As he continued to watch, Pendergrass looked at his watch, gave a quick round of handshakes, and got back in his gray FBI car and drove away. A few minutes later, Burke and the other two Army men walked back across the tracks, got back in the General’s sedan, and also drove away. He saw Pendergrass reach the corner and turn right on Hay Street, no doubt headed back to the FBI offices further up on Morganton where it intersected the All-American Expressway. Shaw expected the Army car to head that way as well, since that was the shortest route back to Fort Bragg; but, surprisingly, the OD sedan did a U-turn and headed southeast, away from Fort Bragg. That was enough playing peeping Tom, Shaw decided, so he sat up and shoved the binoculars in his glove compartment.
Time to get moving, he decided, as he started the car and also drove away. He exited the parking lot and headed east on Maiden Lane, knowing the Army sedan was headed east on Hay. While the two streets started out parallel, they intersected on the other side of downtown; and if he timed it right, that would put him there at the same time. He could then follow them and find out where they were going. And he was right. As he merged into the traffic on Person, he saw the OD sedan only four cars ahead. He stayed back and matched their speed, confident that they had no idea he was behind them.
Since he arrived in Fayetteville, Henry Shaw had spent most of his time in the city itself, on campus, up at Fort Bragg, or driving around in the hills to the north and west of town on one of his “picnics.” What he rarely did was drive east or south of town, or east of the Cape Fear River at all. To him, that was mostly boring tobacco farms, scattered patches of woods, and flat, boring roads, populated by boring, tobacco-chewing rednecks.
East of downtown, Hay Street became Person Street, which soon crossed the Cape Fear River, and he assumed it disappeared forever into the gently rolling farmland beyond. Less than a quarter-mile after they crossed the river, however, the General’s Army sedan made a turn south on Deep Creek Road. It was one of the few roads over here that Shaw had driven before, because it was long and straight, making a nice place to floor the Peugeot and blow the carbon out. Not this time, however. There was only one car between him and the Army sedan, so Shaw braked and dropped even further back. Sooner or later, he knew the sedan must turn off, because this road crossed I-95 a few miles further up and they wouldn’t have bothered to come this way if all they wanted to do was get on the Interstate.
Shaw was right. The land on the west side of the road fell away to the Cape Fear River. Developers had begun to buy the old-time tobacco farms and carve them into five- and ten-acre Yuppie “farmettes,” which were slowly taking over the area. The turnoffs on either side of the road remained few and far between, but up ahead, he saw the taillights on the olive-drab Army sedan as it slowed and turned down a side road to the right. Shaw also slowed. It was a driveway entrance, and as he passed it, he caught a glimpse of the sedan disappearing down a long, tree-lined lane that led to a large Victorian house at the far end.
He quickly swung over onto the road shoulder, stopped, and ran back to the driveway entrance. The first thing he saw was an ornate mailbox with a miniature version of the white Victorian house on the top, above the name “Sherwood Forest.”
As General Stansky’s sedan stopped at the front door of the main house, he reached over and touched Burke’s shoulder. “Bobby,” he said, “I’m a tired old warhorse, and I’ve fought in more battles than I care to think of, but this is different. The Army’s mired in two bloody wars that have been going on for far too long. We keep sending our best people back into them, one after the other, back and forth, over and over again, until they wear out or crack under the strain. They are our people, the best of the best, but I have no idea how they keep on doing it. The number of divorces and suicides? I hate to think about it.”
“They’re professionals, Sir. It’s what they signed on for.”
“Is it? You’ve been out for three years, and it’s a lot worse now. If you close your eyes and open your ears, you can hear the silent screams all the way out here. Morale is paper thin. Fort Bragg is their only sanctuary right now, and a situation like we have had the past few days — the shooting and the bombings — it could push things over the edge. I’m positive that is exactly why this sociology professor of yours was sent here. That’s why you’ve got to stop him, anyway you can.”
“Copy, Sir. I understand.”
“Do you? Do you really? Because putting a clever big mouth like him on trial and allowing him to publicize these incidents and push their agenda isn’t in the Army’s interest. For us to admit that we have a sleeper cell that has burrowed itself inside our Special Ops community? That can’t happen. When I say stop him, I mean permanently. Do you copy?”
