War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2)

by Jeffrey Wilson

  “I don’t like it,” Dempsey said. “What happens if you have to take a piss?”

  Without taking his eyes off the screen, he pointed to a one-liter Aquasana bottle on the desk, filled halfway up with yellow liquid, and said, “Dude, I got this.”

  Dempsey shook his head and looked at Hansen.

  “What task force did you guys say you were with?” Hansen said, his scowl back and uglier than ever.

  Dempsey gave a tight-lipped grin. “Okay, moving on . . .”

  Hansen squinted at the screens of some of the other laptops Wang had set up farther down the table. “You said two other cities. Omaha isn’t the only target?”

  “Correct,” Dempsey said. “Our intel suggests simultaneous attacks in Atlanta and Seattle.”

  “Jesus,” Hansen said, letting out a whistle. “This is some serious shit. Islamic State?”

  Dempsey nodded. “With outside help.”

  “And you guys aren’t CIA?” Hansen mumbled.

  “No, but aren’t you glad we’re here?” Wang said over his shoulder, his boyish grin finally free.

  “I’ll answer that question after it’s all over,” Hansen said.

  A knot formed in Dempsey’s stomach as a new and terrible idea occurred to him. “Wang, is it possible that al-Mahajer already called the other cells in Seattle and Atlanta and we missed it?”

  “Sure, anything’s possible,” Wang said, his eyes still locked on his laptop. “But highly unlikely.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better,” Dempsey said. “If he made the call and we missed it, then Atlanta and Seattle are screwed.”

  “Yes, I know, which is why we’re using every SIGINT technology in our arsenal to monitor for that call.”

  Dempsey sighed, not sure what else to say, but also not satisfied with the situation.

  “Look, Dempsey,” Wang said, turning to look at him. “I know what room they’re in. I know what car they’re driving. As of two hours ago, I own the room next to them and I have equipment inside.”

  “When did you pull that off?”

  “When you were sleeping,” he said with a grin, then turned back to his laptop. “Don’t worry about it, dude. You do your ninja shit out there, and I’ll do mine in here. I’m not going to miss that call.”

  To his surprise, Wang’s confidence actually took the edge off his nerves. “So when the call happens, then what?” Dempsey asked. “Can you hack and track the phones on the receiving end?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So if fuck stick calls his boys in Atlanta, then you can hack and track the phone in Atlanta?” Dempsey asked. Kate and Jacob popped into his mind for the hundredth time in the last few hours.

  “I can track ’em,” Wang said. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll carry the phone around with them. Odds are, they’re all using burners and they all ditch after final instructions are given and received. But once we get the phone’s location—which takes only seconds—we put eyes on them, just like we’re doing with al-Mahajer. Even if they ditch their phones, we can still track them, but instead of using GPS we’re following the rabbit.”

  “Following the rabbit?” Hansen asked.

  Dempsey looked at the FBI man. “Following a target with just line of sight. No signals. With drones and satellites. Less than ideal, obviously, but doable.”

  “More than doable,” Wang corrected. “The new drones can probably read a VIN number for me off a windshield if needed. Don’t worry, guys, we’ll find the bastards.”

  “How do you know?” Hansen asked.

  Wang shrugged. “Have to. The alternative is inconceivable.”

  Hansen scowled at Wang for a long moment, then turned to Dempsey. “So, what do you need from us?”

  Dempsey walked him over to a paper map of downtown Omaha, spread out on a table. In the middle, the cobblestone-paved streets of the Old Market, laid out between Tenth and Thirteenth Streets and the five blocks north to south between Farnham and Jackson Streets, were highlighted. The quaint entertainment district was one of Omaha’s most popular attractions, for both tourists and local residents alike. As the go-to dining destination for downtown Omaha, the Old Market was a perfect lunchtime target on a sunny fall afternoon like today.

  “As I said before,” Dempsey began, “we don’t know if al-Mahajer has selected a specific target inside the Old Market, or if he’s just planning to wander around, machine gun blazing. Hell, he could kill dozens by making a single pass down Howard Street during lunch hour.”

