Righteous Fear

Chapter One

Mobile, Alabama, present day

The detective took a sip of coffee, as if to wash one bitter taste away with another. The squad room was a mess of activity and Dr. Annis Hassan sat numb, looking at the flecks of blood that had dried on her hands.

Detective Brock Jackson grimaced, tapping on his keyboard as he transcribed her last answer into his computer. The monitor smeared ugly blue highlights on his mahogany skin as the track lighting above equally disrespected his bald head. Harsh, artificial lighting almost made her forget his handsome complexion from when she’d first seen him during the day.

“So what did the suspect say again?” Jackson asked.

Hassan winced. “He said ‘your kind ain’t welcome here, Sand N-word.’”

She refused to repeat the slur, and saw Jackson’s eye twitch at the implied name the South would seemingly never be free of. He reassured her that she was as much a victim of racism as he was, and smiled slightly. It was a simple act, and it put that slice of nerves and pressure away.

But there was still the shooting. The ugly threat. The flash of a gun. Hassan’s hands covered in blood as she applied pressure to a student nurse’s gunshot wound. The Foster Portman Women’s Health Center wasn’t officially affiliated with a hospital, but Mobile nursing schools knew that the WHC was one of the best places to send someone to learn the ropes of a clinic.

The racist killer with a blazing gun had hit too many of the young men and women in his frantic shooting spree.

It was bad enough that he’d called the WHC a “baby slaughter factory” and dropped an n-bomb on her ethnicity, but so far, two were dead. The young woman she’d helped had survived, but even as she’d kept the woman from bleeding out, other victims had died. This was like a punch in her heart; an echo of an older time when religious and racist intolerance had threatened her workplace.

Hassan gritted her teeth, willing the tears not to come.

“We’ve got enough video of him doing this that we won’t need your testimony if you feel uncomfortable about it,” Detective Jackson told her. “With him behind bars—”

“We’ll be safe from him personally. But what about the other intolerant monsters who call us a force of genocide? Who aren’t afraid of leaving bombs or sitting outside the clinic with a sniper rifle?” she asked. “We don’t even perform abortion services at the clinic.”

Jackson took a deep breath and sighed. “Asking for logic from that crowd is like asking for blood from a stone.”

Hassan controlled her feelings. America was a land of opportunity, and Mobile, Alabama, was a place that needed health care professionals. She’d left Afghanistan behind, a distant memory as bitter as her youth in Saudi Arabia. Bitter because of superstition and adherence to a toxic, murderous philosophy of manhood and holy entitlement that meant the feelings, the potential, even the bodies, of women were unimportant.

America was a land of freedom and a place where the treatment of females as second-class citizens was not tolerated. But Alabama was a hard place for a female doctor, especially a brown woman. There was enough of a progressive presence in Alabama that African Americans could get good jobs. But the slithering, persistent echoes of the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan were a metastasized infection. The Confederate Battle Flag was plastered on at least one of every four cars she saw.

It wasn’t a sign that the drivers and owners were racist, but it was still the banner under which a nation had torn itself apart. It was a reminder that states had broken away to form their own country just to buy and sell human beings.

Yet there were so many good people in Mobile and the surrounding environs, she had come to love the city.

A loud pop resounded, followed by another, pulling Hassan out of her musings. Jackson rose from his seat at the desk, drawing his department-issue Glock. “Stay here.”

“Was that a gunshot?” she asked, but Jackson was gone.

Hassan fought the urge to get up, but her body tensed, ready to spring. Despite Jackson’s order and the rush of armed men into a hallway, she had to know what was happening. She rose and followed the others. The men and women, some in uniform, others in suits, looked back at her, a few with surprise in their eyes, others with worry.

She drew closer to the end of the hallway, already guessing what could be wrong as one side of the corridor was lined with cells. This was where they held suspects until they could be sent to the city jail for processing. Each officer brandished at least a handgun. A couple had shotguns.

