by Jim Geraghty
The president’s voice resonated through the speakers in Ward’s truck.
“Today, I ordered our great military forces to launch a targeted military strike of fire, fury, and ferociousness. Our target was camps in a remote region of Turkmenistan, camps where Atarsa’s leadership planned the recent terror attacks against Americans,” the president declared in prepared remarks from Camp David. “It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to decimate terrorists wherever they operate.” He deviated from his prepared remarks. “Just terrible people, these guys. Total animals. We’re better off with them dead. Totally and completely dead.” He returned to the script. “This is only one of many ways we are bringing the full wrath of the American arsenal to our enemies.”
Ward wondered if Alec and Katrina were on the ground yet, and if so, what they would find. In the meantime, some Atarsa member was still walking the streets near his family’s home, and he knew he had to focus on what he could control, which was when and how that malefactor would meet a terrible fate.
***
PENTAGON BRIEFING TRANSCRIPT (CONTINUED) 18:34 03–29–21
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: I have personally reviewed the intelligence, and there is no doubt the sites in the Turkmenistan Desert are the operating bases of individuals connected to the leadership of the terror group. In response to the attacks, our government began a deliberate process, led by the National Security Council, to recommend diplomatic and military options to the president. We met over several days and I spoke with our key allies. We determined that this measured military response could best neutralize the threat posed by those in these camps and made appropriate communications with the Turkmeni government. As always, we examined how best to avoid civilian casualties in the execution of the strike, and our actions were successful.
The air strikes were conducted by a combination of US air assets based out of Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and part of the NATO training operations in Tbilisi Soganlug Air Base in Georgia, as well as a variety of Tomahawk missiles launched from sea assets.
REPORTER: Mister Secretary, what was the most important objective of the air strike?
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: To wipe the camp off the face of the earth.
REPORTER: And when you say, “our actions were successful,” do you mean—
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: The face of the earth has now been thoroughly wiped.
***
ASHGABAT, TURKMENISTAN
A half-generation ago, Turkmenistan’s president, Saparmurat Niyazov, aspired to turn his country, a largely ignored, mostly poor but oil and gas-rich Central Asian landmass, into “the new Kuwait.” A key part of his vision was building a new airport, one he insisted upon designing himself. Leaving basic aeronautic engineering decisions to a man with no experience led to predictable problems, such as the control tower being built on the wrong side of the runway, and the new terminal blocking the view of air traffic controllers when they were trying to guide pilots. The president hand-waved away the warnings, declaring simply, “It looks better this way.”
In a country like Turkmenistan, nothing was required to make sense; the arbitrary will of the state claimed supremacy over all other forces, including logic and physics. Authoritarian, paranoid, unpredictable states like this were dangerous from the moment you booked the ticket, as Katrina knew from experience and family history. Katrina wondered if they were a giant involuntary experiment attempting to induce mass psychosis. Like the story of the emperor’s new clothes, everyone knew that telling the truth was dangerous and quickly punished, so daily life required insisting outwardly, at all times, that the authorities were correct, and your eyes were lying. And if you did it enough outwardly, did you begin to do it inside as well? At some point did it become easier to believe the lie, even when you knew it was a lie?
Of course, her parents had escaped Soviet Uzbekistan, a country where they were forced to live a lie, or at least outwardly hide signs of their Jewish heritage and faith, to come to America … where she joined the CIA and voluntarily signed on to living a lie, at least when under cover.
She hadn’t slept well on the flight to Ashgabat, enduring the nightmare about the Friendly’s parking lot again. The mood was the same: dark, twisted; something terrible had happened and she felt hunted. Alec was with her again; the restaurant’s windows were, like before, covered in wanted posters. Except now all of them had dead written in red letters across the faces.
