Hidden Threat

by Anthony Tata

  “This way,” Mansur said, then stopped, falling backward. His head had exploded from a .50-caliber round that shrieked through the open window.

  “Damnit!”

  “He was going this way,” Matt said. “Let’s see what we can find. Pound on the floor. I give it another minute before this place explodes.”

  The cacophony of machinegun fire intensified as if to emphasize his point.

  After about two minutes, Hobart called out, “Over here. Trap door beneath the sleep roll.”

  He had the sheet of dusty plywood off the spider hole and shone a flashlight into the darkness.

  “Has to be it,” he said.

  “Let’s go,” Matt said, pulling his Glock as he snapped his Sig Sauer onto his outer tactical vest.

  He shone the light through into the tunnel and saw darkness start where the light ended. Van Dreeves was in and as Hobart was coming over the edge, the DSHK gunner hit his mark with the entire house exploding into a giant fireball of debris, dust and flames. Hobart fell to the bottom of the six foot drop, immediately covered by falling debris. Matt and Van Dreeves dragged him into the tunnel as the entry hole continued to fill with falling detritus.

  Matt surmised that there would be no going back out in that direction.

  “Let’s move. They’ll inspect the house soon and when they just find Mansur they’ll know we got in the tunnel.”

  They scampered along the surprisingly well constructed path. Every ten meters or so thick 4 x 4 logs supported the sides and the ceiling. After ten minutes of hunched walking-running in flash lighted darkness, they came to a fork.

  “Go left,” Van Dreeves said.

  “That’s it I think, gotta be to house number three,” Matt said.

  Matt continued to lead and found a small ladder another fifty meters in. He turned to Van Dreeves and Hobart and said, “I’ll go up first and go straight. VD you’re second and to my left. Hobart, you’re third and to the right. Both of you need to check the rear also. If this is house number three, we grab the computer hard drive and go.”

  “Uh, Matt,” Van Dreeves said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got two computers right here. Laptops. Looking good. Maybe a year old, no more.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not. And a flash drive.”

  “Bull’s-eye. Can you slide them in your ruck?”

  “Wait a minute. These puppies are rigged with explosives. Looks like C4,” Van Dreeves said.

  “Dismantle it. If this is Rahman’s house, the entire database may be in there.”

  The three warriors stared at each other, briefly contemplating the significance of finding The Base. Al Qaeda was Arabic for The Base and was simply the name of all Al Qaeda members, meticulously kept first in Jeddah as an anonymous database of Islamic Conference attendees. Over time, bin Laden hijacked the system as a way to keep a list of all supporters and fighters. This was what Matt had come for, the hard drive that kept the database of enemy fighters so they could systemically locate and kill this amorphous enemy.

  “Okay same plan then, but we make a quicker sweep through the house and then move to checkpoint seven on the western ridge to link up with the 101 guys.”

  As Van Dreeves knelt to begin dissecting the bomb so he could load the two thin Dell Laptops into his rucksack, they heard a noise directly above them.

  And then the trap door opened.

  CHAPTER 76

  Spartanburg, South Carolina

  Late Sunday Evening (Eastern Time)

  Amanda pulled to a stop in front of Brianna Simpson’s home in one of the lower-income areas just inside Greenville, near Spartanburg. Low income was relative, with house prices soaring into the upper six figures, yet Brianna’s mother had struggled to keep pace with the costs of raising a child as a single mother without support from Brianna’s father.

  The home was a modest brick and siding rambler. Without the address, someone who didn’t know the area would struggle to find the house, because all of the homes were similar in appearance. Red brick and white siding on the frame of the house with moderately sloping roofs appeared on every home on the street in some variety. Some homes had chain-link fences in the backyard. She could still see where some of the fences had only recently been removed from the front yards in accordance with the new community standards.

  Amanda pulled into the driveway and nosed the car all the way beneath the carport. Brianna’s mother, Charlotte, had left her VW Bug on the street so that Amanda could quickly park.