“Roger that, Sir.”
Looking through the long archway of trees and down the driveway, he saw the Army sedan had stopped in a turnaround at the end of the driveway. Burke, or whoever he was, got out, spoke for a moment to the occupants of the sedan, and then waved as the sedan headed back up the driveway toward where Shaw stood. He had seen enough. He sprinted back to the Peugeot, jumped inside and drove away. He continued south on Deep Creek, keeping one eye on the rearview mirror. As expected, the Army sedan came out and turned left, the way it had come, no doubt north to Fort Bragg. When it was out of sight, he did a U-turn in the next wide spot in the road and did the same thing. As he passed the Sherwood Forest entrance again, he slowed and took one more quick glance down the driveway. Sherwood Forest, it was called. He must do some research on the farm and its owner as soon as he got back to his office. Much as that fellow “Burke” knew who his enemy was, Henry Shaw now knew who his enemy was, too.
He pulled out his cell phone and pressed the speed-dial number for George Enderby. When the young black sergeant answered, Shaw said, “It’s time, George. Are my shock troops ready?”
“I have eight men here at the Center. We are going through some last-minute checks.”
“I knew I could count on you. The rifles and the magazines? The pistols? Is everything in readiness?”
“Yes, the weapons and the ski masks, everything.”
“Excellent. I’m counting on you, and on them. They shall be the vanguard. Bring them to the rear parking lot of the Education Center, where my office is, at 7:45 tonight, and not a minute later. Is that clear? Have the military guys drive their cars. They should have no problem getting on post, and the others can ride with them.”
“Where are we going?” Enderby asked. “What’s the target?”
Shaw paused, and then told him, “You’ll find out when we get there, George, like everyone else. You must constantly think of our security. But don’t be concerned, we’ll strike a blow tonight that will bring the infidels to their knees, screaming and crying.”
When Bob bounced up the stairs and into the family room, Linda was sitting on the couch next to Ellie, helping her with her homework. Before he could say anything, she raised her hand, palm out and stopped him in his tracks.
“You better go up to the Data Center and see Jimmy. Patsy’s been calling down here every five minutes looking for you. Did you have your cell phone turned off? She said she’s been texting you.”
“While I was with Stansky, I had it on Mute,” he answered as he pulled it out and saw the shrill text messages stacked up, one after the other. “Do you know what he wants?”
“No. Apparently, Ronald found some stuff you need to see. Jimmy says it’s important, so you better get up there before he wets his pants.”
“All right, I’ll go up there. But if you still want to make that commissary run, tell Ace and Dorothy to meet us out front in five minutes,” he said as he did a “180” and headed for the Geek-Plex in the rear annex. He didn’t make it halfway up the stairs before he saw Jimmy at the top of the stairs looking down at him. “Mr. B! Where you been, Dude?”
“Dude? This better not be about more dancing squirrels and Krazy Glue…”
“No, no, Ronald and Sasha found some stuff you ne
ed to see. Ronald was drilling down into the College records…”
“I don’t have much time,” Bob told him as he walked over to where Ronald sat behind his computer console. “All right, cut to the chase, ‘Dude.’ What have you got?”
“All right.” Ronald leaned forward and went to work on the computer’s touchscreen. “I went through all of Shaw’s classes at the college and the new ones he’s teaching on post, this year and last year, and cross-matched against all the lists I could find at the Muslim Center. There are seventeen cross-matches. I then went to the College admissions records and printed their bios and photographs from their Student IDs. I got most of them, but not all,” he said as the printer suddenly sprang to life and began to spit out paper.
“Great,” Bob told him as he picked them up and quickly flipped through the pages, dividing them into two stacks. “These are ones I recognize from the Muslim Center. From their attitudes, they are definitely Shaw’s minions. These are the ones we’ll be watching out for. I didn’t see the other ones, but that just means they weren’t there when I was,” he said as he committed all of them to memory. “This is good work, guys.”
“That’s not the best part,” Jimmy giggled. “Show him, Sasha.”
