Jackknife

by Johnstone, William W.

  Nobody wanted to be one of the ones who died, though, so the prisoners slowly began to cooperate, crawling together in one of the main aisles. The terrorist stalked along, checking the aisles in shoes and crafts, herding the hostages together like sheep.

  Terry, Ronnie, Allison Sawyer, and Ellis Burke were already in the main aisle, so they didn’t have to move. As they lay there, Terry muttered, “We shouldn’t be doing this. We shouldn’t be cooperating.”

  “Then what should we do?” Burke asked, keeping his voice barely above a whisper. “He’ll kill us if we don’t go along with what he says. You know that.”

  “If we all rushed him at once—”

  “He’d kill half of us,” Burke snapped. “Do you want your daughter to die, Mrs. McCabe?”

  Terry just glared at him and didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway,” Burke went on, “you heard the shooting in the other parts of the store. This guy isn’t alone. Even if we got him, the others would get us. He’s probably got a bomb strapped to him, too, so if we jump him he’ll just set it off and blow us all to kingdom come!”

  “A…a bomb?” Allison said.

  Burke had his arm around her. He tightened it and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this all right. We’ll just play along with that maniac and his friends, and eventually they’ll let us go.”

  “How do you know that?” Terry asked.

  Even in this situation, the lawyer managed to smirk. “Because I know how negotiations work. They’ll ask for something. They’re bound to want something, or they wouldn’t be doing this. When they get it, they’ll let us go.”

  “How do you know the authorities will give them what they want?”

  “Please. Nobody’s going to risk the lives of the hostages. This isn’t Israel, you know.”

  No, thought Terry, it certainly wasn’t. Since the blame-America-first crowd had taken over the government, with the willing assistance of the mainstream media, it was entirely possible that the administration would try to appease the terrorists and give them whatever they wanted.

  But Terry didn’t believe for a second that giving in would save the lives of the hostages. Above all else, terrorists wanted to make a point. They valued symbolism over substance. You would have thought that the liberals would understand that, since they felt the exact same way themselves, but that wasn’t the case. They prided themselves on being so rational—even though they really weren’t—and thought that everyone else should be like that, too. That was why they believed that talking could solve any problem.

  Talking solved nothing when you were dealing with lunatics. Terry understood that. That was why she knew that Burke was wrong.

  The authorities, from the local level all the way up to the White House, could give the terrorists everything they wanted—and the sick bastards would still be capable of killing everyone in the UltraMegaMart, including themselves. There was only one way to ensure that the innocent people in here lived to see another day.

  And that was to kill the sick bastards first.

  She knew her husband would be thinking the exact same thing.

  “Jack,” she whispered, so low that no one else could hear it, even Ronnie, “be careful.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “Who the hell are you, mister? Are you one o’ them?”

  Relief went through McCabe as he realized that the only accent in the voice behind the gun pointing at him was pure Texan. There was something familiar about it, too.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  The stranger who crouched in the shadows alongside him grunted as he lowered his gun. “Can’t see all that well back here, but I didn’t think you was one o’ them camel-humpers. I can tell by your voice that you ain’t. What’s your name?”

  “Jack McCabe. I’m a truck driver for MegaMart.” McCabe didn’t say anything about being ex-Special Forces.

  “One o’ my boys, eh?”

  “Your boys?” McCabe repeated, even though he had already figured out who the man with the gun was.

  “Yeah. I’m Hiram Stackhouse.”

  McCabe grinned in the shadows. “Yes, sir, I know. We’ve met a few times.”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Jack McCabe.”

  “Good Lord. I remember you now. I tried to hire you for my security force, but you wasn’t havin’ none of it. Said you just wanted to drive a truck.”

  The conversation was being carried out in low whispers, inaudible to the terrorists who were still shouting orders at their prisoners at the far end of the stockroom.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” Stackhouse went on.

  McCabe was about to answer when there was a sudden commotion at the far end of the stockroom. They couldn’t see what was going on, but they heard yelling in a foreign language that McCabe recognized as Arabic, followed by a scuffling sound, a heavy thud, and a muffled groan that abruptly turned into a gurgling cry. That noise trailed off into nothingness with a sigh.

  McCabe’s jaw tightened. He knew what that last sound meant. He had heard it often enough, back in the day. He had caused it more than a few times during his career as an operator.

  It was the sound of some poor bastard dying from a slashed throat.

  “What—” Stackhouse started to say, but McCabe stopped the older man with a hand on his arm.

  In English now, one of the terrorists shouted, “You see what will happen if you do not cooperate! If you fight back, or if you disobey orders, you will die like this dog of an infidel!”

  Stackhouse whispered in a shocked voice, “Bastards killed one o’ my boys.”

  McCabe gave him a grim nod. One of the workers who had been rounded up must have tried to jump the terrorists and had been murdered for his efforts. Even though McCabe hadn’t seen what happened, he had been able to follow the sequence of events from the sounds. The MegaMart employee had struggled with his captors, been hit on the head, slumped half-conscious to the floor of the stockroom…

  Then his head had been jerked up, probably by the hair, and a knife drawn across his throat, slicing deep into the flesh. McCabe closed his eyes for a second, but it didn’t help. In his mind, he saw the sudden spurt of blood from the jugular, a crimson fountain that quickly formed a coppery-smelling pool around the dead man.

