The Blood of Patriots

by William W. Johnstone

  At least I’ll have a little warning if he comes to check, he told himself. The man inside would have to turn on a light to see.

  He took the rifle from his back and started down, using the butt to poke ahead of him for anything that wasn’t solid ground. He was making good progress—he had covered about fifty feet, by his estimation—and was feeling pretty good about it when he caught his foot under a root. It snagged just enough to drop him to one knee. He bent to that side, the pain of his broken rib causing him to suck in a long, painful, wheezing breath. It was not the kind of sound made by any nocturnal animal and a flashlight came on within moments. It stabbed the inside of the cave before spearing into the night.

  Ward lowered himself to the ground, onto his left side. Gunmen who couldn’t see their target tended to shoot high because they shot from the hip or shoulder; this position would present as low a profile as possible.

  Each breath was like being stuck with a long needle.

  Got to thinking you were Superman, didn’t you? he thought bitterly. You don’t need to rest busted ribs—no, not you!

  Drawing air deeply through his mouth to keep from moaning, he slowly brought the rifle around with his right arm. He couldn’t site it so he just propped it against his shoulder. He didn’t relish firing: he would only be able to put a bullet in the vicinity of the man. The kid, in response, could chop about a hundred yards of woodland into splinters.

  The light probed the darkness, falling short of where he was. The kid was standing just inside the opening.

  Smart, Ward decided. You don’t want to expose yourself to attack from above.

  The question was, how far would the kid go? Would he return to the cave or would he take some kind preventative action, risk spraying the area with gunfire?

  Ward heard the distinctive clack of the AK-47 being fitted with a loaded magazine. That was followed by the small click of the selector lever being adjusted. The kid was probably going to threaten to shoot and, if no one answered, he’d step out firing in a continuous sweep: up to the left or right, ahead, then up the other side. Overkill was all these young, edgy, inexperienced punks knew. At six rounds per second the odds were pretty fair that one bullet in the volley would hit him. The detective had to get the drop on the guy and there was only one way he could think of. He drew a deep breath and said:

  “Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom You have favored.”

  They were the words burned in his brain by that scumbag vendor in Battery Park. As Ward had expected, the utterance from the Koran got him a momentary hall pass. Gunmen were unpredictable but Muslims were not.

  The kid was silent for several seconds. Then, still inside the cave, he shouted, “Who is out there?”

  Ward did not reply.

  The young man started forward cautiously. Ward could hear the dirt crunch with each tentative step. He saw the front of his boots emerge from the cave before the young man stopped.

  “Who are you?” he repeated. “Answer me!”

  Ward was going to have to say something. “It’s me,” he said weakly, not having to fake the pain. “We ... we were ambushed.”

  “What?”

  “The man from New York ... he was waiting ...”

  That was all Ward said but he was watching the cave intently. He aligned the barrel of the gun with the opening as best he could. If the kid came out to help him, he’d have to shoulder the AK-47 and Ward would have about a second or two.

  The young man came outside a few paces but not to help him. The boy covered one ear with his hand. In the other hand Ward saw an additional glow, a small one. He knew what that was. The kid was calling someone.

  There was no time for stealth or further deceptions. With the boy outside—possibly for better reception—Ward moved to the south a few paces to where he knew there was a tree. He felt his way through the dark with an extended hand and leaned against the trunk for support. He raised the rifle. A hundred feet away, his ear pressed to the phone, the kid didn’t hear him.

  All he heard was the single shot that struck his shoulder and knocked him down.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The kid landed hard just inside the mouth of the cave. Ward hurried to where he lay writhing and swearing. The detective ignored him for a moment. The phone had dropped behind him, just inside the cave. Ward picked up the device and listened. The wind was howling around him; that was why the kid had risked stepping outside. The mouth of the cave was like a turbine. Ward pushed a palm to his other ear so he’d be able to hear. Because it was late, the call had gone into someone’s voice mail; he heard the tail end of the salutation and a familiar, silky smooth voice.

  Gahrah, you two-faced prick, Ward thought.

  Ward killed the call. Then he composed a text explaining that he’d hit the call button by accident, and signed the kid’s name, Saeed, which he pulled from an earlier text. Before sending it, Ward checked the old text further to see if there were some kind of special code. There wasn’t. He pressed send. Then he put the phone on a cooler and looked down at the kid.

  “How ya doing?” Ward asked.

  Blood was pushing through the white shirt, around young fingers which were scratching pitifully at the wound. Ward picked up the AK-47 by the strap, flicked the safety on using his fingernail, and carefully lay the gun over his shoulder. He leaned his own rifle against the cave wall and looked around. He found a bottle of water on a large, oblong crate. He grabbed it and knelt beside the young man. The kid twisted and kicked his feet on the ground in an effort to get away.

  “Thirsty?” Ward asked.

  “You bastard!” the boy said through his teeth.

  “That may be, but I’m all that stands between you and bleeding out,” Ward said. “You gonna let me save you or not?”

  The kid spit at him. The saliva landed back in his own face.

  Ward sat back on his heels to keep his back straight. “You gonna tell me what you were doing up here?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Sure, sure. You got pride. I’m impressed. You got a mother, Saeed?”

