Death Run (15 page)

Knowing that he'd need as much ammo as possible when things turned ugly, Bolan replaced the partially spent magazine with a full one and moved to the building to position himself for a look around the corner. He saw one more guard, this one standing by the door of what once must have been some sort of washing room or cleaning room built on the side of the main structure. He studied the surrounding area but couldn't see any more guards or any likely hides for them.

Off in the area that once must have been the turkey's pasture, Bolan could see a drainage ditch that ran alongside the fence and terminated very near the barn entrance. Bolan moved into the ditch, crouched and ran toward the small cleaning room. When he reached the point where the ditch became too shallow to crouch without being seen, he crawled on his belly until he reached the end of the trench. A small pipe ran into the trench from the room built onto the side of the barn.

The final guard was only four feet from where Bolan hid in the ditch. He waited patiently and when the man turned his back, the soldier lunged out and attacked him. He had the man in a death grip before he'd had a chance to make a sound. Bolan twisted the man's head hard. The man looked at Bolan with a calm expression on his face, then fell face-first onto the ground, dead. Bolan moved quickly toward the door that led into the small lean-to built onto the side of the turkey shed.

The structure had windows on the three sides that weren't connected to the shed, but they were so filthy it was impossible to see through them. Bolan crouched down below the windows in case it was easier to see out than in and moved to the door. When he craned his head to look inside, he saw something he hadn't expected. A young girl was chained to an old, dusty cast-iron sink. A man with an SAR-21 battle rifle stood above her, the short barrel of his rifle trained on her head.

Botros hated the fact that his men were being drawn into the culture of decadence that was motorcycle racing. They had begun listening to popular music, and he suspected that some of them had even begun smoking marijuana since they had been working with the deviant Filipino gangsters from San Francisco.

He watched the Filipino-American swine pummel Eddie Anderson on the floor of the shed. His men still hadn't cleaned up the bloody lump of carved flesh tied to the chair near where the gangsters beat the young American. He knew he should stop the beating — his life might be worth no more than Anderson's if he let these thugs accidentally killed the little man — but he found he was taking too much pleasure in the young man's suffering to stop the proceedings.

Ultimately the beating stopped on its own. As more of the gangsters noticed the grotesquery tied to the chair, they lost interest in beating Anderson. Eventually they stopped altogether. The sight of Nancy Maurstad's remains even quieted the abrasive young American. It was the first time Botros had ever seen the man when he wasn't flapping his lips about something.

"Tie him up," Botros ordered the Filipinos, motioning to a chair not far from bin Osman's previous victim.

By this time the shock had worn off and Anderson resumed his tirade against both Botros and the Filipinos. The Filipinos began to punch the man again.

"Stop. We must keep him alive. Gag him with this." Botros tossed a filthy rag to the Filipino closest to him and the man stuffed the rag in Anderson's mouth, then secured it with a piece of duct tape.

Bin Osman had been pleased when Botros had called to tell him about the abduction of the American. Botros loathed the Malaysian, but it comforted him when his psychopathic boss was pleased. He looked at the hideous carcass tied to the chair in the middle of the room. It had been several hours since she'd died and most of the blood had drained from her body, leaving her looking like a beached manatee. While he thought bin Osman's actions were despicable, he was glad that the Malaysian was going to practice his art on Anderson rather than him.

He was further relieved that the big American had not found them yet. Perhaps he would never find them. Botros didn't know who he feared more — bin Osman or Cooper. Even though the depths of bin Osman's depravity knew no bottom, he thought perhaps he feared Cooper more. Bin Osman was a man — a twisted, emotionally stunted excuse of a man, but still a man. He wasn't so sure about Cooper. He had begun to believe that the American really was
Iblis
made flesh.

But the more time passed without their being attacked by the big American, the more relaxed Botros became. The plan would succeed; it had to. The Muslim world needed to be rid of the traitorous bastards who spoon-fed their people Western decadence disguised as moderation.

