Undeclared War (6 page)

Paxtun, Arzee, and their people had accepted al Qaeda's help, and their money. Paxtun had proven himself trustworthy by his deeds in Afghanistan and his later actions in Bosnia and finally the United States. He had proven himself so trustworthy that his organization was considered a hawala, part of an ancient form of money exchange. A hawala used
trusted people around the world as a way to transfer millions of dollars in cash without documents. Money was left in a hawala and the responsible person was simply told who to give it to.

At the moment, Paxtun was holding over several million dollars in cash in an al Qaeda hawala. But that would mean little if he failed to supply Ishmael with what he needed. And Ishmael wouldn't speak to an underling, even one as highly placed as Paxtun's second in command. Arzee was a fellow Muslim, but he hadn't proven himself in the jihad. That meant Arzee was off the hook in telling Ishmael the bad news. It was going to be Paxtun's task, and that had him thinking quickly.

“There were just too many things that could go wrong with the shipment,” Paxtun said, “and a number of them did. Delays due to plain bad weather made the ship late. But we planned for that possibility. Now, we've just run out of time. Ishmael has told me to expect the time schedule to change again. He won't tell me the operation, but he's probably going to move the timetable ahead again.”

“He's probably never told you his real schedule anyway,” Arzee said. “The man is more than paranoid about security. If anything, he's gotten worse about holding back vital information until damned near past the last minute. He even kept the arrival schedule of his men to himself until they were practically waiting at the border. Ever since Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan back in March, Ishmael and his bunch have become even tighter about keeping things to themselves.”

“We have to accept the situation for the time be
ing,” Paxtun said. “We're in way too deep for there to be any way out for us now. There's nothing we can do but carry on supporting Ishmael and his people. Besides, we owe them our lives and they have no problem in reminding us of that fact.”

“Well,” Arzee said, “at least the money has been good the last couple of years.”

“Yes,” Paxtun agreed, “there's no question of that. But that's not going to help us. He wants firepower, a lot of it. And he's going to want it right now.”

“Supplying something like that's going to be next to impossible,” Arzee said. “It's not like anyone advertises heavy firepower and we can't just buy the weapons he wants. Maybe if we had enough time to go out into the underground market….”

“What did you say?” Paxtun asked.

“Go into the underground market?” Arzee said. “I mean the contacts are there. But Ishmael didn't want to trust any kind of black market to supply his needs. And to get what he wants would take time we don't have.”

“No, no,” Paxtun said with excitement rising in his voice. “What you said before that.”

“What?” Arzee said. “Just buy the stuff? There's no way to really do that. It's not like you can just walk into a gunshop and they'll have the kind of hardware we need. Nobody carries that kind of military weapon, no matter what the movies say. And Ishmael is going to want the real deal. Full automatic fire and lots of it.”

“So what if we had a source of the guns and someone who could build what we wanted?” Paxtun said.

“Around here?” Arzee said. “Where?”

“Something Nicholas was talking about a while back,” Paxtun said.

Raising his voice, Paxtun called out, “Nicholas, get in here.”

Nicholas Murat was a cousin of Arzee's. As such, he and his brother Amman, held positions of high trust in the organization. This wasn't a matter of simple nepotism. It was very common in the Arab community for a business to use many members of an extended family. Blood counted for a lot, and loyalties inside of a family were strong.

At first glance, Nicholas and Amman Murat didn't look like brothers at all. Amman was taller than his bother as well as being a bodybuilder. Heavy muscles covered Amman's frame, and he liked to use his strength to solve problems. His mean streak was satisfied when he helped enforce his cousin's directives. And he knew that Paxtun was in charge.

Nicholas Murat was the physical opposite of his brother, but no less mean. His smaller size was balanced out by being much faster than most people. Nicholas hadn't put his speed to use learning a martial art. Instead, he had developed a taste for and skill in the use of firearms. Taste would be something of an understatement. Nicholas was fascinated by guns, all kinds of guns. He made up for his slight stature by using large and powerful weapons. And he kept up on the latest developments in the firearm market.

Moving into the office from his usual position near the outside door, Nicholas came to see what
Paxtun wanted. Not being one to speak a lot, the gunman waited quietly for his boss to speak to him.

