Hidden Threat

by Anthony Tata

  Amanda couldn’t stop staring at him as she tried to figure out what it was that was bothering her.

  “Amanda?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just a space cadet right now. Anyway, looks like someone’s been out in the sun.”

  Dagus ran his long fingers across his face.

  “Played some hooky and went to the lake. Finals are all done, you know.”

  “Fun.” She paused then said, “Can I just go ahead and finish that edit job?”

  He smiled at her. “Well, you know where the editing room is, and you know where I’ll be when you’re done. How long do you think it will take you?”

  “I don’t know. Couple of hours? You want to check it out when I’m done?”

  “I’ll be free about six tonight. You can either leave it on my desk or meet me here, whichever you prefer.”

  She pursed her lips, which was her thinking pose. “I’ll just call you.” She paused a second and then said, “By the way, do you mind if I don’t publish that poem about my dad?”

  He stared at her a moment, rubbing his chin. “I think that’s a wise move, Amanda. I understood the emotion with which you wrote the piece, but think it makes eminent sense not to publish it in light of what has happened.”

  “Thank you.”

  He coughed into his hand and then replaced it on his knee. “You know, you’ve matured this past week in many ways. This is just one.”

  “You have no idea.” Her words came out louder than she desired, but she was so satisfied that someone had noticed. Maybe she was even glad it was him. “Finally, someone is taking me seriously.” She noticed, not for the first time, his copper-colored eyes that remained fixed on her. They were . . . consoling.

  “I’ve always taken you seriously, Amanda. What are you talking about?”

  “You know, just teenager stuff.” She waved her hand dismissively. She needed to move quickly before she embarrassed herself.

  She grabbed her backpack and walked into the adjoining room, filled with copy tables, computers, and printers. She shrugged her shoulders once and shook off whatever it was that had initially bothered her.

  Suddenly she lifted her head and said to herself, “Rugsdale was in North Carolina?”

  CHAPTER 52

  Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

  Wednesday Morning (Hours of Darkness)

  “You had no right, Matt,” Rampert said.

  “Grow up, General. You’ve been using everyone your entire career. I’ve got your dossier. Don’t think I don’t know about your interrogation activities in the Persian Gulf or your shady dealings with Ballantine. You escaped all of that bullshit, I know, but you walk a fine line.”

  Rampert stared at Matt for a moment, his gray crew cut looking like a wire brush.

  “You don’t know shit, Garrett.”

  “Either we’re on the same team or not. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what you’ve done in the past but we’ve got a few objectives here that we need to accomplish. I have no doubt that you believe every one of your ends justifies the means you use to accomplish them. So, first, get my brother back. Second, invade Pakistan. Third, kill Dubai and Yemen.”

  They had begun calling the two Al Qaeda operatives by the names of the countries they were based in for simplicity.

  Rampert’s cheap circular wall clock ticked away. Matt stared at the general, keeping his momentum. He had to keep moving. If he stopped, he would decelerate, which was never good.

  “You know I’m in, you asshole, but I don’t like it. Pakistan is our domain and I don’t like giving up turf.”

  “We’re going to put more boots on the ground in there than you could ever muster and we’ll be flushing bad guys like rabbits from the bush. So give me a good plan to get over top of these guys with the Predators and your special intelligence and let’s see what we can get.”

  Rampert nodded.

  Changing tack, Matt said, “I’ve got to call Amanda, Zach’s daughter.” Maps still decorated the walls of Rampert’s makeshift office like badly hung wallpaper, all different sizes with unique scales. Rampert sat down and crossed his feet so that they were resting on the tip of a steel-grey desk. With the apparent truce, Matt sat down and began running a toothpick through his teeth, leaning back into an uncomfortable wooden chair.

  “There’s a brilliant idea. Give the plan away to a teenager who hates her dad.”

  “Well, it’s the right thing to do, regardless of it being a good or bad idea.”

  “We don’t know anything for certain, do we? If he’s dead or alive. We think we may have been following him, but we can’t be sure.”

  “We’re sure.” Matt stopped with the toothpick and looked at Rampert with hollow eyes.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Rampert withdrew his feet from the desk and leaned forward, sighing. “But it could compromise our efforts to find him.”

  “I know. I’m just thinking about that little girl. Well, she’s almost eighteen now. But she’s been through hell.”

  “You mean the whole Ballantine thing?”

  Matt scoffed. “Ballantine was amateur hour compared to the bullshit her mother and grandmother have put her through. Zach made me promise that if anything ever happened to him, that I’d take care of it.”

  “She’s eighteen, not much you can do anymore.”

  “I remember her standing there at Zach’s funeral. Unbeknownst to me at the time, we buried Winslow Boudreaux next to my mother on the farm while you had Zach down at Fort Bragg recuperating. You had officially listed him as killed in action.”

  “We’ve been through this, Matt.”

  “Amanda was at that funeral and later found out her father was alive. Zach was the only decent thing she had going for her, even if she refused to acknowledge it.”

