Cloudburst (25 page)

The office reverberated with a loud knock.

“Come in, Ed.”

Toronassi grinned his way in.

“You sound like you’re serving warrants,” Art joked.

“It gets me in. You got any java?” Eddie saw the almost empty pot before an answer came. There was always a pot in his boss’s office, full or not. “Hey, you want something good for the director—well, maybe it’s good.”

Art took the two fax copies. “What do we have?”

“Relatives.” Eddie leaned over the desk and pointed to the top sheet. “We found two brothers of ol’ Marcus, but that’s all for close blood. Once we talk to them there may be some aunts or something. Who knows.”

Interesting.
“The older one has quite a tail.”

Eddie nodded in mid sip. “That’s how we found him. Ernest Jackson is a scuzzball, if only a minor one. Guess it runs in the family. GTA and ADW are the biggest, but no deaths yet.”

“Didn’t break into the majors.”

“Lucky for a lot of folks. He’s got a bunch of other stuff with the biggies, going back a long way. Most of it’s violent in one way or another.”

The present whereabouts box caught Art’s eye. “He’s in Joliet. What for?”

Eddie twisted his neck uselessly, then walked around behind the dark wood desk. “Looks like assault with intent and grand theft. Must be federal.”

“He could play a part in this,” Art said as he pressed hard on his tired lids. “Contacts for the weapons, maybe. At least this keeps the trail moving in the same direction.”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what? I’ve been hunting these guys down most of the afternoon.”

It was Art’s turn to share some good news. “Frankie and Thom struck pay dirt again.”

“Who smiled on them?” Eddie was glad it had been Francine Aguirre. She was a good agent, and had worked her ass off to shake any misgivings about female street agents. It wasn’t supposed to be that way in these days of so-called equality, but old doubts died hard.

“They found the weapon stash in one of those storage places. You know, thirty bucks a month for a room or garage. Lois and I used to keep our RV in one of them.”
Until we sold it…had to sell it, by some damn court order.

The Italian-American agent’s pearly whites shone more. “Like she thought.”

“Yep. The crates and all the packing stuff were still there. Markings and all. The stuff came from an Army facility in Illinois, so…”

“What?” Eddie jumped in.

“What’s wrong?”

“The source, boss. Look at the other brother’s info. PFC Samuel Jackson, currently stationed at Rock Island Army Munitions Depot…in Illinois.”

“That’s a nuke and chemical facility.”

“Right,” Eddie said. “Which means they’d have plenty of guards, and plenty of firepower. They’ve gotta store the stuff somewhere.”

Art scanned the page. Samuel Jackson was just a kid, literally. In uniform for just over eighteen months. “How long has he been there?”

“A year, about.”

Ed was silent as Art read over the full report. Samuel, the youngest of the Jacksons, could have been the source of the guns and LAWs, which would have put Marcus in the middleman position. It was unlikely that Marcus was behind the whole thing, even more so now that they knew of his little brother’s military connection. Still, he might have been the front man in L.A. That, too, was hard to swallow completely. Nothing pointed to Marcus being either a brainy sort or one with any tangible relations to the Khaleds. There was more. Somewhere, if Art was piecing this together correctly, there would be a tie-in. A college professor had once told him that the road to certainty was paved with coincidences. That wisdom of yesteryear was now proving itself in spades.

“Ed, find out what Sam here does in the Army—what his MOS is. Then let’s run down big brother Ernest’s background. I’m going to call Jerry and ask him to hold the director off on this report.” Art tapped the yellow pad. “Okay?”

“You got it,” Eddie answered with renewed purpose. “We’re getting warm, you know.”

“Let’s run with it then.”

Georgetown

The pillows were stacked up against the headboard with his favorite down one at the top. It cradled Bud’s tilting head. He wasn’t tired, yet, being more engrossed in thoughts that tumbled in his head than with the preliminary report from Granger lying on his outstretched naked legs. It was neat, and bound. He wondered how it was that all reports, no matter how rushed, always came attractively packaged. Was there an undersecretary for that?

