Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  Luna was delighted to be working with Kincaid. He felt awful that the seemingly solid intel was proving baseless.

  The Filipino agent stood and stretched and massaged his aching forehead above the bridge of his nose. He yawned and headed for the door.

  "My head may well explode, Tom,” he grumbled. “I gotta get me some fresh air and another bottle of aspirin. Maybe I can pick up a hint if anything is gonna come down. You need anything?"

  "Bring me a mango sorbete," Kincaid said. "And try to get back this time before it melts, if you don’t mind."

  "You and your ice cream," Luna said with a chuckle. "Worse than a kid in the streets."

  The Philippine agent closed the door behind himself, looked up and down the tiny, dark hallway, then hopped down the stairs and out into the blistering Avienda de Mar. He didn’t head in the direction of the ship they were watching, though. Instead, he turned the corner and walked away from the waterfront, his pace matching that of all the others on the sidewalk. This street was no less crowded than the waterfront thoroughfare, but he would be far less likely to draw attention from anyone on the Dawn Flower if he didn't parade back and forth in front of the vessel.

  Luna turned left on Murella Street. He quickened his pace as he paralleled Avienda de Mar, but two blocks over. As the burly agent moved down the shop-lined street, he noticed the already crowded concourse becoming even more congested and noisy. By the third block, the boulevard was packed with a mass of sweating humanity.

  Something was going on. This wasn't the normal early afternoon crowd, hurrying home for siesta. These people were angry about something.

  Above the normal street noise, he could hear someone up ahead shouting through a megaphone, leading the crowd in a rabid, rhythmic chorus. Curious, Luna edged closer until he could make out the pro-Islamic, anti-government slogans that were being chanted. More people were pouring in from the side streets to see what was going on. The agent allowed the crowd to engulf and hide him.

  "It's Sabul!" someone close by shouted. "It is Sabul u Nurizam, here to reveal to us Allah's will!"

  Luna had heard plenty about Sabul. How he was spreading his own militant brand of hateful terrorism across the southern Philippines. How he and the radical Abu Sayuff movement was financing their own private war with drugs and pirate raids. Now he would have a chance to see the mythic Islamic fundamentalist in the flesh. He edged as close as he dared but he could only make out the top of the head of what must be Sabul.

  It seemed odd that such a well known radical cleric would be right out here in public, for anyone to take a pot-shot at, or for the government to arrest. But there he was.

  The terrorist leader had stopped the chanting and was pacing back and forth, preaching to the growing crowd. Luna listened to the man’s inflammatory words. No wonder he was able to whip these people into such frenzy. The radical leader was near hypnotic as he espoused the worst kinds of racist hate, but used the cadence and delivery of an evangelical preacher. He called for turning the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia into a fundamentalist Islamic state. The western world was evil, decadent, intent on bringing its sinful worldliness to the entire globe. It was Allah’s will that such forbidden non-Islamic temptations be banned. That ban would be forcibly imposed, even if it took the blood of the people to do it, and the infidels would be eradicated to assure they did not return.

  Luna had heard such rhetoric before, but it seemed all the more venomous coming from this man. He moved to the edge of the crowd and tried to make his way forward, hoping to get a better look at this deadly prophet. There was a mosque a little farther down the street. That must be where Nurizam was holding forth.

  After fifteen minutes of carefully picking his way through the crowd, Luna could see Nurizam. He was almost surrounded by at least a dozen men who appeared to be bodyguards. Nurizam was a tall, gaunt man. He paced back and forth across the flat bed of a truck, still spouting his bilious message. The man’s face was narrow, pinched, hawk-like, and he wore a full, black beard and flowing robes.

  But it was the eyes that caught Luna's attention, even from that distance. The jet-black pools of fire seemed to be looking directly at him as the terrorist spoke. They appeared capable of burning a path into his soul. Luna had never experienced such a pure force of personality as the one that radiated from this radical Islamic cleric.

