The Island--A Thriller

by Ben Coes

  Dewey’s cold eyes softened, if ever so slightly.

  “You’re mine too,” he said.

  Jenna burst into laughter.

  Dewey laughed with her for a moment, looking into her green eyes, and then he heard the voice:

  Don’t let anyone in.

  Dewey pretended to be looking at the floor in front of him, yet he found her in his peripheral vision. She was looking at him.

  Dewey knew he couldn’t accept Jenna’s invitation. If she was right, and Iran was striking the country, he wasn’t going to go hang out on some British royal yacht; after all, America had kicked Britain’s ass, and it was just something he instinctively didn’t want to do. Hang out with British people, especially royals. It was an invitation to her yacht. He just couldn’t sacrifice his morals like that.

  Then again, he worked with her. Maybe she was really serious and it was a good idea to get away? No doubt it would be a sweet setup. He’d been on many yachts like this, but always in a tactical wet suit, packing guns. This would be the first time he was actually invited.

  But no, Dewey couldn’t allow himself to care about another person. Even now, he still found Jessica’s voice in his head at night.

  But his eyes kept getting drawn back to Jenna, her eyes, and how her hair feathered above her ears. He fought to keep from looking at her, but he was only partially successful. Her face was intelligent, warm, and she was showing Dewey a part of it she’d never shown anyone, despite the fact that she barely knew him.

  When he looked at her, he felt lost for a moment.

  Again came the voice, more insistent this time:

  You killed her. You killed Jessica.

  “I can’t,” Dewey said, standing up. Jenna remained seated.

  He downed the remaining whiskey in his glass and put it down on the desk. He walked to the door.

  Dewey turned and looked at Jenna. She was still seated on the couch.

  She had on a sleeveless tan, red, and blue plaid Burberry blouse. Her arms were thin but not too much so, lithe, sculpted, smooth, all the way up to her shoulders. Beneath her linen slacks her feet were clad in white penny loafers. Dewey was at the door and she looked back at him with a relaxed, lackadaisical expression.

  “I understand,” said Jenna.

  She took another sip of Jameson, and showed Dewey a mischievous smile.

  Dewey said nothing else. As he pulled the door open, he looked back and watched as she swept her hand across her forehead, pushing her bangs aside. Her face went into a sultry blankness. Jenna stared Dewey down from the couch, holding his gaze with a smoldering energy, daring him to look away. Finally, he did, casting his eyes to the floor, even as his mouth formed into a smile.

  She waited a moment, until he glanced back at her, unable to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face.

  “So, does that mean you’ll go, Dewey Andreas?” she said softly.

  “Sure,” said Dewey.

  “Pick you up in a couple hours,” said Jenna.

  14

  7:20 P.M.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  A half hour after Dewey left, Jenna picked up her keys and walked out. She needed to get home and change, and pack, and maybe take a shower, before she picked up Dewey.

  Her head went warm when she thought about picking him up, going to the boat with him, having dinner, seeing him in the morning. It went from her head to her chest up and back through her head, like a wave. She felt it, and then remembered she couldn’t.

  “Stop it,” she said aloud to herself angrily. “This is about work.”

  Well, sort of, I suppose, she thought.

  She dialed Igor back as she walked to the elevators.

  Igor began speaking, not saying hello:

  “I ran down the eight hundred thousand, that was actually quite helpful,” said Igor in his sharp Russian accent. “These three have been in the United States for at least a month.”

  “Where?” said Jenna.

  “They’re all in New York City,” said Igor. “They move around a lot, these three. Who even knows if there are others? They sleep in shitty motels, always moving. There’s no way anything but the raw signals metadata could catch them. Police, FBI, there would be no way even a great detective would find them. Only the metadata shows the trail.”

  “What’s the trail?”

  “A lot of movement. A lot of cash. That’s where I am. These guys are highly trained. I’m working on it but they were stealthy.”

  “Why Dewey?” said Jenna.

  “They spent two days in Washington. The rest of it in and around New York. I think Iran developed intel on Dewey and someone told them to go kill him. Revenge for Paria.”

