Jackknife

by Johnstone, William W.

  The analytical part of Ford’s brain took in all the details of the scene, processing them quickly and efficiently. Four men, two wearing white doctors’ coats, two in turbans. All of them armed with automatic weapons. Ford didn’t see any grenades, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have some. The alcoves were separated by solid partitions that ended about a foot from the ceiling; the fronts had curtains over them that could be drawn for privacy. One of Parker’s guards was firing around the corner of that partition, while the other man was down, sprawled at the foot of Parker’s bed while blood leaked from the wounds that had turned him into a sieve. The killers must have gotten him with a couple of bursts of automatic fire, but the other guard had managed to get behind some cover and try to hold them off.

  Ford’s arrival changed the odds, but he and the guard were still outnumbered two to one. Ford grabbed the bullet-riddled cart and shoved it at the nearest assassin, the one who had turned and opened up on him when he burst into the ICU. The cart’s wheels still worked. It crashed into the gunner, causing him to stumble to the side, and that gave Ford a chance to center the pistol’s sights on the man and send two rounds sizzling into his chest. The guy howled in pain, spun around, got tangled up with the cart, and fell to the floor with a loud clatter as the cart overturned on top of him.

  Ford rolled into the nearest alcove. It wouldn’t give him much cover, but in a firefight any cover was better than none. From the corner of his eye he saw that an old woman lay in the bed in the alcove, surrounded by tubes and beeping equipment and worried relatives. Ford wished he could reassure them that everything would be all right, but he didn’t have time and anyway he didn’t know that was true.

  Everything might still go all to hell.

  Events took another turn for the better, though, when the surviving guard put a pair of slugs into the belly of one of the assassins. The killer doubled over with a groan, dropping his gun. He went to his knees and then toppled over on his face. The odds were even now.

  And guys like these didn’t care for a fair fight. Cowards at heart, like all terrorists, the sick bastards preferred to send others to do their killing for them, usually women and kids with several pounds of explosives strapped to their bodies, poor deluded fools who could be persuaded that they should die for the glory of Allah. Ford’s lips drew back from his teeth in a grimace of outrage and disgust as he surged out of the alcove and fired again and again and again at the shocked assassins, riddling them with lead. The bullets threw them back against the counter of the nurses’ station. They hung there for a second and then slowly slid down to the floor as the life died in their eyes.

  They wouldn’t be waking up in paradise, Ford thought as his heart pounded wildly in his chest and he lowered the gun. They would be shaking hands with the Devil in hell instead…and he wasn’t sure but what even that was too good for the sons of bitches.

  “M-Mister Ford?” The voice came from the surviving guard, a Pakistani security officer named Sharezz. In the echoing silence that followed the fury of battle, it sounded strange to Ford’s ears. “You are all right, sir?”

  Ford glanced down at his light-colored suit, which was rumpled and dirty from rolling around on the floor, but didn’t seem to have any bloodstains on it. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Sharezz, I’m okay. What about Parker?”

  Ford started in the direction of the alcove, but before he could get there a nurse hurried past him. Even here in the hospital, the women wore the baggy dresses and the head coverings, but the tunic this woman wore over her dress had the crescent symbol on it that denoted medical personnel. Ford supposed that she had been huddled behind the counter of the nurses’ station while the shooting went on.

  At the last second as she darted into the alcove, Ford spotted her hand coming out from under her garments with a knife in it. She wasn’t going to check on the patient after all. She was hurrying to kill him while she still had the chance.

  “Sharezz, look out!” Ford yelled as he lunged toward the alcove. The warning came too late. He heard a grunt of pain, then a thin, gurgling cry. As Ford reached the partition he saw Sharezz slumping backward, pawing futilely at his throat while crimson flooded from the gaping wound where the knife had slashed it open. The blade was held high in the woman’s hand now, poised to swoop down into Brad Parker’s chest as he lay there unconscious on the bed.

