‘It would do no good to kill her,’ he thought. As he looked at her frightened face, Saleem found no compassion for her in his heart. But he did want to keep as many of the students alive, for as long as he could. The more students he had alive, the more emotion it would evoke from the World. They were of no use to him dead.
Saleem took the guard with him when he left the room and the hostages were alone.
Rhinefeld waited a good minute before he spoke. He turned his head toward Jason.
“How is everybody holding up?” He asked.
“I guess…okay. Nothing else has happened since the two of you were carted off. Well, except this thing.” he said, pointing to Tracy Peters, who had taken her seat next to Jerry Smith again.
“And what’s that?” the professor asked as he looked at Tracy from across the room. Rhinefeld propped himself up on his elbows and slid back to brace against a wall.
“I’m not sure to tell you the truth. It all happened quickly. I was starting to doze off then Tracy began sobbing uncontrollably and that guy started yelling. People were crying, I think someone may have screamed. The gunman pulled the trigger; at least I think he pulled it. There was a loud click but maybe that’s not what I heard. Nothing happened. There was no shot. That’s when you guys showed up.” Jason said. He looked like he felt guilty. “Like I said though, it all happened really quickly. It may not have happened exactly like that.” He said as he stared at professor Rhinefeld’s blood stained shirt.
The professor looked at Matt, who appeared on the verge of passing out.
“You okay?” He asked.
Fatigue, blood loss and a touch of dehydration had a severe headache gnawing at Matt but he was glad to be back with the students. At least he knew that they were safe and accounted for. When Saleem’s men had drug him and the professor in, Matt had seen the gunman’s rifle in Tracy Peters face. He’d instantly wanted to lash out and attack the man. But deep down, Matt knew it would have only been suicide. He had no strength or weapon to speak of. Now, with their captors gone, the room began to quiet down and Matt’s body began to remind him of the injuries he’d sustained in the last twenty four hours.
“I’m fine.” He lied.
The room watched as Rhinefeld made a painful rise to his feet by inching his way up the wall behind him. His legs felt weak beneath him and his left knee had a piercing stab in the ligaments that joined behind the bend. He wobbled and braced himself with his right forearm against the wall. Some of the students moved to stand and assist him but he waved them off. Finally, the professor took in a deep breath and lowered his head. After several long seconds, he began to pray aloud.
Katherine Boyd, the News Television reporter, had bowed her head, though it had been out of respect for the others and not because of any notion that she was praying to a god. But as she listened to Nicholas Rhinefeld pray in earnest, an aching sorrow reached up and grabbed her. Her life seemed so fragile and delicate now, so temporal.
For the first time in many years, she thought back to Jewish school and the teachings of the Rabbi in her neighborhood. She wished she had something to reassure her, something to make her feel secure like she’d felt as a child. She found herself wishing she could believe in something or someone that was in control of her situation. Someone greater than herself and her tormentors.
Immediately, Katherine opened her eyes. The mere thought that she could question her agnostic world view frightened her. She sat up straighter and refused to close her eyes again. She shrugged it off as stress. She scooted herself back against the wall and wrapped her arms around her legs, below her knees. Despite her best effort though, Katherine began to cry.
• • •
Saleem was heating a pot of water on his propane-powered hot plate when the LED screen on his cell phone lit up. He picked it up and read the screen. In bold caps the word ‘BREACH’ stretched across the display followed by an audible alarm. He quickly removed the pot of water from the camping stove and grabbed his Kalashnikov. On his way out of the deteriorating building, he called for Azim.
“Follow me,” he shouted.
Azim scampered to his feet, knocking over the cot he had been laying on. The two men got into one of the Land Rovers and pulled out onto a deserted street. The back tires squealed as Saleem forced the accelerator down and the large, eight-cylinder engine roared to life. The intruder hadn’t set off the alarm at the other end of the city yet. That meant that they were headed right for each other. Saleem suspected that it was probably just a group of soldiers from the U.N. observer force, out on patrol. He would know soon enough.
Azim was nervous. It was written all over his face. He glanced around at the half collapsed buildings of Quneitra, more for a place to put his eyes rather than a curiosity for the city.
Saleem laughed inside. “If he’s nervous now…” he thought to himself. “What’s going to happen in the next five minutes, when his little world is turned upside down?”
The Land Rover careened down the center of the empty street. Saleem stopped six miles up the road in front of the old grocery store. He got out of the truck and ran to a nearby building with Azim close on his heels. A rusted fire escape hung low over several abandoned cars. Saleem leapt on to the roof of the nearest car and proceeded to jump from car to car, until he stood under the fire escape.
In seconds the men had scaled the building and were standing on its sun-beaten roof. Saleem put his binoculars up to his eyes and focused on the road where he had placed the sensor. A small jeep emerged through the shimmering vapors that rose from the heated asphalt. Just as he had predicted, the Jeep had the familiar U.N. lettering stamped on its passenger door. Its two olive branches cupped a graphic of the globe, declaring the United Nations mission; a World of peace. Saleem put down the binoculars. He rushed over to a corner of the roof where a long wooden crate had been staged and flipped open the lid. Inside, a Soviet made Rocket Propelled Grenade lay cradled in a soft foam cut-out. Azim’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the weapon. Saleem reached down and yanked the anti-tank round out of the box. He pointed to the foam.
