Amy Lynn, The Lady Of Castle Dunn

by Jack July

  “Well, I, I, ah…a…”

  She smiled and gently lifted his hand about three inches and let it drop back to the table. Then she reached across the table and with two fingers pushed him against the backrest so he wouldn’t fall over. His eyes were moving back and forth, all the panic he could show. Then she whispered, “Arms and legs paralyzed? What’s next? Your diaphragm. It stops moving, followed by your heart. Your brain will work just fine, for a while, so you can experience it all. Oh, and no 72 virgins for you. You were killed by three women: me, Daria and Danica Akhtar.”

  She reached over and grabbed her things, left twenty dollars on the table and picked up his drink so she could toss it into the garbage; wouldn’t want the help slamming a leftover drink. She shot him one last look and snarled, “Enjoy hell Yusef.” Then turned and walked away.

  Two hours after her visit with Yusef, she watched the cold rain spatter on the windshield of the blue four-door Mercedes. Highway 6 ran past widely separated old farmhouses, few seem occupied. She passed Tobermory Lake, took a right on Route 12 and started checking mail boxes. She wasn’t sure how many would be at the residence. Saul told her three, up to six, maybe more. She didn’t care how many there were; the adrenalin of the battle masked the pain. Her heart ached from the death of the four civilians. She saw the mailbox and let the car roll to a stop just past it. The tree line in front of the house blocked the car from their view.

  The wind was cold, but she didn’t feel it. After a quick weapons check, she walked beside the two hundred foot dirt and gravel driveway, the gravel crunching under foot. The two or three sets of tire tracks in the mud she followed disappeared under the garage door, and she thought, Somebody is definitely here. She opened the rickety screen and pounded hard on the door. Eyes peeked out through the glass as she smiled and waved. After some muffled talking the door opened, and Farzin stood looking a little pensive with two younger men standing behind him. They were smiling and exchanging looks while looking her over. Raping white women is a sport to Jihadists, and they had one out here all by herself.

  She smiled the biggest smile she knew how and said, “Hi, my car broke down. Anybody here know how to work on cars?”

  Farzin shook his head, but the younger two said in a thick accent, “Yes, yes, we do.”

  She backed away from the door, saying, “It’s out front by the mail box. I’ll wait for you,” and pointing her finger toward the road. When she got to the car she put the hood up, held the silenced .380 in her hand and waited.

  They turned the corner, shoes on but no coat. One walked one way around the car while the other came from behind her. She backed away from the front of the car to keep them in front of her. The one on the left stopped and the one on the right raised his shirt to show his gun and commanded, “YOU, COME WITH US!”

  She smiled and said, “I don’t think so.” Two quick shots to the chest of the man on the left made him crumple. The other turned to run and she shot him twice in the back then once in the back of the head. She finished the first one off with a head shot, put her gun away and dragged them away from the road to the ditch on the other side of the car. She walked back up the driveway to the door and knocked again. Farzin answered. She looked past him into the house. She didn’t see anybody else so she said, “They said they need your help getting the car on the jack. Would you please help them?”

  Farzin froze. He knew exactly why they went out there and it wasn’t to fix the car. Fenian had no need to be silent. She had traded the .380 for the .45 and raised it. “Tell me something: why kill your own daughters?”

  Farzin looked at her with a shocked face and said, “Because Allah wills it.”

  “In America, we don’t care what Allah says. You helped murder two girls, your daughters.”

  “So, are you going to arrest me?” Farzin said with just a little arrogance. Then he saw her face change.

  “No,” she said.

  His chest puffed out and his shoulders went back as he said, “I am ready to meet Allah.”

  Elle nodded and said, “Tell him I said hi.” Then she pulled the trigger.

  After a good night’s sleep in a small country safe house, Fenian made her way to Saul’s home. It was located about thirty miles north of Toronto outside a tiny town called Newtonville in a shelter of trees at the end of a long driveway. The house was large but plain. It looked like something a farmer may have built to house his ten children. She knocked on the door and heard Saul yell, “Come in!”