  The screen door made a metallic rattling sound as she knocked on the side door that led from the carport.

  “Come on in, Amanda,” Charlotte Simpson called from the kitchen. “Hurry.”

  Amanda opened the door while Charlotte walked briskly past her, holding her car keys in her hand. She was wearing a worn Adidas light blue workout suit atop a white T-shirt and had yanked her bleached hair back into a ponytail.

  “Better watch the television, hon. Brianna’s in the back. She’s still a little shook up from everything Jake told her. He called as soon as he heard them talking on your computer.”

  Amanda walked through a small laundry room and into the kitchen, which was not much larger. On the small television stuffed onto the counter next to the microwave there was an image of a house in flames, with fire trucks spewing streams of water into it. The video was obviously being shot from a helicopter flying over the mansion. There were several cars stacked up along the long driveway, many with flashing blue and red lights. She squinted and could barely make out her mother’s Mercedes, but it was still there.

  The crawl at the bottom of the news feed began to spit out small factoids as they were being reported, no doubt by crack journalists on the scene.

  . . . historic mansion destroyed by fire . . . flame believed to have been started by burglar . . . weapon and dead body found . . . deceased is male suspect . . . home recently purchased by Melanie Garrett of Spartanburg . . . ex-wife of Colonel Zachary Garrett, recently killed in Afghanistan . . .

  The picture cut to a feed from a ground crew who apparently had recently arrived at the scene. On the screen was a plain-looking woman reporter who had obviously gotten the assignment because she lived nearby and could change out of her pajamas quickly. She wore a windbreaker over blue jeans and spoke rapidly as she held the microphone to her mouth. Behind her the flames in one part of the house were still roaring and appeared much larger from this vantage.

  Oddly, Amanda was reminded of when her father had taken her to watch the reenactment of the burning of the Heidelberg Castle in Germany. Flames were licking from the windows like tortured demons wishing to escape hell.

  “Bill, what we have here is a huge fire in a house that was sold only a couple of days ago,” she said against the jet engine roar of the fire behind her. “Police are on the scene, and firefighters have subdued the flames at the entrance to the home, where they believe the fire began. These are only initial reports, but there is confirmation of one deceased male in the home, and authorities are telling me that they have found a small pistol on the scene. What that means they are unwilling to speculate, but the owner of the house, Mrs. Melanie Garrett of Spartanburg, is hysterical. She has been running up and down the front of the house yelling at the firemen, telling them to pour more water on the flames and to do it faster. From what I can see, Bill, these men are doing a fantastic job of just trying to save some part of this home. Let’s see if we can’t get a shot of the owner.”

  The camera panned to two firemen holding a stiff hose that was spewing a solid stream of water into the right front of the house. Amanda could see that a charred, black hole was located where the dining room used to be. Suddenly, she saw her mother pushing the firemen and screaming, waving her arms toward the house. The camera panned onto her face, the same contorted mask she’d seen as her mother had knocked the lighter out of her hand and onto the Persian rug.

  “. . . bastards, get more t
rucks here! Save this house! Damnit, I’ve got no insurance! Damn you, save this house!”

  Amanda dropped her eyes. No matter how despicable her mother had been, it was difficult to watch someone acting with such a lack of human dignity. And while Amanda had suspected that something of this nature might happen if the plan worked, actually watching it was challenging.

  Then she thought that it was no more challenging than how she had watched her mother and grandmother emasculate her father on a daily basis until it became routine, commonplace. The notion that he was a deadbeat bastard had eased its way into their lexicon and become a staple of their lives. It was a notion that was so opposed to reality that in hindsight it seemed absolutely absurd to her that she had ever taken the bait.

  “Looks like you got her good, hon.”

  Charlotte had returned her car to the driveway to help hide Amanda’s Mercedes and to provide a plausible explanation should any police arrive.

