Shaw pulled his cell phone from his pocket, pressed the star to bring up his short directory of “Favorites” and scrolled down. His list only had numbers, with no names attached. The second from the bottom was the one he was looking for. It was for one of the many burner phones he hid in his bottom desk drawer in the office, but this phone number wouldn’t ring there. It would ring in the trunk of Shahid Halabi’s Toyota, so Shaw pressed on it.
Cell phone calls can sometimes take several long, irritating seconds to work their way from cell tower to cell tower to server, to satellite to server and back again, through nameless, faceless phone switches in cold, empty “server farm” buildings. In this instance, the server farm was in Charlotte, almost 180 miles away over the mountains to the west. Even so, traveling at warp speed, it pinged through the telephone system and arrived back in Fayetteville in less than two seconds. When the call reached the cell phone in Halabi’s trunk, it completed a circuit and simultaneously sent a signal to each of the four detonators he had inserted in different bottles of C-4. One detonator might have gone off a microsecond before or after the others, but that did not matter. The result was a powerful, blinding explosion that tore the Toyota apart and sent body parts and car panels flying in every direction.
Because Shahid Halabi had followed Shaw’s instructions to the letter and parked his car against the heavy concrete loading dock, under the building’s thick concrete overhang and behind the block wall screening the air conditioning equipment, a substantial percentage of the blast was trapped there, multiplying its effect many times over. The car was blown apart, lifting the chassis four feet in the air. When the force of the blast hit the concrete overhang above, the force bounced back down and back up again, breaking the heavy concrete slab loose. The car chassis crashed back to the ground at the same time the concrete panel of the overhang crashed down on top of it. That was when the car’s gas tank exploded in an orange-yellow fireball that quickly engulfed the scene in a dark, oily cloud of smoke and concrete dust. As for that poor, unfortunate devil Shahid Halabi, Henry Shaw could not say. Between the powerful blast of the C-4, the flying car parts, and the crash of the concrete panel, the young Saudi simply vanished.
Well, this was indeed “Easy Peasey,” Shaw concluded, deciding he had seen enough. He looked at his watch; it was now 5:00 p.m. It had been a busy and productive day, and he had barely gotten started. He sat up, started the car, laid his cell phone on the other seat, and backed out of the parking space. Across the tracks, the pile of burning rubber and scrap metal was filling the street with black, oily smoke, most of which was drifting north. Shaw drove to the back of the lot, into the adjacent AIT Festival Hall parking lot near Maiden Lane, and found another parking space that gave him a reasonable view of the blast site. He wanted to see how the vaunted local emergency response reacted, and who might show up at the scene. Know thine enemy, he thought.
Shaw finally began to relax as he picked up his cell phone again and called George Enderby. Before he drove away with Halabi earlier, he had told Enderby to remain at the Muslim Center for further orders. When Enderby answered his phone, Shaw skipped through the social niceties and got right to the point.
“George, the guns and ammunition I promised you are in the janitor’s closet in the MSC basement — M-4 rifles, a few M-16s, and pistols. There’s also several metal boxes of ammunition. Get six of your best recruits and have them bring that stuff up to my office.”
“Does this mean we are finally activating the cell?”
“Don’t interrupt me! The cell has been ‘active’ for three days now, whether you knew it or not. Have them strip and clean the rifles and load the magazines. While they are doing that, I want you to run over to Dick’s Sporting Goods or Gander Mountain, maybe both, and buy a dozen ski masks. You know, the ones that only leave the eyes and mouth open, but with different patterns. Got that?”
“For tonight?”
“Yes, I want them geared up and ready to go at 7:30 p.m. You and your men will strike a crippling blow against the Crusader oppressors tonight.”
