After the Rain pb-5

by Chuck Logan

  Dale yanked the board up off the wall, wrapped his big hands around it, planted his stance, and drew it back.

  “Shit,” Dale said, “you’d think I’d be good at baseball, since Ace had such a good swing. But I always struck out.”

  Putting all his bulk into the move, he swung the heavy board like a Louisville Slugger. Gordy, bent over on his hands and knees, stared straight ahead through dull, uncomprehending, heavy-lidded eyes. Didn’t even see the pole-barn spike before it hit him in the center of his forehead.

  The spasm erupted out of Gordy’s head, an electric jolt that Dale felt momentarily in his own hands. Dale expected more blood than just the red masklike pool around the one eye that was filming over. The breath a deep rattle. The ketamine probably eased the pain a bit. Merciful almost.

  Dale squatted and held the light bar close to Gordy’s trembling face and studied the life growing dimmer in his eyes. “Told you. Shouldn’t call me Needle-Dick. But you wouldn’t listen.” He took a handful of Gordy’s hair and tipped his head back and up. With his other hand, he scooped up a fistful of the loamy sediment from the floor of the root cellar. Slowly he released his fingers so a stream of the sandy soil filled both of Gordy’s nostrils. Some involuntary reflex forced a deep cough, his tongue protruded as he struggled for breath.

  Handful after handful, Dale slowly poured sand down Gordy’s gagging throat until his entire mouth was full and his chest eventually became massively still.

  Dale took off the rubber gloves, reached down, peeled up one of Gordy’s eyelids, exposing the opaque iris. Touched it. Made a face. It felt like a grape. “In case you haven’t noticed, asshole, I’ve changed.”

  Dale stood up, dusted off his jeans, marched up the stairs, and closed the door to the cellar. He stood, taking deep breaths of the thick night air. Damn. I’m getting good at this. This was the first one he’d done all by himself.

  He went to Gordy’s truck, took out his bike, and then drove the truck into the empty barn behind the house. He closed that door, too. Then he got on his bike and pedaled slowly down the empty road, the long fields ticking with cicadas on either side. The orange dome of light glowing against the horizon guided him.

  And lots and lots of stars above. That meant the clouds were finally clearing out.

  Half an hour later he pumped up the driveway to his folks’ house, and there was Joe’s brown van. Joe was sitting on the front porch steps, smoking one of those French cigarettes.

  “Where you been? George is out there risking his neck for you, to throw them off,” Joe said, getting to his feet. Dale could see he was pissed, but holding it in.

  “I been looking for that woman,” Dale said. No need to tell Joe about Gordy.

  “She ain’t at the bar, I just came from there. Look, we got to get on the road. And you have to call Irv Fuller. Remember? He has to arrange for a security clearance and a time. It’s not like you can just walk in unannounced.”

  “Too late to call Irv, I’ll call him in the morning. And I ain’t going without her.”

  “Listen, there’s other…women,” Joe said.

  Dale pointed his finger. “No, you listen. It’s this woman. I gave you this idea. I showed you how to do it. Without me you’d still be wandering around on the fucking prairie with a ton of explosives. I’m making this happen.”

  Joseph Khari studied Dale Shuster in the dark. Many things passed through his mind; mainly the irony of how a great event could emerge from such a disgusting piece of shit.

  “Nothing goes boom without me,” Dale reminded him.

  If it was up to him, Joe would shoot him and leave him in the driveway. But, in the end, practicality won out. The fat fool was right.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  George Khari, driving north from Grand Forks, was thinking numbers. When he looked up, the night sky sparkled with numbers instead of stars. Endless random numbers. It was like a big lottery, see, because, George was thinking, out there in the darkness, millions of people were touching numbers at this very moment. Pressing buttons on wireless telephones, sending signals to towers. Connecting.

  Why had he listened to Joe and wired the blasting caps to telephone pagers? Didn’t he have enough problems?

  The American agents were virtually on top of Dale and Joe. So close yet so blind, because they’d focused on Ace as a target. So George had told Joe to make a point of mentioning his meet with Ace in front of the female agent. He would draw the agents toward himself. He doubted they’d be interested in tonight’s petty contraband. If his plan worked, he’d be off the hook. It might even collapse their operation.