In her dream, Alec was inexplicably and inappropriately cheery. “I’ve almost figured it out!” he told her. “I know who did this!” Alec ran around the corner of the restaurant, despite Katrina’s cries to him to stop. She followed and found him standing before a giant dumpster—wider and flatter than a real dumpster. “It’s in here!” Alec said gleefully, as if he had caught something. Katrina knew that whatever was in the dumpster was certain to kill them.
She had just seen the antennae, as long as fishing poles, emerge from the dumpster and the top of its head with giant compound eyes the size of beach balls when she woke up with a start. She was in the C-17, on final approach to Ashgabat.
***
The tall Turkmeni government agent, whose visage made Leonid Brezhnev look cheery, led a stiff-postured delegation of military and police officials to greet the C-17.
“Eziz Garayev, Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the tall man said. Katrina and Alec nodded and introduced themselves. Despite the unfortunate acronym, MIA basically ran anything related to security in the country, combining both the Ministry of National Security, the country’s intelligence agency, and the Turkmen national police force.
“We have already secured the site in the desert,” Garayev said. “Your country’s military offered an unforgettable demonstration of destructive power.”
After a moment, he paused and held up a hand and gestured to Alec and Katrina’s holsters.
“I do not believe our agreement with your government included your firearms,” Garayev said grumpily.
“We’re going after terrorists, you can’t expect us to go after dangerous people unarmed!” Alec exclaimed in disbelief. He pointed to his left hand. “See this? Got it in Berlin, chasing this Atarsa guy. Intense firefight. Nearly got burned.” He pulled up his pant leg, showing where the snake had bitten him. “Brazil. Another one bit me … that guy was a real viper.” He rolled up his sleeve, pointed to his elbow. “Huge raid in Mexico City. Guns. A jaguar. Sewer water. By the time all the smoke cleared, there were skulls everywhere.” He cracked his neck. “Hear that? Does that ever since last June when I tracked down this one guy, named Victor, out of Latveria—”
Garayev just stared skeptically and cut him off. “My men are more than capable—”
Katrina put a reassuring hand on Garayev’s arm, and the Turkmeni officer almost jumped from the physical touch. She leaned in and whispered in his ear: “We know you can and will protect us out there, but this arrangement leaves my partner feeling … dishonored by being entirely dependent upon you for protection.”
He furrowed his brow.
“Insufficiently masculine,” she said in Russian.
Garayev almost smiled and gave a knowing nod. “I see.” He turned to his men and muttered quiet orders in Turkmeni.
“We will release all of your equipment to you, including firearms, after a routine inspection,” he offered to Alec. The two men shook hands. The Turkmen took Alec’s firearm and his leather messenger bag and quickly inspected two cameras, a series of sealable plastic bags, a blood collection kit, a flashlight and extra batteries, a black light, a watchmaker’s loupe, an emergency flare gun. They laughed at the plastic booties that were designed to go over his shoes.
They headed to a small convoy of waiting military vehicles and Toyota Land Cruisers. “He didn’t believe your stories,” Katrina muttered under his breath.
“It was all true!”
CHAPTER 49
INTERSTATE 64, APPROACHING WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
WEDNES
DAY, MARCH 31
Dee and Raquel hadn’t liked Ward’s insistence that they cross-check his list of names with their databases, overt and covert, checking for ties to Williamsburg. But they had known Ward long enough—and he had proven his willingness to stick his neck out, time after time—that refusing him would bring aggravating consequences. Ward could behave less than fully rationally when he feared his family was endangered.
By the time Ward completed the list, he had forty names, and Shuler said that he was fairly certain the records in his home weren’t complete. He estimated that anywhere from sixty to seventy troubled individuals had been referred to Isoptera. He had remembered a few names of referrals that were not in his files: Charles Sullivan, Keith Abse, “Norm Fine.” Shuler said he remembered the last one because when he was brought to the program, the guy was neither.
Dee had helpfully explained that “Isoptera” means “equal wings” or “termite” in Greek.