  Hansen leaned in for a better view. “Could be worse,” he grumbled.

  “If we split up into two-man teams, we can cover the majority of the market. We can either start at the corners and converge, or assign teams different key intersections. If I was al-Mahajer, I would launch the attack at the intersection of Twelfth and Howard, but he’s a wily, deceptive bastard. The point is we need to be really kinetic here and adjust in real time once we see how it unfolds.”

  “Can we intercept prior to arrival?”

  “We can certainly try, but I think they’ll come in on foot. I’ll take the northwest corner, so I have a better chance of making a visual ID.”

  “Okay,” Hansen said. “How many shooters are we talking about?”

  “We think two.”

  “Once we pick them up, then what? Kill on sight?”

  Dempsey shook his head.

  “We have every reason to think they will have explosive vests and no idea how they will detonate.” He wished they had been able to examine the vests or knew more about them. He realized that they had learned almost nothing from the woman, Delilah. “They might have dead-man’s switches, like the assholes in Brussels who had gloved-hand switches that detonate on release. In that case, manual detonation is also a concern, if they spot our patrols.”

  “Jesus. So why not just take them now? Wang said he knows their room number. My guys can get there in a few minutes. That has to be lower risk of collateral. They may not even be kitted up and armed yet.”

  Dempsey shook his head. “We’re still waiting for the outbound call. If we take al-Mahajer now, we don’t get any intel on the other targets and those attacks will happen on schedule and we won’t be able to stop them.”

  “Okay, so we surround the hotel covertly, wait for the call, and then kill them.”

  “It all depends on what’s communicated during the call. If al-Mahajer is using ‘Go, No-Go’ protocol, the other teams will be waiting for a last-minute signal to proceed. In that case, we have to wait for the green-light call, or the other teams will alter their plans.”

  “So you’re willing to risk letting this attack happen? Christ, Dempsey. That is some scary cowboy shit, man.”

  “If we can get the teams from all three targets ID’d on the first call, we’ll hit them all right away. If not, we have to wait.”

  Two minutes later, they were consumed by angles, lines of fire, escape routes, mass casualty plans, and where to place their snipers. Dempsey locked thoughts of Kate and Jacob in a black mental box and dug into the details of stopping al-Mahajer as they waited for the outbound call that he feared might never come.

  CHAPTER 40

  Econo Lodge, West Dodge

  Omaha, Nebraska

  0710 Local Time

  Rostami looked up from where his forehead was pressed against the cheaply carpeted hotel room floor and watched al-Mahajer pray his last prayer to Allah. Al-Mahajer had woken him at 4:30 a.m. to share a pot of tea. Then, they prayed the sunna of Fajr, beginning precisely when 5:15 a.m. had passed. Afterward, Rafiq had kneeled and stared at the wall, not speaking, for an hour. It was not permissible to offer voluntary prayer between the Fajr and sunrise—more specifically until the sun had risen a spear’s length above the horizon. Twelve minutes’ apogee was the accepted time period since compact pistols had long ago replaced spears as the instruments of jihad, but al-Mahajer had waited a full fifteen, no doubt extra cautious today of all days.

  Rostami watched a tear fal
l from al-Mahajer’s tightly closed eyes and drip onto the floor beside his mobile phone, where a compass app pointed to 42.33 degrees, the line of bearing to the holy shrine of Ka’bah 7,262 miles away in Mecca. If the ISIS commander had not been so stubborn with his decision to wait until the last possible moment to activate the Atlanta and Seattle teams, then Rostami would not be in this situation. If the call had been made, he could have already put a bullet through the man’s head. But al-Mahajer had not made the call, and Rostami’s anxiety was following an exponential curve. Last night’s events would not go unnoticed. Delilah Shirazi was out there, and that meant the Americans were coming for him. He could feel it in his bones. They were close and getting closer. Every minute that lunatic waited to make the call was a minute closer to capture.

  He will martyr us both if he keeps this up. Only I no longer believe in a paradise awaiting me in the afterlife.

  Al-Mahajer’s eyes sprung open suddenly, and he sat bolt upright on his knees.