  George smiled. It was like the weapon itself; sometimes it was best to hide in plain sight.

  He’d know pretty soon. The van he’d spotted in his neighborhood and around his store was following him right now, at a discreet distance.

  George grinned and shook his head. As a youth he had commanded respect in the Bekaa Valley. Now he was down to running two killers, both difficult to control. He hunched forward and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

  I can do this thing.

  The lights, traffic, and general clutter of Grand Forks had faded behind him, and now he was alone with the huge sky and the empty ribbon of road. For more than two decades he had dwelled among these spoiled children; envying and despising them as they ignored the suffering of Arab peoples. Watching them as they busied themselves watching O.J. and Monica, eating bigger portions, driving bigger cars with bigger gas tanks.

  But 9/11 got their attention. Though they still didn’t really understand. That now it was their turn. For decades they had channel-surfed over mass graves filled with Rwandans, Bosnians, Chechens. A million Afghans. Now viewers in the Middle East would get to recline in their living rooms and watch Americans fester and die slowly on satellite TV for a change. Just like the children in the camps. Or burn fast, like his parents, like his own baby and his wife, who met their end in the Israeli napalm…manufactured in Midland, Michigan, U.S.A.

  It wasn’t just about the money.

  He turned left off the interstate onto State 5, the road to Langdon. An expanse of night sky now showed through the tattered clouds. The wind streamlined the clouds and gave the exposed heavens the appearance of a long, ragged black flag dotted with thousands of stars and a haunting crescent moon.

  He had never believed.

  Allah and Jesus were just two more storybook characters for the instruction of children and fanatics, like the people in the caves along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Or Mr. Ashcroft in his marble cavern at the Justice Department. Their faith reminded him of the Solomon Islanders who formed the cargo cults, who still believed building fires on their jungle mountaintops they could summon the jet airliners down from the stratosphere to land in their midst and deliver wondrous presents.

  The jihadists, for their part, believed that if they started a big enough fire in America, it would bring back the Middle Ages. In the end, they would fail. And when they failed, people would want rational answers again, and men like himself-like George Khari-would come back into style. Until then, he would watch for opportunities to make himself useful.

  If the price was right. Without the incentive of a payday, he wouldn’t be traveling this road. He wondered who would be there. FBI? Local police? Maybe the military? The woman Joe had mentioned, the one Dale coveted-would she be there?

  Getting closer; less than half an hour. George shook his head. He hoped Joe was getting Dale out of town. Dale. The brilliant, invaluable fool. He had picked the target. Anyone remotely Middle Eastern could never gain this sort of access.

  Parts of Dale were clearly missing. George believed that he was the real fundamentalist, the way he took Holy Writ literally and quoted the Koran to them: So what’s the difference if I kill one person or a million? Huh?

  Dale came up with the idea to put the explosives in one of his machines.

  At first the task had seemed impossible, how to make it work? Specifically-ho
w to design the explosives? The answer was in the big tires. They didn’t inflate with air. They were injected with antipuncture foam that hardened. It didn’t go in an air nipple, like on a car tire, but in a large valve, about five inches across.

  So when Dale bought the machine at auction in Winnipeg he also bought a new set of tires. Because they were cheaper in Canada. The tires were empty when they came off the shelf.

  It had been one bitch of a job that took them most of a week, working in a rented garage in Winnipeg. The charges had to be configured in a symmetrical pattern. They’d used cheap garden hose, slit it down the middle and opened it up. Then they stuffed it with the Semtex in a continuous chain, taped up the hose, connected the pagers and blasting caps, and fed it in with this big glob of epoxy on the end so it’d stay anchored to the wheel hub. Then they’d jack up a tire, spin it on the hub, and reel the hose inside. They did that four times. Then they programmed the pagers, inflated the tires with foam, and capped them up.

  Eventually there were six separate charges, placed to avoid detection. All rigged to detonate simultaneously.

