by Ahern, Jerry
“It’s me!”
Her father looked around, put an arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek, then turned back to business. Paul put his hands on her waist, kissed her lightly on the lips, said, “You look pretty,” and turned away and went back to business.
Annie looked at the vacuum cleaner thing with the video monitor. In the monitor, she could see tire treads and all sorts of scratches and scrapes which, evidently, this gadget was picking up off the surface of the road. With the naked eye, she could see a gouge here and there or some other irregularity but nothing so detailed.
She shrugged her shoulders, opened the flap on her purse and reached inside for the scarf she carried there. She turned her face into the wind, let go of her hair for a second, then caught it up again, this time knotting the scarf into her hair at tne nape of her neck. It worked the first time and now she had at least one hand free. She stepped up behind her husband, stood on her tiptoes, looked over his shoulder and asked into his ear, “So, what are you guys doing?”
“Looking for skid marks, trying to get tire impressions, give ourselves something concrete to go on.”
” ‘To go on’? You been watching old ‘Dragnet’ videos or something?”
” ‘Miami Vice,’” her father supplied. “No, actually, there are footprints leading up from the beach indicating eleven men-two of whom were apparently injured but not seriously-and one woman landed here in the predawn hours.”
“He’s not kidding,” Paul supplied.
“Come on. Advanced Man-Tracking 401’s in session,” her rather said. He started toward the beach and Annie fell in beside him. As always when they walked together, if he detected that she was having trouble keeping up-which she was as soon as she got onto the sand-her father slowed his pace and slightly narrowed his stride.
Her shoes were the problem, flat sandals which were bogging down in the sand. “Wait a minute, daddy,” Annie said. “Give me your arm.” She leaned on her father’s forearm and stepped out of the sandals. “There.” She caught them up in her left hand, letting go of her dress. Barring a sudden up-draft, the worst that could happen was that her father, who’d changed her diapers when she was a baby anyway, would see her legs.
They walked on for about twenty-five yards until they were near the edge of the surf.
“Stop here,” John Rourke said. He squatted down over the damp sand. “The wind would have erased most impressions in the dry sand, but here we still have some.
She stepped into the edge of the surf, the water cold against her bare toes.
“Bend down and take a look at this, kiddo,” John Rourke directed. Annie tucked her dress up close under her thighs as she crouched beside him. She saw impressions of varying sizes and shapes. He started tracing one with his finger. “They were clearer before the wind picked up and pushed the surf, but you can see there’s a difference between this heelprint and that one, for example. There was one set a few yards down that was very shallow.
“The woman?”
“Good guess, but no. Hers were shallow, too, but I could tell the woman’s impressions from the width of the foot and the stride. Only known four women in my life who could comfortably match a man’s normal stride: you, your mother, Natalia and Emma Shaw.”
“Ohh.”
“These impressions merely show a number of men carrying heavy loads, probably equipment. The woman was carrying some stuff, too, either that or she limped badly. But I don’t think so. Her left foot impression was deeper than her right. The two wounded men’s impressions were a little erratic, but more importantly they weren’t as deep.” He stood up and started into the surf. She hitched up her nearly ankle-length dress and followed him into water that had to be less than an inch below his boot tops. “Right about where we’re standing,” he went on, “there were the marks from three inflatables. I found the impression-it’s gone now, washed away-of at least two props. These guys didn’t row in. They used silenced outboards. Ed Shaw’s got people looking on both sides of the road, but the twelve probably set the boats out over the surf and let them go back out to sea, most likely with explosive charges rigged to scuttle them once they were well clear of the coast.
“The Navy picked up some floating debris this morning, from a Russian pirate ship-“
“Pirates!Pirates?”
“Pirates.Lots of piracy on the high seas, these days. But they pretty much think-the Navy-the debris is from a Russian hydrofoil. Probably our twelve invaders booked passage on the pirate vessel, then had a falling out, or more likely had it planned all along to scuttle her. This isn’t like those commandos we nailed the other day. I’d guess this is some highly trained, highly specialized unit. Maybe an assassination squad, maybe aimed at specific types of terrorism. Hence, the woman.” “I don’t understand, daddy.”
Her father looked down at her and smiled as she started back out of the surf. “The Nazis historically utilized women, but considered women secondclass citizens in many respects; that’s the case with the current neo-Nazi movement. If I’m reading this correctly-and it’s all supposition at this stage, of course-this group intends to blend in with the general populace on the island and they brought the woman along as a sort of liason, thinking we’d never expect them to use a woman and that she could come and go more freely than the eleven men. And the fact that two of the men were evidently wounded, of course, would dovetail nicely into the scenario concerning the wreckage from the Russian pirate vessel-injured in the battie,” he concluded.
“All right, what now?” Annie asked him.
“We work with Shaw’s Tac Team to hunt these people down.” And he put his arm around her. She leaned her head against him as they walked. “Unlike our adversaries, we know the value of female operatives. If Natalia can*be pried away from Michael, the two of you can pose as tourists-it’s the same tourist mecca here that it always was-or whatever works best, maybe dig around for information.”
“This is like being a cop in one of the videos from the Retreat,” Annie observed.