  With Nurizam speaking, the milling mass had fallen silent. The man was mesmerizing.

  "We must be ready to drive the infidels from our lands! It is Allah's will!" Nurizam ranted. "The Manila government is the puppet of the West! It must be crushed. Allah has revealed his plan to me. We will win this holy war! Then we will build a paradise for his sons, here in our land!"

  Luna soon found he was nodding and chanting in agreement, although he detested every word of the hate-filled diatribe he was hearing.

  A white van suddenly screamed down the street from the opposite direction, its horn blaring away, trying to clear a path through the throng. When the crowd was too thick to move out of the vehicle’s way, it rammed viciously into the people, scattering bodies in all directions. The van lurched to a halt twenty meters from the truck where Nurizam was still ranting, apparently unaware of the carnage that had just taken place in front of him.

  The van's side doors rolled open and four armed men, two from each side, jumped out. The men leveled their machine pistols at Nurizam and opened fire. The crowd scattered, some trampling on others in their haste to avoid the hail of bullets.

  Luna could not believe what he was seeing. It was like a movie was unspooling right there in front of him. He stood there amid the bedlam, transfixed, watching in horror as the men who stood behind and to either side of Nurizam fell, chopped down by the gunmen before they could even unholster the pistols they carried. The cleric's white robes were splattered with the blood of his fallen comrades.

  But amazingly, as the crowd surged in panic, as the people screamed in terror and charged pell-mell away from the scene, as the men around him were ripped apart by the horrible barrage, Nurizam continued to rant, never breaking stride in his back-and-forth pacing. He seemed oblivious to the murder that was happening, to the seething bullets that tore past him.

  The gunmen continued to fire. Impossibly, Nurizam kept preaching, unfazed and unharmed. It was as if he knew the bullets could not hurt him. Then, amazingly, the terrorist leader stopped walking, stood tall, and boldly faced his would-be assassins at pointblank range. His arms were held wide. He watched the gunmen with his dark eyes. He was a perfect target.

  Still, the bullets ripped into the fallen men around him, hissed over the heads of the people on the street who were frantically crawling for cover, clanked into the metal cab of the truck, pocked the wall of the building behind.

  Not a single bullet struck Nurizam.

  After a seeming eternity of carnage, but really only half a minute or so, the would-be assassins jumped back into their van and the driver screeched away, running over still more people were sprawled along the narrow avenue. At the same time armed men came running out of the mosque, their weapons drawn.

  But the assassins had fled. There was no one to shoot at. The newly arrived armed men formed a human shield around the cleric and hauled him away, back into the safety of the stone building.

  The street was empty. Empty except for the awkwardly arrayed bodies of a score or more fallen men and the bullet-riddled truck with the bleeding corpses of the radical’s local bodyguards. An awful quiet fell on the scene, disturbed only by the distant singsong rising and falling notes of an approaching siren and the occasional moaning of the wounded.

  Benito Luna slipped down an alley and ran toward where he suspected the van would have to pass once it turned back to the direction from which it came. He would try to head it off. He drew his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Berretta automatic, from his waistband and checked it ready.

  He had trouble getting past the frightened mob cowering in the alley, some of th
em shrieking and pointing at the sight of his drawn gun. He burst onto the street just in time to see the mini-van scream around a far corner and disappear.

  He stopped, breathing hard. The face he had glimpsed through the passenger's side window of the van looked familiar. It couldn't possibly be, but Luna was almost certain it had been his old mentor, Colonel Ortega, the head of the Mindanao office of the NBI.

  Why? Why would one of the Philippine's top cops be involved in an assassination attempt? It didn't make any sense. Sure, he might want to get Nurizam, but this was hardly the way it was done.

  Luna shook his head. He must be mistaken.

  He re-holstered his gun and walked back toward the hotel room. He didn’t want to have to explain his presence here to the local cops when they arrived on the scene. He also wanted to tell Tom Kincaid the unbelievable things he had just seen.

