Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (36 page)

 
          
This
last statement intrigued Patrick. “Who are your friends?”

 
          
“Powerful
international arms merchant and black marketers,” Zuwayy said. “Let me go and
I’ll tell you everything.”

 
          
‘Talk
or you die.”

 
          
“Thirty
seconds, Patrick. You’ve got heavy armored vehicles on their way to you. Best
way out is to the east. Move it.”

 
          
“Talk!”
Patrick shouted. “This is your last chance.”

 
          
“He
is a Russian,” Zuwayy shouted. “He has access to nuclear weapons, missiles,
aircraft, oil, anything you want. Just let me live and it’s all yours.”

 
          
It
couldn’t be, Patrick thought. It was impossible. The Turks convicted him of
murder and crimes against the state. He got the death penalty—and in
Turkey
, there was no appeal process. He was
supposed to have been executed months ago....

 
          
“Ten
TG, Muck,” Briggs warned him. “Find a place in the shade and hold on.”

 
          
Eight
miles to the north, the EB-52 Megafortress opened the aft portion of its bomb
bay doors, and one by one four bombs dropped from a rotary launcher exactly
twelve seconds apart. These were GBU-28F JDAMs, or joint direct attack
munitions—two-thousand-pound gravity bombs guided by satellite navigation
signals that could glide as far as ten miles and still hit their targets with
great accuracy. But instead of simple high-explosive warheads, these bombs were
fuel-air explosives—the most devastating non-nuclear weapon devised. At a
precise altitude above the ground, the bombs split open, releasing a large
cloud of vapor. The vapor mixed with oxygen in the air to form a highly
explosive gas. At the right moment, three small incendiary bomblets ejected
into the gas cloud were ignited.

 
          
The
resulting explosion of each JDAM was equivalent to a hundred tons of TNT,
creating a fireball a half-mile in diameter and a shock wave that crushed
everything aboveground for a mile in every direction. Spaced exactly two miles
apart, the four fuel-air explosive bombs created a blinding wall of fire over
the Jaghbub airfield. Detonated on the mostly uninhabited West side of the
airfield, the fireballs themselves did relatively little damage—but the
tremendous overpressure caused by the explosion overturned vehicles, blew out
windows, burned wooden buildings, and scorched the sand black all across the
reservation, right to the walls of the Green Palace and the Great Mosque where
Patrick stood with his captive.

 
          
Zuwayy
screamed as the huge wall of fire blossomed out toward him, but his screams
were drowned out by the roar of rushing fire and burning air. The overpressure
that roiled over them was like a one-second superhurricane, tossing Zuwayy
around like a puppet. Patrick kept him facing into the rushing wall of sand and
red-hot wind until the air, now needing to fill in the vacuum created by the
burnt air near the fireballs, reversed direction and rushed back outward.

 
          
Patrick
jumped down off the roof of the rectory, went back inside, and tossed Zuwayy on
the floor. All of Zuwayy’s hair on his face, head, and the back of his hands
had burnt off, replaced by a beard and hair made of gray ash. He found a
pitcher of water on the desk and dumped it on Zuwayy’s face to keep him from
passing out. “Can you hear me, Zuwayy?” Patrick asked. Zuwayy was trembling so
hard that Patrick thought he might be having a seizure. “Answer me, you coward!
Can you hear me?”

 
          
“Yes
... yes, I can hear you,” Zuwayy cried. “Don’t kill me, please, don’t kill me!”

 
          
“You
have one chance to live, Zuwayy,” Patrick said in Arabic. “You captured some
prisoners off some vessels your military forces sank....”

 
          
“I
know nothing of this! What are you accusing me of? This is not—”

 
          
Patrick
silenced him with another shot of electricity. “Be quiet, Zuwayy. There is no
doubt that your forces attacked those vessels—the only question now is whether
or not you will die for doing so.”

 
          
“Do
not kill me! Do not kill me!” Zuwayy bleated. “What do you want? Tell me!”

 
          
“You
will turn them over to the Egyptians immediately,” Patrick said. “If they are
not delivered within twelve hours, I will hunt you down and execute you before
the entire world. And if any of them are harmed in any way, I will find you and
crush you like an insect.” The stranger hammered the desk in the rectory with a
gloved fist, and the heavy cedar-and-burl desktop smashed into pieces as if a wrecking
ball was dropped on it. “I will burn your houses, destroy your bunkers, tap
into your computer systems, and wipe out everything you own. Twelve hours. I’ll
be waiting. If they are not returned, you die.” To punctuate his order, Patrick
reached down, took Zuwayy’s nose between two fingers, and crushed it. Blood
spurted everywhere, and Zuwayy howled in pain. The figure departed through the
door to the mosque itself.

 
          
Moments
later, Mekkawi returned through the secret tunnel entrance, his side arm in his
hands, followed by three heavily armed soldiers. “Highness, there have been
more attacks. I have relayed your orders—” He stopped in sheer horror when he
saw Zuwayy lying on the floor, his hair burnt off, blood covering his face and
chest.
“My what happened?”
He was
going to call for the outside guards, but then he saw them, lying on the
ground, still twitching from the voltage discharging through their bodies.

 
          
“Find
out... find out..

 
          
“Find
out what, Highness?”

