARD all that he needed to. Fraser had a point, though not in the way he intended. The country deserved more than the idiots it had running security in places like this. He couldn’t rely on anyone to pick up the slack, so he had to make sure that things were tight: too tight for the terrorists.
Right now, he didn’t care what happened to Schrueders. The man had proved himself to be unworthy as a human being by disregarding his fellow man and throwing his lot in so readily. His primary aim right now was to stop them leaving campus.
He detached the mike and made his way swiftly back through the building until he was out the main entrance and headed toward the camper van. When he reached it, he took the Tekna knife from its concealed sheath and applied the blade to all four of the tires. That would stop them using this vehicle. There were no others within a couple of hundred yards, and the first in line was the rented Nissan.
Very few people were in this area of the campus. Bolan wondered if he should quickly try to evacuate the building he had just left. Better not, he concluded, as he had no idea how many people were actually behind those closed doors and how long it would take to explain himself, no matter what cover story he chose. Best to let them stay there, allow the terrorists to leave and then try to herd them in the direction he wanted. Scanning the grounds, he had the perfect spot.
All he had to do was wait. They wouldn’t be long. He walked back to the Nissan and slipped behind the wheel.
He saw the four terrorists exit the building without Schrueders.
* * *
HE HAD CAREFULLY taken all the explosive packages from storage and laid them out. The detonators he did likewise, demonstrating how they worked and how to set them. He was very careful in doing that, as he had no wish to either blow himself up or to give them the opportunity to do so before he got rid of them. Ali, Mummar, Amir and Banjo watched him attentively.
Once he had accomplished the task, he helped them pack the explosives into the rucksacks they had brought with them, taking care to keep the detonators separated until the time came to set them. When they had done that, he looked around, then picked up a stool and walked toward one of the windows. He paused, as though remembering something, turned back and used the leg of the stool to smash one of the glass cabinet doors.
“What are you doing, Piet?” Mummar asked softly.
“Thinking ahead. If you drop me at the gate on my way out, I can make sure I’ve wiped the CCTV as of now, and by the time your mission is completed it’ll be like we were never in this room. Meantime, if I smash it up a little, then it’ll look like you broke in here. Well, like someone did...”
“Piet, Piet, Piet,” Mummar said sadly, shaking his head as he moved toward the engineer. “There’s no need for you to worry about that. No one’s going to associate you with what happens.”
“Yeah, maybe, but there’s still going to be the matter of accounting for the missing load,” Schrueders said, a tremulous note creeping into his voice.
Mummar smiled; it was cold. He closed in on Schrueders and embraced him, whispering, “No one’s ever going to think you were involved, Piet. At least not as anything other than an unwilling hostage.”
Schrueders did not reply. As Mummar let him go and stepped back, the engineer’s eyes glazed over and he pitched forward, falling against the terrorist as Mummar moved back, allowing him to slide to the floor in a slowly spreading pool of blood.
Mummar bent over the engineer and used his jacket to wipe the thin tool he had used. It was the shaft of a Phillips-head screwdriver, sharpened to a point.
“You can’t beat the old prison ways,” Ali said admiringly. “There’s no knife I know that you can conceal and palm so easily.”
“Damn right,” Mummar said. “We’ve got what we wanted. Let’s go.”
* * *
BOLAN WATCHED THEM as they made their way back to the camper van with purpose. He knew immediately what had occurred. No matter—it gave him one less thing to worry about. They reached the van and he saw them curse as they realized what had happened. Amir walked around, checking all the wheels, gesticulating angrily. Bolan watched Mummar calm them and start to issue orders. He might be saying nothing of any great import, but his action stayed their dissent and acted as a focal point. The soldier admired that. Without Fraser they would be headless chickens and easy to pick off as such. Fraser was what made them a unit.
So he was the first to take out.
Bolan slid out from behind the wheel of the Nissan, at the same time bringing the Uzi to hand and setting it to short bursts. One tap, three shots.
He had the driver’s window wound down, using the sill as a rest, with the door itself providing cover.
The four men were still standing by the camper van. They had made no attempt to take cover, despite the obvious fact that whoever had damaged the vehicle was an enemy, and one in close proximity. The Executioner had little doubt that this was what Fraser was trying to drum into them, to get them to focus.
A pity for him that they weren’t the soldiers he was, for he would suffer the consequences. One tap, three shots: Fraser took them in the head and upper chest, and he spun under the momentum of the bullets. He was dead before he hit the ground.
For a second, the remaining three terrorists were frozen like potential roadkill in the headlights, trying to locate the direction of fire while working out where they could run.
