The most direct route to Pennsylvania was out on the Newark-New Jersey Turnpike and then on Highway 280, but that would have taken them through West Orange County. It had been the first place in the New York region to be hit with a confirmed case of the disease.
Discarding that route, they headed further south on Highway 78 down as far as Harrisburg, the state capital of Pennsylvania. A proud Union town during the American Civil War. General Robert E Lee of the Confederacy attacked it twice, repelled on both occasions.
With a history so proud, there was no way a disease from a terrorist was going to enter their town. That was what Mayor Samuel G Miller had said, a proud descendant of his namesake Major General Sam Miller, who had held off a determined assault at the Battle of Antietam with seventy-five thousand other Unionists. It was there that the Major General had taken a 0.45 calibre bullet from a Whitworth single-shot muzzle loaded rifle that the British had sold to the Confederacy at an inflated price, straight through the heart at close range.
Eight miles from Harrisburg, Darius, along with his team in four Ford F-150 pickups, with their four-wheel drive and eight-cylinder engines, encountered their first resistance in their move to find Hussein Shafik and hopefully, the missing crate.
‘No vehicles are coming through here,’ Billy Bob McCormick declared at the concrete barriers planted squarely in the middle of the road.
‘We’re on official government business,’ Darius protested.
‘I don’t care if you’re here with the express permission of the President of the United States of America, nobody crosses this line. We’re free of any disease, and we intend to stay that way. We kept the Confederacy out; we’ll keep that disease out, as well. You mark my words.’
‘Do you want me to get the President on the line? Will that help?’ Darius asked.
‘Do what you like. I met him when he came here last year at one of our annual celebrations to mark the end of the Civil War.’
‘You’d recognise his voice.’
‘I certainly would.’ Billy Bob was as equally proud of his rich Civil War heritage as was the Mayor. His predecessor had not been a Major General, just a lowly corporal, but he had been there, made his mark. He would proudly wear a reproduction Corporal’s uniform in the annual parade down past the State Capitol building on North 3rd Street.
‘We’ve run into some resistance in Harrisburg,’ Darius said on the phone to Ed. ‘They’ve blocked the road solid. Not even the President would be able to pass – at least, that’s what we are being told.’
‘Do you think the President will be able to convince them?’
‘Probably.’
‘Who’s stopping you there?’ Ed, overhearing Darius’ conversation with the town defender, asked.
‘Billy Bob McCormick, he runs a hardware store here. At least that is what his truck says. He met the President last year at a Civil War function.’
A few minutes later and the local store owner was having a personal phone conversation with the President of his country.
‘Mr. President, it’s an honour, but we’ve closed the town. We’re mostly self-sufficient, and we can hold out for at least three months. We can’t risk it.’
‘Darius Charleston, a tall Afro-American, is there at my personal request,’ replied the President. ‘His team must get through. If they don’t, there is the possibility of a significantly higher number of deaths. Even Harrisburg will not be safe.’
‘Is it as important as that?’ the defender of Harrisburg asked.
‘Billy Bob, I remember you from when I was last there. Corporal, if I recall.’
‘To be remembered by the President is a red letter day in my books. ‘Wait till my wife hears about this.’
Billy Bob McCormick was the one person the President remembered from his visit to Harrisburg. How someone so corpulent could get into the uniform and still manage to close the dozen buttons on the front of his uniform defied belief.
‘I can always direct them up some back roads,’ the ardent defender conceded. ‘Fishing Creek Valley Road has no traffic, and no one is up there now. There was old Seb Clements, but he moved into town a few weeks back.’
‘Thank you,’ the President said.
Five minutes later, the team was heading back down Highway 78 for five minutes. They turned into Laudermilch Road for a couple of miles before turning left onto Fishing Creek Valley Road. Connecting with Route 15, they met up with Highway 80 just after passing Lewisburg. There was a road block, but it was a flimsy affair and the bullets spraying the tailgate of the last vehicle caused no lasting damage.
Billy Bob McCormick, helpful after his conversation with a grateful President, had suggested an area for them to focus their initial activities.
‘It has to be somewhere remote, where three or four people could hide out for a few months?’ Darius had asked.
‘I’d try the Susquehannock State Forest. It typically gets a fair number of hikers during the summer, but now, with the weather cooling and everyone keeping to themselves, I doubt if you’ll find anyone there. Someone determined could live there for months. It’s possible to find the occasional hut, the fishing in some of the creeks is excellent, and there’s plenty of wild fruit for someone who’s willing to scout for them.’
Darius had made a decision to follow up on Billy Bob’s suggestion. He ran it past Ed who could only agree. Besides, it was the only solid piece of advice they had received. It was to be another ninety minutes before they reached North Bend, the last sign of civilization before the park and the last place they could risk taking the vehicles if they wished to maintain the element of surprise. Hiking gear for all and some food and rations, they were all ready for some serious walking.
Darius was not too keen. His leg ached if he walked for more than twenty minutes, but he was the leader. It was not his place to stay back and claim incapacitation. It was lucky he was carrying a good supply of the strongest painkillers that money could buy. Mobile phones were of no use, so each of the team was kitted out with a two-way radio.