 
          
“Find
out where the prisoners that were captured off the vessels sunk in the
Mediterranean are,” Zuwayy gasped, blood flowing from his mouth and shattered
nose. “Find them all, alive or dead; round them up, and get them ready to move
out of the country. Truck them... no, bus them ... no, fly them ... oh hell,
just get them out of my country immediately!
I don’t want one hair on their heads touched. Contact that peacock Khan in
Egypt
and tell him to get ready to pick up those
prisoners.”

 
          
“Prisoners?
Khan? Who did this to you, sir .. . ?”

 
          
“Just
do it,” Zuwayy cried, spitting blood. Mekkawi helped him up. “Do it
now
!” Zuwayy found a liquor bottle,
poured, and downed a glass, his hands shaking uncontrollably.

AKRANES
,
ICELAND
 
A SHORT TIME LATER

           
“What in hell is going on out there,
Zuwayy?” Pavel Kazakov asked angrily on the secure phone. This time, Kazakov
put the call on the speakerphone, so his aide Ivana Vasilyeva could hear how
the great “king” of
Libya
bleated and whined like a sheep being led
to slaughter. Kazakov knew how Vasilyeva, a former commando and trained
intelligence officer in the Russian army, hated weak men— Jadallah Zuwayy, the
man who claimed to be a descendant of Arab kings, would infuriate her. “Why are
you calling me now?”

 
          
“Hey,
Kazakov, this was your idea to begin with!” Jadallah Zuwayy retorted. “This is
your
fault!”

 
          
“My
fault?”

 
          
“It
was your suggestion to retaliate against the commandos that attacked Samah,”
Zuwayy said. “That’s what I did. They somehow found out where I was, broke into
my sanctuary, and threatened to kill me! He smashed my nose! He threatened to
kill me, my entire family, break into my computers, and destroy my military
bases.”

 
          
“They
sound like extremely powerful, efficient, and well-informed commandos,” Kazakov
commented dryly. I could use an entire battalion of them, he said to himself.
Something that Zuwayy said nagged at his brain.. . . “Or your soldiers need
more security training.”

           
“How could he have found out where I
was? That information is top secret!”

 
          
“Zuwayy,
the entire world knows about your pleasure palace in Jaghbub,” Kazakov said.
“They know that it is the entrance to your escape route if there is ever a coup
against you; they know it is where you bring young girls for whatever perverted
pleasure you get out of screwing children. Besides, Jaghbub is less than forty
kilometers from the Egyptian border—any good special-operations team can get in
and out of the area in mere hours. You ought to try a security back-trace on
yourself some time, Zuwayy—you might be surprised to learn some of the things
anyone can find out about you if they tried.”

 
          
“This
is outrageous!”

           
“Just shut up, Zuwayy,” Kazakov
said. “Nothing has changed. You should have just killed all those captives,
then set a trap for those commandos when they returned to finish you off. You
should have never turned them over to the Egyptians. At least you had the
brains to turn them over to Khan and not to Salaam.”

 
          
“That
commando said he was going to kill me if I didn’t turn them over to the
Egyptians,” Zuwayy said. “He got into the sanctuary so easy, I didn’t—”

 
          
“Hold
it,” Kazakov interrupted him. “You said, ‘that commando.’ Do you mean to say
there was
only one commando
?”

 
          
“I
told you there was only one!”

           
“But you said a minefield and your
military base were also hit.”

 
          
“They
were, but only one commando got into my sanctuary,” Zuwayy said. “He
neutralized the guards and was waiting for me when I—”

           
“He ‘neutralized’ the guards? How?
Did he kill them?”

           
“No. He had no weapons—he didn’t
even touch them.”

           
Kazakov nearly choked on the cognac
he was sipping. He rose slowly to his feet, his throat suddenly dry, his ears
ringing. It couldn’t be, he thought wildly. No, it
couldn't
be ... !

           
“Did you hear me, Kazakov?”

           
“This commando—he was wearing a
black outfit, a full helmet with large eyeholes, and a slim backpack? Did he
paralyze you with an electric shock that traveled from electrodes on his
shoulders to you, without projectiles or wires?”

           
“Yes! How did you know?”

           
“Because I have been hunting him and
his team down for the past year,” Kazakov said. “These commandos are Americans.
I do not believe they are government operatives—I believe they are privately
organized. They fund their organization by shaking down their targets for money
or weapons.”

 
          
“How
do you know so much about them?” Kazakov was about to tell him not to ask
stupid questions, but Zuwayy came up with the answer by himself moments later:
“So you’ve encountered this group before, eh? Perhaps they are the reason you
were captured and brought to trial in
The Hague
?”

 
          
“Zuwayy...”

           
“And perhaps this private
organization got part of its funding from you, eh,
tovarisch?”
Zuwayy asked, laughing. “Oi
dal yimu pa pizde mishalkayl
Did you get your ass handed to you by
them? Now that I think about it, he did seem to know about you.”

           
“Listen to me, you ignorant
goat-fucker,” Kazakov snarled, “you can make fun of me all you want, but if we
don’t stop these commandos, they’ll destroy all of us. You were lucky they just
broke your nose and blew up your base—they could have just as easily carried
you out of
Libya
and destroyed your whole fucking capital!”

           
“What are you going to do, Kazakov?”