They would strike what may well turn out to be a death blow to the United States. By destroying a major U.S. city like San Francisco, the United States would likely become a police state, as it nearly had after the glorious attacks of 9/11. The Americans were so cowardly that after one attack on their own soil they had gladly handed over their freedoms to the government. Their president at the time had claimed that the attackers hated America because of its freedom; in reality, Botros thought, they had hated America for its presence in the Middle East and its support of Israel. Its citizens' so-called "freedom" was just an aspect of what they hated, a symptom of the disease just as a sneeze was a symptom of a cold.

Botros knew al Qaeda did want the American government to curtail the freedom of its citizens, not because they hated that freedom but because the discontent such action would create would in turn create much internal strife that al Qaeda could manipulate to achieve its own ends. They had almost accomplished this after 9/11, but as time went on without further attacks, the American people had slowly begun to reclaim their freedoms.

The bomb that bin Osman was in the process of activating would kill nearly all of the people in San Francisco, and it would kill hundreds of thousands in the surrounding area. The fallout from the bomb would kill hundreds of thousands more. After the attack the government would almost certainly declare martial law. The chaos that would result from this would throw the United States into such a state of turmoil that controlling the chaos would consume all of the country's resources. It would force the U.S. to withdraw much of its military forces from around the world. This would leave al Qaeda free to achieve its aims without American interference.

It would work. Botros could feel it in his bones. By this time, Maurstad should have finished assembling the bomb and set the timer. The bomb would be set to go off at 6:00 p.m. the following evening, in almost exactly twenty-four hours. By that time everyone would have returned from the races and the Egyptian, the Saudi, and the Jordanian traitors would be back in the city. Bin Osman should be returning to the compound within half an hour. After that, it would just be a matter of waiting. Waiting, and watching for that devil Cooper.

Botros knew he had to stop worrying about the American. Everything was going as planned.

The man guarding the young woman hadn't noticed the Executioner peering through the doorway, which was partially open to let air flow into the hot room. The guard was too busy staring at the girl's thighs, which were uncovered because her skirt had ridden up on her hip, exposing a lacy pale pink undergarment. The guard seemed transfixed by the sight, as if he'd never seen a woman before. Bolan watched as the man moved closer to the girl.

Just then the girl saw Bolan's face through the doorway. Her eyes went wide, but Bolan held a finger to his lips, indicating she should remain quiet. The fact that she didn't scream even when she saw the soldier's grease-painted face in the doorway told him that she was either nearly catatonic or else very tough.

The girl looked at the guard and spread her legs, moving the skirt even farther up her hip. Then she gave the guard a seductive smile.

The guard glanced through the door into the main area of the shed to make certain no one could see him, then moved closer to the girl. Bolan crept closer to the doorway and prepared to move. The guard reached down to touch the girl's leg. It looked to Bolan as if the man was shaking. When he reached down to unbuckle his pants, Bolan made his move. He leaped through the door with the Fairbairn-Sykes knife in an ice pick grip and drove it down into the man's sterno-clavicular junction. The blade sliced through the man's jugular vein and he collapsed before he even knew he'd been attacked.

Again Bolan held his finger up to his lip, indicating that the girl should remain quiet, and glanced out the door into the main area of the shed. In the middle of the room he could see what most likely had been a female human, though she'd been sliced into such a gory mess that the soldier couldn't be completely certain. Her bloodless body was tied to a chair. Next to her Eddie Anderson was tied to a similar chair, his face bloodied and bruised.

A more thorough survey of the room revealed several vehicles, including the two he'd followed to the compound after Anderson had been kidnapped. He saw about a dozen Arab-looking men, who must have been Botros men, along with six Filipinos.

The soldier had faced some impossible odds in his life and come out on top — odds a lot worse than eighteen to one — but his luck had to run out sometime. Just because he'd faced worse didn't mean eighteen to one odds were good. He had to play this smart or he'd not only get himself killed, but he'd also bring about the deaths of Anderson and the girl, whom he assumed was Mareebeth Maurstad. He wished he'd have called in Osborne, but he'd been too busy trying to rescue Anderson to take the time to call for help.

