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

by William Brown

  The big black man stared up at him and shrugged, trying to appear completely indifferent. “The stockade, ah guess. Don’t matter. Ah been there before.”

  Bob looked down at him and laughed. “Oh, no, not this time, Bro. As soon as they can unplug you, you’ll be on a ‘private’ jet headed for Gitmo. You do know what Gitmo is, don’t you?” Muhammad continued to stare at him, but a big frown was beginning to overtake his misplaced confidence. “No lawyers or judges this time, no trial, and no jury, just a six by ten cell with four concrete walls, a steel cot, maybe a copy of the Koran if you really want one, and for one hour a day, you get to walk around the yard in a circle with all the others. That’s it, Muhammad… Gitmo, for the rest of your life. I’ll bet he didn’t tell you that, did he?”

  Muhammad’s eyes narrowed. “No, but who the hell are you?”

  “Your worst nightmare,” Bob smiled. “I’m from an agency that’s so secret, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “Ah heard dat kinda bullshit before,” Muhammad snorted. “You ain’t nothin’.”

  “Maybe, but I’m the guy who’s going to send you down there. When I do, ‘Poof,’ you disappear. All your kin back in Mississippi, your mama and your brothers, pretty soon they’ll all be asking, ‘Whatever happened to old Jefferson? That boy just up and disappeared, didn’t he?’ Now tell me why that other guy wanted to kill you?”

  “What other guy? Whatchu mean he tried to kill me? Whatchu talking about, man?”

  “I’m talking about the guy who pressed the button on his cell phone and detonated the bomb with you standing next to it. He had no intention of lettin’ you walk away, Farrakhan. A blind man can see that. He pressed the ‘Send’ button on his phone and tried to blow you up right along with the FORSCOM building because you know too much.”

  “No, man, he wouldn’t do…”

  “No? How do you think the bomb went off?” Bob bent over and got in his face. “You didn’t set it off, did you?”

  “No, no, ah didn’t…” Muhammad’s confused voice trailed away.

  “As soon as the MPs came around the corner and were about to grab you, you became a liability. That’s why he pressed the button on his phone. Fortunately for you, you got a couple of steps away before it went off, or you’d be downstairs in the morgue with the MPs. You were of no further use to him and he wanted you dead.”

  “It weren’t like that. He…”

  “You can’t be that stupid, Muhammad. You didn’t trigger the bomb. He did, before you could get away. He did that on purpose, so he wouldn’t have to worry about you anymore. Who was he, the guy from ISIS?” Muhammad’s eyes narrowed, but this time, he didn’t say anything. “Tell us what he’s going to do with that last pound of C-4. And what about the guns you stole?” Again, the same reaction. “Last chance, Muhammad. Tell us who he is, and you could still get the trial and the stockade. That’ll be a lot better than life in Gitmo.”

  As Bob continued to stare down at him, Muhammad’s expression turned to worry, and then to fear. He wasn’t much better at thinking than he was at acting. Like a rat caught in a very narrow corner, the truth was in his eyes. Finally, Bob turned and walked away, leaving the big man lying there.

  “It doesn’t look like he’s gonna tell us much more, is he?” Sharmayne asked as they met near the door to the corridor.

  “Maybe not now, but he will as it continues to sink in,” Bob told her. “Besides, he may not have confirmed anything directly, but he told us most of what we needed to know. That last pound of C-4 is still out there, he definitely was working with someone else, and he now realizes that the guy tried to kill him. After that sinks in for a few days, if you come back and keep pressing, sooner or later, Muhammad will rat him out.”

  Phillips shrugged. “Let’s hope you’re right.”

