“Looking forward to it, Sir. And I’ll leave a pass at the gate for you.”
Bob got out of the chair, poured himself another cup of coffee, and pressed another speed dial number on his cell phone. Three rings later, another familiar voice answered, “Sunny Acres Retirement Home, Ace the custodian speaking.”
“What happened in Afghanistan?”
“Major, I tried calling you a couple days ago as the story started to leak out, but you were out of town. I figured it could wait until you got back.”
“Well, I’m back. I hear we lost some people?”
“Yeah, Lonzo and The Batman were KIA, plus two other guys from the Unit, Lieutenant ‘Fonzi’ Winkler and a Sergeant Leo ‘Beer’ Stein. I don’t think you served with either of them. I think they both came in later, after you retired.”
Bob was silent for a moment. “It can be a gut-wrenching business, can’t it,” he finally said. “I think I remember Stein, but not that lieutenant. There were too many of them back then,” Bob said. “But losing four Deltas on one Op? No wonder the old man’s on a rampage. What the hell happened? Pat O’Connor couldn’t tell me anything.”
“That’s all I know, except that the jungle drums said it was a bad Op.”
“You forget I know a few things about bad Ops myself. Where were they?”
“Syria, of all places. As I heard it, eight of our guys went in to provide cover for a platoon of Iraqi infantry, who flew in in a Chinook for a night assault on a house on the outskirts of Raqqah.”
“Raqqah? That’s ISIS country.”
“Copy that, the worst of the worst.”
“And then it all went in the crapper?”
“As far down as it can go. The Iraqis were doing their best John Wayne Sands of Iwo Jima impersonations as they charged the house, but it was a trap. The bad guys were waiting, and the whole thing blew up in their faces, killing most of the Iraqi infantry. Their Chinook tried to cut and run, but it was hit by an RPG and blew up. At that point, there wasn’t much for our guys to do, so they aborted and peeled back to their LZ for a quick pickup, taking fire all the way. The bad guys were all over the LZ too. When the Stealth Hawks landed and they jumped in, the bird carrying Lonzo, The Bulldog, Fonzi, and Beer Stein was hit by another RPG and it blew up, too.”
“Jesus. What a fiasco. Sounds like an Op that moron Adkins would dream up.”
“Could have been, but I don’t know for sure.”
“All right, but what about Lonzo, The Batman, and the two other guys who were killed? Is there going to be a service?”
“There’s talk about a memorial service. Maybe next week, but they weren’t able to recover any remains. The helicopter blew apart, crashed and burned, and then they hit it with two hellfire missiles.”
“To protect the stealth technology, sure,” Bob agreed. “But you said there were eight guys and two birds on the Op. Who were the others?”
“Koz and the Bulldog…”
“Koz? I’d love to talk to him when he gets back, to find out what happened.”
“You don’t have to wait. He flew in yesterday: him, The Batman, and the two other guys who were on that bird. You probably don’t know them either, two sergeants named ‘The Prez’ Washington and ‘Illegal’ Rodriguez.”
“They brought them right back? That was a quick turn-around,” Bob commented. “Something else is going on. What is it?”
“You need to ask Koz. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming with me. Neither were the others. All I got was bullshit. Maybe he’ll give you the straight story,” Ace told him.
Bob thought it over for a moment. “All right, Linda talked about throwing a barbecue out at Sherwood Sunday afternoon. I didn’t think it was much of an idea with so many guys gone, but now it sounds perfect. We’ll invite all the Merry Men out, and you can feel free to invite any other guys you know who are in town. Let’s make it 1:00 p.m. Tell Koz and the Bulldog. After a few beers and some arm-twisting and head-beating, we’ll get to the bottom of this. Tell them they can run, but they can’t hide.”
“Will do.”
“Oh, and speaking of head-beating, there’s one other little chore I have for you, Master Sergeant. The Geeks are bored. They’ve been driving themselves and Linda crazy, so take them out behind the barn and have a ‘come-to-Jesus’ session with them.”
