“With C-4? Help you do what?”
“Cause a bit of mischief. I could try to buy it or steal it, but it would be a lot easier to pay you to make it for me. I figure ten pounds, say in one-pound blocks, but more if you can make it, much more.”
“Ten pounds is a lot of bang, Professor,” Sameer answered, clearly surprised. “Apparently, you really do have some mischief in mind, don’t you?” He chuckled. “It is mostly used by the military and civilian contractors, because it is much safer and much easier to work with than dynamite. Please understand, making C-4 per se is not what you might call ‘rocket science.’ About ninety percent is RDX, which is the primary ingredient. The problem of course is getting or making the RDX. Its chemical name is cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, which is a nitroamine, a white, crystalline solid. Your military throws in some plasticizers, mineral oil, and other ingredients to make it pliable, but you need a Destructive Device Permit from the ATF and the County Sheriff to own or use it. If you do not have a permit and get caught, it is a serious crime.” Sameer added, “But I think you already know that, don’t you?”
Shaw laughed and answered him, “Hence my problem. Can you make it for me?”
“That should not be a problem, once I can arrange for the right equipment. All you need is hexamine, nitric acid, water, salt, ammonium nitrate. The actual production could be cooked up in a high school chemistry classroom or even your kitchen, for that matter, but privacy is highly advisable. If anyone sees me cooking that stuff, they will probably assume I am running a meth lab.”
“But you can make it, can’t you?”
Al-Karman stared at him for a long moment. “Oh, yes, but it will cost you $50,000.”
Shaw stared back at him. “I thought you were a devoted follower?”
“But I am, Professor. There are significant costs for the materials, plus the risk of being betrayed and deported… not to mention the risk of blowing my young ass through the ceiling. I for one am not quite ready to go to heaven and meet all those young tender virgins, you see. There is also the risk you face of being blown to pieces when you detonate it. I am not a rug merchant. If you want it done cheaply, I can recommend several undergraduate chemistry students who could try to make it for you.”
“All right, Sameer, $50,000 for five pounds. How long will it take?”
Sameer thought for a minute. “If I can get the ingredients I need, perhaps three days. But I will need half up front, for my purchase of the materials I need. And you will also need detonators. The C-4 will not explode without a proper one. Let us say another $10,000 for a half-dozen detonators.”
“Done. I’ll meet you here at noon tomorrow with the money. But I’m depending on you, Sameer. We both have friends in the mosque and elsewhere who will seek reprisals if anything goes wrong or if the police show up, don’t we?”
Shaw’s cell was beginning to take shape. With a trigger man and his explosives now in play, what he needed next were trained foot soldiers who would follow orders. Shahid Halabi was at the top of his list. Brash, arrogant, and moderately stupid, he would be the first, hopefully, of many more to follow. An angry, spoiled, disaffected Saudi, Shahid was the youngest son of a mid-level government bureaucrat in Riyadh, and he had no discernible academic interests or abilities. He had already flunked out of two American universities, been thrown out of a third, wrecked several sports cars along the way, and had a lengthy police record for drunk and disorderly and other minor offenses. Only the intercession of his father, whom he hated, kept him from losing his student visa and being forced to return to Saudi Arabia, which he hated even more. Shaw knew if he could channel all that anger and disaffection, he could manipulate him into boarding the first-class compartment on the jihadist train.
While Muhammad was cagey and street-smart in his own limited way, and al-Karman was too smart, Shahid Halabi was none of the above. He thought he was, but he wasn’t. He made occasional visits to the mosque to be seen and have his attendance reported back to the Embassy, but he rarely attended classes, spending most of his time in local bars or the TV lounges at the Muslim Student Center where he would watch international soccer matches and American cartoons. Like Sameer al-Karman, he shunned the political discussions in the Student Union or the Muslim Center where the other Arab students hung out, not because he thought they were fools, as al-Karman did, but because he found it impossible to concentrate on anything serious for more than five minutes without getting in a fight. Besides, deep political discussions interfered with his main preoccupations of driving fast cars, chasing young coeds and getting drunk. That said, it was obvious he was the perfect choice for several attacks Shaw had in mind.
