by Thomas Waite
Galina was being modest. Her English was excellent, other than her reluctance to use contractions, which was not unusual for those for whom English was a second or third language. Better than Lana’s Russian, which she considered fair at best.
“I followed Tahir to ISIS and AQAP sites,” Galina went on. “Access logs. I have not cracked their actual messages yet. But there are so many of them to ISIS and another one from him to AQAP. A lot of men go between those two, like they are trying to decide which one to join, but Tahir’s back-and-forth is much more sophisticated. I do not know if he is communicating with them or trying to hack them. He might be working with both of them.”
Lana agreed, having done that kind of double duty herself on numerous occasions.
“But he seems to know his way around the websites. He does not hesitate. He enters them easily. Then he disappears into them in ways I have not been able to follow. Like he finds black holes in their security, or already knows their keys. I am working on it.”
“Are you finding any evidence of him compromising NSA’s perimeter?”
“Yes, but I am not sure he got very far.”
Doesn’t matter. That was great news, as far as Lana was concerned. It would give Galina ample justification, beyond Holmes’s order, for targeting Tahir, a legal resident, should a Senate committee ever threaten to crucify her for investigating him. Lana wouldn’t put it past those senators to use any tool in their box to try to pressure Galina into working for the NSA.
“I wonder if he detected me watching him,” Galina said. “He is very good, so he could have given me a trail to follow to the NSA. It was like he wanted me to see what he was up to—or anyone else doing online surveillance of him. Sending a signal even. But I do not know why he would want to do that.”
To alert us? Lana wondered. To key us in? Was he another spectral presence leaving cyber breadcrumbs behind? In case something happened to him?
“You said he didn’t get very far?”
“That was strange. He hacked five upper-level operatives with the highest security clearances. But once in their domains, he vanished.”
“Meaning you lost him?”
“No, he left the agency.”
“That is strange.”
“Show and tell, maybe.” Galina appeared to like her newfound Americanisms. “He might be as good as Oleg.”
Oleg Dernov, for whom Galina had been hacking at the time she and Lana first encountered each other last year. Dernov was as vicious—and talented—a cyberterrorist as Lana had ever met.
Until Tahir? Possibly. Lana still couldn’t figure out the Sudanese’s game. “So his nephew is supposed to be having ‘difficulties,’” she said. “Did he give any indication of what they might be?”
“No, that was the only reference.”
“Did he mention my daughter, Emma?”
“No.”
“How’s Alexandra?” Galina’s seven-year-old.
“Maybe good. We have to wait to see if the cancer stays gone. She is starting to sleep better. I am not. The doctor says she has a good chance.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.”
“I pray it is good enough.”
“I hope so,” Lana replied.
“She must see the doctor in a month.”
Cairo lumbered back into the living room, completing another of his nightly patrols. She called him over and rubbed his head. She had the urge to pull him close, but remembered Ed Holmes’s warning: “Cairo doesn’t cuddle.”
“I should tell you about something I found about Alexandra in the NSA files,” Galina said, as if she’d been mulling it over.
“Really?” What the devil? “Whose?”
“Marigold Winters.”
“Did Tahir break into hers? Did you follow him there?”
“No. I went there because she replaced the deputy director. I thought I should check her security. I found emails from Flowers to Senator Bob Ray Willens of Louisiana telling him to threaten me with the loss of Alexandra’s medical care if I did not go to work for the NSA.” Through Lana’s efforts, Alexandra had been receiving cancer treatments at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the highest ranking pediatric facilities in the U.S. “Can they take that away?”
“No.” Lana felt her blood pressure shoot so high so quickly the roots of her hair burned. It was as if someone—Flowers, perhaps—had grabbed a fistful of it. “Are you thinking of going to the NSA?” She had to ask. If anything could compel a parent to surrender to threats, it would be one to their child’s health.
No, not health. Her life.
“No. This Flowers woman must be a bully. I know you can take care of her, right?”
“I will. Absolutely.”
But how to fight back flummoxed Lana, although she had a chit or two she could cash in at the White House that might get her a few minutes with the President. Whether she could work her way past the palace guard to actually make her way into the Oval Office was another matter entirely. But Flowers was engaging in a grotesque abuse of power. She needed to be reined in—or exposed. Threatening a child’s health care might even be sufficient to send her packing for good.
“I’ll need a copy of what you found,” she told Galina.
“It could be traced to me.”
“Not after I launder it.”
Lana signed off, sitting back with the phone by her side. The one she’d always used for gambling. The one Galina had found all on her own. The Russian was an amazing digital analyst.
And then it hit her again: the itch to gamble. Lana found herself imagining face cards, then a pair of aces, on her phone, with “YOU WIN! YOU WIN!” flashing in red. She noticed the time, almost three-thirty.
You can’t.
For so many reasons. Without question, someone else would now know. And that someone had a cancer-stricken child who needed Lana’s support and strength, not her weakness.
Buck up.
Cairo rose quickly from his resting place. He must have heard something. He might be older and slower, but his ears were as alert as radar dishes.
Lana had her Sig Sauer under a cushion by her right hand, racked and ready, though she couldn’t fathom anyone slipping past her door without the security system signaling her.
