Authors: Mack Maloney

Strike Force Charlie (11 page)

BOOK: Strike Force Charlie

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They also loaded aboard a box containing several dozen MREsâMeals Ready to Eat, the contemporary version of the old GI C rations. Finch handed them another paper bag, this one containing nine standard American flags, each one about three feet long. “You'll be needing these types of flags as well,” Finch told them with a wink.

Then came aboard the strangest piece of cargo of all: a huge battery-powered freezer. Inside were three dozen tiny dead pigs, flash frozen to the point that they almost looked like cuddly toys. There was also several packages of bacon in the cooler.

“Now, don't go eating any of that stuff,” Finch joked with them again. “That wouldn't be
kosher
â¦ .”

As they were loading on a half-dozen more laptops for Bates to use, Ryder climbed back up to the copter's flight deck and spent about five minutes alone, checking on the aircraft's primary systems. Their improvised flight computer was keeping everything up and on-line. All of his cockpit lights were green. All of his power modes were in the red. They could leave at any time now.

But when Ryder looked back down into the cargo bay he was surprised to find everyone was gone. He climbed out of the copter but again found the area around the Sky Horse deserted. He was just starting to wonder what other weird thing could possibly happen when he heard a voice coming from the air station's Loran building. Loran was a worldwide communication net that was maintained for the U.S. military by the Coast Guard in many locations around the world. Like one big electromagnetic antenna, the building itself seemed to be crackling with energy. Ryder could see flashlight beams inside.

He walked over to the igloo-shaped building, opened the door, and found the rest of the team huddled within. Finch was
with them, as were the Doughnut Boys. They were all smiling, ear to ear.

What was going on here?

As soon as he appeared, Fox said to him, “I know we're in a hurry. But man, we
had
to see this. Check it out.”

Everyone extinguished their flashlights and now all Ryder could see was Eddie Finch. He was holding a halogen lightbulb in his handâbut it was not attached to anything. He was simply holding it. Yet it was glowing, very brightly.

“Can you believe it?” someone asked Ryder. “These Loran places have so much juice running through them, you don't even have to screw the lightbulbs in â¦ .”

Ryder just stared at Finch as the retired Coast Guardsman held the lit bulb under his bearded chin like a Halloween prank. He looked like something from a horror flick.

“Damn,” was all Ryder could say.

It was one of the strangest things he'd ever seen.

Chapter 9

Near Campo, Kentucky The next night

The mysterious noise came just after midnight.

It wasn't an explosion exactly, even though it was loud enough to wake dozens of people in and around the small town of Campo, Kentucky. Some would later say it sounded more like fireworks or old Civil War cannons going off. Some even thought it was an earthquake. The rumbling was so intense, a few people were thrown from their beds.

The one thing everyone agreed on was that the disturbance had originated from the top of Mount Winslow, the 2,500-foot peak that dominated Campo's skyline to the north.

Campo had no full-time police force. There were only 250 people in the town, and the state police barracks was just 22 miles away, down nearby Route 41. In cases like this, unexpected emergencies and such, the town's plumber, a man named Bo Tuttle, became the temporary sheriff. His brother Zoomer and his cousin Hep became his deputies.

All three men lived near the base of the mountain. They, too, were roused by the strange commotion. Their homes were barraged with phone calls, neighbors wanting to know what was going on. The men didn't bother to answer their phones, though. Within minutes of being shaken from bed, the three men were in Tuttle's improvised patrol car, actually
his Chevy Tahoe, and climbing up the south face of Mount Winslow.

There were only three things of any value at the top of the mountain: a cell-phone tower erected a year before by Southern Bell, an amateur weather station operated by the local 4-H group, and an automated radar relay dish used by the control tower at Louisville International Airport, 18 miles away.

The road up to the summit was gravel mixed with oil to harden it. It had rained fiercely the day before though, and the gravel was still loose. Still the 10-minute ride to the top went smoothly; in fact, all three men were able to gulp down a cup of coffee from a thermos Hep's wife had prepared before his hasty departure.

