Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels)

by William Brown

  Perfect, Shaw thought to himself. Two alibis for what was sure to be the delightfully exhausting price of one.

  In addition to the academic benefits of sleeping with one of their professors, Henry Shaw knew it was his sexual prowess, creativity, and stamina that kept the girls coming back for more. Still, after two days of travel and lack of sleep, by morning Steph and Amy had worn him out. He was finally able to pry himself loose and kiss the girls goodbye, but only after he promised them he would come back again, real soon. After stopping off at a pancake house for a tall stack of badly needed carbs, half a bottle of sugary syrup, and a pot of coffee, he finally dragged himself into his off-campus office just after 11:00 a.m.

  It was in the Muslim Student Center, where he served as executive director. Unlike his regular department office on campus, this was his personal castle, guarded by several dozen surly, bearded, dark-skinned men. No one in the administration dared pursue him here. A former fraternity house, the college had purchased it on the cheap after the virulently “anti-Greek” faculty liberals chased the last national fraternity out of town on one trumped-up charge after another; no doubt to get revenge for their being rejected during their own undergraduate days. Whether that was the reason, or just to be politically correct, the college then spent three million dollars of endowment money to upgrade it into a Muslim Student Center, as they had for the LGBT community the year before, and African-American Studies program the year before that. Behind closed doors, even the administration had to admit it was running out of “entitled groups” to slather their largesse upon, now that football, the golf team, and the Jewish center had been dismantled.

  Shaw’s office was located at the rear of the first floor, which allowed him to make a quick entrance and check on what his loyal recruits and minions were doing as he walked in from his parking place. As usual, they were sprawled in the basement lounge or the first-floor TV room, sleeping, arguing politics, playing backgammon, mabusa, or narde, or watching mindless Roadrunner cartoons. What he never saw was an open book; as is often the way with entitlements and the entitled. Most of them came from the upper or government classes in their native countries, and serious study had always been a cultural challenge. Then again, these were precisely the young men who made the best recruits to a radical philosophy.

  When he finally reached his desk, he spent the next hour and a half tossing paperwork in his inbox, checking email, and listening to too many new voicemails. By then, he figured sufficient time had elapsed to pick up the phone and return “Chairperson” Fred Gadsden’s numerous calls — Chairhead, he preferred to call him. Shaw detested dealing with receptionists, secretaries, assistants, or any other gatekeeper. At every stop in his career, he made it a point to ferret out the direct dial-numbers of the people he worked for and the people they worked for. It was a classic power move. The ability to drop into someone’s office unannounced and catch them unprepared, albeit only by phone, could be disconcerting and intimidating to the narrow minds on the receiving end. Fred Gadsden was a classic example.

  “Fred,” Shaw went on the attack, loud and aggressively. “I got your messages. What the hell’s going on? I get kidnapped on a research trip and next thing I know you’ve given my job away! You’d better have a damn good reason, or I’m going to the union, and then I’m going to my lawyer.”

  “A damn good reason?” Gadsden began to stutter. “You up and disappear on us just as the semester was supposed to start, and then we get all these calls from the FBI…”

  “Those fascists? That’s bullshit, and you know it. I was kidnapped, and managed to escape by the skin of my teeth. This was all that bastard Jeff Bloomberg’s idea, wasn’t it? What’s he got? Pictures of you with sheep?”

  “That’s not funny, Henry! And it violates the College’s new Hate Speech policy.”

  “Not politically correct enough, Fred? Well, I want a meeting with the Dean and the President, and I want you and that dork Bloomberg there, too. This afternoon, or you’ll be dealing with my lawyers.”

  “That’s fine with me; they want to talk to you too!”

  Shaw hung up laughing. He just loved to throw hand grenades.