“Nicholas,” Paxtun asked, “what's the hottest piece of firepower on the market at this moment?”

“That would depend on what you mean, boss,” Nicholas said, “hand-held, vehicle mounted, what?”

“Something an individual could use for an assault.”

“Well, there's an outfit down in North Carolina that's making a pump-action 40mm grenade launcher. They're reproducing one from the Vietnam War.”

“A grenade launcher?” Paxtun said. “No, that would have too many ammunition supply problems for what I'm thinking of. Besides, North Carolina is too far away to consider. Anything made closer to here?”

“There's just been an article published in
Small Arms Review
about a full-automatic shotgun going on the market,” Nicholas said as he warmed to his subject. “It was demonstrated earlier this year down in Florida at the SHOT show. It's called the Jackhammer. Ten-round magazine and a really short overall package. Hottest piece of hand-held firepower there is right now, and the company making it isn't more than an hour's drive from here, somewhere up near Port Huron.”

“Do you have that magazine available?”

“Yes,” Nicholas said, “I was just reading it a while ago.”

“Could you get it for me please?” Paxtun said.

As Nicholas left the room, Paxtun sat with a pensive smile on his face. “A machine shotgun,” he said. “That would be just the weapon for a fast raid
ing party. Its effective range would be pretty short compared to a rifle, but close-in, it would rip a target apart.”

Quickly returning with an issue of
Small Arms Review
in his hands, Nicholas laid the magazine down on the desk in front of Paxtun. Pointing to the cover, he said, “They must have thought a lot about this weapon themselves, they mentioned the article right on the cover. I marked the page for you there.”

Flipping the magazine open to the indicated page, Paxtun just looked at the picture that led off the article. It showed a large man holding a very futuristic-looking weapon. Nicholas took Paxtun's intent look at the article as showing interest in the weapon.

“This was written by Matt Smith,” Nicholas said, “he says he was at the demonstration firing. That's it, the Jackhammer Mark 3-A3 shotgun. It's only thirty-one inches overall length. That's barely more than an inch longer than a military M4 carbine with the stock collapsed. And the bullpup design puts the firing mechanism behind the trigger group, that lets the weapon have nearly a twenty-one-inch-long barrel and still be very compact. It's short enough to hide under a coat.

“That big drum at the rear holds ten rounds of twelve-gauge ammo. With magnum 00 buckshot, that's twelve pellets downrange for each shot. It fires on full automatic at four rounds a second—that's sixty-four pellets downrange in one second. That swarm of buckshot can rip a house down. And you reload just by dumping out the drum and slapping a new one in place.”

Looking up from the magazine, Paxtun had a strange look on his face.

“You don't have to sell me on this, Nicholas,” Paxtun said. “I acknowledge your greater expertise.”

Nicholas positively beamed with pride at the unaccustomed praise.

“Where can we find this weapon?” Paxtun asked.

“The address of the shop is at the end of the article,” Nicholas said as he pointed back to the magazine. “It's near Marine City north of Lake Saint Clair. The article does say that the Jackhammer is only made as prototypes right now. But it's been months since the SHOT show and they may have gone into production by now.”

“Thank you, Nicholas,” Paxtun said, “would you excuse us for now?”

As Nicholas left the office, Paxtun looked down at the magazine open in front of him and the smile grew across his face.

“Oh,” Paxtun said, “this is too good.”

“What?” Arzee said. “The weapon?”

“No,” Paxtun said as he turned the magazine around on the desk. Pointing to the picture of the man holding the Jackhammer he said, “This man is Ted Reaper, late of the U.S. Navy. I now believe that this is indeed a very small world.”

“Reaper?” Arzee said puzzled. “Reaper? You man that guy who screwed up your deal in Bosnia five years ago?”

“The very same,” Paxtun said with a smile. “Allah works in interesting ways. He's not only set the tools we need into our hands, he delivered an old en
emy to me. This man crossed me badly once, he will now learn just how foolish that was.”

“But you can't imagine he'll sell us what we want?” Arzee said. “And what the hell is he doing in Michigan?”

“Making guns, by the looks of things,” Paxtun said. “And no, I certainly wouldn't expect this man to sell us anything no matter what we offered. He's as upright as a Boy Scout. But he will have a weakness, everyone does.

