A DISTANT THUNDER Page 5

  “That’s the pros of this position,” Brennan went on gravely. “The cons are that the very features that help us will also help the enemy. Those six wide lanes give Burger King’s limo drivers a lot of dispersal area and turn-around room. Those drivers will be trained in their own escape and evasion tactics. Once the Mad Minute starts, the limos that aren’t immediately disabled could be scuttling all over the area like cockroaches when you turn on the light in a Puerto Rican kitchen. We’ll have our own vehicles at hand, obviously, but I don’t want this thing to turn into a Bonnie and Clyde car chase with us trying to run Sammy down. A good hit should run on rails and there should be no call for anyone to get creative. This kind of operation should never last more than thirty seconds of actual contact time, and then we should all be beating feet. We hit, take down the target, then make like an amoeba and split. Special Agent Shelley obviously likes a lot of elbow room for his transport. We shouldn’t give it to him. Another problem is that if we have good visibility then so will Rothstein’s escort, and that includes visibility from the helicopter. That’s where you come in, Comrade..ah...”

  “We call him Lurch,” said Thompson.

  “Thank you, Thing. Lurch, while we’re taking down the Burger King I want you to splat that chopper with the Stinger missile whenever it gets within such range as you’re sure you can get a hit. Not only a nice spectacular bonus for the six o’clock news, but it also means that after the hit when we’re doing our E & E’s we won’t have to worry about the eye in the sky.”

  “I’ve been past that intersection,” said Lurch approvingly. “Good wide horizon. If that copter comes anywhere lower than three thousand feet I can have that Stinger up his ass before he knows what hit him.”

  “I don’t doubt it, comrade. He’ll have to get lower than that to see what’s happening once we pop the top. Just remember, as flamboyant as a Blackhawk Down is, we want a Black Robe Down. Now, as to the second possible take-down point on Henderson.” (Pointer) “This alternative site is a lot more up close and personal, two-lane highway and the forest very close in to the shoulder. We’d have them good and boxed in, and we could be hiding behind every tree and firing our weapons at almost point-blank range. But by the same token that means more problems for us. For one thing, fewer E & E routes. For another, a much narrower field of fire for the Stinger. Mister Lurch would have to wait until the chopper was visible over the roadway. The actual hit would be here, about a third of a mile from where Henderson Boulevard runs into Old Highway 99.”

  “Not at the intersection itself?” asked Carol.

  “No,” said Brennan. “That would place the strike within sight and sound of the airport and Rothstein’s security detail there, who might come to his aid with more vehicles, maybe even another copter. We’ve got a natural ambush just about here, although it’s not shown on the map, but I went over the ground this morning and I discovered that there’s a very sharp turn, almost 90 degrees in fact, and traffic has to slow to about 20 miles per hour to negotiate it. The woods are very close in and there are a few houses and sheds and whatnot that can provide cover for the shooters, not to mention trees and bushes. Now, we know that place is there. Shelley knows it’s there, and I suspect it worries him, but he may figure what worked once will work again, and help him to evade anything we may have waiting for him on I-5. You lads may remember that running battle Number Two Seattle Brigade had with the FBI’s SWAT unit on the I-90 bridge into Bellevue? They’re very paranoid about interstates ever since, and they do not want a repetition. If Rothstein’s motorcade takes Henderson Boulevard either coming or going, they’re going to have to slow down to about twenty on that elbow. Right at the angle of the curve, there’s a concrete pipe culvert running beneath the road that we can stuff full of the gelignite and all kinds of lovely boomables with a remote detonator. Better compression than the gas pump, and we can do significant damage to at least two of the limos, bring them to a halt and then use our RPGs and armor-piercing bullets. Of the two sites I frankly like this one better. It’s ideal. So ideal in fact that I almost mistrust it as too good to be true.”

  “I like to get in close and see their brains,” said Spiderman. Coming from anyone else who looked like him, with his slouch and his painted Mohawk, you would have said to yourself Jeez, what kind of snot-nosed arrogant little punk is this? But none of us laughed or sneered. We knew Spiderman and Susie, and they really did like to get in close and see the brains. Being sodomized by niggers in the King County jail had that effect on a person. And what they’d done to Spiderman was even worse.

