David Golemon - Legacy

McCabe’s voice was so calm and measured that Laurel was taken off guard. She felt embarrassed and humiliated at having thought this was something that would have made her part-time lover and her father proud of her. She lowered the phone and looked at the Mechanic, who was still wiping his hands on the red rag and sneering at her.

“Disarm the charge,” she said, not looking directly at the bearded man but at the distant jet as it rounded onto the runway. The man saw her face go slack, and the vitality she had displayed only seconds before had drained away. For the first time he saw through the young woman’s expensive exterior and the ugliness that he saw was shocking. He nodded his head. Her eyes narrowed and she watched as the Event Group Learjet spooled up its engines to full takeoff power.

“You realize that the charge will be discovered when the mechanics check the aircraft?”

Laurel, instead of replying, just tossed the cell phone at the Mechanic, not caring if he caught it or not, and then she turned angrily away and stepped out into the misting air.

“Yes?” he said into the phone.

“Can you undo what you have arranged with that aircraft?” McCabe asked.

The Saudi-born Mechanic reached into his coveralls’ front pocket and brought out a small transmitter. He hit the single red button on its face.

“It is done,” he said into the phone.

“Now listen closely. You are never to engage in any wet work without my explicit confirmation of action. You are never to allow Laurel to… compromise herself again. She, like her father, needs to be protected. Do you understand?”

“Completely.”

“Now, I assume you used a remote device on Compton’s aircraft, yes?”

“This is correct,” the Mechanic said. He watched Laurel as she stared after the streaking Learjet on the runway.

“Do you have the ability to track the device?”

“Up to three thousand miles. I am tied into the Faith-” The man stopped himself before saying the name of his employer. “I am patched through a reliable satellite service.”

“Track-only for now. Gather your equipment and alert your ground personnel. We have duties in Russia and then down south in French Guiana.”

The Mechanic closed the phone without saying anything. He watched as Laurel fixed on him with a look of hatred and failure.

“You will have to fly home commercially, madam,” he said. “Or hire a plane. I have been ordered to another area of opportunity.”

Laurel stood in the light rain and stared at the Mechanic. Her hair was drenched and her beautiful features were obscured by the stringy strands of hair.

“It must be hell for a man like you to lose your faith in yourself,” she said. “So many of your brothers have been martyred and here you are, worse than your onetime enemies. Taking money from the people you once professed to despise, who you would have killed in a minute. You are worse than sad, and you hate me because I am a woman.” She took a step toward the Mechanic. “Well, at least I have the courage of my convictions. You have nothing. I expect McCabe knew what he was doing when he hired you. You just may make that martyrdom yet, but don’t expect your promised virgins in the afterlife. From what I understand they don’t reward cowards.”

The Mechanic watched her smile a lunatic’s grin as she turned to leave. He knew that she was right about him. For a man once feared by the Zionists and the entire Western world, he was a skeleton of his former self. A man who thought his brothers in Afghanistan were weak and without conviction, enough so that they thought him unstable. He was banished from the movement forever and now he found himself in the employ of pigs, the very same people he had sworn to annihilate. Laurel Rawlins’s words about achieving martyrdom echoed in his head and then just as quickly disappeared.

He turned away from the woman and watched the Learjet climb into the sky. Then he looked down at the remote device in his hand. He safed the system and placed it in his pocket to check the GPS later for the final destination of the aircraft. He smiled as he saw the landing gear retract on the expensive Learjet and pointed a finger at the plane. He made a motion as if he were pulling a trigger.

“Another time, my friend. Another time.”

The jointly managed space facility run by the Russian Federal Space Agency and the Russian Space Forces was located 124 miles from the Aral Sea. Since the heyday of the Soviet space program, Baikonur Cosmodrome had seen occasional fits of activity, but since the Russian president openly declared that his countrymen would make an attempt at the investigation on the lunar surface, the facility had seen activity on a massive scale. Forty thousand workers had flooded into the old buildings in Kazakhstan, making the area near the sea once more a viable force in science and space exploration. A much needed transfusion of rubles and euros was flowing in.

As the world watched in wonder, the unveiling of Russia’s top secret lunar program, Ice Palace, began to take shape, and it came far faster than any Western government could ever have imagined.

The giant first stage of a rocket known as the Angara A7, the most powerful launch system the world had ever seen, was being transported to the assembly building three miles from where the mission would be launched. The great system was strapped down and prone on the tractor system, looking like a scene from Gulliver’s Travels as it crawled along at four miles per hour toward the waiting hands of its engineers. The seven RD-91 rocket motors were partially covered, but most of the bell funnel system was open for satellites the world over to see. Not since the massive engines of the Saturn V blasted America to the Moon had there been anything like the RD-91s.

The hydrogen-based rocket fuel was capable of creating almost double the thrust of anything Russian science had developed since the horrifying failures of its N series of rockets in the sixties and seventies. The new design was a source of pride for a Russian lunar program that was now twenty years ahead of schedule.

The man watched from two hundred yards away. His eyes studied the Russian air force security personnel who traveled beside the Angara A7 first stage. The security force was a hundred strong and each of the green-clad soldiers carried an automatic weapon. As the man watched, he could see massive gaps in the security line. The force of guards was just not enough to cover the giant launch platform as it moved out toward the assembly building on the huge caterpillar.

The man was dressed in an expensive Western suit. He pulled the equally expensive coat tightly around him as he turned to the shorter man at his side.

“Your martyrdom is assured. Your family will take with them through life the knowledge that your actions will benefit Allah and his glory. You are the man who will strike the first blow against the infidels and their mission to cast God into the shadows. Is your team prepared?”

The small man looked up at his benefactor. He knew the man as Azim Quaida, the former leader of the Islamic terrorist front Egyptian Islamic Jihad. In Western intelligence circles he was also known as the Mechanic.

“My men are ready. Allah be praised.”

“You may proceed with your mission. The attempt to belittle God shall end in this godless country. La illahah illalah, ” he said with unbridled pride. There is no God but Allah.

The smaller man pulled his long coat around his thin frame. Tears streaked down his cheeks.

“Allah Akbar,” he said proudly.

The larger man placed his hand on his shoulder. “You will be in heaven this day, and you will proudly say you struck the first blow against the humiliation of Allah.”