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

by William Brown

  “I… I don’t, I…” al-Karman stuttered, trying to sound helpless, but Bob wasn’t buying any of it. “I just cooked the soup.”

  Ace grabbed him by the hair and turned his face up. “Tell you what, maybe I’ll make you drink some of it,” he threatened, but it was clear the chemist was too terrified to say much of anything. That was when Ace saw movement on the floor under the second Cessna. It was the other Khan brother, Batir, who had rolled over on his stomach and was struggling to get up to his knees.

  “Think we can get him to talk?” Ace asked.

  “Talk? I thought you killed him,” Bob replied, as they saw Batir collapse onto the floor again, out cold.

  “Well, maybe I did.”

  Bob turned back and looked beyond al-Karman. In the corner of the hangar were two cots, open suitcases, a television, a pile of trash, and two makeshift tables built of sheets of plywood and two-by-fours. One was covered with chemical equipment, bottles, beakers, racks, and hotplates. He sprinted over and saw that the second table was strewn with USGS maps, FAA charts, and large sheets of blueprint paper. “Bring that turkey over here,” he told Ace as he headed for the table. Ace picked up the screaming al-Karman by his ear and did what he was told. As Bob passed the welding equipment and circular saws, he saw several more empty gas cylinders with their tops cut off. “Sixty pounds? Damn, he could have blown up half of North Carolina with that. Good thing that was all they made.”

  On top of the maps and charts he saw spools of electrical wire; a hardware store full of screw drivers, wire cutters, and metal working tools; and a box of burner cell phones. He shoved them aside and looked down at the stack of maps and charts. As he began to leaf through them, they heard the Blackhawk land outside the open hangar door.

  “Tell High Rider to get his butt in here, quick,” he told Ace as he began to flip through the maps and turned back to al-Karman. “How come they left this stuff behind?”

  “The Khans told me to burn it all as soon as we finished filling the last cylinder, but then you crashed through the roof and…”

  Before al-Karman could finish making any more excuses, Carmody ran up to them, shaking his head in disgust. “I lost him, Ghost. It’s all my fault, sorry. We came under fire, and by the time I could swing back around, he took off like a madman, hedge-hopping away over the trees. I was so pissed I almost fired a sidewinder at him; but I didn’t know what else was out there and couldn’t risk it.”

  “As the General told me often enough, ‘Excuses are for amateurs,’ ” Bob said as he waved off the apology and pointed at the charts and maps. “What do you make of these?”

  Carmody leaned over the table and began flipping through the FAA VFR charts of eastern Virginia, which stretched all the way from the North Carolina border up to DC. “Holy crap!” the pilot exclaimed as he saw the Sectional Aeronautical Charts for Hampton Roads. “Someone has drawn red circles around the Norfolk Navy Base, the Surry Nuclear Power Plant, and NWS Yorktown.”

  “NWS? What’s that?” Ace asked.

  “The Naval Weapons Station Yorktown.” Carmody stabbed his finger on the chart in the area on the York River. “That’s where they keep all the nuclear weapons for the Atlantic Fleet, not to mention thousands of tons of conventional shells and ammunition. The Surry Nuclear Power Plant and the Norfolk Navy Base speak for themselves. But look.” Carmody flipped over a few more sheets. “They also had the VFR charts for the coast all the way up to Northern Virginia and DC, with Quantico, the White House, the Capitol, the Hoover FBI building, the Pentagon, and CIA Headquarters at Langley circled. All he’s got to do is follow the York River north, and he’s there.”

  “With thirty pounds of C4 under his wings!” Ace said as he slammed his fist down on the table at the same time they heard an echoing Boom! on the hangar’s reinforced-steel rear door, followed quickly by another.

  “It’s that goddamned SWAT team with their battering ram again,” Bob fumed.

  The door finally gave way on the third try and half of the Fayetteville SWAT team tumbled into the hangar, the same clowns who had busted down the front door of the Muslim Student Center, complete with Kevlar helmets, full body armor, automatic weapons, and a bullhorn, screaming, “On the floor, maggots! I mean you! Now!”

  “Oh, screw off!” Bob shouted back at them. “Go get your boss, Charlie Weatherford!”