They met at 10:00 p.m. in a Pizza Hut just off campus, where Shaw showed him the video of himself with Caliph al-Zaeim. It was intended to be convincing, and the more marginal the intellect of the viewer, the more convincing it was. Halabi sat in rapt attention as Shaw leaned forward and looked him in the eyes. “Are you with me, Shahid? Are you ready to stand at the side of Caliph al-Zaeim? He will make room for you at his council table, perhaps even a place in his cabinet. After he sweeps the infidels and heretics aside, you can return home as a hero and a great leader among your people.” Shaw could see Halabi’s mind racing ahead at the thought being a hero, of gaining position, authority, glory, and women.
“You really met the Caliph?” Halabi whispered, still suspicious. “You are not lying to me, are you? You really spoke to him?”
“I spent four days in Raqqah, just the two of us and his top aides. He told me he is depending on me and the men I can gather around me to form an ISIS cell right here in Fayetteville. And he gave me a holy mission. I can’t tell you details, but he wants us to strike blows against the American military at Fort Bragg, blows that will send them reeling. That is why I need you with me. I need you at my side as my deputy commander, and I need you to help me recruit more soldiers, at least a dozen. Will you accept the call? Are you with me?”
“Of course, Shaw, of course!” the young man said as he licked his lips.
It was almost noon the next day when Farrakhan Muhammad called him back on the throwaway cell phone Shaw had given him. “Were you able to get everything?” Shaw asked.
“What? You doubtin’ me?” Muhammad tried to sound offended. “ ’Course I can. Got it all lined up for tonight. Some Glock 17s and even more 19s, with two dozen magazines and a hundred rounds of 9-mil ammo. They only have three M-4s and six M-16s. With the magazines and ammo, ah figure those ought to do for starters. That okay?”
“And you trust these guys? They aren’t ATF or the FBI or anything, are they?”
“Doc, you think ah’m stupid? I done business with them boys before. They’s from up in the hills, white supremacists, I think, but thas okay. They hate me, I hate them, and nobody trusts nobody, except the money. So I need $12,000 by 9:30 tonight, when I gotta go meet them and pick the stuff up.”
“We’ll meet where we met last night, and I’ll go with you, to cover your back.”
“Who you tryin’ to kid? You be coverin’ yo’ money, but thas okay too. Those boys be pretty bad. Don’t ’spect to see ’em in yo class anytime soon. But you got a gun?”
“Back at my office.”
“No sweat, I’ll bring you one. You goin’ with me, you best be packin’.”
At 10:30 p.m., Shaw drove his white Peugeot into the parking lot of a truck stop at a rural exit twenty miles south on I-95 toward the South Carolina border. Farrakhan Muhammad was sitting in the passenger seat with a .357 Magnum revolver and a Colt .45 automatic in his lap. Shaw drove to the rear of the parking lot, turned in behind the wash rack, and stopped at one corner of the brick building. Ahead, at the other corner, they saw two pickup trucks parked a few feet apart with their headlights on bright, lighting up the Peugeot and making it impossible to see much.
“Thas dem in the trucks,” Muhammad said as he shielded his eyes and turned toward Shaw. As he did, he held out the two pistols. “You wuz a Mar
ine; you take the Colt. It’s old school, like you. Ah’ll take the .357.” Muhammad jacked a round into the receiver and handed it over. “Just don’t go shootin’ yo’self wif it… and don’t go shootin’ me, neither.”
Shaw didn’t say anything as he took the Colt, immediately dropped the magazine out, ejected the bullet in the receiver, looked down the barrel, checked the magazine, slammed it back in the butt, and flipped off the safety, all in a matter of seconds, while Muhammad watched. “Yeah, well, ah guess you seen one before, ain’t you? But you stay in the car. Dem rednecks can get a bit twitchy.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Shaw smiled at him.
“Look, ah’ll give ’em some of the money fo’ a couple of the guns, and bring ’em back to you. You check ’em out. If dey’s okay, then we’ll do the rest.”
“Good plan,” Shaw agreed as he handed him a stack of money.
