Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (283 page)

He replaced the telephone handset gently on its cradle, almost as if there was a chance one of the unknown intruders might hear the noise and return to investigate. He stood frozen in place, tapping the telephone’s hard plastic casing absently with his fingers, lost in thought. What to do? He couldn’t stay here forever, cowering in fear in the break room from the guys with the guns. Sooner or later he would be discovered.

Plus, it seemed like a coincidence of the most improbable magnitude that the BCT would be breached by men with automatic weapons on the very same morning that the president of the United States was flying into Boston’s airspace.

Nick had no idea what it meant that the guys with guns were here in Merrimack when the leader of the free world would soon be landing nearly forty miles away in Boston, but he was dead certain that it meant something significant.

He had to notify the authorities. Escaping the TRACON and going for help didn’t strike Nick as a reasonable plan, since it seemed unlikely in the extreme that the guys with guns (terrorists?) would have stormed the BCT and then left the exits uncovered. Even if he were able to escape the building undetected, and Nick knew he would have to hike for miles just to get anywhere he could tell someone about the situation, and by that time, it would probably be too late.

All of this went through Nick’s racing mind in a matter of seconds as he stood next to the useless telephone, feeling helpless and exposed in the shadowy break room. There really was no choice. He had to get to his cell phone in the ready room and use it to call 911, but to do so meant walking fifty feet down the well-lit hallway running adjacent to the operations room. He would be completely exposed the entire time. If anyone should round the corner from either direction while he made the journey he would be toast. And then, assuming he made it all the way to the ready room alive and unharmed, what would he find when he entered it?

Would another terrorist with an automatic weapon be standing sentry, ready to cut him down in a hail of bullets? Nick had no idea how many men with guns had actually entered the TRACON. Maybe the three he glimpsed were just one group of many; there was simply no way of knowing.

One thing he did know, however, was that standing here in the dark was accomplishing nothing, other than to make him more afraid and less sure of his ability to survive the next few minutes. Already a strong sense of impending doom threatened to reduce him to mindless panic. It was an almost physical presence. It was big. And it was growing.

Nick took a deep breath, surprised by how loud the roaring in his ears sounded, and opened the break room door a crack. He leaned forward and peeked through the tiny opening.

No one was there.

He breathed a short prayer to whoever might be listening, then stepped through the doorway and started down the corridor.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Dimitrios and Joe-Bob stood in the marshy wetlands of the Hull Peninsula, frozen in the glare of the Jeep’s headlights. Their shadows stretched in the opposite direction, fuzzy and indistinct on the muddy ground. They waited calmly to see what would happen next. The situation felt oddly similar to the one last week when the Tucson cop had stumbled onto them as they loaded the Stingers from the Army transport vehicle into their unmarked panel truck.

This time, Tony was not stationed somewhere in the darkness with an automatic weapon, ready to cut these people in half. But on the bright side, the Jeep clearly contained nothing more dangerous than a group of stupid kids looking for a little privacy so they could finish getting drunk and stoned. The chances that they were armed were slim, and even if they were, it seemed highly unlikely they were sober enough to hit anything they were aiming at, anyway.

Dimitrios and Joe-Bob could hear excited babbling coming from the Jeep. It was one of the old CJ models, with the removable canvas top, so the interior was open to the elements. Staring straight into the headlights, the two terrorists were effectively blinded and thus could not tell how many people the vehicle held. It sounded like there might be three separate voices.

It became clear that the kids sitting inside the Jeep had no idea what to do. They had Dimitrios and Joe-Bob pinned in the glare of their headlights, but they had not spoken a word to them or shut the lights off or done anything at all for close to two minutes.

Fuck it
, thought Joe-Bob.
We don’t have time for this
. He arranged his face into what he hoped was his most disarming smile and affected his strongest Forrest Gump good ol’ boy Southern drawl. “Hey there, fellas, y’all mind turning down them headlights? All that brightness is givin’ me a headache, ya know?”

“What the hell are you doing out here?” came the shouted reply from the Jeep. It sounded aggressive and much too loud.

“Same as you, I would imagine. Relaxin’.” Joe-Bob kept his voice nice and soft, placating and non-confrontational.

After a moment the Jeep’s headlights were extinguished. All Joe-Bob could see now was a slowly fading blue image burned onto his retinas. Not good, but certainly better than before.

“You’re in our spot.” The tension seemed to have drained from the kid’s voice, and the statement was spoken softly rather than shouted. The kids inside the Jeep seemed to have decided that they had the situation well in hand, which was just the way Joe-Bob wanted it.

“Well, I’m sorry about that, boys,” Joe-Bob replied. “We’ll just be on our way, then. Find us another spot. We didn’t mean to step on any toes or nuthin’.” He exaggerated his drawl.

There was no reply from the Jeep, so Joe-Bob continued. “As a peace offerin’, how ’bout we leave a couple beers with you fellas? No harm, no foul, right?”

“Works for us.”

Joe-Bob sloshed over to the cab of their Dakota, reaching in through the door and grabbing two water bottles. He held them against his chest, using one big arm to shield them from view, so that the occupants of the Jeep would not be able to see that they weren’t actually beer bottles until it was too late. As he splashed past on his way to the Jeep, Joe-Bob growled softly to Dimitrios, “Grab the duct tape.”

