Terror Has A Cartoon Address

By Alan Meyers Starkey

This new Jake Snow venture describes the real world fears in all of us. What will happen when one lone man, undetected on any Homeland Security radar screens, unnoticed by any law enforcement entity with means to stop him, plots to release an explosive device in an open air venue like a ballpark, or a racetrack, or a theme park? All while a capacity crowd seeks to enjoy their day. What if someone develops an ingenious plan so simple and cunning that anyone with a credit card could duplicate the devastation anywhere?

Terror Has a Cartoon Address; delves deep into the mind of an insane terrorist. Take a walk through his intelligent thought processes, the devious and deadly idiosyncrasies that drive him and the distractive insecurities that may cause his fate. The story uncovers the mind boggling possibility of a real life disaster that could easily happen at any venue, in any town, in this nation. Find unusual perspective in the method of investigation which unlocks the plot, but fails to stop it. The theatre in your mind will picture the physical and mental agony that Jake and his friends endure before, during, and after the devastating event. Live through their renewed fear when they learn the Egyptian’s intense vendetta won’t forget about them now that his main mission is complete.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Meyers Starkey
• Release date: Sep 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301832897

Alan Meyers Starkey

I really was born in Pennsylvania in the early sixties. My mother was always my best friend and was really the best writer in the family. She left this world much too soon. My father was an insurance man, then a car dealer for thirty-some years, and then found the desire to try his hand at fiction and poetry writing, without much success. He is still living. I have a brother and a sister, six and eleven years older. My sister has the special ability to shed the light on the things that shouldn’t be included in my books and slice them out with her editing knife. Some of which have been reinserted in the Blurbs section of my upcoming website. You may find some humor there. As I wrote in the Jake Series, I was raised in the farmland settings of south central Pennsylvania. There really was a one hundred and eighty acre farm. There really was an old path carved by the trolley cars from years before, and there really was an amusement park from the eighteen-nineties, complete with that special, hand carved carousel which now resides in the Smithsonian. All of the land is now suburban housing tracts. I think the old buildings in the park may still be there, though I haven’t been back there for more than a decade. I grew up racing go-karts and mini-bikes and motorcycles on the trails and in the clay pits, and rambling through the raspberry patch that was along the trail to old McClintock’s automobile junkyard. We always found ways to explore the creeks with makeshift rafts, and build tree forts in the woods with borrowed items. And... always being in that Tom and Huck mode, finding trouble was often easier to do than not. In those early years, I found a knack for performing in country club kitchens and fine restaurants. Cooking fancy dinners for hundreds every night. When I saw no clear path to success in the culinary arts, I dropped back and punted, to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. Initially, as a radio operator in a Hawk missile battalion when they found that I was color blind and then as a maintenance data analyst in the helicopter side of the air wing. There was a total of seven years, five months and ten days in service with the Marines, not one of which I have ever regretted. I have been to most parts of the world where Marines were found when I was with them. As the years went by I wound up in the maintenance field, and yes... I really am a conveyor guy and have been for decades. In fact, I worked for many years with the company that invented barcode sortation. I can claim to have all the abilities and knowledge of a mechanical engineer, without the degree. I have a strong affinity for classic rock music and have fronted bands in years gone by. And... I really am a Light Sport pilot, albeit a bandit, which means I am not licensed. Now... I really do live in Central Florida and know all of the places and people Jake talks about. Most of the fictional characters are based on real persons. I’ve learned that the most successful writers either spin yarns about what they know, or have endless resources to research what they don’t. I live in the former reality. I am married to a wonderful Colombian girl, Maria, who has a beautiful, seventeen year old that I am proud to call my daughter, Licci. And... about four years ago, we were blessed with the birth of a boy, Henri Diamond Blue. There are some more works planned in and outside of the Jake Series. Maybe some of that will be a sharing of all those childhood adventures. I hope you enjoy my work and care enough to pass the word, if you do. Thanks to all of you who have spawned the inspiration and encouraged me. And...thanks have to go out to Tom Sawyer, Indian Jones, Popeye and Clark Kent. Without them, there would be no Jake. A.

