“Go,” he told Muhammad as he got in. “Nice and easy, but go. There’s an Air Force Recruiting Office up north at the far end of Pope Field. Swing up there and we’ll take a look.”
Like the Post Exchange, the recruiting office was dark, as were the buildings around it, but there were no trash cans outside. Shaw got out of the car, took one of the explosive packages and threw it up on the roof instead.
“A little change of pace,” he said as he told Muhammad to take the big loop around Hurst Drive and Lewis Street back to Butner. When he saw the 139th Regiment Training Academy, he told Muhammad to pull in and drive up to that building.
“Thas the goddamn National Guard,” Muhammad complained as he drove up to the front of the building. “You can blow them all to hell for all I care, but why these rinky-dink places? Why ain’t you going after the big JSOC building or one of the airborne regiments? The commissary and recruiters? The damn National Guard? They don’t mean nuthin’.”
Shaw shook his head. “Perhaps you didn’t notice, Muhammad, but those didn’t have cameras or security guards. And they do matter a great deal to the people I want to shake up. Trust me, a bomb anywhere on this post matters a great deal, and these will put the establishment in a panic all the way to Washington.” That said, Shaw quickly got out, dropped another C-4 package in a trashcan near the entrance, and got back in the car. “All right,” Shaw told him, “since you would prefer a ‘high-value’ target, let’s try the Provost Marshall’s Office, where the MPs hang out. I assume you can find that without any help from me.”
“Oh yeah! I know where dat is.” Muhammad grinned.
“I figured you might. There’s a parking lot on the right side of the building. Turn in Armistead and make a loop through the parking lot.”
“You ain’t goin’ up to dat building, are you? Dey got cameras everywhere.”
“Watch and learn,” Shaw answered as Muhammad entered the parking lot, drove through the outer aisle, turned around, and came back down the one closer to the building, where a long line of military police cars were parked. “Keep driving, nice and slow,” Shaw told him as he lowered his hand out the car window and tossed his package underneath one of the parked police cars. “All right, keep going, nice and easy, just like you’ve been doing.”
“Ah get it now,” Muhammad beamed. “You smart, Shaw. You smart. Nobody gonna see nuthin’ ’til dat sucker goes off, will they?”
“Let’s hope not. Now head west toward Longstreet. We’ll exit through that gate.” Shaw looked at his watch. “By the way, I’m hungry. I guess terrorizing the populace works up an appetite.”
“You ain’t terrorized nobody. When you gonna blow those things?”
“Soon, very soon, my impatient friend. Let’s go back to that sports bar on 401 where you wolfed down that basket of chicken wings, and I’ll buy you some more.”
“Chicken wings? You thinkin’ ’bout chicken wings when we got those bombs layin’ out there? You crazy, man.” Muhammad shook his head nervously.
“Relax. The farther away we are from Fort Bragg when they go off, the better.
It was almost 11:00 p.m. when they reached the sports bar and found a place to park. Shaw carried a paper bag with him as they went inside and found a rear booth where they could have some privacy. It was Monday night and the place was crowded, with a noisy football game showing on a dozen large-screen TVs. Shaw ordered the usual two draft beers and three baskets of wings, recognizing Muhammad’s prodigious appetite. As they waited, Shaw looked up at the closest TV screen and reached inside the bag he brought from the car. He pulled out one of the cell phones, and turned it on.
“Someday you’re going to have to explain American football to me,” Shaw told Muhammad as he keyed in a telephone number. “You ready?” he asked as he let his finger hover over the green Send button.
“Hell yes, ah’m ready!” Muhammad gestured angrily.
Shaw smiled and pushed the phone over to Muhammad. “Then you do it. You may have the honor, my ‘finger-lickin’ good’ friend. Press the Send button.”
The large black man sat up, looked at the phone and cocked his head. “Thas all? Okay,” and he pressed his finger on the button. He cocked his head and tried hard to listen. “I don’t hear nothin,’ Shaw. You sure…”
“Yes, I’m sure. We’re more than ten miles away, sitting here in a sports bar quietly drinking our beers.”
