The day after was going the same way, until Nick hung up his phone with a crack.
“Okay, let’s jump,” he said. “Get that State Police chopper over here, Chandler. Email intercept from Jared Akim to a pal, asking him to tell the folks he was all right, would be home soon—this was the coolest thing.”
“Did they get a locality on it?” Swagger asked.
“Yeah, the GPS record puts it at a Kmart in Germantown, Ohio. About one hundred and fifty miles south of here, right on the state line.”
“Let’s go to Ohio,” said Bob.
22
On the road
The Mercedes-Benz was a sweet ride. But at a small-town strip mall two hours out of Detroit, by way of Ann Arbor on 127, Juba slipped out of it, popped the lock and the ignition of a dark blue Chevy Impala, sitting in the neon wash of a coffee shop, and drove away. Another hour, and he spotted a low creek, shrouded in bushes, and directed Jared, who’d been following him in the Benz, to pull off. It took some arranging, but once they’d removed the shotgun—a Remington 1100 Auto-Tactical—and the canvas sack containing $23,650 in small bills from the Mercedes, Juba sent it through the bushes and into the water. It sank low, until only the roof was showing. Nobody would notice it, at least not routinely.
They drove on in the Impala, and finally Jared said, “Man, I am almost dead.”
“All right. Small motel, you go in and rent a room, pay with cash. Make sure you know this license number so you don’t struggle.”
This proved within Jared’s range of abilities, and soon he was zzzzed out.
He woke at 4 in the afternoon, suddenly disconsolate. What would his parents say? God, he’d been such a disappointment to them. They’d given him everything, he’d given them nothing. Now his mother was battered by tears and pain, his formidable father was being bedeviled by FBI agents, black cars were parked all around the block.
But maybe his friends thought he was cool.
Someone knocked.
“Yeah.”
“Come on, time to go.”
“Let me grab a shower.”
“Hurry.”
He cleaned himself but climbed into stinking clothes.
“You drive,” said Juba, his eyes everywhere.
“I think we’re okay,” said Jared. “I signed with a false name.”
“Oh, what a clever boy,” said Juba. “He knows all the tricks.”
They drove on, staying off the interstates, which were patrolled by more vigilant Highway Patrolmen, confident that they could outsmart small-town cops. Soon enough, they came to a Kmart, mooring some other stores in a downscale strip mall. Juba pulled in.
“Okay,” he said. “You go in. Buy some underwear. Me too. Also buy me a heavy file—a carpenter’s file, no fingernail stuff. And a light jacket, any kind, size fifty-two. But, most important, you buy a disposable phone. You know how they work?”
“Yeah, you buy a card with minutes on it, she activates it at the register, and we’re all set.”
“Yes. Don’t buy anything unusual, like toothpaste and a toothbrush, along with underpants. We’ll buy that some other place.”
“Shall I wear my sunglasses?”
“No. It’s dark out. You don’t want to be noticed. Tell yourself: I am nobody.”
“I am nobody.”
He got out and entered the bright zone of the store. It was sparsely populated, every clerk a composition in disinterest, and he got his stuff together in a short time, stopped for some Milky Ways and some protein bars, and got through the line quickly.
But it was too much. The melancholia broke over him quickly. Sitting on a stool at the hot dog counter in the front of the store, he quickly activated his phone and dialed the number of a pal back in Grosse Pointe.
“Hello?”
“Jimmy, it’s Jar—”
“Holy Christ, man, what are you up to? The FBI has been here, and everything.”
“I can’t explain now. It’ll be okay. Look—real quick, just send my mom an email to Shareen at AOL-dot-com. Say you heard from me, I’m fine, I’ll be in touch in a bit. That’s all.”
“Where are you?”
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“Okay, I’ll send the message.”
“Great. And thanks, man. When I get out of this, we’ll have a good laugh.”
“You got it.”
He rose, put the phone in a trash can. He went back to the store proper, got another one off the shelf, and bought it, feeling very Secret Agent Man. He’d be able to present an unopened plastic-sealed phone to Juba, who’d never know he’d made a call. What were the odds that the feds were intercepting his parents’ emails?
