Jackknife

by Johnstone, William W.

  The sheikh nodded, and Shalla turned, moving the cell phone slowly and steadily so that the camera lens caught the scene. She paused on a group of a dozen men and women, some of them shoppers, the others MegaMart employees. They were on their knees on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Behind them stood one of the terrorists, a machine pistol in his hand. He wore no mask. His dark, bearded face was exposed for the world to see.

  Shalla moved the phone again so that it showed one of the main entrances of the store, just a few feet from where she and Mukhari stood. Another half-dozen hostages sat there cross-legged, their arms pulled behind their backs uncomfortably and their wrists tied together. Directly in front of them was a small but powerful bomb, the components of which had been smuggled into the store under the jackets of several of the terrorists and assembled only after they had taken over the place.

  Mukhari cleared his throat again and Shalla turned the phone back toward him.

  “You have seen for yourselves that I speak the truth. I would warn the authorities that the bombs placed at every entrance are armed and equipped with motion sensors that will detonate them if anyone approaches them too closely. Such a blast will instantly kill the hostages placed near them.” The sheikh smiled. “So storm the place if you will, but know that if you do, you will be killing your own people.”

  Mukhari grew more solemn. “Now, as to what we want…it is quite simple really. The United States must immediately withdraw its warships from the Persian Gulf and cease its unlawful interference with the affairs of the sovereign state of Iran. In addition, all U.S. military forces must be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia and all other Muslim countries. There must be no American boots on Islamic soil. Also, Americans engaged in business in Muslim countries will depart immediately, and all American business interests in those countries will be turned over to the Caliphate established by Hizb ut-Tahrir. These demands also apply to the military and business interests of all other Western nations, not just America. The Caliphate, the new Islamic order, must be completely free of the taint of Western corruption and godlessness.” Mukhari smiled again. “It is a new day, the first day of the holy Caliphate that will rule over all of Islam and, in time, the world, forever erasing the stench of the godless. Meet our demands with no delay, or else all the hostages in this place will die and it will be destroyed in cleansing fire. Allahu akbar!”

  Shalla closed the phone, ending the transmission.

  “Do you think they got all that?” the sheikh asked.

  Shalla nodded. “They got it. Now, what will they do about it?”

  CHAPTER 42

  The Oval Office was crowded again. The President sat in her chair, watching the TV monitor that had been wheeled in front of the big desk. In chairs that had been arranged in wings that curved away from the desk were the usual suspects: the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor, Attorney General, Director of the FBI, Director of the CIA, Secretary of Homeland Security, White House Chief of Staff, and White House Press Secretary. Everybody who was anybody in the decision-making process, in other words.

  A council of war, although the President would not have wanted to hear it described as such, given her antiwar background.

  The President’s husband slouched in his usual chair in the corner, eyes heavy-lidded with apparent weariness, but actually alert and taking in everything. From where he was he could see the TV screen.

  As the image of Sheikh Mushaff al-Mukhari faded, only to be replaced by a grim-faced network anchor, the President muted the sound and waited. Every head in the room swung toward her, but no one spoke. Clearly, they were all waiting for her to take the lead.

  “Well?” she said after a moment, unable to keep the slight tremor out of her voice. “Ideas?”

  Again, a strained silence filled the Oval Office, broken at last by the Secretary of Defense saying, “We can’t withdraw all of our forces from the Middle East. We just can’t.”

  “Can’t,” the President repeated, “or just choose not to?” She looked at the Chairman of the JCS. “How long would such a withdrawal take?”

  The man shook his head. “Days at best,” he said. “More likely weeks. Maybe as long as a month.”

  “Those terrorists aren’t going to squat in that store for a month!” the Vice President said.

  “I agree,” the President said. “But maybe if we began the process of withdrawing our forces, that would be enough of a show of good faith to convince them to release the hostages. Some of them anyway. Do we know how many there are?”

  “It’s impossible to get an accurate count,” the FBI Director told her. “But estimates place the number upward of a thousand shoppers. Counting the employees, there could be as many as fifteen hundred innocent people being held prisoner in there.”

  The Secretary of Homeland Security added, “And by the time they get through counting the bodies at the sites of those bombings, the death toll from them will probably be over a hundred.”

  “Then even if we lose the store, it won’t be as many people as died on 9/11,” the President mused. “It won’t be as bad as what happened on Bush’s watch.”

  The President’s husband grimaced. Nobody in the room said anything about the callousness of the President’s comment, or the political tunnel vision that had prompted it, but he knew that some of them were thinking it anyway.

  He’d have to have a talk with her before she went on the air to issue a statement. If she got in front of the network news cameras and said, Yeah, this is bad, but what happened when the other guy was President was worse, the country would turn against her.

  “This isn’t the first controversy you’ve had to face, ma’am,” the Press Secretary pointed out. “Our polls took quite a bruising over that John Howard Stark business, then all the trouble in Little Tucson, the mass kidnapping in Del Rio, and then that whole Alamo mess was the worst yet.” He swallowed as she glared at him, and went on. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it has to be said. A lot of the American people don’t think that you’re really on our side. They believe that you’d rather side with our enemies.”