They stepped over to the mad Russian’s console and watched his fat fingers flick across the touchscreen, leaving sweaty fingerprints everywhere they went, but two faces quickly emerged — passport facial shots of two young men with closely cropped beards. Their resemblance to each other was uncanny; they could easily be brothers or even twins.
Bob leaned forward and looked more closely. “Who are they?”
“From the College admissions records, two new students who Shaw scurried around campus to get admitted two days ago,” Ronald answered. “The passports are Jordanian, and the names are Abdul-Aziz Mifsud and Hamzah Hadad.”
“Probably phony. Half the Arab tourists in Europe have those,” Bob answered.
“Watch dees, Boss! You ain’t seen nuthin’,” Sasha said in an excited voice as his fingers skipped across the screen again and a collage of old black-and-white newspaper articles with more photographs appeared. Bob immediately recognized the newspapers as Iraqi, from Baghdad. The news photos showed the same two men, years earlier from the knees or the waist up, barrel-chested, with powerful arms, wearing tight-fitting wrestling singlets, grinning with crocodile teeth as they held trophies over their heads or wore medals around their necks. Next to those photos was an older-looking shot of a third man in wrestling gear; he was much larger than the first two, but had the same beard and similar facial features.
“Sasha found them in some old newspaper stories on wrestling.”
“Wrestling?” Bob asked. “Don’t tell me ‘the Russian bear’ was a wrestler, too?”
“Oh, yes, Boss.” Sasha grinned. “Good wrestler, too. Good Russian wrestler, but not as good as those three.” He pointed at the screen.
“Iraqi wrestlers on Jordanian passports?” Bob asked.
“Not Arabs. Not Jordan people. Not Iraqi.” Sasha shook his head like a bear coming out of a stream. “Turkmen tribe on Iraqi Olympic team. Just teenagers back then, the two on the right, but we knew who they were, because they kicked all of our asses.”
“All right, who are they?”
“Khan brothers. Twins? Brothers? Who knows?” Sasha laughed as he pointed at the screen. “Mergen ees on left. Batir ees on right. The big one ees older brother, Aslan.”
As they were talking, Bob heard another voice behind him. It was Ace Randall who had stepped up behind them and quickly scanned the old newspaper clippings and passport photos on Ronald’s monitor. “Man, you gotta be kidding me!” he exclaimed as he pulled out his cell phone and thumbed through some old photographs. Finally, he turned and showed Bob a shot of two men standing in a doorway talking. There was a car parked in front of them and a bright light hanging on the wall above them. “Koz emailed these to me about twenty minutes ago, from that private airstrip down south you told him to stake out. The light isn’t the best and the resolution isn’t terribly clear, but that’s the same two guys.”
Bob looked back and forth between the cell phone images and the photos on the computer screen, and nodded. “He took these down at the hangar?”
“Roger that. Who are they?” Ace asked.
“Two new students in Shaw’s class named Mergen and Batir Khan, with phony names and phony Jordanian passports. Shaw walked their papers through to get them enrolled.”
“And wrestlers!” Sasha added. “Iraqi Olympic team. Strong bastards, like older brother, Aslan. When they got hands on you, their arms around you…”
“Aslan? Did you say Aslan Khan?” Ace frowned. “Now there’s a name from Hell. Don’t you remember who he is? The ‘8 of Diamonds’? Number thirty-four on the old Iraq war playing card list? He was one of Uday Hussein’s pals, Republican Guard, and Saddam’s personal pilot, I think. He was a nasty dude and a stone killer.”
“And wrestler,” Sasha added. “Five, ten years before younger brothers. Beasts.”
Bob looked at the screen again, and at the photos. “And his two younger brothers are in Fayetteville, North Carolina, down at that airplane hangar, where Tom Pendergrass saw Shaw. Isn’t that interesting?”
“But what’s the link?” Ace asked.
“What’s the link to any of it? Pendergrass thinks Shaw was in Syria, maybe Raqqah.”
“An American sociology professor, the 8 of Diamonds, and ISIS?” Ace shook his head. “I got an idea. Why don’t we just kill them all and let God sort it out?”
