Undeclared War (24 page)

“Death,” Bear shouted, “it's time to go!”

Bear twisted the top of his bag shut. Picking up Arzee's AKMS-47, he unsnapped the hook that held the front of the sling to the weapon. He stuck the rifle through the hand loops on the salesman's case that Reaper had tossed to him and snapped the sling back in place. Now able to hold it with a long cloth strap, Bear slung the case across his back and out of his way. The case must have weighed nearly fifty pounds but Bear handled it easily.

“Death, the fire,” Bear shouted. “We have to go—now! You can't do Mary or Ricky any good if you burn to death!”

His partner's shouting finally got through to Reaper as he desperately gathered everything that he could. Crushing the neck closed on his stuffed garbage bag, he took one last look at Arzee's body lying on the floor then turned to Bear.

When they left the office, they could see the glow of the fire through the open doorway into the production area. They had no way to get back to their climbing site. The two SEALs turned to the stairs in front of them. As they ran down the dozen flights of stairs, Reaper shouted into his mike.

“Famine, Famine, Famine,” he said, “Evac, evac, evac.”

“Death,” came back over the earpiece, “Famine, I'm with War. Evac, evac, evac.”

What Reaper and Bear learned later was that Ben had seen the fire start to break out on the upper floor of the Factory and had decided to come up to the building. When he received Reaper's radio call, he was positioned next to the billboard and ready to pick up Max. When Reaper and Bear burst out of the front
doors of the Factory, Ben moved to pick them up. They swung into the open door of the camper and Max grabbed their arms, pulling the two men in.

As the truck moved away from the Factory building, the upper floor exploded outward in a ball of flame. The entire top of the building became a huge conflagration as the remaining intact solvent containers burst apart from the fire. The ether and alcohol explosion engulfed the building. Fire truck sirens could be heard approaching from off in the distance.

There would be nothing that the fire department could do to save the building. By the next day, the old auto factory would have collapsed into a pile of smoking ashes and rubble. The wooden block floors, soaked for decades in oils and lubricants and augmented by drug solvents, burned with a fierce, hot flame. The strong factory building acted as a furnace before collapsing in on itself. The flesh of the bodies of Arzee and his men were consumed in the heat, burned more completely than if they had been professionally cremated. The final fragments of bones had been crushed to powder and mixed with the rubble when the walls collapsed.

The four horsemen didn't hold a celebration or homecoming at the farm later that morning. The victory cigars still lay in their aluminum tubes—intact and unlit. The feelings of disappointment hung thick in the room as the men sat around the kitchen table. The group should have been rejoicing at the recovery of Reaper's family. Instead they sat in quiet silence while they decided on their next move.

A subdued Reaper got up from the table, went into the kitchen and started to get himself another cup of coffee. As he tried to pour the hot, black liquid into the mug, he sloshed some over the side and it spilled onto the counter. Only a little thing, nothing at all, really. But Reaper's nerves were frayed to say the least.

“Goddamnit all to hell!” Reaper cursed as he picked the mug up and smashed it down on the counter. The porcelain coffee cup was strong, but not indestructible. It cracked and shattered under the impact, splashing coffee over most of the countertop.

None of the people around the counter even
started at the outburst. It wasn't as though they didn't feel the same way. A major operation conducted with minimal support, too few personnel, and at lightning speed from conception to execution. They should have been proud, but they didn't have the hostages. And the one among them who had every right to feel the worst was Reaper.

“Did you get it?” Bear asked calmly.

“Get it?” Reaper almost snarled. “Get what? I didn't get anything.”

“The spider,” Bear continued in the same calm tone. “Did you get it?”

“What spider?” Reaper demanded. “What in the fuck are you talking about, Bear?”

“I figured you must have seen a spider there on the counter,” Bear said. “I know you don't like them. And I would never think that you just wanted to smash up Deckert's crockery.”

For a moment, Reaper stood there stunned at his friend's words. Then he looked down at the busted coffee mug and the mess he had made of the counter. As he smiled, Reaper shook his head at his own reactions. Taking a deep breath, he blew it out.

“Okay, Bear,” Reaper said in a normal tone of voice. “I'm back.”

“Never really thought you had left, Brother,” Bear said.

“Okay,” Reaper said, “we have to start up again. Only this time we might try not to burn the target down to the ground behind us.”

“It really hasn't gotten all the way to the ground yet,” Deckert said. “That building is a real inferno. I watched the news this morning and that fire is the
big story. Apparently, the local water hydrants weren't working or somebody turned them off. Either way, the fire departments who responded couldn't do a damned thing about the blaze. They stood by, controlled traffic and made sure the fire didn't spread to the surrounding neighborhoods. Then they pretty much broke out the marshmallows and hotdogs for a barbecue.

