“Good.” Al-Zaeim nodded, still concerned. “Those American NSA devils are very clever. He could have one in a tooth, under his skin, even up his ass.”
“You have been watching too many movies. As I said, he was searched carefully.”
“All right.” Al-Zaeim rubbed his arms to drive the morning chill away. “If you think I must meet with this fellow.”
“I do.” Khan nodded. “He is a blond-haired, blue-eyed American with an American passport and a level of arrogance that we Iraqis cannot hope to imitate. When we send our people into Europe, into Paris, or London, or Brussels, we have large communities of the faithful for support, but in America, the police and FBI are all over them. Most importantly, this fellow Shaw is from North Carolina, from Fayetteville.”
“You mean Fort Bragg? Where those Special Operations killers come from?”
“He is a professor at a small college nearby. He thinks he is coming here to fight in the front lines, but that would be a waste we cannot allow. We need to convince him to go back to Fayetteville. If he put his mind to it, he could recruit men for us — real Americans, perhaps disgruntled soldiers, who can go places and do things that dark-skinned foreigners such as my brothers and I can never do.”
“Army men move around quite a bit, don’t they?”
“Yes, especially now. They can be at Fort Bragg one month and at Fort Benning or over here the next, spreading our message, getting more converts, building more cells, and spreading disunity and distrust with each move they make. It will only take a few.”
“And he can kill them? Like he did to the Syrians?”
“Yes, but what I really want is for him to create a series of distractions, because my brothers will have an infinitely more important task to perform over there, won’t they? That is why you must persuade Shaw that Allah has big plans for him back in North Carolina. You can do that, can’t you, my Caliph?”
“Me? But your brothers can persuade people so much more easily than I can.”
“No. He came here to see you, to fight at your side, so you must be the one to convince him to return home and do what we tell him to do. A well-built fire will burn for a lifetime in a man’s heart, al-Badri, but threats from my brothers will wear off before the Professor’s airplane takes off for home. That is why you must be the one to persuade him.”
“I understand, Aslan, but why must your brothers go to America? I… I need all three of you here to guide me… to protect me.” The little back-alley preacher looked up into his eyes and lied. “You three… you are irreplaceable.”
“No one is irreplaceable, my Caliph, and don’t worry. Batir and Mergen will be here at your side for a bit longer, until their preparations are complete.”
“Will Shaw know about any of that, that they are coming and what this is all about?”
“No, only if it becomes necessary later,” Khan replied. “But regardless of our larger plan, Shaw is uniquely positioned to strike a series of blows at the heart of the American military establishment, ones that will make them hemorrhage. And this may surprise you, but he says he has converted, that he is now a Muslim, that he is one of us.”
Al-Zaeim frowned, surprised. “Shaw? Converted to Islam? How can we trust him?”
“We can’t, but if he fails us or turns out to be a spy or a double agent, Mergen will gut him like a Black Sea sturgeon. So meet with him today. The routes out of Syria and safely back to Turkey and Greece are being closed off every day.”
Al-Zaeim nodded. “Bring him to me after prayers, then.”
“As you wish, my Caliph.” Khan nodded as if it had been al-Zaeim’s idea all along, and began to turn away.
“Have your brothers place him in the center of the room, where he will be surrounded by our people, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, so I can observe him as I deliver my Kutbah.”
“An excellent idea,” Khan said, surprised and pleased by the suggestion. “Afterward, we shall talk, the three of us.”
“Yes, Aslan. When I can look into a man’s eyes, I can usually read what is written on his soul. That is how I shall know what there is to know about this college professor.”
“Yes,” Khan said as he dropped some typewritten pages on the cot next to al-Zaeim, turned, and walked to the stairs. “That is today’s speech. Practice it until you are perfect. You must be at your very best today. Our men must be inspired, as must the tens of thousands of our brothers around the world who will be hearing you over the radio and on the tapes. So practice, because you must be perfect. Is that clear?”
