The Perfect Patriot Read online

  Nitrogen was the culprit, lots of it. Though odorless, he could still smell the associated chemical compounds lingering in the air and being stirred up by the occasional breeze. His senses told him fertilizer was used to create this destruction. Friggin' fertilizer. Lance knew how to build a bomb with cow manure.

  News reports out yesterday said the primary suspect, a loner nabbed by a country cop highway patrolman for having no license plate on his car, was being transferred to Oklahoma City later today. He was apparently a U.S. Army veteran, a supposed right-wing anti-government militia fundamentalist of some sort. McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh.

  Good, they caught him. Now to find the others. This was not a one-man job or a one-time incident. Other violent actions would follow. That's what happens in wars.

  It's just that most of America still didn't know they were fighting this one. Some see a cowardly act like this as declaration of war. But unfortunately that war had been declared years ago. This event is merely another in the seemingly endless shameful acts perpetrated by those who see every day as another in the battle against tyranny that is the Federal Government. Pitiful.

  What is the United Stated Federal Government? It's a bunch of people who go to work every day to earn a paycheck and go home to families. Some are elected; some are lifelong civil servants. Anyone willing to look past the monolith they see as 'big government' will see the people, the humans going about their days and lives. There is no vast conspiracy. No one could organize such a thing in a mismanaged conglomeration of entities with millions of employees.

  Corrupt? Certainly there are those who break the law as Federal employees. Inept? Undoubtedly, many thousands are lousy at their jobs. Slow, bureaucratic, obsolete? Check. But that's the case in any company or organization or level of government. Organized? Barely. Way too much bureaucracy to be on the same page across the country.

  The Federal Government is not the enemy of freedom. It is the result of a bunch of competing interests from across the nation when you have a freely elected representative government. Everyone is out to help themselves and their cause. Thousands, millions of laws and dozens of agencies and millions of workers are not the enemy of freedom. They are the result of a free democracy. But some fools refuse to see government as anything other than evil.

  The media and authorities were busy researching any and every angle of the story about the nabbed suspect. And one connection that had been exposed is the date. The Murrah Building bombing occurred two years exactly after the 76 deaths and horribly grizzly ending of the government siege at that Branch Davidians compound near Waco, Texas. McVeigh and his type were supposedly pissed, enraged that the government could do such a thing -- kill innocent Americans. It was a call to action, to arms.

  Lance had heard all this today on the car radio and then while watching a newscast in a diner. It was a fast moving, quickly developing story. New information came to light every hour. He'd stood back, beside a crowd and watched law enforcement officials and what had to be the FBI continue to comb every inch of the scene. By 1 a.m., the crowd had dwindled to just a few solemn individuals holding candles. One zealous guy had been preaching a fire and brimstone sermon and pounding on his bible for hours over on a street corner.

  Up on the top floor of the apartment building, Lance thought of that street corner preacher's words from earlier in the day. They were filled with hate and anger and vengeance and wrath. Probably the same misguided feelings that drove the alleged bomber, if the developing story had any truth to it.

  Three days post event, the teams onsite were transitioning from search and rescue in the bombed-out pile of rubble that was Murrah building, to recovery of the dead. It was macabre work that had to be done painstakingly slow. Lance looked through binoculars from 290-yards to the north and west. Two firefighters were holding the handles of a body board. A third fireman walked beside them as they climbed down through the rubble. On the board was a body bag, a very small body bag. Lance peeled his eyes away from the binoculars and shook his head. The most heart-wrenching aspect of this American horror story was the fact that a daycare was located inside the federal building. News reports had listed varying totals for the number of children in the center, but 19 or 20 innocent little kids and babies were the numbers mentioned by officials.

  Children die. Happens every day. Every minute of every day. Babies and toddlers and children of all ages pay the ultimate price for the actions of adults; the stupid, ridiculous, unnecessary, tragic actions of those who are supposed to start every action with protecting and fostering and nurturing children in mind. Doesn't work that way. Humans, regardless of age, are selfish, inconsiderate, myopic creatures. And children too often pay for this misguided selfishness, or worse, self-righteousness.

  An adult, or more likely, a group of adults, conceived, planned and executed the massive destruction laid out before him. And they did it with the full knowledge that children would be in the building when they blew up their little bomb. Casual surveillance of the facility would have shown government employees carrying babies and holding the hands of little ones as they entered the building. Killing kids. That is cold, sick. That is an act of war.

  And that is why Preacher was here.

  Through the binoculars, he looked away from the tragedy being borne slowly down the debris pile on the body board and scanned up at the hollowed out structure. He pushed that little angelic victim of misguided human selfishness out of his mind and began surveying the damage, the trajectory, evidence of blast force, debris field, impact velocity estimation, payload requirement, explosive mechanism. The crater deep below what was the street and sidewalk was significant. It by itself gave a multitude of clues about the explosive force.

  It was a big bomb. The delivery vehicle was large. Bigger than a car. This wasn't a bomb in a car trunk, or left on the sidewalk in a large suitcase.