“I'll tell you one thing,” Deckert continued. “You guys would have a lot more to worry about if any of the locals knew you had a hand in that fire. The police can only arrest you, maybe shoot you. But most of the workers in downtown Detroit want to lynch you. That fire is right on the corner of two of the biggest highways in the city—and they shut them down a couple of hours ago because of the smoke and ash. You guys seriously fucked-up the Friday morning rush hour.”

“Well, at least it'll be a while before they can pull out any bodies,” Max said. He had already dumped his street-person clothing and taken the first hot shower. Now he sat at the table with his hair still wet and a towel draped over his shoulders.

“I don't think there's going to be any bodies to concern anyone with,” Ben said knowingly. “I've picked up many a fire victim, and that furnace isn't going to leave much behind. Bodies, bones, bullets, brass, even teeth, they're all going to be part of a football field-sized pile of slag.”

“The news said that the fire chief suspected that chemicals or paint had been stored on the upper floors,” Deckert said. “They might consider the whole thing nothing more than an accident. No one has said arson out loud, or much of anything else really.”

“Well,” Reaper said, “what we have to do is go over every piece of material that we pulled out of that place before it went up. There's two stuffed garbage bags full of Intel that we need to digest. Bear stripped out the desk and I grabbed everything I could from the filing cabinet. That cabinet had a destruct charge on it—Arzee wanted it gone more than anything else. He was dying when he pulled the switch and that's pretty hard core for an asshole like that.

“So we'll start with that bag. Try and keep everything as separate as you can from the two bags. Anything from the desk or the filing cabinet may be significant. We'll go through the filing cabinet papers here. Keith, why don't you work on the counter and sort out the desk materials there.”

“As soon as I clean up the mess somebody left behind here,” Deckert said with a grin.

More than an hour later, the men were still sorting through the papers they had now separated into reasonably neat stacks. Before anyone had touched anything, Reaper had them all put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves from a box in the shop. The documents they had found still came from a crime scene and would be considered evidence by any police agency that got hands on them. It would be best if none of the men around the table left their fingerprints on any of the materials. Both Reaper and Bear had been wearing their FOG glove liners during the operation and had been the only people to handle the documents. They hadn't left any fingerprints anywhere so far.

After an hour of sorting and examination, they separated the papers into two sets of stacks. One set was from the desk, the other was from the cabinet.
Where the papers had come from might be important in figuring out what they were. Most of the documents didn't really mean anything. They were regular business items such as the utility bills, UPS shipper receipts, and bar supply lists. The desk had given up most of those items.

The next stack contained documents that the men couldn't read. These papers, maps, and booklets had been written in Arabic for the most part. Reaper now suspected that a hell of a lot more was going on than just what involved his family. The rest of the men also put two and two together and came up with the likely idea of terrorists operating on U.S. soil.

The situation could be a very serious one. Yet the primary mission was still locating Reaper's family. That was all that concerned Reaper for the time being. Once his people were safe, then the rest of the materials would be sent on to the right hands.

The undecipherable documents made the biggest pile from the filing cabinet. The last mound in both sets of papers turned out to be things whose use no one could figure out. Doodles, notes, phone numbers, everything that came from the drawers of the desk or filing cabinet had ended up in the bags of Reaper and Bear.

“There's something missing here,” Reaper said.

“How can you tell?” Bear demanded as he looked up from a pamphlet he had been reading. The booklet had been extolling the virtues of a hunting lodge on a private island in Lake Michigan. It was an odd thing to find and had perked his interest.

“Because there's nothing on the Factory here,”
Reaper said. “By that I mean the company books, the records of their cash flow. Things like that.”

“Maybe they kept them in that top drawer of the filing cabinet,” Max suggested as he looked up from the table. “You said that you had to leave it shut to keep the papers from burning fast.”

“True enough,” Reaper said, “but that doesn't fit the rest of this stuff. These Arabic documents look important. I can't read the stuff, but the layout resembles some of the military materials we got hold of in Desert Storm and later in Bosnia. Why would they put the company books in the top drawer of a destruct-rigged cabinet?”

“They had a real and a cooked set?” Ben suggested.

“Then why can't we find the cooked set?” Reaper asked. “You keep those separate from the real set so that you can show the cooked ones to the tax people or whoever. If there's a crooked set, they should have been in the desk. We've even got a copy of their sales tax and liquor licenses from the desk. Bear, where's that big briefcase that you picked up?”

“The one from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet?” Bear said. “It must still be out in the camper. I'll get it.”

Bear headed out to get the errant case. While he was gone, they all continued their examination of the documents. In a few minutes, Bear came back into the house, lugging the heavy salesman's case with him. He had a very odd look on his face.