The three men were fairly sure they knew what had happened up on Winslow. The Southern Bell tower had collapsed. The wind had been blowing hard all day, along with the heavy rains, and more than once people in town claimed they could see the cell-phone tower swaying mightily in the strong breeze.

“That's why my cell phone ain't working,” Zoomer had reasoned during their ascent.

But when they arrived at the peak, the cell tower was still standing. So, too, the 4-H weather station and the airport radar dish.

What they found next to the radar dish, though, would haunt the three men for a very long time.

There were four bodies in all.

Two had been shot, at close range, through the headâand not by a peashooter, either. Two others had been chopped to pieces. Arms, legs, pieces of fingers and toes. Cousin Hep was a butcher, but at first sight of this he vomited up everything he'd eaten in the past 24 hours. Bo and Zoomer, too, nearly went into shock. The sight was incomprehensible.

The grisly discovery was even more baffling as the four dead men were already lying in a grave. A shallow pit, 10 feet by 10 feet, had been dug close to the radar station. All four had been dumped into it.

But still, this was not the strangest thing. Because also thrown into the pit were four tiny pigs, their throats cut, their blood dripping all over the corpses and mixing with their own.

The three temporary lawmen tried to make some sense of it all, but none was forthcoming. Four dead bodies, already in a grave, with pigs' guts splashed all over them? It just didn't seem real. The wind was really howling up here, too, adding greatly to the weirdness around them. For years the townspeople thought the top of the mountain was haunted. Maybe they were right.

All three men wanted to jump in the Tahoe and get the hell off the peak, but to their credit, they stood their ground. They would have to rely on their basic police training to get them through. Tuttle told the other two to search the rest of the summit; it was a flattened top no more than 1,000 square feet in all. Zoomer found some camping equipment and four bloodstained sleeping bags. Meanwhile Hep was able to snag a couple of pieces of paper that had blown into some bramble bushes on the southern side of the big hill.

And it got even weirder here: Two of the pieces of paper had notes scribbled on themâbut they weren't written in English. Hep had done almost a year at nearby Clarksburg Community College; he was the most educated of the three. He guessed the writing was Hindu or something from the subcontinent. He was close. It was actually Arabic, written in code.

From what the three men could make out, the sheet with the most writing contained instructions of some kind, the words being accompanied by crude drawings. But the drawings made as little sense as the words. They seemed to be showing the user how to fly something. But what? Their best guess was something along the lines of a radio-controlled model airplane or maybe a large amateur rocket.

They returned to the bodies. Bo was the senior man. It was up to him to climb down into the grave to look for any identification, this as Hep tried again and again to get his cell phone working. Bo gingerly eased himself into the pit.
The smell down here was putrid, the gore overwhelming. He vowed never to watch another horror movie again. The dead men looked like foreigners, and there was no doubt at least two had been killed in a ritualistic way. But where did the pigs come in? And what had caused the loud noise in the first place?

Bo knew it wouldn't be wise to contaminate the crime scene and, on that excuse, decided that he would check for ID on only one of the bodies. He selected one of the gunshot victims, a small dark man wearing only his underwear and a torn suit coat. In the inside right-hand coat pocket Bo found not a wallet but two Immigration Department green cards. Both gave the name “Abdul Moisi.” One identified him as a “soccer player” from Bali.

“Didn't a bunch of foreigners play a soccer game over in Oxville yesterday?” Bo yelled up to Hep and Zoomer. “I thought someone said they saw their bus pass through town.”

But neither man heard him. The wind was blowing too hard.

The other green card identified the dead man as a “student.” Bo looked at the card and then at the body. Bo was 30. The dead man looked at least five years older than him, maybe more.

“What the hell kind of student were you?” he said out loud.

Hep helped Bo out of the pit just as he finally got his cell phone to work. He'd reached Bob's Gas Station in townâBob was a notorious insomniac and Hep knew he would answer his phone. Bo told Bob what had happened, and he promised to drive out to the highway and flag down the state trooper who would be coming by in the next 10 minutes or so. Then Bo instructed Bob to call over to Clarksburg and ask one of the doctors at the poor people's clinic to somehow get out to the top of Mount Winslow. Bo then said all three of them would wait at the murder scene until the state trooper arrived.

