Jackknife Read online

  The compound’s defenders couldn’t see what they were shooting at with the generator knocked out and the floodlights off. Parker and Odie wore night-vision goggles that they had pulled down over their eyes once the floodlights were out. That gave them an advantage. As they hurried past the stalled truck, Parker glanced into the cab and saw the motionless shape slumped over the steering wheel. The odds had caught up to the driver.

  The same was true of the men with the grenade launchers. Both of them were sprawled on the ground, one on each side of the truck. They were riddled with bullets. But they had lived long enough to do their jobs. The building that had housed the generator was a blazing ruin. Parker didn’t look directly at it because the flames would have been blinding through the goggles.

  He spotted several men standing outside one of the other buildings, firing rifles and machine guns toward the place where the gates had been. The terrorists knew that was where the follow-up attack would come. They were just a little too slow in concentrating their fire there. Parker snapped his own rifle to his shoulder and began squeezing off shots. The volley rolled out smoothly from the weapon, and every time it bucked against his shoulder, another of the compound’s defenders folded up or went over backward as Parker’s bullets tore through him. He killed five of the goat-humping bastards in a handful of seconds.

  Then, as bullets whistled past his ears and kicked up dust at his feet, he whirled away from the barrage and leaped behind the corner of a building. He reached under his cloak, found one of the grenades attached to his flak jacket, and leaned out from cover to fling it through an open doorway. He heard men shout in alarm, but their cries were drowned out a couple of ticks later by the eruption of the blast.

  Parker had done his part, killing enough of the terrorists so that the odds should now be even between them and the local fighters. But he had never been one to sit on the sidelines, even for a moment. He spotted Odie crouched behind one of the jeeps that was parked inside the compound, and called to his partner. When Odie looked around, Parker gestured toward the largest building, which was probably where the local leaders of Hizb ut-Tahrir lived, along with being the administrative center for the group.

  Parker and Odie darted out of cover and sprinted toward the building, swerving back and forth to throw off the aim of anyone trying to draw a bead on them. The battle was going on all over the compound now. Muzzle flashes split the darkness, the flames from burning buildings rose higher in the predawn gloom, and the chatter of automatic-weapons fire was interspersed with the screams of dying men.

  The sounds were ugly, even to a man of Parker’s experience. He tuned them out as he bounded onto a porch attached to the front of the largest building. The structure was made of wood instead of mud or stone, wide planks of raw, unplaned lumber that must have come from the trees on the mountains that loomed over the village. Parker kicked the door open and went through with his rifle held ready to fire.

  He and Odie found themselves in a long, barrackslike room. Give these guys credit, Parker thought. They didn’t live high on the hog, like old Saddam had over in Iraq. Their cause meant more to them than luxurious surroundings or personal possessions. Parker could have almost admired them for their courage and devotion to what they considered their duty…

  If that “duty” hadn’t included slaughtering thousands of innocent men, women, and children, and doing it in the name of their god at that. They were death-loving lunatics, and no amount of flowery rhetoric could cover that up.

  Parker held up a hand to stop Odie in his tracks. “Listen,” he hissed.

  From somewhere in the building, he heard a familiar whining sound. That was a shredder being worked, Parker realized. Fearing that the compound was under attack by the American military or CIA, one of the group’s headmen was trying to dispose of vital documents.

  Parker knew that, and he didn’t want any more papers to go in the shredder. He pinpointed the sound as best he could, and than ran to the end of the barracks room, where he found a narrow set of stairs.

  He and Odie went up the stairs as fast as they could. Parker knew whoever was up there could hear the clumping of their boots on the steps, but that couldn’t be helped. He paused before he reached the top of the staircase and searched under his cloak for another grenade. Selecting it by its shape and feel, he armed it and tossed it, then ducked his head and covered his ears. A couple of steps below him, Odie did the same.