“Investigative work; I suppose so. The important thing is that we find these people. They won’t wait forever to hit their first target, whatever that is, then blend into the population. We have to end their careers as quickly as possible.”
They reached the spot where the sand met the rock and she leaned on her father’s arm again while she dusted the sand from the soles of her feet and from between her toes then put on her sandals.
They walked back side by side to the roadway. Paul was looking at the video display for the vacuum cleaner thing, Ed Shaw and Commander Washington flanking him. “Better than we hoped for, John,” her husband called out. “Found some tire treads leaving the road, evidently going off to the side here. The interesting thing is that the tires are perceptibly wider once the vehicle rejoins the road. Could be it took on a heavy load.”
“If it’s only one vehicle, then it’s probably a van or panel truck,” Commander Washington said.
“Agreed,” John Rourke said, nodding.
“What we want to do then,” Ed Shaw said, as if thinking out loud, “is find a match to this tire tread, so we can determine the make and model, then find out what vans usually have these as factory original equipment. We can measure the distance between treads, so we can match that up with a wheelbase size. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a model, make, maybe even a year. And while we’re running those down-
“You can check all the tire stores on the island in case these were bought as replacements,” Paul said.
“My thought exactly,” Ed Shaw nodded.
“Ed? Can you find gainful employment for Annie and Natalia Tiemerovna? They’re experienced and they work great together as a team,” Rourke said.
“Sure can. Certain sections of Honolulu have more extensive immigrant populations. If these people are trying to blend in with the general population, that’s the logical place for us to start looking.”
Rourke was lighting one of his cigars, managing it easily
despite the wind. “The one thing we shouldn’t do,” he said, exhaling smoke, “is make ourselves any more obvious than we have to be. Our adversaries will be wary at any event; no sense putting them even more on guard for us.”
“We’ll be real discreet,” Ed Shaw grinned, ” ‘til we bust and nail their asses.”
15
The purpose of a terrorist act, over and above its tactical objective-a bombing, a robbery, an assassination-was always and always would be to instill terror. That fundamental principle was drummed into Wilhelm Doring’s head from the very first that he volunteered for the Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS, the Schutzstaffel. His uniform, which he proudly wore on those rare occasions these days when he did not work undercover, bore both the runic lightning bolts of SS and the rounded hooked letters of the SD.
Proud as he was of his uniform, he took more pride in his work; and, he was especially prideful that, with less than twelve hours on Oahu and two men wounded, he would make his first strike.
To instill terror, make fear a constant in the lives of those who were its targets, to replace reasoned response with outraged reaction, it was necessary to strike without warning against a target no one would ever think to harden. It was for this reason that Herr Stroud’s van, Gunther at the wheel, was now turning the comer into the parking lot for the Sebastian’s Reef Country Day School.
The children of many of the higher-ranking officers at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, along with the children of various of the islands’ officials in government, those of business leaders and the otherwise prominent attended this school. The children of a few of the islands’ prominent Jews attended this school as well, and that was all the better. Doring had studied the history of terrorism, from its earliest records until the days immediately prior to
The Night of The War. Men of lesser inspiration and vision would have assaulted the school, then held its occupants hostage against some sort of impossible list of demands, then attempted an escape. Wilhelm Doring had no demands.
His objective was terror, not getting an aircraft or large sums of money, or having some manifesto or another read on television.
The van stopped in a slot near the main entrance of the school, a smallish sign in front of the parking position reading “Visitor.” The second van, its occupants local Nazi sympathizers, sincere enough in their devotion to the cause but an undisciplined, explosively violent lot according to the reports he’d been given, pulled up beside them.
Doring stepped out, pulling his hood down over his face, snapping it into position so the eye and mouth holes were properly aligned. The volunteers were already exiting their vehicle, coming round to stand between the vehicles. Doring spoke to these eight and the eight men with him who were part of his unit. “You know our mission. Shoot as many outright as you can, then utilize the explosives. We require as many dead as is possible. Understood?”
There were nods, grunted words of assent. Some of the volunteers from the second van murmured obscene remarks which were at once unprofessional and out of place. But Doring said, “Good.” Doring flexed his shoulders out of the raincoat, threw the garment back into the van and strode out across the blacktopped surface of the lot. The late morning felt cool to those small portions of exposed skin remaining beneath the hood. A breeze was blowing in nicely off the ocean. Just beyond the parking lot and a stand of palms, the surf could be heard.
Doring slipped his energy rifle forward on its sling.
Doring’s own seven men closed in around him, the eighth man (the driver) would wait. They hooded themselves. There were clicking sounds as they checked their weapons.
Doring looked toward the school buMng. A little girl stared out from the window of a lower grade classroom, where con
struction paper cutouts of multicolored birds were plastered to the glass.