  That brought them screeching to a halt, totally confused, until they recognized Bob and Ace from the Muslim Student Center and began to look sheepish. Weatherford was the next one through the door and Bob yelled to him, “Charlie, grab Harry Van Zandt and George Greenfield, and get your butts over here. You gotta see this.”

  The two detectives suddenly appeared behind him with CID Agent Sharmayne Phillips. As they did, Bob’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, saw it was the Geeks, and quickly answered, “Not a good time, Jimmy.”

  “You need to hear this. We dug further into the FAA records and found out that the Khan brothers…”

  “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Let me put you on speaker.”

  “They’ve filed more than a dozen flight plans over the last three weeks,” Jimmy went on. “They were in and out of most of the small airports in eastern Virginia from Suffolk all the way up to Loudoun County. Some days they were so damn busy you’d think they had two airplanes.”

  “Yeah, well, they did, two planes with the same tail number. Which airports were they in and out of the most?”

  “No contest. It was Chesapeake, Hampton Roads, Suffolk, and Williamsburg.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy. Keep digging,” he said as he rang off and turned to the others.

  “He’s headed for Tidewater,” High Rider said glumly. “It’s what you Deltas might call ‘a target rich environment.’ ”

  Bob stared at the map one last time and pointed at the second Cessna. “Carmody, can you fly that thing?”

  “Sure,” the pilot shrugged, “I have dual ratings, fixed wing and rotary, but your guy’s already got a big head start on us.”

  “Then we need to beat feet if we hope to catch him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Harry Van Zandt asked. “Did you say Hampton Roads?”

  “With two bombs on board.”

  “Jeezus Christ!” Van Zandt said. “The George Bush and the Harry Truman are docked at the Norfolk Navy Base right now, and they’re planning to move the new Gerald R. Ford over from the Newport News shipyard any day now to get it ready for sea trials. It might already be there.”

  “For us grunts, what’s that mean?” Ace asked. “Two of those guys are already dead.”

  “Those are the names of our top-of-the-line nuclear aircraft carriers,” Van Zandt told him. “The Ford’s the newest and hottest high-tech model at thirteen billion dollars.”

  “I can tell you right now, the first two were docked side by side at Piers 12 and 14 up at the north end last week when Harry and I were up there,” Greenfield said. “The George Bush is headed out to sea any day now, and its flight deck is full of F-18s, just sitting there.”

  “Come on, Bob, this isn’t Pearl Harbor, 1941,” Charlie Weatherford scoffed. “With all the defenses up there, do you really think some ‘rag head’ in a Cessna could get close enough to hit one?”

  “No doubt about it. This is an open port and open air space. It isn’t the ocean. There are dozens of general aviation aircraft flying all over that area every minute of the day,” Carmody pointed out, “and the military and FAA controllers don’t usually give the small planes a second thought. There’s too many of them.”

  “Or that Al-Qaeda and ISIS never do the same thing twice,” Greenfield said.

  “And this guy’s no ‘rag head,’ Charlie,” Bob told him. “From what we know, he was an Iraqi fighter pilot, and his older brother was the guy flying Saddam Hussein around.”

  “Geez,” Van Zandt said. “What did you say he was carrying?”

  “Two cylinders filled with fifteen pounds of C-4 each,” Bob told him. “And for su
re, the Iraqis hate George Bush even worse than the California Democrats do.”

  “Yeah, but it’s named for his old man, ‘Bush 41’ not for ‘Junior,’ ” Weatherford corrected him.

  “I know that, but I doubt the Republican Guard understands the distinction.”

  Van Zandt looked at Greenfield. “George and I were on a Base PR tour of the Bush before it deployed last year. He can’t sink the damned thing, but with thirty pounds of C4 and a flight deck full of F-18s, he can do one hell of a lot of damage.”

  “We need to call the Tactical Air Command at Langley and get their F-15s in the air,” Greenfield said as he looked at his watch.

  “We already made the call, but you never know if they are listening,” Bob countered.

  “They’ll listen to me,” Sharmayne offered. “I’ll go through Quantico.”