“Okay. Which one wuz dat?”
Shaw looked at the display screen on the cell phone. “That should have been the commissary,” he told him as he dialed a second number and let Farrakhan press the green button again. That done, he told him, “Now the Recruiting Center.” He dialed a number into the third phone and did the same. On the fourth phone, he dialed a number and then handed the phone to Muhammad. “This one is your friends in the Provost Marshall’s office. Would you care to do the honors for them too?”
“You damn right I would!” Muhammad growled as he stabbed his index finger hard on the green button and smiled. “Felt good, damn good, man. Like I said, Shaw, you okay after all. But how you know those suckers went off?”
Shaw shrugged. “I don’t, but we’ll know soon enough,” he said as he dove hungrily into his wings. “Trust me, we’ll know.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Bob had one firm rule about parties — nobody goes to bed until everything is cleaned up and put away. The last of his guests rolled out around 8:00 p.m. Since at least half of them were Merry Men, some of whom were staying over in the guesthouse, he could dragoon all the help he needed to get the place cleaned up and be in bed by 10:00 p.m., his usual witching hour.
He was sound asleep when a sharp elbow jabbed him in the ribs. “Did you hear that?” Linda asked him, then paused and added, “That too.”
“Did I hear what?” he answered, barely half awake.
“Explosions. There’s another one; that makes three.”
He hadn’t heard the first two she thought she heard but he did hear the third one. She was right. It was a faint Bang! An explosion, somewhere off in the distance. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, his ears used to be as finely-tuned as a radar dish. Back in the day, he could differentiate between various-sized mortar rounds, and between them and a 105, a 155, an RPG or an IED. Depending upon wind conditions and ambient noise, he could sometimes tell how far away it was and which direction it was headed. Unfortunately, like all skills, it began to erode when it wasn’t used, and it hadn’t been used for over two years. In the end, however, the longer he lay in bed and tried to analyze the sound, the less he could conclude it was even an explosion. Whatever it was, it had to be miles away to the northwest in the general direction of Fort Bragg.
“Well?” she asked. “What was it?”
He rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 11:45. “I have no idea.”
“You mean you aren’t going to go out and look?”
“Nope. It’s dark, and I wouldn’t see anything anyway. So go back to sleep. If it’s anything important, you’ll know all about it in the morning, but I doubt it,” he lied. From the sound and the distance, he doubted it was nothing. But something? Morning would tell the tale, but whatever it was, it wasn’t his problem anymore.
At 5:45 a.m., he was dressed in chinos, a very faded West Point sweatshirt, and a pair of very fluffy Garfield the Cat house slippers that Ellie had given him for Christmas. He had just poured his first cup of coffee and sat down in the breakfast nook when his cell phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he saw it was Pat O’Connor and immediately answered. “Command Sergeant Major, did everyone have a good time yesterday?”
“Judging from the number of steaks consumed, oyster shells, and empty beer cups at our table, I’d say yes, and thanks for inviting us. That isn’t why I called, though. We need to change our plans for lunch tomorrow.”
“Why? Isn’t the General going to make it back?”
“No, no, he’s already on his way. Sh
ould be wheels down here around 0900, and he wants to move up the lunch to today. Can you make it?”
“Sure, every day’s a Saturday when you’re retired. Today, tomorrow? ‘Macht nichts,’ it makes no difference,” Bob said, using the old fractured German idiom. “But what’s the rush? Tell me this doesn’t have anything to do with what sounded like a couple of explosions we thought we heard in the middle of the night.”
“You two have good ears. Three bombs went off on post around 2345, most likely C-4. The forensics are just coming in, but I can attest that they were damn loud here.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Fortunately, no. One went off near the front door of the North Commissary, one near the front door of the 139th Training Academy, and one underneath an MP patrol car parked outside the Provost Marshall’s office. That really pissed them off, so the post’s been on lockdown since midnight. By midmorning, the traffic will be backed up damn near to Fayetteville, so I’ll come out and pick you up in the General’s sedan. How about we meet at the Bojangles on Santa Fe Road just off the Expressway at 11:15?”
