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

by William Brown

  “Oh, Jeez!” ‘High Rider’ Carmody said. “The Old Man’s gonna flip out. That place was one of his babies.”

  “Great,” Bob grumbled, well aware what that would mean.

  Linda was beside herself. “What’s going on, Bob?” She shook her head, worried, and growing angry. “This isn’t Paris or Brussels. If I wanted this crap, I could’ve stayed in Chicago.”

  “Chicago? Really? Well, like it or not, it’s here now and we’re going to stop it,” Bob answered as he turned his hard, cold eyes back on the others. “So listen up. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover in a very few minutes. Special Ops is under attack, and that’s something I don’t take with a smiley face. I didn’t like it in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I sure as hell don’t like it here in Fayetteville. Ace is my Chief of Staff when I’m not here. See him to draw any weapons and equipment you need. I have the Geeks upstairs in the Data Center working their little keyboards off to get us better intel, and Patsy Evans is coordinating all of that for us. I expect them to have a firm handle on what we’re dealing with in a few hours, and some profiles and details on the opposition.”

  “The distances we’re working over are too great to use our usual ‘Rifleman’ tactical radios,” he continued. “So, I have secure cell phones instead. They’re on the table outside. Take one and stay in touch, but bring ’em back. They aren’t cheap, but I am. I’ll be putting out updates as we learn anything. Oh, and given the erratic nature of what’s going on out there, I’ve asked Ace to harden the perimeter here at Sherwood Forest. Ace?”

  “We now have nine of our ‘operators’ assembled here, who we can deploy elsewhere as needed, plus you and me. I’m putting one man in the nest up on the roof with a spotter scope and a long gun, one here, inside the main house, and one monitoring the electronic security, video and infrared cameras, and motion sensors, which will be on full alert, mostly dusk to dawn. This room will be our operations center, and the roster is posted on the door. I’ve also contracted with old friends at Atlantic Security to augment that with six of their people on site starting in an hour, at 1800, for as long as we need them. Two men will be roaming the site twenty-four/ seven.”

  “And Crookshanks will guard the house,” Ellie piped up as she walked around the room with a plate of Oreo cookies.

  Bob looked around at the smiles. “Be advised,” he warned. “Mess with the attack-cat at your own peril.” He then turned to Koz and said, “I want you to take three men — two shooting teams — down south to a small private airstrip on Butler Nursery Road off Route 87 called Gray’s Creek. There’s a big red, white, and blue hangar at the far end with the name Caspian Aviation Services on it. That’s the target. We have USGS Quad Sheets of this whole area in the library, so do some topo recon before you go out, and pick out a few good spots where you can cover the building, both sides. Our friend Shaw was down there today, and something is up. Take whatever gear and weapons you need from the storeroom — long guns of your choice, ghillie suits, night vision scopes, whatever, and get down there ASAP. For the moment, just observe and report to Ace, and take an infrared digital camera with a telephoto lens. See if you can get shots of anyone going in or out. The Geeks can run a photo match to the other faces we’re keeping track of.”

  “Roger that,” Koz answered. “Illegal, Prez, and Batman, ‘on’ me. Let’s go.”

  “The rest of you guys hang out here for a while, or take a phone and go back to Bragg. My gut tells me there’ll be things to do soon enough,” Bob told them.

  As the group broke up, Linda walked over and tapped Bob on the shoulder. “You know, when we went up to Atlantic City, you put Patsy and me in charge of supplies and logistics. Remember? Well, if we are going to be ‘entertaining’ this many people for a few days, we need food, lots of food.”

  “Order in whatever you need.”

  “I’ve already started, but we need to make a commissary run.”

  Bob looked at his watch and said, “They’re open until 9:00. Ace and I will run you up in the truck.”

  “Dorothy can take me. She has all the IDs.”

  “I don’t want you two going by yourselves,” he said as he looked at his watch again. “I need to run into town for a few minutes. We’ll go as soon as I get back, at say 7:30. That should give you plenty of time.”

  Bob turned and headed for the front door. His Ford 150 was parked in the turnaround, and he was just bouncing down the stairs when his cell phone rang. He took one look at the phone number it was coming from and groaned.