  Ford shot her in the back of the head. Wasn’t time to do anything else. If he’d made a grab for the knife, he would have been too late. A body shot might have left the woman conscious enough to finish the killing stroke. He had to put her down, fast.

  The knife dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers as blood and brains sprayed over the bed and the medical equipment around it, as well as the patient lying there. The woman fell against the side of the bed and sprawled on the floor, next to Sharezz, who had collapsed in the corner and now sat in a pool of blood as his head drooped forward over his ruined neck. Ford knew he was dead.

  So was the female assassin, the nurse who was undoubtedly working with Hizb ut-Tahrir, if she wasn’t a full-fledged member of the group.

  But Brad Parker was still alive, as the steady beeping of the monitor hooked up to him indicated. His pallid face was speckled with blood from the woman. And as Ford stood there, shaken from all the violence, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth in a gesture of revulsion for all the killing, necessary though it had been…

  The machine started beeping faster.

  Ford’s eyes widened. He had a rudimentary knowledge of medical gizmos like this, and the readouts and graphs on the machine told him that Parker’s pulse, respiration, and blood pressure were increasing. He stepped around the corpse to get closer to the bed and leaned over the injured man. “Parker?” he said. “Brad, you hear me, old buddy? Parker?”

  With a weak flickering of the eyelids, Brad Parker’s eyes opened. They didn’t focus at first, but then they locked in on Ford and he husked through dry lips, “F-Fargo? That you? Wh-what’s goin’…on here? Sounded like…thunder…”

  “Nothing to worry about, pal,” Ford assured him. Just an ICU full of dead bodies. Ford’s fingers were working automatically now, sliding a fresh clip of ammunition into the pistol in case more would-be killers showed up. He went on. “I know you just woke up, Brad, but we’ve gotta talk. You were telling me about what Hizb ut-Tahrir is going to pull in the States. You said there was gonna be a terrorist attack, but you didn’t say where. You’ve got to tell me where, Brad.”

  Parker might pass out again at any second. Ford had to get that vital intel from him while he could. They were already out of time—

  “D-Day after Thank…Thanksgiving,” Parker rasped.

  Ford grimaced. It was already Friday morning in the United States, anywhere from 10:30 to 7:30, depending on the time zone involved. Although Parker hadn’t been able to reveal the exact time of the terrorist attack, they already knew the day. Now they needed the location, so they could start to prevent it if there was still time.

  “Where, Brad?” Ford asked in a desperate half-whisper. “Where?”

  “T-Texas,” Parker got out with a struggle. “Mega…Mart…Ultra…Mega…Mart…”

  With a sigh, his eyes closed again. He was still alive, the machines testified to that, but he was unconscious again.

  And Ford was left standing there saying to himself, “UltraMegaMart? What the hell?”

  He knew what MegaMart was, of course, but he’d never heard of an UltraMegaMart. Somebody in Washington would know, though, or could find out, as soon as Ford got back to the embassy and sent a radio message bouncing off a satellite.

  He just hoped the warning would come in time for those folks in Texas, who had no idea of the threat looming over their heads.

  CHAPTER 30

  McCabe had arrived at the giant MegaMart distribution center at Alliance Airport about ten minutes before eight o’clock. The sprawling complex of warehouses wasn’t actually on airport property but adjoining it; everybody
talked about the distribution center as if it were part of the airport anyway, since they were next-door neighbors, so to speak.

  Even though McCabe had been looking forward to the time off, this unexpected job wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t think it would take more than thirty minutes or so, start to finish. He just drove, he didn’t load or unload. Hiram Stackhouse paid other people to handle those jobs.

  Somebody else could bring the empty truck back to the distribution center, too. As soon as somebody at the UltraMegaMart signed for it, McCabe was done. He would call Terry on her cell phone and find out where he was supposed to meet her and Ronnie, and then he planned to enjoy spending an hour or two shopping with his wife and daughter.

