BREAKING POINT (Anonymous Justice Book 1) Page 7

  I go through showing Mike every trick and trap I have or am thinking of having. I’ve planned for repelling any kind of assault on the place. About four months ago when the grass hadn’t been so tall, I’d taken 3’ sections of re-rod and cut it in half on an angle. I then sharpened these stakes and pushed them into the ground at irregular intervals and angles. Next, I’d taken old barbed wire that was already stretched out a bit from some old fencing I removed and wrapped and tied it to all of the sharpened stakes.

  I’ve effectively made a wonderful tangle-foot trap and, since the grass has grown up taller and the clean metal from the cut ends have rusted a bit, it’s blended into the grass. One of the other tricks I made up was built using old bread pans, some black powder and a ton of sheet metal screws. I ran ¾” PVC pipe just an inch under the surface and had run the fuses through it. I started those by drilling a hole in the back of each pan, putting in the fuse, and taping that off with duct tape. Then I filled half the bread pan with powder, packed that in and laid the screws on top, until they were ¼” from the top. I used plastic and duct tape to finish holding everything together, and partially buried the whole plastic-wrapped unit on the left side of the driveway.

  The angle of the hill allowed that, and the fuses ran to the inside of the house. I’d never tried it, but my intention was of making a poor man’s claymore. If luck held out and everything had remained waterproof, all I had to do was light the fuses if I ever needed to. I worried that this would make Mike more than a little worried, but he just nodded.

  “A week ago, I would have thought all of this as crazy. Now I feel like the crazy one,” he says.

  “I know. I worried that sometimes I was the crazy one. I mean, I set this up months ago. Just in case I was ever overrun.”

  “You actually thought you’d be overrun by militant Islamic terrorists?” Mike asks, disbelief written all over this face.

  “Zombies, actually,” I admit.

  He throws back his head and starts laughing. After a minute I crack a grin as well.

  “Why is there nothing across the driveway?” he asks me.

  “Head upstairs to the half loft and then go through the trap door into the hunting steeple,” I tell him, pointing to a wooden ladder built into the wall just past my gun safe.

  Mike looks at me dubiously, and then heads up. I follow and, as he lifts the small trapdoor, he pulls himself up.

  “Holy shit,” Mike says, as I pull myself up too.

  The night air is bitingly cold, but there isn’t any snow here yet. When the snow comes, it wwill blanket the ground thickly, as it’s so close to Lake Huron.

  “Yeah, now you see why I’m not worried about the driveway?” I ask him.

  “You’re forcing them to come into a narrow pathway. You’ve got cover and field of fire. To go to either side is almost suicide,” he says.

  “I really play too much Call of Duty,” I admit, “I only made it up to level 34 of Zombies.”

  “You and your video games,” Mike says, still grinning.

  “Prepares you for real life in a way,” I say.

  “How’s that?” he asks.

  “How else can one man defend himself against a horde of the undead, unless he’s got some tricks and traps?”

  “And this applies to humans as well as the undead?”

  “Yes. Though I don’t have any tripwire stuff that goes boom. I always wanted to, but there’s too many damn deer around here.”

  “Yeah, I can see some moving over there,” Mike says pointing.

  Sure enough, I can just make out three of them cruising the edge of the farm field by the trees. Probably gleaning what they can.

  “You heading back tonight?” I ask Mike, starting to climb down.

  “Uhhh… You mind if I stick around? I might get lost in the dark, and my phone died.”

  “Wouldn’t matter, there isn’t any reception up here anyways. We’re right in the middle of a dead zone,” I tell him. “But we have all the comforts of country living. And I do have a DVD player and a comfortable couch if you want to crash here.”

  “If you have any beer, I’m all for it,” Mike says with a grin, following me down to the main floor.

  “Sure, it’s Michelob Light,” I say.

  “Living in the middle of nowhere, drinking that snake-piss… You’re a bloody savage,” he teases, as I pulled two bottles out of the fridge.

  13

  Doom and Boom, Inc.

  Hamtramck, MI

  3:30 a.m. Wednesday, Dec 23rd, 2015

  They’d surveilled the house enough to have an idea of who lived there, and roughly what rooms everyone was going to be in when the lights went out. The night before, they’d used NVGs to look in the windows after Playboy took out the three streetlights nearby with a slingshot and some ball bearings. Wearing all black, Tank had gotten right up to the casement windows and peeked inside, with the rest of the team watching his back.

  What he saw in the basement had them all making new plans. It was a bomb making factory. Through one unfrosted window underneath the steps which led up to the front door, Tank had spotted all the ingredients needed. Lengths of threaded 2” galvanized pipe, gunpowder, boxes and boxes of metal self tapping screws, lengths of fuse, wiring and a half a dozen remote controls from what looked to be remote control cars. There were dozens of bombs in various stages of being built, but the green image the NVGs threw off made everything seem flat and surreal.

  With a new plan in place, they decided to go in quietly. Well, as quietly as they could. Playboy was going to hit the door and shatter the jam with a fence post driver. It was similar in size and appearance to many of the breaching tools the police used, yet they could be had for about $20 at any local Home Depot. They’d use it once, and dump it inside.

