by Brad Taylor
He saw a row of narrow columns to his front, four in a parallel line perpendicular to him, hissing steam out of the top. The target.
All he needed was to take out one, and the refinery would be put off-line for weeks. The end state would be a rebel success against a government facility, which would cause the Chinese to rethink their tepid efforts at stopping the civil war. Rethink their support for the Sudanese government because their own bottom line would now be affected with the loss of oil imports. They couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t a precursor to another successful attack by the rebels.
Brett gave no thought to whether the strategy would work, only about the tactical method of engagement. The device he had brought was a test item. Something that should take out a tower with little effort, but he had no real idea if it would work. One thing was for sure: If it didn’t, the clowns he was with would get nothing done.
He low-crawled forward until he was within eighty meters of the first column, then opened his rucksack. He pulled out a tripod and a device that was the same size as a gallon stewpot. He was preparing it for initiation when he heard gunfire outside the fence.
Dumb-ass bastards.
He frantically began aiming the device as the gunfire grew in volume. He saw men spilling out of buildings next to the columns, thankfully drawn to the sound of the guns. He rose up to check his aim and was caught in the headlights of a vehicle screaming down the perimeter fence, just to the right of the columns.
He hit the ground, breathing hard, wondering if he’d been seen. He glanced up and saw the headlights swerve toward him.
Holy shit….
He grabbed the initiation device and rolled away, frantically jabbing the button. The device exploded, sending its deadly payload toward the column.
He looked up and saw the first tower buckle. Then the second. And the third. All spewed out an enormous amount of vaporized fuel in various stages of distillation. A split second later, the gaseous cloud erupted in a violent explosion, the shock wave slamming him to the earth.
He rolled around, his ears ringing, his conscious brain screaming at him to find the truck. Eliminate the threat.
He rose to his knees and saw the truck on its side, burning furiously, knocked out by the fuel-air explosion. The entire refinery was on fire, the battle to his rear now silent.
What the hell did I just use? What did they give me?
He began running flat out to the perimeter fence and his exfil to the south.
Two days later, Han Wanchun studied the reports on the demise of the oil refinery. As a partner in the Great Wall Industry Corporation, purportedly a Chinese technology consortium, there was no reason for him to be privy to the secret satellite data showing the destruction wrought by the rebel band. No reason for him to be allowed to read the sensitive firsthand reporting from the Chinese workers on the ground. But as a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, Han had access to whatever information he needed to conduct his mission, which, unlike the false statement propagated by the Great Wall corporation, wasn’t to develop technology. It was to steal it.
Reading the reports, Han realized that something more than a motley band of rebels was involved. There was no way the tribal members could wreak the havoc shown with small arms alone. He cared not a whit about the genocide occurring in Darfur, or about the loss of the refinery. Not his job to do so. But whatever had caused the damage was something to be concerned about. Maybe something to covet.
The strike on the oil refinery was designed to get Chinese attention. As often happened in the hazy world of covert operations, it had accomplished the task, but not in the way the United States intended.
Han put the reports back into the classified sleeve on his desk, the germ of an idea beginning to form.
3
Present Day
J
ennifer Cahill noticed her speedometer had crept past seventy miles an hour, causing her to reflexively glance into the rearview mirror and pull her foot off the gas. It wouldn’t do to get pulled over by some North Carolina redneck sheriff after all she had been through. Too close to finishing. No need to rush. Plenty of time. No cops appeared out of the tree line. The only thing she saw on the desolate road behind her was a pickup truck. It was a monster four-by-four, and gaining fast. She felt a little spike of concern but quelled it when she remembered all of the other trucks she had seen driving around the outskirts of Boone over the past seven days. Way to go. You’ve fully converted into a paranoid. Even farmers cause you to flinch.
The adrenaline subsiding, she felt the weariness seeping back through her like waves rolling into a beach. She had been operating on little sleep for days, and she knew she would either finish this today or she wouldn’t finish it at all. No way was she going back to The Hole again. No way on earth. For the thousandth time, she wondered why she was stupid enough to agree to this. I could be on a dig in South America. Or in grad school, sleeping all I want. Instead, I’m out here playing Jane Bond.
The pickup had gained considerably in her rearview mirror, appearing behind her after every second bend or so. She knew that like every other local, he’d pass her in a cloud of dust, daring anyone to appear in the blind spot around the curve. She decided to let him pass, then track behind at his speed. Let him get the ticket.
The truck drew close enough to allow her to see the farmer behind the wheel. A great big bear of a man with a full beard and the ubiquitous baseball cap. He pinned up right behind her bumper, apparently waiting on the road to straighten out long enough to allow him to test his luck. When it did, Jennifer slowed down and pulled a little to the right to let him to pass. She saw him signal and veer out, then returned her eyes to the road. A second later, she knew something was wrong.
He should have shot right by her. Instead, he was matching her speed in the oncoming lane. The benevolent farmer was gone, replaced by a scowl that was concentrating intently on the rear of her car. Shit. He’s going to PIT me. She knew the truck was about to slam into her rear quarter panel and push her sideways, spinning her into the ditch. The minute she lost traction on her rear tires, she was done. She knew this because she had just learned to do it a month ago.