“Could you look beyond the dictionary and see if any of these names live in the James City County school district?” Ward growled. “One of these guys stole a school bus and set it on fire, adding his little bit of nightmare fuel to the Atarsa video. I’m betting he’s a local. Cross reference the names we have against—”
“Got it, got it,” Dee sang. “DMV records, property records, tax records …”
Ward went over the notes that Shuler had added on the ride to his house in Great Falls. At one point he pulled off at a rest stop to read the stack of papers.
“The ones referred to Isoptera were young males, many but not all white, late teens or early twenties,” Ward recalled, speaking to Dee on his hands-free carphone. “Trouble in school or finding or keeping a job, depressed, anger issues. Feelings of envy or a yearning for revenge were not far beneath the surface. Trouble at home, no relationships, few friends, little or no support network. Often obsessed with guns—well, nothing wrong with that—violent video games, movies. Coping with a sense of powerlessness, meaninglessness. Spent enormous amounts of time and energy dwelling on past slights, insults, sense of feeling rejected or humiliated. Constantly cultivating resentment.”
“No shortage of those, huh?” Dee said. “I found the MySpace page of one of these guys—that shows you how old he is—but you can get the gist: ‘Society locked me in a prison, now I will break down the walls! I lost at life because they cheated! It’s time to turn over the board and end their silly game! I will punish them for cheating me out of the life I deserve!’ Blah, blah, blah. Lotta 4Chan. Lotta talk about school shooters, praising them as rebels.”
“Incels and Columbiners,” Ward muttered, more than a little annoyed that modern society had taught him those terms.
Ward could almost hear Raquel looking over Dee’s shoulder. “Jesus. They’re cultivating homicidal maniacs.”
“This is their plot,” Ward said. “Gather sixty or seventy rage-filled guys willing to die and indoctrinate ’em. Love-bomb ’em or something.”
“Love-bomb?” Dee asked. “I know you’ve got an extensive home arsenal, but there are some details we don’t need to know about—”
“Love-bomb is a technique that cults use for recruits, shower them in attention, praise, validation, maybe even screw ’em, I dunno,” Ward continued.
“Should I be worried you know a lot about cult recruitment methods?” Dee asked.
“For a bunch of years, I studied the militia movement as a personal passion,” Ward said after a long pause, wondering how much he wanted to discuss Oklahoma City. “It’s a short step from there to Waco to Manson to Jonestown. I figure Atarsa would get them good and dedicated to the cause, train them in the basics—hiding a concealed knife, breaking and entering, stuff like that. Then you shut down the program and disappear.”
“And then they sit around, waiting to be activated,” Raquel surmised. “They activate five and have them kill five people at random. Then within a few days, before the cops can catch any, they send them on their suicide run. They could have used all of them at once, but they want people to feel like the threat keeps growing. They’re going to do it again with another five …”
“And with sixty-some guys, they can use five or six guys at a time, for about twelve waves of attacks,” Dee shook her head, finally grasping the scale of the unfolding menace. Atarsa was ready to launch attacks week after week, month after month.
“If we’ve got forty of these names, we can louse up their plans, but we need to stop it cold,” Raquel said. “Elaine says the Bureau’s going to start full twenty-four/seven surveillance on them as they find them, hoping not to spook anyone not on our list. Then, when they’ve got as many as possible, take them all down.”
CHAPTER 50
ASHGABAT INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
TURKMENISTAN
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31
Ashgabat was a surreal expanse of white marble and golden domes, like an ivory-and-gold model of a real city. She felt less directly watched than she expected; maybe her tan skin and careful attention to local attire really was convincing everyone else she was a local. As far as she could tell, tourists from anywhere were rare, and US tourists were exceptionally rare, even before kidnapping Americans had become an unofficial Olympic sport.
Within an hour, the government convoy of Land Cruisers and black SUVs were outside of the city. The Karakum Desert was sparse, empty, and flat. Not much grew between the oven-like days, frigid nights, and periodic blasting winds and dust and sandstorms. A few green shrubs dared expose themselves to the desert sun. One herd of camels went by, with the herder covering his face in a white hood with small eyeholes. Katrina thought it was unnervingly similar to the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, without the pointed top.
