Jackknife

by Johnstone, William W.

  “Y’all ready to go kick some terrorist ass?” McCabe asked.

  CHAPTER 49

  Every sort of high-tech surveillance equipment available to the FBI and the Texas Rangers was pointed toward the UltraMegaMart, so when more shooting erupted inside the store, the people outside knew about it. They heard it on their supersensitive sound pickups, and they saw the bursts of heat imagery on the feed from the spy satellite that had been moved into a geosynchronous orbit overhead.

  The shooting didn’t last long, but it caused a considerable amount of interest and excitement while it was going on, especially in the mobile command center parked about a hundred yards in front of the main entrance to the store. All the cars in the parking lot between the command center and the entrance had been towed away, giving the cameras and microphones a straight shot into the store.

  After a few seconds, the technician at the console where the satellite feed was coming in looked up at Walt Graham and said, “They seemed to have stopped shooting, sir.” The listeners at the audio posts confirmed that.

  “Do you think they’ve started executing the hostages, sir?” Eileen Bastrop asked her boss.

  Graham pondered the question, but not for very long, before shaking his head. “I think if they were going to do something that dramatic, they would have boasted about it first and made sure we knew what they were doing. No, that sounded to me more like somebody tried to jump one of them and got shot down for his trouble.”

  “Then they did kill a hostage, you think.”

  “Maybe, in a struggle. I suppose the guy could have been just wounded.”

  “But whoever it was, they weren’t able to overpower any of the terrorists,” Bastrop said.

  “Yeah,” Graham agreed. “If they had, the fighting would still be going on.”

  “TV networks have picked up on it,” one of the agents at a monitor reported.

  “Of course they have,” Graham said, unable to keep the frustration and disgust out of his voice. The media people always knew what was going on almost before the authorities did. Sometimes they did know before.

  Graham’s cell phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket, opened it, and identified himself. A look of surprise appeared on his normally impassive face. A lot of things were going on today to give his self-control some trouble.

  “Madame President, this isn’t a secure line,” he said after a moment, causing Bastrop’s perfectly plucked eyebrows to rise. “Yes, ma’am, we’re aware of it,” Graham went on. “We don’t know what happened in there, but our best guess is that there was some sort of brief struggle between the terrorists and the hostages…Yes, ma’am, it appears to be over now…We don’t know yet what it means, and at this point I wouldn’t want to speculate…”

  He shook his head at Bastrop, who understood the gesture to mean that her boss damn sure wasn’t about to tell the President of the United States that they thought some Americans might have just been killed in there.

  One of the techs swiveled away from his console and held out a headset toward Graham, who shook his head again and held up a finger to tell the man to wait. Whatever the guy had, it couldn’t be as important as talking to the President.

  “Yes, ma’am, we’re on top of it,” he assured her. “We have our top hostage negotiating team here, and as soon as the terrorists contact us again, we’ll attempt to establish some lines of communication…No, we won’t do anything rash, you can count on that…We want a peaceful solution to the crisis just as much as you do, ma’am…Of course. We’ll let you know right away if anything changes…Thank you, Madame President.”

  Graham closed the phone and grimaced.

  “What did she want?” Bastrop asked. Her chilly tone of voice made it clear what she thought of the current occupant of the White House.

  “She saw the reports on TV about the most recent shooting inside,” Graham said. “She’s worried that this is going to end badly.”

  “So am I. I think we should move this command center back another hundred yards or so.”

  Graham smiled humorlessly. “If they’ve got a pocket nuke or something like that in there, another hundred yards won’t make any difference, Eileen.”

  “I know, but what about conventional explosives?”

  “Too big and bulky. The terrorists couldn’t have smuggled them into the store if they were posing as shoppers, like they must have. It would take a truck bomb or something like that, and the whole parking lot has been swept. We’re dealing something small but nasty.”

  “Sort of like the Presi—”

  Graham held up a hand to forestall the rest of the comment.

  “Sir?”

  Graham looked around at the tech who had been trying to get his attention earlier. “What is it, son?”

  The man held out the headset again. “I’ve got radio contact here with someone at the American embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.”

  Graham’s forehead creased in a frown. “Pakistan?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Who’s on the line?”

  “An undersecretary named Ford?” The tech’s voice rose as if he were asking a question instead of stating a fact.

  Graham didn’t know the name, but he could think of only one reason a seemingly minor diplomat would be calling him from Pakistan on today of all days.

  He took the headset, settled it so that the buds were in his ears, and moved the mike in front of his mouth. “Special Agent in Charge Graham here,” he barked. “Talk to me, Mr. Ford. I assume you really work for our friends at Langley, rather than the State Department.”

  “That’s right, Agent Graham,” a voice drawled in his ear, sounding like the speaker was less than a mile away, rather than on the other side of the world. “My name is Lawrence Ford. It was one of my associates who discovered the terrorist plan aimed at the United States. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to deliver the information in time to prevent the attack.”

  “Well, if you’ve called to apologize, I appreciate it, but I’m a little busy right now.”