She looked for an out, and saw nothing but trees blurring by on her right. She was trapped. And I helped him do it. Idiot. She seized the initiative, jerking the wheel to the left and slamming broadside into the truck in an attempt to get him out of position. Her little sedan did nothing to alter the truck’s trajectory. Instead, she ricocheted back into her lane, weaving left and right, making her manhandle the steering wheel to regain control. She felt the truck kiss the rear of her car and saw the driver crank the wheel to the right, forcing her rear end to begin to slide. She turned into the spin in a last desperate attempt to break the skid. She failed. A split second later, her car was rotating out of control. In a blur, she saw the truck rocket past and disappear as her car continued to spin into the right-side ditch. Her travel was brought to an abrupt halt when the front of the sedan hammered into a tree, causing her to crack her head into the driver’s-side window.
Woozy, she fumbled with the door latch, desperate to get the package from the rear seat and run. She had no plan other than to get away from here. Away from the bearded truck driver. A memory flitted across her consciousness. Her hanging from a beam, naked. The room freezing cold. A woman with a foreign accent hosing her down with water, demanding answers. A man behind the woman leering, waiting his turn. Not going back to The Hole.
She fell onto the ground, turned to the passenger door, and found herself facing the bearded man. Much bigger outside of the truck. Showing not a whit of compassion.
“Where is it?” he said.
She decided to keep to her cover, acting like she couldn’t believe this idiot had just run her off the road. Anything to buy herself some time.
“Are you crazy? You just wrecked my car! You’re not even asking if I’m all right. Jesus. I ought to call the police right now. You’d better have some
insurance—”
He cut her off by slapping her hard across the face with a hand the size of a ham, knocking her to the ground.
“I don’t have time for this bullshit. Tell me where it is or I’m going to get rough. It’s over. Don’t make it any worse.”
On her knees, Jennifer looked up at him and stammered. He drew his hand back again, causing her to throw up her arms and shout, “Don’t!”
The bearded man smiled at her reaction and said, “Tell me.”
Jennifer dropped her head to her chest and began to cry. In between the sobs racking her body, she said, “It’s underneath the front passenger seat.”
The man turned away without another word, bringing a phone to his ear.
“It’s Radford. She’s done. I’ve got the package.”
He listened for a second, then said, “No, it didn’t end well. She’s sitting here crying like a baby. Or like a woman. I told you this whole experiment was stupid. No way is any girl going to be able to do operator shit. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Send someone out for her. The car’s pretty fucked up and I don’t think she can drive.”
Still making sobbing noises, Jennifer watched him circle around to the passenger side, tracking his movement like a predator. She waited until he bent over and disappeared from view before trotting lightly around the car. When she reached the door, she saw him facedown in the footwell, craning his neck to see beneath the seat, his right arm down in the well but his left arm holding on to the seat itself. Right in front of her. As if it were day one of combatives all over again and her instructor was giving her an easy gift.
4
K
eshawn Jackson pulled next to the white coupé in the small parking area for substation 117. He stared at the vehicle for a second, making up his mind. The car was not supposed to be there. The substation was supposed to be deserted. For what he needed to do, it had to be deserted. On the other hand, he couldn’t come back here a second time. The Baltimore Gas and Electric Company truck he drove had a built-in GPS to facilitate recovery operations after a storm or other disaster. It would register him being here. Once could be explained away, but twice would invite scrutiny. As an ex-con, he was a low-level worker. A cable dog. Someone who did the manual labor of getting power back on, supporting the more experienced linemen, not someone who had any reason to be at substation 117.
It dawned on him that he was about to break the law for the first time in over five years. He felt no shame. Before his job at BGE, he had been a gang member and a career petty criminal, in and out of jail for everything from drugs to assault with a deadly weapon. His last stint had been at the infamous Attica prison in New York, where he had found religion. As for many inmates before, God had saved his soul. He had identified what had been wrong with his previous life and found a reason to belong. And a reason to blame. Since then, he’d been on the straight and narrow, a model citizen, waiting to give back something for what his newfound faith had given to him. There were three others from his prison prayer group just like him, working in electrical companies in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Making up his mind, he decided to go inside the small concrete-block house. He was in his BGE uniform, so he wouldn’t be completely out of place. If he saw someone, he’d throw out an excuse and leave. If not, he’d get to work.
He dialed the combination on the chain-link gate and passed through, walking underneath the lines heading in and out and ignoring the myriad of transformers. What he wanted was inside the building. Substation 117 was one of a handful that had a server inside that allowed access into the BGE network. They were sprinkled throughout the service area to allow monitoring of the grid without having to travel to a central control node.
He scanned the facility inside the fence line, but didn’t see a soul. Maybe the guy just parked here and went somewhere else, he thought, although the chances of that were unlikely, since the substation was out in the boonies, in a rural area west of Baltimore, Maryland. Not a whole lot of places to go from here.