  “Even so, bringing it down is going to be a real challenge,” Carmody warned. “Those F-15s are way too fast to catch a ‘slow mover’ like that little Cessna, especially if he hedge-hops through the woods and up the river valleys, and stays under the radar.”

  “That’s why we’ve gotta go after him,” Bob decided. “Carmody, get the Barretts and the 50-caliber ammo from the Blackhawk and put them in the back. Ace, I saw a couple of cans of paint near the acetylene torch. See if you can slop some on the tail numbers. I don’t want an F-15 to splash the wrong Cessna.”

  “You think you can stop him?” Van Zandt asked.

  “If we can catch up, the Barretts can punch some big holes in his plans. By the way,” Bob said as he turned to leave, “this turkey on the floor is their chemist. He’s the one who cooked up all that C-4. And the unconscious one lying over by the Cessna is the youngest Khan brother, Batir. Lock them both up. And put the booking in Tom Pendergrass’s name. Without him, they would have won.”

  “And who’s that one?” Weatherford asked as he saw Shaw’s body.

  “That’s Shaw, the dumb-ass sociology professor who started this whole thing.”

  Harry Van Zandt walked over and knelt next to Shaw’s body. “Looks to me like he slipped on a slick spot on the floor and broke his neck,” Van Zandt pronounced. “Damned unfortunate, isn’t it?”

  “Harry,” Bob turned toward the Fayetteville detective and said, “Can you run Linda and Ellie back to Sherwood Forest for me? Ace and I have a stop to make.”

  “No problem,” Van Zandt answered. “Where you going?”

  “A little airplane ride up to Norfolk.”

  “Let the Air Force deal with it, Burke,” Linda fumed. “Why do you always have to get involved in this stuff?”

  “A little payback.”

  “No, a lot of payback, Ghost. Let’s get out here,” Ace added.

  “Not so fast, Burke, I’m going with you,” Sharmayne Phillips announced. Bob turned toward her and frowned, as she expected him to do, so she added, “You can disagree all you want, but I’m the only one that makes this thing legal, so deal with it. And I call shotgun.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  In the Air Over North Carolina

  Mergen Khan was flying blind. He had turned off the Cessna’s interior and exterior running lights, turned off its transponder, and hugged the ground, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the hangar. At full speed, the Cessna was almost twice as fast as the helicopter, but the Blackhawk would likely be carrying a wide array of rockets and heat-seeking missiles that could close that distance in seconds. The key was to give that helicopter pilot as small of a profile as he could and stay in the ground clutter. For the first few miles he only gained as much altitude as it took to clear the trees, zigzagging left and right, dropping down into open fields, and skimming up the creek beds.

  After the first minute, he reached full speed. After another minute, he knew he was out of immediate danger and managed to slump back in the seat. He took a deep breath, then another and another, trying hard to relax; but that was impossible. Despite his arrogant bluster, Mergen Khan was forced to admit that he was no longer a young man. The power and lightning-quick reflexes he had relied upon when he wrestled weren’t what they once were. Neither were his nerves. As much as he detested the thought, he had become middle-aged. For a fighter pilot, that was the kiss of death. He had known for several years that his days of “barn storming” and hedge-hopping across the Iraqi countryside at full speed with his younger brother were long gone. Besides, those youthful antics had been executed under the bright desert sun streaking across the flat, barren countryside of western Iraq, not this infinitely more challenging American landscape on a dark night.

  He dropped his hand to his thigh. It came away wet and sticky, and he knew he was still bleeding heavily. His pant leg was soaked with blood and a small puddle had already formed in the leather bucket seat beneath him. As he executed one complex movement after another, flying low over trees and down creek beds to get away from the airport, every time he had to extend his right foot and press down on the pedal, the pain made him close his eyes. Pain. Like all wrestlers, he had learned in his youth the many ways to manage and trick it, but pain was insidious. It had a way of dulling the other senses and was nothing to trifle with in the cockpit of a high-performance airplane, especially at night flying at full speed at treetop level across a strange landscape. It left his nerves on edge and became a major, thumping distraction. It took all his mental energy to remain focused on the terrain and keep the airplane out of the trees. Unfortunately, he quickly lost all track of where he was. Like it or not, he was lost, and forced to gain enough altitude to look around.