  “What do you mean? I’ve been here with you and Brianna all night.”

  “You got that right.”

  CHAPTER 77

  Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan

  Monday Morning

  In the tunnel there was very little space for the three of them. One hand grenade would possibly kill them all. The scraping of the floorboard and the partial opening of the trap door into what they believed to be house number three made the next few seconds seem like an eternity.

  Matt grabbed Van Dreeves, who was cutting wires on the bomb protecting the computers that potentially contained the database. It had to be somewhere and what the technicians from Langley had forwarded to Matt was a message that the flash drive’s Trojan had piped back to them a partial file that looked like a list of names, phone numbers and addresses of fighters, financiers, logisticians, businessmen, all of whom were a part of the loose network of Al Qaeda.

  In the modern era, such a list would be akin to finding the personnel roster of a nation’s standing army. Matt knew that the Rosetta stone was not killing bin Laden, though he hoped to do that soon, but to get the list, the database, the Al Qaeda, and then systematically move down that list and kill or capture those on it. Only then could America tip the balance of fear away from its own shores and back towards those who wished to do her harm. Constantly updated, the list was rumored to be kept on two hard drives. Initially on the server in Jeddah, bin Laden determined to keep that list up and running as a decoy. Intelligence agencies spent years chasing the Jeddah server list, which was mostly made up of Muslims who wanted to travel to the conference on Islamic Affairs. True, there were some who ultimately joined bin Laden’s organization and cause, but he transferred them to a different list.

  Getting Van Dreeves to safety and protecting the computer and their hard drives was job one.

  Surviving was job two.

  “It’s a fake,” Van Dreeves said about the time Matt pushed him.

  Matt’s credo had always been that a good offense would eventually wear down a good defense. If you hit enough baseballs over the fence, you win. When in doubt, attack. In the nanosecond that flashed through Matt’s mind as he grabbed Van Dreeves and shoved him past himself and Hobart, he turned to Hobart and said, “We’re going up.”

  He stepped on the wooden ladder that led up to the trap door that was by now two-thirds of the way open and raised his rifle. He flipped on his flashlight and shined it right into the face of a startled man who was brandishing a weapon of some sort.

  Matt shot him in the face, the bullets kicking the man backward. The trap door did not fall, which to Matt meant that there was someone on the backside of it holding it open. In the next nanosecond he put two rounds into the flooring that served as the trap door. In the yellow beam of his MagLite he saw the wood splinter and a penetration hole appear through the panel, which began to fall. He pushed his shoulder into the door and lunged upward from the top rail of the ladder in the direction of the hinge on the trapdoor.

  The door snapped off its hinges and Matt tumbled onto the soft body of a moaning man. He scanned the body for weapons and saw an AK-74 about five feet away. He put his flashlight on the man’s bearded face and saw that he was grimacing in pain. Thinking that he may want a prisoner, he decided to check fire.

  “I’m up. One KIA, one WIA. Let’s move,” Matt said.

  Soon Hobart was up and pushing across the dead man that Matt had shot first.

  They were breathing heavily in the dark, letting the silence settle over them, making millisecond calculations as to what they should do next.

  “VD, stay below until we’ve got this thing sorted out.”

  “Roger.”

  “And protect that precious cargo.”

  “Roger.”

  “I’m thinking if the other house was rigged, maybe this one is also,” Matt said.

  “Roger that.”

  They both heard a noise opposite of their location, what Matt presumed was the front of the house, though he had no way to determine precisely where he was in relation to the home’s blueprint. Their preparation had not detected any tunnels and so he tried to calibrate what he did know about the home. Two back bedrooms, two other rooms and a front door that led to a walled compound. Pretty basic. Four squares within a larger square. Each room led to another room. They were against a wall and Matt slid his back along it until he reached a corner. Hobart had done the same thing, so that now they were in opposite corners aiming at the doorway.

