The Teeth of the Tiger Read online

  Brian grabbed the terrorist’s hands and crossed them on his bleeding chest. “I want you to carry this to hell with you. It’s a pigskin, asshole, made from the skin of a real Iowa pig.” And Brian held his hands on the football as he looked into the bastard’s eyes.

  The eyes went wide with recognition—and horror at the moment’s transgression. He willed his arms to move away, but the infidel’s hands overpowered his efforts.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I am Iblis himself, and you’re going to my place.” Brian smiled until the eyes went lifeless.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Save it,” Brian responded. “Come on.”

  They headed for where it had all started. A lot of women were on the floor, most of them moving some. All of them bleeding, and some quite a lot—“Find a drugstore. I need bandages, and make sure somebody called 911.”

  “Right.” Dominic ran off, looking, while Brian knelt next to a woman of about thirty, shot in the chest. Like most Marines, and all marine officers, he knew rudimentary first aid. First he checked her airway. Okay, she was breathing. She was bleeding from two bullet holes in her upper left chest. There was a little pink froth on her lips. Lung shot, but not a bad one. “Can you hear me?”

  A nod, and a rasp: “Yes.”

  “Okay, you’re going to be okay. I know it hurts, but you are going to be okay.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Brian Caruso, ma’am, United States Marines. You’re going to be fine. Now I have to try’n help some others.”

  “No, no—I—” She grasped his arm.

  “Ma’am, there’s other people here hurt worse than you. You will be fine.” And with that he pulled away.

  The next one was pretty bad. A child, maybe, five years old, a boy, with three hits in his back, and bleeding like an overturned bucket. Brian turned him over. The eyes were open.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “David,” came the reply, surprisingly coherent.

  “Okay, David, we’re going to get you fixed up. Where’s your mom?”

  “I don’t know.” He was worried about his mother, more fearful for her than for himself, as any child would be.

  “Okay, I’ll take care of her, but let me look after you first, okay?” He looked up to see Dominic running toward him.

  “There ain’t no drugstore!” Dominic half shouted.

  “Get something, T-shirts, anything!” he ordered his cop brother. And Dominic raced into the outfitters store where Brian had gotten his boots. He came out a few seconds later with an arm full of sweatshirts with various logos on the front.

  And just then the first cop arrived, his service automatic out in both hands.

  “Police!” the cop shouted.

  “Over here, God damn it!” Brian roared in return. It took perhaps ten seconds for the officer to make it over. “Leather that pistol, trooper. The bad guys are all down,” Brian told him in a more measured voice. “We need every damned ambulance you have in this town, and tell the hospital that they got a shitload of casualties coming. You got a first-aid kit in your car?”

  “Who are you?” the cop demanded, without holstering his pistol.

  “FBI,” Dominic answered from behind the cop, holding his credentials up in his left hand. “The shooting part is over, but we got a lot of people down here. Call everybody. Call the local FBI office and everybody else. Now get on that radio, Officer, and right the hell now!”

  Like most American cops, Officer Steve Barlow had a portable Motorola radio, with a microphone/speaker clipped to the epaulet of his uniform shirt, and he made a frantic call for backup and medical assistance.

  Brian turned his attention to the little boy in his arms. At this moment, David Prentiss was the entire world for Captain Brian Caruso. But all the damage was internal. The kid had more than one sucking chest wound, and this was not good.

  “Okay, David, let’s take it real easy. How bad does it hurt?”

  “Bad,” the little boy replied after half a breath. His face was going pale.

  Brian set him on the countertop of the Piercing Pagoda, then realized there might be something there to help—but he found nothing more than cotton balls. He crammed two of them into each of the three holes in the child’s back, then rolled him back over. But the little boy was bleeding on the inside. He was bleeding so much internally that his lungs would collapse, and he’d go to sleep and die from asphyxiation in minutes unless somebody sucked his chest out, and there was not a single thing that Brian could do about it.