“After what’s going on in town, that might not be a bad idea. Meanwhile, let Koz know what we have out there and see if he can get any more photos of them or anyone else that shows up down there. You and I have to take the girls to the commissary,” he told Ace, and then turned to the Geeks. “Good work, guys, really good. Keep drilling down into the other stuff on the list. We’ll be back in an hour.”
The sun was setting as Henry Shaw crossed back over the Cape Fear River and crossed the line into Fayetteville. He could only smile. His plans were beginning to move quickly now, more quickly than he ever thought possible when he drove into Raqqah that fateful afternoon only a few weeks before. Since then, he had launched a series of increasingly violent attacks on the American Army infrastructure at Fort Bragg, the heart of their Special Operations empire, exactly as the Caliph directed him to do. Were they perfect? No. Had he done much physical damage? Some, but not nearly as much as he wanted to do. What he had done, however, was to knock them onto their collective asses and shake their confidence.
Tonight’s attack would be the culmination of his plan to shake them to their foundations. Then he would disappear. He knew a few rabbit holes in California where he could hide, and many more in Chicago where a man could “go off the grid” for as long as he wanted. After all, The University of Chicago had been his goal from the beginning. He wanted to kick down their doors and show those cowards what a real revolutionary looked like. Not that Chicago didn’t have its risks. There was always Europe. It would be easy to disappear in Belgium, France, or even Italy. With enough money and several phony passports, hiding in Europe would pose little challenge. Easy? Easy peasey.
But what about the Middle East? Might it not be better to return triumphant to Raqqah and be seen and photographed with the Caliph? Al-Zaeim was desperate for victories, and Shaw’s successes in Fayetteville would place him at the forefront of the movement. Imagine being photographed at the Caliph’s side in front of the Black Flag, arms around each other and AK-47s held high in the air. Would that be enough to put him in the Caliph’s inner circle? Perhaps as his heir apparent? Would that be the ultimate step in building his radical resume? Shaw was no longer sure he even cared about that any longer. Chicago? In truth, he was beginning to enjoy this and no longer gave a damn what they did.
He would let tonight make that decision for him. If his next attack succeeded in spreading bloodshed and terror, and brough
t Fort Bragg to its knees, he would leave Fayetteville and vanish into the night and fog. If this one didn’t succeed, he still had two or three more strikes in mind that could be just as dramatic. But he was a perfectionist. He hated loose ends, and there were several embarrassingly long ones that he knew he must attend to before he did anything else. He had eliminated Farrakhan Muhammad and Shahid Halabi, but they had been marginal converts, useful as “throwaways” anyway, and not to be trusted. And they were only the beginning of it, not the end. Now, there were four more names on the list — Stephanie, her equally delightful roommate Amy, FBI Special Agent Thomas Pendergrass, and perhaps this new irritation Burke, or whatever his name was.
He hated the thought of eliminating Steph and Amy. They had been great fun, but they knew too many things, such as when he arrived, making them risks he could ill afford. Snip, snip. On the other hand, Pendergrass was much more troublesome. Henry Shaw took great pride in being a superb liar. He always felt it was a skill he had been born with, and he would have made a very successful con man, banker, politician, or sex therapist if that was what he had wanted to be. That was why Pendergrass irritated him. From the moment they met in Cyprus, Pendergrass had seen right through his story. Like a bloodhound with the scent in his nostrils, he had tracked him ever since and Shaw knew he would be impossible to shake. When Pendergrass first showed up in his office that afternoon, Shaw was sorely tempted to grab the Ka-Bar knife hidden in his desk drawer, leap out of his chair, and slit his throat; and he would have, if the FBI Special Agent wasn’t accompanied by two Fayetteville police detectives.
When he added those three in, plus the Army Military Police and CID, Henry Shaw realized he now had a formidable law enforcement coalition arrayed against him. While the Fayetteville police and the MPs had large numbers of people and resources they could throw at him, the FBI’s footprint in Fayetteville was limited to Pendergrass. If Shaw could eliminate him, he could break the circle closing in on him and still win.
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 32
