Chapter 15

We were now ready to try for some useful information from the Imam, so Nancy removed the gag. We still left the opaque sack over his eyes so that he could not see that Nancy was using ice instead of a knife on him.

Nancy began to simulate cutting long gashes in the Imam. He was now crying, but he still refused to answer our questions. At this point, Nancy had an inspiration. She grabbed his scrotum and placed an ice cube edge against the skin. “Okay, Buster, if you don’t start talking pretty damned soon, I will start carving on your ball sack. I won’t cut off your balls yet, I’ll just cut the skin of your ball sack and pull it off, but I’ll leave your balls hanging in the breeze. I wonder how that will feel? Should I give it a try?”

“NO! NO! I beg you not to cut me any more. I’ll tell you what you want to know.” Thank God we had a recorder going at this time because he spouted off names and addresses so fast that I could never have written them down. He also gave us some information about the operation in Yemen that we would pass along to the CIA. I couldn’t believe that they had all of the data that this guy was handing out.

We also had a list of the next three targets planned by the Islamic Jihad. That was two schools and a synagog. By the time he got through talking, we had two full cassettes of data. This was a big deal if only 10% of it was true! I made two copies. One I sent to the mayor and the other I sent to the FBI. I hoped that the FBI would get off their “not invented here” attitude and act on the information. On second thought, I made 11 more copies and sent them to our senators and representatives in DC. Maybe some Congressional pressure would force the FBI into action. They can be such prima donnas sometimes that they occasionally need a swift kick in the ass!

Well, we had everything we were going to get from the Imam, so we handcuffed his hands behind him and took him out of the cage. We took him to city hall late that night and chained him to the front door. I hung a sign around his neck that proclaimed that he was a terrorist and the leader of the Islamic Jihad. Being seen naked in public like that was the ultimate in shame for such a person, and it certainly would attract public attention!

Nancy and I felt very good after that capture, and we went home to sleep the clock around. The last 48 hours had been very exhausting!

Somehow, word had gotten to some of the relatives of the murdered school children that the leader of the murdering group was chained to the city hall door. By 6:00 AM when the cops finally showed up, only a lifeless body was found. The imam had been beaten to death by a person or persons unknown. We had no further use for the bastard, so we didn’t care!

We got help from our friend who spoke Arabic, and she translated the names we had into the English spelling equivalents so that we could track them down. In some cases, we had street addresses, but we had no idea how reliable they would be. Copies of this list of names was distributed among our contacts, especially in the Muslim community, with a request for help in finding these people. Naturally, we offered a cash reward if any of them were found.

We decided to check out the addresses we had while we waited for our contacts to come through on the others. The first place we looked was a homeless shelter, but our man was no longer there. He had left two days before, the day the imam was found chained to city hall. We figured that he got smart and feared that his identity had been given out by the imam, so he scooted. A wise choice.

All of the other places we checked were also empty of the people we hunted, so all we could do was wait for our contacts to come through for us. That took four more days before we got the first sign of a break. Abdul Malaka was reputed to be hiding out with some friends in an abandoned warehouse on Scott Street.

We resolved to check out the warehouse as soon as it got dark enough. We left in our converted golf cart around 9:00 PM when it would be easy to avoid traffic by taking back streets. Nancy was a very careful driver and took 45 minutes to reach the warehouse. We saw a light in an upper window, so we knew that we would find somebody here.

Nancy parked in what looked like a safe place, and we entered the warehouse through a door with a broken lock. That must have been the common entrance, and it was not pushed completely closed. Oh, well, that made it easy for us and the other varmints to get in. There were no lights on in the building’s ground floor so we donned our night-vision glasses before going inside.

We tried to be as silent as possible as we crept to the third floor. The stairs were made of open-work steel, so we were not worried about a tread squeaking as we made our way up them. However, there was some trash scattered on the steps, so we were careful not to kick any of it and announce our approach. There was enough light leaking in from the moon and street lights so that our special glasses were adequate, so we were carrying our batons in our left hands and our Griffins in our right hands.

We had just reached the top step of our climb when Murphy’s law took a hand. A monster Norway rat ran right in front of me and startled me, causing me to stumble. Damned if I didn’t fall into a pile of empty food cans. I don’t know if they were simply discarded at a convenient place or if they were there to act as an alarm, but there was no silencing the rattle they made as I fell into them.

There were five men gathered around a fire they had built on the concrete floor, and they reacted immediately to the noise I made. All five jumped up, and two of them began to shoot at us with what sounded like 9mm automatics firing parabellum rounds.

Well, Nancy was not one to be shy, so she shot back long before I could get myself into action. She caught one of the shooters in the gut and put him out of action forthwith; however, one of the unarmed men picked up the gun and started shooting. Just as he ran out of ammunition from some very wild shooting, I managed to put a bullet into his chest. That was the last we heard from him. The original shooter may have had more ammunition on him, but it was not obvious. As a result, there was only one shooter left.

That was when Nancy curbed her enthusiasm and took careful aim at the gun, instead of the gunman. There was almost too much light from the fire because she was still wearing her special glasses, but she managed to hit the hand holding the automatic when she fired on full automatic and held the trigger down until one of her bullets hit the shooter and tore his wrist to pieces. His pistol went flying with his hand still gripping it, and blood spurted from the site of the rather gruesome amputation.

The man screamed in pain and collapsed. Nancy and I ran to him, and I stood guard while she used one of her nylon cable ties as a tourniquet. The blood stopped gushing, but it was obvious that the man needed medical attention. However, we were not about to be deflected from our purpose by that. We would call 911 for him after he answered a few questions.

Fortunately, the man did speak broken English, so we were able to question him. He was not very talkative at first, but I threatened to shoot him in the balls with one of those special bullets, and that convinced him to be more cooperative. We found out that he was Muhammad Bezori, and that was one of the names on our list of school bombers from the Islamic Jihad.

We found out that the other man with the gun had also been a member of the Islamic Jihad, their bomb expert, but the third man had just been a fool who tried to shoot at us because we were shooting at his friends. The two men who had vanished were also innocent bystanders and had nothing to do with the Islamic Jihad. We did find out where there was another member hiding out, but that was about it.

We picked up the two pistols and dropped the severed hand into the fire before we called 911. We left before the cops got there, but they would have no trouble identifying us because we had used the Griffin .44, and we were the only ones in Worcester doing that right now. The cops knew that we would stop by the station to give our side of the story sometime tomorrow afternoon, so they would not worry about us not waiting for them to show up.