* * *
• • •
Are we going anywhere? Or are we just going away?”
Juba looked at his watch, pulled over to the edge of the highway.
“Okay, little boy,” he said. “I need to make contact. Phone?”
Juba took it, ripped it from its plastic packaging, which he threw out the window, scraped clear the code of the calling card, tapped it into the phone. He had fifteen minutes.
He dialed a number.
“Yes, I am fine. I need a new pickup. Tell them I am on U.S. Route 127, just past the border of Michigan. I will stay on 127. How much time will it take to intercept?”
He paused. A car passed, then a van.
“Okay. Yes, we are in a dark blue Impala. License: Michigan L11 245. Thank you.”
He turned to Jared.
“Okay, a town called Greenville, about three hours ahead. We will go to a shopping mall on the south side of town—Walmart, not Sears. We are looking for a van, a Chevy, tan, license 276 RC678. Can you remember that?”
“No.”
“276 RC678. Pay attention.”
“What state?”
“Ohio.”
“How did they know we’d be in Ohio?”
“They know everything. Now, get rid of that phone. Sink it in water.”
Jared did as he was told. The phone went into a stream he found about fifty yards in. It occurred to him that this would be a great time for Juba to dump him. Or, he could dump Juba. He could take off now, disappear for a day or so in the Ohio farm wilderness. Then he could turn himself in. The best criminal lawyer in Michigan, whom his dad would hire, would get him a deal. He’d snitch out Juba, and they’d drop whatever thought they had about putting him away for mashing Mrs. Potato Head.
But he knew he couldn’t do that. He’d crossed the line. No matter how much he missed the easy pleasures of his old, meaningless life, he could never go back to it. He was jihadi now.
And, of course, Juba had not left.
* * *
• • •
About an hour further on, Juba, confident they were not under observation, ordered Jared to pull over. He reached into the Kmart bag, pulled out the plastic-wrapped file, and climbed into the backseat.
“Continue to drive. Eyes open, under the speed limit, nothing stupid.”
“Got it.”
Jared drove on, as one of the drearier sections of rural Ohio, its northwest corner, rolled by monotonously, but it wasn’t long until he heard some—well, what? Grinding? Sawing? Some kind of mechanistic sound. The rearview revealed nothing, but he managed a quick look-see on a smooth section of road and saw Juba, hunched over in concentration, his arm like a piston as it plunged ahead, was withdrawn, and plunged ahead again. In a few seconds, Jared realize what he was doing: shortening the shotgun stock.
Juba looked up.
“I cut it down. Easier to hide, and I can cover it with a jacket.”
Jared gulped. He did it again when the filing stopped, and he heard the weird thunk-thunk of Juba inserting more shells into the extended magazine of the shotgun.
23
Greenville, Ohio (I)
At the Ohio Highway Patrol station on U.S. 75 outside Dayton, Nick stood at a much abused lectern and addressed the troops.
“You need to be very careful. We think this guy popped three drug dealers in Detroit. He will shoot. Big, tough Arab guy, we don’t know what name he’s operating under, but over there, where he got his start, he was called Juba. He may be with a kid, early twenties, slight, American citizen of Arabic heritage, sort of his interpreter and facilitator. But he may have dumped the kid, as he knows we’re all in on the two of them.”
The guys on the folding chairs were police-appropriate: crew-cut, gym-big, crisp as Honor Guard Company in their immaculate uniforms, seeming to share a single expression of wary attentiveness. They had faces built for Ray-Ban Aviators and flat-brims, and they all carried plastic Glock .40s on their patent leather Sam Browne belts. They were duty guys, and what more could you ask for?
“Sir,” someone said, “a triple first-degree is big-time. But we know you got here by emergency chopper from Detroit. You’re FBI, but not out of the Detroit Office, and that fellow with you is a ‘consultant,’ meaning a guy who knows a lot about a certain thing. So I’d like just to ask, politely, what’s going on?”
