American Justice Read online

  American Justice

  JK Ellem

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by JK Ellem

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  If You Enjoyed This Book

  Hidden Justice

  Prologue

  About the Author

  First published in the USA in 2018 by

  28th Street Multimedia Group

  Copyright © by JK Ellem 2018

  American Justice, is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue and all characters are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the written permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Copyrighted Material

  www.jkellem.com

  JK Ellem on Facebook

  All rights reserved.

  Books by JK Ellem

  No Justice Series:

  Book 1No Justice

  Book 2Cold Justice

  Book 3American Justice

  Book 4Hidden Justice - coming in the Fall, 2018

  Deadly Touch Series:

  Fast ReadDeadly Touch

  Octagon Trilogy:

  PrequelSoldiers Field

  Book 1Octagon

  Book 2Infernum

  Book 3Sky of Thorns - coming 2019

  Box Sets - only available on Amazon

  Dystopian Thriller Box Set

  The Octagon Trilogy: Soldiers Field, Octagon, Infernum

  The No Justice Series Box Set

  No Justice, Cold Justice, Deadly Touch

  To buy my books go to:

  Amazon Kindle

  Apple iBooks

  Kobo

  www.jkellem.com

  To Shannon, Lachlan, and Reegan. Follow your dreams, because life is too short.

  Love

  Dad.

  1

  It was always going to be one of the ground crew who would carry the bomb on board the plane. Ground crew are notorious for being one of the weakest links in the security chain at most major airports.

  While passengers are observed, filmed, scrutinized, searched, x-rayed, and even interrogated, it is the ground crew who seem to come and go with anonymity. Maybe it’s the neon yellow vests they wear. They scream, I’m important. Don’t question me. I can go wherever I want.

  Unlike passengers, ground crew are not subjected to the demeaning ritual of lining up like cattle at an abattoir, and have almost unlimited access to any part of the airport from baggage handling to the jetway itself.

  They tinker with the underside of planes, the refueling systems, the wings, and wheel struts. They pass unhampered through baggage screening, they open security doors without being challenged, they walk blatantly through restricted areas, and emerge unexpectedly in air bridges that lead directly to the plane’s door.

  The closed-circuit television footage would later show it was one such ground crew member, dressed in the obligatory high visibility attire, complete with a plastic identity card clipped to his lapel, and carrying the all-important clipboard under his arm. The man who carried the device had emerged into the main terminal via a set of stairs from the jetway. The neon vest came from Walmart, the identification tag was a clever forgery of a legitimate TSA tag, printed then laminated in a garage using everyday ink, paper and thermal laminate anyone can easily purchase from Staples while picking up a clipboard.

  The device he carried, however, was something more complex and lethal. Compact in shape, it looked like any other large smartphone that could be carried in a pocket or, quite innocently, in the hand.

  The exchange took place in the men’s room. It was simple, fast, and unobtrusive. The ground crew member simply passed the device under the partition between two adjoining stalls to a passenger. They then went their separate ways.

  Subsequent footage would show the ground crew member exiting the terminal hall well before his shift ended then vanishing amongst a sea of passengers, well-wishers, family, friends, taxi cabs, and Uber drivers. They would find the neon vest in a trash bin, together with the discarded identity tag that would later be traced to a forty-eight-year-old male from Detroit who died of heart disease six years ago.

  Thirty minutes later, the passenger, who had already been screened, searched, and x-rayed before the exchange in the men’s room, carried the device in plain sight in his hand down the air bridge toward the plane. He was welcomed aboard with a smile and promptly took his assigned seat next to the window near the front of the plane.

  In the months that followed, when the million or so fragments were eventually recovered then transported to a classified location and painstakingly reassembled into a horrific puzzle of death and destruction, a new discovery would be made. Residue from the device would be found burned deep into the metal and plastic of the bulkhead as well as in the hardened perspex of the adjacent window where the passenger had sat. Subsequent analysis would leave no doubt in the mind of experts that the residual material was a new kind of composite high-explosive, completely inert to the modern screening devices currently deployed in airports and shipping ports around the country.

  The discovery heralded a new wave of terrorism.