  “What were they doing the other twenty-eight days?” Jenna said.

  “They would spend entire days taking cash out of ATMs all over the city, even in New Jersey and Connecticut. Then they disappear. Off the grid for a day or two. They spent eight hundred thousand dollars in cash. On what? I don’t know,” said Igor.

  “Can you find out?” said Jenna.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps isn’t good enough.”

  “Jenna, I kid. Figuring things out is my middle name.”

  15

  1:29 A.M. ALGIERS

  7:29 P.M. U.S. EST

  HOUARI BOUMEDIENE AIRPORT

  ALGIERS, ALGERIA

  Mansour climbed back aboard the Bombardier, now topped off with fuel and loaded with Russian-made shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and several shoulder-fired launchers.

  But the interaction with Schnabel had not gone as smoothly as he hoped, and now he worried about the German arms merchant. It was no secret that Schnabel sold weapons and weapons systems to anyone with the money. A potential buyer had to be able to afford his prices, which were exorbitant. But Schnabel was also a buyer and paid in cash for virtually anything, from a box of bullets to a kilo of prerefined Siberian uranium, and everything in between. Mansour felt a vague electric paranoia, a cold feeling in his spine. Perhaps Schnabel would blow up the plane anyway? Or perhaps he hadn’t even put a bomb in one of the missiles? The doubt was what created the paranoia, and it had all been self-inflicted. The last thing he needed right now was to worry.

  He sat in a wide black leather seat and reclined. He ultimately realized that it didn’t matter, it was not worth worrying about, because if Schnabel blew up the plane he’d be dead, and if he didn’t it was all back to the original plan, and he’d probably be dead in a few hours anyway. Mansour was tired and his eyes became droopy as he stared down at the North African coast—dotted in lights—then saw black just as the jet soared out above the Mediterranean. He finally fell asleep, drifting into a deep slumber. It was his first sleep in almost two days.

  * * *

  Then he heard loud, insistent beeping coming from his cell. He picked it up and looked at the text. It was a video. It was a short clip, in dark tones, but with enough light to show what was occurring. The video was taken from the ground, on the floor, a sideways angle, in a shaky hand. The focus of the video showed a large man with thick, dark hair, holding a submachine gun, then firing, first to the left, then to the person taking the video, and then it abruptly cut out. They’d retrieved the video from Nussuf’s phone.

  He recognized the man. It was Andreas. It was Mansour’s first time seeing video of the man Nussuf and his team had been sent to kill in Washington.

  The idea to kill Andreas had come from Mansour—it was his design, and it had failed. This was the American thug who killed Abu Paria in Macau. He replayed the video again, and again.

  Andreas was large, as advertised, and he towered over the screen in the short clip. He swept the submachine gun at Nussuf with calm and, clearly, precision—before the clip ended.

  Mansour felt a warm spike of adrenaline run up his back. He felt fury as he watched Andreas kill his own men.

  Mansour had put his best three lieutenants on it, but the mission had failed�
�and three men he had trained from when they were young recruits, teenagers, were now dead, all killed by the man they’d been sent to eliminate.

  Mansour felt guilt, though not because he didn’t go. Rather, he felt guilt because he should’ve gone. He should’ve been the one to confront Andreas. He should have known. Now Nussuf, Hussein, and Mohammed were dead.

  He shut off his phone and closed his eyes. He asked aloud for help to fall back asleep, talking to his God in a whisper, yet all he could see now was Ward 6.

  * * *

  It was at Ward 6 when Mansour had caught the eye of Abu Paria, the head of all Iranian military and intelligence activities. That was when Paria first caught wind of Mansour and plucked him out of a life of crime and thrust him into a life of terrorism.

  A juvenile detention facility in Moscow, one of sixteen such prisons, Ward 6 was a hard place, long concrete buildings with bunks and fluorescent lights, then darkness, and guards patrolling along the bunks with rifles and dogs, even at night, always they were there. There were no weekends at Ward 6.

