Killed six of them in their sleep.
Never knew what hit them.
Felk stood at the darkened doorway and let his eyes adjust to inventory the bedroom. The figure in the bed was large enough to be an adult. Steady breathing.
It had to be her.
Felk tightened his grip on his knife, feeling his rage swirling. As he prepared to step toward the bed, a watery explosion sounded.
A toilet had just been flushed.
He’d missed the line of light under a door—a bathroom door.
With nowhere to hide, Felk retreated to the stairs, descended a few, his eyes at floor level. Bright light flooded the hall and a small girl in a pink T-shirt left the bathroom, shut off the light and padded right in front of Felk.
Outside, Unger’s eyes locked on a marked NYPD unit cutting slowly across the intersection half a block from his SUV.
“Jesus!”
In the house, a woman’s groggy voice called from the bedroom Felk had wanted to enter.
“Taylor, is that you, hon?”
The girl turned and went to the bedroom.
“Yes.”
“You feeling okay?”
“I just had to pee and I think my tummy’s a little sick from the pizza, too many pepperonis.”
“Get in bed with me, sweetie, and get some rest for our drive in the morning.”
Felk reassessed.
He’d give it fifteen minutes for them to fall asleep, then do them both, then the second kid.
Unger’s pulse soared.
A second NYPD car rolled down the street, side searchlights raking over the houses.
“Abort, Felk! Police out front!” Unger whispered, slouching down in the rental.
He held his breath and didn’t move as light shot through the SUV accompanied by faint police radio traffic as the patrol car passed.
The neighbor must’ve called.
Far down the street Unger saw uniformed officers, flashlights sweeping, going house to house, checking front and back doors.
“Abort now! Abort now! Meet me at the rendezvous point.”
Once it was clear, Unger reached under the instrument panel, disconnected his lights, started his rental and drove off without being seen. He drove about a quarter mile to a Mobil gas station.
Unger had quit smoking in high school, but went inside and bought a pack of Lucky Strike. Outside, he reconnected the lights. Then he lit a cigarette and drew on it while waiting for Felk. He hated the taste, got out, crushed it under his foot. Then he went back inside and got a Coke and some gum.
Felk was leaning against the car, waiting for him.
“Did you do it?”
“No, I’ve got a better plan. We’re going to need a few things.”
Felk showed Unger the picture of the map on the corkboard he’d taken with his cell phone before he left.
“We’ll do it there tomorrow. The bitch and her pups will suffer a long, slow agonizing death.”
47
New York City
Gannon arrived at the WPA newsroom about 1:15 p.m.
This was his day off, but he couldn’t let go of the story. Not when he was about to deliver Lisa’s eyewitness account.
It would be an emotional powder keg, he thought, stopping off at the editorial post office boxes. WPA reporters still got snail mail, mostly from businesses selling something, or groups seeking coverage, or kooks ranting. Today, Gannon found three pieces of junk mail and a small padded envelope waiting in his slot.
The return address, scrawled in block letters in blue felt-tip pen, hit him like a bullet:
Harlee Shaw. #1021 Oceanic Towers. Yonkers.
The envelope was plastered with stamps of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. There was no zip code for the WPA—it had been added in ballpoint pen. He tore it open, nothing inside but a memory card about the size of a stick of chewing gum. He went to his desk, fired up his computer and inserted the card. He plugged in his earphones, cranked up the volume.
The card contained a single item: a video labeled Classified.
Gannon glanced around for privacy then clicked on it. The video opened with a man in his thirties sitting alone talking to the camera.
“If you’re seeing this, then I’m dead. I came to you because I followed your stories with the World Press Alliance. You do good work, and after we talked on the phone I figured you for being someone I could trust.
“I never meant for things to happen the way they did. I’m so sorry. I’m very messed up. My name is Harlee Edward Shaw. Sometimes they call me Sparks. I grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. I enlisted in the U.S. Army and was with the 75th Ranger Regiment. I saw action in Iraq and Afghanistan. After three tours, I left the army to work for private security companies contracted for covert ops.
“Nearly six months ago our last mission was a horrible failure. Our team was sacrificed for an illegal ‘ghost’ operation. This is our story.”
The video cut to a jerky night-vision montage from a helmet-cam point of view, showing footage of members of a military unit jumping from a plane at night, parachuting into rugged terrain.
The video cut to soldiers on foot patrol at night, moving quickly at the edge of a settlement. Shaw’s off-camera voice mixed with the breathless voices and sounds of the footage.
“We’re now in a denied zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’re here to support local friendlies by removing several hostile leaders aligned with al-Qaeda.”
Suddenly the camera shakes as the video flares with orange flashes and deafening earth-shattering explosions. Tracers rip through the night, inches from the camera, twanging-whizzing-plunking mixes with shouting, cursing and screaming.
“We’ve been ambushed!”
Shaw gets down, digs in with his buddies. They return fire, fighting back as explosion after explosion tears up the world around Shaw. A hot, muddied clump lands on his lap, the camera turns to—a human face—there is only the face—eyes open wide, mouth an O of surprise.
The mouth is moving, gasping!
Shaw screams
“Billy! Oh, God, Billy!”
Shaw’s agony overtakes the fury of battle.
The video cuts to dawn and Shaw narrates.
“Billy’s gone, Kleat’s gone and Big John. They’re all gone. The enemy outnumbered us. They overran us in the night. Six survivors of the squad retreated to a new position. Three of our men were killed; six of our team were captured. From our location we could see the enemy celebrating their victory by desecrating the corpses of our fallen men. It went on for days.”
The video jumps to a long grainy shot of three bodies hanging from a bridge, then dragged naked through a public square while laughing children followed. Townspeople urinated on the corpses, then they were dismembered; village dogs carried off body parts, others were burned.
“We wanted to get our six men out. Through surveillance we determined their location and launched a night-rescue attempt. Again, we came under heavy fire, were repelled. Luckily we took no casualities and retreated. We had no support. Promised support never showed. We realized we were set up, sacrificed. So we began a long hike from the zone to the nearest coalition outpost. We wanted to regroup and rescue our men. Along the way we met an international aid group that agreed to serve as our go-between with the insurgents and the local clan leaders.
“Eventually, word came back to us that our men were being held by assholes calling themselves the New Guardians of the National Revolutionary Movement. They said our guys had been tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity and had been sentenced to beheading unless we paid a twelve-million-dollar fine. Now, as I make this video, the deadline to pay is nearly upon us.