  The meeting was set for 4:00 p.m. in the president’s office. Shaw intentionally walked in at exactly 4:12 p.m., knowing that being ten minutes late makes a statement, while fifteen minutes late is unacceptably rude. To no surprise, in the corner of the room he saw four chairs carefully arranged in an arc around a fifth. Standing near them were Gadsden, Jason Schrempf, Dean of Arts and Sciences, and College President Hermione Ringgold. The fourth chair, presumably reserved for Bloomberg, was empty, and the fifth, toward which all the others were pointed, was for him. Shaw smiled as he walked toward them, thinking to himself, let the games begin.

  “It’s good to see you again, Professor,” President Ringgold began, “and in one piece.”

  “I can’t tell you how good it is to be back here ‘in one piece,’ Hermione,” Shaw quickly answered, ignoring her title. They all sat down, and he took the single chair facing the other three, more than ready for the inquisition. “It’s been one hell of a week.”

  “So we understand,” Ringgold said, looking at her watch, the empty chair, and finally over at Gadsden with obvious irritation. All he did was respond with a confused shrug. Like all good bureaucrats, they would have held a pre-meeting prior to Shaw’s arrival, which would make Bloomberg doubly late in Ringgold’s mind. Little did she know, Shaw thought to himself. “To get to the point, however,” Ringgold continued, “we’ve had a series of phone calls and visits from the FBI and the State Department regarding your recent… ‘travels.’ ”

  “State Department my ass,” Shaw fumed. “It was the CIA!”

  “All the worse, Professor! To be perfectly blunt, the college receives substantial federal funding, and we don’t relish notoriety like that. As we told them, we were quite unaware you had gone anywhere, and certainly not to the Middle East, without first securing department and college approval,” Ringgold stated firmly, and then stared confidently across at him.

  “Wow! Mea culpa, but I don’t understand the confusion,” Shaw quickly answered. “As you know, I’ve been working on a very important UNESCO grant. My last renewal and the update I gave the department on May 30 clearly stated that I would be making a brief trip to the region prior to the commencement of the fall semester. Here’s a copy of that page and the distribution sheet, which included Fred, the department secretary, and my attorney, to name a but a few,” Shaw said as he handed a sheet of paper across to Ringgold. “If there was some confusion as to what that meant, well… it wasn’t at my end.”

  The three college bureaucrats promptly huddled over the sheet of paper. Ringgold and Schrempf glanced at each other, and then both turned on Gadsden, since the report had been filed with him and his department.

  “Hermione, you don’t think I read every goddamned…” Gadsden tried to whisper.

  “Yes, yes, I see,” Ringgold said, as she turned away and tried to regain her composure. “All right, but what have you to say about these allegations regarding your association with terrorist groups in Turkey and Syria?”

  “It’s garbage, cooked up by Big Brother in Washington in cooperation with the fascist Turkish secret police in Ankara. They’d do anything to prevent the world from knowing about the long-term effects of the genocide and mistreatment they have perpetrated on the ethnic minorities in their eastern provinces, which is exactly what my research was showing.”

  “Professor,” Dean Schrempf jumped in. “Are you accusing…”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing, and the three of you and the college would be joining in that good fight, taking on the Nazis and crypto-fascists in Washington, if they hadn’t stolen my papers and arranged to have me grabbed from my hotel. At first, I thought it was a straight-out kidnapping to hold me for ransom. They drove me out into the desert and I heard them talking, which was when I realized they were Turkish government agents and they we
re going to kill me to shut me up. I managed to escape, which was why they put out the story that I had run off with terrorists.”

  “You realize that is NOT what the FBI has been telling us,” President Ringgold responded. “And that puts the college in a very difficult position.”

  “Of course! That’s why they did it. The State Department and the FBI are under the thumb of the Defense Department, who want their bases in Turkey to fight in one misguided Middle Eastern war after another. They’ll do whatever the Turks tell them to do. But I know that the University and the President’s office won’t cave to immoral pressure like that. You’ll stand side by side with your faculty and defend the academic integrity of this college, won’t you?” Shaw said, knowing he had them right where he wanted them.

  “And as for my classes,” Shaw went on. “I’ve spent a great deal of time and energy preparing for this semester’s classes, both on campus and at Fort Bragg, and I don’t see how you could deny me the opportunity to teach those students simply because I was a few days late because the fascists kidnapped me and tried to kill me.”