Book preview

Preface

I went in through the window. It was one of those old, single-wide trailers in an even older trailer park that should have been run through with a bulldozer years ago. One of those eye sores you encounter on the back roads now and again. As I swung my left leg over the window sill, I questioned whether or not this was a sane thing to be doing. Johnny’s earlier words of caution still vibrating on my eardrums; why do you get yourself into these things, Jake?

I found that I was in a bathroom and the door leading into the hallway was open. There was music playing, coming from another room. It was dance rock; the kind they play on an oldies radio station. As I went toward the sound, I stepped out of my clogs so that the sound of them contacting the linoleum floor wouldn’t be heard. I peeked around the corner and looked both ways down the hallway. To the right, where the room opened up at the end of the hallway, I could see a computer monitor illuminating the living room area. Moving in that direction, a small kitchen alcove beside me also had a dim light on under the wall mounted microwave. The floor was carpeted here, though not with the softness I would expect. It was that older kind of shag that gets tamped down after years and years. There was no one in that room, which didn’t surprise me; I’d reconned it from the outside. I wanted a look at what was on that computer, but I had to figure out where he was first.

Going back the way I came, I went passed a small laundry area just beyond the bathroom door. Light from behind me shined on the white, porcelain painted appliances stacked in the corner. There was another thin stream of light shining out from the partially opened door which must be his bedroom. Peering through the crack, I saw him lying on the bed, his back toward me and one arm lay on the pillow beside his head. I couldn’t see his face, but his feet were dark complected with only a slighter whiteness of skin color on the bottoms of them. He appeared to be in deep sleep. I quietly pushed the door open another foot. A cheap lamp on the nightstand beyond the bed was lit. A glass ashtray with a cigarette stubbed out in it rested on the far edge. There were makings; a syringe, a small spoon, a thin strand of surgical tubing and a charcoal grill lighter strewn across the nightstand. These items were next to a plastic Ziploc baggie with some brown powder inside. And there was an odd smell in the air. There was one of those contraptions people use to hang upside down from, staged near the far right corner. The boots resting on the floor at the base of it looked oddly like ski boots with large curved hooks on the toes. The whole scene could have been snapped from a frame of a rehabilitation movie. He was off in the land of peace and psychedelic bliss, and probably would be for awhile. It gave me a small measure of confidence.

I went back to look at the computer. The music was coming from speakers plugged into the back of it. They rested, spaced apart toward the back of the table. He had several screens opened and some more minimized to the start bar. One of the minimized screens was the CD Drive, where the music was playing. I opened it to find the recorded music had been playing for thirty-eight minutes and had another forty to go. I hoped I wouldn’t need that much time. But something was odd about the music. It was Diamond Girl, not the older original version by Seals and Crofts, by the newer one, and I realized that it was the same song that had been playing when I came in the window. When the song ended, it began again immediately. Stevie B singing in the clear crisp voice just before the instrumentation started. I wondered if the entire CD was a continuous loop.

I opened another screen and found the gold star icon, with the FPS insignia blazoned across it in silver. Federal Parcel Service. The new package delivery company that had taken over all of the old DHL warehouses when they folded domestically. The shielded icon was situated in the upper left hand corner. It was a site depicting their delivery routing system in Orlando. I knew a lot about the upstart because I had lost the bid to do some renovation work on some of their conveyors.

This dark man must have found a way to hack into the site, because the information I was viewing was probably classified. He had highlighted a route which traveled into Cartoon World, the resort theme park which had recently opened on land adjacent to Disney World. I remember reading about how the lawyers at Disney had vehemently fought the land acquisition, claiming something about similar attractions being in close proximity. I had struck me comically; like anyone or any entity, was going to impede the tourists from spending their savings with Mickey Mouse. The new park owners had bought the land through several different names; much like Walt had done with Disney World, way back in the sixties. When the new park was announced, the Disney law team was in court within a week, only to lose.