  He looked up at the sky. And the crazy sensation came back: that he was trapped inside the biggest slot machine in the world. Spinning round and round with millions of numbers.

  Those six separate pagers would be activated by a single group number he had committed to memory.

  He just had to laugh. He was a ruthlessly pragmatic man hoist on the petard of the thing he most dreaded: chance.

  The pagers were in place, activated, awaiting his call. All he had to do was press seven digits into his satellite phone. But not until the weapon was in position.

  And it wasn’t in position.

  What were the chances of some fool out in the big American night accidently tapping in the wrong number?

  His number.

  The weapon would detonate prematurely. In which case, there would be no grand reward. No triumphant story attached to his name. He would just be a nobody again, a nobody who had failed.

  So he had to hurry this thing along. He had to take Dale in hand himself and make it happen. George stepped on the gas.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  They were taking one-hour shifts, perched on top of the pile of air conditioners, keeping watch on the Missile Park. Gordy’s blue F-150 arrived at the bar and parked around back. Nina and Broker marked time, sitting side by side in a mist of mosquito repellent. She lit a cigarette to discourage the bugs. He got out his rough wraps.

  “When did you start smoking again?” he asked.

  “About the time this thing picked up speed.” She put out her hand in the graying light and squashed a mosquito on his cheek. It left a small dot of blood. Then she patted his waist. “So, where’s your club?”

  Personal joke. He was at best a competent shot with a handgun, and usually packed a.45 for its utility as a hefty “tamer,” for close-in thumping. “Don’t say anything,” he said softly, “but I think your Indian lifted it from under the front seat when I was parked across from the bar.”

  She laid her palm along his cheek. “Broker, Broker.”

  “Yeager brought an extra shotgun, in the back,” he said.

  “You won’t need it. Holly’s crew will handle any rough stuff.” She leaned back, then said, “So, did Kit get home okay?”

  Broker grimaced. “You know, I never called once this rolled out.”

  Nina nodded. “We’ll call tonight, if it’s not too late.”

  Just ordinary talk, like little building blocks. Repair work. Due diligence. Broker nibbled lightly on his cigar. After several false starts, he said softly, “I’m glad you’re all right.”

  She turned away, almost nervous to be close to him after so long. What if he really did see her in the window with Ace? She turned, faced him. Jesus, Broker. Impulsively she reached over and squeezed his hand.

  “Ouch.” He drew back.

  She cringed. Wrong hand. Story of my life, she thought.

  “You were never one for hand jobs,” he quipped.

  “Not like Jolene, huh?” she came right back.

  “Jolene, as I recall, had three hands.”

  They moved closer to each other so their legs and shoulders touched.

  Yeager passed around water bottles and energy bars from Jane’s bag. They ate, they smoked, they were bitten by mosquitoes as the light faded to dusk and then to darkness.

  Then Jane’s urgent whisper cut through the bug-spray stink: “He’s on the move.”

  She hopped down from her perch and said, “Okay, I’ll drive. Yeager rides shotgun. Nina and Broker can neck in the backseat.” They walked swiftly to Broker’s Explorer that was parked in the tall weeds a few yards away. As they got in they could see the headlights on Ace’s Tahoe swing as he turned onto the highway.

  Yeager said, “Give him a hundred-yard lead, then pull on the road. No lights.”

  “What’s the deal?” Nina asked.

  “Yeager is guide. He knows the roads,” Broker said.

  “But how do we follow a guy in the dark on a deserted road without being seen?”

  “Trust me,” Yeager said. “Let’s go.”

  Jane put them on onto the road, following the tiny red dots of Ace’s running lights. Then he hit his break lights and turned left just before he came to the town limits. North.

  “Keep going, past where he turned,” Yeager said.

  “We’ll lose him,” Nina said.

  “We keep going,” Jane said.

  “I don’t know about this,” Nina said. They drove for minutes, too long. Ace was gone.

  “Take the next left,” Yeager said.

  They swung left and accelerated down a two-lane blacktop. Yeager pointed to the left. “We’ll parallel him. See? Those are his headlights.” A mile away across the black fields they saw his beams cut the night.