“How come I never get to be the Good Cop?”
“Oh, you scowl so much better than me. Anyway, use your imagination. You can threaten to send Patsy back to Chicago, deport ‘the mad Russian,’ as Linda now calls him, or put them out in the ‘south forty’ picking up cow chips for all I care. Just get the point across that we expect them to get their young butts back to work, or else.”
“Can I have fun?” Ace asked.
“You mean a black balaclava, a 9-millimeter, and waterboarding? Let’s not go quite that far.”
“Damn, this was just beginning to sound like fun.”
“And tell them I’ll be by to see them first thing Sunday morning. I have a few chores for them to do to get ready for the party. It will be their penance.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Henry Shaw always preferred his office in the Muslim Student Center to the one in the Sociology Department, but he had to make a token appearance every now and then. The department building was in the middle of campus, and he felt someone was always under somebody’s thumb when he was there. They were watching and listening to everything he said and did, but at the MSC, he was the king, the Grand Vizier, the Big Kahuna, or whatever. True, his “Caliphate” might be considerably smaller than Abu Bakr al-Zaeim’s, but it was all his, and every one of the two dozen or so men who hung around inside was a loyal follower. They had better be. He had recruited each of them, and he would soon put them to the test.
Never an early riser, when he stepped into his department office around 10:00 a.m. the next morning, he expected to find Jeff Bloomberg’s body draped across his desk and a couple of beer-gut Fayetteville cops standing next to it, arms crossed, waiting to pounce on him with handcuffs. Even though that didn’t happen, he knew he must be careful. By now, he expected the FBI, the CIA, NSA, the Fayetteville police, the campus rent-a-cops, and even the County Dog Catcher to have him under twenty-four-hour surveillance, with bugs on his phones, cookies and spybots in his computer, the latest micro video cameras hidden in every room of his house and department office, and a dozen agents tailing him across the city. But not in here. The Muslim Student Center was toxic to the college administration and became his personal “too-politically-correct-to-dare-touch” sanctuary. Even so, he took a cursory look around for a camera or bug, but he found nothing. As the day wore on, he concluded that either the Feds were very, very good at what they did, or they hadn’t been there to begin with.
His recruiting was finished. Heeding the Caliph’s and Aslan Khan’s advice, he had done an intense search for the most likely candidates from his classes and found eighteen young men ready to do his bidding, to various degrees. They claimed to be committed to take on the Great Satan and attack the Crusader’s castle, provided he could keep stirring their passions, provide enough “incentives,” and get them out of the TV and game rooms. He was learning that The Roadrunner, Shark Tank, and Iron Chef during the day and the late-night soft-porn on Cinemax were truly inventions of the Devil, designed to kidnap the minds of young, impressionable Arab men. Their enthusiasm and attention span were always short-lived. If he didn’t go “operational” and begin creating some serious mayhem in Fayetteville and at Fort Bragg soon, they would fade away and disappear as quickly as they came. Unfortunately, Shaw wasn’t ready. Until he was, he must keep a low profile until he could launch a coordinated, devastating series of attacks. Unfortunately, Henry Shaw had never been very good at waiting. It left him nervous and on edge, while his better angels continued to whisper in his ear, “Stay below their radar; stay below their radar!” Sometimes, however, no matter how careful you are, “the r
adar” finds you anyway.
It was almost 2:00 p.m., and as expected, he had received no blowback from Gadsden, Schrempf, or Her Highness, Hermione Ringgold, herself. He had made one of his token appearances in his office in the Sociology Department building, killing time, looking over the dog-eared notes he would use for his first class later that afternoon. It was an introductory freshman sociology course, something he detested almost as much as the tiny office they stuck him with this semester. It was part of a new five-office pod with a small central waiting area. Gadsden’s stupid idea, no doubt, intended as a personal affront from a bureaucrat who lacked the nerve to take Shaw on directly. Given how seldom anyone else used these offices, however, someone in college space planning and interior design must have run some numbers and decided this tightly packed arrangement was cheaper and so much more efficient. Both this cramped little office and the class were beneath his dignity, but they left Shaw with no choice. Still, he was a master in giving back what he got, good or bad. He threw together some recycled course crap borrowed from some undergraduate classes he had taken and a half-dozen standard texts on the subject. “Comic book” sociology, he thought, “manga,” but that was all these morons deserved.
