Chapter 15

A week after the destruction of the original CIA building, Karen moved back to the house with Robert. While she may have been the one insisting on Mike staying away, she had been just as miserable with the separation. She had missed his calm confidence about being able to survive while the world was going crazy around her. She had missed his strong arms wrapped protectively around her while she slept.

She spent the afternoon looking around the house. It was hard to believe that two men could leave a house so clean.

After thinking about it, she said, “Duh, they’re both Marines.”

The kitchen was a mess by the time she finished preparing one of her special dinners, but the meal was worth it. The table was set with the best china, crystal glasses, and even flowers. Everything was perfect except that it was almost time for Mike to get home and she was still wearing her regular clothes. She fled for the bedroom to change clothes.

Mike entered the house and spotted Robert. He wanted to run over and pick him up, but thought it would be best to wait until he had Karen’s permission. Karen stepped out of the bedroom wearing a slinky blue dress. Mike’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw the dress.

He whistled and then said, “I like that dress.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Karen said modeling her new dress.

She had run over to a strip mall boutique to buy it before returning home. It had taken every ounce of her courage to do it.

Robert was feeling cranky that afternoon and chose that moment to cry. Mike looked over at Karen and asked, “Is it okay if I pick him up?”

A brief flash of concern flickered over Karen’s face, but it disappeared as fast as it came.

She smiled and said, “Go ahead.”

Mike strode over to Robert and picked him up with ease. Lifting the little boy over his head, he asked, “Did you miss me, little fellow?”

Robert answered, “Dada.”

Smiling at the new word, Karen said, “He’s been cranky all day. I’d say he missed you a lot.”

Mike hugged Robert and said, “I really missed you.”

Watching from the bedroom door, Karen felt a little guilty about having kept them apart. She had known that her fears were unjustified, but that didn’t make them any less real. A small smile crept across her face watching father and son together.

Mike looked over Robert’s head and said, “You’re turn is next.”

“I would hope so,” Karen said with a laugh.

After a few minutes, Robert started to struggle to get down. Mike set him on the floor and watched as the baby tried to stand. Giving him a hand, the baby stood and tried to take his first step. Karen watched as Mike helped Robert take a few steps.

She started to laugh when Mike said, “If I die in a combat zone; Box me up and ship me home; Put me in a set of dress blues; Comb my hair and shine my shoes; Pin my medals upon my chest; Tell my mama I done my best; Ma, mama don’t you cry; In the Marine Corps you either do or die.”

“What are you doing?” Karen asked listening to the Mike talk in cadence.

“He’s a Marine. That’s how Marines learn to walk,” Mike answered. Looking down at Robert, he said, “Isn’t that right?”

Little Robert made a noise that sounded a lot like “spwat.” Mike grinned and said, “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“That was definitely an OoRah,” Mike said with a grin.

“Funny, it sounded more like ‘spwat’ to me,” Karen said looking at Mike like he was crazy.

Mike looked down at Robert and kissed the little hand. In a soft voice, he said, “Forgive your mother. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

The little exchange reminded Karen about what she loved about him. He was strong and gentle with a little humor thrown into the mix. He was a man’s man who could lead by example. Mike looked up and saw the expression on her face.

Puzzled, he asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that Robert is so lucky that you are his father,” Karen answered.

“He’s lucky for an even better reason,” Mike said.

“What?”

“He’s got you for a mother,” Mike answered.

Mike sat in the corner of the Internet Café working on his computer. Over the course of the night, he’d had a brainstorm and was trying to see if it would work. The problem was that his left hand wasn’t allowing him to work as fast as his brain.

Frustrated, he stood up and said, “Damn it.”

Charlie, one of the calmer analysts, asked, “What’s the matter Mike?”

“I need someone to type for me,” Mike answered.

Sitting off to the side, Cathy was staring out the window bored out of her mind. She had thought that working for the CIA was going to be interesting and exciting. She had imagined cloak and dagger spies coming in and out at all hours of the night. The reality was a lot more boring than she had thought possible.

She looked over and said, “I’ll do it.”

Nodding his head, Mike said, “Come over here. I’ll walk you through it.”

Cathy approached and the screen changed over to a woman with her face splattered with come.

Mike swore, “Aren’t we ever going to get that fixed?”

Cathy looked at the picture. It was pretty disgusting in her opinion. The woman looked like someone had spilled hand cream all over her face.

Disgusted, she asked, “Do pictures like that really turn on men?”

“Not at the moment,” Mike answered sounding as frustrated as he felt. He stepped back until the screen returned. With a nod from her, he said, “I need you to pull up the information on the vans captured by the cops.”

“How do I do that?” Cathy asked staring at the screen.

Frustrated at the delays, Mike answered, “Type link terrorist rail gun van arrest.”