  “Ghost, this is Dinosaur Actual,” he heard Stansky begin, using his old radio call sign. “ ‘The Irishman’ and I are just crossing the river in my sedan. We’ll pick you up in two.”

  “General, I was just headed into town to…”

  “The museum? So are we,” Stansky replied. “We’ll ‘carpool,’ and I can get there a hell of a lot faster than you can.”

  He wanted to argue, but Stansky had already hung up. “We’ll carpool,” Bob mumbled as he shook his head. That’s just peachy. He stood where he was on the front stairs and looked down the entry drive, waiting, but it didn’t take long. In two minutes, he saw a dark car turn in off the highway, sending a billowing cloud of leaves and dust flying as it flew down the long driveway to the circle in front of the house and slid to a halt in front of him. The rear passenger-side door flew open and Bob knew not to wait. He jumped into the backseat and found himself next to Major General Arnold Stansky in a set of crisp camouflage ACUs. Pat O’Connor was similarly dressed in the front seat, both men looking like they were ready to go to war. Stansky didn’t wait for Bob to close the car door. “Go,” he told his driver and turned back to Burke. “What have you learned, Bobby? Has Agent Phillips gotten anywhere? More importantly, have you gotten anywhere?”

  “She’s been working her butt off. So have a lot of other people. We’ve put together an ad hoc group — Phillips, two Fayetteville police detectives, and the FBI Special Agent from Cyprus who first questioned the toad.”

  “The ‘toad’? Does the toad have a name yet?”

  “We think there’s a blond, blue-eyed sociology professor at Blue Ridge College who started this whole thing.”

  “A goddamned ‘Soc’ professor?” Stansky growled. “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Nope. He’s also an ex-Marine with a BCD, arrogant as hell, with no sense of humor,” Burke told him.

  “An ex-Marine?” Stansky asked, his eyes narrowing angrily. “Back in ‘the day’ in Nam, or even Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d have sent you out with a shooting team and your Barrett. That would have taken care of that ‘toad’ of yours, wouldn’t it?”

  “Agreed, and I have the Merry Men on full operational footing, but we still have a lot of work to do before we can nail the bastard and flush out the rest of his cell. Best guess, he’s tied to ISIS, and he probably has both civilian and military followers here in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, maybe other places for all we know.”

  “ISIS! We need to stop this guy, Bobby, and I don’t really care how.”

  “Agreed, but I don’t want some Number Two guy taking over and the cell going underground. Besides, this is North Carolina, not Kandahar, and bullets have consequences.”

  “The White House and the Pentagon are playing politics with the whole thing, refusing to admit there’s any such thing as a home-grown terrorist cell, or that we could possibly have one operating in our AO. But someone’s gunning for us, and I need you and your people to shut him down.”

  “Will do, Sir, but we’re not there yet. Shaw just came back from the Middle East, Turkey and probably Syria, and he has been on the FBI Watch List ever since. They’re the ones who tipped us off to him so when we get to the museum, be nice to Phillips and to Pendergrass, the FBI guy.”

  “Me?” Stansky answered with a thin smile. “I’m a pussycat.”

  It took five minutes for them to cross the Cape Fear River on Person Street and run through downtown to the Airborne and Special Operations Museu
m to the opposite end. The closest they could get, even with Stansky’s “two star” red pennants on the bumpers of the olive-drab sedan, was a half-block away. Beyond that, all the roads around the building were blocked by emergency vehicles and roped off with yellow crime scene tape and heavily armed cops. As they approached on foot, the view up Person Street provided the perfect view of the destruction. They saw the shattered, smoking hulk of an automobile in the center of the turnaround by the loading rear dock. The concrete overhang above it had broken loose and fallen on top of the car, tearing open a fifty-foot-wide section of the rear wall behind it, allowing them to look directly inside the theater and exhibition areas on both the first and second floors.

