Chapter 7
C
harles Lockhart looked at the turkey dinner he had just nuked in the microwave of his apartment kitchen. What a sad, pathetic thing dinner for one was. For a second he considered picking it up from the counter and dumping it in the trash . . . but he was hungry. And public schoolteachers didn't make enough money to afford such extravagant gestures as throwing away perfectly good food.
Charles's father had always accused him of having his head in the clouds, but he had a practical side, too. He carried the previously frozen dinner from the counter to the table and set it down, then got himself a bottle of non-alcoholic beer from the refrigerator.
Happy Thanksgiving
, he told himself as he sat down to eat. He recognized the bitterness in the thought, but there wasn't anything he could do about it right now.
Besides, there was a part of him accustomed to the bitterness, almost like it was an old friend.
The hour was fairly late for Thanksgiving dinner because he'd slept in, then watched what was left of the parade, followed by the dog show that was on every year. Charles liked dogs, and if he'd had a house, he would go to one of the shelters and adopt a rescue dog. Maybe two. It would have been all right for him to have one pet here in the apartment, but that didn't really seem fair to him. He was saving up for a down payment on a house with a nice backyard, so one of these days . . .
Yeah, just like one of these days he'd be married and have a family and be a respected educator. People would actually listen to him.
The day before, when the bell rang for early dismissal, he had tried to tell the juniors and sophomores in his English II class good-bye and wish them a happy Thanksgiving break, but nearly all of them dashed out the door before he could say a word. They might not be little kids anymore, but sometimes they still acted like they were, and one of those occasions was when school was dismissed early for a break.
In this case, that break was only four days. They'd been bitching all week because they had to go to school on Wednesday. None of the other districts in the area did. In fact, some of them were out all week and called it Fall Break.
The calendar in the district where Charles taught was a little fluky, though. He'd tried to explain to them that they would get out a day or more earlier than those other districts at the end of the school year, but that was months off and didn't mean anything to the kids. Not much did other than the here and now.
Probably it never occurred to any of them that he wanted out of there just as much as they did. The kids all thought that teachers
liked
school, and Charles knew that some did.
He wasn't one of them. He didn't
dislike
it. There were lots worse jobs in the world, and he was well aware of that. And there were those rare times when one of the kids actually understood what he was trying to get across, and that was gratifying.
For the most part, though, he was doing the same thing they were: putting in the time.
As he started to eat, he picked up the book lying on the table, a paperback edition of
The Great Gatsby
. It was one of his favorite novels. The curriculum allowed him only a few authors of his picking each year, and, he usually opted for Hemingway or Fitzgerald, as they were accessible. Sometimes Faulkner or Henry James, if he was feeling in a particularly perverse mood and wanted to torture the kids.
Today he just read the ending of
Gatsby
while he ate. He knew it pretty well by heart but always enjoyed letting his eyes travel over the words anyway. There was something so poignant about being a boat beating against the current. He suspected that was a good description of him as well.
When he was finished, he set the book aside, went into the living room, and turned the TV on again.
The first thing that came on was a commercial for a local gun store. They were having a big Black Friday sale, like every other business in town. Charles had never fired a gun in his life and hadn't even held one in his hand, nor did he have any interest in them.
He flipped through the channels. Football game. Football game. Football game. Commercial for a huge, daylong sale at the American Way Mall, with new specials every hour.
That was a little interesting, he decided. At some point, he would need to buy Christmas presents for his family, so he might as well get started on that. Sure, it would be crowded, but he didn't mind parking at the edge of the mall lot. The walk would do him good.
He spent enough time alone here in his apartment. Being around a lot of people might be just the thing he needed to perk him up and bring him out of this gloomy mood.
A little excitement would be a welcome thing, he told himself.
* * *
The SAM arced up from the brown, gray, and tan landscape below, trailing smoke as it tore through the hot air toward the chopper.
Jamie Vasquez's co-pilot yelled, “Incoming!” but Jamie was already leaning on the controls, sending the helicopter veering sharply down and to the left. Startled cries came from the troops she was ferrying.