Aslan Khan and his brothers had carefully written and orchestrated today’s speech. He knew that the words and the microphone would transform this limp dog sitting on the cot into Abu Bakr al-Zaeim, the Caliph of the Worldwide Caliphate. The Khans had created him, and he would not fail.
CHAPTER SIX
Sherwood Forest
Bob Burke drove away from the airport and turned onto I-95. When he crossed the Cape Fear River, he leaned back in the driver’s seat of his pickup truck, and smiled. The first exit took him north into the open farm country east of the river. His passenger side window might be missing, but he didn’t care. It let the soft, fragrant night air pour in, carrying with it the smells of the lush fields on each side of the road. Tobacco had been the dominant crop down here for generations, and you could still see a few of the rustic wooden drying barns here and there. Many farmers had now shifted their production to corn and beans, but there were enough of the floppy green plants around to demonstrate that tobacco was still prince, if not king.
Even under the thin light of a quarter moon, he saw that the crape myrtles were still in full bloom, as were the beds of colorful wildflowers along the roadsides. The apple and pear trees were hung with fruit, and the tobacco plants showed the first signs of their autumn-yellow. In another month, the tobacco harvest would begin. Once that was over, college football, NASCAR, and duck hunting, life’s three main passions down here, would begin in earnest.
He passed one of the suburban golf courses that had been carved out of one of the old farms. Linda had been bugging him all summer to take a “mental health” day off and play a round. It wouldn’t be a bad idea if he gave a rat’s patootie about golf, or if he had half the patience it would take to play a game like that, neither of which he had. Bob figured it was a second marriage thing. She still clung to the fading hope that she could change him, and he still clung to the fading hope she’d stop trying. Neither was likely to happen anytime soon.
After the spat in Atlantic City, she even bought him a set of golf clubs. “You said you were going to become a semi-retired ‘gentleman’ farmer. Remember? Well, let me call the club pro and have him take you out for a round.”
“Golf? Did I ever tell you about the last time I played?” he asked her with a sly grin. “It must have been five or six years ago. Ace found an old course near an abandoned air base south of Kandahar, probably something the Brits built decades ago. Anyway, our mission got scrubbed for the day, so Koz rustled up a couple of sets of clubs from the Air Force guys, and Ace, Chester, Lonzo, The Batman and I went out to play a round.”
“That’s a fivesome, not a foursome,” Linda tried to correct him.
“Not really. Our Humvee doubled as the golf cart, and we took turns sitting out a hole, riding up top, and keeping watch with the 50-caliber machine gun.”
“I see — USGA Full-Contact golf.”
“Just a normal day in Indian country. So, we knocked back a couple of beers…”
“A couple? Those guys?”
“A figure of speech. Anyway, I think we got out three, maybe four holes when Lonzo hits this gorgeous drive down the middle of the fairway. His ball must have hit a mine, because Ka-Boom! All of a sudden, the course has a new sand trap.”
“Bringing an end to the outing, I assume?”
“Us? Surely you jest. By majority vote, we decided it was a ‘lost ball’ and assessed him a one-stroke penalty.”
“You ke
pt playing?”
“Of course!”
“You guys really were nuts.”
“Hey, there were some serious wagers going on.”
“All right, what did you shoot?”
“An eighty-five, I think.”
“An eighty-five, that’s great.”
“Scout’s honor,” he grinned, “but we didn’t play the back nine.” She shook her head and glared at him, so he added, “And that’s why you don’t want to send me out with a pro. The poor guy might never want to play again. Besides, I’m too damned busy here to even think of wasting four hours chasing a little white ball.”
As he said, she kept hoping to change him, and he kept hoping she’d stop.