  Stansky stared at the wreckage, hands on hips, his face turning red, unable to move. “I was here in 2000 when we opened the place. I was a lieutenant colonel with the 3rd Special Forces Group back then. Henry Shelton, Chief of the JCS, and Ross Perot were the keynote speakers. It was a proud moment for everyone, and why not? I knew one hell of a lot of the men whose names are on all those plaques inside. This is a desecration, and your ‘toad’ did it to try to demoralize us. It won’t work. It didn’t work at Pearl Harbor or at the World Trade Center on 9/11. What it does do is make me want to put a red-hot poker up whoever did this. Better still, it makes me want to turn you and the Merry Men loose come what may,” Stansky said as he turned and glared at Bob.

  “Copy that, Sir,” Bob answered as they set off across the railroad tracks toward the blast site. When they got there, they found Army CID Special Agent Sharmayne Phillips kneeling on the ground, huddled with three of her CID techs dressed in white, head-to-toe hazmat suits, plus Detectives Van Zandt and Greenfield, and FBI Special Agent Pendergrass.

  “I thought you’d have been here before now,” Phillips said as she looked up and shot a hostile glance over her shoulder at Bob Burke.

  “I held him up,” Stansky growled.

  When she looked back and saw the two black stars on the Velcro tab in the center of his chest, Phillips immediately stood up. “Sorry, Sir, I was…”

  “Don’t let me stop you, Sharmayne,” Stansky said as he quickly shook hands with her and the other three. “What have you got?” He stepped closer and knelt next to her. That flinty look in his eyes had been known to make more than a few lieutenants and captains pee their pants, but she didn’t even blink.

  “Car bomb,” she said as she turned back to the wreckage. “We have crime scene techs working the scene at the moment — Fayetteville PD and our own, with an FBI team en route from Quantico. Everything’s still preliminary, but it looks like a Toyota. We found one badly burned North Carolina license plate we are still tracing, but nothing so far that would indicate military. Inside, there’s some badly shaken-up people with minor injuries, and one badly burned DOA out here. Looks like he was near the car when it went off, probably the perp. He was slammed up against the concrete block screen wall around the air conditioning units. The body’s on its way to Quantico along with any other evidence we find, so it’ll be a while before we have anything solid. We think it’s a male, and he was not wearing a military uniform.”

  “Well, thank God for that much.” Stansky shook his head as he studied the scene. “Anything on the explosive?”

  “From the way the car blew apart, it was in the trunk. We are still hunting for fragments of any cell phone or trigger device. Using some very crude field tests on residue, looks like it’s C-4 again, but not from the same batch as before. The others all had the same markers but this one is different. First, it was much bigger, by a factor of five or ten. Second, we haven’t found any markers at all, much less any that match the earlier batch.”

  “Homemade?” Bob asked.

  “That’s what we’re thinking; and if that’s the case, it would really be bad. We shut off their supply on Fort Bragg but if they’ve started cooking it up themselves, it’s a whole new ballgame. Have you come up with anything yet?” she turned and asked Bob.

  “Major point number one, everywhere we look, we find Professor Henry Shaw at the bottom of it. For security purposes,” Bob said as he looked over at General Stansky, “we are now calling him ‘The Toad.’ ”

  “Sounds like a perfect choice,” Van Zandt quickly agreed.

  “I thought you’d like it, Harry; and I’ve put the fastest keyboards in the west on all the data points we hit on this morning. Knowing my guys, it won’t be long before they come up with some correlations, matches, and faces to go with them. And I also have two teams who will be staking out that airplane hangar as soon as it gets dark,” Bob said. He turned to Tom Pendergrass. “Have your people come up with anything?”

  “Our friends at the Agency are hammering away at the Turks. They found the captain of that fishing boat who took Shaw to Cyprus and are sweating him and the old guy who drove him there. The old guy is as tough as old shoe leather. They don’t think they’ll ever get much from him but the boat captain is talking his head off, and his story is definitely not the one Shaw told us.”

  Detective Van Zandt looked at his watch and joined in. “We’ve got the Cumberland County District Attorney walking the halls of Superior Court, trying to find a friendly judge who might issue some search warrants as soon as we get a shred of evidence tying any of this back to our friend Professor Shaw.”

  “Good. I’ll feed it to you as soon as I get it. Let’s stay in touch,” Bob said as he looked at his watch and turned toward Stansky. “Maybe we should leave these people to their work, Sir.”

