Manhunt in the Wild West Read Free Page B

thanks to Lee’s itchy trigger finger.”
    As planned, they’d come out of the coma-inducing meds mid-transpo. Fax had suffered a moment of atavistic terror at finding himself zipped inside a body bag, but al-Jihad had come through as promised. The bag was taped shut rather than zippered, and one of the four guards had distracted the others long enough for the prisoners to emerge from their bags and get into position. Then they’d killed all four guards—including their accomplice, whom al-Jihad didn’t trust to stay bought—by breaking their necks, so as to keep their uniforms unbloodied. Then they’d switched places, four for four. Fax didn’t know what the death-mimicking meds had contained, but they’d left him with a nasty hangover and occasional double vision. That didn’t matter, though. He was still alive, his cover intact. His job was to keep it that way until he figured out who al-Jihad was working with, and what they planned to do next.
    With fanatical monsters like him it wasn’t a case of if; it was a case of when and where.
    “Hey!” Slow to catch the insult, Lee spun in the midst of dragging the younger man’s body into the van. “The guy recognized me. I had no choice!”
    “Maybe,” Fax retorted, propping the woman up against the cold cement wall, partially hidden behind a Dumpster. “Maybe not.”
    Knowing he was pushing it, he slid a look at the other two men, who as far as he was concerned were far more dangerous than Lee Mawadi.
    Muhammad Feyd’s dossier pegged the dark-eyed, dark-haired man at thirty-eight, a fanatic among fanatics who’d left al Qaeda in search of a more proactive group of anti-Western terrorists. He’d found exactly that in the man seated in the passenger’s seat of the prison transpo van…a man known simply as al-Jihad.
    The terrorist leader’s dossier was thin, devoid of any information predating the new millennium. He’d appeared on the world stage just before the September 11th terror attacks, had slipped out of the country immediately thereafter, and had played tag with Homeland Security for the next several years. Federal law enforcement suspected that he’d been the mastermind behind numerous bombings and other atrocities, but had never managed to concretely tie him to any of the attacks until he’d finally been tried and convicted for the Santa Bombings that had occurred in several major Colorado cities a few years earlier.
    Targeting six shopping malls all owned by the American Mall group, the bombings had been planned to coincide with the ceremonial arrival of the mall Santas to their decorated thrones. All six of the Santas had died…along with the parents and children who’d been lined up, eagerly awaiting the kickoff to the holiday season.
    It had been terrorism at its most horrible, and local and federal law enforcement had worked around the clock to indict and convict al-Jihad and his henchmen. They had succeeded, but the evidence had been more circumstantial than proof-positive. The terrorists’ high-powered defense attorney had lodged appeal after appeal, but the filings had wound up logjammed in the legal system, which Fax figured was no accident. The courts had no love of terrorists.
    The delay had given Jane time to formulate Fax’s cover and arrange to have him locked up in the same prison as the terrorist leader and his two lieutenants. She’d turned Fax’s honorable military discharge into a dishonorable ousting, cast him in the role of anarchist, invoked the USA PATRIOT Act and held him without trial, making him that much more attractive to an anti-American bastard like al-Jihad.
    And thus, an unholy alliance had been born, right on schedule.
    In person, the terrorist leader was tall, thin and angular, and graceful enough in his movements that he almost appeared effete…except for his eyes, which were those of a killer.
    From reading the available reports, Fax had known that al-Jihad would be a smart, driven, dangerous man.