Muhammad got out of the car, tucked the big .357 Magnum in the small of his back, and walked toward the bright headlights. He waved and four burly white men with beards and baseball caps wearing bib overalls climbed out of the trucks. The five men began talking. Slowly, as Shaw watched, the four rednecks gathered around Muhammad, smiling and laughing. Everything seemed friendly enough until their leader, the one with the John Deere hat, held out his hand and the pushing and shoving began. One of them grabbed the .357 Magnum from the rear waistband of Muhammad’s pants. He turned and decked one of them with his size-twelve right fist, but as he turned back, the others already had their guns out and the fight was over.
“Hey, man, all we wants is da guns,” Muhammad said as he held up his hands and tried to back away until one of the others pressed a gun in his back.
“Yeah, well, Bro, all we wants is da money,” John Deere said as he held out his hand again. Reluctantly, Muhammad handed over the small stack that Shaw had given him. The redneck quickly fanned it and scowled. “Ain’t but $1,500 here. Where’s the rest?” he said as he stepped forward and poked Muhammad in the gut with a long-barreled, gunmetal-blue Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum “Dirty Harry” revolver.
“Da other guy, da one in the car, he got it,” Muhammad answered as he turned his head and looked back at the Peugeot, parked at the opposite corner of the carwash illuminated by the pickup truck’s headlights. The rednecks turned their heads and looked too. Both of the car’s front doors were hanging open but the car was empty. No one was there.
“What the hell?” Muhammad frowned.
“What kinda game you playin’?” the redneck asked as he turned away from Muhammad and pointed his big cannon at the Peugeot. “What other guy?”
“You mean me?” Shaw whispered in John Deere’s ear as his right hand slipped around the redneck’s chest. It was holding a 7-inch blue-steel USMC Ka-Bar knife, and the first thing that John Deere felt was its razor-sharp blade slicing across his throat. The redneck’s big .44 Magnum went off like a cannon, hitting one of his own men in the leg and knocking him down. As John Deere began to fall, blood spurted out the side of his neck, splattering Muhammad’s face. Henry Shaw then shoved John Deere into one of the two rednecks remaining upright, turned on the other redneck, and shot him twice in the chest.
Muhammad stood stunned, mouth open, his hands out from his sides. Maybe it was the roar of the .44 Magnum, the blood on his own face, or the subsequent blast from the .45, but he was frozen, staring down at himself, wide-eyed. Shaw chose to ignore him as he continued forward and pointed the .45 at the redneck who was lying on the ground, pinned under John Deere. He shot him twice in the head before he walked over to where the redneck lay who had been shot in the thigh by John Deere’s .44 Magnum, and pointed the Colt at him.
“Where are the guns?” Shaw asked him in a quiet, determined voice.
“Ain’t no guns, man,” the redneck groaned as he twisted back and forth on the ground.
Shaw turned back toward Muhammad and said, “Look in their trucks,” but the big man wasn’t hearing. He was still in a trance. Shaw slapped Muhammad across the face to get his attention. “Wake up! Now go look in those trucks and see if they brought anything.”
Muhammad finally stumbled away, looked in the truck beds and behind the front seats in both pickup trucks. “No, man, ain’t nothing here.”
Shaw looked back down at the last redneck. “Is that all this was? A rip-off?” he asked him angrily before he shot him twice in the chest. “Come on.” He motioned for Muhammad to follow. “Get their guns and my money. At least it won’t be a total loss. And turn those headlights off!” he said as he walked back to the Peugeot, got in, and waited for Muhammad.
The big black man finally joined him and dumped a handful of pistols on the passenger side floor of the car. “Ain’t a bad haul,” he said as Shaw quickly drove away and got back on the Interstate, headed for Fayetteville. “Ah got a big hog-leg .44, a .38 Colt Diamondback revolver, and two Glocks. Dey didn’t have no rifles, but we didn’t pay nothin’ for ’em, either,” he laughed, and then turned serious when he saw the expression on Shaw’s face.
“You’re missing the goddamned point, Farrakhan! We came here for rifles. All the rest is bullshit. You need to go back to your pals in one of the arms rooms and get us some rifles and ammunition. You got that?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure, ah’ll check around and see what ah can get. But you know, you had me fooled, man. Dat was cold, whatchu done back there, killin’ ’em all like dat. Real cold.”