  Surely an hour or two was all it would take for them to finish their shopping, he told himself. After all, they had gotten up a long time before the chickens and had planned to be at the store when it opened. They would have more than a two-hour head start on him. Once they were done, they could run him back up to the distribution center, where he would get his pickup and head home to spend the rest of the weekend doing some serious vegetating.

  That was the plan anyway.

  But as happens so often with plans, things began to go wrong with it almost right away.

  The trailer he was supposed to take wasn’t loaded when he got there. “Sorry, McCabe,” the warehouse supervisor told him without really sounding very apologetic about it. “We’ve been workin’ pretty much around the clock for weeks now, tryin’ to get that damn store stocked. You wouldn’t think it could hold so much. But we’ll have you loaded and ready to go as soon as we can.”

  “How long are we talking about?” McCabe asked.

  The supervisor shrugged. “Half hour, maybe less.”

  That wasn’t enough time to go and do anything and then come back, McCabe decided. “I’ll just hang around here and wait then,” he said.

  “Use my office,” the supervisor suggested. “Pour yourself some coffee and read the paper. We’ll let you know when you’re ready to roll.”

  McCabe nodded his thanks and headed for the row of offices along one side of the vast, noisy warehouse. The walls of the office wouldn’t keep all the racket out, but at least it wouldn’t be quite so loud in there.

  He poured that cup of coffee the supervisor had mentioned and sat down on an old, cracked leather sofa to glance over the front page of the newspaper that was scattered on the sofa as well. At home he had brought in the paper but hadn’t even glanced at it. He knew what was going to be on the front page. Tensions in the Middle East, with both sides rattling their sabers…and if you read between the lines, somehow all the trouble would be America’s fault.

  Sure enough, that was what he found, along with a story about continued Iranian protests over the presence of American warships in the Persian Gulf. McCabe was a little surprised that the President had sent the fleet to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. It wasn’t like her to do anything except back down from every potential confrontation. He supposed it was because any disruption in the flow of oil would cause gasoline prices to skyrocket again. No politician wanted that, especially a President who would be facing an election in less than a year.

  McCabe tossed the front page aside in disgust. He had put in his time in the front lines of the shadow war, and like most veterans of that conflict, he felt an immense love for his country but an instinctive distrust—and often disgust—for the politicians who ran it. Most of them had no idea what was really going on behind the scenes.

  And if they knew the truth, knew how close the country had come to utter disaster on numerous occasions, most of them would shit their pants.

  McCabe picked up the sports section instead, and started reading about how the Cowboys had beaten the Redskins in the Thanksgiving Day game the day before. Now that was interesting.

  Engrossed in the story, he didn’t really notice how much time was passing until he happened to glance at the clock on the wall of the supervisor’s office and saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. He grimaced. That half-hour wait had almost doubled.

  McCabe tossed the paper aside and was about to get up and go looking for the supervisor to ask him what the holdup was, when the door of the office opened and the man himself came in, a smile on his face.

  “Got you loaded and ready to go, Jack,” he said. “Sorry for the delay.”

  McCabe shrugged. “I guess it couldn’t be helped.”

  “That’s right. The Old Man wants this to be the best store ever. Not just the best MegaMart, mind you. But the best store, period.”

  McCabe had no trouble believing that. Hiram Stackhouse was larger than life and wasn’t going to settle for second-best in anything. He liked media attention, too, and in McCabe’s opinion, Stackhouse carefully cultivated the colorful, eccentric image he presented to the world.

  The old guy wasn’t all hat and no cattle, though. He had plenty of guts, and had proven it a couple of years earlier by getting himself right in the middle of a dangerous ruckus out in Arizona, when a small town near the border had found itself overrun by a criminal gang from Mexico. The bastards had shot up a MegaMart there and drawn the wrath of Stackhouse down on their heads. During the final showdown between the town and the gang, the Old Man had shown up with his security forces, using them like a private army as he stepped in to fight on the side of the good citizens of Little Tucson. Stackhouse had risked his own turkey neck, too, driving into the besieged town in his fancy car with the longhorns mounted on the front, his old-fashioned ivory-handled six-gun blazing.