“Let me through! Who is hurt?” Hassan asked. She pushed and cops parted.

A cell door stood open. A man in uniform lay on the floor, blood pooled around his head. Inside the cell was the man who’d attacked the clinic personnel. His head was bloody, face torn by a single .40-caliber bullet. Blood bubbled from his shattered nose. At first glance, the domestic terrorist had apparently put the gun under his chin and must have flinched. Instead of death, he’d been left with a shattered jaw, blown-out teeth and a chasm between his mouth and his nose.

He was a bloody mess and he was having trouble breathing, but that might have been panic or shock. Hassan rushed toward him, her instincts taking over. She had a small amount of gauze, which she put on his bloody face in an effort to control the flow of blood. She didn’t apply pressure, because that would turn his jaw into a further mangled mess, and if he survived...

This is a survivable wound. The cold, detached medical mind in her spoke. A broken jaw and a torn face are easy to fix. There was also no way that this damage had been self-inflicted, Hassan thought. Not aiming outward from his skull.

The doctor, in her time in war zones, had seen people who’d attempted suicide with handguns. The angle was completely wrong, no matter how the body contorted, unless the dying man stretched his jaw outward and neck forward. It was an impossible, not to mention uncomfortable, position to put oneself in, when the side of the head would produce certain death, as would the Glock if pushed between his lips.

It was not a legitimate suicide attempt, she thought, though she wouldn’t say anything out loud. She was surrounded by people with guns, and someone had tried to manipulate this man’s death. With the mass shooter out of the picture, the cops could drop the case.

She looked at Detective Jackson, at other faces, seeing genuine concern, genuine shock, genuine confusion painted across their features. Nobody in the front of the milling crowd of cops seemed like a cold-blooded killer, not with a dead uniform on the ground and a badly injured suspect.

“I need towels and gauze. The bullet missed everything vital,” Hassan said.

“What about...?” one of the other officers began to ask, nodding toward the fallen cop.

Hassan knew that her face melted into a mask of grief and agony; she was never good at pronouncements. The lawmen present knew the toll. The huge flap of skull blown off by a .40-caliber hollowpoint round, the excavated brain matter on the floor and the lack of pumping blood were all signs of zero-zero-zero: no pulse, no breathing, no brain function. Readings that told a paramedic or other first responder that nothing could be done for a victim.

“Cuff him!” Jackson ordered. “We were supposed to have this bastard under suicide watch. How the hell did he get the drop on Gomez?”

Uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives looked at each other, hoping for answers to spill from someone’s mouth. Hassan looked away. She was a doctor, not an investigator. She wanted to say something, but someone had just broken into a police station and murdered a police officer. If she spoke up, there was a good chance that she’d be the next target.

The injured shooter’s arms were yanked behind his back, cuffs snapped shut on his wrists. Hassan was torn between concern for the injured man and the part of her hoping that he wasn’t in such shock that he couldn’t feel his rotator cuffs under stress or the hard, unyielding steel grind his wrist bones. Her Hippocratic oath meant that all patients required the best care and her solemn vow of “First, do no harm” was being tested to its limit.

This wounded creature had murdered her coworkers, unarmed coworkers whose only sin was to work in a place the community associated with abortion. No, those people were without sin. This thing...

More gunshots rang out as the killer was lost within a tangle of bodies. Cops squirmed, fighting among themselves, pushing each other out of the way. Jackson clutched his arm, blood darkening his shirtsleeve. Another officer was bent over, a bullet having gone through him.

Hassan didn’t have to look to see the injured shooter, knees curled to his chest.

“He grabbed Jackson’s piece! He was gonna try to shoot his way out!” a lawman, his pistol held by trembling hands, said.

“You better hope this fool can survive all of this!” Jackson snapped.

Hassan rushed to the detective, pressing gauze on either side of his through-and-through wound. “Can you wiggle your fingers?”