  He had them squirming now, and it was Fred Gadsden who was stuck responding. “Nonetheless, when you disappeared…”

  “Disappeared? Speaking of disappeared, where is my chosen replacement, the eminent Professor Bloomberg?” Shaw asked as he looked at the empty chair. “Well, if you have no objection, I’m going to go back to my office and finalize my class prep, since I’ll be teaching my class tonight. I leave it to you to break the news to poor Bloomberg, if he ever shows up.”

  Once Shaw was rid of these petty distractions, he could get back to his classes, and more importantly finish his recruitment and build a cell of fire-breathing fanatics. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Fort Bragg, that should be like shooting fish in a barrel. They were the poorly educated lower-ranking soldiers in a foreign army of occupation. That was what the Americans were in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, whether they wanted to admit it or not, and they could muster only so much emotion and patriotism for a cause they barely understood. After the first few years, the bloodshed and body bags inevitably took their toll. It was exactly as the Caliph told him, “In any war, the martial spirit begins to fade after the first year, the downward spiral picks up speed after the third year, and it is irreversible after the fifth. What begins as minor gripes and rumbles from disgruntled privates quickly moves up the chain of command through the sergeants to the lower-ranking officers. Everyone can see it, everyone knows it, and everyone denies it.”

  When you add in ethnic and religious divisions, poor pay, and family separations, morale and recruiting quickly plummet. New enlistees never meet the standard of the men they are replacing, and the death spiral continues. Those were the men the Caliph wanted him to recruit — the older, more bitter, middle-ranking enlisted men. They were the ones with combat experience who had seen blood and knew how to kill. Pay them, buy them things, convince them that they are the chosen ones. As the Army moved them around from post to post, spreading the cell to post after post, his master cell would spread its tentacles, increasing exponentially until it had insinuated itself into every major military base across the US and abroad. As they did, his men would eliminate key senior leaders, sow dissent, and bring their Special Operations “Big Green Machine” to a grinding halt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sherwood Forest, North Carolina

  The breakfast nook off the kitchen of the main house had a small table that was just right for two. It sat in a bay window that looked out on a formal English garden and on the farm fields and woods behind the house. Frankly, the English garden had seen better days. When Bob and Linda first saw the house, it was immaculate, as if someone, probably a Brit whom the previous owners had imported for the job, must have been trimming the boxwoods with fingernail clippers. Bob had hired a local service to take care of all the grounds, but it would never be the same. Nonetheless, at 5:45 a.m. when the sun first began to peek through the trees, he thought it was the loveliest place in the world to sit, have that first cup of coffee, and scan the online editions of Army Times, the Fayetteville Observer-Times, and the Washington Post, before the rest of the house was up and things got crazy. Those were the three daily newspapers that affected him and his business the most. After those, he would glance at the federal contracting tabs of Government Executive, FCW on federal technology, and the Federal Times to see what mischief the pirates on the Potomac had caused since the previous morning.

  A half-mile west through the bay window, beyond the garden and the tree line lay the Cape Fear River. If he could see through the trees and across the river, which he couldn’t, he would see the southeast edge of Fort Bragg, not that he didn’t know exactly what was going on over there at that time of the morning. At “0h 545” as they called it, the airborne and Special Ops troops would already have bounced out of their barracks and be lined up for PT in their company areas. The grass would be wet, and the air thick and misty — perfect for their early morning runs in small groups, platoons, or even company formations, counting cadence and chanting, “I want to be an Airborne Ranger, living on blood and guts and danger,” with numerous other verses and variations not usually meant for mixed company. As they ran through the post, every boot or running shoe would strike the ground in unison. It was one of those psychologically cohesive activities that bonded men and units together; something you can’t explain to “civilians,” lawyers, or Presidents who have never done them.