Jamie wasn't surprised, though. Intel said that the Taliban wasn't active in this area right now, but she was in her third tour in Afghanistan and had learned a long time ago that intel could be trusted only so far.
She kept the chopper swooping hard to the left, hoping the surface-to-air missile wasn't a heat-seeker. Most of them weren't. In large part, the Taliban forces were still using weapons left over from the ill-fated Russian invasion more than thirty years earlier. Many of them weren't very advanced.
This missile didn't appear to be changing course in response to her actions. In the pair of heartbeats Jamie had to spare as the SAM streaked toward the chopper, she recognized that and heaved a mental sigh of relief. Her reflexes had been fast enough to get them out of harm's way.
Then the missile barely clipped the chopper's tail and detonated.
The explosion jolted the helicopter as if a giant hand had tried to swat it out of the air. Men yelled curses as the aircraft began to spin crazily.
Jamie fought the controls as they tried to tear themselves out of her hands, using all the skill and strength she had developed during thousands of hours in the air. In the other seat, the co-pilot shouted readings from the instruments.
The sandy, rocky ground was coming up fast.
The chopper was still level, though, which was good. If Jamie could stop the spin and get just a little forward momentum, she could set them down without a catastrophic crash. She hoped. There would at least be a chance . . .
Of course, even if they got on the ground, Taliban fighters would probably be waiting for them.
She lowered her chin to key the mike strapped to her throat and called in the Mayday, giving headquarters their position. A few fighter planes might be able to keep the enemy off of them long enough for another chopper to get here for an evac.
If they didn't . . .
Well, those soldiers back there had signed up to fight. Looked like they might get their chance a little sooner than they'd expected.
The spinning slowed. Servomotors whined as they responded to Jamie's skillful touch. She coaxed a little more stability out of the controls.
The chopper lurched forward, clearing a pile of jagged rocks by no more than twenty feet. A gentle, sandy slope loomed ahead of the aircraft. Jamie thought she might be able to set it down without too much damage . . .
Then it tilted with no warning and rammed starboard side first into the ground.
* * *
She came up gasping for air, as if she were fighting against a literal tide that threatened to drown her.
“Whoa, honey, take it easy,” her husband Tom told her. “You just dozed off.” He frowned. “Were you dreaming that you were back there again?”
She sat up in bed. The light on Tom's side was still on. He'd been reading a paperback Western that he must have set aside when she startled awake. It was sitting facedown on the covers, open to a page about halfway through the book.
Jamie glanced at the clock. 10:50, it read. She had gone to sleep almost immediately when her head hit the pillow at 10:30, exhausted after a long day of kids and Thanksgiving festivities.
That meant she had been asleep for twenty minutes. How in the hell could she have had such a detailed dreamâor nightmare, to give it its rightful nameâin only twenty minutes? In real life the incident hadn't taken as long as that. Among the ones who had been killed was Master Sergeant Benjamin Farley. He had saved Jamie's life at least twice, then lost his defending the makeshift stronghold from the enemy. In addition to Jamie, only four soldiers had lived through that fight.
Various medals had been passed out, some of them posthumously. Jamie had gone home and taken the medical discharge they offered her. She had been on her third tour when she was wounded, so nobody pressed her to stay in.
Besides, she had a husband and four kids between the ages of eight and seventeen, and she had been away from them long enough already. Somebody else could handle the fighting from here on out.
That didn't mean it was easy to leave the past behind, though. A couple of times a month, on average, she had these painfully vivid dreams where she relived that day in the desert. Those rocks were on the other side of the world from her suburban Springfield home, but to her they might as well have been just down the street.
She pushed the covers back on her side of the bed and said, “I'm taking something.”
“Are you sure that's a good idea?” Tom asked.
She swung her legs off the bed and was struck by the asymmetry of them. The right one ended just below the knee. She had assumed she would be used to that by now, but sometimes she wondered if she ever would be.
The doctors had done a top-notch job all the way around, from the amputation to the rehab to the prosthesis to the therapy that taught her how to get around on it. People who only saw her in jeans might not even realize she was missing part of her leg.