“Someone get some proper paramedics here!” Jackson shouted. “I’m not gonna use up our witness’s wits on taking care of everyone!”

Hassan looked at the female police officer who’d folded. Her features were sweaty, but her eyes were clear, and the part of her chest she held was not seeping lifeblood.

“Vest stopped it,” she rasped. “I’ll be okay.”

“Check for broken ribs first,” Hassan stated. The officer’s name tag read Juarez. The doctor smiled at her.

“Is he alive?” Jackson demanded, making it difficult for Hassan to keep his wounded arm wrapped.

“Hold still.” She saw his fingers clenching. That was a sign that his upper arm wasn’t broken. “Hold still!”

Jackson glared at her. “Why aren’t you helping him?”

Hassan froze. Some officers had torn open the clinic shooter’s shirt, a bloody smear across the middle of his torso. When one officer began CPR compressions, a squirt of blood came out of the wound. There was no pooling, no pumping, no spreading unless an outside force was applied to his torso.

“Because he’s gone already,” she said.

“He’s not breathing. We’ve got no pulse,” one of the responders noted. “This asshole was determined to die, and die he did.”

Hassan pursed her lips tightly, keeping her suspicions to herself.

This wasn’t a determined case of suicide. This was a determined case of eliminating a loose end. The threat the clinic shooter represented was still viable because someone closed his mouth.

The killer hadn’t even cared that he’d assassinated cops in his murderous efforts. One cop dead and two alive only by the grace of bulletproof vests and through-and-through biceps injuries. She looked at the man who’d cut down the shooter. He was in adrenaline shock, and he wasn’t white. Hassan glanced at the Glock that had been torn from Jackson’s holster. Given the crush of officers in the hall and the mayhem of the moment, anyone could have pulled the weapon and stuffed it into the clinic shooter’s hand.

Juarez helped Hassan wrap Jackson’s arm, keeping pressure on the gunshot wounds. The detective was still sitting, fussing as the body of the shooter was loaded onto a stretcher and wheeled out. The dead officer was treated with greater care, with silent acknowledgment and mourning. But the man they’d thought killed him? They glowered at the slab of lifeless flesh under a sheet.

Hassan didn’t care about the murderer’s life or death, drew catharsis from his suffering, but with the criminal dead, suddenly his activities didn’t warrant immediate investigation. Who had helped him and who had silenced him?

“Dammit.” Jackson wasn’t complaining about his injured arm. Immediate shock shut down those nerves. No, he was still laser-focused on the dead prisoner, the murdered cop and the yet-to-come snarling of a high-profile screw-up in the media.

A racist terrorist attacks an “abortion clinic” then dies. Thousands of Alabamans would quickly call this a self-resolving problem, thanks to blue suicide, resisting cops and getting shot. Politicians would sweep it under the carpet.

Jackson blinked, eyelids heavy. “I...”

“Adrenaline has faded,” Hassan told him. She and Juarez sat the detective down. “Get him on an ambulance and IV fluids. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

The paramedics weren’t long arriving. The EMTs had the detective on a stretcher in minutes—over his complaints—and were rolling him to the elevator.

Another detective had taken over looking at Jackson’s paperwork for her testimony.

“Everything looks right,” the new detective, Ethan Bradshaw, told her. “We’ll file this, but like Jackson told you, we have enough video to make this case. With him dead, we won’t need a trial or testimony.”

“And if he had friends?” Hassan asked.

Bradshaw, a white man, looked at her with sad brown eyes. “We won’t know until they take a step forward.”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“I wish we had the manpower for more. I’d throw our tech department at his social network footprint, for example.” Bradshaw pushed an index card toward her. “If he had like-minded shooters on his friends list...”

Hassan gritted her teeth for a moment, but any doubt she had toward Detective Bradshaw’s motives quickly disappeared. He’d literally pushed her a lifeline. He knew there was the possibility of something more than just the unnamed shooter.

She looked down at the index card. Anderson Williams. That was his name.