And then they broke. Bolan cursed as instead of staying together, they moved in separate directions. Because of where he had the Nissan located, none of them were stupid enough to make a break toward the main gates. To the rear of the building they had just exited was the edge of the peninsula that led down to Sybil’s Cave and the drop down to the banks of the Hudson. He had wanted to drive them that way so that he could take them out with a minimum of trouble for himself and a minimum of danger to any innocent bystanders. They should have stayed together and mounted a rearguard action. If Fraser had been alive, then that was what might have happened. But with the most disciplined and trained member of the cell now eliminated, they’d lost their heads.
It had always been a possibility, but not one that he had seriously considered, which he now saw as a miscalculation.
Ali and Banjo had separated but were both headed in the same direction, toward the rocks that led to the caves. They were too far apart to try to take out in the same action, but as their destination could only take them one way, and away from any innocent bystanders, they could wait.
Amir was the immediate danger. He was carrying a rucksack full of explosives, and he was running toward an area of the campus where there were people, whose attention had been alerted by the gunshots.
Bolan cursed as he picked up speed and raced after Amir. The terrorist turned and stumbled, falling as he pulled a gun from his pocket. The stumble saved him as the Executioner had sighted and fired; the three-round burst plucked at the air where the terrorist’s body had been moments before.
Amir fired back wildly. The shots strafed the air around Bolan. The soldier stood and took aim again. There was little point in trying to avoid shots so wild; in doing so he stood more chance of being hit. He loosed another three shots at Amir, hearing sirens in the distance as he did so.
The soldier was an excellent shot, yet
somehow the desperate motions of the terrorist as he tried to scramble to his feet acted with providence. Fire that should have snuffed out his life was denied by the desire to stay alive. Two of the three bullets hit home, but only in the thigh. The third thudded harmlessly into the turf.
Amir screamed, blood pumping from the artery in his thigh that had been hit. Bolan moved toward him, sighting in for one last shot. Behind the prone terrorist he could see that some people were hurrying away from the firefight, but unbelievably some were rushing toward it. To them, it looked as though Amir was the victim of a random shooting from a man who was now moving toward him for the kill.
They were partly right, Bolan figured, but in the way. He had to finish this before they were too close. He did not want to put them in the line of fire, nor did he want them to detain him. Each moment he spent on Amir was another moment that the remaining two terrorists were gaining ground.
With purposeful strides, Bolan closed in on his target, hands clamped on the Uzi for a steady shot as he picked out the terrorist’s head and chest. Amir had a major artery ruptured. He didn’t have long left, but there was still damage he could inflict.
Amir, as the world closed in on him in a tunnel of darkness, was well aware of that. His time was up, and he would not be able to fulfill his mission. Paradise would not be waiting for him, unless...
There was one thing he could do to help his comrades on their way. He could try, with his last moments, to take out the man who had eliminated the other cell, and had now eliminated half of his. That might buy him eternal salvation.
Absurdly, one of the last things that went through his mind was the memory of the confections from Carlo’s Bake Shop. In a life of wasted opportunity, it was one of the few things that he could recall as an untainted pleasure. It was little enough, but it would do to take him into whatever came next.
With the last ounce of strength he could muster, he twisted his gun arm so that the muzzle was directed into the rucksack. He squeezed the trigger....
Bolan could see what he was doing, but he could not fire as his own bullets would have hit the rucksack. All he could do was curse and throw himself to the ground as the explosive in the rucksack detonated, blowing Amir into the hereafter.
Bolan opened his mouth to equalize the pressure and flung his arms over his head as he hit the ground, hoping that the explosive power would not be enough to take him with the terrorist.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I know you said you wanted to step things up, but this is taking it a little far, even for you.”
Bolan had no reply. It had taken him nearly an hour before his hearing had returned and the buzzing in his ears had started to subside. He ached all over. The shock wave had felt like a gang of Marines had jumped him, swinging baseball bats. He was lucky that there had been no stone or glass near enough to the blast to generate substantial debris. The earth thrown up had been reduced almost to a fine dust. It was only because his reaction and recovery time had been tested by hundreds of battles that he was able to get away from the scene before anyone else had time to react. He didn’t know it at the time, but he beat the sirens by a matter of minutes. The campus was soon swarming with police. They had found Schrueders, but there was nothing left of Amir save a hole in the dirt.
Getting away from the scene had been paramount. Any thought of chasing down Ali and Banjo would have to wait until he was clear of the campus. To be detained while searching near the caves would do nothing other than waste time with detailed explanations and denials, then finally verification.
He knew where they were headed. He would have lost the trail down by the Hudson’s banks, but he could pick it up in the heart of New York City. He would need help, though.
Brognola would not be happy, and he had a right not to be. Bolan should have taken out all four of the terrorists while on campus. He should have waylaid the camper van before they had even had the chance to enter the research facility and just eliminated them. But he’d wanted to know if they had any other connections and how they planned to carry out their mission. That hadn’t been necessary; he had created this situation himself.