“I think these guys were running on a cash basis,” Bear said. To the astonishment of everyone, he tossed a thick bundle of hundred dollar bills on the
table. The paper strip wrapped around the bills was printed in bright red: $10,000.

“Jesus, Bear,” Reaper said as he picked up the bundle. “Where in the hell did you get that? Hey! Be careful there!”

Bear spread out a towel over the carefully sorted papers on the kitchen table.

“It was with its friends,” Bear said, and he dumped the contents of the case onto the towel. Bundles of hundred dollar bills cascaded out of the case—piling onto the towel and spilling onto the floor.

“I always wanted to do something like that,” Bear looked up from the huge pile of cash with a big grin.

“Have I called you an asshole recently?” Reaper said.

As they went through the bundles and stacked them up, the men soon came up with 250 sets of $10,000 each.

“So that's what two and a half million dollars looks like,” Max said.

“Funny,” said Bear, “I always thought it looked bigger on TV.”

“What the hell would someone have this much cash on hand for?” Reaper said. “And why in the hell would they try to burn it rather than let it be captured?”

“Maybe Arzee wanted it as mad money for his vacation,” Bear said.

“Vacation?” came up from Ben at the table.

“Yeah,” said Bear. “He had this brochure for a hunting lodge in his desk.”

He picked up the document and handed it to Ben.

“Northern Lake Michigan?” said Ben. “Wait a minute, I saw something else like that.”

Going through the regular business papers stack from the filing cabinet, Ben pulled out a faxed receipt on shiny thermal paper.

“Here it is,” Ben said as he handed the fax to Reaper. “It's a receipt for a load of diesel fuel and groceries going to someplace called South Wolverine Island.”

“I know that place,” Deckert said. “It was in the papers a few years back. Some article about the whole damned island being sold to a private party. The environmental and native Indian groups raised a big stink about it.”

“That anywhere near Leland?” Reaper asked.

“North of there, yeah,” Deckert said. “Why?”

“Because that's where this receipt came from,” Reaper said. “It was sent from a fax machine at the Leland Yacht Harbor, and it's dated only three days ago.”

“This is a lot of food and fuel,” Deckert said as he looked at the papers. “Enough for a large group of people.”

“Enough for a big hunting lodge,” said Bear.

“Not just that,” Deckert said. “There's nothing in the way of fresh foods on this list. This is all canned and frozen stuff. Not what you'd expect a hunting lodge to feed paying customers.”

“Arzee started to say something about my family being ‘up' somewhere right before the explosion,” Reaper said.

“Up North is what everyone down here calls that part of Michigan,” said Bear. “It sounds good
enough to me. I think we may have found them, Ted, or at least a real good place to start.”

Reaper was excited by what they had found, and he agreed with Bear's assessment. As they went through more of the papers with an eye for anything regarding that part of Michigan, they came up with some more clues. Fuel receipts for stops on I-75, the main drag heading up north in Michigan. Restaurant receipts, even motel receipts. And most of them were dated within the last month.

Going back to his computer, Deckert looked for everything he could find about South Wolverine Island and the lodge there. All information stopped as of the year before. The stated reason had been for renovation of the facilities by the new owners. More searching through databases failed to come up with any listings of the permits needed for such renovations. Even the public hearings required by law weren't listed as ever having happened.

Satellite images were available on-line regarding the island. It lay twenty-five miles north of Leland, the closest port on the mainland. It was part of a pair of islands, the smaller, North Wolverine Island only being about five miles northeast of the much larger South Wolverine Island. Both islands boasted heavily wooded areas, large game populations, and airstrips big enough to handle small planes.

“Okay, we need a boat and some additional gear,” Reaper said.

“Don't have a boat,” Deckert said, “powered chairs don't swim for shit.”

“Let me call a friend,” Bear said as he left the room.

They spent the rest of the day and into the evening learning everything they could about South Wolverine Island and what might be happening there. When the other men finally went to sleep that night, Reaper remained awake until Bear reminded him that not getting any sleep wouldn't do Reaper any good. Finally, the big man agreed and went to get some rest himself.

 

At the lodge on South Wolverine Island, Paxtun had a bad situation he needed to discuss with Ishmael. Even as remote as the island was, the news of a major fire at the Factory in Detroit, and the incredible traffic jam it caused, had made the local broadcast media.

In addition to the loss of the building and the club, Paxtun had lost something he would have a very hard time replacing; a man he could trust. While he had trusted Arzee, his second in command, only because he could firmly control him, he still counted it a loss. The material and personal losses, the bulk of the liquid funds to finance Ishmael's operations in North America, the hawala bankroll, had gone up in smoke.