What she hadn’t planned on was a person close to her slipping out a door with her own deep secrets.
• • •
Jimmy ran Sexy Streak without lights till he was far from Oysterton. Then he set the GPS for the oil platform on the electronic navigation charts and watched a white dot blink alive on the blue screen. It looked so harmless it was hard to imagine the horror of the beheadings that had taken place 140 miles ahead of him.
They’re crazy, he thought.
“Maybe as crazy as you are for going after them,” he said aloud.
He turned on a bow light, keeping the beam on low for another mile, then switched on the big headlights and pushed the chrome throttle forward.
The race boat responded with a bolt, racing up to 80 mph in seconds. It felt like the Lamborghini one of his rich clients had loaned him for a weekend.
The onrush of speed thrilled Jimmy, as it always had, but it also brought alive a deep fear of the industrial refuse floating in the Gulf. Hard enough to avoid at times in daylight. In darkness it could prove deadly.
Without looking away from the water, Jimmy put in ear buds and switched to CNN on the boat’s communications console. The network was reporting that widespread inoculations of Americans with smallpox vaccine had been scuttled after a suicide bomber blew himself up in a line in Rockville Center, New York. ISIS then pumped up the terror exponentially by announcing that infected Muslims were in lines across the U.S. “They will infect everyone who tries to defy Allah’s will.”
That announcement, according to the news network, was leading to widespread panic and fighting, with attacks on anyone perceived as Middle Eastern or Muslim. The CDC had advised health authorities in all fifty states to suspend the vac
cination program, “pending the full restoration of civil order.”
“Good luck with that,” Jimmy said to himself.
He feared he’d done nothing but help those ISIS terrorists from the time he’d forced them ashore from these very waters.
All you can do now is what you’re doing.
Jimmy felt like he was in the middle of a war movie in which a soldier goes off on a solo mission to save the day. But he heard no stirring music in the background, only the powerful rumble of those twin outboards pushing him ever closer to the oil platform.
To destiny, he thought.
Or to die.
Or to save someone worth saving. Maybe a whole lot of someones called Americans.
• • •
Lana finally dozed on the couch, waking ninety minutes later to Cairo’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor. His dark eyes stared at her from above his white muzzle, as if to say, “You okay?”
She nodded at him, just to see his reaction. He turned away and continued his umpteenth tour of her house. She realized she admired his ingrained sense of purpose—protection—and shared it fully.
Aware once more of her throbbing leg wound, she went back online, shocked to find video of an attack on Long Island that had targeted people who’d been waiting half the night to get their families vaccinated. She saw shredded children’s clothing and shoes and copious quantities of blood.
That grim account was followed by a report of an assault on Ed Holmes’s kennel near Hagerstown by two self-styled, homegrown ISIS terrorists, one of whom had posted on Facebook a minute before the attack took place that they were going to kill the dog that had gone after bin Laden.
And claim the reward, she thought.
When they didn’t find Cairo—saved by the call of duty down in Bethesda—they killed a ten-week-old Malinois puppy. Two retired Army Rottweilers ambushed the pair, killing the one who’d left the Facebook message.
Reuters reported paramedics on the scene had balked at treating the Islamist radical who’d survived. Despite severe wounds, the man was vociferously taking credit for the attack on the puppy.
Police officers forced the EMTs to offer him emergency medical measures and take him to a nearby hospital.
Lana heard Cairo heading up the stairs slowly.
It’s come to that? Killing a puppy?
She checked on Deputy Director Bob Holmes, who was still in the ICU and still seeing only family, which in his case included Donna Warnes.
Lana then received an email from park ranger Harry Riggs, who said Jojo remained immobilized. The dog’s spine had been almost severed during the knife attack. No word on whether he’d ever walk again. Riggs said Jojo would be kept sedated until he’d healed enough to safely assess his mobility.
Lana thanked Harry and checked the time, 4:42 p.m., before turning her thoughts to what she’d say to the President, if she ever got the chance for an Oval Office meeting.
• • •
Jimmy drew within ten miles of the rig. He spied the sky turning from starlit black to the darkest shade of gray. He had to risk racing closer without lights. He needed to reach that platform before they could see him. Otherwise, his mission would fail.
And they’ll have a boatload of fun killing you.
He gunned Sexy Streak up to 140 mph, racing blind until he shut down the engines one mile out. He let momentum and current take over from there. Normal security would have alerted those on the platform to an incoming vessel, but he hoped ISIS would be ill equipped to take over the more technical aspects of perimeter security, after killing almost everyone up there. Even more likely was that a specialist had activated a self-destruct program before ISIS could take full control of the facility.
Jimmy thought the odds might favor him so far.
A little more than a half-mile from the installation, Sexy Streak slowed almost to a stop. He stripped to his briefs, tied a line around his waist and the end to the bow, and slipped into the water.
The Gulf felt cold, which he attributed to his low-grade fever more than the water, which had been warmed by unseasonable highs all summer.
With the current still running with him, he started swimming and towing the boat toward the pontoons that supported the BP operation looming before him. If all went well, he’d have Sexy Streak tied up under them before dawn made visibility his greatest enemy.