  No, this was much bigger. Had to be a large truck or van. Video footage being amassed from nearby ATMs and security cameras indicated a large yellow rental truck was in the immediate vicinity in the minutes just before the explosion. An axle from the rental truck had been found more than 500-feet from the blast crater. Lance looked from the ravaged remains of the Murrah building to the surrounding buildings and streets and alleys and parking lots. It was an enormous debris field.

  To track and find and stop a terrorist bomber two years earlier, he had become one. It all came flooding back over him during the last three days. Like riding a bike. He surveyed the living, breathing, moving map laid out below him. The target structure. The approach. The ideal location to deliver the greatest impact. In less than 30 seconds, he spotted seven locations that would have provided better targets, greater damage, more deaths. 'Why the middle of the street?'

  The debris pile that resulted from the blast into the structure followed by collapsing concrete, metal, wood, wallboard, furniture, and sadly, humans, was large. It piled up against the nine-floor structure. Rescue and recovery crews were working night and day to shore up the building and retrieve any remains.

  Lance examined the gaping wound again through the binoculars. He could see the multitude effects of the explosion. The crater was beneath that huge pile. He looked at the concrete columns and could see where the brisance, the literal shattering of concrete occurred at the lower levels. Up above, the concrete floors showed the catenary effects of being blown upward by the blast wave before settling back down in a sagging manner. Like a chain or cable hung from two points will find a natural curve, the concrete floors of the building sagged as the concrete was made weak. The rebar inside the concrete slabs kept the whole thing from coming down, collapsing in on itself.

  One big bomb.

  After 20 minutes from his top-floor perch, he had thousands of details amassed and catalogued. He closed his eyes to shoot up a hundred miles above mother earth where he could look down on the curving North American continent below. He'd done this little exercise thousands of times over the years, ever since he was a kid exa
mining every detail of the spinning globe on the shelf behind a teacher's desk. Lance liked to have a whole picture to start his analysis. Looking down on the continental United States did not tell him anything in particular about the heinous crime of mass murder committed in Oklahoma City days before, but it did let him look from OKC to points north, south, east and west.

  Those who did this sickening work, this despicable and cowardly act, were down there. Rats, vermin, the lowest of the low. They were down there moving about the surface of this spinning globe confident in their tainted and misguided beliefs. He'd find them. They would pay with their lives.

  For a brilliant flash inside a moment, he thought about it all. He owned up to his disconnection from the world, his utter lack of empathy for the vast majority of the human residents. He owed them nothing, just as they owed nothing to him. Every single human moving about below is going to be dead in a hundred years. Billions of others will take their places and perpetuate the collective lifecycle of this ever-spinning world. Yet here he was surrounded by the disheveled and destroyed remnants of human creation working through scenarios to deliver painful punishment to those who had perpetrated this ugly mess.

  Such is life.

  He turned his head sideways. The collage of mental images he currently viewed in his cranial repository was actually pieced together from satellite images he was allowed to view two years earlier at a top-secret NSA installation outside D.C. He'd spent hour upon hour just rolling through thousands and thousands of satellite-mounted camera images beamed back down to earth from geosynchronous orbit. It was kid in a candy store with a cherry on top stuff.

  It took his penchant to devour maps to a celestial level. He could start with entire continents, countries, states and drill-down through a barrage of hyper-focused cascading images to cities, neighborhoods, street corners. The granular detail of the images was astounding. These were seriously powerful cameras at work.

  He recalled that illicit detail now as he looked down upon Oklahoma City in the nation's heartland, then outward to neighboring cities and towns and farms in Oklahoma and the surrounding states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri. He knew he was looking at the answer now. It was right there in the minutia. They were there, the bastards who did this. Pure evil.

  If this bombing had taken place almost anywhere else, Lance wouldn't be involved. He wouldn't have left Marta and their days-old infant daughter. It was difficult to do so, but Marta basically forced him to go. She saw the look in his eyes one too many times since learning about the bombing. She knew he was already gone, hovering, out their somewhere looking down with his screwy "satellite view." It was Oklahoma. Where he'd grown up from puberty through high school and then college. His mother and brother were there, in Tulsa, 90 miles north and east from the bombsite. This was an attack at the heart, the heartland of America. She understood.

  For a vicious and inhuman killer who dispatched others without second, third or fourth thought, Lance was taking this one personally. Whether it was the innocent babies in the daycare or the innocents going about their federal employee workday or the laid-back pace that eventually subdues all turmoil in America's heartland, it struck a chord. It was a bitter, bitter note. Lance doesn't often get angry. Preacher is the alter ego hothead of the pair. But this, this sick friggin' act of pseudo-terror required a response. She didn't know if it would be Lance or Preacher or Black Angel that responded. But one of them was going to get answers and provide violent retribution.

  He opened his eyes and took one more look at the death and damage and scattered debris below. He was about to turn and make his way back down to street level when something caught his eye. He was several feet back from the sliding glass door leading to the balcony to avoid any light falling on him. But others were not trying so hard to keep from being seen.