  Within an hour and a half, they’d have their quarters squared away, breakfast eaten, and be off to training, work, or jobs at one of the dozens of rifle ranges and training areas in the vast pine forests to the northwest. Once or twice a month, they’d form up and bus over to Pope Army Airfield, now part of Fort Bragg, where they would gear up and board C-130s for a crack-of-dawn jump.

  Drinking his morning coffee in the bay window was a great way to wake up, Bob thought. But next to a sharp fire fight and the sound of bullets zipping past your head, there was no better way to get the blood pumping in the morning than to jump from a C-130 into the Normandy, Sicily, or Holland drop zones, or one of the two dozen others even further to the west at Fort Bragg. God, Bob thought, but he missed that place!

  After he finished with the newspapers, he would usually hit the gym for a brutal workout with weights and the heavy bag, take a fast three-mile run around the farm, be back in time for a quick shower and shave, and be standing in the kitchen in time to make breakfast for Ellie and Godzilla when they came bouncing down the stairs for school. Funny, how the only time the pit-cat would even tolerate him was when he had that can of Fancy Feast gourmet cat food in his hand. Watching it jump onto his table and stare at him was… priceless! The feigned affection would only last until he put the cat’s dish on the floor, and then the same old surly beast would return. And who said pets weren’t a lot like people?

  One other good thing about getting up at that hour was that it gave him a one-hour head start on the Chicago office. He would usually call Marianne, whom he’d named President a few weeks before. They’d have a quick chat about the day’s issues after she had a chance to sort through the company mail. So, by 9 a.m., when the rest of the world was just getting to their desks, Bob already had both ends of his north-south business empire under control.

  That morning, however, things began a bit differently. He had just sat down in the breakfast nook with that first cup of coffee when he decided to pick up his cell phone and pressed the speed dial number of Command Sergeant Major Pat O’Connor, General Arnold Stansky’s right arm. He knew Pat would be up at that hour too, and he wanted to know why Stansky left the message he wanted to see him. They weren’t having lunch until next Tuesday after Stansky got back from Europe, but his curiosity was getting the best of him.

  On the third ring, he heard the crisp parade-ground greeting of the Command Sergeant Major. “O’Connor, Sir. What can I do to help make your day?”

  “Pat, Bob Burke here…”<
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  “I can hear the C-130’s warming up out at Pope, Sir. It’s a great Airborne morning, wanna go jump?”

  “I’d love to, Pat, but you know how young wives are. She’d kill me.”

  “Makes a man cry to hear words like that coming from a warrior like you, Major.”

  “I’ll bet!” Bob roared with laughter. “Hey, while I was out of town, I think you called, or maybe it was the general, setting up a lunch with me at JSOC next Tuesday. To give me a little heads-up, do you know what he wants?”

  This time, it was O’Connor’s turn to laugh. “Major, you and I are what’s called ‘stress relievers.’ Every now and then when the old man gets tired of bitching and moaning and gnawing on me, he calls to the bull pen and brings in you.”

  “Fresh meat?”

  “Or a fresh ear, anyway. At his age, I’m not sure fresh meat should still be on his menu, but you’re a good listener and he appreciates that.”

  “Do you know what’s bugging him this time?”

  There was a long silence at the other end, before O’Connor said, “Oh, that’s right, you’ve been out of town; so, I guess you didn’t hear. We had an Op go seriously bad over in the desert, and we lost some people a couple of days ago… some of them were yours.”

  “Some of mine?”

  “It’s all classified, so I can’t say anything else; but I’m sure you can get the rest of it if you ask around.”

  “You think that’s what he wants to talk about?”

  “More than likely. And to vent about a lot of the political crap going on — budget cuts, manpower reductions in Special Ops, and how we have bureaucrats and the goddamn Air Force running the Pentagon now. They may know a lot about computers and software, but they don’t know a damn thing about how to properly employ boots on the ground.”

  “Copy that. He’ll get no disagreement from me,” Bob sighed as he looked out the window as another of the first rays of a glorious red, gold, and orange sunrise rose over the trees. “As you can appreciate, Pat, I’m going to make a few phone calls, but I’ll see you Tuesday.”