She would always know it, though.
She didn't bother putting on the prosthesis just to go to the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. The crutch she kept by the bed was good enough for that. She shook a pill from the prescription bottle into the palm of her other hand and closed the cabinet, then swallowed the pill dry and looked at herself in the mirror.
Her sandy blond hair was still cut short to fit in a flight helmet, even though she wouldn't be taking the controls ever again. There weren't any more lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth than you'd find on the faces of most women in their late thirties.
Once she had overheard one of her oldest son Andrew's friends telling Andrew how hot she was, which had embarrassed Andy, of course and almost started a fight.
Where the image broke down was her eyes. They had seen too much
Luckily, she had come home to a loving husband, good kids, and a peaceful life. She had figured she would put everything else behind her.
She was trying, but so far the results had been mixed.
Tom was pretending to read again when she got back to bed, but she saw the way his eyes cut toward her now and then in a sideward glance.
“I know I've probably been taking a few too many pills,” she said as she climbed into bed. “I'll cut back on them. I really need to get some decent sleep tonight, though. I've got Christmas shopping tomorrow.”
“You don't
have
to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving, you know,” he said. “It'll be all right if you wait until next week when the crowds aren't so bad.”
“No, you and the kids had to celebrate Christmas without me for too many years already.”
“Hey, we always Skyped.”
“It's not the same thing and you know it,” Jamie said. “I promised myself that the first Christmas I was back, I'd go out the day after Thanksgiving and buy presents for all of you. You know how it is when you set a goal for yourself.”
“Sure,” he said. Tom Vasquez knew about goals. He was the vice president of a corporation that made machine parts for the U.S. Air Force through various Department of Defense contracts, so he had to be goal oriented and diligent. Jamie was the same way. She'd always thought that was one reason they got along as well as they did.
He went on, “But if you get up in the morning and don't feel like it, you don't have to go. Hey, you can always buy stuff online. You can get almost anything that way now.”
“No,” Jamie said, shaking her head stubbornly. She felt the pill beginning to take effect already, so she slid down in the bed and pulled the covers over her again. Drowsily, she said, “I'm going to the mall tomorrow, just like I promised myself. I did three tours in Afghanistan . . . after all . . . How bad . . . can a shopping mall . . . be?”
Chapter 8
H
abib and Assouri went into the apartment house lobby. No one was around. One of the lights in the small lobby was burned out, so it was only dimly illuminated. Habib could see well enough to make out the names on the labels under the buttons. He pushed the button marked
REED
.
The voice that came scratchily from the intercom speaker sounded annoyed as it asked, “Who's there?”
“Habib and Mahmoud,” the younger man answered.
“Oh. Come on up, then.”
The buzzer sounded, signaling that the inner door was unlocked. Mahmoud pulled it open and held it for Habib.
Donald Reed lived on the third floor. The two men were in good shape, so the climb didn't bother them. When they reached the hallway, they walked quietly down it to the door of 307, Reed's apartment. He was waiting for them with the door open a couple of inches. He swung it back as they approached and smiled.
Habib saw the small, semi-automatic pistol in the American's hand. With a smile on his own face, he asked, “Expecting trouble, Donald?”
“You mean this?” Reed gestured with the gun. “Nah, just being careful. I wanted to make sure you guys were alone.”
“Who else would be with us?”
“I dunno.” Reed stepped back so they could come in, then closed the door behind them. “I guess I'm just paranoid. I was afraid Homeland Security or the FBI or somebody like that might have grabbed you and forced you to lead them to me.”
As if anyone would ever care about such a tiny cog in the machine as Donald Reed, Habib thought. It wasn't like Reed was the mastermind behind the plan.
No, that was Habib.
“No one has discovered the plan. No one has reason to suspect a thing,” he said. “Everything is going exactly like we want it to go. That is, if you've done your part.”
“Hey, of course I have.” Reed sounded a little offended at the thought he might not have carried out his assignment. He set the pistol on a table and went on, “Everything is locked up in that supply closet just like it's supposed to be. As far as anybody knows, it's just cases of industrial-strength cleaning supplies.”
