Dead of Night

by Blake Banner

  I took a stroll, pressing the open button on my key, and pretty soon I heard the bleep and saw the flash of lights on a big, bad Dodge RAM 3500, thoughtfully sprayed in dark blue, for minimum visibility at night.

  The back contained a large steel box, about four foot square, with a padlock. I returned to the Jeep, collected my morning’s purchases and dumped them in the back of the RAM, then climbed in the cab, rolled down the ramp, paid my dues and pulled out onto South San Pedro again. A couple of blocks up North Los Angeles and I merged onto the 101, and the San Bernardino Freeway. I looked at my watch. It was closing on one PM.

  I took it easy, with the windows down and the Eagles and Creedence loud on the sound system. At Beaumont I pulled into the Shell gas station, bought a couple of takeout burgers and a bottle of water, and filled four one-gallon cans with gas, which I stowed in the back. A little less than an hour later I pulled into Indio and made my way to the Coachella Farming Supplies store, at the Home Depot Shopping Mall. There I bought two one-hundred-weight sacks of sodium nitrate, loaded it in the back of the RAM and continued on my way.

  Ten minutes later I pulled out of Indio and onto the 111. The sun was inching toward mid-afternoon and the desert wind was warm, cruising through those same, familiar fields of dates, grapes and other crops I could not identify, struggling against the dry, gray earth.

  I came finally to Mecca Avenue, where Mohammed’s safe house was. Or, at least, where we were all assuming it was. But I didn’t turn in. I kept going, slow and steady at forty miles an hour, until I came to the end of the complex of chalets and bungalows that had, when the lake was originally created, been the seedlings of a holiday resort. There, well out of view of Mohammed’s house, I turned off the road, bounced and jolted across the desert ground for a hundred yards, and wound up on Morraco Avenue, outside a ramshackle collection of barns, sheds and shacks, all built around a large house that was partially in ruins. The whole complex was set back about twenty yards from the road, with a big dusty yard to the side where there were two decomposing boats and an old, rusty Ford truck. None of which looked very functional. It was a place I had spotted last time I was there, and earmarked for future use.

  I turned in, going slow to raise as little dust as I could, and pulled up behind the largest of the sheds. Then I climbed down to have a look around. The day was growing hot and I could feel the fine desert dust clinging to the perspiration on my brow. I walked to the big, old sliding door of the barn. It was made of wood attached to a steel frame. Some of the wooden slates had rotted over the years and I was able to peer inside. There were a few old drums, some wooden cubicles that might have been meant for horses, a handful of old tires and not much else.

  The door was held closed by a padlock the size of my fist. It was corroded and rusted, and even with a gallon of oil and a set of lock picks, you’d never get it open. But the wood it was screwed to was so rotten a couple of thumps with a rock pulled it free. The door rolled open, I swung back into the cab of the RAM and drove it inside, where it was cool, shaded, and most important of all, out of sight.

  I knew from the satellite photographs that Ben-Amini’s safe house was a quarter of a mile away, and well within range of the EMP device. I spent the next hour examining that device and digesting the instructions. They weren’t complicated. It came with four lithium ion batteries which could be used only once and then had to be recharged. They were three foot in length and weighed about fifteen pounds each. You slotted the battery into its housing, locked it with a clockwise twist, and then flipped the charge switch. You waited five minutes till a green light came on, and then pressed the red button. All electronic equipment in a radius of one mile—half a mile each way—would then instantly be fried. That would include, the instructions stressed, your own cell phone and the transport vehicle, unless they were properly insulated. It would also fry the instruments of any aircraft flying overhead.

  Fortunately, a note appended to the instructions confirmed that the RAM’s electronic systems were properly insulated, and if I left my cell in the cab, so would that be.

  The next hour I spent carefully mixing the two hundred weight of ammonium nitrate with large amounts of gasoline, turning it into a thick, muddy sludge. That I packed tightly into four tough garden refuse sacks, each weighing about fifty-five pounds, and dumped the lot in back in the rear of the RAM. I also put together the bow and slipped six of the arrows through the straps on my rucksack.