“I want you to find that weakness. Find out everything you can about this man and his business as quickly as you can. And you have to keep it quiet. I don't care what it takes, costs, or what favors you have to call in—you find a handle that we can use to control this man.

“It would be very sweet to force this particular individual to break the law in order to help us. But it will take something very solid to make him hand us over the weapons. If there aren't enough of them available, he can just make more of them. This article lists a shop address and phone numbers. You find out if he has a family, parent, kid, girlfriend, whatever it is that brought him to Michigan or that he has around here. The records are out there, you just have to find them.

“This man tried to take me down once,” Paxtun said with hatred in his voice. “Which makes using him all the better.”

A loud buzzing roar filled the small room as the big man in the dark blue shop apron held the long steel bar against the wheel, the flexible cloth buffing wheel spinning at more than 1,700 rpm. With his feet spread out for stability, the big man leaned close to the buffer and ran the long steel bar across the face of the wheel. The buzz increased in volume as the rapidly moving cloth stripped dark, cloudy layers of buffing compound off the surface of the steel—leaving a bright shining surface in its wake.

His face hidden behind the rubber and cloth of a respirator mask and his eyes behind safety goggles, the man leaned into his work, concentrating on the path the steel took as he guided it across the surface of the buffer. His hands were covered in Kevlar gloves, the fingers of which were wrapped in layers of worn tape to insure a good grip. A solid grip was important not only to make sure that the steel was guided properly across the rapidly moving cloth wheel, but also necessary for safety as any observer
could quickly see that the object being so carefully buffed and polished by the man was the long blade of a broadsword.

In his dark blue shirt, jeans, and black boots, the man was almost completely still except for his hands guiding the steady passing of the blade back and forth across the wheel. His concentration was on keeping the shape of the blade distinct, smooth, and even—while not allowing the sharp edge to dig into the cloth wheel. The power of the spinning wheel would tear the blade from his hands and drive it into the floor, wall, or possibly something that could bleed quite a bit.

Watching silently from the doorway, the stocky, gray-haired man sitting in a wheelchair knew not to interrupt the man standing at the buffer. He waited quietly until the man at the machine stopped and straightened up. After looking along the edges and body of the blade to be certain he hadn't missed polishing a spot or blurred the lines of the blade's edges and corners, the man switched off the buffer and the wheel whined down to a stop.

Pulling down his respirator, the man turned to the doorway and noticed the individual sitting there. “Oh, didn't know you were there,” Ted Reaper said as he pushed the safety goggles up to his forehead.

“Somehow, it didn't seem to me to be a really great idea to bother a man either while he was buffing, or holding a yard of sharp steel,” Keith Deckert said with a big grin spreading out under his bushy white mustache, his teeth splitting the features of his face. “But you did want me to remind you when it was coming up to lunchtime.”

“Thanks,” Ted said as he looked at the watch on
his left wrist. “I've got just enough time to clean and box this thing and get back to the house before Ricky gets home.”

“You might want to take a moment to wash up as well,” Keith said with a chuckle. “You look like a reversed raccoon.”

Catching a glimpse of himself in the glass front of a cabinet, Ted could see that the goggles and respirator had protected his eyes and lungs, but the greasy residue from the buffing wheel had spattered the exposed parts of his face with gray muck. The only parts that were clean were his mouth, mustache, nose, and eyes.

“Here, give me that pigsticker,” Keith said. “I'll get the tape off the grip and pack it while you clean up.”

“Thanks,” Reaper said as he handed over the blade, hilt first.

Deckert turned his powered wheelchair and ran it over to a tall workbench on top of a large parts cabinet where he laid the sword down on a carpeted surface. Turning the armrests inward across his chest, he moved a control and his Life Stand Compact Model LSC wheelchair began to unfold and extend the back and seat upward. In a moment, Deckert was in a standing position, secured to the chair by the armrests, which had formed a padded brace against his chest. In an almost straight up-and-down standing position, the muscular arms of the man could reach the top of the workbench and manipulate the materials there easily and skillfully.