He sat back and could feel the tension pulsing through him and knew he needed something to help him relax and take the edge off before he exploded. He had smoked up the last of his dope before he left for Turkey, and could already feel the tension building, when his TA, Stephanie Brisbane, came running into his tiny office, all red-faced and out of breath. The TAs’ offices were over here in the department building, and seeing her again gave him an excellent idea on how to get rid of the tension.
“Oh, my God, Henry…! Professor Shaw, I mean,” she quickly corrected herself as she turned and looked back at the other offices, but saw they were alone.
“ ‘Oh, my God?’ Steph? Really,” he laughed. “Do you know how many times I heard that last night? Problem was, I couldn’t tell if it was you or Amy… and I’m not sure I cared.”
“Henry! Listen to me,” she said as she tried to get serious. “Did you hear about Professor Bloomberg? He’s dead.”
“Dead? No kidding?” He sat back in his chair, disappointed they had found Bloomberg’s body so soon. The landfill seemed such a good idea at the time. “Close the door, Steph,” he told her. His hands had been tingling since he snapped Bloomberg’s neck and he needed something to take the edge off. Stephanie was just what the doctor ordered. “Come over here.” He patted his knee. “You can tell me all about it.”
“Is that all you can think about?” She eyed him suspiciously, but she knew exactly what was coming when she went back, locked the door, and sat down on his knee anyway. “It’s all over the news, you know, and on the internet. They say his body fell out of a dumpster when the truck tipped it over in the city landfill. Can you believe that? Gross, huh?”
“Gross, totally,” he replied as he began to kiss her neck and fondle her. “You turned me on last night, Steph. What do you expect?” He shoved the books and papers aside and lifted her onto his desk.
“We have class in twenty minutes, Henry.” She grinned at him as he raised her skirt and laid her back on the desk. “Are you sure we have time?” she giggled.
“Oh, don’t worry, I never disappoint,” he promised.
“You’d better not. I haven’t screwed on a professor’s desk since I was a freshman.”
That didn’t stop either one of them, and they had just reached full-stride when his desk phone rang. Reluctantly, he looked down at the display and saw the call came from that dork, Fred Gadsden. Shaw let it ring. Then, on second thought, he looked down at Stephanie and put his finger on her lips. “Shush,” he said before he picked up the receiver, but kept on pumping.
“You really are a bastard,” she moaned, but she didn’t stop, either.
“Fred! I’ve got class in a few minutes. What can I do for you?” Shaw asked.
“You sound all out of breath, Henry.”
“Oh, just my usual afternoon cardio workout. But if this is about Jeff Bloomberg, I just saw it on the web. Wow, what happened?”
“I don’t know, but the Fayetteville Police called. They want to meet with me, you and some of the other faculty later this afternoon. I was looking for you around the department building earlier, but I couldn’t find you.”
“Well, I didn’t get back here until a little while ago.”
“Yeah, you seem to be spending an awful lot of time at that Muslim Center now.”
“That’s because I have a lot of things going on over there now.”
“Okay, okay. I’m not going to argue with you. I’ll tell the police they can find you back here in your department office when your class is over.”
“All right,” he answered, looking down at Stephanie. Her eyes were closed and her face flushed. She was biting her lip and holding on to him with both hands as she rocked back and forth. He had her right there, as he said, “My desk here is a real mess right now, but I’ll get it straightened out by then.”
“Your desk? I doubt the police care. Just be here,” Gadsden said as he rang off.
“Oh, God,” Stephanie suddenly exclaimed, panting. “Oh, God.”
“There you go again,” he told her as he leaned forward and gave her a long, wet kiss, “but I can certainly understand your confusion.” Finally, he pulled away from her and pulled his pants up.
