The Blue Widows

Book 6: Ben and Danielle

by Jon Land

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

In today's terrifying new world, in which small groups of individuals with unlimited resources can wreak incredible havoc and catastrophe, the task of stopping them becomes all the more urgent and compelling. Jon Land's latest topical thriller finds Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea facing just such a threat: an obsessed fanatic plotting nothing less than the total destruction of America.

Danielle, now the head of Israel's National Police, still relies on her Palestinian-American partner, detective Ben Kamal, currently working for a private security firm in Boston. When a raid on a terrorist hideout in Gaza yields flame-charred pages written in Arabic, she sends the document to Ben for his inspection. Shockingly, his translation reveals that the pages are actually a fatwa, a religious edict, granting permission to bring about a biblical prophecy known as the End of All Things.

Layla Aziz Rahani, embattled daughter of a powerful Saudi Arabian billionaire, is the mastermind behind this insidious plot, whose apocalyptic scope and magnitude are almost beyond comprehension. Now Danielle and Ben, working both separately and together, must track Rahani along a deadly trail of shadows and subterfuge that spans three continents-before an ancient prediction becomes a very real and irreversible disaster.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: March 1, 2003

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 384

Sample

The Blue Widows

DAY ONE




CHAPTER 1
Danielle Barnea felt the submachine guns clacking against her as she ran through the woods.
Bramble scraped at her face. Exposed roots and fallen logs tried to trip her up, but she rushed on through trees wet with the residue of a quick-moving storm.
She had no firm plan of action set in her mind. She had earlier committed to memory the plans of the People's Brigade compound in the central-Idaho community of Pine Valley on Heydan Lake. The best way of getting inside without being detected, she had noted, was through a culvert, a long drainage pipe that bypassed the security sensors, trip wires, and booby traps that otherwise dotted the woods surrounding the compound. The culvert originated within the barbed-wire security fence, so that once inside Danielle would have only perimeter guards to contend with.
"America's lost her fucking spine," came a voice through her headset, which she recognized as that of Hollis Buchert, leader of the People's Brigade. "You think the government would have learned from 9/11, but it hasn't learned a goddamn thing. So you know what, son? If Washington can't do the job, then we will. Gonna teach this country a lesson she'll never forget. That why the FBI sent you to snoop around here?"
"I told you," she heard Ben Kamal's voice insist. It sounded raspy and nasal, as if his nose had suffered the first brunt of Hollis Buchert's ire. "I'm not working for--"
A heavy whapping sound ended Ben's words.
"We don't like Arabs and we don't like liars and you're an Arab liar, son. Means we'll have to kill you twice. Or make the first time last twice as long. You from the F, B, I?" the man repeated, drawing out the letters.
"No."
"Because word is they've been trying to set us up. Why, I've even heard it told they got somebody on the inside. Maybe trying to learn something, you ask me. Shit, can you believe that?"
"I--"
The whap! that followed sounded like a strap striking flesh.
Danielle shuddered and quickly checked her watch. The interrogation was eleven minutes old. She wondered how much time she had left before Hollis Buchert tired of the process and simply used his gun.
Hold on, Ben, she willed, picturing the man she had known for seven years and wondered if she could live without. Just hold on ... .
The assignment undertaken on behalf of their company, Security Concepts, had gone horribly wrong. Ben and Danielle had been retained by one of Detroit's most influential Arab businessmen, Victor Rantisi, to surveil the compound and provide proof that his kidnapped son was inside. Rantisi had sought out their private security agency after being repeatedly rebuffed by the FBI, settling upon Security Concepts specifically because an ex-Palestinian-American detective, Ben Kamal, was in the company's employ.
Danielle had been against the job from the start. Her missions for the elite Sayaret, the commando teams forming the Israeli Special Forces, had invariably been accompanied by firm intelligence on the positioning of targets. Not so this time. She loathed the notion of undertaking even a simple reconnaissance mission withoutintelligence on where the People's Brigade's guards were posted, or how many she and Ben would have to confront.
The plan was for her to infiltrate the lake side of the compound, while Ben entered from the land side to the north. She had just begun her sweep along the shoreline when Ben's jaw-mounted microphone broadcast the sounds of his capture. Fearful there would be too much open ground to cover from that point of entry, Danielle had looped around to the eastern side of the compound and located the culvert from memory, a bit distressed to find it was smaller than the scale map had indicated. She had no other choice but to shimmy inside on her stomach and pull herself along through the rank-smelling muck that had accumulated inside the pipe.
The culvert was no longer functional, just a leftover relic from a time when the People's Brigade's twenty-acre compound had been a farm. Danielle shifted her submachine guns so they rode atop her back, stilled now. But her pistol dug into her side and she tried to reposition it as well, to no avail. Fortunately she had clipped her knife sheath far enough back on her hip to keep it out of her way.
