Chapter 14

Our life was pretty quiet for a couple of weeks. All we had to do was to escort some older couples into Boston or NYC for an evening of dinner or shows. No muggers or other bad guys showed up, and we all had a very pleasant time. However, that was to change very soon.

One morning, we woke up to a news broadcast that an explosion had ripped through a neighborhood school. We were usually late risers on the day following an escort gig, so it was almost 10:00 AM when we flipped on the TV. The Today program was just closing down for the day when the local station broke in with the news that a major explosion had ripped through a Worcester elementary school. A total of 237 people were killed or critically injured as a result of the blast. Most of the dead and injured were school children, but there were adult teachers and service personnel who were also involved.

Thank God that our kids were not yet old enough to attend school, or they would probably have been included in that count. In awestruck horror, Nancy and I watched the news report along with most of the rest of the population of Worcester. About 10 minutes after we had turned on the TV, an announcement was made that this was the first strike by the Islamic Jihad, and more attacks would be made as long as the Massachusetts National Guard (MNG) was deployed in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Nobody had ever heard of an organization calling itself the Islamic Jihad, so we didn’t know just how seriously to take the claim of responsibility. Nevertheless, it was certain that there was a group of murdering extremists at large!

Homeland Security was immediately dispatched to do what they could to find the perpetrators of this atrocity, but Nancy and I decided to do what we could to help the investigation move along. There was a chance that people would talk to us because we had no official connection to the establishment. Some people had information that they were willing to share, but they were afraid to attract the attention of the police, etc.

The first thing that we did was to let it be known that we would pay for valid information that helped us further the investigation. That was done the morning of the explosion, and we had our first reaction the following afternoon. It was one of those friend of a friend of a friend kind of contacts, but I was to go alone to meet an individual in a certain back alley in the depths of the Worcester industrial district.

This was too good a lead to miss, so I agreed to go, but Nancy came along to back me up. She stayed out of sight, but she was close enough to help me if the contact turned out not to be as advertised. The contact was a man in a scraggly beard and a generally unkempt appearance. He looked to be about 25 years old and a confirmed drug user. He wanted $500 for his information, but I was not about to give out that kind of money to an informant I had just met, so we settled for $50 now and the rest if the lead turned out to be useful. I could tell by the man’s look that this was really what he expected, so he told me what he knew and I gave him the $50.

The informant scurried away, and I met Nancy at our car. Just to be on the safe side, we had left a few tell-tales to warn us if our car had been visited while we were away, but none of them were disturbed. We figured that we were safe enough, so we drove back home. On the way, we discussed the information that I had received.

The information condensed to the fact that there were a bunch of radical Muslims who had just arrived in town, and they were trying to recruit men to join them in a Holy War against the US. They claimed to be from Yemen, and their first plan was to put pressure on the State of Massachusetts to pull its NG out of the Middle East. They seemed to have no idea how the US government and the Army really worked; they seemed to think that we had a tribal society run much like that of Yemen. In other words, if the people of Massachusetts did not like what the federal government was doing, they could just walk away.

Anyway, their plan was to kill as many innocents as possible so that the citizens of Massachusetts would rebel against having troops in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The attack on the elementary school was just the first stage of their campaign. Their next target was a Catholic Church when it was packed with people on Sunday morning. The informant did not know which church was to be attacked.

Our informant claimed to be a Muslim who had been approached, but had refused to join in such a crazy plan. He could not go to Homeland Security because he was an illegal alien and was afraid of being deported. Therefore, he came to us when he heard about the reward that we were handing out for information. We were not certain whether or not to believe him, but the consequences were too dire to contemplate if we did not take him seriously.

I called the Police Commissioner, the man who had deputized Nancy and me a while back, and gave him the information that I had. He promised to get on the job right away, but we decided not to wait for him. Buried in the information that I had picked up was an address that we could follow up on. We could look without a warrant, so we could act immediately, but the police had to go through the official routine.

That afternoon, Nancy and I drove past the address, and it turned out to be a building rented by a local imam who was known to be against the use of American troops in Muslim countries. That, alone, was not enough to convict him, but it sure was enough to arouse our suspicions. Therefore, we were going to visit the building after dark.

That night, we donned our black outfits and gathered our equipment. Recently, we had acquired, in secret, a large electric golf cart that we had painted matte black and rigged it with some unusual accessories. It was equipped to be street-legal with headlights, etc.; however, a flip of a toggle switch would convert it into a stealth machine that used FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red Radar) for safe driving at night without lights. We were certain that we could approach the imam’s building without anybody noticing us if we were careful. We had gotten it for use against kidnappers, but this was another perfect place to use its stealth capabilities.

We used back streets with few or no street lights to approach the building. We parked in an alley about 100 yards away and made use of the shadows to get close to the building. All buildings in Worcester had to have access to the inside via a roof hatch of a minimum size that was large enough to pass a fully equipped firefighter. The hatch had to be clearly marked and not sealed enough to keep out a firefighter doing his job.

A special key was required to open the lock on the hatch, and, theoretically, no crooks had access to the key. That was problematical, but I had yet to find a lock that I could not pick by some means or other, and this was no exception. We went up the external fire escape to the roof, opened the hatch, and descended the stairs to the top floor of the three-story building. Nancy closed the hatch so that it was not obvious that we had used it, but we could escape by that route on a moment’s notice.

As soon as we got inside the building, we heard voices talking in a foreign language that we could not understand. We couldn’t identify the language, but that was an unimportant detail. The voices were coming from a room on the second floor, and we crept down the stairs to see what we could find.

Four men were in the room and working at a table on a device that was obviously a bomb with a time-fuse. The men were too intent on what they were doing to notice us, so we were not discovered. It was readily apparent to us that this was the bomb aimed at the Catholic church or one destined to be used against a similar target.

We needed to talk, so I signaled Nancy to return with me to the third floor where we could discuss the situation without being heard. We talked only in whispers and discussed in detail our options. We finally decided to hang around until the building was empty before doing a detailed search. We wanted to find some sort of paperwork that would give us a lead on the organizers of the Islamic Jihad. Also, we planned to use the bomb we saw being built to destroy this building.