Shaw hung up and turned his eyes back on the museum again. Being much further away now, he opened his glove box and pulled out a pair of “birdwatching” binoculars he kept there for his afternoon drives in the hills with coeds. They always seemed to fall for his birdwatching line, especially when he pulled out the binoculars and put his arms around them, pulled them back against him, and showed them “how it worked.” He enjoyed pressing himself against them, up close and personal, and it never seemed to fail. But enough of those pleasant thoughts. He slumped back in the seat again, focused the binoculars on the smoking wreck of the car, and waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sherwood Forest
Earlier that afternoon, Bob walked the short distance from the main house, across the rear yard to the Annex and up the stairs to the “KGB Spymaster Data Center,” the exclusive domain of the Geeks. It took up half the second floor of what had originally been eight bedrooms, and now included a large three-bedroom suite, a kitchen, game room, fitness room, and a Hollywood-level multi-media entertainment room, all of which surrounded their central Data Center. Bob hadn’t been up there in almost a month and barely recognized the place or the new space-age array of equipment sitting on the desks, attached to the walls, and hanging from the ceiling. It was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks and take it all in. The Data Center was dark. The windows had been closed off and only indirect lighting and the glow from dozens of electronic components in computer monitors lit the interior. In the middle of the room, forming a “Y,” sat three attached, curved, multi-level, 270° computer workstation modules that looked like the control room of the Starship Enterprise.
Each of the workstations contained an individually molded, padded “command chair” that looked like something ripped out of the Space Shuttle. Jimmy’s had been specially designed as a “two-fer” so Patsy Evans, Jimmy’s ever-present “main squeeze,” could “squeeze” in next to him, as she usually did, and smiling. Also in each workstation was a large, custom-made, five-panel monitor, with a large central panel and two more flanking it on each side, one high and one low. Each unit was driven by dual, state-of-the-art pedestal computers. Off to the side of the room sat a bank of printers, both black-and-white and color, a massive battery backup unit, and a large, dedicated server. Bob paused, trying to take it all in. The place was stunning, even he had to admit; and if he wanted to really dig into it, he was certain he would find a blank check signed by Linda at the bottom of it. Bob was frugal, and he came from a long line of frugal. Normally, he would explode at the thought of this kind of gross excess, but the Geeks had already proven they were worth any price.
Jimmy Barker, Ronald Talmadge, and Sasha Kandarski, the Geeks, were at their desks, sitting in their command chairs waiting for Bob to arrive. This time, Ace must have really impressed them with the seriousness of the situation, because they were all-hands-on-deck as ordered, with neither Krazy Glue nor singing squirrels anywhere to be seen. That pleased Bob. Jimmy still looked like he was fifteen and Ronald still looked like his younger brother, but they were changing. They were getting an edge.
Since Patsy moved in here with Jimmy after Atlantic City, he now sported a permanently dazed, satisfied smile, as did she. Ronald, on the other hand, wore his usual pair of thick, black, horn-rimmed glasses with a large blob of masking tape holding the nose bridge together. What was new, however, was Ronald’s cobalt blue, spiked hair. An interesting new look, Bob thought, not that he probably couldn’t use a bit of excitement too.
Even more surprising, however, was the appearance of Sasha Kandarski, the third Geek. The Russian ex-pat classmate of Jimmy and Ronald at Caltech, he was as physically large as the other two put together. When Bob first met him, he had thick, curly, black hair and a bushy, unkempt black beard, which had all grown together like an aggressive shrub that now surrounded his head like a Christmas wreath. Most of the Merry Men thought he resembled
a large Russian bear, and he usually smelled like one. However, having a six-year-old step-daughter who watched her educational TV, Bob thought he looked more like Cookie Monster, but with black hair, not blue. The hair aside, the one lasting impression that Sasha left with people was his pair of riveting black eyes sunken in the center of that huge wreath of bushy black hair.
Now, to his utter amazement, when Bob walked into the room, he saw that Sasha had shaved it all off — the hair, the bushy black beard, even the thick moustache. He’d even shaved his head so close, it shone.
Bob did a double-take. “Kojak! I wouldn’t have recognized you.”
Sasha turned toward the other two in confusion. “Kto Kojack?” Who is this Kojak?
“We’ll explain later,” Ronald snickered. “But I think it means the Major likes your new do.”
Bob paused to look around at the desks and all the new office equipment. “Man, what is this stuff?” he asked Jimmy. “I thought we bought you guys new gear when you moved in?”