The site showed specific addresses with building names and notes about where the packages should be dropped off and the names of those whose signature must be secured, if a signature was needed. There were other stops inside the complex that had been highlighted. There were also projections of delivery timeframes. It seemed to be setup to ensure the drivers stayed on schedule. Something else that caught my attention was that this route only had stops at Cartoon World and at four or five places in Disney World. Those limited stops must have been enough to fill up the delivery truck.

Another screen was the site of a housekeeping supplies company; Lexis-Clean. He had selected several items for purchase, like bleach and floor stripper and placed them in the shopping cart, but he hadn’t pressed the checkout button yet. Another sidebar screen was focused on the delivery dates. By paying an additional fee, the products could have a next day or second day guaranteed delivery.

The first thing I noticed on the third screen was the extended syntax in the browser bar. He’d gone through a search engine that I never heard of, where the other sites had been accessed through Google and Yahoo! The syntax was a series of numbers and random letters, followed by slashes and colons and then more numbers and letters. It appeared to be an encryption and it was longer than the visible space on the browser. The site was foreign; the language indecipherable to me, maybe somewhere in Bosnia or Croatia, but I could see the pictures. They were photographs of munitions, guns, rocket launchers and their accessories. Self propelled heat seeking missiles and larger caliber, high cyclic rate, portable cannons. This nut was going to blow something else up! And…It shed more light on what I seen him do from the sky. He must have purchased the missile launcher from this site.

The other sites were an office supply company; Paperclips, a plumbing supply company; Pipes and Things, a company that made vinyl display banners, and one of the major hardware chain companies. All of which had items selected for purchase, but nothing had been finalized. I wanted to screen print everything to the little printer set up on a small table beside the desk where I was sitting, but I couldn’t risk the noise it would make. Diamond Girl kept playing.

You’re my diamond girl, ooh oh diamond girl…

The last screen was one I was very familiar with; Google Earth. I zoomed out to find I was looking at the intersection of I-4 and another major artery. On the upper portion of the screen, I saw that I was looking down at Cartoon World. It was on the property across the main thoroughfare leading north from the interstate. The Disney property was on the left, vast and stately, occupying most of the left portion of the screen. After a minute of study, I zoomed it back in to where it was before.

That tingling feeling, that sensation which crept up the back of my neck was becoming more prominent, telling me to get out of there. Tick-tock, tick-tock; that internal warning system I have which simulates the sound of the second hand ticking on the clock. I’d been inside his house too long. I was taking too much of a risk. But, I needed to be able to connect these dots, to put together what was going on in his mind. I found a note pad behind the keyboard and silently tore a page out of its middle. There was a pen there too. As quickly as I could, I jotted down all of his planned purchases from all of the websites, the syntaxes from the browser bars and some of the items listed on the munitions site. Then I took some pictures of all the screens with my camera-phone, risking that the tsk-tsk noise of the aperture closing wouldn’t be heard above the sound of the music. Then I minimized all of the screens.

I ran the tail of my tee shirt across all the keys on the keyboard, wiped the pen and made my way back into the bathroom. In another minute, I was outside the window, pulling the glass back down, with the clogs on my feet intact.

Beginning:

Jake

I am a pilot and two days ago I’d been in the sky over The Green Swamp, an area of Lake County, Florida that has been designated an ecological safe haven. My float plane; A de Havilland DHC2 had recently had all the cylinders tuned and the carburetors cleaned and was performing spectacularly. I have it painted red and black and there is a pirate flag attached to the top of the rudder. It flaps in the wind and is a topic of conversation with all who see it.

Lately, I’d taken to playing games with my pilot friends, climbing higher and faster than they could and losing them, either in the sun or by perching several hundred feet overhead in their blind spot. It would solicit some frantic reactions and rapid radio chatter. Pilots like to know where all the airborne activity is. Those with amphibious craft like mine would suddenly be surprised when setting down on a lake, by my full throttle, screaming Wasp radial engine buzzing them or hooking across their bows. I’d do this at a speed much greater than they were travelling, so as not to create any real danger for them or me. But, none of my friends were in the sky on this beautiful Sunday morning.