“As some of you may have surmised, there is a national security connection, but I am not at liberty to divulge it. The Detroit thing is a helpful pretext to get me troops without having to explain things. Let me just say this guy is thought to be very dangerous in ways not connected with Detroit, and that it is in the highest national interest—and urgency—to take him off the page right now.”
He watched them watching him. Like most State cop shops, it was a shabby installation off the highway, innocuous except for the OHP shield on a sign outside and the two dozen black-and-whites outside.
“Why here, why now?”
He backgrounded them, finishing on, “We’re working on the theory they stole the Impala in Hudson—blue, plates Alpha-Four-Five-Five-Charlie—and dumped the Benz outside of Hudson. So they’re headed south on 127. Since they’d been going forty-eight straight, I think they bunked somewhere and got on the road again maybe late last night. Still heading south. Don’t know if it’s random or they’re aiming toward a certain destination.”
“But you see it as this part of Ohio?”
“Yeah, and so far they’ve shown a tendency to stay off the interstates, because they know that’s where you guys are and they fear you guys. They know you pay attention. So my bet is, they’re still on 127 headed toward Greenville. So our target would be a dark blue ’13 Impala.”
Nick had more.
“Really, guys, do not go all heroic on me and try for a one-man intercept. This guy has tons of combat experience in the sandbox and he is a world-class shot. He’s got a twelve-gauge semi-auto and a box of double-aughts, stolen from the drug stash. With that gun, he’s too good to go man on man against. He will not miss. He will not go down to .40, unless it clips the central nervous system. Are you that good while taking incoming double-aught? I didn’t think so.
“So, note road and direction and pass on by. Don’t even pursue at a distance. You’ve done your job. Last thing we want is a rolling-felony-stop massacre as in Dade County. We can’t catch him, we’ve got to ambush him. We’ve got to be there in force or we’re looking at a shooting event like you wouldn’t believe. Like you wouldn’t survive. If we get the ID, we’ll go to helicopter then, airborne, try and monitor them while we throw together some kind of roadblock, way overgunned for the occasion. I’ve got SWAT people coming in from Lansing and Columbus and Dayton; they’ll do the rough stuff, if it comes to that. They like rough stuff.”
Nick turned to Swagger.
“Can you think of anything?” Nick asked Swagger, standing just off to the side of the lectern. He turned back to the men before Bob could answer and said, “My associate here has been in more gunfights than probably anyone this side of Frank Hamer, and, as you can see, he’s more or less alive.”
There was some laughter.
Bob just said, “As Nick has said, I have been in many shooting events and had to put some folks down. This guy scares the hell out of me. I’m supposed to be brave, but I would run like hell until I had twenty guns backing me up. So bear that in mind if you get bitten by the hero bug. Your widow gets a folded flag, your kids get nothing, and you get dead.”
* * *
• • •
The accoutrements of the wait: cold, stale coffee made slick by degrading Styrofoam, intense cigarette hunger even for those who shook the monkey years ago, finger-drumming jazz variations, playing games on the iPhone with half an ear toward the cop-talk frags that come over the loudspeaker.
“Hector, this is Lima Five, just swept up through and past Greenville on 127, no contact.”
“Continue your route, Lima Five.”
“Hector, Lima Nineteen, am on binocs at Walmart parking lot, looked at a lot of cars, but no ’13 dark blue Impala.”
Nick said to the supervisor, “You know what, another tell might be a bad spray-paint job. And yet another is a different license plate. He might have changed.”
“Also, one of the guys might have gone flat in the backseat, or been dumped, so there won’t be two profiles,” said Chandler.
“Good on that, Chandler.”
The supervisor put that out, said, “They’ll find him.”
“If he’s there.”