“Okay,” Cathy said. She sat back and said, “A whole bunch of documents appeared.”

“Type refine link gasoline,” Mike said hoping that he would get some reports on the levels in the gas tanks.

“There are only three articles left,” Cathy said.

“Pull one of them up by clicking on it,” Mike said.

“Okay.”

“Does it say how much gasoline was in the van?” Mike asked.

Cathy scrolled down the description of the van. She found that it held a three quarters of a tank of gasoline.

Nodding her head, she said, “Three quarters of a tank was left in it.”

Looking over at Jim Donnelly, he said, “Jim, you’ve got the expertise on the Geographical Information System, right?”

“Yes sir. I’m about as good as they get on a GIS system,” Jim answered.

“We need to find out the gasoline mileage that a van of the type used in the attack gets, figure out how much gasoline a quarter of a tank is, and establish a radius within which that van must have refueled,” Mike said. Looking over at Cathy, he said, “Give Jim the data when he needs it.”

“What are you doing?” Charlie Adams asked finding what Mike was doing much more interesting than what he was working on.

“I’m going to find the gas stations that those bastards used to fill up the vans and trace them back to where they came from,” Mike said.

“Clever, but that’s like searching for a needle in a haystack,” Charlie said.

“We’ll ask a thousand cops to nose around until we find that damned needle,” Mike said.

“But...”

“Look. We know they paid cash for their gasoline since queries on their credit cards turned up nothing. That means they had to deal with someone at the gas station. They’ll remember them,” Mike said.

Jim said, “Okay, I’ve got it. There are one hundred and twenty three gas stations within the radius that van could have traveled. There are sixty that are along highways leading into town.”

“Okay, print up the gas stations and pictures of the men driving the van. Send it out to the appropriate state police units with a cover letter that tells them that we need to find out which of those gas stations was used,” Mike said.

Charlie said, “Before you do that, let me do something. Send me that file.”

For close to five minutes Charlie talked to his computer. Cathy was staring at him in amazement.

She looked over at Mike and said, “I’ve never had a man sweet talk me like that.”

Mike laughed and watched what Charlie was doing.

Charlie sat back with a grin on his face and said, “Eureka!”

“What is it?”

“Two of those gas stations are owned by Muslims who are on a terrorist watch list,” Charlie said.

“Now that is an interesting twist,” Mike said sitting down on the nearest chair.

If the people working at the gas station were Muslim, they’d be an information dead end. As soon as the first question was asked, they’d be demanding their lawyers. Once the lawyers got involved, that would be the end of it.

The screen in front of Cathy switched over to a woman looking up at the camera with a cock in her mouth. The image was from the perspective of a man looking down at a woman giving him a blowjob. Cathy looked at the picture and decided that she actually liked it. She could understand why a man would like such a picture.

“Cathy, why don’t you and Charlie work through the other reports containing gasoline and see if we can’t narrow down which gas station they might have used,” Mike said. His words snapped her out of her thoughts.

She said, “You need to move.”

“Oh, sorry,” Mike said after looking at the screen.

The woman in the picture looked a lot like his wife. He moved out of the way and let her work.

Over the next few hours a rather interesting picture emerged. There was a network of Muslim gas stations spread over the country such that one could drive from one side of the country to the other side without ever having to stop at a non-Muslim gas station. Even areas where the density of Muslims was about one per hundred square miles had gasoline stations that were owned and operated by Muslims.

Mike sat back and stared at the picture. This kind of work was so far out of his expertise that he wasn’t even sure what to do with it.

Turning to Harold McKinsey who was on the FBI anti-terrorism task force, he asked, “What does that map tell you?”

“It tells me that there is a huge network in place that can be used to transport people and weapons across the country without raising any suspicions. Mike, I think you have discovered the Jihad transportation network,” Harold answered.

The news covered the fall of Israel with less attention than such an important event demanded. Taking a feed from an Arab news service, the Wolf News Channel showed some of the fall, but cut off the transmissions when it became too bloody to show. The Muslims were killing people in the street and leading off young women. Not one reporter was willing to say what future those women faced.

On hearing one of the talking heads on the Coax News Network say that the fall of Israel meant that a major source of conflict between the Middle East and the West had been eliminated and that wasn’t an entirely bad thing to have happen, Mike switched off the television in disgust.

Angry, he said, “That’s it. We’re totally f•©ked now.”

“You can say that again,” Karen said.

She couldn’t get the image of the women being led away out of her mind.

Shaking his head at the loss in intelligence information that this meant, Mike said, “You’d think that the liberal press would have covered that story with a lot more diligence. A small country surrounded by enemies is totally destroyed. Isn’t that the kind of underdog story that they like so much?”