Death Run (11 page)

"I don't want this one," the Executioner said. "It's broken."

While the members of Team Free Flow stared at the gruesome sight of their dead comrade, Bolan jumped in the car and Osborne tore out of the garage, all four fat tires of the Audi twisting up a noisy cloud of smoking rubber.

"He what?" Botros couldn't believe what the man on the other end of the cell phone had just told him. "Is he insane?" He paused while the man back at Laguna Seca asked him what they should do with the body.

"Wrap him up in the shower curtain and throw him in the Dumpster in the back. Of course they will find him, but by then we'll be on a jet heading back to Saudi Arabia, and the American authorities will have much greater problems than a body in a Dumpster." He paused again while the man calling from the garage protested disposing of his brethren in such an undignified manner.

"He is a martyr," Botros said. "He has given his life for
jihad.
He is guaranteed passage to Heaven. We should be so fortunate."

Botros projected bravery to his man back in Laguna Seca, but in reality he feared he may very well end up a martyr himself and he felt anything but fortunate. He'd begun to believe that this tall stranger with no background had sprung from the bowels of Hell, a demon come to bring Botros back to Hell with him. He'd exercised bad judgment by expressing this thought to bin Osman, after which he'd been chastised for being a superstitious savage. But he suspected bin Osman had developed a healthy fear of this strange man himself.

Of a more immediate concern was telling his superior he'd failed to kill the big devil. Depending on bin Osman's temperament at the moment, Cooper may not even get the chance to drag Botros down to Hell. If bin Osman decided his failure was unacceptable, the man would bring Hell to Botros before he even died. Many young boys torture insects and small animals, but thankfully they outgrow it. Bin Osman was one of the terrifying few who hadn't; rather, he'd graduated to ever larger and more challenging creatures to torture, ultimately settling on human beings as his subject of choice.

Unfortunately for Botros, bin Osman was not in a very good mood. Gunthar Maurstad, the scientist from Los Alamos whom he had coerced into assembling the nuclear device he planned to detonate in San Francisco the following evening, was stalling.

"Bring out the woman," bin Osman ordered one of the Saudis that Botros had assigned to help assemble the bomb. A moment later, the man pushed a female figure, her hands bound behind her back, her feet shackled together and a canvas hood over her head, into the filthy, decaying turkey shed that served as their makeshift laboratory. "Secure her to the chair." He pointed to a wooden chair that he'd had bolted to the floor.

"Dr. Maurstad, you are trying my patience. Do not think that I can't see through what you are trying to do. Believe me when I tell you it will not work. Did you think I was joking when I said that if you did not cooperate, I would torture your family?"

Maurstad lunged toward bin Osman, but he hadn't gone three feet before several Saudis subdued him.

"You have had ample opportunity to prevent this from happening, but my patience has worn thin. The time has come for me to show you that I am serious." Bin Osman produced a curved dagger and began cutting the bag over the woman's head from the back to the front, slicing the heavy canvas with the sharp dagger as if it were tissue paper. The woman tried to scream, but a gag filled her mouth.

"Remember, everything I do to your wife, I will then do to your daughter if you do not cooperate.

"Nancy!" Maurstad shrieked to his wife, but was cut off in mid syllable by a fist into his jaw.

"I regret having to do this," bin Osman lied — in reality he was excited about torturing Maurstad's wife.

Bin Osman grabbed the front of the woman's dress, which had looked elegant and expensive on the morning that his men had kidnapped the Maurstad family as they returned home from church but now looked like a filthy collection of rags. Bin Osman sliced down the front of the dress. The opportunity to practice his art came far too seldom these days. As a member of Malaysia's elite upper class, bin Osman had been able to prey on Malaysia's impoverished lower classes as a young man, but a concerted effort to build the nation's middle class depleted the ranks of potential victims for the twisted man to torture. While studying abroad, bin Osman had sublimated his urge to torture by engaging in date rape at every possibility, but he'd had to curtail even that mild diversion as he'd rose in the ranks of the business world.