  That was about all the preparation I could do before dark. So I settled down, ate my burgers and slept for four hours. It was going to be a long night.

  I awoke at nine in the pitch dark. I drank some water and pulled my night-vision goggles from my rucksack. I checked my P226, fitted the suppressor and slipped it under my arm. Then I loaded the Smith and Wesson and put it back in the rucksack.

  I swung down from the cab, put the rucksack on my back and grabbed the 416. I rammed a magazine in, slung three more from my belt and put another three in the rucksack.

  Then I pushed the door open, clambered back in the cab and moved slowly out of the barn. I didn’t follow the roads. I left my lights off, stayed in low gear and rolled quietly over the dirt, at the back of the crumbling, empty houses, until I came to Damascus Avenue, which ran parallel to Mecca. Down at the end, Mohammed’s safe house occupied the entire area between the two roads. I figured his compound was about eighty yards from where I was right then.

  I pressed the gas gently, then went into neutral and let the truck freewheel silently forward till I was about forty yards away, and in the cover of a large acacia tree. There was no moon yet, but I could make out the dark bulk of the perimeter wall. I stopped, killed the engine and swung down from the cab. I climbed into the cargo bed and opened the EMP case, slammed in one of the batteries and set it to charge. I gave it five minutes, and when the green light came on I hit the button.

  It was odd. Nothing happened, except that the glow from the safe house vanished. Other than that there was total silence and stillness.

  I sprang down from the truck and hauled myself back into the cab, gunned the engine and let the weight of the vehicle carry me to the corner by the main gate of the house. Inside I could hear dogs howling and muffled voices, occasionally raised in shouts. They were Arab voices giving instructions.

  In silence I made two running trips back and forth from the truck and stacked the four sacks of high explosive against the gate. Then I turned the truck around and pulled the Smith and Wesson from the rucksack. I took careful aim and hammered a five hundred grain round into the sacks. The detonation was massive. Four pounds of that mixture can blow an SUV apart. This was over two hundred pounds, and at forty feet in almost lifted the RAM off its wheels and tipped it over, but by that time I was already accelerating toward the back of the compound.

  With my ears ringing I turned off the road and pulled in tight against the wall, about level with where the tower was, inside the compound. I jumped out, pulled on my night-vision goggles, slung the HK416 over my shoulder, grabbed the bow and clambered onto the roof of the truck. From there I jumped for the wall, pulled myself up and sat astride it, seeking the guards on the roof of the tower. I found one, a black silhouette against a green sky. There was a lot of shouting and screaming, and the guy I’d found kept running back and forth, like he didn’t know where to go or what to do. I figured he was maybe sixty feet away. It wasn’t an easy shot, but I was good with a bow, this kill had to be silent, and this was the only way.

  I knew at some point he’d freeze, so I drew, waited and when he did I loosed the arrow and skewered him through the chest. He went down and I nocked another barb, then waited. I didn’t have to wait long. I heard a shout above all the other shouts and his pal came into sight, probably wondering what the hell had happened. I pulled and loosed in one fluid movement, and the shaft thudded home through his sternum. Two down.

  I looked into the shadows of the garden, saw everything was as it should be, and dropped.


  Chapter Seventeen

  I made it to the first clump of date palms. The guards couldn’t see or hear me, on account of they had no lights and no cameras, but the dogs could smell me. They came thundering across the lawn like two green daemons let loose from hell. I knelt, held the Sig out at arm’s length and waited till I could see their eyes. By that time I could practically smell their breath. I squeezed off one round that took off the nearest dog’s skull, and by the time I shot the second one he was just three feet away and my heart was hammering in my throat.

  By now the guys had sorted through the rubble and had seen that no vehicle had collided with the gate, but a bomb had been deliberately placed there, and they had realized that the loss of light was connected to that event. In fact, it was dawning on them that their security had been breached and they were under serious attack. But they couldn’t see their attackers anywhere. So they were now running around like headless chickens and I could hear one of them, probably their CO, bellowing for somebody to get a damned flashlight.