  From the polished concrete corridors of the Pentagon to the glass and steel meeting rooms of the CIA, questions were asked, answers were scant, and tempers became frayed. The war on terrorism had taken a distinctly nasty and hi-tech turn.

  Like athletes who managed to keep one step ahead of the drug-testing authorities and the technology they use
d, the terrorists had taken a giant leap ahead of the agencies, authorities, and technology employed to find and kill them. Terrorism as an industry was now searching for and employing the best chemists and molecular scientists who were sympathetic to their cause, no matter how insane that cause seemed. The modern day terrorist foot-soldier no longer wore a balaclava or black headband emblazoned with white Arabic script while brandishing an AK-47 assault rifle and recording their latest Internet video.

  The new foot-soldier of terrorism wore a white lab coat and spent most of their day working under fluorescent lighting in a modern, well-funded laboratory with enough equipment to make the board of Pfizer jealous.

  At thirty thousand feet, the passenger seated at 6A, accepted the plastic cup of soft drink with ice from the flight attendant, took a sip of the low-sugar liquid, brought the smartphone to his face, swiped the screen until he located the specially designed app that was not available for download from any app store, selected the image on the screen with his thumb, then pressed the phone against the curved bulkhead next to the window.

  The interim forensic report that landed on a large important desk in the U.S. Department of State indicated that the smartphone device was more than capable of punching a hole six feet wide and three feet deep in solid concrete, let alone through the bulkhead of a Boeing 777, splitting the fuselage in two, completely destroying the aerodynamics of the plane as well as killing all the passengers and crew.

  2

  Hank Adams from Wyoming was the second person to realize something was wrong.

  The first person was an air traffic controller eighty miles away in Utah. The flight that had originated out of Salt Lake City International Airport completed a series of turns on its ascent, pointing it toward its destination of New York City. The plane then leveled off at its designated cruising altitude and the engines were throttled back to conserve fuel. The seatbelt sign was turned off and the captain gave the passengers an update on the weather en route and an estimated arrival time into JFK. The cabin crew were making their way down the aisles offering tea, coffee, drinks, and light snacks.

  One moment the flight was on the air traffic controller’s radar screen as a compact collection of pixelated data showing the aircraft ID, speed and altitude, stuttering across a dark display amongst a myriad of other planes, and the next moment the flight vanished somewhere high above the wide open expanse of prairie fields in Wyoming.

  Hank Adams, a third generation dairy farmer, was minding his own business, tending to a batch of cows in his milking shed. He had two hundred Holsteins he milked at the same time each day. Some folks said he was joshing, but old Hank knew the name of each of his cows just by their own distinctive black-and-white pattern. It’s a known fact that no two Holsteins have the same hide pattern. They are as unique as human fingerprints.

  Hank had connected the last cow to the milking machine when something landed on the tin roof with a distinct, loud thud.

  At first it was a single thud, then silence. Hank looked up expectantly waiting and listening. But nothing else came. He didn’t notice how eerily silent it had become. Normally there was a constant cacophony of mooing, bellowing, snorting, and grunting.

  But nothing, just silence.

  Hank shrugged; he would take a look after he was done. He went back to making sure the hoses and vacuum tubes were connected and working properly. Maybe it had been a tree branch, but there were no trees near the milking shed.

  Then another thud a moment later.

  Maybe a bird?

  It sounded too big and too meaty to be a dead bird, but its resonance on the tin sheeting was too small to be a tree branch.

  Thud.

  Hank looked up angrily and cursed.

  Then another thud, this time smaller, not as loud. Then another, this time much bigger.

  “What the hell?” Hank grumbled as he got off his stool and made his way outside. He had two more groups to milk before he was finished for the day and he didn’t need any problems.

  Hank knew pigs couldn’t fly—neither could his cows—but something large had landed on the roof of his milking shed.

  Outside the air was still, the insects stopped grating, and the cows were silent. Hank tilted his head skyward, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun. He saw nothing but endless blue, and a scattering of thin clouds to the east. Higher, directly overhead, there was a black smudge, maybe a rain cloud. The cloud was streaked with red and gold, and underneath it, spiraling downward, were ribbons of black, twisting and turning like tiny shooting stars, leaving a smoky trail in their wake.