  Fury filled the young man’s eyes. Ward didn’t know if he took that as a threat or if he was simply offended that an infidel had mentioned the sainted woman.

  “I only ask,” Ward told him, nodding toward the phone, “because I’ll need to know which number to punch when you’ve headed off to Paradise—which’ll be in about a half-hour, I’d say. I’m sure she’ll want to know.”

  The kid looked away. He was huffing hard, trying not to show pain, apparently resigning himself to torture. He was also shivering from the cold; the cave was naturally cooler than the outside and was made even colder by catching the valley wind. But the boy showed no intention of yielding. Ward decided to wait until he had bled a little more, had a little less fight in him, before trying to patch him up—or interrogate him. From what he could see, the wound was high and clean. The detective felt bad, but then the kid was out here waving around a weapon that looked like it had been through a few wars.

  Which it probably has, the detective thought. He picked up the kid’s flashlight and rose. A kerosene lamp on the floor revealed some of what was in here, none of which was designed to make friends. There was a collection of handguns and rifles hanging from a pegboard, along with knives and even a trio of hand grenades.

  “You’ve made a bunch of back-alley scumbags very happy, haven’t you,” Ward said. “The question is, why?”

  He turned the flashlight on the area below the pegboard. A pair of fold-out chairs served as desks. There was a laptop on one and a Koran on the other. The kids obviously knelt here while working.

  “Guess you’re used to kneeling,” Ward said as he noticed two shelves stacked high with tightly rolled prayer mats. He went over and counted them. There were six on each. “A dozen jihadists.”

  He shined the flashlight into the darkness beyond. The sight was not unexpected but it chilled him all the same. A rope ladder was strung up one w
all, to the cave roof some fourteen feet above. Several feet behind it hung a thick rope reaching halfway to the floor. “Climb the ladder, transfer to the rope, climb down, drop to the floor. Jump back up to the rope, climb, swing like Tarzan back to the ladder, then down.” To the left of them was a chin-up bar fixed between two outcroppings of rock. “You got yourself a little terrorist training camp here, don’t you?” He continued to explore with the flashlight. Also against that wall were bedrolls, two life-size martial arts dummies—hard rubber torsos and heads mounted on a pole, scuffmarks showing where they’d been struck with blackjacks—and, hanging from hooks, the most chilling sight of all: three sets of street clothes stuffed with straw.

  “Scarecrows for bayonet practice,” Ward muttered. And for the first time he felt sick. There was a man, a woman, and a child with holes in each.

  He turned back to the computers, saw Saeed trying to claw his way to the pegboard. Ward walked over and drove a heel down on the back of his right hand. The young man screamed.

  “You practice on children, you twisted son of a bitch? You can’t afford to let them scream so you cut their little straw throats?”

  Ward lifted a heel and broke the man’s left hand as the knuckles on his right were turning reddish-purple. Saeed’s second scream was more of a loud sob. Ward could’ve stood there and done that all night, up one arm and down another. But he had other work to do. He went to the laptop, knocked the pack of cigarettes off the top.

  “So, families,” Ward said. “Is this just a general education or are you planning on attacking families out here?”

  The laptop was still on and Saeed was still logged in. Ward was almost disappointed. He had made a bet with himself that he could get the password with kerosene, a cigarette lighter, and Saeed’s head.

  There were local maps, mostly of Basalt and Aspen, with bookmarked sites for tourist spots. But the biggest file was on the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport.

  “You’ve got photos and schematics but no schedules,” Ward thought aloud. “What’s that about, Saeed?”

  Ward looked through the photos. They were mostly ordinary shots taken inside the terminal, a few exteriors, and then shots of people moving en masse toward exits with security personnel going the other way. He looked at the date stamp.

  “Eight days ago,” the detective said. There was something bobbing around in his memory—then he remembered. The car rental agent said something about a security scare the previous week.

  A test run?

  With sudden, stomach-twisting fear, Ward saw dots starting to come together.

  He pulled Police Chief Brennan’s card from his wallet and, rather than drain his own battery, used Saeed’s phone to call her private number.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  For the briefest moment, John Ward’s New York paranoia struck: he had visions of the few bad cops he had known in his life, in his father’s life. He was momentarily gripped with the fear that Police Chief Brennan would answer, “Saeed—is there a problem?”

  She did not. She sounded alert as she said, “Bet you have a wrong number.”

  Ward’s throat relaxed. “No, Chief Brennan. This is John Ward and I have the right number.”

  It took a moment for her to gather her thoughts. “But the wrong phone. Who the hell is Saeed Kamyab?”

  “He’s a guy who was babysitting what looks like a terrorist training camp up here in the mountains,” Ward said.

  Again, she took a moment to process that. “In my mountains?”

  “Buried deep,” Ward told her. “It’s the reason the Muslims wanted the Randolph place. Not just because it was a high point for a mosque, but because it was a wormhole to this little slice of hell.” Ward was looking among the other supplies the men had brought up, packed in a trio of duffel bags. “Look, I can explain that later. I’m in the cave, Saeed is my prisoner, and you have to promise you and the troops won’t come rushing up here.”