  “That’s absurd,” she snapped. “I always do what I think is best for America.”

  “Of course. But a lot of people don’t agree with what you think is best anymore.”

  The fella didn’t lack for guts, the President’s husband thought. Talking to her like that…telling her the truth when she didn’t want to hear it…was a good way of getting taken to the woodshed.

  “The people elected me, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But the poll numbers don’t look good for your reelection.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t worry about that now. I have to deal with this problem today.”

  That was unusually nonpolitical of her, her husband thought. Ever since she had taken office, everything had been about getting reelected and hanging on to power. He knew her well enough to know that power was like food and drink to her. She couldn’t live without it.

  “What about the business angle?” she asked. “Can we convince American companies that have holdings in the Middle East to divest themselves of them? Maybe that would be enough to satisfy the terrorists without the military withdrawal.”

  “You’ll never get them to go along with it,” the Vice President said. “You’re talking about billions and billions of dollars at stake.”

  “Can we force them to comply? Maybe issue an executive order—”

  The President’s husband had to risk speaking up. He did a lot of traveling and fund-raising, and he knew the CEOs of all the top companies in the United States on a first-name basis. He said, “If you do that you’ll have a real crisis on your hands. You can’t force an American company to turn over its holdings to a bunch of terrorists.”

  “American companies have been nationalized by foreign countries before,” she replied.

  “Yeah, and in those cases it was a fore
ign government doin’ the nationalizing, and we didn’t like it. What you’re talking about would be us doing it to our own people. They won’t stand for it.”

  “They stand for having to work more than half the year just to pay all their taxes,” the President pointed out.

  “But it took more than forty years to reach that point. The process was slow enough so that people just shrugged and went along with it, when they noticed at all.”

  The President fidgeted with a pencil on the desk. “Then if we can’t give the terrorists what they want, how can we convince them to release the hostages? Would it do any good to promise them amnesty? Perhaps provide them with a safe way out of the country?”

  “What about a reprimand or even sanctions against Israel for that raid on Iran?” suggested the Vice President. “That would certainly show our good faith—”

  “What the hell is wrong with you people?” The sharp voice of the National Security Advisor cut through the room. “You’re sitting around here trying to figure out the best way to let those terrorist bastards win!”

  The President glowered at her and said stiffly, “We have the lives of all those hostages to consider.”

  “Then with all due respect, ma’am, you should be trying to figure out a way to rescue them and kill the criminals who have taken over that store, instead of asking yourselves how bad a screwing do we have to take in order to convince them to play nice.”

  “You are out…of…line,” the President grated.

  “No, ma’am, the thinking in this country is out of line,” the NSA snapped back. “No sooner had we gone into Iraq than the press and a certain segment of politicians began carping about what our exit strategy should be. There’s only one acceptable exit strategy in a war. Win the damned thing! Let the losers worry about exit strategies!”

  The President was on her feet, shouting. “You think we shouldn’t have pulled out of Iraq?”

  “I think we shouldn’t have gone in unless we were prepared to win! But once we were there, retreating just turned the country over to the bad guys and made them stronger than ever. The previous administration made the rest of the world mad at us, yes. But your administration, ma’am, has made the rest of the world sneer at us in contempt.” The NSA crossed her arms and matched the President’s icy glare for icy glare. “I’d rather have the rest of the world mad at us rather than contemptuous of us. And I’d sure as hell rather have our enemies afraid of us instead of scornful of us, knowing that we don’t have the stomach to put up a real fight anymore.” She blew her breath out through her nose in a frustrated sigh. “Of course, that appears to be the truth…at least in this room.”

  “You’re fired,” the President whispered.

  The NSA reached for her briefcase. “No, ma’am. I quit the minute you started talking about how we could best go about giving in to the terrorists’ demands. You just didn’t know it yet, you prissy little bitch.”

  With that she turned and stalked out of the Oval Office, leaving a stunned silence in her wake.

  Finally, the President slumped back in her chair. She took several deep breaths, visibly struggling to bring herself under control. When she had, she said, “All right, now that we’re all on the same page again, let’s find an answer to this problem. Options?”

  No one answered.

  “For God’s sake, somebody has to have an idea!”

  The director of the CIA spoke up for the first time. “Madame President, I don’t have any suggestions regarding how you should handle this crisis, but a thought did occur to me while we were watching the tape of the sheikh’s statement.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He told you his name and showed you his face. The other terrorist we saw wasn’t disguised in any way either. We should be able to figure out who he is without any trouble.”

  “So?” the President snapped.

  “Even when they’re operating in their own countries,” the top spook said, “terrorists will usually wear hoods or masks of some sort, to conceal their identities. These guys don’t care if we know who they are.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  The President’s husband answered before the director of the CIA could, because the same thought had occurred to him. “It means they’re not planning on coming out of there,” he said. “Whether you give them what they want or not…this is a suicide mission and always was, right from the start. They want to be martyrs. They want to die for the cause of jihad.”