“Pull it up.” He said, motioning with his eyes. Azim bent down and removed the foam insert. Below, there was a fifty-caliber machine gun and a tri-pod mount system. Azim hesitated.
“Get it out and place it over there.” Saleem yelled.
Saleem hefted the rocket onto his right shoulder. It was heavy but with all the practice he had put in, he had expected the weight. He looked through the rectangular sights and placed the approaching truck square in the front sight. The vehicle was too far away to engage, so he set it down gently on the roof and ran over to where Azim fumbled with the machine gun.
He pushed him out of the way and unfolded the heavy steel tri-pod legs.
They dropped into place with a loud thud. He looked up at the road again to gauge how much time he had. The jeep was moving slowly toward them. Its occupants, unaware of the alarm they had triggered and the fate that awaited them, drove leisurely. He had time. He busied himself with the gun again.
The gun was a post World War l model. With its massive fifty caliber shells and a cyclic rate of between four hundred and fifty and five hundred and twenty-five rounds a minute, the Browning M2 was a devastating weapon. Saleem had very little experience firing the M2. Its ammunition was quite expensive. But he had trained with many other, smaller gun systems. Azim however had no experience. But with the butterfly trigger and the veritable wall of lead that it sent out in front of it, it was pretty hard to render it ineffective.
Saleem opened the feed tray cover on top of the machine gun and placed the end of a belt of ammunition down inside. He closed the cover and jerked back on the bolt before releasing it. It made a loud metallic click as the bolt forced itself to the rear of the gun’s upper receiver and then slid a round into the chamber.
Azim looked very unsure of himself.
“After I fire the rocket, you need to shoot the jeep, it’s that simple.” He said.
<
br /> Azim nodded his head that he understood, but Saleem had his doubts.
“Place your two thumbs here on the trigger and press down to fire. It will be much louder than anything you have ever fired and the recoil will scare you at first. You will get used to it.”
Azim nodded again but made no attempt to speak.
Saleem looked back to the road. The jeep was almost in range now. He shuffled back over to the RPG and picked it up. Placing one foot on the lip of the roof’s raised edge, he knelt down. It wasn’t the most comfortable position but it stabilized his whole body and braced him for the recoil of the back blast.
He waited until the Jeep was so close to them that he would only have one shot. The men in the open top vehicle were not alert at all. Two were dozing off while another and the driver mindlessly sang a song that was playing through the speakers.
Saleem placed the Jeep in the center of the rocket’s sights again and pulled back on the crescent shaped trigger. There was a two second lag. Then, all of a sudden, his head felt like it was being compressed to the size of an Ataif (Arab pancake), as the rocket ignited inside the shaft and exited the barrel. A dense cloud of smoke engulfed Saleem, temporarily blinding him from the scene on the ground. There was a loud roar as the warhead burned its propellant on the way to the target. The rocket impacted with the grill of the vehicle and exploded. The resulting sound was a thunderous clap as metal crashed into metal and the truck burst into a fireball of shrapnel. The passenger side tire blew, penetrated by the flying debris, and the Jeep flipped over onto its side. Saleem looked at the mess below and then to Azim. The man was staring down the length of the .50 cal through the sights but the gun was silent. He was frozen. Saleem ran back over and shoved Azim out of the way. He crouched down low and pressed the tips of his two thumbs against the butterfly trigger and squeezed. The rounds made a deep rhythmic pop as they impacted the truck. The belt of ammunition shrunk in size as the weapon gracefully pulled each bullet into the feed tray and then discarded the empty shell casings and belt retaining clip on the opposite side of the receiver.
When the one hundred round belt was depleted, Saleem released the trigger. A thick cord of white smoke coiled up toward the sky from the end of the barrel. The potent smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils. Except for a dull pinging sound in his ears, the space between the road and the roof was dead quiet.
He stared at the wreckage of the vehicle and waited. After he was sure that there were no survivors, he started packing up the equipment. He couldn’t even look at the coward Azim. He hoped that not all of his men would respond like this when the enemy sent real troops in, which he was sure they would eventually do. If so, then it was going to be a bloodbath for Saleem and his men.
Once back on the ground, Saleem surveyed the damaged Jeep. What the RPG hadn’t mangled or obliterated, the fifty cal had severed and torn. Men were strewn about the interior of the vehicle, their bodies broken and bashed. It was gruesome. Azim began to dry heave loudly. The radio had been smashed to a million pieces; they’d had no time to contact their headquarters. Chunks of foam from inside the ripped seats littered the jeep’s interior. Azim tried to speak to Saleem, feeling the tension between him and his leader but all that came out was his breakfast.
Inner Harbor, Baltimore Maryland
The President had ordered a medium-rare, eight ounce steak and roasted russet potatoes with asparagus. He hadn’t taken a bite.
Kenneth Paine, on the other hand, was smearing his last piece of swordfish in a white wine cream sauce.