  And his headache was now threatening to blow off the top of his head.

  Sabul u Nurizam stood before his followers in the central hall of the masjid, the local mosque. He seemed unfazed by the attempt on his life even though only a minute or two had passed since his regular bodyguards had pulled him inside.

  "See, my sons," he said as he raised his out-stretched arms, palms up. Broad patches of dark red blood stained his white garment. "It is as I said. Allah protects and guides me on our quest."

  He surveyed the group of men who stood around him there in the unadorned, simple room. Even the mihrab, the niche indicating the qibla, the direction of Mecca, was little more than a simple, open, wooden closet. The dozen men stood in sharp contrast to the quiet, peaceful room. Their camouflage dress was still sweaty from the dash outside to rescue their leader. They still held their weapons loosely, ready. Watchful eyes followed Nurizam's speech, but they stole frequent glances toward the room's accesses. Bodies were tensed for instant action.

  Nurizam continued, his voice rising in pitch as his excitement increased.

  "You saw it! The people saw it! Bullets all around! And not one scratch! It is Allah's will. He will guide us. We must move forward, push our plan boldly. We cannot fail."

  It was Manju Shehab who finally spoke.

  "Sabul, I don't understand. Why did you order us to stay in the mosque and insist on using the local mullahs for your protection? They had no training, no experience. You were almost killed."

  The terrorist leader looked into the eyes of his top lieutenant and hesitated a moment before he answered. He spoke slowly, weighing each word carefully.

  "Manju Shehab, you are my most trusted compatriot. It is right for you to question that which you do not understand. There are things that I will tell you to do that you will not understand. You must trust me in those things. Today, I was in no danger. Allah protected me. It was important for the people to see me unafraid, even when faced with such a brutal assault." Nurizam looked at the dark, muscular fighter, still clutching his AK-47. "I know that you are concerned for my safety. That is good, but trust me, it is not necessary."

  Shehab shook his head as he tried to understand what his leader was saying.

  "Sabul, I faithfully follow you,” he stammered. “You know that. But you are correct when you say that you do things I do not understand. You tell us to stay in the mosque and you are almost killed. You tell us to steal a ship full of heroin worth millions, then you tell us to dump it into the ocean. It was money that could have bought many weapons to use in our struggle against the infidels."

  Nurizam shook his head and allowed a slight smile to play on his thin lips.

  "I will say it again, but only because I know you question me with the purest of motives. It will all be made clear to you later. Believe me when I say those drugs are more useful to us now than if they had been delivered to the decadent streets in America.” Nurizam put an arm around his most trusted lieutenant’s shoulder. “Now, enough of this. Come! We are wasting time here. We must go to the mountains. There is much to do."

  With that, the terrorist leader marched out of the room, through a door, and onto a side street. His lieutenants were left to catch up as he rounded a corner and hopped into the back of a black Mercedes SUV that was sitting there idling, waiting.

  As he ran along behind his leader, Shehab shook his head, puzzled by what had happened just around the corner. Still, one thing was clear. Nurizam had been unscathed, had lived through a barrage no mere mortal could have ever survived.

  If there had been even the slightest of doubts before in the deepest recesses of his rational mind, it had been washed away in the blood of the mullahs who had died on the bed of that truck. The tall, thin man he followed at a gallop to the SUV was Allah’s emissary on earth.

  Shehab knew that more certainly than ever.

  The torrents of sweat ran down through his eyebrows and stung Jon Ward's eyes. His lungs were on fire. He charged down the empty path, going all out, the only way he knew how to go. All he could hear was the hammering of his heart as it threatened to burst out of his ribcage and the dull pounding of his feet on the pavement.

  The flowering crepe myrtle and the twittering songbirds were lost on him. The bumper-to-bumper late afternoon traffic on Kempsville Road whizzed past but hardly registered on his consciousness. The drivers of those vehicles were preoccupied as well, with the mental recap of their day’s work or the voices on their radios, with their jobs up in Norfolk or getting to their homes in Chesapeake or Virginia Beach. They paid no attention to the muscular, middle-aged man as he ran along the path beside the street.