“Sounds good. Do you think the bombs had anything to do with the shootings outside the golf club Saturday night?”
“Don’t know. I can tell you that the General and a lot of other people have been stoking a roaring fire under the Provost Marshal’s butt until he finds out.”
Under normal conditions, Fort Bragg is a relatively open post. Official vehicles and authorized traffic with the correct decals, IDs, and transponders can sail right through the gates. Once through, you can drive almost anywhere, including the unit headquarters and barracks areas, family housing, commercial services, dining halls, parade grounds, and even past the numerous rifle ranges and drop zones out Manchester Road without being stopped. On the other hand, increasingly tighter rings of perimeter security begin when you get near anything important, like the Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters, the Army Special Operations Command, the XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters, the 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, Special Forces Command, 3rd Special Forces Group, Delta, and dozens of other Airborne and Special Operations Group buildings and training sites.
The JSOC buildings are screened on all sides by thick woods, not visible from any of the surrounding roads, and airbrushed out of Google maps, GPS maps, and anything else that might show they even existed. To see the buildings, much less knock on those doors, you had to get past several rigorous checkpoints and special inspections. The JSOC building itself was rather nondescript and looked like a large classroom or office building, the kind you might find on any American military base around the country. However, the large array of satellite dishes and pole antennae behind the building told the tale. Coupled with extraordinary security going out a half-mile in all directions, the multiple layers of fencing, checkpoints, multiple gates, concrete barriers, tall chain-link fences, razor wire, bollards, lights, sensors, motion detectors, roving patrols, concrete vehicle barriers, strategically placed ponds and ditches, gates, and cameras, all under the watchful eyes of Humvees carrying 50-caliber machine guns and heavily-armed guards protecting the place, caused many to call it “the Pentagon South.”
Even for someone with Bob’s background, it was hard to even get in the same zip code with JSOC without the right pass. It wasn’t the kind of place that tolerated strangers or people who showed up without an invitation. That was why Pat O’Connor met him outside the gates at Bojangles in the general’s sedan precisely at 11:45. As Bob got in, O’Connor pointed at the white 150 truck.
“You look good in your new ‘down-home’ wheels, by the way.” Then he noticed the missing passenger side window. “What’s that? Redneck air conditioning or are windows optional equipment now?”
“A long story,” he answered sheepishly. “They’re on backorder.”
“A long story?” O’Connor laughed. “And I’ll bet a good one.”
It was a fast ride back up the All American Expressway to the post. With an OD sedan and the general’s red two-star pennant flying from the front bumper, they blew by a quarter-mile of backed-up cars and trucks, and sailed through the official vehicle lane on the far right.
“Looks like the Provost Marshall hasn’t backed off on the security checks,” Bob said.
“No, it’s only gotten worse. Two hours ago, they found a fourth bomb on the roof of the Air Force recruiting office up at Pope. Apparently, somebody tossed it up there, which appears to have knocked one of the wires loose. In any event, it didn’t go off. Now, they’re literally searching every other accessible roof on post to see if there are any more.”
“Have they taken it apart and looked at it yet?”
“Yeah, and that’s the scary part. It was a half-block of Army C-4, our own stuff, with one of our detonators and a cheap commercial burner phone as a trigger device. The phone was bought at Cross Creek Mall. They’re trying to trace it, but that’s hopeless, and they’re doing an inventory on every ounce of C-4 on post. The EOD people think the three bombs that went off were about that size. A full block weighs about a pound and a quarter, so someone’s missing at least two blocks, that’s two and a half pounds of C4. That’s impossible to cover up. We should know a lot more on the C4 by the end of the day, as well as on the shell casings found at the scene of those two murders behind the Stryker Golf Club.”