“Mr. B,” Jimmy shook his head, as if he were dealing with a slow third-grader. “That was then. Now is now. When you really want to rock out, a $50 acoustic guitar from Walmart won’t cut it. Will it? The best need the best.”
Bob sighed. “Linda bought all this stuff, didn’t she?” he answered his own question without asking. “She always was a soft touch,” he said as he bent down and looked at for the label on the computer under Jimmy’s desk. “You didn’t get these babies from Walmart, did you? What are they?”
“Walmart? Not exactly,” Jimmy began to slither.
“I don’t even see a brand name on any of it,” Bob said.
“It’s what you might call a… ‘private label.’ ”
“Looks big and fast. Is it?”
“Oh, yeah!” Ronald snorted. “Six-point-two GHz, 128 gigabytes of RAM. Fast as a thief. Not even NASA or NSA has anything like them.”
“Can I play Pong on them?” Bob asked.
“Pong? Chto Pong?” Sasha asked, confused again. What is Pong?
“Never mind,” Jimmy told him.
“They can explain it to you later,” Bob said as he looked each of them in the eyes. “Time to show me you deserve them. I have some serious work for you guys, and I need it done yesterday.”
“Breeng eet on! Comrade General!” Sasha roared in his heavily accented English.
“There’s a professor named Henry Shaw over at Blue Ridge College,” Bob began. “And as the Godfather said, ‘I want to know what he’s got under his fingernails.’ ”
“Kto Godfather?” Who is Godfather, Sasha asked, more confused. “Feeengernails?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll explain that later, too,” Ronald added.
“Shaw teaches at Blue Ridge College, as well as a few classes at Fort Bragg. He also runs the Muslim Student Center on campus. I want you to tear into its budget, membership, funding, and get a list of their employees. Then, get a roster of all the classes he teaches. Go back two years, cross-reference the names and the classes. And see what you can learn about the mosque. If they have any membership lists, cross-reference that against the other two. And as for Shaw, I want you to tear him apart —bank accounts, credit cards, passport, any property he owns, cars, what he buys, what he drinks, his travels, girlfriends, telephone records, and internet activity. Everything. Finally, on all the matches, get their pictures and see if you can get into the Fayetteville police records, drivers licenses, the FBI, and the Turkish secret police, too. I want to know everything we can learn about them, too.”
“Uh, you know, half that stuff’s illegal, don’t you, Mr. B?” Jimmy asked.
“Nah, it’s all illegal, which is why I came to you guys,” Bob smiled. “You know how get in and get out without leaving any footprints. Later, I may want you to go back in and mess him up, but that can wait.”
“Da, piece of cake, Comrade General!” Sasha saluted as he turned to his keyboard. “Jimmy, you take deees weasel person Shaw. Ronald, you take college and mosque. I take FBI and those bastard Turks! Cutie pie Patsy, go to icebox. Get round of Red Bull for everyone, and bring munchies, lots of munchies. KGB Spymaster Data Center ees on it, Boss!”
“One other thing,” Bob said. “Jimmy, I emailed you some photos I took of the crew inside the Muslim Student Center. Run facial recognition on all of them, and match those up with the other names and photos you assemble.”
“Will do, Boss,” Jimmy said with a crooked salute.
“Also, there’s a private airstrip down the road here in Cumberland County called Gray’s Creek. Check them out. And check out a new company that just opened shop down there called Caspian Aviation Services. Top priority on those two.”
“You want what’s ‘under feeengernails,’ right?” Sasha asked.
“Right. Sasha, you can take on Caspian Aviation and the airfield. Do that before the other stuff. It’s that important,” Bob told them as he watched the Geeks turn away, one by one, attack their keyboards, and zone out. He immediately knew it was time for mere mortals to leave the Gods of the Geekdom alone. Watching pure genius in action is like watching sausage being made. Bob had seen the Geeks do this before, and he knew it was a complete waste of time to intrude into their little world now. Like the sausage, it’s better to wait until sausage makers are finished.
He turned and headed for the door and glanced over at Patsy. She was probably the only person in the room who had a clue he was still there. “You get to play ‘house mother’ here for the next few hours. If they come up with anything that sounds promising, translate it into human speak and text it to me.”