  The two men stared at one another. It was clear to Matt that Rampert accepted his responsibility in the matter. He had deceived the government and the families involved. It was the stuff of the “dark side.” Why not develop a truly covert operator? It was difficult to become more covert than to be presumed killed in action. And so Rampert had evacuated Zach Garrett from a Philippine jungle, switched identification tags with an operator who had been essentially vaporized by an enemy weapon, and reported Zach as killed in action.

  All is forgivable if a happy ending is to be found, which of course it had been. Zach was used in a covert manner in the Ballantine mission, and the nation was spared the death and devastation of a nuclear attack by retrofitted unmanned aerial drones launched from a Chinese merchant ship. The post 9-11 world not only excused such excesses, it demanded them. Nonetheless, the hardened men who toiled at the sharpened edges of this global war separated themselves from their enemies by having a conscience. Morality was, after all, the fuel that burned the cleanest when you were driving a machine bent on destroying your enemies.

  “How can I help?”

  Matt looked at the floor, spinning the toothpick in his hands, and seemed to consider his shoelaces. “By finding her father.”

  “You know I’m doing all I can. And when we put this Airborne division in there, it could help or it could hurt.”

  “I’ve thought of that. You’re just pissed we’re bringing in conventional soldiers to do a special ops job,” Matt said.

  “Not really. I’m glad we’re going into Pakistan. Been needing to do it for a long time. Like you say, it will flush some of the bad guys. Plus we’ve got Dubai and Yemen we’re still looking at.

  “There’s that.”

  They sat quietly.

  “You gonna call her?”

  “I think I’m going to call her and maybe just confuse her a little bit.”

  “Don’t you think that’d be worse than just lying to her?”

  “I’m trying to balance what we need to do to find Zach against her best interests. There’s a middle ground somewhere. She’s a smart girl, but she has been her mother’s spy and personal suicide bomber for the last half of her life. These madrassas
in Pakistan have nothing on the brainwashing techniques of her mother and grandmother.”

  “Sounds like a couple of real sweethearts. Now you know why I spend so much time over here fighting these bastards.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s easier than fighting a woman with sharp fangs and poison in her veins. Remember what Rod Stewart said? ‘Next time I tell you I want to get married, just make me buy a house for a woman I hate and leave it at that.’ Something like that.”

  Van Dreeves came barreling into the general’s office holding a piece of paper in his hand. “Sir, we’ve got something. We had a walk-in. Reliability undetermined, but he claims an American serviceman is being held in a house in Asadabad in Kunar Province.”

  “Held?”

  “Roger. A local family is protecting him. AQ has been negotiating to buy him back, but they refuse. This is Pashtun-Wali at its purest. The informant doesn’t know how long it will last.”

  Pashtun-Wali was the code of honor and protection to which the Pashtun tribe adhered. Difficult for most Westerners to understand, the code was more powerful than law enforced by police and judges. Most of all, a Pashtun who is obligated with the protection of someone who has helped the tribe will defend him to the death.

  “Let’s get some eyes on this place and get a plan together. I don’t want to miss this time.” Rampert’s orders were clear.

  Van Dreeves moved quickly into the adjacent operations center to begin to steer the Predator to the location they had been provided. Matt wandered into the operations center, which was now buzzing with activity. Hobart was at the map plotting with a compass and pencil. Even Eversoll was repacking his rucksack, conducting pre-combat inspections of his gear.

  Matt walked up to the large map that covered practically the entire wall. With his finger, he traced the Kunar River from the Pakistan border south where it wound its way to the populated town of Asadabad. They had been right. It was him.

  Zach was alive.

  “And here,” Van Dreeves said. “I found the group of enemy we fought on the raid to get Colonel Garrett.”

  Matt and Rampert watched the Predator feed zoom in on a group of about twenty fighters, plus what looked like some locals with picks and shovels.

  “They took the Thorium bait. That’s the exact location of the primary Thorium mine on the bogus map we planted on the flash drive.”

  “They’re going into the mine,” Van Dreeves said.

  “What do we have flying?”

  “A B-1, two A-10s and the Predator.”

  “Put a JDAM on the mouth of the mine once they’re all in there,” Matt said.

  Rampert looked at him. “They’re some villagers in that crowd.”

  “They know what they’re doing, General.”

  “Last man is in the mine,” Van Dreeves called.

  “Put the biggest thing you got on it, then drop whatever the A-10s have in there, put a hellfire from the Predator on top, and then have some troops go check it out to make sure.”

  “You’re not messing around.”

  “If Rahman thought there was Thorium in there, he would have sent his A-Team. It’s time to close the mine and attack into Pakistan.”

  “Shit, I’m getting a woodie,” Van Dreeves said.

  “Save it for the sheep, VD. Just order the strike,” Matt said. “General?”

  “Do it.”

  Five minutes later, the B-1 had repositioned and punched in the geo-location of the mine. He gave instructions as Matt had articulated.

  A few minutes later, the front hillock that formed the mouth of the mine exploded, whiting out the screen until the dust settled and then the A-10s put 500 pound bombs a bit deeper into the mine.

  “No need to waste the hellfire. Save it for squirters if there are any,” Matt said.

  “Ain’t nothing squirting out of that,” Van Dreeves said.