But what if there had been others who could have taken up the task? They would have no lead on them. He had taken a gamble, and it had only partly paid off. He would have to take the consequences when the time came. Right now, it was more important that he finish cleaning up.
That was why he was now in midtown Manhattan, in Andrew Low’s office. The Fed eyed him over the desk as he put down his phone.
“Forty men, positioned around the museum and the construction site. We should really close it to the public.”
“I agree. We should. But if we do, then we alert Ali and Banjo and drive them underground. And not only do we lose them, but we also lose the explosives they have in their possession. We need to get that back. We need to flush them out.”
“I guess so, but what do we do if they’re cornered and do what Amir did?”
Bolan smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let it get that far.”
* * *
“THE PORT AUTHORITY of New York and New Jersey have been told that we’re positioning men on-site, but as far as they’re concerned it’s just a matter of a protest that’s being flagged as part of the ongoing antiglobalization campaign. Not violent, but a possible public obstruction.”
“Pity to use these people as a shield,” Bolan said wryly. “Agree with them or not, they’re sincere...but then so are the bastards we’re trying to snare.”
“Exactly. I don’t want to freak the locals too much, just account for our presence,” Low commented.
The two men had left Low’s office almost as soon as the order to supply the human resources had been issued, and they were now standing in the middle of the memorial site, which honored the 2,983 victims of 9/11, whose names were inscribed on seventy-six bronze plates. Each of those names represented a memory that would be sullied by the terrorists they sought. By a kind of domino effect, everyone who had ever come into contact with the deceased would be directly insulted by the actions the terrorists planned.
The names of the victims from the North Tower and those of the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 11, which had hit the North Tower, were located around the perimeter of the north pool, while those of United Airlines Flight 175, which had hit the South Tower, were with those of the victims who had been in that tower, around the perimeter of the South Pool, along with those who had been in the immediate vicinity of the Twin Towers. Here, too, were the names of those who had perished as first responders during rescue operations, along with those who had been killed at the Pentagon, either on-site or as passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 77, and those of United Airlines Flight 93, which had been brought down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The sheer weight of the numbers, and the widespread locations in which they had perished, weighed heavily on his mind as the soldier paused for thought. This was perhaps as many people as had been lost in desert warfare over the succeeding decade.
As a soldier, Bolan faced death every time he went into action. It was what he did, his raison d’être. The office workers, cleaners and service workers who had been in the Twin Towers or their immediate vicinity on that morning were not part of any combat. They had been going about their everyday business.
There were those who would say that the actions of a covert nature that Bolan took part in were the acts of a criminal, that the United States was not at war and that there was no necessity to take out the men who would plant bombs or, indeed, be walking bombs. If they said that about any overseas actions the nation took part in, then there was debate to be held. But as he stood contemplating what the site represented and the lasting reminder of the senseless slaughter it would stand as, he felt that anyone who saw his actions—and those of operatives like him—as criminal might like to sta
nd here and feel what he could feel. Maybe they would like to stand next to a suicide bomber as he arbitrarily ended their existence as these people’s had been.
There were a number of workers still on-site, and as Bolan prowled the area, he wandered out of the construction area and into the areas that were populated by the public. Here, he made his way as if drawn to the Survivor Tree, which had been replanted in December 2010. It was a Callery pear tree that had originally been planted on the site back in the 1970s. It had been there all the while that construction had gone on and had made it through. It had been at the center of what had happened, and somehow it had managed to survive the event. It had been buried under the rubble on the site until October, when recovery workers had unearthed it as part of their work. It had been eight feet tall, badly burned and had only one living branch.
That had been all that was needed. Taken to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and carefully nurtured by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, it had been replanted on November 11, 2001, after being cleaned of the ash that had weighed it down. No one had expected it to survive, but it was more than a tree: it was symbolic, and it was as if in some strange way the hopes and desires of the country had been wrested in it. It survived a storm that uprooted it, and even after its replanting it had survived Hurricane Irene, standing tall while everything around it was lashed by the elements. It had been described by one of the survivors 9/11 as something that “reminded us all of the capacity of the human spirit to persevere.”
It now stood thirty feet tall, and as Bolan looked up at it he realized two things: first, that this place had significance that went way beyond the material. Second, the tree itself had such a symbolic weight that it was a natural point for one of the two terrorists to head for.
He took out his cell phone and called Low. “The Survivor Tree—it’s the obvious target for one of them. Concentrate on that as the center of the sweep and move out. The memorial site, too. You take out the work that’s been done, you cause damage to the plates that will go round the pools. Then you hit right at the heart of the nation. The collateral damage they can cause with that amount of explosive is just a bonus.”
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