  The men stacked up, their suppressed H&K MP5s held closely. Each man had a hand on the other’s shoulder, and Diesel was the fourth man in the stack, the last to enter the front door. After breaching the door, Playboy would fall back to the back door and ensure nobody got away. Two doorways, and they weren’t taking prisoners.

  Playboy took one last look at the neighbor's house. Their lights had gone off by 9pm, and it was now 3:30am. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed to be deep asleep. With any luck, they could get in and out before Murphy had a chance to cock up their--

  “Go,” Diesel whispered, from the back of the stack.

  Playboy swung the fence post driver in an arch. The rounded edge that made up the head hit the door between the handle and the deadbolt. Both the door and the jam splintered and Tank was the first one to burst in, followed by Lewis, Grim and Diesel. Playboy dropped the driver to the grass below the elevated porch and vaulted it, landing softly on his feet. Almost immediately, he heard the pfft, pfft, pfft sound of suppressed weapons as the four men went through the house, room by room.

  Playboy took position in the deep shadow and listened as each man called clear in soft quiet voices, barely audible outside. A rattle at the back door had Playboy holding his rifle up to his shoulder for an aimed shot, but when the screen door opened, he hesitated. It was the wife, one of the shooters. Playboy had never had to shoot a woman before, but she seemed to sense him in the darkness and a pistol materialized in her hand. She had started to lift it when Playboy let out a half a breath and fired off a three shot burst.

  She was blown back into the house; the screen door banging shut the loudest thing. Playboy heard more and more of the pfft sounds until he heard a low whistle at the back door. His signal. He waited, to make sure, and a huge form easily the size of a grizzly bear silhouetted itself in the doorway. Playboy recognized Diesel and lowered his MP5 and started looking for his brass.

  “Get anything good?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah, we got some documents and a laptop. Lewis is in the basement rigging the place. We have five minutes. Get your brass and get ready to move.” Diesels voice was soft, but a light on the house next door clicked on.

  Playboy melted
back into the bushes, and the back door of the neighbor’s house opened. Slowly, Diesel shut the screen door and playboy waited. A flicker of light and then the fragrant smell of tobacco followed. The old man next door had awoken, and was just having a cigarette. In the moonlight, Playboy could see the man walk around in his backyard, through a chain link with weeds growing up through its edges. Every moment he waited there, was a moment he could possibly be found, or the old man could notice the shattered door of his neighbor’s house.

  None of Doom and Boom would feel bad for this takedown; they knew they were going after the people who had shot up the church, knew it beyond all reasonable doubt. The neighbor though, they had to avoid him at all costs. He was an innocent. Just an old Polish man who had called the cops on his neighbors at least four or five times for suspected terrorism. Of course, this was all public record, and the cops had written it off as an old man who didn’t like Middle Eastern people.

  After what seemed like twenty minutes, but was probably only three, the old man threw his butt in the corner of the fencerow in the back of the property, and walked back inside. Playboy got up and crept to the back door and was about to turn the handle, when Diesel cracked it.

  “Is he gone?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he’s back inside,” Playboy told the leader of D&B.

  “Good, move out slowly. You’re on point, let’s go.”

  The rest of the exit went without a hitch. They skirted the side of the house opposite of the neighbor who’d woken and piled into a rented SUV, obtained by one of their many shell corporations.

  “Everyone police their brass?” Playboy asked from the front seat.

  The consensus was yes, they’d had enough time. Barely. As they were driving away a fire lit in the basement, and soon the black powder went up, igniting the heavier explosives they had been mixing. It wouldn’t have taken much to stage it to look like it had gone off on its own, but they’d filled the house’s five occupants with so much lead, they could have been used as a pencil. The two shooters, the getaway driver, and their parents. All had been killed and dragged into the middle of the house.

  Everyone had been careful, and they’d made it almost half a mile away when they felt, more than saw, the house go up. It might rattle windows for a quarter of a mile, maybe blow out some glass of the houses within the immediate block as the overpressure escaped, but there would be just enough left for the cops to figure out that it wasn’t an accident. They didn’t want it to look like one; they wanted to leave a little doubt, should anything ever come back their way.

  “Good job guys,” Lewis said quietly. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

  Everyone knew Lewis was talking about the women, and Playboy shuddered. He already knew where he was going; every blooded warrior knew… But he didn’t care. He’d gotten revenge for the hundred odd victims of these bastards. He felt marginally bad about it, but tomorrow, after he dealt with his up-coming hangover, it wouldn’t bother him a bit.

  “You talk too fucking much. Let’s get drunk,” Grim said, smiling big.

  “Sanitize our weapons and gear first,” Diesel said, “and then let’s wait for the media circus. Anybody wanna watch it on the big-screen?”

  “Dibs on the Lazy boy,” Tank said in a falsetto voice.

  “I’ll lazy boy your ass,” Playboy said, annoyed he was being so flippant.

  “You would, that’s why your nickname is--”

  “Enough of that shit,” Diesel said. “Good job guys. Just get ready to move, and move fast, if this somehow falls on us.”

  “Aye boss,” Grimm said with a smile.

