Guardian of Lies

SIXTY-SIX

I am sliding sideways under the truck so I can see down the sidewalk behind us when I realize we are alone. I can see him in the distance walking the other way, toting two bags over his shoulders.

“Herman.”

“Yeah.”

“Slide out on your side. There’s nobody here. I think they’ve gone.”

The three of us make our way out from under the truck on the left side. We stay low, moving toward the front of the truck so that if someone on the sidewalk looked back they wouldn’t see us.

We wait until he is a block away and then race for the lift gate in the back. Herman throws the gate up as Maricela and I clamber aboard. Herman comes in behind us and lowers the gate, but not all the way.

He holds it up a few inches, just enough for light to come in so Maricela and I can try and get her father free. He is shackled to a metal rail along the inside of the fiberglass box.

Maricela removes the tape from his mouth and eyes as I try to figure out some way to release his hand from the metal rail.

As soon as the gag is out of his mouth, he starts spitting instructions at his daughter in Spanish.

“What’s he saying?” I ask Herman.

She is arguing with him.

“He wants her to go. He wants us all to leave now. He says to run as fast as we can.”

I look down and see the open panel on the side of the wooden crate, get on my knees, and look inside. There is a green metal container, just a little smaller than the crate itself.

“Ask him”-I look up at Maricela-“ask him if there’s any way to stop it.”

Herman is looking around desperately for something to prop up the door with so he can help me.

She says something to him and Nitikin responds with an answer that seems to take forever.

“He says there’s a safety. A wire on the side of the metal box inside the crate. But he says it won’t do us any good. It will stop the big bomb, but the little explosion will kill us all anyway. He says we must leave now.”

“There must be a way to stop it,” I tell her. “Ask him again. Tell him we’re not leaving until we stop it.”

She speaks to him and they argue. He yells at her. She reaches up and pulls on his arms, trying to free his hands as tears run down her face. Suddenly he says something, a quieter and calmer voice this time as he looks over his shoulder at the crate behind him.

“He says there’s a pipe sticking out of the metal box inside, near the top, in the front. It should have two wires coming out of it. Do you see it?”

I look, but I can’t see a thing. It’s too dark inside the crate, especially with the lift gate down.

“I need more light.”

“Screw it,” says Herman. He throws the lift gate all the way up. Light streams in through the back of the truck. I see the two wires and then the black metal pipe. Dangling from the end of the wires is a small green circuit board not much bigger than a playing card.

Alim wondered what was going on. He was halfway between the truck and the car and he still couldn’t see the two brothers anywhere. But Jamal was in the passenger seat looking down at something in his lap. Alim could see him even with the late-afternoon sun glinting off the car’s windshield.

With the straps from the two heavy bags over his shoulders Afundi waved his arms in the air and signaled for the car to pick him up. But Jamal wasn’t looking. His attention was drawn to something else.

At this rate, by the time Alim made it to the car, they would have to drive back to the truck to reset the timer in order to gain enough of a cushion to get away. As he thought about it, Afundi turned and glanced back over his shoulder at the truck, then turned back toward the waiting car. He was walking toward the sedan before the image in his brain registered. When it did, he stopped dead, turned around, and studied the back of the truck. The lift gate was up!

Alim dropped both bags on the sidewalk, unzipped one, and pulled out the Kalashnikov along with two of the loaded clips. He pushed a clip up into the receiver, slapped it home, then cycled the bolt to chamber the first round. He left the folded stock closed knowing the gun would be easier to conceal.

He tried to signal Jamal, who was still sitting in the passenger seat. It looked as if he was reading something. In his mind, Alim made a pledge to shoot the bastard and to take the heads of the two brothers with a sword at the first opportunity.

“I think I see it.” I follow the wires with my eyes until they disappear beyond the end of the pipe.

Nitikin tells his daughter something.

“He says that’s the breech of the gun barrel. There is a cork…żcómo se dice?” She says something in Spanish to her father. He corrects her.

“He says it’s a plug,” she says. “The plug screws into the end of the barrel where the wires go in. Do you see it?”

Herman comes over to the crate and moves around behind me to stay out of the light. He pulls on the tie-down rail holding Nitikin’s wrists to the wall, hoping to free him so the Russian can help me.

I feel with my hand along the two thin wires until I find where they disappear into what feels like tiny holes in the threaded plug. The plug is screwed into the end of the barrel. The metal is warm to the touch. I don’t even want to ask what is causing the heat. With my fingernail I can feel about a quarter inch of exposed thread along the edge where the plug sits above the closed end of the barrel of the gun.

“Yes. I can feel it,” I tell her.

She relays this to her father, who is looking anxiously over his shoulder as Herman jerks on the steel rail, trying to free him.

He says something else to her.

“If you can unscrew the plug, he says you will be able to pull the wires, they will be attached to something…I don’t understand the word he is using,” she says.

“It’s a detonator.” Herman is jerking hard on the metal rail tie-down as he speaks. Then he stops for a second to catch his breath. “He says it’s an electronic detonator attached to a cordite charge. Which means it’s probably enough to take your hand off up to the elbow. ’Course if it goes off in the gun, you won’t have to worry about that.”

“My father says that once the small explosive charge is removed the gun will no longer work. If we throw the small explosive out the door, no one will be hurt when it blows up.”

I trace the wires back up to the end of the gun and feel the plug with my fingers once more. I touch the sharp edges of a hex head, like the hexagonal head on a bolt, only larger. If I had an expandable wrench I might be able to get a purchase on the plug and unscrew it. I try turning it with my fingers, but it won’t budge.

The two small MH-6 Night Stalkers came in at two thousand feet with their blades running on whisper mode so that the sniper teams could reconnoiter the area around the truck.

Using forward-looking infrared (FLIR), the “little birds” searched for warm bodies out in the clear and then zeroed in on the windows of the truck’s cab.

They circled for two or three minutes, but the only heat signatures they picked up came from the box in the back where the thin fiberglass shell revealed four separate figures as well as a larger square inanimate object that seemed to be emitting heat. The object rested on the forward center section of the bed, up near the cab.

As the snipers hovered in place, the larger Blackhawk put the NEST team down in the middle of an intersection cleared by the police. They dropped their duffel bags with their gear and asked one of the officers to load them into patrol cars and to follow them to the site. They took only their tool belts with the basic implements needed to get at the bomb. As soon as the empty bird lifted off, the next chopper, carrying the hostage rescue team, used the same controlled intersection and deposited the agents.

Together the two teams jogged east down the street toward San Diego Bay and the box truck parked two blocks away.

The snipers circling in the air overhead asked the NEST team about the wisdom of firing through the fiberglass shell of the truck’s back half.

The answer came back in a flash, negative. Depending on the source of detonation and whether the people inside could trigger it, a loose round in the wrong place or a ricochet and they could set off the device.

Alim folded the stock back on the Kalashnikov, unzipped the front of his overalls, and slipped the assault rifle inside to conceal it. He held it with his right hand by the pistol grip with one finger on the lever between safety and full automatic.

Afundi moved to the other side of the street, into the shadows, and slowly walked back toward the truck. Halfway down the block he stopped and set up under some trees, behind a parked car.

Because of the deep shadows inside the truck he couldn’t see far enough into the open back end to make out what was happening.

Alim checked his watch and knew he was now at the point of no return. He either had to break and run for the car to get across the bridge at near-light speed, or take his chances on entering the truck to reset the timer. It was one or the other. The single certainty was that he couldn’t wait any longer.