  In the backlit window of an office building three blocks from the epicenter of the blast, a man was looking through a pair of binoculars. Lance put his binocs back to his eyes and focused on this individual. Even with the large set of field glasses covering most of his face, Lance recognized him. Ayers. FBI.

  He had last seen Ayers and his partner Scarfino in a cold as hell snowy alley in Detroit. He and Marta tracked and nabbed a member of a terror cell planning to blow up those funky round Ford corporate headquarters buildings. Preacher had been a little scary toward the two agents. Threatened to kill them if they tried in any way to stop he and Marta from taking the nabbed terrorist away to an undisclosed location. Probably frightened the hell out of them.

  The cell phone in Lance's pocket vibrated. He pulled it out and pressed the talk button.

  "What do you see?" Her voice was distant, but soothing, velvet. He closed his eyes and saw their tiny angel lying on her chest.

  "Death and destruction and hate." He opened his eyes to look at Ayers again.

  "Pattern?"

  "I see the planning, the observation, the target location and required payload. I see a change of plans last minute. The location is wrong, hurried." Their conversation held no details. Nothing from which anyone scanning telephonic radio waves with interception technology would be able to discern specifics. They were always measured in broadcast conversations. Cell phones are basically two-way radios. The NSA is always listening. Always.

  "Anything else."

  "One of our two friends from the Motor City alley." The FBI agents. "Looking at him right now."

  "And lots of their friends, of course." Marta added.

  "Of course."

  "Night."

  "Night."

  She severed the line. Twenty-two seconds of conversation. No "love you" or "miss you" or "take care." All of that was contained in the one-word goodbye. Night.

  Lance stepped over to the landline phone in the apartment and lifted the handle to listen for a dial tone. He dialed information. Two minutes later he was leaving a message for Special Agent Ayers that would be relayed to him by a clerk working the overnight intake desk at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  Something else.

  Something made him turn and step back to the window. The pattern below, in it he had missed some element, some development. He could see the change in plans in the placement of the truck, but he couldn't see the why. He squatted back on his haunches and took it all in again.

  The ruined federal building lit up by dozens of floodlights. Flashing lights atop police cruisers positioned at the periphery of the cordoned off sector. The fence, outlining a battle zone. Mostly empty early morning streets. He brought the binocs back up to his eyes and scanned for details missed the first few times through.

  It was when he returned to the building where he had spotted Agent Ayers in the window that the arrector pili muscles attached to the base of each of the hairs on the back of Lance's neck contracted. Hair standing on end on his back and neck usually meant something bad.

  Correction, always, every single time, hair standing up on Lance's back meant something very bad was going to happen. It was failsafe.

  It started with Ayers' face. Even from this nearly quarter-mile distance, Lance could tell it wasn't right. Ayers had lowered the binoculars from his eyes and was rubbing his forehead. But his eyes were uncovered. And they were looking right at him. Seriously, right up at him, right here in this darkened corner top-floor apartment.

  And even worse, Ayers' head was shaking back and ever so slightly. A warning. Lance squinted into the binoculars to see the FBI agent's mouth form a word. He watched the man's lips move as he mouthed the word, "run."

  The phone in Lance's pocket vibrated again. He stepped back away from the window and answered.

  Before he got the device to his ear, he could hear her screaming. And before he heard her screamed words he thought of the strangest thing -- Marta shouldn't be yelling. She'd wake the baby.

  "Get out, run. Now!" Her voice blasted into his ear from 700 miles to the west.

  Chapter 5

  He was two steps ahead
of her, already at the door. He opened it and was about to step into the hallway.

  No good. Just over 40-feet away, two body-armored FBI agents were kneeling to take aiming position. Behind these two, four others were stepping into doorways and taking aim with M-4 rifles. He'd been so intent on surveying and collecting information on the damage and evidence below, he had not been listening for the sounds of humans climbing 24 flights of stairs.

  "Freeze," the closest officer yelled from behind his mask as he brought his assault rifle up to take aim.

  Preacher dove backward and kicked the door closed as two-dozen rounds exploded into and through the wood door. With the lock broken by his kick, the door was thrown open by the force of the fired bullets. Damn. Not good.

  But this spinning globe hurtling through a frozen solar system around an ever-exploding ball of hydrogen at thousands of miles an hour creating time and gravity moves in slow motion compared to the human brain. And Preacher's moved just a little quicker than others. Always had.

  He formulated a plan as he rolled across the floor and crawled to the balcony where he rose to a squatting position and then flung his left leg and then his right over the railing to stand outside the protective wall surrounding the balcony. Without hesitation, he stepped off and dropped. His fingers gripped the ledge his feet were standing on a moment before.

  He swung his feet, legs and torso forward like a trapeze artist and dropped the ten feet to the balcony below. He then did the same over-the-edge drop-swing thing three more times until he was on the 20th floor. Once on this 20th floor balcony, he kicked the glass sliding door in, shattering it. He moved through the apartment to the door and into the hallway, through the door to the stairwell. He then took the stairs three at a time, dropping five more flights in 22 seconds.