  Nina looked around, noticed they were losing the light from town, headed into total blackness. “He’s speeding up. We can’t keep pace with our lights off,” she said.

  Jane reached down. “How soon you forget. Remember? We own the fucking night.” She reached for a set of night-vision goggles on a webbed elastic headband. In a fast, practiced move, she yanked them over her head and adjusted them to her eyes. Broker made out her profile in the dim spill light from the dashboard-part insect, part unicorn.

  Yeager said, “That’s what I need, a pair of those…”

  Then Jane dialed the dash lights down to a bare flicker, stepped down hard on the gas.

  “Ohhhhh shit!” Broker and Yeager reached for the handholds above their doors as the Explorer bucked, hurtling forward through the rushing darkness. No road in front of the car. No center line. No shoulder. No control. Lots of stars, though.

  Jane glanced to the side, her head and the protruding goggles grotesque and alien in the faint glow of the dash. “How we doing, Yeager? Better than lights and sirens?”

  Yeager, his feet braced, leaned back and grinned through clenched teeth, enjoying the carnival ride of his life. The headlights to the left fell off behind as they pulled well ahead.

  Oh, Jeez. Broker didn’t like this. There were going sixty, maybe faster. Maybe seventy. Three, four minutes of it, more…

  “In about two miles we take a left. We should be able to beat him to Richmond Corners. There’s a tree line we can pull into. When he goes by, we’ll fall in behind,” Yeager said.

  “He won’t see us?” Nina said.

  “Don’t think so,” Yeager said. “He’ll kill his lights when he hits the gravel. What they usually do is creep up to their pickup point. Since there’s hardly any moon, he can’t spot landmarks, so he’ll be going by his odometer. He won’t be scared off by anything but headlights.”

  “Not bad,” Nina said. Yeager knew his stuff. Never could’ve done this on their own. And if they’d gone through channels, there’d be a mob of cops and feds out here cluttering up the road. But this, so far, was just right. She reached over, found Broker’s good hand in the
dark this time, and squeezed it.

  “What do you want?” he feigned wariness.

  “Hold your hand, asshole,” she said.

  He returned the squeeze. Felt good, too. After all this time. Then Jane stabbed the gas and Broker tensed, pressed back in his seat by imaginary G-forces.

  Jane, her augmented eyes fixed on the road, had an adrenaline frog in her throat as she shouted over her shoulder: “Don’t get your hopes up, Nina. Holly ran this Khari guy through all the databases. His dad was with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But that was twenty years ago. Khari immigrated here to live with his uncle after his folks died in 1982. He comes off pretty clean. And his uncle was a decorated Korean War vet.”

  “We’ll see,” Nina said.

  “It gets worse. Homeland Security sent a honcho in to watch over us tonight. One of those serious prayer-breakfast types. Same old same old. He wants to shut Holly down for exceeding his authority.”

  “Aw, Christ,” Nina said. “It’s Afghanistan all over again.”

  “You got it,” Jane said.

  “What happened in Afghanistan?” Broker asked.

  “Holly and some of his regular Army pals tried to commit a couple U.S. battalions on the Pakistani border to seal the routes out of Tora Bora. Washington was afraid of taking U.S. casualties on the ground. They nixed the plan and relied on the B-52s and the Afghan warlords. Holly got in a lot of trouble and bin Laden got away,” Nina said.

  “That’s our Holly-fighting a two-front war against terrorism and Washington. Then there’s the hawk,” Jane said.

  “The hawk?” Broker asked.

  “The Black Hawk at the radar base,” Nina explained. “The people trying to shut us down are saying Holly stole it.”

  Hearing this, Broker smiled in the dark. I’m starting to like this Holly guy…

  “Wait a minute,” Yeager said nervously. “You guys stole a helicopter?”

  “Whoa, hold on,” Nina said. “It’s this gray area. Justice and the FBI want to arrest people and charge them with civil crimes, right? But if these guys are the real thing tonight, we’re going to snatch them as enemy combatants. Naturally, they’re a bit more sticky about procedure. We didn’t ask permission, we just took the bird and went.”