  Hank noticed how quiet it was. Real quiet, like all the air, heat, and bugs had been sucked out of the landscape, leaving an empty vacuum behind.

  Even the cows that milled around waiting to get milked had stopped eating grass. They stood motionless. It was like the earth had stopped rotating and all life had paused.

  Hank wiped the sweat from his brow on the sleeve of his overalls as he watched the strange cloud overhead slowly expand across the sky in bruised shades of orange, red, and black.

  Thud.

  Hank stepped back and glanced around at the roof of the milking shed and saw a thin twist of smoke rising from behind the pitched gable. He backed up some more, changing the angle so he could see what was on the roof.

  Suddenly the cattle nearby scattered, wide-eyed and fearful.

  All around Hank Adams it started to rain; an arm, the shirt sleeve torn and burnt, landed to his left. A hand with a wrist watch on. Half a leg from the knee down with no shoe, just a torn sock. Then a blue suitcase. It hit the ground hard and burst apart, a mix of clothes and shoes spilling out. Next a burning red roller bag, smoking and warped, followed by a shower of plastic coffee cups, plastic trays, a torso with one blackened and smoldering arm attached, a tray-table, twisted and wrenched.

  In a panic Hank turned and fled toward his homestead as more objects fell from the sky. He stumbled and staggered across the uneven ground, a shower of burning debris raining down all around him. A laptop computer charred and dented. Cell phones. A coffee pot. Packaged meals. Hunks of twisted metal. A row of seats, bodies strapped into them. The air was thick with the pungent reek of aviation gas and bitter with the stench of scorched flesh.

  Hank ran track and field in college, but now he seldom ran for anything—let alone for his life. Now he ran as fast as his seventy-year-old legs could carry him.

  He stumbled, fell to one knee, recovered, and kept on running, his chest pounding, while all around him echoed the solid thuds of airborne objects peppering the ground.

  He could feel his heart struggling against his ribs, his ears ringing, a dull pain in his chest, his breath short and ragged. He had to stop, he couldn’t run any longer, but his mind screamed in fear and panic.

  He collapsed to his knees in the dirt and hung his head in shame and exhaustion. Shame because he wished he was fitter. Exhaustion because if he took another step he would die.

  Something hit him on the shoulder, bounced off, and landed on the dirt beside him.

  He looked sideways at the object, his vision blurred, his mind groggy.

  It was a strange, small object that seemed out of place amongst the dirt and chewed grass.

  Then his mind clicked into place and he let out a muffled cry, his bunched fist stifling a scream.

  A pretty, pink Converse All Star sneaker, kid’s size, with sparkly laces and a tiny foot still in it.

  3

  By the time she walked off the plane, pulled her trolley bag along the air bridge, down the escalators, battled her way through the myriad of confused, excited, nervous faces in the main terminal, and then out through the automatic doors, Jessie Rae, a twenty-eight-year old African American flight attendant had just about had enough. She was tired, hungry, and more than a little cranky.

  All she wanted to do was pick up her car, go home to her small but quaint studio apartment, take a long hot shower, and spend the next twelve hours sleeping in her own
bed. She never slept well in hotel beds. They were too hard and the pillows were mushy and soft.

  Jessie had four days of doing nothing before her next long-haul rotation. She was looking forward to doing nothing but sleeping in, before spending late mornings at her favorite coffee shop around the corner, followed by lazy afternoons curled up on the couch reading, and late nights binge-watching her favorite cable TV shows.

  She exited the terminal and made her way across the public parking area to the staff parking lot where she had parked her car a week ago.

  She couldn’t help think that it was good to be home. Someone once told her home was the place you go to when you were sick and tired of being nice to people.

  It’s not that she didn’t like her job. She had been a flight attendant for five years and, for the most part, she loved it. At first it had seemed glamorous to travel the world visiting different countries and cities, experiencing new cultures and exotic locations. But lately the shine had started to wear off. What remained were the cold hard facts of a not so glamorous life: long hours, sore feet, dry skin, disruptive sleep patterns, and eating meals at strange times either by standing in a small galley or by balancing a food tray on your knees while the plane bounced through turbulence.