  “Christ!” Of all people, it was Michelle Peters, holding the hand of a ten-year-old girl whose face was as aghast as a child could manage.

  “Michelle, if you know anything about first aid, pick somebody and get your ass to work,” Brian ordered.

  But she didn’t, really. She took a handful of cotton balls from the ear-piercing place and wandered off.

  “Hey, David, you know what I am?” Brian asked.

  “No,” the child answered, with some curiosity peering past the pain he was feeling in his chest.

  “I’m a Marine. You know what that is?”

  “Like a soldier?”

  The boy was dying right in his arms, Brian realized. Please, God, not this one, not this little boy.

  “No, we’re a lot better than soldiers. A Marine’s about the best thing a man can be. Maybe someday when you grow up, maybe you can be a Marine like me. What do you think?”

  “Shoot bad guys?” David Prentiss asked.

  “You bet, Dave,” Brian assured him.

  “Cool,” David thought, and then his eyes closed.

  “David? Stay with me, David. Come on, Dave, open those eyes back up. We need to talk some more.” He gently set the body back on the counter and felt for a carotid pulse.

  But there wasn’t any.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, man,” Brian whispered. With that, all the adrenaline evaporated from his bloodstream. His body became a vacuum, and his muscles slack.

  The first firefighters raced in, wearing khaki turnout coats and carrying boxes of what had to be medical gear. One of them took command, directing his people into various directions. Two headed to where Brian was. The first of them took the body from his arms and looked at it briefly, then set it on the floor, and then he moved away without a word to anyone, leaving Brian standing there, with a dead child’s blood on his shirt.

  Enzo was nearby, just standing and looking, now that professionals—mainly volunteer firefighters, actually, but proficient for all that—were assuming control of the area. Together they walked out the nearest exit into the clear noontime air. The entire engagement had lasted less than ten minutes.

  Just like real combat, Brian realized. A lifetime—no, many lifetimes had come to their premature ends in what was relatively a blink of time. His pistol was back in his fanny pack. The expended magazine was probably back in Sam Goody. What he’d just experienced was the nearest thing to being Dorothy, sucked into a Kansas tornado. But he hadn’t emerged into the Land of Oz. It was still central Virginia, and a bunch of people were dead and wounded behind them.

  “Who are you guys?” It was a police captain.

  Dominic held up his FBI ID, and that was enough for the moment.

  “What happened?”

  “Looks like terrorists, four of them, came in and shot up the place. They’re all dead. We got ’em, all four of them,” Dominic told him.

  “You hurt?” the captain asked Brian, gesturing to the blood on his shirt.

  Aldo shook his head. “Not a scratch. Cap’n, you got a lot of hurt civilians in there.”

  “What were you guys doing here?” the captain asked next.

  “Buying shoes,” Brian answered, a bitter edge on his voice.

  “No shit ...” the police captain observed, looking at the mall entrance, and standing still only because he was afraid of what he was going to see inside. “Any ideas?”

  “Get your perimeter set up,” Dominic said. “Ch
eck every license plate. Check the dead bad guys for ID. You know the drill, right? Who’s the local SAC?”

  “Just a Resident Agent here. Nearest real office is Richmond. Called there already. The SAC’s a guy named Mills.”

  “Jimmy Mills? I know him. Well, the Bureau ought to send a lot of troops here. Your best move is to secure the crime scene and stand by, get the wounded people clear. It’s a fucking mess in there, Cap’n.”

  “I believe it. Well, I’ll be back.”

  Dominic waited for the police captain to walk inside, then he elbowed his brother and together they walked to his Mercedes. The police car at the parking lot entrance—two uniforms, one of which held a shotgun—saw the FBI ID and waved them past. Ten minutes later, they were back at the plantation house.

  “What’s going on?” Alexander asked in the kitchen. “The radio said—”

  “Pete, you know about the second thoughts I’ve been having?” Brian asked.