He shook the mental cobwebs away. Content wise the report was solid. The plans, though incomplete, were thorough. The operation would hurt the Libyans, probably with few civilian casualties, though that was a minimal concern to Bud. Some still held with the belief that innocents in a hostile place were to be safeguarded at all cost. He had never been able to grasp the logic. But then he had the luxury of being a military man. It wasn’t a question of playing by some unwritten set of chivalrous rules, which more often than not tied the hands of those on the righteous end of the stick. It was a question of reality, and of the future good. The greater good. A hundred enemy innocents now, or two hundred American innocents later.

Still, with all the justification and the culpability, not to speak of the moral issues of correctness, Bud couldn’t come to reconcile himself with the belief that this would do much more than hurt those who stood in the light, albeit a light of “evil.” It was those in the shadows who struck without warning, and it was they who would walk away with blood on their hands but little, if anything, on their conscience.

Jesus, Bud! What do you expect?

The bottle of Evian on the nightstand was less than half full, and a long draw later it was gone. Bud realized that he’d rather it were a beer. Oh well—the sacrifices of public service.

Those who had precipitated this with their surreptitious bravado filled Bud’s mind before it could lock on to anything tangible. Who were they? Almost certainly the former DCI and DDI, but what about higher-ups, and what about those in lower ranks? Had the order, or even the general inference of authorization come from the president? Or, as Landau believed, were the former heads of the Agency the source of the turmoil? That would make the most sense, Bud agreed. The Iran-Contra fiasco had proven one thing: The odor of shit drifts upward rapidly. A chief executive could not expect, in the age of the media circus, to distance himself from scandal, even one that ignorance of was a truthful defense.

It was almost unfathomable. Executive underlings had done it again, only this time their actions had led to the death of a president—and not even the one they served under!

The pillows’ soft bulk caught Bud’s head. It bobbed backward, and then the rest of his body slid until he lay almost flat on the bed.

He could feel the coldness of the plastic report cover on his legs. A lift of his knee slid it off.

Was the military option the right one?
You’re supposed to be answering questions. Bud.

Damn!
he thought. In those thirty-five pages was a plan that would work, but would it work right? It was another question, but at the moment he had little else. Certainly not any perfect answers.

In the morning he might need to recommend a strike to the president, and, he knew now, it would not be with a ready conscience. The public would support it if it became a necessity, but the long-term results would be practically nil. Maybe that’s what bothered him the most. Even the experts and so-called authorities agreed that large-scale retaliation usually only fomented further acts of terror. Tit for tat, where our tit led to their tat. The experts, Bud reminded himself, said that negotiations were the best hope for preventing future occurrences, if they were meaningful and binding.

“But who the hell is the antagonist?” he asked aloud. Who was the protagonist and who was the antagonist? Right and wrong. Did prevention mean giving the terrorists what they wanted, if only in part? Was it good to look at an issue with irrational, evil persons and search for common ground? Was it right?

“No!”

Bud brought the backs of his hands up to his eyes, blocking out the soft light. If only the goddamn rogues had succeeded there would be no problem. Qaddafi would be gone. The source would be eliminated.

Bad analysis, Bud knew. It had been an easy out, the tainted blood option, but too slow. Too much chance of discovery, the exact nightmare they were living now.

Right target, wrong method, wrong avenue of decision. It could have been right, and legitimate, and successful, with only God being the final arbiter of its righteousness. Those involved would be called on the carpet in the hereafter. Time enough to convince oneself of absolution, Bud figured.

The last thought scared him, and enlightened him. He pulled himself up on his elbows, looking into the semidarkness of the hallway to the bathroom, and wondered if wrong could be manipulated into right.

Flight 422

Hadad’s eyes opened peacefully from a dream-free sleep. His education would contradict that thought, his teachers having told him, and the other medical students, that all people dreamed during sleep. He could break from that part of his past now, too. Allah had cleared his mind. Cleansed him, actually. Completely. It had to happen so that the purpose would be achieved with purity.

