Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

This revealed that the general had been lung-shot and the bullet was lodged very close to the hilum, the root of the lung. This gave him a three-choice gamble. An operation using a cardiopulmonary bypass was an option, but it would be likely to cause even further lung damage.

The second choice was to go for immediate invasive surgery with a view to extracting the bullet. But that, too, would be highly risky, as the full extent of the damage was still unclear, and it could also prove fatal.

He chose the third gamble — to allow twenty-four hours without further interference in the hope that, even though resuscitation so far had taken a huge toll on the old man’s stamina, he would achieve a partial recovery with further resuscitation and stabilization. This would enable invasive surgery to be undertaken with a better chance of survival.

After that, the general was removed to intensive care, where, by the time the detective conferred with the surgeon, he lay festooned with tubes.

There was one from the central venous line on one side of the neck and the intravenous cannula on the other. Oxygen tubes up the nostrils, known as nasal specs, ensured a constant supply of oxygen. Blood pressure and pulse were displayed on a bedside monitor that, at a glance, revealed the heartbeat.

Finally, there was a chest drain under the left armpit between the fifth and sixth ribs. This was to intercept the constant leakage of air from the punctured lung and guide it down to a large glass jar on the floor, one-third full of water. The expelled air could leave the chest cavity and emerge underwater and bubble to the surface.

But it could not then return to the pleura, for that would collapse the lungs and kill the patient. Meanwhile, he would continue to inhale oxygen via the tubes in each nostril.

Having been told there was not a chance in hell of talking to the general for days to come, Det. Hall left. Back in the parking lot behind the ambulance entrance, he asked Lindy to drive for him. He had calls to make.

His first was to Willoughby College, where the killer, Mohammed Barre, had been studying. He was patched through to the dean of admissions. When he asked for confirmation that Mr. Barre had been a student at Willoughby, she agreed without hesitation. When he told her what had happened on the Princess Anne golf course, there was a stunned silence.

The identification of the morning’s killer had not been released to the media. He would be at the college in twenty minutes, he said. He would need the dean to have available all records and access to the student’s private quarters. In the interim, she was to inform no one and that included the student’s parents in Michigan.

The second call was to Fingerprints. Yes, they had received a perfect set of ten from the morgue and had run them through AFIS. There was no match; the dead student was not in the system.

Had he been a foreigner, there would have been records with Immigration, dating from his visa application. But it was becoming clear Mr. Barre was a U.S. citizen of immigrant parents. But from where? Born Muslim or a convert who had changed his name?

The third call went to Ballistics. The gun was a Glock 17 automatic, Swiss made, with a nearly full magazine, five bullets fired. They were trying to trace the registered owner, whose name was not Barre and who lived near Baltimore, Maryland. Stolen? Purchased? They arrived at the college.

The dead student was of Somali extraction. Those who knew him at Willoughby declared he seemed to have had a change of personality around six months back, from a normal, outgoing, bright student to a silent, withdrawn recluse. The core reason seemed to be religious. There were two other Muslim students on campus, but they had experienced no such metamorphosis.

The dead man had taken to abandoning jeans and windbreakers in favor of long robes. He began to demand time out from studies five times a day for prayers. This was granted without demur. Religious tolerance was supreme. And he grew a bushy black beard.

For the second time that day, Ray Hall found himself going through the private possessions of another person, but there was a fundamental difference. Apart from the engineering textbooks, all the papers were Islamic texts in Arabic. Det. Hall understood not a word but collected them all. The key was the computer. With this, at least, Ray Hall knew what he was doing.

He found sermon after sermon, not in Arabic but in fluent, persuasive English. A masked face, two burning eyes, the calls for submission to Allah, for a completed preparedness to serve Him, fight for Him, die for Him. And, most of all, to kill for Him.

Detective Hall had never heard of the Preacher, but he closed the computer down and impounded it. He signed for everything he had confiscated, leaving the college with permission to inform the parents, to call him when they wished to come south to pick up their son’s effects. Meanwhile, he would personally inform the Dearborn police. Taking two trash bags full of books, texts and the laptop, he returned to police HQ.

There were other things on the computer, including a search of Craigslist for a man with a handgun for sale. Clearly the paperwork had not been completed, which would lead to a serious charge for the vendor, but that would come later.

It was eight p.m. when his cell phone rang and a voice introduced himself as the son of the stricken general. He did not say where he was, only that he had received the news and was on his way by helicopter.

Darkness had fallen; there was an open space behind police HQ but no floodlights.

“Where is the nearest Navy base?” asked the voice.

“Oceana,” said Hall. “But can you get permission to land there?”

“Yes, I can,” said the voice. “One hour from now.”

“I’ll pick you up,” said Hall. While he waited out the first half hour, he consulted police records nationwide for any similar assassinations in the recent past. To his surprise, there had been four. The golf course slaying made the fifth. In two of the previous four cases, the killers had immediately taken their own lives. The other two had been taken alive and even now were awaiting trial for murder one. All had acted alone. All had been converted to ultra-extremism by online sermons.

He picked up the general’s son at Oceana at nine and drove him to Virginia Beach General. On his way, he described what had happened since seven-thirty that morning.

His guest questioned him closely on what he had discovered in Mohammed Barre’s dorm room. Then he muttered: “The Preacher.” Det. Hall thought he was referring to a profession, not a code name.

“I guess so,” he said. They reached the hospital main entrance in silence.

The reception desk alerted someone to the arrival of the son of the man in ICU, and Alex McCrae came down from his office. As they went up to the intensive care floor, he explained the seriousness of the wound, which had precluded surgery.

“I can hold out only slim hopes for recovery,” he said. “It’s touch-and-go.”

The son went into the room. He drew up a chair and gazed in the dim light at the rugged old face, locked away in a private place, kept alive by a machine. He sat there throughout the night, holding the sleeping man’s hands in his own.

Just before four in the morning, the eyes opened. The heartbeat quickened. What the son could not see was the glass jar on the floor behind the bed. It was rapidly filling with bright red arterial blood. Somewhere, deep inside the chest, there had been a rupture of a major vessel. The general was bleeding out too fast to save.

The son felt a tiny pressure on his own hands from those he held. His father stared at the ceiling and his lips moved.

“Semper Fi, son,” he murmured.