Bob had been inside the JSOC building many times over the years as a member of various Special Ops units, including the Delta Force, and had even worked on the staff for a few months. More recently, he had been a frequent guest of General Stansky. The biggest thing he took away from those meetings was how the men and women of the various services — Army, Navy, and Air Force — were working side by side and apparently getting along. As he well knew, intra-service harmony didn’t happen by accident. It only occurred when there was strong unifying leadership from the top, and he suspected that a certain short, energetic two-star had a lot to do with that.
As they got out of the car in the secure JSOC parking lot and walked toward the building’s front door, Pat O’Connor handed him a thick, clear plastic “Cred Pack” on a chain to hang around his neck. It contained his pass and photograph. Without having it hanging around you, no one got beyond the security checkpoint at the front doors. Once screened, searched, scanned, and checked against the authorized guest lists, no one got much further without the proper badges or went anywhere inside the building without an armed MP escort, no matter who they were, or who they were signed in to visit. In Bob’s case, he was on the list and escorted by the Command Sergeant Major. Pat’s scowl alone could open most doors, but not these. At the JSOC front doors, there were no shortcuts.
Major General Arnold Stansky’s office suite was one of a handful on the top floor, requiring yet another authorized key card to get the elevator to rise above the first floor. In addition to Stansky’s office, with his assistants and staff, there were a half-dozen other key staff members up on the fourth floor, including the Commanding General, a theater, an ops center, and several meeting rooms. When Bob and Pat O’Connor finally walked in, Stansky was bent over his desk on the telephone, barking orders and not very happy. They came to attention the proper distance from his desk, as usual, but he waved the formality aside and pointed toward the two straight-back chairs in front of his desk. He hung up, walked around the front of the desk, and extended a firm hand to Bob. Pity the uninitiated, as Bob and many others around here had learned, because shaking hands with Arnold Stansky was like sticking your hand in the jaws of a vice. The man could crack walnuts with his bare fingers, but Bob was ready.
“Good to see you, Bobby,” Stansky barked as he pulled him closer and looked him in the eyes. It was a disarming tactic, one Bob learned years ago from the old man. “So, how’s that lovely new wife of yours? She hasn’t run away screaming yet, has she?”
“No, sir. She’s just fine, except a little pregnant. She told me to tell you she really missed you yesterday.”
“A little pregnant? A
t your age, I thought you’d figure out what caused that.”
“Oh, I think we figured that out a long time ago, Sir.”
“Good. And you can tell her I really am sorry I missed the party. Damn Germans! I had no choice but to go over and crack some heads — our Special Ops people and theirs, but I think I have things on track now, at least over there.” Stansky went around to his desk chair and they all sat down. “No sooner do I leave town then all hell breaks out here. What’s going on? Two officers gunned down execution-style outside the golf club, and now these bombs. This isn’t Brussels! It’s goddamn North Carolina! Who were they, Pat?”
“None of ours. One was in Post Finance and the other was from the Transportation Office. Purely random, as best anyone can tell,” the Command Sergeant Major explained. “They had been at separate tables inside, drinking with other people, and happened to leave the building at the same time, or so it seems. CID’s still investigating.”
“Random killings.” Stansky frowned. “Those are supposed to be the hardest to try to crack, but I understand they recovered the shell casings?”
“Six .45-caliber ACP cartridges. Standard Army issue for the old 1911 Colt.”
“That was sloppy on the shooter’s part, to leave his brass behind,” Bob pointed out. “Anyone with Special Ops training knows to police up his brass, and they wouldn’t have used a Colt .45, anyway. They’re antiques. I doubt the shooter was one of ours.”
“The MPs are doing a surprise inventory on every arms room on post this morning,” O’Connor continued. “The Provost Marshal just reported that we’re missing a dozen M-4 and M-16 rifles and the same number of Berettas from one of the Quartermaster units, plus ammo and magazines. But the good news is, there’s no mention of any .45s yet.”
“You think they’re selling them?” Stansky asked.
“There’s no shortage of white supremacist militias floating around in the mountains.”
“We better hope so,” Bob added. “If not, somebody’s starting a war.”
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 20