  Mansour hadn’t done anything to deserve it, other than be the son of a teacher during a time when anyone could be accused of anything and killed for it by a thirty-year-old self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner. One of them shot Mansour’s father in their living room, for no reason, in front of Mansour, his brother, and his mother.

  When Mansour was fourteen, a year after they shot his father, his mother died of cancer. He was sent to Ward 6 by a neighbor on the local volunteer committee, a man who thought Mansour needed the state’s attention and watch. On his second day at Ward 6, he was punched in the face by an older boy. On the morning of his third day, he awoke shivering on his bottom bunk, his blanket missing.

  Most of the teenagers at Ward 6 were the children of hardened Iranian criminals, tough boys who grew up in the slums of Danesh, Baghestan, Mellat Park, Qods, or one of the districts, or one of the many other slums surrounding Tehran like a noose.

  He learned to get along. To survive. By fifteen, Mansour had a knife of his own, a skin, a piece of metal he’d ripped quietly from the meal room, which he sharpened at night against the concrete floor, and kept nearby, tied with string beneath his left forearm. For some reason, the others at Ward 6 had never taken to Mansour. It was rumored his mother had been French. In April of that year, Mansour was attacked in his sleep, even as armed guards were inside the dormitory. Two older boys, one with a wire. They were going to scare him—or choke him to death. But Mansour had seen them coming. A stitch of undulating shadow in the light from the yard. He heard them approach.

  In silence, he stabbed the first one in the chest, straight through his heart, then garroted the second one, dragging the blade across his neck. He dragged them back to their bunks and placed them on their beds, all in silence, in the secrecy of the night, without being seen by the guards. The other boys alerted the guards and Mansour spent a year in solitary confinement. When he came out he was sixteen years old. After a year of doing nothing but push-ups and sit-ups, angry that he’d been punished for defending himself, Mansour now stalked Ward 6 like a predator.

  A year in solitary confinement had hardened him, and he grew into his frame despite the lack of food. He reemerged into the general population of the juvenile facility as if coming in from the jungle.

  A week after being let out into the general population at Ward 6, at the beginning of mandatory exercise, Mansour stepped into the prison yard and registered someone to his right. It was a glint of metal. A boy with a weapon in his hand was watching Mansour. It was the younger brother of one of the prisoners he’d killed.

  Mansour’s eyes swept left. There were two others whispering to each other conspiratorially, one of them eyeing Mansour. He turned and ran, charging toward the entrance, but it slid suddenly shut. He could see the eyes of the guards watching the coming violence from behind the gate.

  What Mansour did next was why Paria came to recruit him.

  Mansour turned and entered the yard as several of the juvenile delinquents converged on him. They were shouting, like a mob.

  Mansour charged at the brother of the boy he’d stabbed. He was coming at Mansour at a jog, with a hateful look on his face. In his hand, he clutched a knife.

  The others were coming as well, at least a dozen, from every direction.

  As Mansour freed the metal skin tied to his forearm, the boy swung first, slashing at Mansour, but Mansour ducked and stabbed his blade into the boy’s stomach. He pulled it quickly out, then swung blindly behind him, hitting another one of the attackers in the face, cutting through his jaw and mouth. Blood spilled down to the concrete. The younger brother was on the ground now, bleeding out, and Mansour grabbed the knife from his hand. He slashed both of his arms wildly, striking at whoever was closest, ducking and moving when he sensed someone on him, constantly swinging the blades and stabbing as deeply as the blade and his strength would allow.

  The sirens in the yard finally went off, followed by rifle fire, into the air, and yelling from the guards. When the situation calmed, Mansour was standing in the middle of bodies. His hands and arms were coated in blood. Mansour killed nine people that day.

  By dinnertime, Mansour had been picked up at Ward 6 in a white van and taken to a facility south of Tehran, a training facility for Hezbollah.

  * * *

  As the luxurious jet began its initial descent toward the coastline of America, cutting miles high above Manhattan, Mansour stared out the window at the country, at the city, at the island, he was about to attack.