  Rostami squeezed his eyes shut and began to move his lips in final, feigned prayer. He did manage one short prayer, just in case: Allah, please allow me to survive this madness. After a minute, he opened his eyes and took a long, slow breath as if completing a deep and solemn prayer. Then, he looked over at al-Mahajer with a tight smile.

  “Today is a great day for true believers, my brother,” Rostami said. “Your reward for your sacrifice will be great.”

  “I’m weary of your false flattery.” Al-Mahajer turned to look at him with cold, black eyes.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Al-Mahajer laughed sardonically. “Do you think me blind? Do you think I don’t know your heart, Persian? You might have charmed me at the Emek Café, but I’ve come to know the real you these past days. You, Behrouz Rostami, are not a true believer. Like all Rafidah, you are an opportunist who cares only for yourself and sating your most carnal desires. Allah knows this, too, and has no place for your kind in Paradise.”

  “You have misjudged me,” Rostami said, while instinctively inching his right hand toward the pistol tucked in his waistband.

  “You want to kill me?” al-Mahajer said, narrowing his eyes. “You’ve been contemplating it since Guatemala, but you can’t do it now for the same reason you couldn’t do it then. Your masters in Tehran will put a bullet in your brain if the operation fails. Our destinies are entwined.”

  “So it would seem,” Rostami said, through gritted teeth. “Is it time to make the call, brother?”

  Al-Mahajer scooped up his phone and got to his feet in a single fluid motion.

  “It is,” he said and powered up his phone.

  Rostami watched him select and dial the first of only two numbers in the contact list. Then, al-Mahajer surprised him by turning on the phone’s speaker. The phone rang once and picked up.

  “God is great,” al-Mahajer said in Arabic.

  “May God be with you,” came the reply, strong and confident—much more so than Rostami had imagined.

  “I am moving up the timeline.”

  “When?”

  “Today we shall be together in Paradise, my brother.”

  The pause that followed spoke volumes.

  “Today?” the voice said at last.

  “Yes,” al-Mahajer replied.

  “God is indeed great. We will be ready.”

  “Only the day changes,” the ISIS commander instructed. “The time and the target remain the same.”

  Confidence had found its way back into the voice on the line: “Praise God.”

  Al-Mahajer looked into Rostami’s eyes and smiled a devious smile as he spoke his next words. “I will make another call at precisely one minute before the appointed time. Should that call not come, then something has happened to me and you will change to the secondary target at the alternate time. Do you understand?”

  “I understand. We will be ready and will await your call to strike.”

  Al-Mahajer severed the call without a parting word, his black-hole eyes still fixed on Rostami. “It appears, Persian, that we will be together until the glorious end.”

  “Praise and glory to God,” Rostami said robotically.

  As al-Mahajer dialed the second team, Rostami’s mind was racing. He had not expected the call would be made only in the final seconds of the attack. Al-Mahajer had thought of everything . . . Now he needed to devise an escape plan from the Old Market, because the opportunity to send al-Mahajer to Paradise early was forever lost to him.

  CHAPTER 41

  Embassy Suites Downtown/Old Market Lobby

  540 South Twelfth Street, Omaha, Nebraska

  0720 Local Time

  “Got him,” Wang shouted, his fingers flying over his keyboard. “Now I just have to lock the coordinates and move the drones. We need a solid visual fix for backup, in case they power the phone off.”

  Dempsey walked over and squeezed Wang’s shoulders—the universal ops center attaboy.

  “I’ll do it,” came Baldwin’s voice, calm and professorial from the second laptop screen. “You stand by to lock the second phone.”

  “Okay,” Wang said. “They’re in downtown Atlanta . . . tracking just off the intersection of Carnegie Way and Cone Street . . . looks like they’re in a parking garage. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Damn it.”

  “Calm down, Richard,” Baldwin said slowly and softly, a teacher to a student. “I have a fix, and I’m recording the call. Please prep for the next call. I’m sure the Director would prefer to hear the live audio as opposed to your commentary.”

  Wang mumbled something under his breath, then glanced over his shoulder at Dempsey.