At North Bend, they had found a friendly face in Mavis Brandley. She was in her eighties but still spritely, with a scruffy little dog. She had mentioned a rough old station wagon coming through some time previous. A busybody who disliked strangers, she had taken a shine to Darius as Bobby, her Jack Russell Terrier cross of uncertain parentage, had stopped yapping when he stooped down to pet it.
***
Hussein Shafik could read a map. There had been a couple of years when relations with Israel had deteriorated. He had been conscripted primarily by the Egyptian Army for his high standard of education. ‘Advanced strategic and tactical planning,’ they had told him when he presented himself at the El-Abassia Military Barracks on Qasr el-Nil Street in downtown Cairo.
‘We don’t want a repeat of the Setback,’ Commander Aziz Nasser said at the induction parade.
Shafik was lined up with twenty other mainly reluctant conscripts. Their only wrongdoing was that they were smarter than the majority of the populace. The Setback, the euphemism Egypt and the Arab world used when referring to the Six-Day War, where Israel was easily victorious, and they were embarrassingly found to be wanting.
An inspiring speech at his induction, but six months later and with a thawing of the tension between Israel and Egypt, neither the map-reading skills nor the bush skills they had taught him was required. He spent a further tedious twelve months manning the border to the Gaza Strip before the military, short on money demobilised him. It took him another six months working day and night to regain his lost education. The training had come in handy when he and his two colleagues, Faiz Ahmed and Mustafa Hafiz, needed a place to hide out. The risk of disease was apparently not as severe as expected, but Shafik realised that the authorities would soon deduce that it was him who had taken the crate. The three of them needed time to commit the most severe bioweapon attack on American soil. Montana had been out in the sticks. It was only a prelude to when they hit New York.
‘Why?’ Faiz Ahmed complained. An unpleasant individual, who smelt of advanced body odour and with depressingly oily dark hair, was as devoid of a personality as he was of soap.
He had been born in New York, never been anywhere apart from the occasional trip back to his homeland on the northern border of Pakistan. It was there that an articulate Mullah had directed him to the cause that had become his passion: the overthrow of the decadent Western world and the installation of Islam as the one true religion. Unfortunately, the Mullah had not instructed him in the advantages of hygiene and his conversion to fundamentalism had not come with the embracing of a bar of soap. Shafik found him easy to dislike.
Mustafa Hafiz was a different person altogether. Attractive, charismatic, and invariably cheerful, he had been a hit with the girls at the school he attended in the Bronx. They didn’t care that he was Muslim, came from Pakistan and didn’t drink alcohol. It was at the school dance when Beverley Maddison, a vivacious sixteen-year-old seduced him in the back of her father’s late model Buick. Her father had left it at the school in case she got cold and wanted somewhere to warm up.
It was warm that evening and fifteen-year-old Mustafa – they called him Musty – lost his virginity in the steamed-up interior of a comfortable car. Beverley’s father had thanked him profusely for ensuring that his calming influence had stopped her getting drunk, as she had a tendency to do all too often. Musty, however, failed to thank him for the loan of the back seat of his car and the more than ample handfuls of his daughter’s breasts.
An acknowledged stud at fifteen and, by the time he was sixteen and a half, he had seduced all of Beverley’s friends several times over and was eagerly looking forward to the next year’s senior form.
It was only six weeks before the new intakes were anxiously awaited, and on a long-overdue trip to Pakistan, that Mustafa received news that his extended family in the north had been killed by a rogue American military drone. Distraught in a way that he didn’t understand, and a piousness that he had not previously experienced, he saw it as his duty to avenge their slaying.
He returned to the school, seduced a few – even Beverley on a couple of occasions – but his devotion was to Islam, not to wanton and lecherous seducing of decadent Western infidel women. He missed them as they missed him, but as the frustration intensified, he directed his energies to prayer and the studying of the Koran.
‘‘I’ll tell you why we’re going camping,’ Hussein Shafik, increasingly annoyed with the constant whining of Faiz Ahmed said. ‘They will be looking for me. And if they find me, they will find you.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Faiz said. ‘We only met you outside that dump you called home. They don’t know who we are.’
‘Tell him, Mustafa,’ said Shafik angrily. ‘He’s as stupid as he is smelly.’ The car had smelt of Faiz’s rank odour all the way up to their starting point, just out of the forest. They had been forced to keep the car windows open, and the wind had been both cold and biting.
‘If they catch Hussein they will torture him,’ explained Mustafa. ‘They will find all they need to know.’
‘They always say they don’t torture.’ Faiz had read the newspapers, accepted it as fact.
‘I trained at an army barracks outside Cairo,’ said Hussein. ‘That’s where they brought the Taliban fighters for special treatment. They had some jail cells out the back. Sometimes, we could hear the screaming, and I can tell you there were Americans present.’
‘But they don’t know what we look like, where we live,’ Faiz protested.
‘Do you go to the mosque every Friday?’ Hussein asked.
‘Of course, I do,’ Faiz answered with pride.