  “Whoever he’s working for is going to figure that out too, so I’d double the guard and keep this whole wing on lockdown. And put out the word that he’s dead. That last pound of C-4 is still out there and it would shut him up permanently.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Blue Ridge College

  Henry Shaw sat at his desk in the Sociology Department building, eating a quick lunch of tofu, red bell pepper, and ginger salad. The events of the previous night were little more than a pleasant memory as he jotted down some quick notes for his next class. Tofu? If his old Marine drill instructors at Camp Lejeune saw him eating crap like this they’d have torn his uniform off, probably a couple of body parts too. But this was part of his on-campus “persona” now. So was the outfit he was wearing — a black Rolling Stones “lips and tongue” T-shirt, a thin linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up his forearms, blue jeans, Docksiders with no socks, and of course his signature bright red Gucci glasses. No telling what the DIs would think of those, but they were all part of his well-cultivated “college professor” look now, which he continued to reinforce. He was trying to be what they expected him to be, but a “professor”? He glanced down at his notes again and wondered how one energized this next batch of undergraduate geniuses without resorting to an electric cattle prod or a keg of beer.

  Shaw had just taken another bite of his salad when his cell phone rang. He didn’t mind phone calls, even at inappropriate times, because he rarely answered them anyway, letting most of let them die in voicemail. As he stared at the phone, he was about to let this one go to voicemail too, when he got an odd feeling. He didn’t recognize the number, but something in his gut told him he should answer this call. The number was from the Fayetteville area code but the exchange and prefix were odd. Another burner phone? Most likely, he thought as his curiosity got the best of him and he pressed the “receive” button.

  “Professor, I assume you were able to complete our College registrations?” a deep, heavily-accented Arabic voice asked. Shaw didn’t need a name to know that it was that surly bastard Mergen Khan at the other end again. He had grown to intensely dislike all three of the Khan brothers, but he disliked Mergen the most. He hadn’t seen or heard from any of them until Mergen had called the day before and that delivery boy handed him an envelope containing two passports, student visas, completed Blue Ridge College enrollment forms, and all the other documents necessary for them to be admitted and registered in his class and several others.

  “You didn’t give me much time, you know,” Shaw huffed. “Those applications were three days past the deadline, and I had to go hat in hand to the registrations people in the Admissions Office and then to the Dean’s office this morning. You have no idea how I detest doing things like that.”

  “But you did it, didn’t you, as our brother instructed.”

  “Yes, damn you, it’s done! But a bit more notice would have been useful. Why the last-minute rush, anyway? When are you coming over?”

  “Over? We are already here, Professor.”

  “Here? Why wasn’t I told? Why didn’t you report in to me?” Shaw replied, shocked, and barely able to contain his anger. “I’m the one who is supposed to be running this operation!”

  “Professor, you have your assigned tasks and we have ours.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that if you have complaints, you should take them up with Aslan,” Mergen answered, his voice dripping with sarcasm. That pushed Shaw over the edge.

  “How am I supposed to do that with me here and him back in Syria?”

  “It can be arranged. In fact, he wants to talk to you, to give you more instructions,” the young Turkmeni told him.

  “Your brother, Aslan? What instructions?”

  “I’ll tell you what, Professor, why don’t you come outside and you can talk to him yourself on my cell phone,” Mergen quickly replied.

  Shaw’s mind began to race. “Outside? Where are you?”

  “Batir and I are parked in front of your building at this very moment,” Mergen said. “If you would like to know what we have been doing, come outside and we will show you… unless you
are afraid of us, Professor.”

  “No, no, of course not. I’ll be right down,” Shaw answered and immediately regretted saying that. True, he wanted answers, but not like this, not alone with the two Khan brothers. Unfortunately, his quick temper and big mouth had gotten him into this. Before he could think of anything to say to get himself out of the fix, the phone went dead. Mergen had ended the call. Shaw slumped back in his chair and stared at the phone for a few more seconds. What were the Khans up to, he wondered. More important, what were those bastards planning on doing to him? He opened his bottom desk drawer and unlocked a small cashbox that had been pushed to the back behind a box of Kleenex. Inside lay a .38-caliber Beretta. He pulled it out and checked the magazine, chambering a round, disengaging the safety, and slipping the small pistol into his jacket pocket. Further back, behind the cashbox, was his favorite Marine Corps Ka-Bar knife in its thin leather sheath. He pulled that out and put it in his inside jacket pocket. The Khans were powerful men, chiseled bodybuilders, but two bullets to the head or seven inches of razor-sharp steel jammed under the sternum would stop Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Shaw took the fire stairs down, not the elevator. On the first floor, he peeked around the doorframe and looked out through the building’s double-glass doors and saw a large, dark-blue Mercedes sedan parked at the curb. Its rear passenger door hung open. When he gathered up sufficient courage, he opened the fire door. Chin up, smiling, he strode as confidently as he could across the lobby toward the building’s front door. As he got closer, he saw Mergen Khan sitting on the far side of the car’s rear seat and his brother Batir in the front seat behind the steering wheel, waiting for him.