Bob turned off the road into the long entry drive to Sherwood Forest and parked in the turnaround in front of the main house. Grabbing his briefcase and computer bag, he walked up the front stairs to the tall twin doors. Should I bother to pull out my keys, he wondered. It was 50-50 the damned things weren’t even locked, so he grabbed the decorative brass doorknob and gave it a quick twist. Sure enough, the heavy, oak-panel door swung open, just as he knew it would. The doors were custom-made. Each had a steel plate fitted inside, making them strong enough to stop a tank, but so delicately balanced a small child could push one open. The hinges and locks were titanium and the sophisticated alarm and sensor systems on the doors and windows provided “embassy level” security. Unfortunately, Linda had picked up some bad habits from the locals. No matter how much money he poured into security systems, if you don’t lock the damned things, they don’t work.
“Lucy, I’m home!” he called to her from the foyer, doing his best Desi Arnaz.
“Then you’d better get out of here,” she answered from the family room. “My husband’s due home any minute now.”
“Think he’d mind?”
“Him? Probably not, but the cat would.”
“Godzilla’s in there? Now, I know I’ll stay away.”
“If Ellie hears you call him that again…”
“I know, I know, I’ll be nice,” he answered as he walked into the family room. “By the way, I notice you didn’t lock the front door again.”
“Bob, Honey, if I lock the doors, the neighbors will think it’s rude,” she explained, as if she was talking to a slow third-grader. “They just don’t do that down here.”
Rude? He looked down at her and shook his head, knowing this would lead to problems sooner or later, but what could he do? It was 11 p.m., and the only light on in the family room came from the 60-inch wall-mounted flat-screen TV. It was showing an old movie he knew Linda hadn’t been watching. Worse still, she was sprawled on the couch with an arm and a leg hanging off the side, and her head tucked under a large bedroom pillow. One glance told him this was not good. On top of that, she was still wearing her rattiest old terrycloth bathrobe, which meant she hadn’t got dressed today, which was even worse.
“Did someone have a bad day?’ he asked with a deep frown.
“You have no idea,” she mumbled from under the pillow.
“Hmmm… Are the Huns storming the battlements? Did the floodwaters wash over the top of the dike? Have the children been misbehaving?” he asked as he set his computer bag and briefcase on the end table, picked up one corner of the pillow, and gave her a kiss.
Finally, she raised the pillow high enough to look at him with one eyeball. “What’s on the front of your shirt?” she mumbled. “Is that blood? And a cut?”
“Nothing all that dramatic,” he tried to shrug it off and turn away.
She wasn’t buying. “All right, what did you get yourself into this time?”
“Some bikers tried to steal my truck in the airport parking lot.”
“And we couldn’t let that happen, could we?”
“My new pickup truck? A ‘southern boy’ like me? Surely you jest.”
“A southern boy like you?” She raised the pillow a few inches and looked at him with both eyes. “How many bikers? Six, eight, two dozen?”
“Only four, hardly worth mentioning.”
“Hardly, except one of them managed to cut you, didn’t he?”
“A scratch. I couldn’t let them take the truck, could I?”
“We have insurance, you know. It would have replaced the stupid truck. And, God forbid, the city has policemen who actually get paid to take care of crime, Robert. Why would you take a risk like that?”
“Me? I didn’t think I was. After all, there were only four of them.”
She flopped back with a loud groan, and pulled the pillow over her head. Finally, she gave up and looked again. “Speaking of children, you need to find something to keep the Geeks busy. They’re bored, and an ‘executive intervention’ is essential.”
“I was afraid of that. Hunting for New York mob bank accounts has run its course.”
“Any schoolteacher will tell you that it’s the bored smart kids who are always the big discipline problems.”
“I sat them down before I left and told them to behave; what did they do this time?”
“Let’s see, yesterday, the Mad Russian…”
“Sasha’s now the Mad Russian?”
“He was when he found himself Krazy Glued to the toilet seat at 3:00 in the morning. Do you have any idea how hairy that guy is?”
“Ugh! Not a pretty sight. Don’t tell me you had to pry him off?”
“Me? God no, but I saw the toilet seat afterward. It looked like a Chia Pet.”
“Ouch!”