  Brennan nodded. “So do I, lad. Well, then, Henderson Boulevard it is. Now as to our dispositions on the morrow.” The discussion went on the whole afternoon and I won’t give it verbatim. After the CO finished his briefing, Smack passed out the weaponry. “Young Ryan, the CO tells me he likes your style on full auto during a tickle,” said Smack.

  “Can I pack that Thompson again?” I asked. I loved that tommy gun, although all I had done thus far with it was to make some Mexicans dance the flamenco in front of a bodega in Centralia (damned recoil got away from me in the awkward position I was in, leaning out a car window.) Plus later on I ventilated an Assembly of God minister’s house in Chehalis, in order to make a theological point about the Jews being God’s Chosen People. I called the minister up afterward and suggested that his sermon the next Sunday be on Matthew 27:25. He left town instead.

  “Afraid not,” said Smack, shaking his head. “I lent the Thompson out to some boys who had a special job laid on up in Seattle, and it won’t be back for a week or so. Got a goodie for you, though.” He took a weapon out of the back of his van, which was pulled inside the hangar, and tossed it to me. Long and lean and lovely it was, with a reet pleat, a stuff cuff, and a drape shape.

  “AK-47?” I asked, turning it, in awe of the sheer beauty and balance of Major Kalashnikov’s famous design of death. The wood of the stock was varnished a deep red-gold and polished to gleaming perfection. Without the weight of a magazine it almost seemed to twirl in my hand like a pistol. “Or is it a knock-off? What make? Not a Valmet, is it?” Valmet was the Finnish version of the Kalashnikov, probably the best made and best firing version of many.

  “Nope.” Smack gave a sigh. “Wish I had a Valmet to give you, son. Wish I had Valmets to give all of you beautiful people. This is the later model of the 47, an AK-74. Last Soviet military issue before the Iron Curtain went down. This particular piece is a souvenir of sunny Iraq. Still got Saddam’s fingerprints on it. To tell the truth, the main reason I want you to tote this tomorrow is that I need to use up this 5.45-mm Russki ammo. You used to be able to buy 5.45 over the counter fairly easy, but the damned Schumer Act banned these beauties and so we’re pretty much having to stick to what we can take off the cops and the Feds. We’ve only got this one piece and about two hundred rounds, and after they’re gone I intend to convert it to .223, which is a hell of a lot more available caliber. Re-boring the barrel is no problem and I’m going to amputate the stock and cut the barrel down to right in front of the gas regulator, here, so this will be one hell of a close-in chopper. She’ll tickle Yehudi’s liver soft and sweet. Gonna smoothbore it too, to fuck up the ballistics so ZOG can’t trace it, although the re-chambering is going to be a bit tricky. Going to have to actually sleeve it up, if you follow.” He handed me a round canister drum magazine and two extra banana clips of red plastic, plus a handful of loose rounds. “One hundred rounds in that can.”

  “This Soviet issue as well?” I asked, looking over the drum curiously.

  “Nope. Home manufactured in our own machine shop, young Ryan,” he said proudly. “Gonna be too heavy for you?”

  “I’m not a girl,” I said.

  “Watch it, dude!” said Susie Q. “He means you’re a shrimp.”

  “Sorry, Suze. I’m a shrimp, but I can handle it, Smack, although yeah, the drum does seem to throw it a bit off balance,” I added as I slapped the canister into the magazine well. I pi
cked up the weapon and hefted it, aimed it. With the drum mag it was indeed heavy, but I was young and wiry and could manage it. “I’ve fired the M-16 and the BAR, and the Thompson, of course,” I told Smack. “The BAR and Tommy gun are heavier than this piece with full magazines. This bolt seems loose.”

  “AKs are deliberately engineered like that, with a little bit of play to allow for heat expansion and crud and to avoid jams,” explained Smack. “That’s what makes them such fine weapons. You can stick an AK at the bottom of a swamp for a week, pull it out, blow out the bolt assembly and it will still fire. You was never in the army?”

