Jackknife

by Johnstone, William W.

  The wheels of Graham’s brain were still clicking over. “Carry permits?”

  “We’ll cross-reference the names on the list we come up with. There are bound to be some customers in there who are carrying handguns. But I imagine the terrorists are familiar with the laws here, and one of the first things they would’ve done was make a sweep for weapons and get everybody they could to give up their guns.”

  “Maybe some people managed to hide their weapons. If they did…”

  “If they did, then sooner or later we’re gonna have a gunfight in there,” Huckaby said, finishing the thought.

  CHAPTER 44

  Allison still couldn’t believe this was happening to her. Nate, her brain cried out to her. She wanted to be with her son. She wanted to go home.

  Burke must have felt the shudder that went through her. His arm tightened around her shoulders, and he said quietly, “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until they get everything worked out and let us out of here.”

  Was he just trying to comfort her, Allison wondered, or was he really that stupid? Those men were killers. They weren’t going to let anybody go.

  She was never going to see Nate again.

  Tears began to roll down her face.

  “Go ahead and cry,” Burke told her. “I’m right here for you.”

  At least they were sitting on the floor now instead of lying on it on their bellies. That was a little more comfortable. The terrorists had forced men to work at gunpoint, clearing merchandise away in certain areas to create open spaces where large numbers of hostages could sit. She suspected that there were at least a dozen of these enclaves—she remembered that word from one of her college courses and thought it fit here—in the store, with ninety to a hundred hostages in each one.

  Terry McCabe sat on Allison’s other side. She muttered, “We should have jumped them when some of the men were already on their feet. Our chances would have been better that way.”

  Burke had heard her. He gave a skeptical grunt and said, “Chances of what? Getting killed? The only smart thing to do is cooperate with them. They probably want to get out of here every bit as much as we do.”

  Allison doubted that. The man who was primarily responsible for guarding them didn’t look like he cared one way or the other. His dark eyes burned with the fanaticism of a man to whom life and death were the same thing. He never put down either of the two machine pistols he carried, and he looked like he would enjoy nothing better than to squeeze the triggers of both weapons and send leaden death spewing into the crowd of prisoners.

  A man who was sitting in the row behind them leaned forward and whispered to Terry, “Ma’am, you sound to me like you got the right idea. You reckon you could distract that fella?”

  Terry looked back over her shoulder. So did Allison. “Why?” Terry asked.

  “Because I got a .38 I managed to hide on one o’ the shelves when they come around yellin’ for us to give up our guns. Got my hands on it again while we were movin’ stuff.”

  “You’ve got it now?” Terry asked from the side of her mouth.

  “Damn right, pardon my French. If you can get that fella lookin’ somewhere else, I think I can draw a bead on him and put him down.”

  Terry hesitated. Allison didn’t know what she wanted the older woman to say. She hated their captors and wished all of them were dead, but if that hostage with the gun tried to shoot the man with the machine pistols and missed, there might be a bloodbath right here and now.

  “You’ll probably just get one shot,” Terry breathed.

  “I know. I won’t miss.”

  The man sounded confident—but scared. Allison couldn’t blame him for that. Even if she had known anything about shooting a gun, she was too shaky now to have any hope of hitting anything she shot at.

  Burke had been listening, too, and now he turned his head to hiss, “You’re crazy! You’re both crazy to even be thinking about such a thing! And you’re going to get us all killed!”

  “You got a better idea, mister?”

  “Yes. Cooperate. I’m sure the authorities are working on a solution to get us out of here right now.”

  “Trust in the government, eh? If those ol’ boys who were holed up in the Alamo last spring had done that, they’d all be dead now, wiped out by that rogue Mexican army general. The government can’t help us. It’s up to us to save our own lives.”

  “I think you’re right,” Terry said. “He has two machine pistols. If we can get our hands on those, we can all scatter and hide. It’s a big store. They can’t track all of us down. Whoever gets the guns can put up a fight, maybe take down some more of them, get more guns…”

  “Mom.” Ronnie was shaking her head, a terrified look on her face. “Mom, you can’t. You’ll get killed.”

  Terry managed to come up with a smile. “I won’t get hurt, honey. I’m just the distraction. I’ll hit the floor before the shooting ever starts.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Burke asked in a savage whisper. “You’re talking about throwing all of our lives away, and by God, I won’t let you do it!”

  Allison started to say, “What are you talking about?” But she only got the first couple of words out before Burke put a hand on the floor and started to lever himself out of his sitting position.

  “Hey!” he said. “Hey, Omar, or whatever your name is! Get over here. I need to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER 45

  It was night now in Pakistan. Lawrence “Fargo” Ford was in the embassy’s communications center, the most heavily shielded and most often swept room in the entire place. He was as certain as you ever could be that it was secure from any electronics eavesdropping. He had been here all evening, in constant touch with CIA Headquarters back in Langley, Virginia, getting reports on the situation in Texas.

  Ford had overruled all the doctors and practically hijacked an ambulance, bringing Brad Parker back to the embassy with him. Parker shouldn’t represent a threat to Hizb ut-Tahrir anymore, since he had already regained consciousness and passed along all the intel he had, but you never knew what those turban-wearing crazies might do. Parker seemed to have made the trip without suffering any further setbacks, and at least here at the embassy he would be safe from any more assassination attempts.