  The flash-bang grenade went off with devastating effect, blinding and deafening anyone who wasn’t ready for it. The eye-searing, ear-numbing blast lasted only a second, and then Parker and Odie were moving again. They lunged up the rest of the stairs and came out in a room with several desks in it. Three terrorists were stumbling around, pawing at their eyes, obviously disoriented. Two carried rifles and one had a pistol. The man with the pistol bumped into one of his fellow terrorists, yelled in alarm, and turned and started shooting, jerking the pistol’s trigger in panic-stricken fashion. The unlucky bastard who’d bumped into him flew backward, half his head blown away by the bullets.

  Dumb jackass, killing his own man, Parker thought as he lifted his rifle. That just made it easier for him and Odie. He sent a two-round tap coring through the pistol-wielder’s skull while Odie shot the third and final terrorist in the chest. They stepped over the bodies to get to the desks.

  Parker became aware that the sounds of battle from outside in the compound had slowed down. The firing was more sporadic now. He hoped that meant his team had just about won. “See how the others are doing,” he told Odie, “while I see what I can find in here.”

  Odie nodded and hurried back to the stairs. Parker started pawing through a heap of papers piled on the desk where the shredder was set up. It stood to reason that the terrorists would have started disposing of the most important papers first, but that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Who knows what might be scattered in this mess?

  Parker read Arabic fairly well, and was able to start making two piles as he sorted through the documents, one for papers that were obviously unimportant, just mundane details of running the compound, the other for documents that might contain valuable intel. He scanned the writing that resembled chicken scratches, picking out familiar names and places. Islamic terrorism was like a spiderweb, with strands going every which way and connecting one group to all the others. He was beginning to get the idea that Hizb ut-Tahrir was at the center of that web, even more so than Al Qaeda.

  He stiffened in shock as he stared at one document. It appeared to be notes of some sort, made during a meeting of the organization’s top planners. The plot they set forth was so hideous that it shook even Parker, who had thought that he knew the depths to which these bloodthirsty madmen could sink. But now he saw that he was wrong. Worse yet, this plan appeared to be on the verge of being implemented, to strike back against the United States for its support of the Israeli air attack on Iran’s nuclear bomb factory.

  Parker’s eyesight blurred slightly. The night-vision goggles made it hard to read. He ran a finger along a line of Arabic scrawls, seeing the characters that translated, at least loosely, into the term “sleeper cell.” Hizb ut-Tahrir had agents already inside the United States, waiting for orders. It had long been known in the intelligence community that Al Qaeda had agents in the U.S. Many of them had been identified, and the FBI and Homeland Security kept tabs on them as best they could without tipping off the agents that their identities were known.

  But as far as Parker knew—and admittedly, he could be behind the curve on this—the Powers That Be were unaware that Hizb ut-Tahrir agents were already in the country. This was important stuff, especially considering what that crazy sheikh was planning for them to do. Parker stuffed the handful of papers inside his jacket. He had to get out with these and pass them on to his superiors, no matter what else happened. Somebody had to warn the folks back home.

  The sudden burst of automatic-weapons fire somewhere close by made him jerk his head up. He saw Odie backing
up the staircase and shooting at a figure below. The young California transplant reached the top of the stairs and stumbled, sitting down hard. Odie twisted around and yelled in English, “Get out of here, dude! Now!”

  Parker saw the bloodstains on Odie’s clothes. They were black through the goggles. He took a step toward his partner as Odie tossed a grenade down the stairs. The blast stopped the shooting.

  Odie turned to him again and motioned weakly toward the windows. “Courtyard’s clear, and the C-4’s planted. Get out while you can, Brad.”

  “We’re both getting out,” Parker insisted. “I’ll call for choppers—”

  “I’m hit too bad for that, and I think some of them are still alive down below. They’ll be comin’ up the stairs in a second. I’ll hold ’em off—”

  A cough wracked Odie, and blood gushed from his mouth.

  “Go on, man,” he half-whispered. “I don’t know if you found any good intel, but if you did, you gotta get it out of here.”

  Parker had found some good intel, all right. Vital intel. And Odie was right—it had to be extracted.