“Good luck,” Bradshaw told her. “Keep in touch if you find anything worthwhile.”

Hassan gave him a sad smile and left the police station.

The cops dropped her off at the health center’s parking lot and as soon as she was behind the wheel of her car, she knew that staying awake after the day’s emotional roller coaster would require a quick infusion of caffeine. She pulled into a nearby market and trudged through the doors. Her eyes quickly scanned the interior. It was late, past midnight, but there were a couple of customers present. Neither of them looked armed, or as if they were waiting for her.

Hassan headed to the beverage coolers and pulled out a couple of coffee-flavored energy drinks. She was tempted to pop one open and chug half of it, but set aside that thought.

She waited behind a man who was buying a case of beer. Her mind drifted to how the situation at the health center might just be the beginning, that there could be more incidents. She had to do something, but where did she start? She thought about Anderson Williams, an animal who’d wounded multiple people, who’d killed innocent clinic staff and blown out the brains of a Mobile, Alabama, police officer. She didn’t give a damn about Williams, except for whether he had friends waiting in the floorboards, ready to scurry into the open like cockroaches and spread their filthy hate across the city.

It was enough for a detective to slip the killer’s name and social media address to her on a card.

“Four sixty,” a man said in front of her. Hassan blinked and looked him in the eyes. She fished in her pocket, pulled out a five and then placed it in a dish beside the register.

“Sorry, long day,” she muttered. He pushed a black bag through the slot under the Plexiglas stop-and-rob window. She dumped one of the energy drinks into the sack, then one-handed the pop top on the other. Fizz bubbled over her fingers, and she slurped off the top. She ignored the thought of “all those rats crawling over these cans.”

“Sure,” the clerk said. He didn’t look like he gave a damn, just as long as she laid down the money and got the hell out of the store.

Hadib Asada couldn’t believe that she had walked into his market after all this time. She didn’t recognize him, but he remembered her.

Dr. Annis Hassan had shot down his brother nearly a decade ago in Helmand Province, killing him to save a stranger, one who might have been an American. The man who’d stopped their cleansing of the unbelievers could have been from the United States, simply because of a nearby US base, but his visible skin had been almost as dark as any desert-dwelling Afghan.

Whoever he was, he’d disappeared. Asada and his surviving brothers in arms had escaped into the desert. Originally, Asada had left Saudi Arabia to help Afghanistan fight against the evil Americans who’d violated the divine Islamist state established by the Taliban. After the assault by the stranger had torn the heart out of Asada’s unit, he’d made his way back to Saudi Arabia. The defeat and humiliation were a weight around his neck.

He’d failed his faith. He’d failed his comrades. Only after a few years of his brooding over the fiasco was he asked to once again take up the cause.

Thus, he was here in the heart of the Bible Belt, serving caffeine to and ringing in groceries for the very people he had wished to drive from a Muslim country. The Christians paid him no attention; he was invisible. The filthy dollars they spent were funneled to operations within the United States, the slow, inexorable encroachment of the New Islamic Revolution striking at the black heart of America.

And now, the doctor he’d been sent to kill seven years ago in Afghanistan had just walked out of his store. Like the Christians, she’d ignored him, disregarded his presence, but Asada remembered her.

His hand hovered near the pistol he kept under the counter, but she was gone. He’d blow his cover for a message that no one would understand. All the resources spent on creating this money funnel, to have him disappear behind enemy lines and stay hidden from the bigoted Christians, would be wasted with a single gunshot.

Asada reached for his phone instead.

Time to get the killing crew back together.

Chapter Two

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

It was late. Barbara Price had settled in at a work station in the Annex’s Computer Room. The daytime cyberwizards were off duty, taking time to decompress and relax. Even with no action teams in the field, someone had to pull night shift during the week, and this time around it was Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s turn. While the wheelchair-bound cyberboss took a late dinner up at the farmhouse, Price was keeping an eye on various hotspots in case Stony Man received an emergency alert.