  What the house lacked on the outside, it certainly made up for on the inside. “Saul?” she called out.

  “Back here.” There was a light on in another room across from the large living room. She poked her head in and saw him busy working on something that looked like a piece of luggage. She watched over his shoulder as he carefully wired the blasting caps then pressed them into the C-4 explosives—24 blocks, each block 11 inches by 2 inches by 1.5 inches and weighing 1.25 pounds. Each block had enough explosive power to destroy a large truck.

  Saul turned, flipped his glasses up and said, “My dear, I don’t know what you plan on doing with this, but there is enough here to bring down a large building.”

  Fenian gave him a little smile and said, “That’s the plan.”

  Saul stuck the soldering iron back in the holder, looked around at the equipment spread out on the floor and said, “So, here’s what I see. You’re going to put on that big tandem master parachute rig, attach 160 pounds of steel and explosives to your chest, jump out of a plane, open your parachute, fly over a building, release the explosives, fly away, land, and then detonate said explosives.”

  Fenian smiled, nodded her head and said, “That’s the plan.”

  Saul shook his head and said, “You, my dear, are insane.”

  Fenian was startled by a voice behind her that said, “I think it’s ambitious.”

  “You would,” said Saul.

  Fenian whirled and froze. Her mind felt like it had short circuited. All she was thinking was, Oh, oh, whoa, wow, oh my God, that’s the most beautiful man I have ever seen. Say something. Say something, you idiot, “Ah, hi,” she said, her voice cracking.

  Saul turned and said, “Elle, this is my grandson Adrien. Adrien, this is Elle.”

  “Hi,” said Adrien, putting out his hand.

  “Yeah, um, hi.”

  “I was going to make myself something to eat. Are you hungry?”

  “Ah, sure, okay.”

  “Come this way.” He put her hand on her shoulder and she winced and pulled away.

  Adrien held his hands up and asked, “Are you alright?”

  “My shoulder is injured.”

  “Anything I can do?” said the perfect lips and crystal blue eyes.

  “Um, well, no. Not unless you have some cortisone.”

  “I do.”

  “Really? Do you think you could um, ya know.”

  “Give you an injection? Sure.”

  “That would be great, thank you.”

  She followed him to the kitchen, trying to figure out where she had seen him before. Then she realized, He looks like a young version of Uncle Jack’s favorite actor, Michael Landon. He directed her to a stool at the bar and she sat down. He opened the refrigerator, removed ingredients, and prepared to cook. Every move he made was smooth and angelic with a devil’s edge. She sat and watched him, feeling things, naughty things. All of those physical sensations that Bogus had taught her how to release switched on at once.

  He set a blackened Tuna steak down in front of her and carved off a thin slice. He put it on a cracker and topped it with a small piece of pickled ginger. He held it up to her mouth, and she ate from his hand. She did not get the significance of that, but he did; If a woman lets a man feed her with his bare hand, chances are she’s sleeping with that man. When she’d had enough, he excused himself to get the medical kit. He st
ood with his back to the counter, holding the syringe. She stood and pulled her sweatshirt from her back over her head, leaving her arms in the sleeves and letting it bunch at her chest, then turned around.

  “Ouch,” he said with empathy. “Someone has been playing the game.”

  She nodded her head. He said, “That’s a bullet on Kevlar. That hurt.”

  “Yes, yes it did.”

  He touched her back where the injection points would be. She nodded that was okay. He pressed the needle in and she grunted at the burn. “Be over in a moment,” he said sweetly in her ear, softly rubbing the injection spots. She looked relieved as the burn stopped. He put the needle down on the counter and smoothly put his left hand on the side of her face. His right hand lay flat against her washboard stomach as he pulled her close, dancing his lips from under her right ear down the side of her neck. In the distance she could hear someone breathing hard, and then it became nearly a pant as she realized it was her.