  “Nope, evil racist as I was. 4F on grounds of moral fiber, lack thereof.”

  “But you know full auto fire control procedures, right? This is a joy to use, son, and it can do a lot of damage, but it’s not to play Rambo with.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I told him. “Carter and Adam Wingfield both taught me. Fire short bursts and try for a good tight shot group. You say to yourself fire-a-burst-of-six as you pull the trigger and that actually gives you a burst of five rounds.”

  “Tank, any way we can let Shane and some of these others test fire their weapons before showtime?” called Smack. “It’s just not good work habits letting people go into combat with a piece they’ve never even shot. Especially on a tickle this important.”

  Tank agreed and so much of the rest of the evening was taken up with a trip to a private home on a back road outside Yelm where a long enclosed cellar contained an impromptu, soundproofed firing range. It was helpful but also make-work, since Tank was an experienced combat officer and believed in keeping his troops busy. We put on ear protectors and I fired a banana clip out of the AK-74, five shots semi and the rest in automatic bursts. The AK had virtually no recoil; I could have played tic-tac-toe with it. Susie Q. cut loose with a full drum of double-ought buck from the South African Stryker shotgun she would be packing, Spiderman put a magazine through the Uzi he’d drawn, Tommy Connors popped a few mags through an M-16 he’d been given, and Lurch ran over the firing procedure for our one LAWS rocket with Spiderman, although we couldn’t fire it for obvious reasons.

  When we’d cleaned the weapons Tommy and I went back to the old swimming hole while the rest of them went to undisclosed locations where they would rack in for the night before rendezvous at 0900 next morning. Another rule we learned the hard way was never have your entire Volunteer force in one place for any longer than was necessary. Always move and camp in detachments. I was assigned a cot in one of the offices and given my guard duty shift, me and Smack on ten to two and then Tommy and Carol would relieve us. Before racking in I managed to have a word with Tank, a number of words actually, and he probably wondered if I was stoned or something until he finally figured out what I was hinting at. You never asked questions about the status or whereabouts of other Volunteers even within your own unit. Such curiosity made others curious about you. But there was someone special I hadn’t seen around for a while.

  “Rooney’s the one on the inside at Evergreen with this one, Shane,” he told me. That’s what I had been afraid of. You wouldn’t have thought someone as striking-looking as Rooney would be a good spy, but since to be honest she was striking in a gooney-looking way instead of a supermodel-looking way, no one ever looked twice at her. I mean, everybody knows from James Bond movies that female spies are all stunning beauties, right? Normally the CO wouldn’t have told me what she was doing, but he knew about me and Rooney. “She’s not strapped, so you don’t have to worry about her getting caught by a metal detector or anything like that. All she’s got is a cell phone. She’ll be doing her Valley Girl act. Maybe she’ll even ask for Sammy’s autograph if she can get close enough, and tell him all about how she wants to go to law school and become legally blonde. You’ve heard her do her routine. During the course of the afternoon she’s going to make a couple of calls to an equally brainless Valley Girl, and if any Zoggies are eavesdropping they will swear they’re listening to Jennifer and Brittany from Encino. We have a pretty comprehensive code set up for them and she can tell us anything we need to know. She will tip us as to when they leave, and if she possibly can she’ll let us know what limo Burger King is riding in. She’s a soldier, son, and a damned fine one.”

  “I know that, boss,” I said with a scowl. “I have to accept that, but I don’t have to like it.”

  “Yes you do, and no you don’t,” said the CO with a slap on my shoulder. “By the way, she was worried about you too. I told her you were a total stumblebum who couldn’t be trusted with a piece without shooting himself in the foot, but for her sake we’d look out for you.”

  “Thank you from both of us,” I told him.

