Storm was ready to give him one more shot, but it wasn’t necessary. The man was out. Storm took the guard’s AK-47 and draped its strap over his own torso. Then he grabbed the guard under the arms and dragged him quickly back into the shack. There was no rope or tape inside, so he yanked the cord out of the back of the television, using it to bind the guard’s wrists behind his back.
The guard was wearing a turban, which Storm hastily unwrapped, exposing a matted mess of curly dark hair. Storm tore the garment into three strips, using one part to gag the man, another to secure his legs, and a third to tie the leg restraint to the hands, trussing him up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
It was not, to be sure, the most secure binding Storm had ever devised. But it would take the guard some time to get out when he came to. Storm planned to be long gone before that happened.
Storm’s final act before exiting was to take the key ring off a hook by the door. He approached the gate, which was as tall as the wall on either side of it and made of wrought iron. It was secured by a thick bolt that went deep into the ground.
He was impressed. A tank could have gotten through. But any other vehicle wouldn’t have been able to get enough speed on the narrow street to ram it open, nor would it be able to gain the proper angle to hit it head-on.
That said, the gate was no match for the thin piece of metal now in Storm’s hand. He slid the key into a well-oiled lock, which slid easily. Storm lifted the bolt, squeezed through a narrow opening in the gate, then left it ajar—enough that it wouldn’t impede his exit, if that exit had to be speedy; but, hopefully, not enough that anyone inside would notice.
He was in. As far as he knew, he was the first American ever to penetrate a Medina Society cell. And what worried him more than anything was that, at least so far, it wasn’t that difficult.
Which, in itself, seemed all wrong.
THIS BEING HIS FIRST CHANCE to study the inside of the compound in real life—not on Google Earth—Storm hastily slid to his left and found shelter behind an accumulation of scrap metal.
From that area of relative safety, he assessed his surroundings. There was a large, open area between the wall and what appeared to be the main house. Except to call it “open” was a misstatement. It was a cluttered mess, with heaps of metal everywhere, some several stories high. In the dim light under the quarter moon, it was difficult to say what all of them were. More than anything, Storm could discern the darkened outlines of shapes jutting out from the piles: rectangles at strange angles, circles looming in the sky, triangles heaped atop parallelograms. Storm wondered if the Medina Society had used some of these metal pieces to make the laser that shot down the planes in the Emirates.
Some of the piles had large cranes or dump trucks next to them. His nose told him there was a smelter somewhere nearby. He could smell its faint but sharp odor, its acrid scent still present even though it was not currently in operation.
Storm found himself smiling at the clever, perhaps intentional double entendre of the Ahmed Trades Metal rallying cry. This cell—or training camp, or whatever significance it held within the Medina Society network—was a scrapyard where metal was traded all day long.
Except now, in the dark of night, those mountains of metal were just one aspect of the terrain he could use to his tactical advantage. If the several hundred yards of space between the gate and the main house had been truly open, covering it would have been a suicide mission. Anyone inside who happened to be looking out could have picked him off at leisure.
Instead, Storm was able to slink from one mound to the next in relative safety. He had closed the gap between himself and the house significantly when he reached the smelter, an older brick building topped by a tall chimney.
He was leaving it when he tripped on something in the darkness. In his peripheral vision, he saw that it was a human leg. He whirled and drew Dirty Harry, ready to fire in case what he had tripped on was a sleeping insurgent.
But no. This particular human’s mortality had already been taken. Storm saw the top of the man’s head had a rather large chunk missing.
Then he saw the eyes, the mouth, the pointy chin. He recognized Professor Stanford Raynes. Or, rather, what was left of him after his apparent run-in with Ahmed and his men.
Storm took no great pleasure in Raynes’s death. But it did solve one problem: the secret of the promethium’s location had more than likely died with him. Now Storm was the only holder of that secret, and he did not plan to give it up.
Leaving the body, Storm had worked his way to within about fifty yards of the main house when he saw the cargo truck. It was sitting just off the driveway, under a towering eucalyptus tree, by itself.
Storm sprinted to it, taking the risk of being fully exposed for perhaps three seconds, relying on his black clothing to conceal him. He reached the rear bumper and moved his hand toward the catch that would allow him to lift the trailer door. If he could remove the box with the promethium and hide it somewhere, it might not solve the whole problem, but it would be at least one less load of the stuff that could be used to make a weapon.
But the door was padlocked. And unlike the cheap, drugstore lock Raynes had used on the cave, this appeared to be of a more substantial variety. The dial went from one to a hundred, not one to forty. Storm brought his ear to it, gave it several turns in both directions, listening intently the whole time. He did not hear anything like a pin falling into place. The better locks were cushioned that way.
Any of the other strategies he might have used to thwart the lock involved making noise. And noise, at this point in his mission, was the enemy. For all Storm knew, one of the buildings he had seen was a barracks, filled with terrorists-in-waiting, any one of whom would love to have an American agent as a trophy, or any one of whom would be willing to martyr himself in the effort, knowing all the while that seventy-two virgins awaited him in heaven.
Storm’s primary defense—explaining to the young men that virgins were vastly overrated as sexual partners—seemed inadequate.