  Once seen, images like that were never forgotten. McCabe knew he would never forget the ones he had witnessed. They were part of him, like his DNA.

  But he had planned to spend the rest of his life without ever having to see anything like that again.

  That would teach him to make plans. All too often, life had other ideas.

  McCabe was sorry for the man who had just died, but he and Stackhouse—and all the other captives—had their own problems. He forced his mind back to that and leaned closer to the billionaire entrepreneur.

  “We can’t stay here,” he whispered. “If they conduct a better search, they’ll find us.” He nodded toward the near end of the stockroom, where a wall had been erected, behind which were offices. “Let’s see if we can get in there. They’ve done a sweep of the offices already, so maybe they won’t check them again for a while.”

  Stackhouse nodded. On hands and knees, they crawled along the narrow space behind the mountain of crated-up TV sets.

  They only had to cover fifty yards or so, but it was a long fifty yards, McCabe thought. About halfway there, they had to cross a twelve-foot-wide opening where two of the double swinging doors opened out into the main store. The doors were closed at the moment, but each of them had a large Plexiglas window set into it. If one of the terrorists happened to be on the other side of those doors and happened to glance through the clear Plexiglas at the wrong time…Well, it was an unlikely possibility but a possibility nonetheless.

  “Don’t waste any time getting across there,” McCabe told Stackhouse. “And stay low.” He was struck by the irony of him giving orders to the man who paid his salary, a man who was worth so much more than McCabe was that the
difference seemed astronomical.

  Stackhouse didn’t seem to think anything of it, though. He nodded and did as McCabe told him, crouching to stay below the windows in the swinging doors and darting across to the point where the narrow aisle continued along the wall, behind shelves and stacks of assorted merchandise.

  McCabe waited until Stackhouse was safely concealed back there again, then hurried across himself. Luckily, the terrorists were still making noise at the other end of the vast stockroom, blustering and threatening and generally lording it over their prisoners.

  McCabe wished he could do something to help those guys, but for now they would have to wait. He and Stackhouse needed to get somewhere safe, so they could catch their breath and start putting together a plan for dealing with this threat.

  Stackhouse had a revolver of some sort; McCabe had seen it, had stared down the barrel of it, in fact. The only weapon McCabe had was a pocketknife.

  So there were two of them, armed with one gun and one knife, against a couple of dozen terrorists with automatic weapons and, for all McCabe knew, bombs.

  Shouldn’t be that difficult, he thought wryly.

  The terrorists had left the door open into the stockroom supervisor’s office. The upper half of the wall that looked out into the stockroom was glass, but the bottom half was solid. McCabe and Stackhouse went to their hands and knees to crawl in there. To reach the door they had to come out into the open. A central aisle that had been left in the piles of merchandise ran all the way from one end of the stockroom to the other, so if the terrorists turned around and looked, they would be able to see the two men slipping into the office.

  From the shouting that was still going on down at the other end, McCabe figured the terrorists were still haranguing the hostages. He slid past Stackhouse and ventured a look. Both men, who wore jeans and thick jackets, had their backs turned. Without taking his eyes off them, McCabe flipped a hand at Stackhouse and said quietly, “Go.”

  Stackhouse went, scurrying through the door into the office without wasting any time or making a sound. McCabe was right behind him. He turned to his left as soon as he was through the door and sat with his back pressed against the half-wall under the window. Stackhouse was beside him.

  McCabe breathed a little easier now, even though the overall situation was as perilous as ever. As long as he and Stackhouse stayed low, the terrorists couldn’t see them without walking all the way down here from the other end of the stockroom. If they did that, McCabe and Stackhouse would hear them coming, because footsteps echoed in the cavernous room whenever somebody wasn’t trying to be careful and not make any noise.

  “Well,” Stackhouse said, “we’re in quite a fix, ain’t we, McCabe?”

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “Those boys are Ay-rab terrorists, aren’t they?”

  “They’re Islamic, all right,” McCabe agreed, “but they may not be Arabs. Hard to say. They were speaking Arabic, but that doesn’t mean much. Nearly all the terrorist groups have members who speak Arabic.”

  “Sounds like you know somethin’ about this sort o’ shit. Used to be a spy, didn’t you?”

  McCabe grunted. “I was in Special Forces. I didn’t work for the Company. And how the hell do you remember anything about me? You probably have hundreds of thousands of people on your payroll.”

  “Yeah, just about,” Stackhouse agreed. “But I pay special attention to fellas with security backgrounds. Fella who’s worth as much money as I am needs to have good people around him. People who’re loyal. Hard-asses, too. I figured you’d qualify…if you hadn’t been so damn stubborn about wantin’ to drive a truck.”

  “I was retired from the other stuff,” McCabe said, even though he didn’t really think he owed Stackhouse any explanations.

  “Well, you ain’t anymore,” the older man said. “I reckon you’re right back in that line o’ work.”