Computer towers hummed as they ran search algorithms and monitored activity in other agencies’ surveillance systems. It was quiet. Calm. Giving Price time to read after-action reports or undertake some political analyses of current events from the most fact-based, opinion-neutral sources available. Such reads would allow her, as the Farm’s mission controller, more insight into the danger zones she would send the Stony Man action teams.

Price glanced toward the screen and saw two programs spark into activity. She set aside the report she held and opened up one of the alerts. It was a “lookout” program that registered the names of people Mack Bolan had added to the database. News and law-enforcement alerts were consistently scanned for specific names from an ever-growing list of contacts. The Executioner was no longer a full-time member of Stony Man Farm, but he was the founder of the Sensitive Operations Group. As such, he was allowed leeway for suggesting monitors of different folks. This way he could keep a watch on those who had helped him in the past, as well as seek out their aid in the future.

Mack Bolan was a man who had altered his identity many times over his career. He’d been Sergeant Mack Samuel Bolan in the US Army before going AWOL to avenge his family. He’d been the Executioner, rampaging against organized crime to prevent others from suffering the losses he’d had. He’d been Colonel John Phoenix when he was the founding member of Stony Man Farm in the wake of his incredible successes in his personal vigilante war. He’d returned as the Executioner, standing at arm’s length from the Sensitive Operations Group, after an assault on Stony Man had resulted in the death of April Rose, the love of his life, and Andrzej Konzaki, the Farm’s weaponsmith.

The Farm did its best to make sure that the world, the internet, would never see or remember the warrior, sweeping the truth of his life under the carpet. Bolan was a myth, a rumor, and his ability to strike anywhere in the world was simply his invisibility. Even so, the world was the world and people were people; few folks could forget his six-foot-three frame, those graveyard blue eyes and the unmistakable confidence of the Executioner. They wouldn’t know who he was, but they would know what he was about.

The contact list worked both ways: picking up information about a particular person from a news or law-enforcement event and providing a card that would lead to a randomized, untraceable dead-drop message line.

The screen laid down output.

Dr. Annis Hassan. Contacted in Afghanistan. Health professional. Possible assistance when injured in region. Charitable works may put her in the line of fire of terrorists or criminals.

A follow-up output told what had happened.

Subject mentioned in law-enforcement reports. Terrorist incident involving forced birth extremists at women’s health center. Two dead. Several wounded. Dr. Hassan witness.

“Why did you pick the term ‘forced birth extremist’?” her boss, Hal Brognola, had asked Price on one occasion.

“Because you’re not very life affirming by placing bombs to kill doctors, nurses and patients,” she’d answered. “And they sure as hell aren’t lining up at orphanages to adopt the babies they force these women to carry to term. So, why call them by the name they want to be called when they’re just extremist killers? We don’t give polite names to Hamas terrorists when they blow up children in a school bus or to Neo-Nazis when they put poison in a water supply. So why should we call a yet-unnamed extremist movement anything but what their hostility stems from?”

“Has the Pro-Life Movement pissed you off?” Brognola had asked.

“We’re all pro-life, Hal. We all wish abortions weren’t a necessity. But when you shoot doctors, you are an extremist and a terrorist. When you bomb a health center, you are an extremist and a terrorist. And our organization was founded on the necessity of killing terrorists before they harm innocent people. Be pro-life. But when you become a murderer for your political beliefs, you are a terrorist, and these terrorists have been active for too long without being tracked and shut down.”

“When you explain it that way, it isn’t political correctness,” Brognola responded.

Price recalled frowning at her friend and supervisor. “Hal, we track down mass murderers and deal out justice—usually with a bullet—for their crimes against humanity. When have we ever been close to being politically correct? Call an extremist an extremist. Communists, fascists, religious fanatics—we fight them all and take them down without a sliver of guilt because they don’t care who they kill on their way to their ‘solutions.’”