  “NO! No, no, I can’t,” she exclaimed, spinning out of his grasp. She put her hands out in front of her and backed into the counter on the other side of the kitchen. “I’m sorry, oh Jesus am I sorry, but I can’t.”

  He gave her a wicked little grin, picked up his glass of wine, took a drink then set it back down. “Hmm,” he said with a little smile as began to slowly walk towards her, “You are the most perfect thing I have ever seen, and you look like you could use a friend.”

  Her hands touched his chest as her arms failed to even try to hold him back. He put one hand on the small of her back, pulling her to him, and the other behind her neck. Her face tilted up to his as she found herself in some sort of dream sequence. Her lips began to part and suddenly, she stopped. She firmly pushed him away and, while trying to control her breathing, said, “Okay, okay, you win, you win, okay. I’m married, I can’t but if I wasn’t, well, you win, just, just back up, stay away, back up.”

  He tilted his head with a disappointed look on his face. Her look was panicked and confused. She was still backing away when she bumped into a table and nearly fell. He let a small laugh escape, then he said, “I’ll be in that room back there,” he pointed, “reading a book. If you change your mind, you know where I am.”

  “Yeah, okay, yeah. Nice to, ah, meet you. Bye.” Then she turned and moved quickly to the room where Saul was working. She walked in and shut the door behind her, looking for a lock, but there wasn’t one. Saul flipped up his glasses and stared at her for a moment. Her face was flushed and she appeared to be perspiring. He asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah I’m fine.”

  “My dear, you look like you’re going to have a heart attack, or a, well, an orgasm.”

  She buried her face in her hands, turned and started bouncing her head off the wall, then said under her breath, “There is nothing wrong with my heart.”

  Chapter 41

  Oshawa Municipal Airport was sixty miles east of Toronto, thirty miles past Saul’s house. Fenian arrived and saw one plane sitting in front of the FBO, an old Cessna 182 with a cargo door. She parked her car next to the only building and found her pilot asleep on a couch. She gave it a swift kick and said, “Hey, Harold, let’s go.”

  Harold was groggy and sat up slowly. “Are you hung over?” she asked.

  “Just a wee bit,” he replied.

  Great. Just great, she thought. “Help me load the plane. I need to tell you a few things.”

  Twenty minutes later Harold exclaimed, “A bomb! That’s a bloody bomb!”

  “Maybe you should say it a little louder, I don’t think the people in town heard you.”

  “What are you?”

  “Not important. We have twenty-five minutes before takeoff, and we have some planning to do. I need the wind speed and direction at 12,000, 6,000, and 3,000 feet. Then let’s go take a look at that aerial chart; we need to calculate where I’m getting out.”

  “Getting out? Are you insane? It’s 40 degrees below zero up there.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m dressed for it. Plus, I’m not going to be up there that long. When I get out, I want you to go get my plane and meet me at the transient line of Toronto International. Got it?”

  “This is terrorism. You’re a terrorist.”

  “You know me better than that. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.”

  “If I get caught, this is life in prison.”

  “No, just tell ’em you were forced at gun point.”

  “I don’t know. This is crazy...what if I refuse?”

  She reached in her jacket, pulled her .45, pulled back the hammer, leveled it at his head and said, “Then you will do it at gun point. This IS going to happen.”

  He looked in her eyes for a long moment. This wasn’t Mrs. Z, the Lady of Castle Dunn. Whoever this was, she was serious. “Okay, okay, ah, sweet mother Mary,” he said under his breath.

  She hooked the bomb high on her chest first, then attached the lower hooks and pulled the straps tight. She used a small piece of Velcro to tie down the handle for the industry-standard three ring release system between the upper hooks and the bomb itself. Harold yelled back, “One minute!”

  She waddled her way toward the door, grabbed the handle and shouted, “Door open!”

  “What?” Harold called back.