  “We can track them out of the garage, right?” Dempsey said.

  “If they keep the phone powered on. If not, they could drive away in any of a dozen cars and without eyes on the ground, we wouldn’t know which one,” Wang said as he typed and clicked.

  “Shit.” Dempsey saw a new number flash on one of the laptops. “Is that the second call?” he said, pointing to the center screen.

  Wang slapped his hand away. “Hands off, dude. That’s, like, a touch screen. You’re gonna jack up my shit.”

  Dempsey pulled his hand back and Wang tapped the screen, this time bringing the audio up on the speakers.

  The speakers greeted each other in Arabic. Dempsey felt his fists and throat tighten hearing al-Mahajer’s voice.

  “What are they saying?” he asked.

  “Moving up the timeline. They’re going today, but at the same time as previously planned. God is great. They’re going to Paradise to bang virgins. Blah, blah, blah. Now something about a second call one minute before and instructions to change targets if the call isn’t received.”

  The words hit Dempsey like a punch in the gut. “Fuck.” He turned to look at Hansen.

  “How’d you know, Dempsey?” Hansen said. “How’d you know they’d pull that shit?”

  “Because this is not my first rodeo,” Dempsey said. “We’ve seen this tactic before.”

  He watched Wang’s hands fly across several different laptops. The second screen to the left was zooming in spurts, magnifying a particular section of Seattle. Wang ignored the map and satellite feeds, his fingers typing code furiously on the computer beside it.

  “Almost got it.”

  “Got what?” Dempsey asked but then bit his tongue, trying to be quiet.

  “Oh yeah!” Wang shouted and raised his hands over his head. “I own you bitches.” He looked up at Dempsey with the smile of an eighth grader bringing home an A+ on his science project. “Now I’ll just run the GPS in the background.” He was back to tapping again, this time on the center keyboard. “Got ’em,” he said, and a blue dot now appeared on the satellite image.

  The camera zoomed in on a neighborhood situated like a little peninsula surrounded by the Broadmoor Golf Club. It was located just south of Route 520 and less than five miles northeast of downtown. The image zoomed again, and soon he was looking at the top of a big whi
te house with a circular brick driveway cutting through well-manicured hedges. In Seattle, it had to be a $3 million home—maybe more. The dot flashed in the northwest corner of the house.

  “Can you tell me what floor they’re on?” Dempsey asked.

  Wang looked up, eyebrows raised. “Sure,” he said. “Do you need that?” He started typing again.

  “No, I was kidding. I just—”

  “The device is 15.6 feet from ground level—so second floor.”

  “Christ, Wang. Where’d Jarvis find you again?”

  “This ain’t ‘find my iPhone,’ man,” Wang said, gloating now. “I’m using some seriously high-speed shit, dude.”

  “I’m in,” Baldwin said from the other laptop. “The encryption is generic on this phone. I’ll dump the data for the team to sort through. Also, I have a drone on the way.”

  “For the Seattle location?” Wang asked, clarifying.

  “Yes, Seattle.”

  “What about Atlanta?”

  “I should have it . . . wait a moment,” Baldwin said, his voice terse, but still measured like a college professor lecturing.

  “Shit,” Wang said.

  “What’s wrong?” Dempsey asked. All the screens looked the same to him.

  “The Atlanta phone powered off.” Wang was typing again, this time on the last laptop in the row. “But if the battery is still in, then I can interrogate the GPS in 911 mode. Much less precise, but still useful . . . Shit! It’s gone. They must have taken the battery out.”

  “It’s not your fault, Richard,” Baldwin said.

  “Tell me you at least got a data dump from the Atlanta phone before it powered off?” Wang asked.

  “Incomplete,” Baldwin said. “The Atlanta phone had better encryption. Why don’t you periodically try to power it back on, just in case they put the battery back in. If you succeed, let me know immediately so I can export the remaining data from it.”

  “No promises,” Wang said, “but I’ll try.”

  “You focus on that, and I will sift the data from the Seattle phone for coordinates or anything pointing to the specific target location.”