Swagger stretched, yawned. Another headquarters day: a room decorated with radio shit and maps, with chalkboards all over the place, the radio people being mostly dowdy civilians, because why tie up a trained State cop sitting at a mic? Pictures of the governor, the president, the vice president, and various officials of meaningless rank. Fluorescent light pouring down, turning everything pale ghost gray even if outside it was a sunny midwestern day and prosperity’s engines were turning smoothly, except where they weren’t. Seemed odd to be hunting a shotgun-armed jihadi in Yourtown, U.S.A., and Swagger worried that if Juba saw what was ongoing, he might divert to the nearest mall and start blasting citizens until someone brought him down. He’d go out the obsessed, mercy-free jihadi way. Whatever you could say about these guys, they were hard men, in it to the end, willing to back it up with guts and fast to offer their own lives in the transaction.
Crackly noise.
“Hector, Lima Seven, have a possible Impala, no matching tag, maybe a ’13, tan, but the tan looked ragged to me.”
“Identify location, Seven.”
“Greenville. I’m north on Oakton, he’s south, just past Miller, inside speed limit. I haven’t turned on him.”
“Nearest unit—ah, let’s see—can you get to Oakton and Biddle, park, hide behind your vehicle, get an eyeball on this guy as he passes, but stay low.”
“This is Lima Nine, Hector, wilco that.”
It was silent except for the gravy train of static, amplified so much that it became especially irritating to those who hadn’t made peace with it.
“Go to chopper?” asked Bob.
“Not yet. Maybe it’s a no-go.”
Then, “Hector, Lima Nine, tan Impala just passed, black woman, three kids in backseat.”
“Got it. Good try, Lima Seven. Everybody stand down and—”
“Hector, Hector, Lima Nineteen, now at Walmart Plaza. There he is, parked near the store entrance. Sorry, can’t see if car is occupied, but it’s still dark blue and it’s got the Michael Charlie plates.”
Nick said to the supervisor, “Get your people on the south side, out of sight. Get ’em to assemble—I don’t know—close by, no sirens, no squealing brakes. We’ll take a look-see from up top and issue procedures at that time.”
“Got it.”
Nick turned to Swagger.
“Let’s go,” he said.
* * *
• • •
&
nbsp; From above, the small city of Greenville was mostly elm canopy, pierced here and there by church spires. At the edges, a few industrial tanks stood out like white mushrooms. Nick had instructed the chopper pilot to orbit from a mile out, never coming directly over the Walmart and its wing of the mall. Nick and Bob worked their binoculars carefully.
“Okay, I got it,” Bob said. “Dark blue sedan, south entrance, in the row up from the main entrance on the east side, no action, no motion.”
Nick found it and focused, and there was the car, a long way away. Given the vibrations of the chopper, it was hard to hold it clearly for more than a few seconds.
“Yeah, I see. Looks empty to me.”
“Sure, they’re probably in the mall, getting a burger. But they could also be hiding on the floor, waiting for something, ready to roll when the time comes.”
Nick went to SEND mode.
“Hector, this is Fed One, you getting me?”
“Yes, I am,” came the voice, now clearly an older man’s, probably the State Police commanding officer, over from Columbus a few minutes ago.
“Sitrep, please,” said Nick. “What assets on the ground?”
“I’ve got my own SWAT in an armored vehicle, I’ve got twenty black-and-whites, we’re about a block away holding in the parking lot of First Methodist. All my people are armored up, cocked and locked. I’ve got an auxiliary SWAT unit from your office in Columbus, but they don’t have any armored assault car. I’ve got Greenville P.D. ready to take over traffic and isolate the mall from civilian ingress quick-time. And we’ve got the vehicle identified and are ready to launch.”
“Real good. Colonel, what’s your thought?”
“You don’t know if they’re in the car or the mall, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Okay, my call would be to move five black-and-whites in through the five entrances on two streets to the mall. I have my SWAT people in an armored vehicle, ready to hit the site and deploy. I will move Columbus and Dayton SWAT around the back of the mall as primary assaulters in phase two. On my go, the armored SWAT vehicle and the five squad cars hit the pedal and race to the car, establishing a perimeter and firebase if they’re there.”
Game of Snipers Page 14