When he'd had his religious awakening and devoted his life to
jihad,
he once again gained access to subjects on which to practice his art and he thanked Allah for every opportunity to do so. These days it was the closest thing he got to sexual release.

Maurstad babbled, "All right, I'll do it. I'll finish putting together the explosive device. It will be ready to transport by midday tomorrow."

Bin Osman was glad that the man had seen the light, pleased that he would do his part in implementing the Malaysian's plan, but he felt cheated of his fun with the Maurstad women. He would have to find some other means of relieving the tension that had built up in his groin.

Maurstad had returned to work and bin Osman had left Nancy Maurstad tied up in the center of the room in order to motivate the scientist to do the job. When Jameed Botros entered the building, bin Osman could tell from the look on the Saudi's face that he wasn't going to like what Botros was about to say. Bin Osman decided to make the task as difficult as possible.

"You have come to tell me that your man has taken care of this mad American, correct?" he asked Botros.

"Not quite," Botros said.

"I thought you sent your best man to kill him."

"I did."

"And the man failed. What does he have to say for himself?"

"Nothing," Botros said. "Cooper just dumped his body in the middle of the garage complex."

"He what?"

"He drove a car into the garage complex and dumped our man's body on the floor. He'd been knifed and there wasn't a drop of blood left in him when the American threw him on the floor."

"How is this possible?" bin Osman asked. "Did your men simply sit around and allow this to happen?"

"No. One of my men attempted to shoot the American."

"How did that work out?" bin Osman asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.

"Cooper pulled his gun faster."

Bin Osman gave the Saudi a look that he knew would make the man squirm in his skin. Who was this man who hounded his every step? He was no law enforcement officer — he killed with too much impunity to be associated with any law enforcement organization. And he was no soldier, at least not in any Western military organization. Even the Russians didn't operate as recklessly as this man. He had heard Botros call him
Iblis,
the fire demon, the Islamic equivalent of Satan. He had written off the Saudi's fear of the American as the barbaric superstition of a primitive, but now he wasn't so sure.

Regardless, Botros would have to pay for his failure, though that payment would have to wait until after they'd accomplished their mission. Bin Osman needed the Saudis to complete the mission, and they were so close now he could smell success. Just another day and a half and the Islamic revolution would step up to an entirely new level.

Bolan and Osborne drank coffee in the soldier's hotel room, waiting for Kurtzman to get back to them. Osborne took a drink from his cup and winced. "You like your coffee on the strong side," he observed.

"This? I take it you never had the coffee when you took your blacksuit training." If Osborne had tasted the sludge Kurtzman called coffee, anything else would seem like brown water.

"No, I never did."

Bolan and Osborne had spent hours cleaning the bloody mess in the bathroom and had just returned from dumping the assassin's body in the Team Free Flow garage complex. Bolan had sketched in the details of his mission to the blacksuit and Osborne offered his services to help the Executioner find the plutonium. Bolan studied the man. So far he'd proven to have the strength needed to do this sort of work, both physically and emotionally, and Bolan's instincts told him the blacksuit was someone who could be trusted.

"There is something you might be able to do," Bolan told Osborne, "but it could be dangerous."

"Worse than what we've already done?"

"Much worse. If I need you for the job I have in mind, that'll mean I've failed to find the plutonium and you'll be sitting on top of a high-powered nuclear device. That would make you the last line of defense between life continuing in America as usual and something that could very well resemble Armageddon. The sensible thing for you to do would be to hightail it to someplace about two thousand miles from here."

"You're talking about my city, Cooper. I refuse to abandon her in her time of need."

Bolan looked at the man. Of course the soldier knew Osborne would not abandon his city, but Bolan had wanted to hear it from his own mouth. "Okay, I need you to go back to the city and remain ready to stop the Free Flow people from detonating the bomb if something happens to me in the next couple of days. For now you might want to go home and rest."