“And a mighty big pig you could stick with it, too,” said Keith as he started stripping off the dirty
masking tape that had been protecting the finish of the blued-steel cross-guard and wire-wrapped grip.

Reaper stepped away from the grinding room and walked to a small workbench where he kept his own toolbox and materials. He unclipped the small Uncle Mike's pocket holster he had in his right front pants pocket and placed it and the stainless steel Taurus Model 445 five-shot .44 Special concealed-hammer revolver it held into a large central drawer in the toolbox.

Since he had been in the civilian world and not in the military, Reaper had to have a need to go armed. Security was always something you had to think about in a gunshop, even one frequented by customers who were in law enforcement. The shop hadn't always been a gathering place for cops, and civilian customers still came in. It would take a fairly stupid crook to rob a gunshop, but dumber things had happened.

Moving across the workshop, Reaper went over to the opposite wall where a large utility sink stood next to a long, shallow, steel tank with a tight-fitting cover.

There was a smell of solvents coming up from the covered cleaning tank, but the smell would have been a lot worse if the shop had been hot. The tall, barnlike shop building was well insulated against the winter cold or summer heat, both of which could get pretty extreme in southeastern Michigan. But even if it wasn't as heavily insulated as it was, there would be little enough to hear in the way of noise this far out in the country.

The steel building was attached to the back of a
two-story brick farmhouse and sat on twenty-five acres of land less than five miles from the Saint Clair River and the border between the U.S. and Canada. The location was closer to Port Huron than Detroit, both cities being less than an hour's drive away. The area was open countryside with stands of trees separating fields. The house and barn were set back from the main road, a quarter-mile of blacktopped driveway leading to a semicircular drive at the front of the house, with an extension leading out to the back shop building.

It was an out-of-the-way location for a business, but that's what the farmhouse and steel barn had been converted into. The front part of the first floor of the house was a gunshop, the barn a well-equipped machine shop with facilities for polishing and finishing metal and wood.
D & R POLICE SUPPLIES AND GUNSMITHS
was all it said on a small sign on the white siding at the front of the house. The sign was a fairly new one, the paint on it being much fresher than that of the tan-painted twin doors leading into the house. The doors were at the top of a long ramp, allowing the owner's wheelchair easy access to the building.

There would be plenty of room for additional workers once business picked up. The gunsmithing and small gun shop had been at the farm for a number of years, but the police supply business was new. So for now, there were just the two men living and working in the building.

The farm and buildings were both owned by Keith Deckert, a big, gray-haired ex-Army sergeant
who had lost the use of his legs several years earlier in a racing accident. Outside of the limitations on his mobility, the only thing remarkable about Deckert's body was that his arms, shoulders, and chest were even more muscular than when he had been an Army Ranger.

As Reaper was scrubbing his face and arms, Deckert was polishing the grip and hilt of the sword with a soft cloth.

“Damned big for a knife,” Deckert said with a chuckle. “This from some movie or something? One of those Harry Potter books? Conan?”

“Sort of,” Reaper said from across the room. “Ricky saw one like it in that Hobbit movie,
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Apparently, there's a sword like it in some role-playing game he's into with his friends.”

As he was drying his face and hands on a wad of paper towels, Reaper walked over to where his friend was placing the sword in a long, wooden box. The shining blade, diamond-shaped and double edged, was thirty-six inches long with a simple blued-steel cross guard. The round disc pommel was also blue steel and secured an eight-inch grip that was covered with twisted steel wire. The pattern of the wire seemed to almost flow in an optical illusion as you kept looking at it.

“Hopefully, he'll like it,” Reaper said as he tossed the wad of towels in a trash can. He looked with a critical eye at the blade lying on a bed of red velvet in the long, polished wood case, but could see no flaws in it. “I made it real, not a toy. It'll be some
thing that can stay with him forever if he wants, maybe better than his old man did.”

“Things haven't improved between you and Mary?” Deckert asked quietly.

“No,” Reaper said with a note of sadness in his voice. “And I'm not sure they ever will. But I have to make certain that Ricky knows it isn't his fault and that I still love him. So I made this for him, something from my own hands.”

“Well, it's a little big for him now,” Deckert said. “But I'm pretty sure he'll grow into it. You'll have to get him fencing lessons so he knows how to swing one.”