  McCabe was afraid that Stackhouse was right. There was probably no one else inside the UltraMegaMart who was as qualified as he was to fight back against the fanatics who had taken over the store.

  To satisfy his curiosity, he asked Stackhouse, “What are you doing here anyway? I thought you weren’t supposed to be on hand for the celebration until later in the day.”

  Stackhouse chuckled. “I like to show up early. Helps me weed out employees who don’t like to work anytime except when the boss is around. That keeps ever’ body on their toes.”

  McCabe looked over at him. Stackhouse didn’t give the appearance of a man worth billions of dollars, a man who was in charge of the biggest retail organization in the world, a man whose business contributed more to the country’s economy than any other private enterprise in history.

  No, in boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, Hiram Stackhouse looked more like a farmer or rancher than an entrepreneur. He was in his seventies but still healthy and vital, with a ruddy face and a shock of silver hair. He could be brusque and domineering, but he also had a folksy charm that made people like him even when they didn’t always agree with everything he did. And not one penny of his fortune had been inherited. He had built his business empire himself, from the ground up.

  “Where are your security people right now?” McCabe asked. A man like Stackhouse wouldn’t travel without a complement of bodyguards.

  Stackhouse grimaced as he jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the far end of the stockroom. “They got rounded up out there with the others,” he said. “I think I’m payin’ those boys too much.”

  “How come the terrorists didn’t get you, too?”

  “I was back in the can, takin’ care o’ business.”

  “They didn’t check the bathroom?”

  “They did,” Stackhouse said, “but not before I’d climbed up on one o’ the walls around the stall, pushed up a ceilin’ tile, and climbed into the crawl space.”

  “How did you know to do that?”

  “I heard the shootin’ and the yellin’ and knew something was mighty wrong. I just figured it was another kidnappin’ attempt. My bodyguards have fought off a couple o’ those over the years.” Stackhouse shook his head. “Turned out to be even worse, though. I’d barely got that ceilin’ tile back in place when I heard somebody come in, and then a couple of seconds later he hollered somethin’ in some language I couldn’t understand. That Arab lingo you were talkin’ about, I imagine. I knew then the shit’d really hit the fan. I stayed where I was for a few minutes and then climbed down, figured I’d take a look and see just how bad things really are. I was workin’ my way down to the other end o’ the stockroom when I came across you.”

  “What were you gonna do, take on a whole gang of terrorists with one revolver?”

  “Well, I hadn’t quite figured it out yet. I tell you one thing, though—it really chaps my ass to see them towel-heads runnin’ around givin’ orders and hurtin’ my people.”

  McCabe didn’t like it either. He gestured toward the gun that Stackhouse had tucked behind his belt and said, “Why are you carrying that anyway? Because of those kidnappers you mentioned?”

  “Yeah.” The old man grinned. “And because I like packin’ heat.”

  McCabe couldn’t help but chuckle. He had always figured that Stackhouse’s colorful personality was largely a put-on, a show for reporters and news cameras, but clearly, what you saw was what you got with Hiram Stackhouse.

  McCabe wouldn’t have mind having a whole bunch of Stackhouse’s private army here right about now. Then things might have been different.

  Or maybe not, if the terrorists had explosives. That would put a whole new angle on things.

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  McCabe raised his eyebrows. “You’re asking me? You’re the billionaire here.”

  “Son, I know about makin’ money and sellin’ folks what they need for lower prices than just about anybody. I don’t know diddly-squat about fightin’ terrorists. That’s your department.”

  “Well, I do
n’t know yet,” McCabe said. “I haven’t figured it out.”

  “I wouldn’t spend too much time thinkin’ about it. The rest o’ the world knows by now what’s goin’ on in here. A jillion cops’ll be stormin’ the place soon, and then all hell’s gonna break loose.”

  McCabe shook his head. “Nobody’s going to storm the place, not with a thousand or more hostages inside. Not until they’ve found out what the terrorists want and have stalled for as much time as possible.”

  “What do those bastards want?”

  McCabe shook his head. “I have no idea. We may be the last to know. But I’m sure they’ll be telling the world very soon, if they haven’t already.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Shalla Sahi held up the cell phone, angling it so that its camera lens caught the lean, bearded image of Sheikh al-Mukhari. The sheikh said, “They are seeing this at the television station now?”

  “They are,” Shalla replied with a nod. “I spoke to their news director just a moment ago. He can see and hear you, and your message is being recorded.”

  Mukhari smiled thinly. “Thank you, my dear.” He looked directly into the lens and said, “I am Sheikh Mushaff al-Mukhari. I am a proud member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation. I am speaking to all of you out there in the godless nation of America. Today we have struck a blow for the glory of Allah and the cause of Islam. Today you have felt only a small sample of the pain that my people have felt for decades because of Western and Zionist aggression and imperialism. The new crusade launched against my people by the infidels must now come to an end. My fellow freedom fighters and I are in control of this…this satanic monstrosity you call an UltraMegaMart. Everyone in here is now our hostage, and if our demands are not met, they will all die.”

  The sheikh paused and cleared his throat. He and Shalla stood near the front of the store, at the end of a seemingly endless row of checkout stands that were now empty of clerks and shoppers.