  But that meant leaving a man behind, and doing that went against every instinct in Parker’s body.

  “Damn it, Odie—” Parker began as he took another step toward his partner.

  The firing from below began again. Odie swung the muzzle of his rifle from side to side and sprayed lead down the stairs as he shouted, “Burn in hell, you pricks!”

  Then he went over backward as more slugs ripped into his body.

  Parker knew he had no choice. He opened the window and started climbing out. He glanced back to see that Odie had been able to push himself upright again, even as badly wounded as he was, and was still firing at the enemy.

  That image was burned into Parker’s brain as he dropped the dozen feet or so to the ground.

  He was running as soon as his boots hit the sand. He’d been forced to leave behind a lot of documents that might have proven to be important in the ongoing battle against terrorism. But he had the most important paper of all, the notes detailing the latest and most heinous plot hatched by the bastards since 9/11.

  Bodies of the tribal fighters were sprawled everywhere, along with the dead homicidal-maniacs-in-training, as Odie had called them. It looked to Parker like the two sides had pretty much wiped each other out. Unfortunately, a few of the terrorists had survived. They were the ones who had killed Odie—and now they spilled out of the building Parker had just left, giving chase as he sprinted toward the gates.

  There were only four of them, he told himself. He could stop and fight. But with the information he was carrying, getting away was more important, even if it went against the grain. He darted around the truck that had been used to crash through the gates.

  As he did, he was hit. The blow felt like a giant hand slapping him in the side. He spun out of control, hit the ground, rolled over a couple of times. As he came back up on his knees, he told himself to ignore the fiery pain in his side and squeezed the rifle’s trigger. Set on full auto, it spewed death at the onrushing terrorists. Two of them were knocked backward. Another stumbled forward a few steps before falling on his face. But the fourth man kept coming.

  Parker’s rifle ran dry.

  There was no time to slap another mag into the weapon. The only break Parker caught was that the other guy’s gun was out of bullets, too. The jihadist flung it aside and jerked a knife from behind the sash around his waist. Parker grabbed the guy’s wrist in both hands as the blade slashed at him. The terrorist’s momentum carried him into Parker, and the collision sent both of them to the ground.

  From there on out, it was a desperate, hand-to-hand struggle. Mano a mano, Parker told himself crazily as more thoughts of El Borak came back to him. He hung on for dear life with one hand and used the other to slam a hammer fist into the guy’s head. A heave of Parker’s body sent the terrorist toppling to the side. Parker lunged after him, still hanging on the wrist of the guy’s knife hand, twisting his arm, forcing it down…

  The man let out a sharp, short cry, then a long sigh as his knife went into his own chest. Parker bore down and buried the blade as deep as he could. The terrorist’s head fell back. Parker had seen enough men die to know that the guy was done for.

  He left the knife where it was and struggled to his feet. His hand went to his side to check the wound, but surprisingly, he didn’t find any blood. When he reached into his jacket, he pulled out fragments of his radio.

  Well, he couldn’t call any choppers in to extract him now, he thought. The radio had saved his life by stopping the bullet. The impact had been enough to knock him down and hurt like hell, but the slug hadn’t penetrated.

  It might have doomed him anyway, though, since he was a hell of a long way from anywhere, with no transportation but his own two feet. He would have to make his way back to what passed for civilization in this backwater country on his own.

  But at least no one would be chasing him. As he looked around, he seemed to be the only person left alive in the compound. In the nearby village, the inhabitants would be cowering in their beds, waiting to see if the shooting was going to start again.

  Maybe he could find another truck that was in running order, Parker thought as he reloaded his rifle. Lord knows the one they had used to bust in here was shot all to hell.

  He broke into a stumbling run that steadied somewhat as he loped off into the darkness. He hoped it wouldn’t take him too long to contact his superiors. The intel he carried had to be passed on to the proper people ASAP.

  Parker hoped it wasn’t already too late.