  “No, the reason I called is to pass along some more intel that might prove useful to you.” Ford’s tone of voice was crisper now. “You have an asset inside the UltraMegaMart that you probably don’t know about.”

  Graham cocked an eyebrow at a clearly puzzled Bastrop and said, “Oh? What might that be?”

  “A man,” Lawrence Ford said. “He used to work with me. His call sign is Jackknife…”

  CHAPTER 50

  Burke started shaking a few minutes after the shooting in which the man who’d had the .38 and the boy next to him had been killed. Terry wasn’t surprised. She had seen delayed reactions like that hit people before, when they had been involved in sudden, unexpected violence.

  Of course, in this case the violence wasn’t all that unexpected, Terry thought. After all, they were dealing with lunatics.

  But Burke had looked surprised that the terrorist named Hamed had killed two people so brutally, and without any sign of remorse. As hard as it was for Terry to believe, the lawyer seemed genuinely shocked that anyone would do such a thing.

  She would have been willing to bet that Burke’s parents had been antiwar protestors during the Sixties. The apple, as the old saying went, didn’t fall far from the tree.

  At least Burke had had sense enough to fall back on his ambulance-chasing shyster persona and hadn’t told Hamed the truth about why he got to his feet. If the terrorist knew that the hostages had been plotting against him, he might have killed even more of them, just as an object lesson.

  Burke sat with his head down, seeming to stare at his hands, which he held in his lap. His hands were trembling, Terry saw. Burke was taking deep breaths, almost like he was trying to hyperventilate.

  He was about to lose it, she sensed. She didn’t want that to happen. It couldn’t help anything.

  She put a hand on Burke’s arm and said in a low voice, “Take it easy. It’s all over now. No need to get upset.”

  “It�
��s not,” he replied, his voice shaking just as much as his hands. “It’s not over. He…he killed those people.”

  “That’s what he does,” Terry pointed out. “He’s a terrorist. Anyway, he killed a man earlier. Didn’t that tell you what sort of monster he is?”

  “It’s different,” Burke insisted. “I…I saw his eyes. He was thinking about…about killing Allison and me. All he had to do was squeeze a trigger, and he came so close…so close…”

  Terry remembered the old joke about how a liberal was just a conservative who hadn’t been mugged yet. There was a lot of truth to that, and Ellis Burke was a classic case of it. He was beginning to realize that he had been making excuses for a bunch of animals.

  Worse than animals really. Only man was capable of as much wanton cruelty as these terrorists exhibited.

  “Listen to me,” Terry said. “You’re alive. Allison’s alive. We can’t give up hope. You know the sort of people we’re dealing with now. You won’t make the same mistake again. They’re the enemy, Mr. Burke. They want us dead. All of us. And you can’t reason with them.”

  Burke’s gaze was bleak as he raised his head. “But…if we can’t reason with them…how can we hope to get out of here alive?”

  She knew he wouldn’t want to hear the real answer.

  Kill all of them before they can kill all of us.

  So she told him, “You just said it. We can hope.”

  Hope…and wait for another chance to strike back.

  There were fourteen guys in the stockroom who had been held prisoner by the two terrorists who were now dead. The dock foreman McCabe had spoken with earlier, when he arrived with his truck, was dead, too, his throat cut just as McCabe had supposed. The other fourteen men were alive and healthy, though.

  McCabe had had to stop them from stampeding toward the service doors at the rear of the stockroom. He had spotted small backpacks sitting in front of each of the large, roll-up doors, and knew from his conversation with Fargo Ford that those were probably bombs equipped with motion-sensitive detonators. McCabe had explained quickly to the men that they couldn’t take a chance on setting them off.

  There was no way out except through the store.

  Counting himself and Stackhouse, McCabe had sixteen men to deal with the threat of the terrorists. The odds were almost even.

  Except for the fact that the terrorists were heavily armed, of course.

  McCabe intended to do something about that.

  “We’re going to try to make it to sporting goods,” he explained to the men he and Stackhouse had liberated from captivity. “There are rifles and shotguns there, along with ammunition. Better stay away from the shotguns, though, with so many hostages around. We don’t want buckshot spreading and taking out innocent people.”

  “How are we gonna get from here to there without some of those bastards spottin’us?” one of the men asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” McCabe answered honestly. “That’s why I’m going to have a look first and see if I can get the enemy located, especially the ones right around this part of the store.”

  “They’re liable to be spread out all over the place,” Stackhouse commented.

  McCabe nodded. “Yeah, and that’s going to work against them. They took too many hostages. All they were thinking about was the maximum number of people they could kill. They didn’t stop to consider that they have to watch all those prisoners, and there are too many to pack them into a compact area.”

  “You sound like you know something about things like this,” one of the other men said.

  “A little,” McCabe admitted.

  Stackhouse snorted. “No need to be modest, son. Boys, McCabe here used to be Special Forces. He’s fought them terrorist sons o’ bitches before, on their home ground.”

  That revelation made the men look at him a little differently. McCabe didn’t care about that, except for the fact that knowing his background might make them more likely to follow his orders quickly and without question.