Reaching the other end of the culvert, she peered out and found herself just inside the tree line on the compound's eastern perimeter. She guessed the barbed-wire fence would be a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet back. Beyond her, trails sliced through the thick woods hiding the open stretch of land that led to the complex of buildings noted on her schematic.
No guard stood in her line of vision. Danielle pulled herself from the culvert and dropped in snakelike fashion to the moist ground, pushing forward until she heard the booted footsteps of the first guard patrolling. She stayed prone, camouflaged by a thick patch of brush adjoining the trail down that he was striding. An M-16 dangledfrom the guard's shoulder, too far from his grasp to cause Danielle much concern. His combat boots crunched the twigs and underbrush scattered along the path, and she waited for him to pass her position before lurching to her feet, knife in hand.
Danielle swept the blade forward at the same time she wrapped a hand around the guard's head, closing her palm over his mouth as she jerked the killing knife through his ribs into his heart. The man thrashed briefly, then stilled. Danielle lowered him softly to the trail and dragged him into a thick patch of underbrush, where his body was likely to remain hidden.
Her hand was soaked with the guard's blood and she wiped it off on her pants. The coppery stench hung with her as she dashed along the line of the trail, drawing deeper into the compound. The barbed-wire fence ran inward at an odd angle here, and Danielle found herself pressed against it briefly before the woods widened again and she heard a branch snap ahead.
A second perimeter guard stood facing away from her. A plume of smoke lifted over his head as he shook a match free and began puffing away on a cigarette. Drawing closer, Danielle could see he wore headphones over his ears, the muffled din of rock music wafting up lightly when she closed.
This guard's frame was slighter than that of the first, his fatigues a bad fit, as if he had not yet grown into them. She knew as she made her final lunge he was young, barely out of his teens. But the gun on his back and walkie-talkie clipped to his belt concerned her more. She had killed for the first time herself when she was not much older than he. Still she blocked his youth from her mind, focusing instead on Ben, whose plight denied her the luxury of conscience. Danielle used her hands this time, breaking the guard's neck. But she avoidedlooking at his face when she dragged him into the damp overgrowth that rimmed the fence line.
Danielle drew the first of her Heckler and Koch submachine guns around in front of her and made sure the silencer was screwed in properly. After so many years using an Uzi, the heft and added length of this gun discomforted her. But it was well balanced and carried a reputation of shooting truer at moderate distances than any other gun in its class.
She smelled wood smoke burning on the wind and angled toward it. She clung to the trees as much as possible, knowing she would have to take the next guards from a less comfortable distance.
The first one saw her an instant before Danielle saw him, M-16 leveled straight and ready instead of slung. But he hesitated for a second, and that was all the time she needed to fire a silenced burst into his chest. A mist of blood sprayed into the air, settling atop his body.
Danielle ran on, took the next two guards as they walked side by side. Her heart felt strangely quiet in her chest after the initial thundering against her rib cage. Her brain had settled in, found the zone she recalled so well from her tenure with the Sayaret.
As the woods dipped, Danielle found herself nearing a slight hill beyond which she could now see clouds of wood smoke floating into the sky. She heard voices, laughter, multiple footsteps slashing through the brush. Five men, maybe six or even more, lumbered unsuspectingly across the compound. Too many and too far away to rely on any submachine gun's limited range of accuracy. And she was out in the open, no viable cover to rely on before they crossed the ridge.
Danielle tossed her nearly spent Heckler and Koch to the ground and tore open her shirt to expose her sports bra. She staggered forward, moaning, muttering, clingingto branches to pull herself along when the men reached the crest of the hill.
"What the fuck," she heard one of them say.
Six, Danielle counted as she collapsed to her knees, making sure her second submachine gun was hidden behind her. The men above froze briefly before starting down the hill en masse. She whipped the second Heckler and Koch around the moment they drew within her killing range and emptied its clip into them.
Danielle slammed a fresh clip into the submachine gun and charged upward, the men's bodies tumbling past her to the foot of the hill. It dipped slightly at the top, offering a clear view of the buildings comprising the center of the People's Brigade's sprawling compound.
The farmhouse and barn were covered in weathered silvery shingles, standing out amid the dull brown bunkerlike buildings, barracks, and storage depots that were products of more recent construction. Danielle clung to the cover provided by the last of the trees, watching a few men in military uniforms traipsing about between buildings. She knew the bodies she'd left in the woods wouldn't go undiscovered for long, meaning she had to act fast. So she studied the activity coming to and from the various buildings, ultimately focusing on the barn, where three men stood before the heavy door as if to guard it.