“The only good witness is a dead witness.” Shaw glared at him. “Don’t ever forget that. Besides, nobody’s going to give a damn about four rednecks.”
“Yeah, well, you probably right about dat.” He leaned back and sighed. “But it really shook me up, man. Ah need a drink, maybe a lot of them.”
“Not yet. We still have a job to do tonight.”
“A job? Oh, come on, man.”
“Shut up! You’re the one who screwed this up. I could’ve just as easily left you lying back there with the rest of them. Don’t forget that!”
Shaw exited I-95, took the Route 87 bypass around Fayetteville and the “All-American Expressway” north to Fort Bragg. The main gate was eight lanes wide and looked more like a row of toll booths on the Jersey Turnpike but Shaw had the status as an on-campus contract teacher and a stick-on transponder for his car that let him pass through without stopping. A short distance past the gates, he reached Gruber Road and turned right.
“Where we goin’? Dis part ’a da post ain’t exactly my neighborhood, you know.”
“We’re going to the golf club, the one at the Stryker golf course. It’s where a lot of the officers hang out at night to drink,” Shaw told him as he drove past the brick clubhouse and went around back into its dimly lit parking lot. He stopped in a side aisle and handed Muhammad the Colt .45 pistol. “You wanted some payback? Well, it starts tonight.”
“Whatchu up to, Shaw?” The big black man frowned as he looked at the old semi-automatic in his lap.
“The revolution. It starts here, tonight. Officers hang out here. You wait in the shadows near the rear door. When you see a couple of them — you know what I mean, the ones with eagles or stars on their collars and Special Ops insignias — then you take them out.”
“Take ’em out, huh?”
“It’s the mission the Caliph gave us: to hit their Special Operations people hard, here, back home where they live and work, to take out their leadership, and sew discord and disunity in their ranks. That is why they sent me here, and why I picked you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“No ‘yeah buts.’ Wait until two or three officers come out, majors or colonels. They won’t be armed or expecting any trouble. You can take them down before they even know you’re there. As soon as they hit the ground, I’ll drive over and pick you up. We’ll be out the rear gate before the MPs even know it happened,” Shaw said as he put his hand on Muhammad’s shoulder. “Tonight, Muhammad. Tonight, we begin building our cell. It’s our sacred duty, and what I was sent back here
to do. Allahu Akbar!”
“Uh, yeah, Allahu Akbar,” Muhammad repeated with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Reluctantly, he opened the door as if the handle was red-hot, and got out of the car. He had a big man’s propensity to show off, to brag and bluster, but it was his own big mouth that got him into this fix. He never intended to kill anyone, especially not an army officer, but that was the trap he had fallen into. There was no way out now. He closed the car door behind him and walked away across the grass on tired, wooden legs.
Shaw turned the car around and parked along the sidewalk, facing the rear door of the golf club. The next five minutes passed with agonizing slowness for him, and probably a lot worse for Muhammad, hiding in the bushes. No one left the club and no new cars came into the rear lot for at least ten minutes. Then the building’s rear door opened. Light flooded out across the sidewalk, and he saw two men walk out, silhouetted against the doorway. Seconds later, the late-summer night was punctuated by blue-white flashes and the loud bark of two gunshots followed by two more. Shaw immediately put the car in gear and drove forward to where the sidewalk from the rear door met the parking lot. He had barely stopped when Farrakhan Muhammad’s large shape ran at him from the dark shadows, yanked the car door open, and squeezed himself inside.
“Go, go,” the big man said, but Shaw already had the car moving. “God, God, I never done nothin’ like dat,” he said, his chest heaving, hyperventilating.
“Calm down, calm down.” Shaw tried to steady him. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked as he drove around the back of the golf club and headed toward the rear gate.
Muhammad rolled down the window and stuck his head out for air. “Yeah, yeah, I be okay. Jes get me da hell outta here.”
They drove through the outbound gate without being stopped and finally began to relax as Shaw drove down into the city. “Who were they? Who did you shoot?”
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 17