“They’re on the way, and the package your Geeks put together made all the difference. But it doesn’t matter. Van Zandt’s waiting for one to be signed by a county judge for Shaw’s offices, the mosque, and the Muslim Student Center. The city SWAT team is rolling, and that’s where they’re headed right now. I told him we’d meet them there, and I’ve put out an APB for Shaw’s white Peugeot.”
Bob and Ace rode in Bob’s pickup truck, but he let Sharmayne lead in her MP squad car with light bar flashing. “Ace, this is the only way to fly,” Bob told him. “Rolling down Bragg Boulevard at 110 miles an hour from the gate to downtown Fayetteville, think of all the time we wasted!”
They were at the edge of Blue Ridge College in less than ten minutes, when she turned off her light bar, slowed to a casual fifty in a thirty limit, and took a sharp left onto Filter Plant Drive. Bob skidded and tried follow her as his cell phone rang. He tossed it to Ace and said, “How about answering that for me.”
“Burke’s answering service,” the big master sergeant said into the phone. “He is ‘très occupado’ at the moment.” In seconds, he turned back to Bob and said, “It’s ‘High Rider’ Carmody, the General’s pilot. You want to talk to him?”
“Put him on speaker.”
“Is it true?” they heard Carmody ask, “About the General and O’Connor? Are they really dead? The story’s running through post like a Wyoming wildfire. I know how close you two were, and I figured you would know.”
“About the General? Yes, he’s dead, but it looks like Pat’ll make it.”
“Well, thank God for that much. What the hell happened?”
“A car bomb in the parking lot of the commissary, from the same people we’ve been chasing the last few days.”
“Ghost, what can I do to help?” Carmody pleaded. “I’ve got the fastest Blackhawk on post, all supercharged and torqued up for the General, and she’s fully armed.”
“Well, I’m not looking to blow the hell out of anything, John, not yet anyway, but a Blackhawk would beat the hell out of a Ford 150 if we’re in a hurry,” Bob answered. “Is there anywhere near the college campus or downtown where you can set it down?”
“Yeah, there’s a helipad at the central fire station, and another one up at Station 14. It’s late enough that nobody’ll care if I drop in. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Do that. I’m not sure if we’ll need you, but it will be nice to know you’re there.”
“Need anything else? Some side arms or rifles?” Carmody asked.
Bob looked at Ace, who shrugged and said, “Well, if the man’s offering…”
“Not a bad idea, High Rider. Anything you can get your hands on.”
“The arms room here at the Field has about everything. But you and Ace? I figure you’d want a couple of Barretts, and what? Two bullets? That’s all you usually need.”
“Best make it a some .50-caliber magazines. Ace may not need them, but I’m a tad rusty. And a sniper scope and an infrared. Look, we’ll swing by the fire station as soon as we can,” Bob told the pilot as they turned off Bragg Boulevard and followed Sharmayne Phillips onto a dark side street on the east side of campus.
There was a line of cute, antique wrought-iron streetlights that ran up the left side. They didn’t provide much light under the best of conditions, especially with tall, leafy oak trees overhanging the street, creating huge dark shadows. Sharmayne pulled over to the curb and parked behind two Fayetteville police cruisers, an unmarked police car, and the city SWAT van. She got out of her car, and Bob and Ace followed. Ahead of them they saw a small huddle of city police officers. Harry Van Zandt and Captain Charlie Weatherford, the SWAT commander, were at the center, standing under one of the trees, laughing and smoking.
After the usual round of professional handshakes, Van Zandt said, “We’re two blocks from the Muslim Student Center and have the area on lockdown. Same for the Sociology Department building, where Shaw’s other office is. George is over there. As soon as the city attorney shows up with the search warrants, we’re moving in on both. By the way,” he turned toward Bob, “we’d never have gotten them if it wasn’t for the stuff you texted over from your Nerds.”
“Geeks. They’d be insulted if you called them Nerds.”
“Whatever, and I assume you heard about Pendergrass and the girl?”
“Yeah, and I assume you heard about General Stansky?”