“Yes Sir, Comrade General,” she said with a Russian accent and a smile.
“Not you too. One Sasha is enough.”
As Bob left the Annex and began walking across the rear yard to the main house, thinking about his plans to employ the Merry Men, he heard the dull clap of an explosion to the west, and stopped moving. Instinctively, he rotated his head and shoulders to get his ears and nose pointed in the direction he thought the noise came from. It was an old infantry trick. After a lot of long hard years in too many combat zones, he knew that the sound of gunshots, mortars, artillery fire, even IEDs and bombs, could take strange turns outdoors, especially when you were surrounded by woods and buildings. Still, he had learned to trust his ears and his brain, as he rotated his head slightly to his right and to the left like a radar dish. After a few seconds, he was almost certain the rumbling noise came from due west, through the woods and across the river. But what was it? He was positive he heard a sharp clap, followed by a muffled, rolling Boom, and it wasn’t thunder. The sky was too clear for that. It was a bomb. Another one at Fort Bragg? No, the Army post was located north-northwest from where he was standing. The explosion came from the west and it was much closer than Fort Bragg.
That was when Bob saw a plume of black smoke rising above the tree line directly west from where he was standing. He quickly concluded that was a good news / bad news kind of thing. Good news for Fort Bragg, but bad news for the City of Fayetteville. Bob pulled out his cell phone and pressed Command Sergeant Major Pat O’Connor’s cell phone number. “Pat,” he said, “did you just hear that? There was a loud explosion to the west of Sherwood Forest, maybe in Fayetteville.”
Pat paused and then replied, “No, we didn’t hear anything, but we’re pretty far north. The general and I spent the afternoon jumping into the Normandy and Salerno drop zones with the 82nd, and I don’t think I could hear much of anything right now if it went off right next to me. Do you think it’s another bomb?”
“I’m going to call the two city cops and see what they know. I’ll be back to you when I learn anything.”
“Do that. Meanwhile I’ll call Special Agent Phillips.”
Bob rang off and hit one of the new speed dial numbers he’d entered that afternoon, the one for Detective Harry Van Zandt of the Fayetteville Police Department. When he answered, Bob said, “Harry, was that something bad I just heard?” The ques
tion proved unnecessary, when he heard the loud screech of emergency sirens in the background.
“Yeah, looks like a big car bomb went off at the Airborne and Special Ops Museum on Hay Street. It blew the hell out of the west wing. George and I are headed over there right now. The goddamned museum? Why would anybody…”
“Because it’s a symbol, and it probably means they aren’t done. I’ll call the others.”
“Don’t bother, Phillips just called.”
“I’ll let Tom Pendergrass know and then I’ll be over in a little while.”
“Suit yourself, you know where we’ll be.”
“Any casualties?”
“Not that we know of yet, except maybe the bomber, but it’s still early.”
Bob continued to the conference room in the main house. He was five minutes early, and it was already standing room only. Most of the Merry Men who were ‘in country’ were present, plus a few others — “Ace” Randall, “Chester” Blackledge, “Koz” Kozlowski, and Joe “The Batman” Hendrix, who had been part of the original group since the dustup in Chicago. Also present were the newcomers — George “The Prez” Washington and José “Illegal” Rodriguez, who had been on the Syrian raid with Koz and the Batman. In addition, there were Master Sergeant Frank “SpaghettiOs” Spagnolo, a close friend of Ace and Pat O’Connor, Staff Sergeant Ernie “Kraut” Krauthammer, who Koz brought, Sergeant First Class Max “Pad” Baughman, Staff Sergeant Kimba “Dictionary” Webster, and Chief Warrant Officer John “High Rider” Carmody. He was General Stansky’s helicopter pilot on those rare occasions when the old man let anyone else fly his bird for him. There were also Linda, Dorothy, and even Ellie, who was circulating around with a tray of Oreo cookies.
“All right, listen up,” Bob began with no preliminaries. “I had intended this to be a planning meeting but that just went out the window. As you may or may not have heard in here, a couple minutes ago a big car bomb went off at the Airborne and Special Ops Museum in town…”
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 30