THE STRAP had left Ben's jaw swollen, the teeth on the right side of his mouth loose, and one eye puffy and closing. Ben coughed and spit out blood. He closed his eyes and thought he might have passed out briefly. When he opened his eyes, Hollis Buchert was still standing before him. Buchert was short and stocky. He had athick neck, straw-colored hair oiled to his scalp, and a face like worn shoe leather crisscrossed with prune-deep wrinkles. He was wearing jeans, boots, and an army fatigue jacket.
Buchert took a step forward and stooped down close enough for Ben to catch the stench of dried sweat rising off him. He grabbed a chair that was a twin of the one Ben was laced to, spun it around, and sat down leisurely. "See, here's the thing. You're gonna tell me what I want to know. Everybody I bring into this barn does. I'm making it my mission to send anybody the government sends after me back to them in pieces. Whether I do it while you're alive or dead, well, that's totally up to you."
Buchert dragged his chair a little closer.
"So what do ya say, son? How we gonna play this?"
Ben remained silent.
The wrinkles on Buchert's face seemed to stretch a little. "Ain't nobody coming to your rescue, son. You best put the possibility outta your mind. Only one thing you gotta concern yourself with now and that's how much you wanna take. You thirsty?"
Ben wet his lips.
"Yeah, you're thirsty all right."
Buchert drew a nine-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt and cut Ben free of the chair, though his arms remained bound. The man had an iron grip, his body hard and densely packed with muscle. Buchert effortlessly dragged Ben to the water trough and shoved his face down so it rode just over the ripples on the surface.
"Here, son, have a drink."
Buchert pushed his head under the water, Ben straining his neck to fight him, to no avail. His chest heaved and his lungs begged for air. His brain clouded up, felt as if it were going to explode, when Buchert jerked himback out. Ben gasped for breath, managed to catch it an instant before Buchert plunged him under again. He waited a little longer this time before yanking Ben back out and letting him catch his breath again. Rancid water pasted Ben's hair to his scalp. His stomach quaked. He retched and coughed up a stream of greenish trough water. Then he smelled Buchert's stench looming over him once more.
"Man," Buchert said, jerking Ben back into his chair, "you're a fucking mess. Washington oughtta be able to do better."
He launched a boot into Ben's chair and it tipped over backward. Ben's head smacked against the hard barn floor. A series of flashes exploded before his eyes. He was upside down, half in the chair and half out, arms still bound behind him.
The People's Brigade soldiers surrounding him laughed hard and kept laughing, until the gunshots sounded outside and suddenly the barn went dead quiet.