“That guy Shaw’s really got balls — those bombings, and now an FBI agent and one of your top generals. He’s laughing at all of us.”
“Still, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Ace asked. “Shaw doesn’t make much sense, either, to be that smart and that out of control.”
Bob thought that over for a moment. “You know, maybe Shaw’s a little bit too much ‘out of control.’ He’s a smart guy, all right; but to launch all these attacks at once? Getting us to chase him and our own tails all around town? It’s almost like he’s trying to distract us.”
“But from what?” Van Zandt asked.
Sharmayne Phillips’s cell phone rang, and she turned aside to take the quick message. After a few mumbled comments, she turned back to the group. “The APB got a hit. Guess where they found his Peugeot?” Without waiting for any guesses, she said, “It was sitting in the commissary parking lot, empty, of course; but since we’re still missing some C-4, I told EOD to check it out before we lost any of my crime scene Techs.”
“Well, at least we know where he ain’t,” Ace said.
“I’ll bet he got off post as quickly as he could,” Bob added. “Did you get any reports of a stolen car there?” Sharmayne shook her head. “Then my guess is he took a car from one of his guys who went inside the commissary.”
“We have them all ID’d now,” Sharmayne answered as she pulled out her phone. “I’ll put out APBs on their cars too, but that’ll take a while. We’ll have to dig out the registrations, and you know what enlisted guys are like. They change cars faster than basketball shoes.”
While she turned away and began making more calls, Bob turned to Detective Van Zandt and asked, “Harry, are you still waiting for that warrant? I thought you had it.”
“It was supposed to be here, Bob,” Van Zandt looked at his watch. “The City Attorney himself is walking it through, but you know how those damned judges can be.”
“Yeah,” Bob said as he motioned to Ace and they strolled back to Bob’s Ford 150. He opened the storage box in the rear cargo bed and pulled out a black windbreaker and a dark sweater. “Here,” he tossed the sweater to Ace. “This thing stretches; it might fit you.”
As they put them on, Van Zandt walked over and whispered, “Bob, you aren’t about to do what I think you’re about to do, are you? We’ll have the warrant…”
“Don’t need one,” Bob smiled as he and Ace strolled away up the street, whistling. “We’re just two private citizens out for a walk.”
“Yeah? Well, just remember, we got nervous cops with guns all over the place; and that might not be a really good idea.”
“Harry, not to worry. They’ll never even know we’re there,” he said over his shoulder as he and Ace walked into the deep shadow of a leafy oak and… disappeared.
Two minutes later, a frustrated City Attorney careened around the corner, screeched to a halt next to an even more frustrated Harry Van Zandt, and handed him the envelope. “Sorry, Harry, but you know how that goddamned Judge Pearson…”
“You couldn’t find anyone else?” Harry asked as he ripped it open and quickly scanned the text. “Is there anything hinky in here I need to know about?”
“Nothing except I had to retype the damned thing three times.”
“Like I freakin’ care!” Van Zandt answered as he turned to the SWAT commander. “Charlie, tell your guys to move in,” Van Zandt said as he began running up the street, leaving the SWAT commander to radio his tactical teams. Van Zandt had a tactical radio in his breast pocket and put the earpiece in his ear. He shook his head as
he listened to the officious SWAT chatter, all full of tactical “handles” and pseudo-army terms. Lots of luck trying to confuse any reporters listening in on their scanners, he thought. Any idiot could tell what they were doing. Van Zandt pulled out his Glock and quickly checked the load as the silly conversation between the tactical team and their commander suddenly took a strange turn.
“Red-One, Green-Five. Captain, you need to come back here to the rear door,” one of his perplexed SWAT officers reported.
“What the hell is it, Johnson!?” the frustrated Captain answered.
“One of the perps… well, you gotta come here and see it, Sir. He’s here on the rear stairs, all trussed up like a Butterball turkey.”
“Red-One, Blue-Three. Same-o, same-o, we got two more like that at the front door.”
“10-4. Both ’a you! This goddamn better be good.”