As the sun set to her left, she passed the shell of a snub-nosed Soviet-era Mig-15 jet fighter, abandoned decades ago and stripped of anything useful. Around the bend, off in the distance, in a salt flat that seemed to go on forever, she saw what must have once been a Soviet-era rocket project, gargantuan, perhaps twice as long as the old US space shuttle. Like a giant black thimble on its side, it stood silently, half-completed and then abandoned, long since lost to rust and disrepair. What hadn’t been eaten away by the elements made a nice home for birds and other desert critters.
Katrina furrowed her brow. A long time ago, she had wondered about joining NASA or the space program or one of the thriving private space exploration projects. She knew the Russians had attempted to equal the successful Saturn V rockets with enormous rockets of their own, designated the N1 program. The rockets built by the Soviets were gargantuan in scale and technically the most powerful rocket ever built by man. The one little catch was all of that unrivaled fast-burning explosive power proved just about impossible to control. The Soviet space program never actually managed to launch an N1 rocket correctly; the only four ever built all ended up as wreckage in one form or another. The most infamous failure was the second launch in 1969, which cleared the tower … and then the rocket suffered sudden massive failure of almost all of the engines, with one lone functioning engine steering the rocket into a quick looping arc, pointing the nose back down toward the earth. The second N1 impacted with the earth, detonating 2,300 tons of propellant fuel, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in recorded history. Wreckage flew in every direction for six miles and droplets of rocket fuel fell from the sky like intermittent rain for a half-hour afterward. It took a year and a half to rebuild the launch site.
But all of the Soviet N1 rockets were destroyed, she recalled. What was this rusting husk doing out in the middle of central Asia? She shook her head and made a mental note to look into the mystery another day.
***
They drove for another half hour past the old Soviet rocket, then turned away from the highway, onto what could only loosely be called a road—more like a dusty path cleared of brush—until they saw smoke on the horizon. Within a minute, they saw small dark fabric fluttering from a tent post, an inadvertent black flag waving to them.
&nb
sp; A small fleet of Turkmeni military vehicles had surrounded the site, and soldiers were picking through the debris.
“They’ve already taken any useful evidence and intelligence,” Katrina said to Alec in Spanish, guessing that Garayev didn’t speak the language. Unfortunately, Alec stared back with a furrowed brow, not understanding her. She rolled her eyes again, recalling that just a few days ago, he had insisted to Raquel that he spoke sufficient Spanish to work in Mexico.
She knew Garayev spoke Russian and might speak Turkish. She repeated her frustrated conclusion in French. When Alec shook his head in confusion, she shifted to Japanese. Again, no clue.
“What’s left, Klingon?” she fumed, settling for English. “They’ve already removed anything useful.”
Alec nodded. “Ey’re-they eeping-kay it-ay as-ay argaining-bay ip-chay.” Now she frowned in confusion and took a moment to understand him.
Before them “stood” the remains of a large tent. A few small smoldering patches of black cloth emitted wisps of smoke. Soldiers examined the mundane and thoroughly trashed wreckage of the camp scattered around the site: Tables. Chairs. Cots. One actual bed. What once might have been a power generator.
“A great demonstration of your national arsenal,” Garayev said with an approving nod. “You must be quite proud.”
Katrina slipped on rubber gloves and walked carefully to the center of the site, a still-smoking crater. After surveying all 360 degrees, she walked slowly, in larger and larger circles, working to the outer edge. Alec took a lot of photographs from the perimeter of the debris field. Suddenly Katrina stopped, looked quite closely at one spot, moved a piece of metal with her foot, and picked something up that had been hidden underneath.
“I think I found something …” she held it up. “Key.” It was small, metal, blackened on one side, the blade slightly bent. It was too small to be a car key.