Bolan needed some sort of diversion. He was still trying to figure out what form that diversion might take when he heard a cell phone ring. He watched as Jameed Botros pulled a phone from his pants pocket and said, "Did it go well?"

Botros appeared pleased with the answer. "How far out are you?" he asked. When he apparently got the answer he hung up his phone. "Open the door," he ordered. "They are coming up the road."

Musabin Osman hoped the Filipinos in the truck with him would not notice that he was excited. His heart pounded when he thought about the task before him, and he plotted out every cut he planned to make on the American's body before he finally released him into death. He probably wouldn't take as much time as he had with the Maurstad woman, but the youngster had caused him problems and for that he would pay.

When the van drove up to the overhead door that he'd had installed in the turkey shed, he looked at the guards Botros had placed in the derelict cars around the building. In one car he could see no one and in the other the sentry appeared to be asleep. Botros would pay for the incompetence of his men. By the time the door had been raised and the Filipino driving had shut off the engine of the van, he'd worked himself into a complete state of rage.

"You incompetent fool!" he shrieked at Botros.

"What is the problem?" Botros asked.

"It's the men you have guarding the building," bin Osman shouted. "They are either asleep or they have left their posts."

"That is impossible. They are good men, and experienced. They would never fail me."

"If it is impossible, what has happened to them? I clearly saw one man sleeping in the vehicle near the door, and his counterpart seems to have disappeared entirely," bin Osman shouted.

"Hadad!" Botros addressed one of his men. "Go and see if this is true. If these men are indeed absent or sleeping, find them and bring them in here."

Hadad ran from the building to go and check on the guards.

"If what you say is true," Botros said to bin Osman, "I will see to it that the men are punished."

"You will if you do not want to be punished yourself," bin Osman warned.

"Did you run into any problems arming the device?" Botros asked. They had been able to speak freely around the BNG members because none of them spoke Arabic. Most spoke only English with only a smattering of Tagalog because they had been in San Francisco since they were small children.

"Only a bit of reluctance on the part of Dr. Maurstad," bin Osman said. "Bring Dr. Maurstad out here," he ordered in English.

One of the Filipinos opened the rear door of the van's cargo box and two more BNG members emerged with Gunthar Maurstad sandwiched between them. When the man saw the remains of his wife tied to the chair, he almost collapsed, but the Filipinos on either side of him held him upright.

"When I reminded him that his cooperation was the only possible way to spare his daughter the same fate his wife met, he became much more helpful."

Once the device exploded, Botros knew his deviant master would deconstruct the younger Maurstad woman with at least as much care as he'd dismembered her mother.

In the meantime, bin Osman could work on the young racer. And Botros would have two more people to guard for the next twenty-four hours. It seemed bin Osman did not care how much extra work he made for Botros and his men. As he contemplated the disrespect that bin Osman seemed to have for him, Botros heard three loud popping sounds from behind him, as if someone had set off three small firecrackers. He turned to look for the source of the sound, but was interrupted by a distraught Hadad, who came rushing into the building at that very instant.

"They're dead!" Hadad shouted.

"Who's dead," Botros asked.

"All of them," the shocked man said.

"All of who?" Botros asked, getting impatient with the man's circular discourse.

"The guards. All of them, dead."

Botros heard four more of the popping sounds in rapid succession and Hadad fell flat on his face, a large chunk missing from the back of his head.

When Botros sent the man he called Hadad to go check on the sentries, Bolan still hadn't formulated a good plan but he knew his time for formulating had run out. It was time to act. From his hide behind a crate that had likely housed components for the nuclear explosive device that bin Osman and Botros had assembled, he counted the men in the room, noted their locations and decided the order in which he planned to shoot them. If he was really fast and his timing perfect, he'd be able to cut the odds against him in half before anyone had a chance to fire back.