  The American never looked back, so he failed to see one of the wounded men inside the compound lift his head. Ibn bin Suleiman hurt terribly, but he didn’t think he was so badly wounded that he would see paradise this day. Still, he would have welcomed death—if it had not been for the fact that the American might have discovered what was being planned for that nation of infidels. Suleiman had meant to shred those notes, but he hadn’t gotten to them yet when the dogs burst in…

  He pushed himself to his feet. He had heard one of the Americans say something about C-4. That was an explosive, Suleiman knew. He was quite familiar with it, in fact, having taught scores of young men how to blow themselves up with it, along with as many of the godless as possible. Suleiman knew now that he had to get out of here. He had to warn his friends that their plan might have been discovered. And if possible, he had to stop that American and make sure that he didn’t tell anyone about what had been planned here.

  Suleiman stumbled through the wrecked gates and started toward the village.

  He had gone less than fifty meters when the explosions began behind him. The concussion knocked him to the ground, and as he pressed his face to the sand, he thought that it sounded as if the entire world were coming to an end…

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hey, it’s not like it’s the end of the world, old buddy-roo,” Ellis Burke said into his cell phone as he inched along in the heavy traffic on the interstate. “Trust me, this is just a minor setback. We’ll still get everything we want from those bastards at the insurance company. You remember everything I told you, right? You don’t ever step outside the house without that collar around your neck? You stupid asshole!…No, no, not you, Mitch. I’m talkin’ to this guy in front of me who won’t get off his brakes…Yeah, you just do like I say, and payday’s a-comin’…Hey, who’s the lawyer here, you or me? I’ve handled hundreds of these cases. Thousands! Those insurance sons o’ bitches’ll cave. You’ll see…Okay. No, that’s all right, no need to apologize. Of course you worry about it. You’re out of work. Your family’s future depends on this settlement.”

  So did the next payment on Burke’s Caddy, but he didn’t say anything about that to the client. It was always best to keep it all about them, and never remind them that he stood to collect a big chunk of change from this case, too. He needed the money as much as Mitch Sherman did; otherwise, he was gonna have to choose b
etween the car payment and the child support payment. Couldn’t make ’em both this month.

  But he was confident that the insurance company’s lawyers would give in once they’d strutted around and acted like hard-asses for a while. They had to make it look like they were worth that big retainer the insurance company paid them. Ellis Burke didn’t know why, instead of paying off legions of high-priced attorneys, insurance companies didn’t just deal fairly with the folks who filed claims against them. Hell, they had all the money in the world to start with. It was only fair that they spread some of it around.

  “All right, Mitch, all right, I’m glad you called. I’ll be in touch…Nah, at this point, we can’t really expect any movement until next week. It’s Thanksgiving in a couple of days. People are already thinking about turkey and football and Christmas shopping, instead of lawsuits. Gimme a call on, like, Wednesday if you haven’t heard anything from me, okay? Okay-doke. Bye-bye.”

  Burke closed the phone, slid it into his shirt pocket, and thought, Asshole.

  He told himself he shouldn’t be that way. It wasn’t Mitch’s fault that he’d been born and raised in a state full of gun-nut, execution-loving assholes…and assholes who didn’t know how to drive at that.

  “Can’t you just go on and get out of the friggin’ way!” Burke shouted at the drivers clogging the highway in front of him. Traffic hadn’t come to a dead stop, but it was really creeping along. Burke wished he was back in New York, where people had the good sense to use public transportation. You’d think with all the ugly, empty space in Texas, the highways wouldn’t be so damned crowded.

  That was because too many “damn Yankees” had moved down here, to hear the local yokels tell it. He got fed up with them getting mad whenever somebody with some common sense—namely him or somebody else from an actual civilized state—tried to explain that you couldn’t keep doing things the same way just because that was the way Cousin Zeke and Uncle Jed had done them for the last hundred and fifty years. Frickin’ Wild West lunatics with their gun racks and their racist Confederate Rebel Nazi bumper stickers and their love affair with the death penalty. What was he doing down here in this Lone Star Insane Asylum anyway?