  Anyway, the plan hatched by the sheikhs who led Hizb ut-Tahrir was already under way. A series of vehicle bombings in Texas had wreaked havoc and death. That news had been flashed worldwide, followed by even more startling reports that terrorists had taken over a huge discount store called the UltraMegaMart.

  Ford remembered shopping in regular MegaMarts the last time he was Stateside, but he didn’t recall any UltraMegaMarts. Must be a new thing, he had thought when he heard the name.

  Sure enough, more intel kept coming in during the evening, indicating that today had been the store’s grand opening. It was packed full of holiday shoppers when the goons came in and started shooting.

  So now the authorities in Texas had a full-blown hostage situation on their hands, with hundreds of hostages, maybe even more. An UltraMegaHostage Situation, Ford caught himself thinking at one point. A bleak chuckle came from him.

  It wasn’t funny, of course, and he knew that. Lots of people had already died, including children. The terrorists had aimed directly at America’s heart—and hit it. Ford’s brief attempt at humor was just a case of trying to laugh instead of crying.

  The worst of it was that there wasn’t a damned thing Ford could do to help. All he could do was sit and monitor the situation at extreme long distance. To that end, he had established a secure computer link with Langley and networked it so that everything that came in from the field showed up here in Islamabad, too.

  Ford didn’t recall when he had eaten last, but he didn’t care. He didn’t feel the hunger. He sat there in front of a bank of computer screens and video monitors, coat and tie off, sleeves rolled up, his eyes behind the black-framed glasses always moving, flicking from report to rep
ort, from satellite feeds of U.S. network news broadcasts to intel from military and CIA surveillance satellites. The supercomputers at Langley were trawling through trillions and trillions of bytes from the Web, searching for anything that might be helpful to the people in Texas who were trying to come up with a way to get those hostages out of there safely.

  A list of names scrolled by on one of the monitors. A line of type at the top of the screen told Ford that these people were employees of MegaMart who had been scheduled to work today at the UltraMegaMart at the time of the attack. No telling if all of them were actually in there or not, but most of them probably were.

  The Company must have gotten a massive info dump from MegaMart’s computers, because information on store inventory began to scroll past Ford’s bleary eyes, along with a restocking list and a delivery schedule. Documents blinked into view for a second and then were gone. Ford reached up, about to take his glasses off and rub his eyes in weariness.

  He stopped short as a name on one of the documents jumped out at him. Then it was gone and he couldn’t call it back. The flood of info kept rolling along.

  Ford knew what he had seen, though. He sat forward in his chair, pulled a keyboard over in front of him, and began typing furiously as he got an encrypted e-mail ready to go through a seemingly endless series of secure servers to Langley. He had to confirm the information he had glimpsed so briefly.

  That took about twenty minutes, and when Ford was sure, he switched to radio transmission and talked to his bosses at Langley for another five minutes before they agreed to find out the cell phone number he wanted and patch him through to it.

  Ford didn’t know if this was going to do any good or not, but he figured that the odds in favor of the hostages had just gone up a little.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Sporting goods,” McCabe said.

  Stackhouse’s eyes lit up. “Oh, hell, yeah. Plenty o’ guns and ammunition there.”

  “Is there an access door, like the one in electronics?”

  Stackhouse frowned in thought. “It ain’t like I know every inch o’ every store,” he said. “But I remember signin’ off on the plans for this one…and I don’t recall there bein’ one.”

  McCabe nodded. “That’ll make it a little harder then. But not impossible. If we can take out the two terrorists back here in the stockroom, then all of us can make a rush for sporting goods and arm ourselves before the rest of those bastards can cut us off. It’s not that far.”

  “Sounds like you’re comin’ up with a plan after all, McCabe,” Stackhouse said with a chuckle. “How we gonna get rid o’ those two fellas?”

  “I’m still working on that,” McCabe admitted.

  Before he could think about anything else, he felt a familiar vibration in his shirt pocket. His eyes widened in surprise. He had forgotten all about his cell phone.

  And now it was about to ring.

  He and Stackhouse had left the door of the office open so they could hear if the terrorists started coming in this direction. Now that precaution was about to backfire on them. McCabe didn’t know if the sound of the cell phone’s ring would reach all the way to the other end of the stockroom, but he couldn’t take the chance that it would.

  He grabbed desperately for the phone, which was set to vibrate a couple of times before ringing. If he could just get it open in time—

  He didn’t have a chance to look at the display and see who was calling. He flipped the phone open just as the first note of the ring tone sounded and jammed it to his ear. “What?” he asked savagely, through gritted teeth.

  “Hey, Jackknife, old buddy. Hope I didn’t call at a bad time.”

  The shock of recognition jolted McCabe. Of all the voices he might have heard coming from his phone, this was just about the last one he would have expected.

  “Fargo?” he said.

  “That’s right, pal. Where are you?”