Bo was about to hang up when Bob stopped him. The station owner had a piece of news for him.

As he was probably the only person awake in Campo when the big noise was first heard, Bob told Tuttle he'd run outside his station within seconds and was astonished to see a helicopter coming down the side of the mountain, heading right for him. It was making very little noise, but it went right by the gas station, flying very low. So low, in fact, Bob was able to read the words painted on its fuselage:
United States Coast Guard
.

“Coast Guard?” Bo bellowed. “We're about a thousand miles away from the nearest ocean.”

But Bob insisted that's what he saw. What's more, he said he had observed several men riding in the back of the copter. They were dressed like soldiers and looking out the side window as the aircraft zoomed by. Two of them waved to him. One gave the two-finger V-for-Victory sign.

Then they were gone.

Bo finally hung up, wondering if Bob was drinking again. If not, his information only added to the gruesome puzzle they'd just found at the top of the formerly peaceful mountain.

That's when Hep came up beside Bo and tugged on his sleeve. He didn't say anything. Between the wind and the gore, all three of them were having trouble talking now. Hep simply pointed, straight up, to the top of the Southern Bell cell tower, rising 250 feet above the peak.

Bo had to squint to see what Hep was pointing at. But then, yesâhe saw it, too. A small flag was flying from the top of the cell tower. All stars and stripes, it was an American flag.

Bo scratched his head.

“I don't recall ever seeing that up there before,” he said.

Chicago that night

The first thing Chicago police detective Mike Robinson saw when he pulled up in front of the North Street mosque was small American flag up on its roof, flapping mightily in the breeze.

This was very odd.

“What's that doing up there?” he wondered aloud as he squealed to a stop in front of the alleged holy place. This part of Chicago was close to some particularly notorious housing projects and hard by the approach path to O'Hare Airport. It was a neighborhood filled with crack dens and flophouses. There was at least a couple murders here every night.

Strange place for a flag â¦ .

The mosque had opened here about two years before, in a building given free of charge to a Muslim group by the city in return for a promise to renovate it, as part of an overall neighborhood beautification project. No renovation happened, of course, but the mosque remained.

And it was a mosque in name only. The structure was far from the magnificent architecture of Muslim holy places found in the Middle East. This was a building in a slum, made of rotten wood and crumbling brick, with burned-out shells of buildings on either side of it.

Robinson ran this district's anticrime unit. His six detectives were called to the mosque on a weekly, if not daily, basis, mostly looking for merchandise stolen from a shopping mall nearby. At any given time, between six and eight people were known to be living in the building. The size of the actual congregation was unknown.

Robinson was here checking a report of shots fired inside the mosque. Two patrol cars roared up behind him. Four uniformed cops jumped out, already wearing their SWAT helmets and body armor and carrying M16s, adapted police rifles.

Robinson put on his own bulletproof vest and had a quick conversation with the four cops. There was no one else on the sidewalks or anywhere within sight of the mosque. This, too, was strange. True, this block was a free-fire zone on most nights. But there were always a few people out on the streets, on the corners or in the alleys, even on the warmest of nights, which this was. But right now, the streets around them were empty.

“Two out back?” Robinson suggested to the four cops. A pair of them wordlessly broke off from the pack and ran around to the rear of the decrepit building. Robinson gave them a minute to get in position; then he and the other two walked up to the front door. They had a battering ram with them, but they didn't need it. The door was not locked. Robinson easily pushed it open with his foot.

It was dark inside the entryway. Dark and very quiet. Robinson looked back at the cops with some trepidation. They would all have rather come in with a bangâforced entries tended to scare the bad guys inside. Being sucked in quietly was not the best way to enter a trouble zone.

But enter they did. It was their job.