Van Zandt followed Captain Weatherford through a side yard, across the alley, and into the rear parking lot of the Muslim Student Center. Looking around, he saw ten cars parked in the lot and turned to one of the uniformed officers with him. “Harris, run all the plates out here and let me know if you come up with any hits.”
As they approached the rear steps to the building, he suddenly understood what the chatter was all about. “Holy crap,” Weatherford said, hands on hips as he stared down at a dark-skinned, Middle Eastern-looking young man lying on his stomach on the back porch. He had been “hogtied” with white plastic flex-cuffs, his hands and feet behind his back. His left shoe was missing and what appeared to be his left sock was stuffed in his mouth. But the corker was the loaded Army M-4 carbine lying harmlessly across his back.
“What the hell do you make of that?” the SWAT captain turned and asked Van Zandt.
Van Zandt knew exactly what he’d make of it and chuckled as he led Weatherford through the bushes and around the side of the house, where they found a similar scene on the front porch. This time however there were two young men hogtied and stuffed just like the one in back. One of them also had an M-4 carbine lying on his back, while the other had a Beretta 9-millimeter pistol lying on his, and appeared to be unconscious.
Harry turned his head and saw Bob Burke and Ace Randall sitting on the front steps down by the sidewalk watching Harry, Captain Weatherford, and the rest of his team scurry about the front yard. Finally, two burly SWAT team guys ran up the sidewalk with a heavy, four-foot long section of eight-inch iron pipe filled with concrete, to which someone had welded “re-bar” loops for handles and painted it dark blue. This was “The Tactical Search and Seizure Intrusion Device,” which they sold to hundreds of local police departments across the country for $5,800 each, thanks to a federal grant; leaving Harry Van Zandt wondering who should be on which side of the bars.
“Harry, they don’t have to knock the door in,” Bob called out. “It’s open.”
Unfortunately, the SWAT team hadn’t had this much fun in months, and nothing was going to stop them from swinging their new battering ram into the first door they found and smashing the door and doorframe.
Van Zandt looked back at Bob and asked, “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with this? Did you, Burke?”
“With what?” Bob asked innocently. “Oh, no, that’s all yours. As I said, we’re just two private citizens, out for a little evening walk.”
The SWAT team poured in through the front door and began searching the Center, so Van Zandt, Bob, and Ace followed them to the front door, where they found two more men similarly trussed up on the porch, with automatic weapons lying on top of them.
“Relax, Shaw isn’t here,” Bob told Van Zandt, who gave him a frown.
“Did you need us here at all?” the detective asked.
“Of course! This place is way too big for Ace and me to search all by ourselves. Besides, you’re the one with the search warrant.”
“Search warrant? ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ search warrant!’ ” Van Zandt laughed.
“Harry, if you check the serial numbers on those M-4s, I’m pretty sure you’ll find they match the ones stolen up at Bragg. What bothers me, though, is there should be more of them. Make sure your guys look in all the nooks and crannies; they’re in here somewhere.”
“Okay, while the uniforms are searching the place, why don’t you come in and look at the ‘Usual Suspects’ with me.”
In the central lounge, the city police had lined up eleven very unhappy Middle Eastern men against the far wall. Their facial expressions ranged from boredom, arrogance, and anger to you-just-woke-me-up. As Bob walked down the line, he immediately recognized four of them from his last trip. They were already in his rogues’ gallery, but the others weren’t. Three were the ones they’d hog-tied outside. They’d been handcuffed and arrested for possession of stolen weapons, but the other four were new. Bob pulled out his cell phone and took a few close-ups, ignoring their angry shouts that he can’t do that, and they wanted their lawyer.
Bob smiled at them. “The CIA needs these so they can assign the right guards for you down at Guantanamo.” When they screamed even louder, he shrugged hopelessly to Van Zandt and said, “Gee, Harry, I guess you just can’t please everyone, can you?” Then he turned back and photographed the rest of them.
Five SWAT team men came down from the upper floors.
“No sign of Shaw up there?” Captain Weatherford asked hopefully.
“No, just these creeps,” one of his men answered as they herded four more Middle Eastern men down the stairs and shoved them into the line-up.