  “Hop in, Professor Shaw,” Mergen called out in a friendly voice. “Have no fear, Batir and I rarely dine on college professors this early in the day.”

  Reluctantly, Shaw did as he was told and got inside, but he left the car door standing open, with one leg outside and his hand on the pistol in his pocket. “Where are we going?” he finally asked, more than a little suspicious. “I have a class…”

  “Not until 2:00, so close the door,” Mergen laughed. “You asked what we have been doing so we thought we would take you for a ride in the country and show you.”

  A ride in the country? Shaw felt he was putting his neck directly under the guillotine’s blade as he pulled his leg inside and closed the car door, but what choice did he have? They exited the campus, turned south on Murchison, and continued to the city’s four-lane bypass. In a matter of minutes, they had passed the airport, crossed over I-95 and were speeding south on State Route 87 into the lush, rolling farmland beyond.

  “A lovely country, is it not?” Mergen commented as he looked out his window and smiled. “I tell you, for two boys like Batir and I, who grew up in the high mountains and dry, arid deserts south of the Caspian Sea, seeing lush green fields and dense forests like these is simply inconceivable.”

  “It’s only tobacco,” Shaw countered glumly. “Now where the hell are we going?”

  Mergen shook his head. “You know, Professor, as we got to know you back in Raqqah, you led me to believe that if we cut you open, we would find a failed poet buried deep inside.” The big Turkmeni laughed and tapped Shaw in the chest. “All this beauty and all you can see is ‘tobacco.’ How unfortunate. Well, sit back and relax. Soon enough you shall see where we are going and what we’ve been doing.”

  Batir pressed his foot down on the accelerator and the Mercedes quickly ate up the winding, divided four-lane country road as they raced south between a patchwork quilt of dense woods, tobacco, corn, and soybean farms. It really was lovely, Shaw had to admit. Three minutes later, they passed a small billboard that read “Gray’s Creek Aviation” with a large red arrow that pointed down a side road to the left. Over the last year or two, Shaw had driven most of the country roads around Fayetteville, but this was a new one to him. The Mercedes slowed and turned in. A quarter-mile further on the left, he saw a second sign and a private airfield with eight or ten large metal buildings. One was a service building, but the others were big enough to be airplane hangars. In addition, there were more than a dozen small airplanes parked in the grass in a neat line beyond the buildings. Between them he saw a series of taxi strips and a long asphalt runway which disappeared to the northwest.

  Batir turned in the airfield’s entry road, drove to the far end, and parked behind the last building on the left. It was a new, freshly painted white-metal building with decorative red and blue stripes around it. How patriotic. Shaw knew nothing about airplanes or general aviation, but guessed it had to be an airplane hangar. The building appeared to have no windows, only a small man-door in the center of the rear wall. Like the other buildings on the opposite side of the runway, presumably it had big doors on the other side facing the taxiway and runway, doors wide enough for a small airplane to pass through. On the end wall, facing back toward the entry road, he saw a name prominently displayed: “Caspian Aviation Services.” Above the name was a large logo with palm trees and a beautiful red, yellow, and purple sunset in the middle. Below the palm trees he read “Flight Training,” “Express Delivery,” and “Aerial Taxi Service.”

  As the three men got out of the car, Mergen paused and stood hands on hips, looking up proudly at the new building and the sign. “Well, Professor, what do you think of our new venture? The Republican Guard air wing never had anything this pretty, I can assure you.”