So he decided to keep quiet. He slunk around to the wheel well where he had stuck his phone and retrieved it. Then he went to the driver’s side of the truck and pulled on the door handle. It was locked, too. He would have to deal with it and its payload later. Worst case, he’d break the window, climb in, and hot-wire the thing. Best case, he’d find a way to blow it up.
With the truck out of his mind, he focused on the main house. It was a sprawling, one-story adobe residence that looked like it had once been a farmhouse.
Storm began searching for access points, but saw nothing that thrilled him. Like many houses in that latitude, the windows were small and high. Adding to the difficulty factor, their glass panes appeared to be constructed from crosshatched metal bars that had been anchored into the structure itself.
So the windows were not an option. The roof, which was made of sturdy, terra-cotta tiles, was likewise impenetrable. There was a chimney, but it was capped and, in any event, Storm was not feeling like Santa Claus.
That left the front porch, which faced the driveway. It was something of a novel concept for Storm, actually trying to enter a house through the front door. But at the moment it looked like his best—and only—choice.
There were, broadly speaking, two ways to approach the house: slow or fast. Slow had its benefits, in that it would give him more time to study his target as he slunk slowly along the ground. It would also be far less detectable by anyone inside the house who happened to be looking outside.
But fast had the advantage of being over with quickly. It also would make him a harder target to hit. And since his previous dash did not seem to have been noticed, Storm gambled that past equaled precedent.
It was roughly a hundred feet from the front of the truck to the front of the house. Storm felt the wind against his ears as he sprinted the distance, pulling up to the side of the steps, where he couldn’t
be seen from within the house.
There was no response to his mad dash. The house—the whole property, for that matter—remained dark and still. It was getting to be almost eerie, how unguarded everything inside seemed to be and how little opposition he had met.
Storm paused, listened. Nothing. Definitely nothing.
He turned and crept up the steps. The front porch was not especially tidy, littered with a random assortment of stuff that could not unfairly be categorized as junk. There were a few AHMED TRADES METAL signs. There were metal chairs that may or may not have been heading for the smelter. Standing next to the door was a tall sculpture that had been roughly welded together out of scrap metal. To Storm, it looked like the Tin Man, though he wasn’t sure if The Wizard of Oz was central in Egypt’s cultural lexicon.
“There’s no place like home,” Storm whispered to himself as he walked across the porch.
He had Dirty Harry out now, held low at his side. He was ready to raise and fire it at the slightest provocation.
There was just nothing to shoot. He reached for the screen door, then opened it. His hand went to the handle of the main door. It turned easily. Was this really happening? Was he really going to be able to just walk right into the front door of a Medina Society hangout?
The door was wooden and just slightly swollen against its doorframe. Storm had to put a little extra weight behind it, but it budged easily enough.
And then, without warning, it was like the world caught fire.
BEING THAT LIGHT TRAVELS FASTER than sound, Storm first became aware that illumination was suddenly pouring out of every orifice of the house, including some floodlights attached to the roof that he hadn’t seen before.
Nanoseconds later, the noise hit: a wailing, shrieking, ear-splitting alarm.
Storm reacted instinctively. He grabbed the Tin Man and tossed him across the door’s threshold. Then he rocketed himself through the maze of junk to his right and over the side of the porch railing. He flattened himself against some half-broken latticework that kept animals from crawling under the porch, keeping Dirty Harry tight against his chest.
As the siren continued pulsing at a volume that could have shaken a pharaoh from a four-thousand-year slumber, Storm stayed hidden in the shadow of the porch. He waited for the cavalry to emerge—dozens of future jihadists, swarming to protect their liege’s castle.
No one came. After a minute or so, the alarm stopped. The lights stayed on. Storm heard cursing and the sound of someone tossing the Tin Man aside. Storm dared to turn and peek through the bottom slat of the porch railing.
What he saw, backlit against the bright glow of the house, was one of the men he had shot earlier in the day. It was Ahmed, the leader of what Storm had thought was just a motley gang of desert bandits. When Storm had heard Raynes say the name Ahmed, it hadn’t triggered any bells. Ahmed was a common name in this part of the world. Had Storm known who the man really was, he would have taken care of all of this in the desert.
Yet another example of hindsight being fifty-fifty.
Ahmed took one step out on the porch, but no more. His head was bare, without its usual turban. His long, salt-and-pepper hair was greasy and unkempt. He was dressed in an ankle-length nightgown. He wore nothing on his feet. His right arm was tucked in a sling. His left arm carried a sawed-off shotgun.
He was letting the shotgun lead the way. He swung the muzzle from left to right, back to the middle, again to the right, and then to the left. Storm stayed absolutely still, knowing he was effectively invisible in the shadow of the porch, with all that junk to serve as cover.
Ahmed walked to the edge of the porch, swiveled the gun some more. He was mostly looking in the direction of the guard shack, where there was no activity.
“Wake up, you lazy dog,” he yelled in Arabic, but of course got no response.
“You’re fired,” he added, to no greater impact.