A MAN had emerged from the barn. Another had gone in. Danielle estimated there was a hundred feet of open ground to cover between the tree line and the barn. She waited until there were three men standing in view before she charged.
Danielle began her charge across the ground and opened fire the moment they spotted her. Her bullets punched them backward, and the barn door opened a crack from the force of one of them crashing into it. Danielle kept firing until the submachine gun clicked empty. Then she drew her nine-millimeter pistol and kicked the barn door open all the way, crouching as sheentered and measuring her shots at shapes partially lost to the dim light of the barn.
A soaked figure stirred on the dusty brown floor near a trough of water.
Ben! she thought, as a shape near him lunged for a shotgun leaning up against a beam.
A fissure of dirt and wood burst up at her feet before she managed a shot, and Danielle spun to find a man steadying a hunting rifle on her from a raised perch in the loft above her. She fired at him fast, her first bullet missing, but her second taking the man in the leg and pitching him over the side.
She heard but never saw him land, swinging back just in time to see Ben, hands tied behind his back, slam into a man she recognized as Hollis Buchert an instant before Buchert managed to steady his shotgun.
Ben kicked his leg out and landed atop him. His wrists ached as he pummeled Buchert, his laced hands smashing into the leathery face now even with his.
"Ben!" he heard Danielle scream just before a fresh hail of fire from the doorway forced him to spin off the People's Brigade leader and roll for cover.
Across the barn, Danielle clacked off single rounds toward the new gunmen as she rushed toward Ben.
"Let's get out of here," she told him.
"Buchert," Ben gasped between labored breaths. "Where's Buchert?"
Danielle grabbed Ben by the sopping shirt and lifted him to his feet, pistol poised in her free hand. "I don't know. We can't worry about him now."
She sliced the rope binding Ben's wrists with her knife and led him through a side door. Behind them they could hear a commotion as more People's Brigade soldiers rushed the barn. Danielle tried to plot the best route back to the culvert, but any route in that direction would mean confronting the converging force head on. Thatleft the Heydan Lake side of the compound, to the west, as their best option for escape, despite the stretches of open space with which they would have to contend.
Danielle had started to lead Ben in that direction when the first of the helicopters appeared overhead.
"Federal agents!" a voice hailed over an amplifier. "Drop your weapons!"
Some of the People's Brigade members began shooting up at the choppers, bullets dinging off their steel skin. The choppers fluttered into a rise while gunmen perched in the open cabin doorways returned fire. Danielle drew Ben away from the lingering sounds of the battle into the woods, which quickly gave way to thinner brush. She could hear the sound of water lapping at the lake's edge, mixed oddly with the heavy whir of helicopters flitting over the compound.
They stumbled over a rise and rushed toward the barbed-wire fence. Beyond that lay Heydan Lake, dotted with skiffs and small outboards to aid their flight. They reached the fence, and Danielle used the rest of her torn shirt to cushion their climb over the barbed wire.
She had just dropped down after Ben when a burst of automatic fire stitched across a tree just over their heads. Danielle spun and saw the figure of Hollis Buchert a hundred yards back, firing an M-16 from the other side of the fence. An exposed root caught his foot and tripped him. He went flying, hit the ground hard, and struggled to find his feet again.
His fall gave Ben and Danielle the time they needed to plunge into the frigid lake waters, swimming toward a small dock twenty-five yards north where a pair of small boats had been moored.
Buchert's fire chased the two of them as they struggled in the water toward the dock. When the firing stopped, Danielle looked back and saw a heavily armed troop of FBI agents converge on his position in thewoods. She waited for the expected exchange of fire, but it still hadn't come when she and Ben reached the dock and climbed into the nearest skiff.
"Stay low!" Danielle told him, as she started the skiff's engine and sped off across the lake.
Copyright © 2003 by Jon Land