By the time he reached the Jeep, Joe-Bob’s vision had returned more or less to normal. He could see now that the vehicle held three young men in their late teens, two in front and one in back.

He reached over the Jeep’s passenger side door, and as he did, he flung the two half-full water bottles hard into the face of the kid unfortunate enough to be sitting there. He pulled a thirteen-inch tactical combat knife out of its nylon sheath at his waist and in one smooth motion gutted the kid, plunging the razor-sharp CTV2 stainless blade into his belly and pulling up, using its serrated upper edge to slice him jaggedly open between his ribs.

Joe-Bob heard a sharp, surprised intake of breath followed immediately by a weak, watery “Ahhhhhh.” The kid’s voice sounded bubbly and far away, and he was dying with shocking suddenness.

Blood dripped from the black titanium carbonitride blade, looking almost as inky as the blade itself in the near-total darkness. Joe-Bob lifted his hand to shoulder height, using his massive bulk and the unexpectedly terrifying sight of the knife to intimidate the vehicle’s other two stunned occupants. The attack had occurred with such savage swiftness that it seemed neither kid had a chance to grasp what had just happened to their friend. Their reflexes dulled by alcohol and drugs, both young men stared stupidly at Joe-Bob, mouths hanging open in identical displays of shock.

“So, who wants to be next?” Joe-Bob asked quietly with a half grin.

No one answered, so he motioned Dimitrios forward with the knife.

By now the critically injured young man was panting as if he had just sprinted a great distance, his breathing rapid and shallow. Each outward expulsion of breath sounded bubbly and wet, and was accompanied by a low moan, and he had his arms wrapped tightly around the front of his body in an effort to keep his entrails from spilling out of the gaping wound in his belly and chest.

He was mostly failing in that regard. He was also fading fast and would be dead within minutes.

Dimitrios wrapped the duct tape around the driver’s head twice before slapping it on the seam. He taped the man’s hands to the steering wheel, then shut off the Jeep’s engine and pocketed the key. He repeated the procedure with the backseat occupant, taping that man’s hands to the driver’s side headrest since there was no steering wheel back there.

The wounded man in the front passenger seat slumped sideways against the door, his head lolling out the open window. He was still breathing shallowly but had slipped into unconsciousness.

Joe-Bob used the kid’s denim jacket to wipe some of the blood and gore off his knife, which he then slid back into his scabbard. He told Dimitrios matter-of-factly, “Luckily this little misadventure didn’t cost us too much time, but we really need to start getting set up. Let’s move our asses.”

Without looking back, he trudged back to the Dakota. The Forrest Gump good ol’ boy accent was almost completely gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Larry looked at his watch again and sighed. Where the hell was Futz, and what was taking him so long to get his goddamned snack? He should have been back ten minutes ago. It wasn’t like Larry minded sitting and staring at a mostly empty radar scope, especially since the federal government was paying him a 10 percent premium on top of an already handsome salary for working in the middle of the night, but he could feel his reflexes slowing and his eyes beginning to droop. He knew he needed a break; even just a few minutes to take a walk and stretch his legs would be enough.

He thought about what had happened to Lisa and wondered how he would react if he had been in Nick’s position. Wife brutally murdered and now buried in the ground, without the opportunity to even say good-bye.
Life sucks; then you die
.

Larry had married Sharon a few years before Nick and Lisa tied the knot, and although he and Sharon certainly didn’t have the perfect marriage—at least not when you compared it to Nick and Lisa’s—Larry knew he would be lost without his wife. He couldn’t imagine how Nick was going to cope. He had tried talking to his friend about it once or twice, and Nick had politely but firmly rebuffed him each time. He said he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. Larry supposed he could understand that.

As he was debating whether it was worth making another attempt to raise the subject with Nick, he heard the click of the main TRACON door opening behind him. Larry was a little surprised that Nick would enter from the door at the other end of the ops room rather than the side door he had used when he left, but maybe he had gone to his cubicle in the ready room to grab a book to read while he sat at the scope doing nothing. At least he was finally back, and Larry could get started on his own break.

He sat resting his chin on his hand with his elbow propped on the console in front of the scope, watching the lone target representing ChekPro Flight 112 move steadily toward Logan Airport. In the old days, airplanes running checks were a staple of overnight traffic at facilities all over the country, but with the advent of electronic banking, the check runners were becoming a dying breed. Larry figured within a few years they would be gone entirely. He wondered what the pilot of ChekPro 112 would do then.

Larry felt rather than heard the presence of a person standing behind him. Without turning around, he started a position relief briefing. “Okay, here’s what’s going on—” He stopped in midsentence as he felt the cold, insistent pressure of a gun barrel being jammed into his neck.

“No,
here
is what is going on,” came a deep, unfamiliar voice. Whoever was holding the gun pushed harder until it was all Larry could feel. The barrel was right beneath his ear. It defined his existence. “You will be quiet. You will do exactly as you’re told. If you cooperate, you will live. If you do not, you will die an extremely unpleasant and painfully messy death. Do we understand each other?”

Larry swallowed heavily and gave an almost imperceptible nod, afraid that if he moved, the gun would go off and blow his head all over the front of the radar scope.