“No kidding. Well, by this morning, he had uploaded a virus onto Jimmy and Ronald’s super-dooper gaming computers. It kept running a block of text across the screen in Russian above an X-rated animated cartoon with singing squirrels, over and over again.”
Bob roared with laughter. “X-rated singing squirrels? What were they singing?”
“How should I know? I don’t speak Russian, but I got the picture. Patsy finally got Jimmy to translate it, but it was so anatomically disgusting that she wouldn’t even tell me. That much was funny.”
“That’s why I brought them down here from Chicago, to entertain you.”
“And you succeeded. But the real problem is that Sasha’s message-bot locked up their computers, they missed their turns in some big online, worldwide mega-game they were playing, and The Grand Vizier broke their swords over his knee and disqualified them.”
“How can you break a digital sword over your knee? I take it the war isn’t over?”
“Oh, no! It is definitely not over. If they have their way, it has hardly begun. So Patsy said you’ve got to find something for them to do. With all the time on his hands, Jimmy is about wearing her out too… if you get my meaning.”
“As odd as it may seem, I expect I do,” Bob said as he turned away, opened his briefcase on the desk, and began to pull out reports. “Speaking of children, how’s Ellie?”
“She’s great, no problems there,” Linda answered. “Oh, and I almost forgot, General Stansky called you this morning.”
“Stansky? Called me?” Bob smiled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“He wanted you to come over to JSOC to have lunch with him today, and he wasn’t very happy when I told him you were out of town.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Pat O’Connor who called?”
“Normally, you could be right. I usually can’t tell where one of them ends and the other one begins; but this time it wasn’t the command sergeant major, it was definitely the general himself.”
Bob looked down at her and frowned. “Linda, Stansky couldn’t figure out the last phone system they put in over there, much less the new one. O’Connor places all his calls.”
“Pat? God, I love that old guy…”
“Remember the Godzilla rule? You better not let him hear you call him ‘old.’ ”
“Pat’s a pussy cat. We chat whenever he calls. So, no, that definitely was General Stansky. He wanted to have lunch with you, but since you were gone…”
“Not tomorrow, I hope, I already have…”
“No, he said he had to catch a flight to Germany for some meetings for a couple of days. He said next week, maybe Tuesday at JSOC at Oh-twelve-hundred,” Linda said, doing a passable imitation of Stansky’s voice. “He’ll have a private room for you guys in the Officer’s Mess. Call Pat and confirm, so if you don’t want to go…”
Bob shook his head. “Linda, the guy’s a major general, that means he’s got two stars and outranks me by four pay grades.”
“You forget, you’re a civilian now. You outrank him.”
“It’s nice that you think that way,” he looked down at her and laughed, “but he’s the Deputy Commander of the Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, and a very useful guy to know. Remember that night when Dorothy and Lonzo got shot up in Atlantic City and we needed a quick medevac. It took him all of ten seconds to make that happen and get them flown to Fort Dix. Besides, he’s one of the very few straight-shooters left in the Army, and we’ve always gotten along.”
“That’s probably why he invites us to all those receptions and dinners at JSOC,” she smiled. “Nobody makes better shrimp and crab, or those little finger dessert-things, than the chef over at JSOC.”
“I’m sure that’s why he invites us.”
“No, he invites us so he can corner you and vent. He knows you’ll stand there, nod your head, and listen. That, or he needs you there so he won’t be the shortest guy in the room. It’s one of those, but I’m not really sure which.”
“Very funny. For your information, he and I are the same height.”
She turned her head and looked at him with one eye. “In your dreams,” she replied. “But those cold, blue eyes of his could freeze a waterfall,” she shivered.
“No doubt. Did you ever hear how he got where he is?” Bob asked her. “I went to West Point, like my father, but Stansky came straight off a North Dakota wheat farm. The day he turned eighteen, he went down to the recruiter, enlisted for Vietnam. A year and a half later, he was a 130-pound warrant officer, flying gunships and medevac helicopters in the 7th Cavalry, General Custer’s old ‘Garryowen’ unit.”
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 7