  They would first destroy the tunnels into Manhattan. The vehicle tunnels. There were four: Holland, Lincoln, Queens-Midtown, and Brooklyn-Battery. It was by far the easiest part of the mission. The explosives were in vans, already set to be delivered.

  Active shooters would come next. By Mansour’s count, more than five hundred embedded Iranians as well as Lebanese on borrow from Hamas, and several Tunisians, Moroccans, and Egyptians, heeding a call they’d long ago agreed to in order to be allowed to come to the U.S. This was the unknown. Would they sacrifice their lives for a higher purpose? Mansour believed they would.

  The bridges. There were so many. The bridges. Mansour’s simple insight: that the bridges would take care of themselves as people fled the island. A simple notion but powerful: the bridges would quickly be jammed with abandoned cars and screaming people, as his embedded soldiers moved on foot with submachine guns, mowing down anything that moved.

  Within the chaos, Mansour had designed a mushroom cloud of random violence atop which could be placed a sleek geometric pattern of precise and ultimate harm to the U.S.

  The attack could only happen after the president of the United States arrived at the UN. Then and only then would the plot be instigated. If executed properly, President J. P. Dellenbaugh would be trapped inside the UN. Any efforts to rescue him would be met with lethal violence. The PZR Strelas stowed in the luggage compartment of the Bombardier would be delivered to a construction site—a field—next door to the UN. The terrorist was a famed Hamas shooter named Hamash. He’d been in New York City for a week now, sleeping in the shadows.

  Mansour himself would lead the team into the UN: two buses filled with elite Hezbollah gunmen. They would smash the security at the UN in the mouth. Mansour believed that half his men would die upon the initial takeover of the first floor of the tower. But by sheer numbers they would overwhelm a UN security set they’d studied for months, along with various members of the Secret Service, FBI, and NYPD, and take the entrances with a combination of surprise, overwhelming numbers, and superior firepower—at least in the first two to three minutes, when it mattered.

  What occurred next was on Mansour and Mansour alone. The timing would need to be perfect.

  Maybe that was why he couldn’t sleep.

  Mansour needed to create a distraction just as the buses arrived, in the minutes following the destruction of the tunnels. Mansour needed to distract them as Hezbollah gunmen swarm
ed the facility.

  Mansour knew they would have to kill hundreds in order to kill one. A team would move to a floor above Dellenbaugh, then work its way down as Mansour worked his way up. Trapping the president and killing him.

  Mansour couldn’t sleep as the jet moved west across the sky, above the Atlantic Ocean. It was because he also saw the flaws in the design of the attack. If Hamash was unable to shoot down the helicopters as they approached the UN, Dellenbaugh would soon be rescued.

  In addition, Dellenbaugh was not a typical target. He was an athlete, a fighter, who just happened to be a politician. An excellent politician. But he was a fighter first.

  16

  8:30 P.M.

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  After returning from Langley, Dewey had gone for a run up Rock Creek Parkway into Maryland, then returned via the streets of upper Georgetown. He took it at a fast pace, more as a way to clear his mind and collect his thoughts, letting the pain cut to the core, though by the time he was five miles away he felt his body reacting in a way he knew wasn’t good. He was out of shape. Not dramatically so, but he hadn’t run in weeks and with each step he felt the beer, Jack Daniel’s, cheeseburgers, steaks, and occasional cigarette with which he’d fueled his body.

  Dewey was standing in his kitchen, shirtless, dressed in a pair of running shorts, leaning into the sink, his head beneath the faucet. He was drenched in perspiration, still breathing heavily fifteen minutes later. The duct tape was holding. He hadn’t seen a trickle of blood the entire time.

  Dewey knew the cobwebs could either be kicked off gradually, with less effort and less pain, or suddenly, and he always chose the latter. Dewey didn’t enjoy pain but he understood it and he’d long ago discovered his body’s capacity for enduring it, compartmentalizing it, isolating it in a part of his mind and divorcing it from his actions. In Delta training so many years ago, Dewey had twice run himself into unconsciousness. Compared to that pain, a hard run in an out-of-shape body, with the occasional dry heave into the bushes, was nothing.