  Ward pulled up at the light on Indian River Road, his chest heaving, jogging in place as he waited for it to change. There, a block down the way, he saw a flash of red running shorts as they disappeared around the corner onto Lake Christopher Drive.

  He grimaced. Damn! When did that kid get to be so fast?

  The light changed. Ward ran across the six-lane thoroughfare and turned right. A block down the street, he, too, made the turn into Lake Christopher Drive. The final four hundred yards along the quiet, tree-lined street brought him to his house, a neat two-story with the blue water of Lake Christopher lapping at the edge of the backyard.

  Jon Ward came to a stop beneath the shade trees in the front yard and bent double. His breath came in great, ragged gasps as he tried to suck oxygen back into his lungs.

  "Not bad for an old man," Jim Ward called cheerfully from where he lay on the grass at the side of the house, idly drinking from the trickling nozzle of a garden hose. The well-muscled young man was not even breathing hard. "If we had run another twenty miles, you might have finished in the same time zone."

  The tall redhead laughed easily as his father staggered over and collapsed on the grass next to him, too winded to even reach for the hose.

  "Soon as I get over this heart attack I’m having, I'll teach you a lesson or two about respect for your elders," Jon Ward jibed back with a broad, proud grin. "When did you get to where you could run like that?"

  "Ain't youth great?" the younger man retorted. "And Dad, in case you’ve gotten too senile to remember, I am the captain of the Naval Academy cross country team this year. And I could make that run without…"

  But his words were interrupted by a call from the back of the house, from someone on the patio. It was Jim’s mother, Jon’s wife, Ellen.

  "You two road warriors want to quit lying around, getting grass stains all over your clothes, and come on back here for some Gatorade?"

  The two looked at each other. The drinks sounded good. They found Ellen seated at a glass patio table, surrounded by books and papers. More volumes filled the seats of two patio chairs on either side of her. She looked up and pulled off her reading glasses when her two men came around the corner of the house.

  They went straight for the bottles of sports drinks she had waiting for them in a cooler filled with ice.

  Ellen Ward’s reading glasses were new. She hated the idea that she even needed the damned things. It was her first concession that she might be aging, like most norma
l humans do.

  "Still working on your lecture?" Jon asked as he turned up the frosty bottle of Gatorade. It was mostly gone by the time his wife had a chance to answer him.

  "I have to get it done. I haven't taught college-level botany since you were a junior officer." She brushed back her red hair, now streaked with gray. Coloring her hair was another concession to age she preferred postponing as long as possible. "I’ve got a lot of catching up to do."

  “Humph! Trees is still trees, ain’t they, Miz Ward?” he said with a grin and then ducked the pencil she threw at him.

  "Mom, does this mean we have to start calling you Doctor Ward?’" Jim kidded.

  She swatted at him. He easily ducked.

  "Yes, and you and your father had better start showing me the proper respect. Just because your dad used to drive submarines and you’ve managed to fool the Naval Academy into letting you stay around for a fourth year doesn’t mean I don’t deserve a bit of reverence around here, too. Besides, we academicians stick together. A whisper from me to one of your professors, Mister, and your GPA is toast. Oh, and by the way…”

  She picked up an envelope from the stacks of papers on the table and tossed it to her husband.

  “What’s this?” Jon asked.

  "Oh, nothing much. Just notification that I got accepted to lead the college’s summer tour to Thailand this year. Three months in the highlands researching epiphytic orchids in their natural habitat with a class of twenty students. What do you think of that, Commodore?"

  "That’s fantastic! Congratulations, honey," Jon answered as he bent down and kissed her cheek. "But who’s going to fix my supper while you're gone?"

  Jon Ward deflected another pencil tossed his way.

  "Speaking of good news and the Far East…” Jim said, a big grin on his face.

  Both parents looked his way, eyes wide.