  “My God,” the President breathed. “How can you negotiate with people like that?”

  No one said anything, but they all knew the answer to her question.

  CHAPTER 43

  “Talk to me, Captain,” Walt Graham said.

  Captain Jarrod Huckaby of the Texas Rangers said, “Well, sir, we’ve taken control of the situation at the request of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department and the Fort Worth Police Department, who share jurisdiction up here. We have Department of Public Safety SWAT teams and Texas Rangers surrounding the place. We have our hostage negotiators on hand, but so far those fellas in there aren’t answering any of the phone lines we’ve tried.”

  “Those bastards aren’t interested in negotiating,” Graham said. “There’s not any compromise in them.”

  “Well, sir,” the stocky Ranger captain said, “I think they’ll find that there’s not much back-up in us either.”

  Graham managed not to grin. This wasn’t the time or place for it. But he knew exactly what Huckaby meant. Graham was a Fed, but he had been a Texan long before he went to work for Uncle Sam. To the type of man Graham had always been, that meant a lot.

  They were in the Rangers’ mobile command center, a long black motor home packed to the gills with high-tech equipment and the men and women to operate it. On a monitor next to where Graham and Huckaby were standing, a video image had been frozen. It showed a gun-wielding terrorist standing behind a line of hostages on their knees, with their hands clasped behind their heads. Graham reached over and tapped the screen.

  “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “They don’t care if we identify them,” Huckaby said.

  “Exactly. They plan on dying. Doesn’t matter what we do, they’re not coming out peacefully.”

  Huckaby’s broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Then we might as well go on in and root ’em out,” he said. “Can’t be more’n a few dozen of ’em.”

  “They’ll start killing the hostages,” Graham warned.

  Again Huckaby shrugged. “Gonna kill some of ’em anyway. Might as well minimize the casualties.”

  The look in the Ranger’s eyes told Graham that Huckaby wasn’t as resigned to those deaths as he was trying to sound. He just couldn’t think of anything else.

  And a part of him was probably afraid that the Feebs were going to waltz in here and take over. After all, the SAC from the Dallas office of the FBI was already on the scene. Sure, so far all that Graham had done was ask for a sitrep, but how long could that last? The Feebs weren’t known for their restraint.

  “What about the explosives at the entrances?” Graham asked. “They’re supposed to have motion detectors on them that will trigger them if anyone comes too close.”

  “The bomb squad guys think that might be a bluff. They’ve been studying the apparatus through binoculars, and they don’t think the bombs are really that sophisticated.”

  Graham frowned. “It doesn’t strike me as likely that those men would be bluffing under these circumstances.”

  “We can find out easy enough.”

  “How?”

  “Robot,” Huckaby said. “Roll one of those little suckers right up to a bomb and see if it goes off.”

  “And what happens to the hostages who are sitting nearby?”

  Huckaby shook his head. “Won’t be enough of ’em left to scrape up with a spoon. But we’d know whether the terrorists are bluffing or not.”

  Graham’s eyes narrowed. “I hope you’
re just speaking hypothetically, Captain.”

  “For God’s sake!” Huckaby exploded. “You really think I’d blow up those folks? We’re just brainstormin’ here, Agent Graham.”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d say. Let’s come up with something else.”

  Both men drew a blank, though, as they stood there amid the glow from a dozen monitors and the low-pitched chatter of the Rangers working in the command center. One of the doors opened, letting in a slice of pale, autumn sunlight before it quickly closed again behind Agent Eileen Bastrop.

  “Anything new to report?” Graham asked her.

  Bastrop shook her head. “Negative, sir. Hasn’t been another peep out of them, and they’re staying away from the entrances. None of the snipers have been able to spot anybody except the hostages who were placed near the explosive devices.”

  “What about around back?”

  “We can’t see through the service doors because they’re solid, but heat sensors detect the presence of a dozen or so individuals right behind each door. They probably have bombs with them, too, and if we roll the doors up, the devices will detonate.”

  “But that’s just a guess,” Graham said.

  It was Bastrop’s turn to shrug. “But an educated one.”

  Graham clenched one big hand into a fist and smacked it into the palm of the other hand. “Damn it! The hostages probably outnumber their captors fifty to one. Why don’t they just…”

  “Just overpower them? If the terrorists are all armed with automatic weapons, they might be able to kill a couple of hundred hostages before they went down. Nobody wants to be one of the unlucky ones who dies. Sooner or later it may come to that, but right now everybody’s still hoping they’ll get out of this alive somehow.”

  Graham looked over at Huckaby again. “Any chance of putting together a list of the people who were in there?”

  “We’re working on that already,” the Ranger said with a nod. “All we have to go by, though, are citizens who call in and say that their friends or loved ones planned to go to the UltraMegaMart today and they want to know if they’re all right. We’re assuming that the ones we can’t locate are still in there.”