  “Agreed!” Stansky said. “You’re all doing great. And let me know if there’s anything I can do. Anything!” Stansky looked at Sharmayne and nodded, then he, O’Connor, and Bob Burke turned and headed back to his staff car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Fayetteville

  Scrunched down in the front seat of his Peugeot in the AIT Center parking lot, Henry Shaw had a clear view of the rear loading dock area of the museum through his binoculars. It was 5:30 p.m. Despite the rush-hour traffic, within minutes of the explosion a hook-and-ladder fire truck, two pumpers, six ambulances, and a dozen city and county police cars descended on the scene from all directions, with flashing lights and sirens blazing. Of course, it helped that the police department and fire department’s central stations were right around the corner, and the uniformed help was almost tripping over each other now. As Shaw watched, they attacked the flames around the burning husk of Shahid Halabi’s Toyota, closed the surrounding streets, and combed through the wreckage in the rear rooms of the building looking for casualties. All in all, it made an interesting exercise to observe. At no time, however, did anyone cast a suspicious eye at the classic French car parked less than eight hundred feet away in a rear parking lot across the tracks.

  Five minutes after the explosion, a dark-blue Ford Crown Victoria with black-wall tires and three whip antennae passed through the police cordon and parked on Hillsboro Street behind the museum. A Crown Vic? Shaw chuckled. Only cheap police departments or the Feds buy ugly cars like that. Two men got out, whom Shaw quickly recognized as Detective George Greenfield and his smartass partner, Harry Van Zandt. Good, Shaw thought. The mess behind the museum was an excellent place for them to ruin a cheap suit. Within a minute, a large black step-van pulled up with Fayetteville PD CSU and the city crest painted on the sides. As expected, he thought. They were followed by two Army MP police cars and an Army Hazmat van, which pulled up in the street. Soon, both the military and civilian crime scene techs had donned their yellow hazmat suits and were sifting through the rubble, side by side.

  Shaw continued watching and soon hit the trifecta when he saw a gray US Government sedan pull in next to the other cars. FBI Special Agent Pendergrass got out and joined the group. Shaw wasn’t particularly worried about the local hick constabulary, but the FBI was another matter. The slightly built “Feeb,” as local cops always called the FBI, had been a thorn in his side since Cyprus. It was time he dealt with Pendergrass, before “Leonard Hofstadt
er” elevated himself from a nerdy thorn to a major threat.

  Moving the binoculars, he saw a woman standing in the circle of men, supervising the MP techs. A woman? Interesting. He had read that there was a female MP investigator working on the earlier bombings. Her name was Sharmayne Phillips, and it was odds on that was her. She was a Warrant Officer, as he recalled. Half NCO, half officer, and all bitch, no doubt. When he was in the Corps, those hybrid ranks had always confused Henry Shaw, so he solved the problem by hating them equally. As he watched, the woman bent down in the middle of the group, sifted through the debris, and showed something to the others. Surprisingly, they bent down around her and listened to what she was saying. That was even more interesting.

  He turned his head and saw an OD green Army sedan stop a few hundred feet up the street from the museum. Shaw focused the binoculars on the sedan and saw red pennants with the two silver stars on the fenders — a major general, no less — and watched as three men got out of the car. Two were in Army camouflage uniforms, and one wore casual civilian clothes — chinos, a sweatshirt, and Army desert boots, like you’d expect to see on a carpenter or small-time contractor. He zoomed in on his face and refocused. Just as he thought! It was that arrogant bastard Samadafatch or Burke or whatever the hell his name was, who had walked into the Muslim Student Center earlier that afternoon and assaulted his men. As he watched, those three joined the others around the bomb site where they shook hands and began to talk. He studied the faces of the others. No one chased them away or looked surprised that they were there. Clearly, they were part of the group, too, and not to be taken lightly, especially the civilian in the chinos.

  Pendergrass, that two-star general — he thought his name was Stansky, from a few post newspapers he remembered seeing — and that damned Burke: they had apparently formed an unholy alliance to stop him, and he could not let that happen. There were also the two Fayetteville police detectives and that female CID agent, but Greenfield and Van Zandt were run-of-the-mill city cops. They had no authority on the Army post, and Sharmayne Phillips’s authority didn’t extend beyond the Fort Bragg gates.