What was in the sky over the swamp, was an unfamiliar ultralight trainer, a twin seat Quicksilver circling at about five hundred feet over a desolate area of intermixed swamp water and cypress clumps. There was something on the water below his curving flight path. I could tell that his focus was directed toward the object below, so slipping in above him wouldn’t draw his attention. I’d seen him from two or three miles out and didn’t recognize him. Danny Knight and Eric Northman had a similar plane that they were using to train new guys over at Gator Airpark, but this plane’s wings were distinctive neon orange, while theirs were white and black. I’d gone high and circled over him from behind the sun, to increase my camouflage. When I was close enough to observe his activity, I cut the throttle back far enough to just hang out above him without stalling.

Quicksilver trainers have wide open cockpits and their seats are mounted in a side by side configuration. The pilot and the trainee sit out in open air. The aircraft is little more than wings, frame and motor. It’s designed to be as light as possible so that lift can be attained very easily. The downside of the plane, like all ultra lights, is that they don’t do well in winds more than about fifteen knots, especially winds that are gusting. But there was very little wind today.

This pilot was parked in the right seat, which was a little unusual. His coordinated, left wing dipping movements, caused the plane to stay circling over the object in the water. He kept the craft in a long tilted oval, only leveling out when he was completely through each turn. He was displaying a large amount of experience at the controls.

I grabbed the glasses from the dash and focused in on the floating debris. It was two blue plastic chemical barrels with a wood pallet strapped to the top. Not unlike a floating boat dock. I swung the glasses over to get a better look at the pilot and my attention locked onto what he had mounted in the left seat. It looked like some type of tube, painted the olive drab color always associated with military weaponry. There was also something mounted to a horizontal frame extending out in front of the wing center. It appeared to be a camera of some kind, like he was recording the event.

The pilot was concentrating, studying the raft through a sight glass fixed to the rear part of the tube. Then I saw his hand move and his head jerk clear of the sight. Something launched from the tube flailingly, with trailing smoke spiraling toward the water before centering in on the object below it. It was faster than I could follow and I remember tossing the glasses onto the seat beside me. The missile impact wasn’t what I expected. There was a very brief flash of light, before the entire swamp, in a sixty or seventy feet radius, exploded. Water rose up a hundred feet in the air and when it was finished spraying back down, there was nothing left anywhere on the water’s surface. In that brief instant, the missile had made the floating raft completely disappear.

Holy shit! I said aloud. What is this guy up to?

I saw the pilot’s left hand rise in the air and shake in victory. Then he straightened the aircraft and headed east, maintaining the same altitude and searching left and right for any surveillance. I was still a thousand feet above him, and as much as I could determine, I hadn’t been spotted. I wanted to follow his flight path. I took the de Havilland even higher, leveled off at about half throttle and stayed just about two thousand feet above his six, where I was confident he wouldn’t see me.

After about ten minutes of flight at an airspeed of about fifty knots, I watched him right angle his approach into Osborn’s Airfield on the south side of State Road 50. It was a little known grass airstrip off of Empire Church Road. During the past couple of years, Darlene Osborn and her husband had erected some new canvas dome hangers at the south end of their field in an attempt to garner more tenants. It must have worked with this guy.

During all of the flight activity, I hadn’t been able to get a lock on the pilot’s face, and I was determined to see what this character looked like. What he had done in the swamp wasn’t what I’d consider normal. Even for me. We’d attempted to mount laser tag apparatus to our planes one time, back when I was still flying the little Beaver, but abandoned the idea because it caused the aircraft to come in proximities too close to be safe. We’d also drop balloons filled with flour or paint onto the airfield at Gator Airpark in competitions meant to showcase slow flying skill. But this guy’s event was a little stranger than that activity. It caused a curiosity in me that was a little unsettling. I began to believe that he had something devious and maybe deadly in mind.