The hallway smelled awfulâand it was not just the garbage piled up to the ceiling. The stink of burnt gunpowder and cordite was also in the air. Robinson and the cops inched their way through the foyer and into the first room. It was dark, filled with smoke, but empty. Down the hallway another six feet to the second room. Here the cordite was especially thick, but this room was empty, too.

Next came a set of stairs that led up to the second floor. Robinson could see a candle flickering up there, somewhere. He went up first, his Glock out, front and center. The two uniforms had their M16s up, too. They were vets at this sort of thing, though this sort of thing rarely went the same way twice.

They reached the second floor and were naturally drawn to the bare light of the candle. It was in a bedroom to their left. This was where they found the first two bodies.

Both had been shot multiple timesâlots of bullet wounds in the arms, shoulders, kneecaps, and groin, with one massive wound in the stomach. The candle had been positioned at the feet of the victims. Whoever did the killing wanted the two victims to suffer first. And they did, greatly. A message was being sent here; that was obvious. But it got stranger. Both dead men had something very odd stuffed into their mouths. At first, Robinson thought it was entrails, as repulsive as that sounded. Only by bending down and looking
closely did he see what it really was: handfuls of raw, bloody bacon.

He looked up at the two cops who just shook their heads, baffled. “What's up with that shit?” one asked in astonishment.

The two dead men were mosque members. Despite their gross wounds, Robinson recognized them both from his previous visits here. They were of Middle Eastern descent. Both were named Abu.

Robinson and the two cops moved on. Several other rooms were thick with gun smoke but empty. Instinct told Robinson that more bodies were to be found. There was a ladder leading up through the ceiling to the roof. Ladders were not a preferred means of movement among cops, especially in a situation like this. But again, duty called.

Robinson went up first, chunky in his suit coat and tie, waddling in his heavy vest. It made for hard climbing. Three steps up, Robinson lost his balance. Without ceremony, one of the cops behind gave him a mighty push on the rump, propelling him up through the open trapdoor and onto the roof itself.

He found two more bodies up here.

They, too, had been shot. They, too, had had their mouths stuffed with bacon.

The two cops followed him up the ladder. Jets landing and arriving at nearby O'Hare made it hard to talk, hard to think. But they were as baffled by the scene as he. Next to one of the bodies was a suitcaseâor at least what appeared to be a suitcase. Closer inspection by Robinson proved it was not something clothes would be packed in. It appeared to be more of a carrying case for some kind of computer tool or electronic device.

The case had to be dusted for fingerprints, so Robinson placed a small yellow marker next to it letting the CIS team know his intentions.

Meanwhile, one of the other cops noticed something else unusual. The roof was flat and covered with tar, a typical cap for buildings in this area. Playing his flashlight along the widest part of the roof, the cop had discovered a long, thin indentation that appeared to be newly made.

He called Robinson over, and they both inspected the strange imprint. Incredibly, it looked like tire tracks.

“On a roof?”
Robinson said out loud.

They found another, similar indentation about eight feet away and very close to the edge of the building.
Two
tire tracks, made by something heavy, embedded deep in the tar.

This made no sense.

At this point, the two cops watching the back arrived on the roof. As it turned out, one of them was ex-Army aviation. He studied the tire marks and just shook his head. He recognized the mark of a helicopter wheel when he saw one.

“A good-size chopper was up here,” he told Robinson. “You can bet on it.”

To reinforce his theory, he pointed to a series of strange scrapes along one side of the building's metal-pipe chimney.

“See? This is where the tips of the copter blades hit,” the cop said, also noting an ancient clothesline rope was ripped to shreds nearby. “But it was a very tight fit. Whoever was flying this thing knew what they were doing. Or they might just be crazy.”

The ex-Army cop took one long look around and concluded: “Whoever iced these guys came and left in a helicopter.”

Robinson was more baffled than before. Dead mutts with bacon stuffed in their mouths? Helicopters landing on top of tenement buildings? An American flag, left behind, rippling in the wind?

Robinson just shook his head as a jet screamed overhead on its way to landing at O'Hare.

“Whatever happened to drive-by shootings?” he asked.

BOOK: Strike Force Charlie

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