  By that time I had dropped the bow, holstered the Sig and stepped out from behind the palms with the HK416 at my shoulder. The pool was a strange, luminous, liquid green surrounded by black lawn. The white walls of the house also shone a luminous green in what little starlight there was, and at either side of the house I saw two men come running. I figured they were returning to their posts at the back of the house.

  Above, on the lower roof terrace, I saw another two men, peering into the dark below, searching for an attacker. They couldn’t see me yet, and I had to act fast, before they did. The first shot I fired would reveal where I was, and before I did that, I wanted to be out of the line of sight of the guys on the roof. So I pulled the Fairbairn and Sykes from my boot and sprinted for the next clump of palms, almost level with the side of the house. The guy who was running up heard my footfall, stopped and squinted into the blackness. He saw me, but by then I was already on top of him and as he opened his mouth to shout I rammed the blade of the fighting knife through his throat and sliced savagely to the side. He was half decapitated and a fountain of blood sprayed high into the air.

  I stepped in close as his knees folded and lowered him softly to the ground. I dropped to one knee, up against the wall of the house, slipped the knife in my boot and rasped, “Tati! Tati!” Come in Arabic.

  The guy who’d been hurrying up the far side of the house appeared, eerie in green and black, running toward me, calling “‘Ayn ‘ant?”

  He was asking where I was. He never found out. I put two rounds through his head and blew what brains he had across the paved patio. And the guys upstairs were shouting and screaming so loud, nobody heard the suppressed shots.

  The plate-glass patio doors were open. I made for them, but a sudden thought made me retrace my steps and search in the pockets of the guy I’d just shot. I found his cell phone, then moved back into the house, closed the doors and locked them. I made first for the kitchen and examined the stove. It was gas, as I’d hoped, and that made me smile. I opened all the taps, called myself on his cell, then I left his cell by the stove. I stepped out, closed the kitchen door and sprinted up the stairs with the assault rifle at my shoulder. Upstairs was where I figured Mohammed would be.

  Even with night-vision goggles, it was hard to see. There was no moon outside, and no artificial light for miles around. What I could make out, in the black and green nightmare world, was that the stairs made a dogleg and rose to a broad landing. On the left as I came up there was a door which I figured led into the rooms below the tower. Ahead of me there was a long passage into darkness, and on the right, at the far end of the landing, was another door. There was also another staircase, presumably leading up to the tower.

  A door crashed open up there, voices shouted to each other and boots tramped. I had killed the two on the roof of the tower, so these must be the three or four men from the roof terrace, who’d gone up and discovered the bodies. I sprinted, my heart pounding hard. I needed to catch them while they were still in the narrow stairwell. They couldn’t see me, but they heard me. Muzzles flashed green in the blackness. I dropped to the floor and snaked around the bannisters. The flashes from their automatic weapons made it impossible to see. So I opened up and emptied the magazine, thirty rounds in two and a half seconds into the confined space. If I didn’t get them, the ricochets would. Their grunts and cries said I was right.

  Mohammed could be in any of a number of rooms, but my gut had told me from the word go that he would be in the lower part of the tower, isolated from and protected by the rest of the house. I didn’t have time to confirm the kills in the stairwell, but I was pretty sure they were either dead or dying. I scrambled to my feet and crossed the landing in three long strides, slamming in a new magazine as I went.

  One round took care of the lock. I kicked in the door and stood back as a hail of lead tore splinters from the wood and gauged plaster from the walls. I lay flat, eased around the doorjamb and, as the volley of fire paused, I saw two men in suits kneeling with weapons at their shoulders, waiting. They were as blind as everybody else, except me.

  Two controlled burst of three rounds took them down. Then I was on my feet and in the room, searching.

  It was a sitting room with a table, chairs, a sofa, armchairs and a TV. A window showed me men running outside. It would be moments before they were swarming up the stairs.