  “Yeah, but what—”

  “You can forget about them, Pete. Forever and always,” Brian announced.

  CHAPTER 14

  PARADISE

  THE NEWS crews flocked to Charlottesville like vultures on a fallen carcass—or started to until things got more complex.

  The next news flash came from a place called Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs, Colorado, then came one from Provo, Utah, and finally Des Moines, Iowa. That made it a colossal story. The Colorado mall hit involved six dead cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy—several more had been pulled outside to safety by their classmates—and twenty-six civilian deaths.

  But word of Colorado Springs had gotten quickly to Provo, Utah, and there the local police chief, with a good cop’s instinct, had dispatched radio cars to every shopping center in town. At Provo Towne Center, they scored. Each car carried the mandatory police shotgun, and an epic shoot-out developed between four armed terrorists and six cops—all of whom knew how to shoot. That produced two badly wounded cops, three dead civilians—a total of eleven local citizens had joined in the pitched battle—and four very dead terrorists in what the FBI would later term a bungled attack. Des Moines might have turned out the same, except that the local city police were slow to react, and the final score there was four terrorists dead, but thirty-one citizens to keep them company.

  In Colorado, two surviving terrorists were holed up in a retail store with a police SWAT team just fifty yards away, and a company of National Guard riflemen—activated with alacrity by the state’s governor—on the way and champing at the bit to live out every soldier’s fantasy: to use fire and maneuver to immolate the invaders and set their remains out for cougar bait. It took over an hour for this to come to pass, but aided by smoke grenades, the weekend warriors used enough firepower to destroy an invading army and ended the lives of two criminals—Arabs, as it turned out, to no one’s surprise—in spectacular fashion.

  By this time, all of America was watching TV, with reporters in New York and Atlanta telling America what they knew, which was little, and trying to explain the events of the day, which they did with the accuracy of grammar-school children. They endlessly repeated the hard facts they had managed to gather, and hauled in “experts” who knew little but said a lot. It was good for filling airtime, at least, if not to inform the public.

  THERE WERE TVs at The Campus, too, and most work stopped as the troops watched them.

  “Holy Jesus,” Jack Jr. observed. Others had murmured or thought much the same, but it was somewhat worse for them, since they were technically members of the intelligence community, which had not provided strategic warning against this attack on their home country.

  “It’s pretty simple,” Tony Wills observed. “If we do not have human-intelligence assets in the field, then it’s hard for us to get any kind of warning, unless the bad guys are really loose on how they use their cell phones. But the news media likes to tell people how we track the bad guys, and the bad guys learn from that. The White House staffers, too—they like to tell reporters how smart they are, and they leak data on signals intelligence. You sometimes wonder if they’re stringers for the terrorists, the way they give away code-word-sensitive information.” In reality, the staff pukes were just showing off to the reporters, of course, which was about the only thing they knew how to do.

  “So, the rest of the day the newsies will be screaming about ‘another intelligence failure,’ right?”

  “Bet on it,” Wills responded. “The same people who trash the intelligence community will now complain that it can’t do the job—but without acknowledging their own role in crippling it every chance they get. Same thing from Congress, of course. Anyway, let’s get back to work. NSA will be looking for a little cheering on the part of the opposition—they’re human, too, right? They like to thump their chests some when they pull off an operation. Let’s see if our friend Sali is one of them.”

  “But who’s the big kahuna who ordered this one?” Jack asked.

  “Let’s see if we can find out.” More important, Wills didn’t add at the moment, was determining where the bastard was. A face with a location attached to it was a lot more valuable than a face without one.

  UPSTAIRS, Hendley had his senior people together in front of his TV set.

  “Thoughts?”

  “Pete called up from Charlottesville. Care to guess where our two trainees were?” Jerry Rounds asked.

  “You’re kidding,” Tom Davis responded.