  “In a world of shit,” McCabe answered. “I’m inside the UltraMegaMart here in Texas. Turn on your TV,” he added dryly. “I’m sure you’ll see something about it.”

  “Oh, I know what’s going on, don’t worry about that. I assume since you answered your phone that you’re not a prisoner. Our towel-headed friends would have taken it away already if you were.”

  “That’s right,” McCabe said. “Where are you, Fargo?”

  “Islamabad,” Ford said. “Pakistan.”

  “I know where Islamabad is.” McCabe gave a grim chuckle. “I was hoping you were somewhere closer, like right outside this damned store.”

  “No such luck. I wish I wasn’t halfway around the world, too, so I could give you a hand. Got time for a sitrep?”

  McCabe had given situation reports to Lawrence “Fargo” Ford on numerous occasions in the past. Special Forces and the Company had an alliance that was uneasy at times, but for the most part they worked together without much trouble. Ford had functioned as the CIA liaison on several missions that McCabe and his team had carried out in several different Third World hot spots.

  Given their familiarity with each other, McCabe was able to fill Ford in very quickly on what he knew about the situation, which was admittedly not much.

  “If you’ve been monitoring U.S. news broadcasts,” McCabe concluded, “I’m sure you know more about what’s going on here than I do.”

  “You know about the bombings in Fort Worth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Those were just to get our attention. You’re right in the middle of the main part of the attack. It was planned and carried out by a sleeper cell of Hizb ut-Tahrir agents, led by Sheikh Mushaff al-Mukhari.”

  McCabe recalled attending briefings on Hizb ut-Tahrir while he was still an operator. The group hadn’t been a major player back then. Obviously, it had grown in power. He didn’t remember any mention of Mukhari, but he was sure the guy was your typical Islamic fundamentalist maniac.

  “Mukhari is on the scene, leading the attack in person,” Ford continued. “He and his friends sent out a video of their demands via a cell phone camera.”

  “Mukhari told you who he is?”

  “Yeah,” Ford said, “and one of the guys with him showed his face, too.”

  McCabe closed his eyes for a second and rubbed his forehead. That bit of news was bad, really bad.

  “All right,” he went on. “Do you know how many of them are in here?”

  “Best guess is around two dozen.”

  “How are they armed?”

  “Machine pistols are all that we’ve seen, except for the bombs at each entrance into the store.”

  “Bombs?”

  “Yeah, armed with motion sensors so they’ll detonate if anybody comes too close, and they have hostages sitting practically on top of them, too. There won’t be any SWAT teams rushing the doors, Jackknife. Nobody wants footage of hostages being blown up on the six o’clock news tonight.”

  McCabe thought about Terry and Ronnie. It was possible they were some of the hostages who had been placed near one of those bombs…

  He shoved those thoughts out of his head. He couldn’t afford to dwell on the danger that his wife and daughter might be in, because then fear for them might paralyze him. He had learned during many hazardous years to keep all his attention focused on whatever task lay in front of him next. Deal with one problem before worrying about the next one.

  “What do the terrorists want?”

  “More than they’ll ever get. All U.S. military off Muslim soil and all Western business interests in the Middle East turned over to the Caliphate, a new Islamic superstate they’re trying to put together. It’s impossible.”

  “Even if it wasn’t, it doesn’t matter,” McCabe said.

  “Yeah. What they really want is to hurt us even more than they already have.”

  Something else occurred to McCabe. “How did you know I was mixed up in this?”

  “Saw your name on some intel I was monitoring. MegaMart’s let Langley into their computers, and I’m hooked i
nto the network.”

  “Why? Because the plan came out of your part of the world?”

  “Yeah. In fact, it was hatched at a Hizb ut-Tahrir training facility in the mountains along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. One of our guys led a raid on the place and discovered the intel. You probably remember him. Brad Parker.”

  McCabe remembered him, all right. Parker was a good man. A little bit of a cowboy sometimes maybe, but still a good man.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Bunged up some, but he’ll be fine.” Ford paused. “Listen, Jackknife, I’m sorry we didn’t get the word out in time to keep this from happening.”

  “Yeah, so am I,” McCabe said. “My wife and daughter are somewhere in the store, too.”

  “Oh, Lord. I’m sorry, Jack. If there was anything I could do—”

  “You’d be right here doing it. I know. I may call on you for intel later.”

  “Sure. What are you going to do? You do have a plan, don’t you?”

  “Sort of,” McCabe said. “There are only two of the guys back here in the rear of the store. We’re going to take them out, free the prisoners in the stockroom, then see if we can reach the sporting-goods section.”

  “Guns and ammo,” Ford said, realizing what McCabe was getting at. “Better be careful. The bastards are liable to have explosives strapped to their bodies.”

  A grim smile touched McCabe’s mouth. “Head shots,” he said. “That’ll solve that problem.”

  “Yeah. Good luck, my friend.”

  “We’ll need it,” McCabe said. He closed the phone, breaking the connection between North Texas and Pakistan.

  “Who in blazes was that?” Stackhouse asked as McCabe slipped the phone back into his pocket—after turning off the ringer completely.

  “An old friend.”

  “And he calls you at a time like this to catch up on old times?”