  Even so, he had no idea where he was. Five minutes flying at 250 mph had likely taken him twenty miles away from the small airfield, probably south and east. He looked down at his instrument panel and sighed. The Cessna came equipped with beautiful, state-of-the-art, dual-touch-screen avionic displays that rivaled the best fighter jets he’d ever flown. They featured full-color maps and attitude displays, but they were so much scrap metal now. With the system now shorted-out, he was flying the old-fashioned way, “by the seat of his pants.” He found that strangely reassuring, because it took him back to one of his very first combat missions during the second war against the Americans. He was a green, nineteen-year-old pilot, brave but exceedingly stupid. On the second day of the war, he tried to strafe an American armored column, when his jet was struck by a burst of ground fire. He immediately lost his automated controls and his engine began to smoke badly. To this day, Mergen had no idea how he made it back to his base north of Tikrit, but the memory of that “white knuckle ride” made him laugh. This time, his instruments were out and he was on foreign terrain, but at least his engine was running fine. Besides, he had plenty of fuel and two bombs hanging below his wings, demanding a target.

  Using skills his grandfather taught him in the mountains high above the Caspian Sea, he raised his head and looked around. “Find the stars,” the old man said; so Mergen turned his eyes left and right, and then up through the front windscreen. The cabin was dark without the lights from the instrument panel, and he could see better. There was a thin, quarter moon rising to his right, which must be east. And he saw stars. Plenty of them. Looking around, he soon located the big dipper high to his left. Excellent, he thought. He now knew which direction was north and which direction was east. He pulled back a bit more on the stick, pointed the nose of the Cessna midway between them, and tried again to relax.

  In another twenty or thirty minutes, he knew he’d reach the coastal wetlands around New Bern, North Carolina. From several earlier flights, except for the dense pine forests, the river and marshland below reminded him of the Tigris River valley and the delta around Basrah and Bubiyan Island. He would descend again, until he reached the Pamlico Sound, then continue north at treetop level until he reached the Outer Banks on the North Carolina coast. That was his new reference point. He would then bank left and fly up the beach at wave height, passing Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, and Duck until he crossed the Virginia border.
In the thin moonlight, even a rookie pilot could follow the thin, white surf line north. He and his brother had spent two days flying around Tidewater, and he knew the coast would take him to Virginia Beach and the mouth of the Hampton Roads ship channel beyond. It was the entrance to greatest natural harbor in the world, and if he continued to follow the shoreline left, it would bring him to the sprawling Norfolk Navy base.

  Mergen looked at his watch again and figured he would reach Virginia Beach just as the dawn was breaking. When he then swung west, the sun would be coming up directly behind him. Perfect! This looping route to the coast would take more time, probably a half hour more, but it would allow him to approach the anchorage from the east, down on the water, unobserved and below their radar as he attacked out of the sun.

  All week, he and Batir had debated which target they should go for. They even phoned their older brother Aslan in Syria, speaking in an ancient, unwritten Turkmeni dialect that would confound even the fastest NSA computers. Batir advocated attacking the big nuclear power plant at Surry, located further up the James River. Even one of the C-4 canisters would be enough to punch a hole in the nuclear plant’s containment dome and contaminate half the state. That would be a marvelous accomplishment, but Mergen had always preferred the Naval Base with its row of frontline nuclear aircraft carriers. In the end, Aslan agreed. “If you can strike a powerful blow to even one of those ships, there in America, in their home port, it would be worth any sacrifice.”

  As the Cessna droned on, Mergen realized he had lost even more blood. His right leg was numb, and he could never make it up to DC, much less the nuclear power plant, if he ran into problems and had to maneuver very much. That made the decision for him. He would go for the aircraft carriers. As a boy, he remembered seeing a pirated, scratchy videotape of the old war film, Tora! Tora! Tora! about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Mergen was not Japanese, and he was not flying a “Zero” or a “Val” dive bomber, but any of those pilots would have sacrificed their own right leg to be where Mergen Khan was this morning, approaching the most powerful ships in the world, alone, with two deadly bombs slung under his wings.