  “This is how we win,” Matt said and then walked out of the command center.

  CHAPTER 53

  Spartanburg, SOUTH CAROLINA

  Tuesday Evening (Eastern Time)

  Having completed the layout for the magazine, Amanda had rushed from the high school back to her home. As she pulled into her driveway, she saw Brianna Simpson through the windshield of her car standing on her front porch talking, rather arguing, with her mother. Amanda lowered her window to listen, but she was still too far away.

  As they noticed her pulling in, Brianna raced from the porch through the front yard. She did not acknowledge Amanda as she climbed into her mother’s old VW bug.

  Amanda jumped from her seat, only to watch Brianna speed away. She stood there for a moment, looking over the top of her Mercedes at the empty front porch. She was pretty sure it was her mother, but it could have been Nina, who had been talking to Brianna. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. She wasn’t certain if her grandmother looked young or her mother looked old.

  Determining that she would catch up with Brianna later, she refocused, feeling energized now. She had taken Harlan’s Charlotte Observer and now she glanced at the article trashing her father, sitting face up in the passenger seat. Somehow, it motivated her. She had begun to crack the puzzle.

  And she was juiced.

  She bounded up the steps and plugged her charger into her cell phone, laying it on her nightstand. She stretched, raising her arms and bowing her back like a cat might.

  She sat on her bed and thought for a moment. The best way she could describe what was happening was that two parallel universes were colliding with utter force. In the past, it had been no big deal. Her mother’s universe—which she now understood to be comprised of deception and lies—had always dwarfed whatever straightforward purpose her father would come bearing.

  Those collisions often produced sparks and tension well beyond the average human interaction. And through all of her observations, Amanda was coming to the conclusion that both her mother and grandmother enjoyed the manipulations and the mind games. It was as if Lake Moultrie’s dirty secrets and poisonous ethos had found better packaging and marketing up here in Spartanburg. Thus, in Amanda’s young view, simple and straight-forward had always lost out to manipulative and ill-purposed. Hell, that had been the pattern of her life.

  How could so many good memories just fade away, as if they had never existed at all? What secrets of power did her mother and Nina know that others did not? They always seemed to be getting their way. Were people really just means to whatever ends you sought, she wondered?

  She pulled the thumb drive out of her backpack and plugged it into the computer. After a series of commands, she finished storing all of the digital media inside her computer and then looked at the thumb drive. It had a long lace that was intended to be used as a lanyard so she could carry the portable drive around her neck without fear of losing it.

  She laced the cord around her neck, pulling her hair back to allow the necklace to rest against her skin. She opened the file on her computer and clicked on the “Grandmother Letters” file that her father had created. There were only a few documents in the file, all of which had been scanned. She opened the first one, marked, “The Beginning.”

  “. . . instead of divorcing Zach right away, you should get pregnant first. A baby will provide you with a steady source of income and will be more influential with a judge when you finally do leave him. You’ll get child support for at least eighteen years and a kid will give you a better shot at getting alimony for life.”

  Shaking her head slowly and whispering to herself, she skipped to the next letter labeled Divorce.

  “. . . I’m not sure what you are waiting for. It’s about time you divorced Zach and moved back to South Carolina. I’m tired of you moving around and am ready for you to be home. When you file, make sure to be as aggressive as possible: kick him out of the house, antagonize him with the hopes that he hits you, try to get a neighbor to stand up for you. Your main thing should be to threaten his career. Once you do that, he will probably give you
anything you want.

  “Break your locks, hide some valuables and call the police. Make sure when you do this that he has no one who can account for his time. You will need to make four or five charges against him for one or two to stick. That has been my experience. If he doesn’t respond to that immediately, then think about how you can say he ‘does’ stuff to Amanda. She’s only three and is easily influenced to say whatever you want her to say, though she is very close with Zach, and you will need to be careful there. You may need to do some prep work yourself if you choose to use this scare method.

  “Remember, Amanda is your ace in the hole; prepare to use it at the right time.

  “Love, Nina.”

  Amanda leaned back in her chair and sighed with such force that her breath blew her bangs up, separating them. Her grandmother, the Wizard of Oz, she thought to herself, pulling the levers behind the scenes. Had her mother ever stood a chance?

  After a moment of thinking, she determined that her mother did have a choice. She could have decided to ignore the long reach of Nina Hastings’s icy fingers. Nina, it turned out, needed her mother and herself within her fold for her own selfish purposes. She figured that it wasn’t so much the money as it was the love, the attention, and the avoidance of loneliness.

  She felt nauseous. She pushed away from the desk, descended the steps and pushed through the front door just as the UPS man was preparing to knock.

  “Perfect timing,” he said. “Are you Amanda?”

  “That’s me.”

  “This box is for you. Just need you to sign right here.” Amanda grabbed the pen, scribbled something that looked like a signature and retrieved the small box from his outstretched hand.

  The man stood there for a second, as if he had another package.

  Preparing to continue her quest for oxygen, she looked up at him, a young man in his mid to late twenties.

  “Is there something else?”

  He shuffled his feet a second and then said, “I’m sorry about your father. I served with him in the Airborne. He was a great man.”