  “All right, we can’t afford to waste any time,” he said. “Some of the other terrorists may be coming back here to check in with these two. Lay low here while I have a look around.” He nodded to the man who held the second H&K machine pistol. “If any of them come back here, try to stay out of sight…but if you can’t, kill the bastards.”

  The man gave McCabe a grim nod. “Damn right.”

  McCabe went to the double swinging doors and crouched so that he was below the level of the Plexiglas windows. He raised his head enough so that he could take a quick look through one of the windows.

  His line of sight ran up an aisle between the shoe department on his left and something else on his right. Crafts? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t know the layout of this store, although Stackhouse had given him a quick verbal sketch of it from memory. He was sure, though, that sporting goods was to his right as well, past several other sections.

  From where he was, McCabe couldn’t see all the way to the front of the store. Shelves full of merchandise cut off that view. But in the area he could see, no one was moving. He eased one of the swinging doors open about six inches and listened intently.

  He heard talking, but it wasn’t very close to his position. He couldn’t make out the words. After taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open some more and stepped out of the stockroom into the main part of the store.

  He gazed left and right, along the wall dividing the stockroom from the rest of the store. A narrow aisle ran along that wall, at the back of the shoe section to his left and crafts—he’d been right about that—to his right. Again he saw no movement.

  The terrorists must have herded the hostages into groups in central locations, probably in the main aisles of the store. They would have swept their areas already to round up any stragglers. They probably felt like they had everyone under their guns by now.

  Making no noise even in his thick-soled work boots, McCabe started to his right in a crouching, gliding pace, machine pistol held ready in his hand. He moved past shelves full of needlework and crochet kits, bins filled with skeins of brightly colored yarn, packages of beads and baby doll heads, hot glue guns, and paint-by-the-numbers sets. Such things didn’t mix too well with terror and death, but they were here anyway…

  The crafts section turned into bedding—sheets, pillowcases, blankets, and comforters—then a stretch of plastic garbage cans, laundry baskets, ironing boards, plastic storage tubs, and the like. McCabe cat-footed past them, and suddenly he found himself at the rear of several aisles full of camping equipment.

  He had reached the edge of the sporting-goods section. He looked ahead of him, past the fishing gear, and saw the gleam of glass-fronted cabinets with rifles in them.

  That was when the realization hit him that those cabinets would be locked up, as would the ammunition. Employees who worked in this area would have the keys—but those employees had all been taken hostage and rounded up. McCabe could break the glass and get to the guns that way, but the noise that would make was bound to draw the attention of the terrorists.

  He was pondering what to do about that problem when a woman came around a display of exercise equipment a few feet away, started toward him, then stopped short at the sight of him. Her eyes widened in shock, her mouth opened to shout an alarm, and she jerked her hand up to thrust the machine pistol in it at McCabe.

  CHAPTER 51

  McCabe was moving before the woman was. His senses were keenly alert, and his muscles were taut and ready for action. He knew that anybody he ran into moving around the UltraMegaMart would in all likelihood be an enemy. Even if he happened to encounter one of the hostages, he knew he would have to move quickly to prevent their surprise from giving him away to the terrorists.

  So even as the woman’s gun came level, McCabe reached her and clamped his left hand around the weapon, pinning the slide so that it couldn’t fire. At the same time he drove his right fist into her jaw. He was holding the machine pistol he had taken from one of th
e dead terrorists in the stockroom, which just made the punch that much more potent.

  The woman’s knees buckled. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets, and McCabe knew she was out cold.

  He got his right arm around her and kept her from collapsing to the floor. She let go of the machine pistol, so McCabe had no trouble taking it from her hand. He headed quickly for the counter behind which the gun cabinets were located, half-dragging, half-carrying the unconscious female terrorist.

  No question she was one of them. She wore jeans and the same sort of thick jacket as the others McCabe had seen, plus her long, raven-black hair and olive skin testified to her Middle Eastern heritage. Of course, she could have been Italian or something like that, McCabe supposed…but the gun was kind of a dead giveaway, and so was the fact that her first instinct had been to try to shoot him.

  All those things added up to the fact that she was one of the enemy.

  Once they were behind the counter where they wouldn’t be easily spotted, McCabe lowered her to the floor. Her eyelids were already fluttering. He knew she wouldn’t be unconscious for very long.

  The smart thing to do would be to cut her throat while he had the chance.

  But McCabe wasn’t made that way. Besides, she might come in handy. Not as a hostage, because the fanatics behind this attack wouldn’t care whether she lived or died, but as a possible source of information.

  He unbuckled her belt and pulled it out of the loops on her jeans, then used it to tie her wrists together. He pulled her knees up and lashed her ankles to her wrists, being none too gentle about it and not worrying about how uncomfortable she might be.

  She groaned with returning awareness.

  McCabe lifted her jacket, pulled her shirt loose from the jeans, and used his pocketknife to cut a strip from the bottom of it. Then he cut off another piece of material from the shirt, wadded it up, and jammed it into her mouth, tying it in place with the strip of cloth. His movements were swift and efficient, and he had her hog-tied and gagged in less than a minute.