  What a character. McCabe had met Stackhouse several times and wouldn’t mind seeing the Old Man again. Stackhouse was supposed to be at the grand opening of the UltraMegaMart today, but McCabe wasn’t sure exactly when he was going to show up. If McCabe missed him, that would be too bad, but he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

  He left the office, walking through the warehouse and out the huge doors at the far end to the loading docks. The trailer he was supposed to take was waiting for him there, with the back door still rolled up. McCabe glanced in at the cargo. He never drove without making sure the truck was loaded properly. A load that shifted while he was on the road could cause some definite problems.

  Satisfied, McCabe nodded to the warehousemen, who rolled the door down and dogged it closed. He gave them a wave, then walked to the cab of the eighteen-wheeler and climbed into it, settling himself in the comfortable driver’s seat. He had taken this truck out before, so he was familiar with it. He ran through a mental checklist, sort of like an airplane pilot getting ready to take off, he thought. The dashboard of the truck wasn’t as complicated as the control panel of an airliner, but there were things to check as he fired up the engine.

  Of course, the biggest difference was that if his engine died, it wouldn’t be at thirty thousand feet. He could just pull over onto the shoulder. McCabe hated flying. He hated jumping out of a perfectly good airplane into pitch darkness where enemies were waiting to kill you even more, but he had done that on numerous occasions. Surviving things like that made it easier not to sweat the small stuff of everyday life, like having to work for a while on a day when you thought you would be off from work.

  The time was a few minutes after nine o’clock when McCabe drove out of the distribution center. The sun was shining, and it was a chilly but beautiful autumn day. He thought about calling Terry to let her know that he was on his way, but he didn’t really see any point in doing that and decided not to. Calling her could wait until he was at the store and had delivered his load. Then he would be through with work and ready to spend the rest of the day with his family.

  The UltraMegaMart was less than five miles from the distribution center and it should have taken only a few minutes to drive there. McCabe suppressed a groan as he reached the interstate and saw that that wasn’t going to be the case today. Traffic was at a near-standstill on the highway, both lanes just inching along in a sea of brake lights. McCabe knew why it was that way, t
oo.

  Everybody wanted to go shopping.

  His mind worked quickly, trying to figure out an alternate route. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t one, he admitted to himself a few moments later. He could circle around on some back roads and come up toward the store from the south, but the traffic from that direction would be just as bad, if not worse. Like it or not, McCabe thought, he was just going to have to be patient and fight his way through the traffic jam.

  It took him five minutes just to get through the entrance ramp and onto the highway itself. He bulled his way into the line of vehicles. He knew people resented truckers for doing things like that, but it wasn’t his fault that what he was driving was ten times bigger than what they were driving. Let them try to maneuver one of these behemoths and see how they liked it.

  Once on the highway, McCabe tuned the cab’s radio to a local sports talk station and listened to the hosts and callers rehashing the Cowboys’ victory the day before. Winning any game was sweet, of course; winning the annual Thanksgiving Day game was sweeter still. But beating the Redskins on Thanksgiving…well, short of playoff victories, it didn’t get much better than that.

  The traffic’s pace picked up a little, and when McCabe checked the speedometer he saw that he was going ten miles per hour. At that blazing rate, he’d reach the UltraMegaMart in thirty minutes or so. He looked at the clock on the dash. Nine twenty. He ought to be there by ten. He wasn’t running that awful late.

  Shouldn’t be any big deal.

  CHAPTER 31

  At nine twenty-five, a dark-haired man pulled into the parking lot of a bank in one of the suburbs just north of Fort Worth and brought his late-model car to a stop in a place right next to the sidewalk, less than fifteen feet from the front door. The bank wasn’t very busy yet this morning. The man got out of the car and walked to a strip shopping center about fifty yards away, as if he intended to run a few errands first and then return to the bank to finish up his business.