I twisted the radio dial over to tell the Osborn tower of my planned approach. I lowered the landing gear and brought her in from the opposite direction than the ultralight had come, hoping to pass by him on the extended, seventeen hundred feet long, green grass runway. But, my plans were foiled when after touching down at the southern end, he stopped his plane, pulled over to the right side and got out of the cockpit. He seemed to be unfastening the apparatus from the left seat and covering it with some type of canvas bag. I’d floated the de Havilland about halfway down the runway, just beyond the deep dip in the grass, and set her down cleanly. As I taxied toward where he was, he walked behind the engine and prop, in what could only have been a move to conceal himself from me.

When I reached his end of the runway, I spun the plane around and called the tower to let them know I would be taking off right away. I throttled up and sailed by him at fifty-five knots and launched into the sky with my head below the left side glass, also keeping him from seeing what I looked like. I took her up to eighteen hundred feet and began a slow circle, high enough to lose any attention, but still low enough to watch the activity at the airfield. He was back at the controls moving the plane down the runway toward the new hanger area. I continued in a long, slow, circle still watching with the glasses. After fifteen minutes, he had hangered the aircraft and left, walking toward the parking lot, where he got into an old, rusty Dodge pickup. In another minute, he was traveling north toward State Road 50. He turned left, heading toward Mascotte and continued across the line into Sumter County. I saw him turn left again on a road I wasn’t familiar with and then turn right in another mile into an old trailer park. He moved the Dodge down a dirt path between several trailers and parked it in front of the last trailer on the right. There was a huge stand of pines and palmettos beyond the trailer at the end of the property. Now I know where you live, I said to myself.

Hani

The Egyptian woke from the slumber in the early morning. The strong need to urinate had caused him to wake. He’d taken too much liquid into his body yesterday. That excessive intake, mixed with the chemicals he’d injected in his arm had slowed the process of waste elimination until now, and the ensuing pain in his bladder was almost unbearable. He also knew he had to get moving, there was test work to be done in the airplane today, but that familiar fog haze was still in his head. It was the only side effect from the heroin that he didn’t like. A shower would help to alleviate the problem. He moved out of the bedroom and into the hallway toward the bathroom, guiding a hand along the wall to keep himself steadied.

He flipped on the light and the blinding effect caused him to squint while he did his business in the toilet. It was taking a long time to empty his bladder, lately it always took a long time and he wondered if it was really the effects of the junk or whether there was something else wrong with him. Still squinting, his eyes wondered to the floor of the bathroom and he noticed something strange in the glare of the light.

It was footprint. A dull, naked imprint of a foot on the otherwise somewhat shiny linoleum. It was barely visible, but it was there. And something about it seemed odd. When he finished peeing he moved to stand above the impression and then placed his foot alongside it. An immediate flash of anger entered his mind. The foot print was larger than his. And the toes were arranged differently too.

Someone had been in his bathroom. He went to the window and saw that the latch wasn’t locked. Opening it and peering outside to the ground below, he saw that the dirt there had been disturbed. Someone had stood there and entered through the window. The dark man, now clearer headed and able to focus, ran to the living area and sat down on the computer. All of the screens had been minimized and he knew he hadn’t left them that way. Someone had been in his house last night, while he slept. He cursed himself. The junk had put him out so deep that he’d been unaware of the break in. This robber must have had a lot of courage, to enter a house when it was occupied. How could he have taken such a chance? It must have been a professional, steeled against fear by lots of experience. How could he have known that I wouldn’t wake up and catch him in the act? He ran back to his bedroom and looked around. His kit was laying on the nightstand, a stupid thing to leave out. He reached under the mattress and found what he had left there. At least the fucker hadn’t found that. He looked into cabinets and other places trying to determine if anything had been stolen and found some relief when he decided that nothing had.

But the lingering fear of the minimized screens on the computer haunted him. What if the guy had