That was when one of the more overweight uniforms ran up the stairs from the basement. “Captain, we got something down here. There’s a closet with a lock on it…”
“Cut the goddamned thing off, Lutarski, that’s why they call it a search warrant!”
Two minutes later, Lutarski came running back up, puffing, holding two rifles in his arms. “We got ’em, Sir. There’s a whole closet full ’a guns down there.”
“Then lock them up! All of ’em.”
Bob walked down the line of sullen young men. “I called Guantánamo and told them to hold the pink bedrooms for these guys,” he said as he finished taking his pictures and turned to Van Zandt. “Have you heard anything from Greenfield at the campus office?”
“Yeah, there was nothing there, empty drawers and empty walls, with some papers and crap for his next course.”
“No surprise. I figured if he had anything, it would be here, where these clowns could keep an eye on it for him.” That thought was interrupted by his cell phone, which he had put on vibrate when he and Ace went for their walk. He looked at the screen and saw it was the Geeks again. “Jimmy, I’m sending you a half-dozen more head shots.”
“Go ahead. Maybe they’ll be different. The last batch is pretty much all the same. They’re from all over the Middle East, maybe half from Saudi Arabia. Three or four of them are on phony passports, like those two Khan brothers. And we have all of them on campus security videos talking with Shaw and the men killed at the commissary.”
“What about that hangar down at the airport?” Bob asked. “Have you learned anything about the ownership yet?”
“We’re still working on it,” Jimmy answered. “They’ve got one of those multi-multi-layered holding company things like we saw with the New York mobs.”
“Good, you guys have those down.”
“Sasha says it’s a ‘piece of cake,’ Boss.”
“Well, tell him I want the damn cake in twenty minutes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Sherwood Forest
Getting out of Fort Bragg proved surprisingly easy, Henry Shaw thought. The commissary was located immediately adjacent to Bragg Boulevard and that gave him a straight shot onto the big road heading south. A general alert had not been sounded yet, and with most of the emergency vehicles heading into the commissary area, he was through the gates and off the post in a matter of minutes.
While he could take satisfaction that the raid created preci
sely the chaos he intended, on balance, it was a failure. If Enderby was right, his nine best men were now dead, including Enderby himself, the man he handpicked to lead the assault. On the other hand, he could take satisfaction in eliminating that pesky FBI Agent, Pendergrass, and from the bomb that took out an Army major general. No small prize, that one! He had seen the general’s photograph in Fort Bragg newspaper stories, and he knew Stansky was one of the most important Special Ops leaders on the post. That was good, but from what Enderby told him, and what he saw with his own eyes, it was really that bastard Burke who called the shots and had orchestrated the manhunt for him. As much as Pendergrass and Stansky paid the ultimate price for their meddling, so would this civilian, Burke; because Shaw now knew where he lived.
Even at night, the drive to that big farm across the river could not have been simpler. Bragg Boulevard went straight southeast into the heart of the city and passed the front side of the recently abused Airborne and Special Operations Museum. Shaw couldn’t help but smile. At Hay Street, he turned east, passed through the center of downtown, and continued east to the Cape Fear River. This was exactly the route he took earlier that evening, over the bridge to the first right, Deep Creek Road. Last time was in the fading light of a soft autumn afternoon. Now, it was dark and there were very few lights along this rural road. Two miles further on, he slowed as he saw the driveway entrance to Sherwood Forest. This time, instead of passing by, he turned in and stopped. Halfway down the long entry drive, he saw that the front of the house was nicely illuminated by ground-mounted floodlights. From all appearances, it appeared to be a lovely, well-appointed gingerbread Victorian farmhouse him, but he knew better. There was no front gate to the driveway and no guards visible, not yet at least. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Shaw thought. The key to pulling this off would be to move quickly.
He pressed on the accelerator and drove down the long entry drive towards the house at a normal rate of speed. As he approached, he quickly scanned both sides of the road and looked up at the roof and side gables on the house. There! In the center of the main roof, he saw the dark shape of a guard behind one of the roof parapets. Apparently, his nemesis Major Burke was no gentleman farmer, after all.
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 37