He punched in the combination on the metal door and entered the concrete structure. It was small, only two rooms with a closet. Most of the area was filled with analog equipment and circuit breakers to pull the substation off-line in an emergency. He didn’t see anyone inside the building, which caused him to let out his breath. He also didn’t see the server, which made him wonder if his information had been wrong. He opened the closet door and smiled. Inside on a desk was a normal-looking desktop computer. The screen was off, but he knew it was running by the blinking hard-drive light. He looked around once more, then pulled out a thumb drive and stuck it into a USB port.
He had no expertise at all in what he was doing, but then again, he didn’t need any. His contact from the prayer group had told him to simply stick in the thumb drive and it would do the work. The mass hysteria and multiple news reports of cyber threats and the vulnerability of the U.S. system to hackers had caused a phalanx of firewalls and other security measures to be implemented in the BGE power grid. All were directed outward, at the access points to the Internet, where the threat was supposed to live. Nothing had been done to protect from an attack on the inside, using BGE’s own hardware. A lesson they would learn the hard way.
Watching the erratic blinking LED on the thumb drive, Keshawn was startled by light spilling in from the outside door. Before he could react, he heard, “Hey, what are you doing?”
He turned around and saw a smallish man in a coat and tie. Shit. Management.
Blocking the view of the computer, he said, “Nothing. A buddy of mine did some work here yesterday and thought he’d left his sunglasses. My route was over here today, so he asked if I’d look.”
The man cocked his head suspiciously. “And he left them inside this building? What’s he do?”
“He’s a cable dog. Like me. I don’t know what he did at this substation. Look, they ain’t here anyway, so I’ll just go.”
Keshawn could tell the man was still suspicious, but the fact that he worked for BGE seemed to be tipping the scales. He turned to close the closet door, which was a mistake. The man saw the blinking thumb drive.
“What the hell is that? What are you doing with the server? Do you know how bad you could screw things up?”
Keshawn said nothing. He simply reached out and clamped both of his hands around the man’s neck, squeezing with all of his might. The man fought back, at first trying to pull Keshawn’s hands away with brute strength, then resorting to ineffectual hitting. When his face went bright red and his eyes began to bulge, he seemed to realize he was truly in a fight for his life. He began clawing at Keshawn’s face, scratching gouges on his cheeks. Keshawn maintained the pressure until the man passed out, then continued on, kneeling on his chest and squeezing until he was sure the man was dead.
Keshawn slowly let go, looking deeply into the half-closed eyes of the body on the ground for signs of life. He saw none. He smiled and whispered, “Allahu Akbar.”
Finally, after years of waiting, he had begun his part of the jihad.
5
I
heard Radford’s transmission in disbelief. I just couldn’t picture Jennifer completely breaking down. Then again, she had never been placed under so much pressure in so little time. Even given her experiences last year. Turbo, the guy in charge of this section, said, “Well, that’s it. Let’s wrap this up and go get a beer.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “We don’t do anything until we get a debrief from Radford. Let it continue.”
Turbo rolled his eyes and said, “Pike, are you shitting me? You think your chick’s going to come through that door? Radford’s right, and you know it. This whole thing was a waste of time and money.”
Like most of the men inside the Taskforce, Turbo was a he-man woman hater. Any thought of a woman encroaching on his meat-eater world caused a fit. He wanted Jennifer to fail, with all of his heart. I used to be just like him, but after she saved my life, I became a believe
r. I had convinced her to do this, and wanted her to succeed more than I was willing to admit. Even if it looked like it was going to go Turbo’s way, I wasn’t doing anything until I spoke to Radford.
“Another couple of minutes won’t hurt. She’s only got eight minutes left anyway. Let it ride.”
Turbo grimaced and stomped away. Knuckles, the man to my right, finally spoke up.
“You sure you want to continue? You think she can handle the RTL again? Even if she says yes, do you think it’s fair to put her through that?”
I said, “She can do this.”
“Pike, I know she did some amazing shit overseas last year, but maybe this is just too much. She came pretty damn close, and that’s going to mean something to the boys.”
Knuckles was somewhat of a woman hater as well. He had been my second in command before I left the Taskforce and was now in charge of my old team. He’d gotten mixed up with Jennifer and me in a chase for a terrorist in Bosnia last year and had seen Jennifer operate a little bit. Not as much as me, but he’d seen enough to wonder. If Jennifer made it through this, he’d be a believer too.
Even so, Knuckles might have a point. Maybe I was overambitious in asking Jennifer to attempt Assessment. She wasn’t coming onboard as an official operator. She was just a partner in our business—a cover organization designed to support Taskforce activities, not execute them. Given that, she would be the first Taskforce female who came even tangentially close to the sharp end of the spear. We had plenty of female intel analysts and a smattering of case officers, but they all exited stage left when we did an Omega operation. I knew the meat eaters would need to trust Jennifer, sometimes with their lives. They wouldn’t do that unless she earned their respect, and I figured there would be no better way than to make her go through Assessment just like the males.