  * * *

  In revolutionary movies they show a tickle like this going down with the NVA actors all dressed up in full tiger-stripe camouflage fatigues, black turtle-necks and ski masks, maybe a few wearing the old Party fedora for picturesque effect, hiding in complex dugouts in the woods, calling one another by rank and saluting one another in both military and National Socialist style, rappeling out of trees and down skyscrapers and all kinds of malarkey like that. Okay, there were one or two operations during the war that probably went like that, like the attack on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy in Bremerton, but none that I ever went on. Most of my tickles never had more than four or five guys tops, two in one car and three in another because you always took two vehicles. If the NVA had sashayed around town wearing ninja outfits, I kind of think people would have noticed. We made it a point to dress like typical American slobs.

  The morning we went after the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, I was wearing cutoff jeans, negroid running shoes, a puke-green beer advertisement T-shirt showing a drunken dancing frog, and a blue Seattle Mariners baseball cap, with my extra magazines for the AK-74 stuck out of sight in the Jeep Cherokee Johnny Pill and I had been assigned. Volunteers dressed down so that when we E & E’ed afterwards we could blend in with the equally ragbag populace. What we did a lot of times was carry two shirts on a tickle, usually T-shirts, or two jackets in the winter, so if witnesses saw two men in army camo jackets at the scene, then ten minutes later on a street two miles away one man wearing a cardigan and a second guy across town wearing a leather bomber jacket would attract less attention. We also would usually wear a hat into action in order to break our profile, sometimes the old Party fedora which was the only uniform or badge the Northwest movement ever had prior to Longview, and sometimes a cowboy hat or a pea cap. Then we’d switch to typical Amurrican El Dorko baseball caps once we broke contact. All white boys in baseball caps looked pretty much alike to FATPO. For the Rothstein gig I had a rolled up plain white sweatshirt and I was planning to lose the baseball cap after we beat feet.

  Carol, Brennan, Tank Thompson and the Bear had planted the explosive charges in the culvert in the pre-dawn hours, with the remote control detonator going to Carol. She apparently had a real case of the ass for abortionists, this being the reason she had invited herself along on this particular operation. Because the charges were below ground they hadn’t bothered with exotica like Teflon pellets or phosphorus, but in addition to the seventy pounds of jelly they’d tossed in about ten of Semtex and a few sticks of TNT just for shits and giggles. There was going to be one hell of a hole in that road, and we all had to stay at least a hundred yards away on either side and well covered so we didn’t get caught in the blast. We didn’t dig dugouts or climb up in trees and make turkey blinds or any cute mess like that. Once a Mad Minute (which was usually about twenty seconds, by the way) was up and your team leads popped the smoke grenades you ran, not walked, to your transport and you floored it out of there.

  Earlier that morning, Tank had taken each team out from the warehouse on Airdustrial Drive. Using a different one of our vehicles each time, he cruised nonchalantly past the edge of the airport where we could see enemy movement and glinting metal behind the Bremer walls under the huge red, white and blue Masonic dishrag.
The CO showed each of us where we would be stationed. All of us were positioned with our wheels, out of sight in the woods or otherwise off road along Henderson Boulevard for about three hundred yards on either side of the ninety-degree elbow in the highway, two or three Volunteers per vehicle. Our communications would be a conference call on cell phones, one man per team being issued a disposable phone and headset. We didn’t want to use our own phones because ZOG could track various electronic tags in a signal through the cell site, and not only locate the caller but figure out the phone number on any wireless being used. Henderson Boulevard ran through a sparsely populated area on the edge of town, and within our fire zone there were only a couple of private homes with driveways, a ragged-looking little apartment complex that appeared to be about half vacant, and a small auto body shop consisting of a junkyard and a couple of corrugated iron sheds. The apartment complex would probably get some windows broken by the bomb’s concussion, but they were in a small hollow below highway level, and unless someone was actually pulling out of the driveway onto Henderson Boulevard at the time there shouldn’t be any injuries. The body shop was on the edge of the blast area and would probably get some shrapnel through the walls. “I’ve got their phone number and once we know that the target convoy is on Henderson and we’re D minus about forty seconds I’ll give those guys a call on my other wireless phone and tell them to get out from under any cars they’re under and hit the floor,” said Tank. “That’s all we can do for them.”