  Shaw studied the building for a moment, not sure what he was supposed to say, but he finally ventured, “It’s very nice, Mergen, very nice. Do you guys work here?”

  “No, no, Professor,” Batir snorted. “We don’t work here; we own it! It is ours. Come inside and have a look.” He walked to the rear entrance, unlocked a thick master padlock on the door, and pulled it open. As they stepped inside, Shaw saw Batir turn his head and quickly glance around the perimeter of the airfield and then back up to the entry road they came in on and the highway beyond. The Khan brothers were always cautious and on guard, he had observed back in Raqqah, just as Aslan must have taught them to be.

  It was pitch dark inside. Mergen opened his cell phone and used the flashlight feature to illuminate the rear wall long enough to find the circuit box mounted near the door. He threw a series of breakers and powered up the banks of fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling. They immediately turned night to day inside. The harsh white light made Shaw blink, and as he took his first breath inside the hangar, he was struck by the overpowering smell of fresh enamel spray paint, thinners, and solvents, which made him want to sneeze. Like the building itself, the light fixtures and the fresh concrete floor looked new. Strewn about inside was an assortment of metalworking tools, parts cabinets, air compressors, generator, empty paint cans, an acetylene torch, gas cylinders, and various sized pieces of scrap metal. In the center stood a matched pair of freshly painted red, white, and blue single-engine, propeller-driven airplanes with low-slung wings, and their color scheme and logos matched the hangar.

  “Really, Mergen?” Shaw smiled. “Red white and blue? I didn’t realize the Caliph had a sense of humor.”

  “He doesn’t, Professor. The colors were our brother Aslan’s choice.”

  “Those are Cessna TTX T240s, the best you can get,” Batir added proudly. “You would not believe how they fly,” he said as his hands made a dramatic sweeping motion.

  “Interesting,” Shaw answered as he stepped closer and slowly walked around them. He could see they were stylish late models, and no doubt expensive, as were the hangar and all the maintenance equipment strewn about inside. Shaw had always thought of small airplanes like that as toys for wealthy business executives or a major corporation, but Batir said they were theirs. If they were, where did the Khans get that kind of money? And as he looked closer at the two airplanes he saw another oddity. They both had the same FAA registration number painted on their fuselages and tails — N792CH. Again, he knew nothing about airplanes, but he had a good idea that two airplanes were
not supposed to be using the same FAA number. When he came around past the far corner of the hangar, he saw several cots, sleeping bags, a propane stove, two open suitcases, and a kitchen table, and set of folding chairs. Obviously Mergen and Batir had been living and working here in the hangar.

  Mergen motioned proudly toward the two airplanes. “Well, do you approve?”

  Henry Shaw stared at them for a moment. “I knew you two were pilots, but I didn’t know you were mechanics and painters too. Are you opening a flight school or something?”

  “Yes,” Batir laughed. “Or something.”

  “And the same registration numbers? Is that some way to dodge the fees?”

  “Yes,” Mergen quickly answered. “You are very perceptive and saw right through us, Professor. It is a way to dodge the fees and taxes.”

  Shaw turned on him, a flash of anger in his eyes. “Look, I don’t give a damn what you’re doing out here, Mergen, but I busted my ass getting you two enrolled at a college that I don’t even know why the hell you want into,” Shaw said, obviously irritated. “But now I see you’ve been down here playing with this crap the whole time” he motioned toward the airplanes and the equipment. “What are you doing, anyway? Are you going to take the damned classes, or stay out here and play with your new toys?”

  Mergen bristled. “They are not toys, as you shall soon see!” he glared back at him. “And we needed the admission documents and the classes to validate our student visas. That is why you were told to get them.”

  “Well, if you screw up the classes, they’ll pull those visas and beat me over the head with them. Then what will you have?”

  “By then, it will not matter. It will not matter at all,” Batir answered.

  “Our brother Aslan can answer your questions,” Mergen joined in.

  “Well, that’s sure as hell convenient, since he’s not here, is he?” Shaw confronted them hands on hips, frustrated.