TERRORIST SAFEHOUSE
DEARBORN, MICHIGAN
21:12:14 EST 05 APR 2011
The keyboard has a lot of blood on it but then again so does almost everything, including Mike Brown. He doesn’t really know why he’s sitting at this keyboard. There’s been a gunfight and it ended so few heartbeats ago that reports still ring in his ears, sulfur stench closes his throat, and most of the blood on the floor hasn’t even properly pooled yet.
Mike figures he should probably go around and see if anybody is still alive, anybody he could help maybe. But he somehow knows there isn’t. The only things left alive in that little white crackerbox house, out in the shitbird suburbs of Dearborn, Michigan, are him – and the computer which sits on the desk before him.
The machine has got an outsize flat-panel display, which is bleeding a cool glow out onto the still-warm bodies and all the hot smoke. Dusk has fallen outside and shutters cover the windows anyway.
Glancing down at his fingers, which are poised over the keyboard, Mike notices a smear of blood on his forearm. Christ, he thinks, there’s blood on everything. There really shouldn’t be blood on him. Mike Brown is a techie – a twiddler of bits and manipulator of abstract symbols. True, he works for a federal agency where people sometimes carry guns. And, yeah, the boundaries between the bit-twiddlers and the trigger-pullers has gotten a little porous in the last few years.
Nonetheless, Mike is nursing this feeling that he should really be 600 miles away in a swivel chair, slinging code and monitoring signals intelligence. Or, at most, directing trigger-pullers on the radio. He shouldn’t be sitting in a house full of dead people. He should never have found himself fifteen feet away from a balls-out gunfight. And he shouldn’t have blood on his arm.
And on his eyeglasses. Somehow he missed that. He removes them and regards the fine crimson spray – bright arterial-red, probably from way deep inside somebody – then wipes them on his shirt. He puts them back on his face and refocuses on the room. He tries to get his head around what he is seeing.
Like somebody whose car has been towed, walking around in a circle, seeing perfectly well that there’s no car there, but not believing.
Scattered on the floor, on a sofa, in a doorway, slumped against a wall, out on the front porch, are a half dozen very nice sheriff’s deputies. Also, an indeterminate number of hajjis, also arrayed in awkward poses. “Hajjis” is how one of the sheriff’s deputies described them, in the approximately four seconds he’d had to radio in. Mike forgave him the crude racial profiling, given circumstances.
They’re dark-skinned guys, and they’d been shouting in some language not English. Mike guessed they looked Middle Eastern. And they were just armed to the nines and blazing away like goddamn crazy sons of bitches.
And now they are gone. All of them have decamped, or died trying. No surrenders, no survivors. Just this one computer. And Mike Brown.
With that many guns going off, that rapidly, in quarters that close, Mike would not have expected every single one to miss him. He is deeply surprised to find himself having dropped completely unscathed through this meat grinder. For a few seconds there, he’d figured that was his last few seconds. He’d been on the front porch, and grabbing floor, and he hadn’t been armed himself. But, still.
Here’s the thing. This thing is this. Typically when Mike would go out to serve a warrant on a house he’s identified as the physical source of some computer security breaches – some annoying and clever but, you know, basically parryable hacker attacks – when he went to serve a warrant on some hackers, he didn’t expect to get shot at. Yeah, he went out with sheriffs. And, yeah, the sheriffs had guns.
But one didn’t, in one’s heart of hearts, expect to end up getting blasted into the next jurisdiction by a bunch of dark-skinned guys with assault rifles. Much more typically, he’d be interrupting an online porn masturbation session by some post-adolescent script kiddie with delusions of hacker grandeur.
And Mike could tell you something else: there but for the grace of God. Those geeky kids were Mike without the advanced degree and the federal ID.
So, Mike doesn’t know why he sat down at that bloody keyboard and logged in. But this act would set the pattern for the next year of his life. Soon, Mike will get so jaded about typing on blood-spattered keyboards that he hardly notices it. He’ll carry hankies.
But on this first day, he’s a little vacant, a bit blank in affect. So much so that when the cavalry arrives a few minutes later – in the form of probably the entire Detroit metro area SWAT establishment – he doesn’t remember to put up his hands and move real slow.
The SWAT guys could conceivably have shot him, yeah. But probably not.
Because another thing Mike Brown is very shortly to learn? He’s going to learn that those SWAT guys are big pussies. Just huge, enormous pussies. And so were those poor dead sheriff’s deputies, and so are the FBI (including their fabled Hostage Rescue Team), and so are regular military, and so are most workaday special forces units – and especially so are even the most heavily armed and vicious hajjis you can even dig up.
You know who aren’t pussies?
Mike Brown will tell you who aren’t pussies.
D-BOYS
A Preview of the Forthcoming Novel by
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS
U.S. DE