A local chef, who’d turned a meager cop’s salary into a robust family business, which was beginning to rival the big name franchises in the area, owned “Terry’s Steak House”; one of President Vanderbilt’s favorites. The secret service hated it. It was a logistical nightmare for them, with walls of massive picture windows in every direction and an open air deck overlooking the blue waters of the always crowded harbor. The only bright side was that the owner always closed the top floor when the President dined, so that he could eat in peace.
“So, what are you gonna do?” Paine asked.
“Well, I thought that’s what I had you for Kenneth. I need a direction to take this thing in.” Vanderbilt said as he adjusted the napkin on his lap for the fifth time.
Paine hadn’t seen the President this morose since they’d discovered that a leak was about to link his administration to a nasty oil scandal.
“Yeah well, if I were you, I would do nothing. The American people are used to seeing Palestine tear itself apart every few years.” He said before greedily stuffing the dripping fish into his mouth.
“The only other thing you can do is…” Paine added between lips that were mostly closed to hold the food in. He looked up at the President and shook his head from side to side. “Never mind,” he said coolly and swallowed. He waited to see if Vanderbilt would take the bait.
“What?” The President asked eagerly hoping that Paine would once again produce a brilliant political response.
He had jumped onto Paine’s hook. Now all the man had to do was reel him in. ‘How did this guy get to be President?’ He asked himself. ‘Because I trained him, that’s how.’ he thought arrogantly.
“Well,” he continued. “You need a strong stomach just to hear this, let alone to implement it.” He warned.
He filled his empty wine glass from a seven year old bottle of red wine and sat back in his chair. He looked around the restaurant, as if to ensure that no one could overhear, and then leaned over the table on his elbows.
“Why doesn’t Israel just blow Palestine off the map?”
Vanderbilt blushed at the question but didn’t attempt a reply.
“Because, they don’t have to. They don’t have to give concessions or hold peace talks with the Palestinians or this new guy, Nazari. Where is a credible threat to Israel in the West Bank? What army in Gaza has the power to climb that fence and launch a barrage against them?” He took a long sip of his wine.
“Graham, they throw rocks at armored bulldozers and some of the fiercest military equipment on the planet.” Paine’s face became animated as he spun his proposal to the President.
“Palestinians have global support for their cause. The World bleeds with them, albeit emotionally, but still. They get to continue throwing those rocks and lighting up public transportation like a bonfire because they know that if the Israelis respond with full force, public opinion will drive them into a dark cave. What the situation warrants is a level playing field.” He let the words circle around in the President’s head before he went on.
“I want you to try to picture this,” he said pulling his cloth napkin off of his lap and stretching it out across the table. He pushed his plate aside and emptied his wine glass. Drawing a pen from his suit pocket, he began placing rough lines in the center of the napkin.
“What we have here is the West Bank. On one side we have our allies, Israel. On the other, we have the Palestinians whom we would like to have as allies.” He shaded in the crude rectangle along the line that represented Israel.
“Along this border are stationed some of the bravest, most well-armed soldiers in the Universe.”
Then he shaded in the other side.
“And on this side you have men and women who have been, for all of their lives, at odds with this superpower and ill equipped to do anything- with any lasting ramifications- about it. Again, let’s revisit their arsenal. Rocks, sticks, outdated RPG’s, inconsistent explosive devices, World War l grenades, sixty year old rifles and so on. They use terror as a means to an end because that’s what they have at their disposal. Now, if they had modern weaponry, Israel would begin to take them seriously. The Prime Minister would not be able to ignore their requests for concessions and would be eager to get through the peace process.” He placed his elbows on the table again.
“Furthermore Graham, if those same weapons came from the United States, then the world would be off our backs about all the support we have be
en giving Israel over the years and we would start to be seen as true advocates for peace in the region.”
Instead of being shocked as Paine had expected, the President appeared to be contemplating the suggestion. Now he was leaning in over the table. His hands were interlaced and hovering above his untouched plate of food.
“We’re not talking about building an army here. It would only require enough military power to pose a perceivable threat.” Paine said.
A thin, blond waitress approached from the restaurant’s kitchen. Paine stopped talking. The President observed his friend as he feigned interest in the girl’s menial task of refilling their water glasses.
She asked if they needed anything else. The President quietly thanked her and sent her on her way.
“As I was saying, we wouldn’t need to give these guys a Nuke or anything, just a few tanks, some up armored Humvee’s and training.”
Kenneth was interrupted for a second time, by the President’s aide.
The aide leaned over the President’s shoulder and cupped a hand over her mouth, hiding her lips. She whispered into his ear for a prolonged period of time.
Kenneth watched the President’s face closely. One of Vanderbilt’s great skills was that he could keep a poker face like no one else Kenneth knew. His expression didn’t change until the aide quickly walked back to the security detail in the other room.
The President stood and grabbed his suit jacket from the back of the chair. He flung the jacket around his shoulders and popped his left hand through a sleeve.
“Well, I don’t know what you think about my proposal Graham but I believe that aside from doing nothing, arming the Palestinians is all you have left.” Paine stated, adding to his fragmented conversation with the President.
SANCTION: A Thriller Page 9