  I saw another door, figured it was a bedroom, and I kicked it open. There was a man huddled on the floor, whimpering and covering his head. I took a handful of his hair and dragged him to his feet. I snarled in his ear.

  “I can do a lot worse than kill you. Cooperate and I won’t hurt you.”

  I ran him out of the room, toward the door to the landing. He was sobbing and burbling, begging me not to hurt him. Voices and running boots told me my escape route was cut off. I had an immediate choice to make: kill the man I had found, assuming him to be Mohammed Ben-Amini, and then try to fight my way out, or try to take him alive and interrogate him, but risk getting killed in the process and failing in the mission. At a rough estimate I figured I had killed nine of them, which left anything from four to eight more.

  I spun him to face me and drove my right fist into his solar plexus. He went down and I knew he wasn’t going to get up and go anywhere anytime soon. Three strides took me to the top of the stairwell, pulling my cell from my pocket. The voices and the running boots were loud, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

  I found my last missed call and dialed the number of the phone that was sitting beside the stove in the kitchen. It rang once.

  Explosions, close up, do not roar as they do in movies. It is not a deep rumble, like a volcano. It is a hard, jarring flat smack of air. The house shook, plaster fell from the walls and the ceiling, glass shattered from the windows. I leaned over the bannisters and started picking them off with short, controlled blasts as they reeled and tried to make sense of what was happening. I could see six men in panicking confusion. I took out two, moved down the first few steps and took out another two with short staccato bursts of fire. The last two were falling over each other, scrambling to run. I took one down and the other got away.

  I went after him, leapfrogging the bodies that littered the stairs. He was running, a green and black figure panicking in a green and black nightmare. He ran blind toward the glow of the plate-glass doors and the pool outside. He could hear me and turned toward me, stupidly staggering backward. He hit a coffee table and fell. I drew level and stepped on his hand.

  “How many left?”

  “Just me, please sir, mister, just me, please, I have…”

  Wrong answer. I shot him once in the head and ran back up the stairs to find Mohammed.

  I found him on his hands and knees, vomiting as he tried to get to his feet. I helped him, with a hand to the scruff of his neck, and ran him across the landing and down the stairs to the front door and the gravel drive to the gate.

  The improvised bomb had done a lot of damage
. It had blown the gate off its runners, knocked down part of the wall, killed one of the guards, strewn rubble and debris across the lawn and even shattered the glass in the front door. We ran across the scene of devastation and stepped out onto Tripoli Drive. Mohammed was silent, aside from a slight whimpering. I dragged him around the corner and ran him, stumbling, the hundred yards toward where I had left the truck. In the distance I could hear the thud of a chopper. It might have been two.

  I wrenched open the passenger door, shoved the 416 in Mohammed’s face and growled, “Get in!”

  He didn’t argue. He clambered in while I rammed another battery into the EMP. Then I slipped in behind the wheel and, keeping the lights off, I rolled slowly away from the devastated compound. Every cell in my body, every neuron in my brain, was screaming at me to floor the pedal and get the hell out of there. But I kept it to no more than fifteen miles an hour, rolling across the dirt with the window open, so I could hear the approaching helicopters.

  A flash of light in my mirror and I knew they had arrived at the house and were playing their spots over it. I glanced at Mohammed. He was staring at me in terror, but I could read his face. He was thinking that I was going so slow, he could jump from the cab and the choppers would save him.

  Jeet kune do is my preferred fighting style. It is all about non-telegraphic, explosive speed. And your primary target is always the tip of the jaw. Hit that, and the fight is over. He never saw it coming. I smashed my fist into his chin, his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped back in his seat.

  That was when I looked in the mirror again and saw that one of the choppers was peeling away from the house, moving in what was promising to become a grid pattern, searching for whoever had devastated the house. I figured the other was on the radio, calling for ground reinforcements. I slammed on the brake, jumped from the cab and vaulted into the back of the truck. Five minutes had passed and the light was green. I slammed my fist on the red button. The spotlights disappeared and the thud of the choppers stopped.