Storm had a perfect shot at that moment. He could have dropped Ahmed easily. But if he killed Ahmed, he would have no more intelligence about the Medina Society’s structure or organization, and certainly no idea of how to stop its current plot.
As a result, Storm maintained his hiding spot. Ahmed muttered a few choice Arabic words that ventured some unkind descriptions of the guard’s mother. Then Ahmed turned and walked back in the house.
It was finally dawning on Storm that there was no one else here. There was no cavalry, no bloodthirsty true believers coming to the leader’s aid. It was just the guard—who wasn’t going to be an issue—and Ahmed.
Well, them and the Tin Man. But Storm didn’t think the Tin Man would put up much of a fight. No heart.
Mostly, Storm couldn’t believe his luck: a Medina Society leader, ripe for the taking.
All he needed was some patience.
He leaned back down against the latticework and watched as, one by one, the lights in the house went out. Then the floodlights followed suit. He removed the AK-47 from his back. He would not need to lay down a heavy blanket of fire against just one man.
Storm’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness again and he began formulating his plan. Eventually, the leader—convinced that the Tin Man had been the cause of the false alarm—would fall back asleep. Storm just needed to be able to get into the house without tripping off all that sound and fury.
What kind of system was it? Knowing was the key to defeating it. Back in his days as a private eye—when he was barely scraping out enough business to cover the rent on his tiny strip-mall office—one of the services he offered his clients was consulting on alarm systems. Another one was defeating alarm systems so he could snoop in his target subjects’ homes, not that he advertised that particular offering in his literature.
He was not the world’s foremost expert on the subject. But he knew enough to get by. In his mind, he replayed the scene of himself opening the door. It had happened so fast the first time. But by concentrating on it, he began to slow it down. Each replaying got just a little longer. Details that he had missed the first time began to pop out, almost like a form of self-hypnosis.
Once he got the picture moving slowly enough, Storm caught what he was looking for: there were two pressure sensors in the doorframe, one just above eye level, the other down around his shins. He knew well enough how they worked. They were nothing more than small semicircles of plastic attached to springs. As long as they remained depressed, the alarm system believed the door was still closed. When the springs extended, the system knew the door had opened.
He just needed to keep them down. Back in his private eye days, he used chewing gum, tape, Silly Putty—whatever he had available. He just didn’t happen to have any of those things on him at the moment.
Then he remembered the eucalyptus tree that the cargo truck was parked under. Still moving cautiously, Storm crept around the other side of the porch. Then he made the sprint to the tree, running until he was on the opposite side of the trunk from the house.
He searched for old cuts and scratches in the tree, found several, and began pulling off the gum that had hardened there. He stuffed it in his mouth, where he began working it so it wasn’t quite so stiff. It tasted terrible—Wrigley’s had nothing to fear from untreated eucalyptus gum—but the consistency was right. He waited until he had a decent-sized mouthful of the goo, then moved back toward the house.
All was again quiet. The only thing that had changed about the house from the first time was that the Tin Man was now lying forlornly on his side. Storm crept up the steps, across the porch. He opened the screen door, then turned the handle on the main door.
But this time, he didn’t shove. He slowly nudged it partway open, then held it there with one hand. He bit off a hunk of eucalyptus gum and with his other hand, wedged a lump of it over the top sensor. It held nicely.
He repeated the maneuver with the lower sensor. Gingerly, he opened the door just a l
ittle further, so that now the entire doorjamb was exposed. He used the remaining gum in his mouth to completely cover both sensors, packing them tightly so there would be no chance their springs would extend as the gum dried.
He opened the door the entire way. The alarm did not go off. Storm exhaled. He took one step into the house and closed the door behind him.
His eyes were already well accustomed to the dark, but they had not yet focused on the dim recesses of the foyer when he heard one of the more unmistakable noises in the modern world. It resonated straight from its source to some deep, reptilian part of Storm’s brain. It was an authoritative chuck followed by an even more convincing chick.
It was the sound of a shotgun slide being racked from about fifteen feet away.
THE SAWED-OFF SHOTGUN is the most effective short-range antipersonnel weapon ever devised by man. In addition to the massive force of fire, its multitude of projectiles spread upon exiting the muzzle, meaning it only needs to be aimed in a very general sense. There is no such thing as surviving a shotgun blast from point-blank range without significant—and, most likely, terminal—injuries.
The only thing that saved Derrick Storm’s life was that pumping a shotgun requires two fully functioning arms. And Ahmed, with only one, had to brace the shotgun stock against the floor in order to rack the slide before bringing the muzzle back up.
That small delay, no more than two seconds in duration, was all Storm needed. As Ahmed brought the gun back up and fired, Storm was diving to his right. The deadly blast of pellets sailed over his head and to his left, hitting only the air where Storm had once been standing and then the door behind him.
Storm rolled and came up with Dirty Harry drawn, as he had trained himself to do. From the light of the quarter moon that leaked in the small windows, he could make out Ahmed pumping the shotgun, ejecting one cartridge and loading the next one. He again was bracing it against the floor as he performed this maneuver. Storm didn’t give him the chance to fire it again. He aimed for the man’s left shoulder and squeezed the trigger.