  “No, I’m not. They whacked the bad guys for fair, without outside assistance, and they’re back at the house now. Bonus: Brian—the Marine—had been having second thoughts about his function. That, Pete reports, is a thing of the past. He can’t wait to go out on some real missions. Pete thinks they’re just about ready, too.”

  “So, we just need some solid targets?” Hendley asked.

  “My people will be checking the feed from NSA. You gotta assume that the bad guys will be talking back and forth now. Their downtime in chatting back and forth should be coming to an end even now,” Rick Bell thought aloud. “If we’re ready to go active, then we can go active, and soon.”

  That was Sam Granger’s department. He’d kept quiet to this point, but now it was time to speak.

  “Well, guys, we have two kids ready to go out and service some targets,” he said, using a phrase the Army had invented twenty years before. “They are good kids, Pete tells me, and from what happened today I think they will be properly motivated.”

  “What is the opposition thinking?” Hendley asked. It wasn’t hard to figure out, but he wanted additional opinions.

  “They wanted to sting us cleverly. The objective here manifestly is to strike at Middle America,” Rounds led off. “They think they can strike fear in our hearts by showing us they can attack us anywhere, not just at obvious targets like New York. That was the element of cleverness in this operation. Probably fifteen to twenty total terrorists, plus some support personnel, maybe. That’s a fairly large number, but not unprecedented—they maintained good operational security. Their people were well motivated. I would not say that they were particularly well trained, though, they just decided to toss a mad dog in the backyard to bite some of the kids, as it were. They’ve demonstrated their political willingness to do some very bad things, but that’s not a surprise; also to throw dedicated personnel away, but that’s not a surprise either. The attack was low-tech in nature, just some bad guys with light automatic weapons. They have demonstrated viciousness, but not real professionalism. In less than two days, the FBI will have them tracked down to their point of origin, probably, and maybe their routes of entry. They did not learn to fly or anything like that, so they probably have not been in-country all that long. I’d be interested in learning who scouted out their objectives. The element of timing suggests some preplanning, but not much, I’d guess—it’s not hard to read the time off a wristwatch. They didn’t plan on getting away after doing their shooting. They probably came in with their objectives already identified. At
this point, I’d bet a few bucks that they’ve only been inside our borders for a week or two—even less, depending on their method of ingress. The Bureau will have that one nailed down pretty soon.”

  “Pete reports the weapons were Ingram submachine guns. They look pretty—that’s why they show up in TV and the movies,” Granger explained. “But they are not really efficient weapons.”

  “How did they get them?” Tom Davis asked.

  “Good question. Figure the FBI already has the ones from Virginia, and is busy tracking them down by serial number. They’re good at it. We should have the information by tonight. That will give them leads on how the weapons got into the terrorists’ hands, and then the investigation will get going.”

  “WHAT’S THE Bureau going to do, Enzo?” Brian asked.

  “It’s a major case. It’ll have a code word assigned, and every agent in the country can be called in to work on it. Right now, first thing they’re looking for is the car the bad guys used. Maybe it’s stolen. More likely it’s rented. You have to sign for those, leave a copy of your driver’s license, credit card, all the normal stuff you do in order to exist in America. It can all be followed. It all leads somewhere, bro. That’s why you chase them all down.”

  “How are you guys doing?” Pete asked, entering the room.

  “A drink helps,” Brian answered. He’d already cleaned his Beretta, as Dominic had done with his Smith & Wesson. “It wasn’t fun, Pete.”

  “It isn’t supposed to be. Okay, I just talked with the home office. They want to see you guys in a day or so. Brian, you had some qualms before, and you say that’s changed. That still true?”

  “You’ve trained us to identify, close on, and kill people, Pete. And I can live with that—just so’s we’re not doing something completely off the reservation.”

  Dominic just nodded agreement, but his eyes didn’t leave Alexander.

  “Okay, good. There’s an old joke in Texas about why the lawyers are so good down there. The answer is, there’s more men who need killin’ than horses that need stealin’. Well, those who need killing, maybe you two can help them along some.”