Michael Savage - Abuse of Power

Behind them the cruisers began to slow, moving in a serpentine formation to keep more civilian cars from rolling onto the bridge. Then Forsyth cut his siren and brought the SUV to a halt, the other vehicles in the caravan pulling up next to them. They all jumped out, Forsyth pointing a pair of Bushnell Night Vision field glasses toward the top beam of the south tower, which spanned the width of the bridge. He squinted against the magnified brilliance of the lights on top of the bridge.

“Holy shit,” he said. “There are two people up there and one of them is a woman.”

“What?” Jack reached for the field glasses.

Forsyth handed them over. His heart slamming hard, Jack aimed them toward the top beam.

It was Sara.

He was torn with emotion. She was up there and she was alive, standing 746 feet above the bay, against the protective railing. Hassan Haddad was holding her by the bare upper arms. They were both standing spread-eagled against the wind gusts, their position precarious at best.

Jack knew that this was Swain’s last little “up yours,” and it had nothing to do with holding Sara hostage or waiting for Jack to arrive before hurling her to her death. In fact, Jack no longer had any doubts about the game plan. He was convinced that what he saw strapped to Sara’s back was the device Haddad had procured from Chilikov in Bulgaria.

It was a backpack nuke.

It was quite possibly the most beautiful sight Haddad had ever seen.

The only sound he could hear was the wind, and he felt as if he were only a step away from Janna — from Paradise-where he would soon have a home. Where he would feel no pain, suffer no sickness, experience no sadness. Where Allah would look after him and he would find true peace in his arms.

The peace he couldn’t find in this life.

Here he stood at the very top of the infidel world, on a narrow catwalk, pressed against the rail, looking down at the bowing suspension cables of the bridge, following their lines all the way down through the darkness to the road where the cars looked no bigger than beetles, moving silently between the white dotted lines.

He saw the ineffectual police cars with their flashing lights, but they were far too late to stop him now.

The wind was strong but he did not feel cold. Allah was insulating him from its sting. And in a few moments he would feel nothing but the embrace of death followed by his feet on the pathway to the Garden.

The woman was trembling, however. As he gripped her arm, her flesh felt icy.

She was disavowing the inevitable. She could not accept the fact that she was about to die.

When he had first seen her in the back of Swain’s van, her hands tied, her mouth gagged, he was surprised. He had long suspected that she was exploiting al-Fida, but he had not known the depth of her betrayal to her faith and to her people. He had not known that she was in league with the Turk and the Gypsy whore, and many others who fought to destroy the Hand of Allah.

Swain had told him many things about this woman, and Haddad at first felt anger. He wanted to use his hands on her as he had on the whorish blonde when she was no longer of any use to him.

But soon his anger gave way to pity. Pity that one of their own had lost her way, had forsaken her faith in Allah and his word.

So he had agreed to do as Swain had asked. To martyr her in the Lord’s name, just as he was about to martyr himself.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said suddenly. She was yelling so he could hear her above the sound of the wind.

He tore his gaze from the view and looked at her. He remembered thinking that she was beautiful, but the ugliness in her soul clouded that beauty now.

“I do as Allah commands,” he said.

“Allah would never command such a thing. You are about to take the lives of innocent people. Women. Children. Countless Muslims.”

“These people are not innocent. They live their lives in ignorance of their god. They elect leaders who kill our Muslim brothers and sisters.”

“And how are they any different from the men who control you?”

He scowled at her. “I answer only to Allah.”

“And Imam Zuabi.”

“Zuabi is a great leader. The Lord sometimes speaks through him. He has counseled me since I was a child.”

“And what about Swain? Does the Lord speak through him as well? He and the people he works for are no different than those you wish to-”

“Be silent!” Haddad snapped.

Haddad no longer wished to listen to this woman. She had been subverted by Western ways and she was trying to trick him, to keep him from doing what he had come to do here at the top of the world.

He turned from her, returning his gaze to the road below, using a pair of field glasses to look toward the north side of the bridge now, waiting for his signal that the time was near. That the moment was upon them.

And then he saw it, little more than a crawling bug in the distance.

The tanker truck was rolling onto the bridge.

Jack’s gut was on fire.

He needed to get to Sara. If they were all going to die, he wanted to die with her.

Emergency personnel were swarming onto the bridge behind them-a lot of sound and fury but not much else at this point. What could they do?

Jack turned to Forsyth. “We’ve gotta get up there.”

“And do what? We go rushing up there, he’ll pull the trigger and you can kiss this bridge and everything on it good-bye.”

“He’s gonna pull that trigger anyway,” Jack told him. “And if that tanker truck I told you about is anywhere in the vicinity, it’ll be a lot more than this bridge that goes up. If it ignites, the smoke and ash will carry lethal doses of radiation across Northern California.”

“The bridge authority is moving to close it down as we speak. As soon as the southbound traffic has cleared, it’ll be deserted.”

“Great. That’s a terrific plan. We’ve still got a madman up there with a nuke.”

“We don’t know that it’s a PTND,” Forsyth said.

Jack shook his head ruefully. A Portable Tactical Nuclear Device. The FBI made everything seem so sterile-manageable because it had a classification.

“Look, I’m sorry about before,” Forsyth said, “and I understand you’re upset about the girl. But we’ve got to wait for the negotiating team. If we can try to reason with the guy-”

“ Reason with him!” Jack shouted. “Do you know who this man is? The only way to reason with him is to put a bullet in his head.”

“If it comes to that we will. We’ve got a chopper headed this way with a sniper on board.”

They’re doing it by the book, Jack thought. That’s all these people know-and one day it would be their downfall.

Probably today, in fact.

But Jack wasn’t part of their team and he’d make his own rules, as he’d done since this damn thing started.

What was it the Reb always said about Israeli negotiating tactics? “Every Jew a twenty-two-”

Jack gestured to Forsyth. “Give me your gun.”

“What?”

Jack moved toward him. “Give me your damn gun!”

“Back off, Hatfield, that’s not gonna-”

Jack lunged, thrusting his hand inside Forsyth’s jacket and ripping the Glock from his holster. Forsyth grabbed him but Jack wrenched free with a furious tug and ran, heading across three lanes of highway toward the pedestrian walkway.

“Stop him!” Forsyth shouted as he took off after him, several of the others joining in the chase.

“Shoot?” someone called back.

“Negative!” Forsyth said with something that sounded like regret. “Just freakin’ stop him!” He started running, joined by four other agents.

Jack leaped over the rail and hit the sidewalk, running for all he was worth, heading for the right flank of the tower. He heard shouts behind him but ignored them as he covered the last several yards to the base of the spire. Few people knew that there was a door built into the design, but Jack was one of those few and he reached for the handle, finding it locked.