  “One thing at a time,” Brennan said. “This Saeed—is he hurt?”

  “Not a bit,” Ward lied. He couldn’t tell her the truth. He was betting she’d be forced to send a Medivac chopper up to get him. Seeing or hearing that might scare the others away. He started rummaging through their supplies.

  “What’s his condition?” the police chief asked.

  “Semi-conscious,” Ward said as he found what he was looking for: a first aid kit. “Chief, we have a situation. The place is armed for an assault and there are all kinds of images of the Aspen airport on their laptop.”

  “There was a false alarm there last week,” she said.

  “I know. I was just looking through the photographs. I have a feeling someone was testing their response apparatus.”

  “Aspen?” she said. “Why would terrorists strike there?”

  “Because—it’s Aspen?” Ward said.

  “Yeah, but it’s off-season and tourism is down. Even the glitterati are going elsewhere.”

  Ward didn’t buy that argument. The NYPD ran a focus group on potential terror targets. The majority of respondents said they wouldn’t care if celebrities or jet-setters got hit, but celebrities and jet-setters would be all over the airwaves talking about a Vegas or Atlantic City or some other pleasure spot if it did get clocked. It would be in the news for weeks, a jihadist’s dream.

  “Regardless,” Ward said, “there has to be a reason for all the surveillance and we need to find it. Do you have any of the specifics of the alert last week?”

  “I’m looking it up now,” she said. “Threat analysis from the FBI Denver—terminal evac and flight lockdown triggered by the discovery of a 7.62-by-39-millimeter casing on the floor of the main terminal.”

  “That’s an AK-47 shell,” Ward said. “They’ve got a bunch of those bad boys up here.”

  “Security cams were unable to ascertain who dropped it or where,” Brennan went on. “Early conclusion was that a hunter, probably meeting someone on a flight, had it on his person without knowing. Planes were allowed to take off and the terminal was reopened. Fingerprints turned up negative. Initial judgment stands.”

  “That’s bull,” Ward said. “Someone was testing the system. They were exposing the sky marshals on-site. Some of the images here, I saw two civilians with handguns helping passengers out.”

  They were both quiet for a while.

  “Any kind of calendar in the computer?” Brennan asked.

  “Nothing that I found. But it doesn’t look like we’re dealing with a seasoned operation,” Ward said. “But they are homegrown, which is trouble. And something else.”

  “What?”

  “Saeed was trying to call Gahrah when I stopped him.”

  “John, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Why?’

  “Gahrah and his cronies own over a dozen properties in Basalt,” Brennan said. “The man’s got the stealth jihad working for him, and pretty effectively. Why would he do something like attack the airport?”

  “He may not be doing it,” Ward said. “I’ve never dealt with a criminal enterprise that’s monolithic. Maybe there’s a radical cleric behind it, the imam here or whoever is funding them. Gahrah may not have a choice when it comes to supporting it.”

  “All right,” she said, thinking quickly. “I need to get some tech guys working on that computer.”

  “Fine, but in the meantime we’ve got to shut this training camp down—preferably when a bunch of them are inside. That lessens the chance that they can pull off whatever they’re planning at the airport.”

  “Any idea how many people are involved?”

  “They’ve got a dozen prayer mats, but I only saw five men here tonight. There isn’t a helluva lot of room. They obviously come here in shifts.”

  “You said they’ve got guns?”

  “Plenty, with the serial numbers burned off the ones I checked. You’ll have reason to hold them.”

  “All right. What do you want to do?”

  “Well, we’ve only got till sunrise to
set something up,” Ward said. “Chances are someone will be checking in come morning—sooner, if he was supposed to check in. When they can’t raise Saeed, someone’ll come and check it out.”

  “Can you get him to play ball with us, buy us time?”

  Ward looked at Saeed. He was barely moving. “I don’t think so. Tell you what, Chief. I’ll get the laptop to you—”

  “How?”

  “The kid’s Arctic Cat is here,” he said. “I can take that and be back before sunup. Why don’t you concentrate on the airport angle and—”

  “You’re trying to sideline me, detective.”

  Busted, Ward thought. “Not sideline,” he said. “Delay. Do you really want to take a bunch of teenagers into custody and question them with their lawyers hovering over you?”

  “That’s how it’s done.”

  “Right, but I’m looking at bayonet dummies up here—and one of them’s a child. Is that a line you’d ever cross?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Exactly. Normally, I’d agree with you. But this isn’t ‘normally.’”

  Brennan did not reply.

  “Chief, they’re ramping up something deadly and we need to find out what it is.”

  “John, are you telling me you’re gonna work Saeed over?”

  “I don’t know,” the detective answered honestly. “I was thinking of calling his mom, having her get it out of him. Intel says these kids are more afraid of their mothers than they are of Gitmo.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Ward wasn’t sure how far she’d go, even with an attack of some kind in the offing. That was one reason he had not told her where the cave was located. She had to realize that too.

  “Bring me the laptop,” she said. “And the prisoner.”

  Now it was Ward who hesitated.

  “You took him down, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Not entirely,” John answered.