‘Anyone at any mosque in New York, probably the whole of America, has had their photo taken either going in or coming out. The majority will have a name against them, an address and a file down at CIA headquarters. I only have to say which photo, and you’ll be taken, and if they can’t find you, they’ll target your family - trumped-up charges if necessary.’
‘Okay, let’s go camping,’ Faiz Ahmed said reluctantly, ‘but I’m not going to enjoy it.’
‘We are doing this for Islam, for the Prophet, peace be upon him. It’s not for your well-being.’
Heading north of North Bend for several miles, they eventually reached the edge of the forest. They took a dusty road, heading deep into the forest for about five miles. After unloading the back of the wagon, Faiz Ahmed still complaining, they gave Shafik’s pride and joy a push over the side of a particularly steep ravine and into the river flowing below.
‘What will we do for transport when we leave?’ Faiz moaned.
‘I’m not sure I see the wisdom in dumping our transport, either,’ Mustafa said.
‘The car is too distinctive,’ said Shafik. ‘I can guarantee that Latino bastard, who bleeds me for rent, will have told the CIA all about my passion for the vehicle and what it looks like. Mind you, he was as blind as a bat, but we can’t risk it.’
Shafik looked around him, gauging their whereabouts.
‘We head up here for a while,’ he pointed to the track heading further into the forest. ‘You both can go first, and I’ll cover our tracks as we go.’
‘Regular Boy Scout, aren’t we?’ Faiz sarcastically sneered.
‘As a matter of fact, I was in my younger days. Do you want to enjoy the benefit of a CIA torture cell?’
‘Of course, I don’t.’
‘Well, then shut up or I’ll hand you over to them myself just for a bit of peace and quiet.’
‘I’ll give you a hand as well,’ Mustafa added.
‘You’re a right pair of miseries,’ Faiz complained.
It was a gruelling ninety minutes through the untouched undergrowth before they reached their destination. It had been over a substantial rise and down into a deep gully, dense with trees and with a stream that flowed down the middle.
‘There’s the hut,’ Shafik proclaimed.
‘It doesn’t look much to me,’ said Faiz, unable to remain quiet.
‘What did you expect, the Ritz? It’s an old logger’s camp. It will do for our purposes. We’ll store the crate over there by that rock.’ Faiz and Mustafa had manhandled it between the two of them, and their arms were tired and sore.
‘It’s rice and beans for a meal, is that okay?’ said Shafik cheerfully. He relished the outdoors and, to him, it seemed like heaven. ‘There may even be fish in the creek. We can try and catch some tomorrow.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ Mustafa said. Faiz only grunted.
It was three weeks later that Darius and the team walked past the point where the Chevrolet Wagon had gone over the side. The weather had been dismal ever since they had taken off from North Bend. The pelting rain, almost turning to snow and, with their hoods up, they completely missed the skid marks, the broken branches, even the number plate suspended in the fork of a tree twenty metres down.
It was not surprising. They were not skilled trackers and, even if the weather had been good, they would still have missed the signs. Hussein Shafik meanwhile was in his element. Basic training and then carrying out covert actions close to the Israeli border had taught him how to survive in the bush.
Darius and his team carried on for another two miles and made camp. It was a sad and sorry group that ate cold rations that first night.
***
Billy Hammond looked like a runner, but he was not. He had a skinny frame with legs that looked almost too long for him, and a face that perpetually looked hangdog due to the drooping eyelids and lips that curled down at the ends. A smart guy and good with a gun, he had waylaid two robbers the week before, who were aiming to mug a lady down near the condominium he shared with his girlfriend of ten years.
She was getting tired of waiting for a proposal, but Billy was a pedantic, slow-moving individual, not inclined to do anything rash. At least, not until he had present
ed her with a prenuptial agreement to sign. He knew she would take it the wrong way, but he had only just inherited the mansion in Richmond, Virginia and he didn’t want to divide it down the middle.
His previous wife had taken him to the cleaners. He had only managed to hang onto the condo by going into serious debt, way above his ability to pay. The mansion had been a lifesaver and, girlfriend or no girlfriend, wife or no wife, he had no intention of sharing his good fortune, especially after the boring, pointless visits he had made to Uncle Howard and Aunt Susan.
All the uncle spoke about was how much he’d spent on the upkeep of the mansion and the ridiculous amounts the incompetent tradesman asked. The aunt always complained about how her foot was playing up, or her leg, or her bowels. He had earned the mansion. His girlfriend, Anne, pleasant enough but possessive had criticised him every time he left for the weekend.
‘You care more about them than you do about me.’ She may as well have played a record.
Billy was an office man, good with figures. However, with the numbers of personnel down in the office, he had been assigned to Darius.
‘Where do we go from here?’ he asked.
‘We need to split into four teams,’ said Darius.
‘In this weather, what chance do we have?’ Billy preferred a nice office, but with a downturn in business, the girlfriend was at home four days a week, and she’d only be in his ear complaining about this and that. Even a damp and miserable tent for a few days was preferable.
‘I appreciate the chances are slim, but we had a reasonable lead that they’re here somewhere. We can’t do aerial flyovers. Freak these guys out and they could dump the crate and its contents in Grand Central, Macys, Time Square or wherever else.’
Terrorist: Three Book Boxed Set Page 21