  14

  Dharma and Jade:

  Home in Hamtramck, MI

  4:00 a.m. Wednesday, Dec 23rd, 2015

  We’ve been up all night, but then we didn’t exactly get up early yesterday either. Staying up late has been getting to be a habit, now that I have Jade around so much. Never a dull moment. I like it!

  “What are you playing with over there?” I ask.

  “Oh, just real-time translation of video!” she says. “My video gear has the horsepower to do it, and I’ve wanted to know what kind of crap the mob was saying on all of those YouTube clips we saw, outside the gun shop. For some reason, it bothers me not to know. It just came to me a little while ago, how to accomplish it.”

  “That sounds like very cool stuff. Let me know if you have any luck with it.” I go back to making a living, working on my latest idea; a cPanel management app for Android phones.

  A few minutes later: “Uh, Dharma? I think you’d better take a look at this!” Jade says, loud enough for me to hear through my earphones I wear to block out sound while I’m concentrating. She looks freaked out, so I quit what I’m doing and take them off.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “There’s a lot more video now in that Islamic channel we were looking at before. When I translate it to English, they’re all worked up about that William guy shooting the three Muslims with Jihawg bullets, which may have sent them to hell when they died. They’re threatening to kill him when they find him. They have definite plans to burn down Thor’s Gun Shop, where the bullets came from, tonight during protesting, after dark. Listen to this and see what you think,” she says, handing me her earphones.

  She plays me what she had seen and listened to translated, and she is right! “We have to let Mike Thor know about this right away,” I tell her.

  We go back to my desktop machine that has the cell phone program on it, get a connection, and I send a text to Mike’s personal phone:

  Emergency – Have discovered definite plot to take out Thor’s Gun Shop tonight. There is chatter threatening William’s life. Need to communicate. Reply with the word NOW when you are available for voice call.

  -Anonymous-

  After thirty minutes, there’s still no reply. “I can’t stand waiting,” I say. “If he doesn’t reply like within another thirty minutes, we’d better call him voice, and wake him up. Listen, while we wait, I’ve had another idea bouncing around in my head that I wanna talk over with you, Jade.”

  “Yeah? Do tell.”

  “Take these videos for example, that the protesters put up on YouTube about the beating and shooting at the gun shop. They’re looking at it from their prospective, and vocalizing how they feel about it. They aren’t afraid to say plainly, even if it is in their own language, what they’re thinking. In order for us to know what they’re saying, we’d either have to either learn to speak Arabic (not), or translate it to English, like you just did.

  “They can get away with saying just about anything they want, like this lie about William shooting the Muslims with Jihawg bullets, because nobody who could call them out on it understands what they’re saying, or else they’re afraid to make a target of themselves, should they ‘offend’ anyone, by speaking up. That in itself constitutes terrorism, if you ask me. The mere fact that they have anyone else afraid to speak up.

  “The Muslim community in general, (the good ones and the bad ones) have Al Jazeera America channel on YouTube. Their opening video blurb says: ‘Quality journalism, dedicated, fair, fearless reporting; meaning that you are on the side of the viewer…’

  “They have an Al Jazeera English Facebook page too. Neither of these are really radical at all. They do however use their well-honed ‘fair reporting’ skills and interesting content to cater to both the Muslim community, as well as to catch the ears and eyes of non-Muslims, to get them used to hearing about everyday events from a Muslim point of view. They are very successful at that. Brain-washing, you could say.

  “ISIS (the Islamic State) publishes a monthly glossy magazine called Dabiq that claims to be informational to further unity, truth-seeking, migration, holy war and jihad.

  “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has a magazine called Inspire that is definitely for radicalized Muslims.

  “My point is, all of these sites are out there in plain sight, doing their thing, yet there’s nothing out there specificall
y catering to the Silent Majority of Americans, to educate them on all of the above, what these people are really up to, what they believe, and what their goals are for America.

  “I think it’s time that you and I fought fire with fire, and put up something for them. We could start out with a blog and a Facebook page of our own, that we set up in our own special way, called Anonymous Justice. We can begin loading content like we just watched, but translated into English, and explain our point of view. We could kick-ass and name names of dangerous people on watch lists and no-fly lists, and see how the Silent Majority would like to interact with them. We could show proof of guilt for events like the church shooting, and explain why citizens should decide to fight in the same way that the terrorists who commit these crimes do - say screw the rules, and quit playing nice, as you say!” I rant.

  “I like that idea,” Jade says. “I think it would be huge! Between the two of us, we def have the know-how to do it, easily. We should probably start out small, like you say, and be ready for it to be pulled down in a heartbeat. Let’s start by telling the whole, real story of the church shooting, and present all of our evidence.

  “Then we could show what really happened at the gun shop, and our evidence there.

  “In the future, we could try and warn citizens in advance, before these assholes do something. Maybe give them time to set up little surprises for them, before they show up to do their dastardly deeds.”

  “Hell, let’s get started while we’re waiting on Mike! Looks like we’re gonna be up all night anyhow,” I say.

  15

  William & Mike:

  Will’s Cabin

  9:00 a.m. Wednesday, Dec 23rd, 2015