“You don't learn how to wave one of these around in classical fencing,” Reaper said. “He's getting into something called the Society for Creative Anachronism, SCA they call it. Bunch of kids, some adults, too, get together and re-create the knights of old. They stage sword fights with padded fake blades and other weapons.”

“Uh-huh,” Deckert said, “sounds weird as hell. But at least it doesn't seem like something that would keep him sitting in front of a computer all day.”

Reaper closed the lid on the long wooden case and secured it in place with two brass latches. Picking it up by the leather handle, he turned to the nearby door that led into the house.

“Nope,” Reaper said, “the boy does like his activities. Gets out and moves around, better than a lot of kids today. He's smart enough to like getting on his computer and playing games with his friends. But
he doesn't spend all day sitting in front of a computer or game console.”

“Sitting down all the time isn't necessarily all bad,” Deckert said as he pushed a control and his wheelchair started to slowly collapse back into a sitting configuration. Chuckling at his friend's mild embarrassment at what he had said, Deckert turned to the doorway and started to roll toward it.

“So, you hear that news out of Canada?” Deckert said, to let his friend off the hook and change the subject.

“What news?” Reaper said. “I've mostly been in the grinding room the last few days and the noise level isn't the best for listening to the radio.”

“There's these great new inventions called headsets,” Deckert said as he rolled through the door Reaper was holding open. “You should look into them. At any rate, seems that Canadian customs up in Toronto found some container ship with a bunch of guns and ammunition on it. At least they found one container with a load of hardware hidden in the walls—you know how the news exaggerates these kinds of things.”

“Yeah,” said Reaper following Deckert out of the shop and into the house. “They find a couple of boxes of shells and two weapons in a takedown and the guy had an arsenal of guns and ammunition. So what did they find really? Did you hear?”

“Seems it really was a bunch of small arms,” Deckert said. “Real bad-guy stuff. Military AK-47s, RPG-7s, ammunition, even grenades and explosives.”

“Shit,” Reaper said surprised. “Sounds like they
busted a supply run for some terrorist cell. Did they get any leads on where the stuff was going?”

“Not that I heard,” Deckert said. “According to the news, they didn't know if the stuff had arrived for some Canadian group or was headed somewhere else. It was close enough that it could have been heading here to Michigan, Chicago, or maybe that big ship terminal down in Toledo. The Canadians made a great big deal of finding the stuff, not a hell of a lot of guns in the Great White North.”

“They would have made a big deal of finding that kind of stash even here in Detroit,” Reaper said. “Good to see that the security is starting to work.”

“Yeah, well you better change into something a little cleaner than those clothes before you head to see Mary and Ricky,” Deckert said as he rolled past the kitchen of the house and into the office that had originally been the dining room.

“There's an idea,” Reaper agreed as he laid the sword case on the kitchen counter and headed to the stairs leading to the second floor. He had been living in the shop/house for some months now—ever since he had separated from Mary, his wife of fifteen years. Times had been hard since he was forced to leave the service, and he knew that he hadn't treated his family the best way that he could in the intervening years.

Losing his career and being forced to leave without any retirement or benefits had been hard—both financially and emotionally. He had gone out with his buddies from the Teams a few too many times while the family lived down in Imperial Beach in Southern California. It was when his old friend and
Teammate Bear, who had now retired from the Navy, had looked him up that things had seemed as though they would improve.

Bear had said that there was a friend of his back in Michigan who could use some help. Being that Reaper had spent more than a little time working in the armory, and had learned metalworking in high school, Bear thought he would be a great addition to his friend's gun shop. It was the chance for a good job doing something Reaper would like.

Going out to Michigan, Reaper met Keith Deckert for the first time and the two men hit it off well. Mary and Ricky were tired of moving across the country as they had so many times when Reaper was in the Navy. But he had sworn that this would be the last time. The bulk of the family's savings had been spent in making the move.

Things had improved a bit in Michigan for the Reaper household, at least the cost of living was a hell of a lot better than it was in Southern California. Mary had been able to do part-time teaching, which she had always loved. Ricky was making friends in school now. He even was starting to like winter sports, not exactly the sort of thing he could have done in the San Diego area.