Mahmoud said, “The janitors will not bother it?”
“No reason for them to. I stacked the boxes in the very back, like you told me. Under normal circumstances, it would take a couple of weeks before anybody would touch them.” Reed grinned. “And of course it'll all be over with long before that, praise Allah.”
Habib managed not to wince at the sincere but awkward sound of the phrase. He hated to hear that name in the mouth of an American, even a deluded fool like this one who considered himself an ally of the holy jihad.
He knew that Donald Reed had drifted in and out of a dozen different religions and movements in his life before deciding that Islam was the answer for which he had been searching all along. Habib was certain Reed had thought that about all the other impulses he had followed.
Someone who honestly converted to Islam could be accepted, even an American. Reed probably had visions of fighting the Great Satan alongside his new Muslim brothers. To Habib, though, he would never be fully trustworthy. The blood of too many infidels ran in his veins.
Better to make use of him, then be certain that he wouldn't lose his resolve at the last moment and ruin everything.
That was why Habib and Mahmoud were here tonight.
“You're sure your people will have a way out for us?” Reed asked now.
There, Habib thought. He's already wavering. Worrying about his own life, instead of being happy to give it up as a martyr to their glorious cause.
“Everything is arranged,” Habib lied. “Once we have carried out the mission, helicopters will land on the roof of the mall to carry us away from there. We'll take hostages with us, so they won't dare shoot us down. Then there will be planes waiting at the airport.”
“I can't wait to actually see Mecca,” Reed said.
There would be no helicopters, no planes, no Mecca for Donald Reed. Not for any of them. Reed thought this plan had originated with the leaders of the movement in the Middle East, but in truth it had come from an entirely different place.
It came from the brain of Habib Jabara. He had planted the seeds, cultivated them, nursed them along, adding a piece here, a piece there, recruiting this man and that, building an invisible organization right under the noses of the Americans, right here in the heartland of their country.
Let others protest, hold press conferences, file lawsuits. Let them infiltrate the government, worm their way into the corridors of power, exploit the foolish obsession many Americans had with “diversity” and “tolerance.” In the long run, Habib knew, that was a better, more effective way to crush America once and for all, but it was also slow. Too slow for the hatred that burned inside him.
Let others worry about politics.
He was here to spill infidel blood.
And what better time to start than now?
While they were talking, Mahmoud had been easing around behind Reed. At a slight nod from Habib, he struck.
He grabbed Reed from behind, locking an arm like an iron bar across his throat to choke off any outcry. Reed seemed to be completely shocked and didn't even fight back except to paw feebly at the arm clamped around his neck.
Habib pulled up the front of the Bears sweatshirt enough to reach under it and grasp the handle of the knife sheathed on the inside of his blue jeans' waistband. He drew the knife, stepped closer to the suddenly horrified Reed, and drove the razor-sharp blade into the American's chest, angling it up so that it missed the ribs and went into the heart.
Reed's eyes opened as wide as they could, almost impossibly wide. He jerked a couple of times as Habib leaned his weight into the knife to make sure the point penetrated the heart. Reed lifted his hands but didn't strike out with them. All he could do was shake them uncontrollably.
Then his body went limp. His eyes still stared at Habib as the young man eased the blade out, but they no longer saw anything. Habib stepped back as Mahmoud carefully lowered the body to the floor. There was a little blood on the front of Reed's shirt, but not much.
The American had died without a sound, too. That was good. They would lock up the apartment when they left here, and the body probably wouldn't be discovered for several days. Not that it would matter, as long as it wasn't discovered before eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.
Habib took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from the knife before putting it away. Mahmoud leaned over and checked Reed for a pulse, although it really wasn't necessary. He gave Habib a curt nod.
Feeling quite pleased with the way things were going so far, Habib went into the apartment's small bedroom, looked in the closet, and came back carrying a uniform, black trousers, and gray shirt, on a hanger. The shirt had
AMERICAN WAY
stitched over the right breast pocket.
He held up the security guard's uniform, smiled at Mahmoud, and said, “I think it will fit me quite well, don't you?”