She slowly rolled off the desk, and tried to put herself back together as well, before she stepped closer, put her hands on his chest, and asked, “I have an important question for you, Henry. What are you planning for me for next semester and next year?”
“To get a bigger office, one with a couch, I hope.”
“No, silly.” She gave him a playful slap on the arm. “I mean about me and my position. I need to make some plans too, you know.”
“I thought your position was just fine.” He grinned at her.
“I’m serious!” she said as she gave him another slap, harder this time.
“Just teasing,” he answered as he pulled her close and gave her another long kiss. “Don’t worry, Steph, you’re a big part of my plans. A big part. It’ll be a surprise, trust me. Oh, and after class, I’ve got to meet with the Fayetteville cops over at the department offices to talk about Bloomberg, so you stay here. After all, we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea about what goes on over here, would we?”
He took a leisurely walk around campus after his class ended before heading to his department office, hoping that they’d give up and go bother someone else if he left them cooling their heels for forty-five minutes, but he was wrong. As he entered the office suite, he saw three men in jackets and ties leaning against the walls of the central waiting area outside his door. Obviously, they weren’t college academics. One was older, with short hair, wearing a cheap, dark-gray suit that might have come off the rack at Sears, a wrinkled white shirt, and a clip-on plaid tie. Army, Shaw thought. He looked as if he still got his hair cut on post. The second one was younger, dressed in blue jeans and a green polo shirt under a linen blazer with the sleeves pushed up his forearms. He had a trendy, closely trimmed beard and fashionably mussed hair. Both were smoking, and the younger one had his shoe propped against the wall behind him. Cops, Shaw guessed. No doubt the “aforementioned” Fayetteville PD detectives.
As Shaw entered the room, they eyed him with the studied indifference of two morticians trying to figure out how much work this stiff might require. But the surprise of the afternoon seeing his old FBI “friend” from Cyprus, Tom Pendergrass, who was sitting on the sofa along the far wall. Shaw swore that Pendergrass wore the same rumpled suit and cheap, striped tie he wore the last time they met. But they were lightweights, he thought, all of them.
“Well, if it isn’t Special Agent Pendergrass,” Shaw said, ignoring the two cops to give the Fed a cold, thin smile. “You got here quickly, didn’t you? I guess you must have gotten better flight connections than I did.”
“What can you expect when you go on the dole?” Pendergrass countered. “Can we go inside your office, Professor Shaw? We have a few things to discuss with you.”
“Nobody’s going to read me my rights?” Shaw looked expectantly at the other two.
“You don’t have any,” the older Fayetteville detective answered.
“You know you’re violating a whole law book full of city ordinances and college rules by smoking in one of our school buildings, don’t you?”
“It’s been a long day, Per-fesser. Don’t piss us off.” The younger detective dropped his cigarette on the tile floor and ground it out. “We’ve been up to our keisters diggin’ through a landfill. So you can open your damned office door and we can go inside and talk, nice and easy, or we can run your smart ass downtown. No guarantees that your paperwork won’t get lost and you won’t see daylight until the middle of next week, but what the hell.”
Shaw shrugged, turned the doorknob and pushed his unlocked office door open. “If it’s that important, you could’ve started without me.” Shaw went in and plopped himself in his desk chair while the three policemen took the chairs opposite. Pendergrass was the first to speak, which told Shaw volumes about the pecking order here.
“This is Detective Harry Van Zandt and Detective George Greenfield from Fayetteville PD,” Pendergrass began, until Shaw preempted him.
“What on earth happened to Professor Bloomberg?” Shaw leaned forward.
“And here we were hoping you could tell us,” the older detective, Greenfield, replied.
“Me? I hardly knew the fellow. As my travel ‘agent’ Pendergrass will attest, I didn’t get back from Cyprus until last night. After traveling for a day and a half, I didn’t even get up until noon today.”
“Got anyone who can corroborate that?” Van Zandt asked.
“Corroborate? If necessary, but I’m not one to kiss and tell, Detective.”
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 15