Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“He is six foot three,” Musa said as he tightened a strap on his helmet. “He is also a mixed martial artist and one tough bastard, apparently. We don’t know what kind of weapons or explosives we’re going to encounter. I wouldn’t even recommend going in on the bird with this EMP shit, but there’s no other way. So bottom line, be very, very fucking careful, okay, folks? Paying these assholes back won’t be any fun if you’re dead.”

At the end of the briefing, Emily and I, along with two trooper teams, were assigned to watch a back road up on the ridge behind the farm.

Fifteen minutes later, with our headlights off, we coasted to a stop on a tree-lined gravel road beside a barred cattle gate. Beyond the gate was another gravel road that curved down to the left, out of sight through some trees. Down below the trees were the fields and farm.

When the other two teams radioed that they were in position a hundred feet back down the road behind us, I turned off the car and rolled down the window.

I looked down at the farm’s rugged, unkempt fields. It was some desolate-looking country, all right. An almost constant wind whistled in the creaking roadside pines and white birches around us, like something out of The Blair Witch Project . Like most born-and-bred New York cops, the country at night always scared the hell out of me.

“Did you know they say Rip Van Winkle fell asleep around these parts?” I said after a minute to fill the creepy silence.

“I thought that was the Catskills,” Emily said.

“You’re right. Maybe I’m thinking of the Headless Horseman,” I said as I heard a low thumping.

I looked up as the FBI’s Black Hawk swung over the ridge above the car.

“Here we go,” I said, turning up the radio.

The world went green as I peered through the night-vision telescope we’d been supplied with. As I got the farmhouse below in focus, I could see the chopper hovering over its roof and the FBI commandos already fast-roping into the front yard. Blasts of green-tinged light blazed at the house’s front windows as the FBI guys tossed flashbangs.

That’s when I heard a sound up on the wooded hill beside the car. I heard it again. Something crackling, something moving through the trees and underbrush to our left.

“A deer?” Emily whispered beside me as I swung the night-vision scope.

She was wrong.

At the top of a small hill through the trees, I could see three men coming directly at us. I made out that they were large and in camo and had long beards before I tossed the night scope and swung around for the backseat.

“Shit! It’s them! Get behind the car!” I hissed at Emily as I turned and grabbed my M4 off the backseat.

I double-clicked it from safe to full auto and flung the door open. Wet mud sucked at my knees as I rolled beside the car into a prone shooting position.

The men, who must have finally seen the car, stopped suddenly halfway down the hill.

My heart bashing a hole in my chest, I managed to sight on the first man as I yelled, “Police! Down! All of you! Now!”

They looked at each other, then started whispering as they stayed on their feet. One of them was taller than the other two, I saw. Was it al Gharsi? Damn it, what were they doing? Did they have guns? Suicide vests? I wondered.

They definitely weren’t listening. I decided I needed to change that.

The silence of the night shattered into a million pieces as I went ahead and squeezed off a long burst of about a dozen or so.223 rounds up the hill. Wood splinters and leaves flew as I raked lead all over the trees and forest floor in front of them.

“We give up! Please don’t shoot!” one of them said as all three of them dropped into the fetal position.

I stood with the gun to my shoulder and my finger still on the trigger as I heard the sweet sound of the first trooper car screaming up the gravel road.

“This is total bullshit! This is racism! I know my rights. How dare you shoot at me on my own property?” said the large and broad-shouldered al Gharsi as he glared hatefully at me in the back of his crumbling farmhouse a tense twenty minutes later.

“Hey, I’m not the daring one, Al,” I said, kicking a cardboard box of double-aught shotgun shells across his dirty, scuffed floor. “Running a jihadist camp in New York State sixty miles from Ground Zero? Talk about chutzpah.”

And talk about living off the grid, I thought, shaking my head at the surroundings. The house was barely habitable. There was no phone, and what little electricity there was, was provided by a small propane generator. I couldn’t decide which part of the decor was more charming — the little room off the kitchen, where a roughly butchered deer lay on a homemade plywood table, or the upstairs bedrooms, where Arabic graffiti covered the walls above sleeping bags.

Handcuffed behind his back, al Gharsi shifted uncomfortably on a ratty, faded orange couch, where he sat bookended by two standing FBI commandos. The only other furniture was a massive green metal gun locker in a far corner and twelve pale immaculate prayer mats set in a disturbingly precise four-by-three rectangle in the center of the room.

The locker had kicked out some good news for a change. Several of the semiautomatic AK-47s inside had been illegally converted to fully automatic. A felony federal weapons violation would be a good start at gaining some leverage to find out just what in the hell was going on.

“This is not a jihadist camp,” al Gharsi said through yellow gritted teeth. “We are woodsmen, hunters.”

“Woodsmen,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that Arabic on the walls up there says, ‘Give a hoot, don’t pollute.’ You’re not woodsmen, but I’ll concede that you are hunters. It’s what you’re hunting that’s the problem.”

I walked behind al Gharsi and took the photographs Emily was holding. The black-and-white blown-up stills showed the two men from the subway tunnel bombing.

“Who are they?” I said, flapping the photographs in front of al Gharsi’s face.

He shrugged as he studiously refused to look at them.

“Who are they?” I said again, patiently.

“Wait. I know them. Yes,” he said, nodding, as he finally glanced at the pictures. “The one on the left, his name is... let’s see... Fuck. That’s it. His name is Fuck, and the one on the right is... um... You, I believe. There they are together, Fuck and You, my dear old friends.”

“That’s pretty good, Al. Your delivery needs a little work, but it’s almost happily surprising to see that you have any sense of humor at all.”

That’s when I walked behind him again and took a document and another picture from Emily. I showed him the PayPal stuff along with a photo of him sending funds from the nearby library.

“Last Thursday at three o’clock, you sent money to these two different accounts. I want to know why.”

“What?” he said, peering at the photo.

“You sent money. Why?”

There was a glimmer of something in his face then. Recognition, definitely. Then a little confusion. Then his mask of impertinence was back. After a moment, he gave me a cold yellow smile.

“I want my lawyer,” he said.

I smiled back.

“Don’t worry, Al. A lawyer will be provided for you. That’s what makes our country so great, you see. Free lawyers, stuff like that. Maybe one day you might want to ask yourself why you want to wreck it so badly.”

He started laughing then.

“More amusement, Al?” I said. “I got you all wrong. You’re just a big teddy bear, aren’t you?”

“You’re here about the attacks,” he said. “The mayor, the bombing, the EMP.”