"It's been a long night," Osborne admitted. "It's been awhile since I pulled an all-nighter like this."

"I wish I could say the same," Bolan said. "I'll contact you as soon as I know anything."

Til say one thing about you, Cooper," Osborne said. "You don't screw around."

Osborne had barely shut the door when Bolan's phone rang. "What did you find out, Bear?" Bolan asked.

"You're not going to like what I've got to say, Striker."

"I don't like anything about this situation, so why should this be any different?"

"I've narrowed the possible destinations of the van down to twelve locations."

"Just twelve, huh?"

"I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or if you're just tired," Kurtzman said.

"Both. Can you send the locations to my GPS unit?"

"No problem."

"How about my new wheels?" Bolan asked.

"Problem," Kurtzman said. "I wasn't able to get another bike like the last one. In fact, there wasn't a motorcycle to be rented in northern California, so I had to buy one."

"What did you get?"

"I think you'll like it. It's another BMW, an F800GS. It's down some on power, but the top speed is almost identical because the bike is lighter and the handling is much better, both on- and off-road. You can actually take this one into the dirt."

"When will it be here?" the soldier asked.

"Within the hour."

"Good. I have a lot of territory to cover if I'm going to check out all twelve locations." Bolan wasn't looking forward to trying to scout a dozen locations, but at the moment he really didn't have any other choice — he had to find that plutonium.

"I've got one more piece of information that might help you. We've lost one of our top scientists from Los Alamos." Kurtzman referred to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, meaning only one thing — someone might have access to one of the nation's most capable nuclear scientists.

"What do you mean 'lost' him?" Bolan asked.

"I mean we lost him. He and his family have just disappeared. He was coming home from church with his wife and daughter and they all disappeared. We found their car abandoned between the church and their home."

"Any chance he defected?"

"Highly unlikely," Kurtzman said. "He checks out solid. And there appears to be signs of struggle in the vehicle. The wife left her purse and the daughter left her iPod."

"Not good. If he was kidnapped, any idea who grabbed him?"

"We do. We think it may have been MS-13." MS-13 was a street gang that had started out in El Salvador and spread to the American Southwest. In recent years they'd been responsible for a crime wave that had swept through Arizona and New Mexico.

"Aren't the BNG and MS-13 mortal enemies?" Bolan asked.

"They seem to have formed some kind of truce and they've been working together in a few different cities. It makes sense that they'd eventually link up. The Filipino street gangs tend to have close ties with the Hispanic street gangs."

"What's the scientist's name?"

"Gunthar Maurstad," Kurtzman said. "His wife is Nancy and his daughter is Mareebeth, with three E's."

"Three E's?" Bolan asked.

"Maurstad's from Germany, but his wife's people are hillbillies from northern Arkansas," Kurtzman said. "They can't help it."

"How old is the daughter?"

"Six."

"You think bin Osman has them?"

"It could be a coincidence," Kurtzman said, "but I don't think so. This doesn't appear to be a typical kidnapping. There's been no demand for ransom, and nothing was stolen from the vehicle."

It may have been a coincidence, but the soldier's instincts told him that Kurtzman was probably right.

Because the Laguna Seca track was the westernmost track on the MotoGP circuit, the time difference with the rest of the world was problematic so the qualifying session was moved up from the usual noon start to nine in the morning.

Eddie Anderson stretched on the ground in the pit area beside his motorcycle. He wanted to be as limber as possible for the session ahead. By the time he was ready to ride out onto the track, his head was completely clear of any thoughts not pertaining to the job at hand. His brother had owned Laguna Seca, both in his American Motorcyclist Association racing days and during his brief but spectacular MotoGP career. He'd set the lap record on his 990 cc bike, a time that no one thought would ever be beaten since the switch to 800 cc bikes.

Maybe his brother's record would never be beaten, but Eddie felt he could do it. His bike was fast enough, and everything just felt right. He even thought Darrick would want him to break the record. In some strange way he felt like his brother was there on the track with him.