  “Never mind!” She forgot he wasn’t a jump pilot.

  She waited for the last minute to put her helmet on so it wouldn’t get warm and frost up on exit. After one last check, he yelled back to her, “GO!”

  She swung her legs out, put one foot on the strut, leaned out and fell forward. Once in a stable free fall position, she pulled the small drogue chute to slow her terminal velocity then went straight for the pull handle. She was under canopy by 10.5K feet. After a quick canopy check, though she couldn’t see much in the dark, she released her steering toggles, causing the canopy’s nose to drop, and it began flying forward at 15 knots. Added to the tailwind of twenty knots, her groundspeed was thirty-five knots. She loosened and then unhooked the lower attachment points of the bomb, found the release handle and put her hand on it to make sure she could find it. After letting out a deep breath, she thought, I can’t believe this is going so smooth. There were no thick clouds, but visibility was somewhat compromised by a slight fog layer, formed because the surface was still warm but the air had cooled. She wouldn’t get a look at the ground until 1,500 feet. She reached into her jump suit pocket, pulled out her GPS and set course for the Melton mosque.

  She kept her hands tucked away to keep them warm, pulling them out only for course corrections. The distant strobes from the end of the runway at Toronto International guided her in. She knew it would soon get tricky. She figured she would be at about 1000 feet over the building. Dropping the bomb on the roof from that height would be iffy at best. Then she had to quickly decide where to land.

  She had chosen a primary landing spot and two alternates if things didn’t go as planned. The primary was the park on the right. But there were trees, and as her jump master at Fort Bragg once told her, they’re not the happy, friendly, soft things you think they are. The branches will gore like a bull. To the left was the airport: big, open, with lots of grass, but with big planes flying in and out really fast. She didn’t want to be a bug on a windshield. At the last minute she chose the airport.

  The building was coming up fast, and this was the only thing she had never practiced for: the bombing run. The winds died at lower altitude. Her ground speed had dropped to about 20 knots. She could no longer feel her hands; they were numb but they still worked. She looked down at her chest and grabbed the release handle. She waited. She reached the edge of the parking lot, and pulled.

  Without the extra weight her canopy’s forward speed slowed. She got a good view of where it landed. Through the roof of a car parked next to the building.

  “DAMMIT!” she screamed inside her helmet. Then s
he banked left and headed for an open place to land. She made it over Airport Road at about six hundred feet, then she saw the landing lights of the jet. It missed her by a couple hundred feet, but the air turbulence caused half of the cells in her canopy to collapse, and she plummeted toward the ground. She pumped the steering toggles like mad trying to inflate the cells, and it finally opened at about fifty feet. She released the toggles, trying get forward speed to flare a landing, but that didn’t happen. She pile-drove into the mud, and lay there with the wind knocked out of her.

  Realizing she wasn’t dead, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. At the mosque, security was trying to figure out how a piece of luggage fell out of a plane. She hit speed dial and heard the buzz of a ring. It took the guards a second to figure out what they were listening to, but by then it was too late. The explosion sent the engine from the car through the mosque, cutting two support beams. The building collapsed, crushing dozens who’d gathered for evening prayer. Then came something she hadn’t known would happen: a secondary explosion that dwarfed the first one. The mosque had been storing explosives and bomb-making equipment. A fireball shot hundreds of feet into the air, looking like a mushroom cloud. Body parts and pieces of the building rained down a quarter mile away. My work here is done, she thought.

  “Harold, where are you?”

  “I’m returning to Billy Bishop, Apparently someone set a bomb off close to the end of the runway and the airport is shut down.”

  Oh no, I didn’t think about that, she thought. “Okay, I’ll be there when I can get there. Sit tight.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She dialed the phone again and the raspy voice said, “I bet I know who this is.”

  “I need you to come get me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the International Airport on the other side of the fence from Airport Road, between two big signs. I’m wet and freezing to death, please hurry.”

  “On my way.”