He reached to his left and slid the shade up in the porthole like window. Not much like a ship’s porthole, he decided, having spent weeks on a ship during his transit of the Atlantic to the medical college in Buenos Aires years before. That had been enjoyable and frightening, being on the sea the first time, especially since all that surrounded the converted freighter was endless water.

Through the thick upper-deck window he could see the first sheets of yellow coming from the sky over the buildings to the plane’s left. It was still dark inside the lounge where he sat, and quietness filled the aircraft like a void. All below were asleep, or silently praying, or, if infidels, they simply were contemplating the last few hours and those still to come.

He rolled sideways in the wide seat and pulled his fatigue coat up over his neck. One of his comrades must have covered him when the chill snuck up on the desert during the night. His arm came up and twisted toward the incoming light. Almost five-thirty in the morning, or was it? Yes, he had adjusted the time. Five-thirty it was. Hadad leaned forward and tried to twist and stretch the sleep from his muscles. Soon he would need to start what would be a long journey. Not in time or distance, but in change. Every journey had a beginning and an end, a truism that Hadad knew was false for himself. Arrival at the final destination was but his first step toward a reunion.

Ten

TRICKS AND TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Pope AFB

“The propellant charge is one quarter of standard,” the master sergeant said. He held the 40mm grenade vertically between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like a pistol bullet enlarged by a factor of ten. “With the projectile weight being, oh, about two and a half times a normal H.E. round, the range is going to be a max of two hundred feet. We’ll have to adjust the charge for the range you want.” He waited for the information.

“One hundred feet,” McAffee obliged. “What’s the range of error?”

“Five feet either way.” The master sergeant wrapped his palm around the special round.

McAffee unfolded the aircraft cabin floor plan. The forward cabin was longer than ten feet as a unit of the interior, so the margin of error was acceptable. “Okay. How many can you have in an hour?”

“How many you need?”

The major gave it a quick thought. “Eight. All the same. Two sealed in HK-69s, and six loose for practice.”

The NCO nodded confidently. “You’ll have ‘em in thirty minutes.” He gave a few commands over his hand-held radio, instructing his crew to adjust the propellant amount in the grenades. “The frame charge is ready. You wanna see it?”

“Let’s do it.” McAffee turned to the aircraft behind. “Captain Graber. Outside with me…pronto.”

The three men went to a grassy area a hundred yards from hangar 9. A row of pines hid the spot from view, but not from the electronic eyes that might be high above. To counter that a canopy was strung between four metal poles driven into the wet earth. Misty rain was settling down from the clouds hidden in the dark sky. Sunrise would be in less than an hour. By that time the weather was supposed to be back to a full-fledged rain.

A corporal stood beneath the canopy, his hand swathed in a towel to dry the aluminum panel of the moisture that was constantly condensing on its top surface. Attached to the bottom with double-sided adhesives was a single-frame charge, hastily but expertly assembled to meet the needs of the team.

“Everything ready, Geller?” the master sergeant asked, bending down to inspect the underside where his handiwork was attached.

“All set. I ran the detonator over to the berm.” He motioned to the sky. “There’s enough tree canopy there to cover it naturally.”

McAffee and Graber inspected the charge and the aluminum. The metal was a quarter inch thick, the same as the material they would need to penetrate on the aircraft. Four concrete poles were holding the metal plate four feet off the ground. Two bolts from each pole held it securely down, the entire structure as rock-solid as a single unit.

“We have four of these, but, unfortunately, we can’t adjust the power on them as easily.” The master sergeant directed the Delta officer toward the mound of dirt that would shield them from the blast. “The blast won’t be as loud as a door charge, and not as much backward concussion. You could probably stay three feet from it with no problem.” He trotted up and over the berm, followed by the others.

“Right here.” The corporal handed the detonator to his superior.

The master sergeant held it up. “Your standard setup. I will caution you: There’s gonna be more smoke than usual. Remember, this thing is like a bunch of HEAT shells packaged around the blast perimeter. They’re practically gonna melt the metal.”