  “I’ll take the door and then next room. You follow,” Matt whispered into his voice activated communications device. “VD, act as rear guard against anyone coming from the tunnel.”

  “You got it.”

  “Shoot to wound. This is Rahman’s place.”

  Matt moved silently to the door, which opened inward, so he took the opposite side and kicked it open, inviting a fusillade of automatic weapons fire in the general direction of Hobart.

  “You ok?”

  “Yeah, coming up your back,” Hobart said.

  With the door open, Matt and Hobart pushed back from the opening, both hearing the unmistakable click of a spoon popping from a hand grenade and seeing the equally unmistakable toss and whir and roll of the baseball sized object.

  “Grenade!” Matt screamed. But he realized that they were not the intended targets. It had been a careful toss to roll toward the sloping hole where the trapdoor was open. Matt had thought to leave the door open to make Van Dreeves’ route of egress from the tunnel easier. He had not calculated the enemy’s use of the open door. He thought about Van Dreeves and he thought about the hard drives and the database that was always there. He wondered if Al Qaeda kept a back up of the database and he suspected that they didn’t. Bin Laden had been anal retentive about using servers and anything the U.S. intelligence agencies could crack. Paper initially and then hard drives, which could be removed and stored and hidden, but were easier to manipulate and update than using paper and pencil.

  He heard the crunching roll of the grenade as it slid across the gritty, dirt floor. Turning, he dove across the reignited wall of lead that the enemy had started pouring into the room again. Like the shortstop that he was he dove with an outstretched glove hand, his left hand, watching the grenade bounce along. This was nothing but a sharply hit ground ball into the hole. Backhand this baby and then rifle it to first base. His weapon slapped him in the face and he felt the weight of his body armor slow him down as his fingernails scraped against the grenade that was rolling slowly toward Van Dreeves and the database that would always be there.

  His body was twisted and he was airborne as the grenade took a funny hop off the fuse straight up into the air, giving his body mass time to catch up and he clutched the round object with his left hand.

  Matt had turned hundreds of double plays as a shortstop and fielded thousands of ground balls in little league, high school and college. The key was the quick transfer of the ball from glove hand to throwing hand. Sometimes he caught the ground ball or the second baseman�
�s flip of the ball with his throwing hand and seamlessly, less than a second, could rocket the ball to wherever it needed to go. From the time a baseball would leave the bat, enter Matt’s glove, and then be released, less than two seconds would have transpired.

  The fuse on a standard M67 hand grenade lasted three to five seconds. If this was a three second fuse, Matt knew he was screwed. If five seconds, perhaps not. Matt calculated that already two seconds had transpired, as he wrapped his hand around the grenade and his body landed with a scraping thud on the dirt floor. He pictured the door directly behind him.

  He had no alternative but to whip his left arm backward, releasing the grenade, as if he were glove tossing the ball to the second baseman, a trick he had mastered at the University of Virginia. While not left handed, he was nearly ambidextrous, and flicked his wrist toward the open door with the machinegun fire raining down upon them.

  In those brief seconds, Matt heard the whirring of the hand grenade, the sound of machinegun fire, the screams of Hobart and Van Dreeves, and the chop of helicopter blades above the roof.

  Then the world stopped for Matt Garrett when the hand grenade and its millions of metal splinters filled the house.

  CHAPTER 78

  Spartanburg, South Carolina

  Sunday Evening

  Amanda found Brianna lying on the twin bed in her small bedroom. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with the word “GODDESS” in sparkling letters printed across the front, and white sweatpants. Amanda could see that she had been crying, though Brianna’s face was turned away from her. A salty path stained her left cheek and was clearly visible. Amanda also noticed Brianna’s old tennis racket in the corner of the room next to a pile of clothes. Two large posters of Britney Spears wearing next to nothing were hung on either side of the lone window. One of the posters was drooping from the top left-hand corner as the tape had dried and lost its adhesive properties.