Doring turned the muzzle of his weapon toward the window and the little girl who still stared at him from behind it. Doring opened fire …
Tim Shaw’s hand dropped the dash radio. Although late fifties wasn’t anywhere near chronologically old these days (people were routinely working well into their eighties and living past the century mark and still thriving), some things made him feel old. The “All Cars” that was just broadcast shocked him so much that he dropped one of the dashboard radios from his hand. It would have made him feel old if he’d been twenty. Patrolman Linda Wallace, her normally chocolate brown skin gone grey, gripped her hands tighter on the wheel of the car. She muttered, “What kind of bastards would-“
Shaw snarled, “Turn the fuckin’ car around. Now! Excuse my language.” Shaw picked up the radio set from the floor between his legs and snapped “One Echo Twelve responding. Get every damn unit you can scrounge over to that school fast. I mean fast!” He snapped the radio back into its dashboard receptacle.
If he ever changed professions and started robbing banks, Linda had a job. Linda was a good “wheelman”; she had the unmarked squad car out of the J-Turn and going against inbound Honolulu traffic along Jacob Fellows Boulevard before Tim Shaw could wrap his fist around the grab handle. And she knew her stuff, lights only, no siren. When they were almost parallel to the next intersection, she honked the horn a few times and got them through, into the outbound lanes where they belonged.
“How quick to Sebastian’s Reef Country Day, Linda?”
“Two minutes, Inspector.”
“Make it a minute and a half,” Shaw told her. He reached across to the rack between them; there was an energy rifle there. “When we hit the scene, you use this; I never liked these things but you’re a good shot with one of ‘em.”
Shaw reached into the outside pocket of his black raincoat, found the butt of his revolver, pulled the gun and checked the cylinder. The cruiser’s electric motor was humming more loudly than he’d ever heard it before, but he didn’t look to the dashboard panel to see if over-rev warning lights were flashing; Linda knew what she was doing and hadn’t trashed a car yet, he reminded himself. This gun, like the rest of his firearms* was a Lancer reproduction; if he could have found the originals he couldn’t have afforded them anyway on a cop’s salary and the Lancers were so faithful that without their distinctive logo on each part, even a collector wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. This one was a Smith & Wesson Model 640, the Centennial with enclosed hammer in stainless steel, but with three-inch barrel. Loaded with 158-grain Lead Hollow Point Plus Ps, it was devastating up close and, despite the fact it was double action only, decently accurate at longer ranges too.
Shaw closed the cylinder and shoved the revolver back into his raincoat pocket.
They were turning into Sebastian’s Reef now, the huge, expensive houses and fenced mini-estates going past them on either side in a blur. “Slow it down just enough so we don’t wind up driving into something, Linda.”
“Right, boss!”
The slipstream around them coupled with the breeze coming off the sea tore at Shaw’s face. He screwed his black fedora down tighter to his head. People, mosdy women, some servants, were running from the houses, some of them armed. There were sounds of explosions in the distance.
“About twenty seconds and well be turning into the parking lot, Inspector.”
“You block the exit, then use that energy rifle, but get the hell back somewhere in case they wanna try out their explosives on a police car; don’t be a hero.” Shaw reached to his waist, pulling the stainless steel Colt Government Model .45 from where he habitually nested it, butt outward, between his right hip bone and his navel. He thumbed back the hammer, squeezed the slide rearward a hair, press-checking to verify the loaded chamber, then raised the safety.
As the cruiser rounded the corner, the rolling grounds of Sebastian’s Reef Country Day spread out before them beyond a high, black, wrought iron fence. Palm trees swayed rhythmically, flowers bloomed everywhere. The gates to the school were opened. As they sped past along the driveway, Shaw caught no glimpse of a damaged lock or any sign of forc
ed entry. “Just left the damn gates wide open.”
As they rounded a curve in the driveway, Shaw could at last see the main building itself, flames licking upward hungrily against the bright blue of the cloudless sky. There were two vans visible in the parking lot to the far right of the building, one of them already in motion. “Stick with ‘em, Linda; lemme out now!”
Linda cut the wheel hard left, the cruiser fishtailing for a split second on the gravel, then whiplashing left, the rear end skidding forward and right in a cloud of gravel and dirt. The instant the car stopped, Tim Shaw threw open the door and was out, slamming it behind him as Linda accelerated and he averted his eyes from the gravel spray, feeling the rocks pelting at him through his raincoat. The first of the two vans sped toward them, bearing down on him. Neither gun he carried was suited to stopping a vehicle, but they were both well-suited to stopping men.
Energy rifles opened fire at him from the open side door of the van. Shaw dumped four rounds from the .45 into the opening, a body tumbling out as the ground on both sides of him exploded as die plasma bolts struck.
Shaw dropped like a stone, rolling onto his left side and firing out the last three rounds. He used the old-style seven-round magazines, not the eight-round magazines brought into vogue for the big old Colt shortly Before The Night of the War; and, he observed the old gunfighter’s dictum of loading from the magazine, resisting going for an eighth round.
One bullet at least struck the safety glass in the rear window of the van and spiderwebbed it.
Linda wheeled the cruiser into the driveway and was in pursuit.
Shaw was up to one knee, made a tactical magazine change for the .45 and thumbed down the slide release as he got fully to his feet. “Too old for this shit!” Shaw rasped through his teeth. But he could still run the hundred as well as the average department recruit, and the trousers from his Marine Corps uniform of better than twenty years ago still fit when he inhaled. He reminded himself of all of that as he ran along the driveway.
