Chapter 16

This opportunity was too good to miss, so we jumped out of our car and ran to intercept the man before he actually reached the synagog. Nancy was the one who ran to brace him while I covered her from the man’s back. “Stop right there. You are under arrest for trying to plant a bomb.” That was not a very subtle approach, but the man reacted as we expected. He sort of threw the package at Nancy and tried to turn to run.

He didn’t get even a step as I jammed my baton into his solar plexus. At that point, he lost all interest in anything but trying to regain his breath. I held the man while Nancy slipped handcuffs onto his wrists. The man still had not regained his breath completely, so he could not resist as I forced him to stumble toward our car. Meanwhile, Nancy called for the bomb squad.

She waited at what was probably not a safe distance for the bomb squad to show up while I stayed with the suspected bomber. It was half an hour before the full bomb squad showed up, but there were regular policemen around to cordon off the area until they did arrive. There were cops that we knew in those who did show up, so we were able to leave without a big hassle. As usual, Nancy promised to drop by headquarters the next day to take care of the official paperwork.

I was sitting with our captive in the back seat of our car when Nancy came to the car to drive us to that warehouse where we had questioned our last prisoner. I know, we were violating all kinds of civil rights by our actions, but this was too serious and time-sensitive to worry about that. We were only private citizens and not police officials, so the niceties of the law were ignored.

The ice cube trick had worked so well with the imam that we decided to start out with that technique on this guy. I helped Nancy arrange the man in a standing position against the bars of his cage and left to get some ice cubes. While I was gone, Nancy cut away his clothes and laughed at the size of his cock. That was the first step in our psychological attack. Nancy had him blindfolded and awaiting his “torture” when I returned with a cooler full of ice cubes.

We were going to get our questions answered one way or another, but we would start with the ice cubes. If that didn’t work, I was going to apply a candle flame to his cock and balls. No man could withstand much of that, so I knew that we had a winning combination.

To start off, Nancy grabbed the man’s scrotum and squeezed it enough to cause some pain, but nothing like what he would feel if he did not answer our initial questions. “Look at this pitiful excuse for balls,” she said and giggled. “They look like what you would find on a medium size rat and not on a full grown man. Do you think that he would even notice if I cut them off? I know that no woman would. They are not worth bothering with right now. Let’s see how he reacts to having gashes cut into his skin.”

Naturally, the man immediately started out begging for us to let him go, but we ignored him. He was blindfolded, so he could not see when Nancy picked up an ice cube and dragged it along his raised arm. “How does that feel? You sure do bleed easily.” That last was a reference to the melted ice water than ran down his arm and must have felt like blood. “Let’s see what happens when I cut your other arm.”

By this time, the man was already screaming for mercy, but Nancy ordered him to shut up. He finally did slow down to a kind of blubbering, and I asked the first question. He refused to answer, so Nancy went back to her pseudo cutting. It was not long before we found out all we wanted to know about this man, but he got very tight lipped when I asked about his associates and the man called “Fist of God.” In fact, he actually quailed at the mention of that name. Okay, we were not going to get any more information from him about the cell or the top leader, so it was time to get out the candle.

I held the lit candle below his crotch and let him feel the heat from the flame, but it was far enough away so that he was not yet burned, just scared almost out of his mind. He still refused to answer questions, so I raised the candle to a bit closer to his scrotum. Being a good Muslim, he had shaved off all of his pubic hair and the rest in that region so there was none to burn as I brought the flame closer to his scrotum.

At this point, he began to cry, but he still would not answer important questions. Okay, it was now time to put up or shut up. Normally, I would not have done this, but there were too many lives at stake. I let the tip of the flame, actually the hottest part, just brush the skin of his scrotum. His scream of pain was certainly authentic; it really was more of a screech. I asked him, “How much more of that do you think that you can take before you tell us everything we want to know?”

Of course, the question was rhetorical, and I did not get an answer. He still would not talk, so I held the candle close enough to scorch his skin for a few seconds. That loosened his tongue. He suddenly started to babble the names and contact addresses for the rest of his cell. He also gave us information on how to contact Fist of God, but he did not know an address where the man could be found. However, he did give us the name and address of a man who should know that.

We seemed to have wrung him dry of useful information, and I had it all on audio tapes. It was now getting to be well past supper time and we were hungry. Probably, our prisoner was hungry, too, but we ignored him. Nancy and I went out of earshot, and I called the mayor to hear about the bomb and to tell him that we had some useful information, but not all that we needed.

It turned out that the bomb was a combination of explosive and thermite, guaranteed to make one hell of a mess, or maybe that should be Hell. The explosive portion of the bomb was surrounded by nails to act as shrapnel. There was no telling how many people would have been killed if it had gone off.

I asked what we should do with our prisoner, and the answer was, “What prisoner? We have no record of a prisoner being taken when the bomb was discovered.” Okay, that was enough for us. This guy was going to undergo the same fate as the imam. We fastened him to the doors of City Hall and put a large sign around his neck explaining who he was and why he was there. He did not survive past breakfast time when he was “officially” discovered. What was left of the man was photographed and shown on TV and in the newspaper. We felt that he had received exactly what he had deserved.

The police were credited with discovering the bomb, and our names never appeared in any reports. That made us happy, but we figured that the perpetrators had to know who had captured the dead man. We were prepared to accept whatever our fate might be, but we were concerned that revenge might be taken on our family, so we arranged for them to take an extended vacation in Orlando, FL. The grandparents were happy for the vacation in Florida, but the kids were too young to appreciate the theme parks. Nevertheless, they went along for the ride.

We had the list of names translated into English and began our search for Fist of God. While we were about it, we let our contacts know that we would pay $1,000 to anyone who could lead us to him. Our side of the search was to go down the list and question each one. One of them might have a way for us to find our main quarry.

The first name on the list was startling because it was Jerry Smith. How the hell did someone with a name like that wind up with a bunch of fanatic Yemeni tribesmen? We assumed that he was one of those people who had been seduced to the “dark side” by religious fanaticism or by a craving for adventure. Either way, we wanted to find him.

A search of police records showed that Smith had converted to the Muslim faith while in prison for armed robbery. He had been paroled and had disappeared about six weeks after his transfer back into normal society. Nobody knew where he had gone, but few people cared, so he just fell off the screen. We guessed that he had gone to Yemen by some clandestine route to be trained as a terrorist. He was certainly familiar enough with American life to be an excellent undercover operator.