THAT NIGHT AT around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.
Unfortunately, we weren’t at the state park for a midnight weenie roast. There were at least a dozen New York state trooper vehicles already in the large parking lot, along with the same number of unmarked FBI Crown Victorias. Beyond a trooper command bus were two matte-black BearCat troop trucks, and at the end of the lot, in a muddy clearing, sat a bulky olive-drab Black Hawk helicopter with military markings.
We were finally on the hunt now. At around five that afternoon, PayPal had revealed the name of the person who had sent funds to both the mayor’s shooter and the dead EMP guys, and it was a doozy.
The name on the PayPal transfer was Jamil al Gharsi. Al Gharsi was a Yemeni-born Muslim cleric who was already on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, suspected of running a militant and potentially violent Islamic group on a grubby cattle farm five miles due east of Fahnestock State Park.
Al Gharsi’s two dozen–strong group had a website that billed them as a kind of Muslim Cub Scouts, though they were anything but. The FBI had been following them closely since their inception six months ago, and they had been observed training with weapons.
The group also had ties to al Qaeda in Yemen, which boggled my mind. Why hadn’t they been shut down already? No one knew, or at least no one would say. If al Gharsi’s group turned out to be responsible for the bombings and for the assassination in New York, I was truly going to kick somebody’s ass. If Homeland Security had let yet another Islamic terrorist attack occur, I was going to be the first to propose its disbanding.
Emily and I passed a bunch of troopers wearing their Smokey the Bear hats and climbed onto the crowded bus, where the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had already started its briefing.
A flat screen behind the driver’s seat showed a series of photographs from reconnaissance that had already been done.
The pictures featured a cluster of buildings in the center of a large hilly field near the bottom of a ridge. There was an old farmhouse—a low concrete building that almost looked like a school—and a large dilapidated barn that was listing so far to the left it looked as if some magic spell had frozen it in the midst of collapse.
“This is al Gharsi,” the HRT leader, Terry Musa, said as he handed out a printout showing a mean-looking bald guy with a beard that would make any of the Boston Red Sox’s starting lineup green with envy.
“He is six foot three,” Musa said as he tightened a strap on his helmet. “He is also a mixed martial artist and one tough bastard, apparently. We don’t know what kind of weapons or explosives we’re going to encounter. I wouldn’t even recommend going in on the bird with this EMP shit, but there’s no other way. So bottom line, be very, very fucking careful, okay, folks? Paying these assholes back won’t be any fun if you’re dead.”
CHAPTER 45
AT THE END of the briefing, Emily and I, along with two trooper teams, were assigned to watch a back road up on the ridge behind the farm.
Fifteen minutes later, with our headlights off, we coasted to a stop on a tree-lined gravel road beside a barred cattle gate. Beyond the gate was another gravel road that curved down to the left, out of sight through some trees. Down below the trees were the fields and farm.
When the other two teams radioed that they were in position a hundred feet back down the road behind us, I turned off the car and rolled down the window.
I looked down at the farm’s rugged, unkempt fields. It was some desolate-looking country, all right. An almost constant wind whistled in the creaking roadside pines and white birches around us, like something out of The Blair Witch Project. Like most born-and-bred New York cops, the country at night always scared the hell out of me.
“Did you know they say Rip Van Winkle fell asleep around these parts?” I said after a minute to fill the creepy silence.
“I thought that was the Catskills,” Emily said.
“You’re right. Maybe I’m thinking of the Headless Horseman,” I said as I heard a low thumping.
I looked up as the FBI’s Black Hawk swung over the ridge above the car.
“Here we go,” I said, turning up the radio.
The world went green as I peered through the night-vision telescope we’d been supplied with. As I got the farmhouse below in focus, I could see the chopper hovering over its roof and the FBI commandos already fast-roping into the front yard. Blasts of green-tinged light blazed at the house’s front windows as the FBI guys tossed flashbangs.
That’s when I heard a sound up on the wooded hill beside the car. I heard it again. Something crackling, something moving through the trees and underbrush to our left.
“A deer?” Emily whispered beside me as I swung the night-vision scope.