And if things go to shit, Jimmy boy?
Then nothing’s gonna matter, he answered himself. Least of all you.
JIMMY WAS SHIVERING BY the time he towed Sexy Streak under the Blue Ring oil platform and hauled himself up onto a floating dock, tie line hanging from his hips.
Happy Daze, the forty-two-foot cabin cruiser that ISIS had hijacked to launch its assault on the rig, rested in a slip some twenty feet away. Jimmy had no intentions of leaving it afloat so ISIS could escape. That boat was getting a stick of dynamite on his way out.
If you get that far.
The oil rig was similar to BP’s ill-fated Horizon, which blew, burned, and killed eleven oil workers in 2010 before spilling five million barrels of crude into the Gulf. But Blue Ring’s potential for catastrophe was even greater—all ISIS had to do was sabotage the rig’s automatic shut-off valves, called BOPs, or “blowout preventers,” before destroying the oil pipe proper and subsea wellhead.
Jimmy figured if he knew that much from working just three weeks on a rig, then ISIS would likely know even more because the execution of the group’s plans—and most of the rig’s employees—had so far been both grisly and flawless. And the terrorists had made clear their desire to turn the Gulf into petroleum goo. But if Jimmy could blow the oil pipe running up to the platform before ISIS disabled the BOPs, the sudden change in pipe pressure should trigger the fail-safe mechanisms, if the oil companies had actually upgraded them after Horizon.
A big “if, ” he thought. But another “if” came to mind: If there had ever been a time to bank on hope, it had arrived this morning in all its shaky glory.
To get started, he tied up Sexy Streak and threw on his clothes, grateful for the warmth. Then he headed toward the nearest door, stilled by the sound of someone trying to key the lock.
Jimmy dug into his pocket and pulled out the Saturday night special the cantankerous Burr had loaned him, trusting the cheap .38 wouldn’t jam or backfire and blow off his face. No choice about using it, though: Anyone stepping through that door would see the race boat at a glance.
But they don’t need to see you.
He dashed to the side of the door that would open in front of him and give Jimmy cover for precious seconds. The person on the other side seemed to be trying a second key.
Must be ISIS. A Blue Ring employee wouldn’t have been fiddling around.
Now a third key. Jimmy was sweating now instead of shivering.
The lock opened and the steel door swung toward him. He caught a glimpse of a lone man with black hair and beard stepping out to the boarding area holding a Kalashnikov by his side. As the door slowly closed behind the fighter, Jimmy watched him turn toward Sexy Streak.
“Don’t move,” Jimmy said.
The man froze. The door swung back slowly. Too slowly. Jimmy wanted it closed to block the sound of gunfire.
“Drop the gun and turn toward me.”
The Kalashnikov clattered on the deck.
Jimmy aimed right between the man’s eyes, but another pair greeted his gaze: The fighter had a head hanging by his side, middle and ring fingers plunged into each socket and his thumb hooked into the mouth. Could have been a bowling ball.
A beat later the door did click shut.
Jimmy fired exactly where he’d aimed, and one of ISIS’s finest crumpled to the deck. The head he’d been holding started rolling toward the water.
Jimmy swore and lunged for it. The last thing he wanted was to fish it out. Right before it would have fallen off, he grabbed a shock of hair and rested the head upright on the deck so it wouldn’t take off on him again, though it n
ow gave the distinct appearance of bearing witness to the macabre goings-on in the immediate vicinity. Only then did Jimmy recognize the victim from television as one of the two oil workers who’d been taken prisoner with the rig’s chief engineer.
Jimmy commandeered the Kalashnikov and a beauty of a Browning 9 mm semi-automatic pistol, then tore open the dead killer’s shirt hoping to find body armor. None. But he spotted a long knife sheathed in black leather and pulled the blade out, wondering how many heads it had severed. The knife was clean. He slipped it back in the sheath and hung it from his belt.
With a wary eye on the door, he climbed back on Sexy Streak, put in one ear bud, and scanned news channels to try to find out the extent of the violence up above. Had all three been killed?
An AP report on a New Orleans radio station said an oil worker had been beheaded because the chief engineer had claimed he couldn’t shut down the BOPs.
Just as Jimmy wondered why they hadn’t dropped the head into the Gulf, as they had the others, the reporter quoted from a terrorist communiqué: “We will use the heads of the last three men on this rig as soccer balls on the White House lawn as soon as we take Washington.”
“You’re not getting anywhere near the White House, you sons-of-bitches,” Jimmy said to the dead man. “And neither are you,” he added in more soothing tones to the roughneck’s head a few feet away.
He checked out the Kalashnikov. He’d never handled one but knew their reputation for reliability, as well as a lack of accuracy.
Are you really going to use that?
Jimmy had no choice, not in any world in which he wanted to live. They’d started killing the innocent again. He couldn’t in good conscience merely blow the oil pipe and leave. He’d have to go up to that platform and do whatever he could to save the last two men and the Gulf of Mexico, which he loved as much as the Louisiana land on which he’d been born.
He grabbed the keys from the dead man and headed back toward the door.