Oath to Defend

by Scott Matthews

  Casey dropped the Relentless down until they were flying just above the tree tops for the last three hundred yards. As he swung around to land on the other side of the hangar house, they saw there were no vehicles in the driveway.

  As soon as the helicopter’s rear wheels touched the tarmac, Drake sprang for the door behind Casey and jumped to the ground, fifty yards from the hangar house.

  ~~~

  At the other end of the runway, Barak stared out the window next to the copilot seat in his jet. His pilot had just turned the jet around for takeoff at the north end of the runway when he’d seen the red and black helicopter come in low and swing around to land beside the hangar house.

  Allah was on his side. Another ten minutes, and they wouldn’t have been able to pull the Hawker out of the hangar and onto the taxi way. He didn’t know who was pursuing him in the sleek helicopter, or how they had found him, but he didn’t really care. In another minute they weren’t going to find a trace of him in this cursed land.

  He gestured for the pilot to takeoff and watched as a man ran to the side of the hangar house and turned to wave back at the helicopter. With his cell phone in his hand, Barak waited until they had raced down the runway to liftoff. As he flashed past the hangar house, he sent the message to the disposable phone inside the house to detonate the Semtex surprise he had left there.

  Turning to look back as the Hawker gained altitude, he saw the hangar house explode and felt the shock wave hit the plane.

  ~~~

  Casey stepped down from the Relentless and saw Drake wave him forward. As he ran around the red nose of the helicopter, the hangar house erupted in a flash of fire. Instinctively, he turned his head away from the blast. When he looked back, the side of the house where Drake had been crouching was now a just a pile of debris.

  He was running to the place where he had last seen his friend when the jet that had just taken off exploded in a burst of flame and began falling to earth just past the end of the runway.

  ~~~

  A Hispanic man in his late forties and smoking a fat Cuban cigar was standing beside a black Chrysler 300c. He held a cell phone in his left hand. As he watched the white Hawker jet explode and burn before his eyes, he raised his right hand in a universal salute of disrespect. A just and fitting death, thought Hector, for the assassin who had killed the head of his cartel.

  61

  His first sensation when he regained consciousness was that his head hurt and the light was too bright. When he tried to lift his head, dizziness was added to the list along with a throbbing pain in his left arm and most of the rest of his body.

  A familiar voice told him to relax.

  “You’re in the emergency room,” it said. “You have a concussion, a broken arm, contusions, and lacerations. And you look like hell.” The voice turned into Mike Casey. “But you’ll live because I’ve seen you hurt worse than this.”

  Drake tried to open his eyes again, but promptly decided it wasn’t worth it. “What happened?”

  “The house blew up and fell on you.”

  “Whose house?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  A voice he didn’t recognize saved him from admitting that he didn’t remember.

  “Let’s let Mr. Drake rest now,” someone said. “We’re almost finished here. He’ll be moved to Ortho-Neuro, third floor and you can visit him there.”

  Other voices, different smells, and a ride in an elevator to a room with dimmer lights brought Drake to a place where it felt like it would be a really good idea to sleep for awhile.

  Soft voices in the room woke him later. Looking up very carefully, he saw Mike and Liz standing on one side of the bed and his secretary and her husband standing on the other.

  “How are you feeling?” Margo asked as she straightened the blue sheet that covered him.

  He managed a smile. “Two aspirin and a good shower and I’ll be fine. I might not be in the office tomorrow, but I’m fine.”

  She shook her head. “The doctor said it might be longer than that. He wants you to rest for a day or so, then he’ll run some more tests. You were unconscious for close to half an hour. I told him to keep you as long as he needed to, that I’m used to running your office by myself.”

  Drake looked at her husband. “Paul, you’re married to her. What does a guy have to do to get a little sympathy?”

  “I haven’t been married long enough to find out,” Paul said with a smile.

  Drake carefully turned his head. “Mike, you asked me if I remembered what happened. Last thing I remember is landing at the hangar house….”

  “You ran to the house and stopped against the wall under the deck. When the house exploded, the shock wave blew the wall out. When we dug you out, you were unconscious. You stayed that way till we got you to the ER.”

  He considered this for a minute. “Was Barak in the house?”

  “No, we think he was in his jet at the other end of the runway. He flew over just as the house exploded. We think he detonated Semtex in the house, enough to bring down a building three times that size.”

  “So he got away?”

  “Not exactly,” Casey said. “His jet climbed to maybe five hundred feet and then it exploded too. Liz and her people haven’t confirmed from the remains they found that Barak was on board, but I think he was. Preliminary report is someone rigged Semtex under the copilot’s seat.”

  “It’s over then,” Drake said. He closed his eyes and asked, “What about the bomb at the polo field?”

  Liz took a turn answering his questions. “It was Semtex, same as the hangar house. It was a shaped charge planted in a storage compartment on the side of Vazquez’s horse trailer. We think Barak was tying up loose ends and creating a diversion so they could run the nuke to the dam.”

  Drake opened his eyes again. “If Vazquez was the target, someone had to wait for him to get next to his trailer. Do we have a suspect for that?”

  “No, but we’ve collected everyone’s cell phones and we’re hoping there are pictures that will help identify the bomber. We have a team at Wyler Ranch and we’re interviewing Mr. Abazzano in Los Angeles. It all leads back to that ranch and the people there. It might take some time, but we’ll put it all together.”

  “While they’re doing that, ole buddy,” Casey said, “I’m going to fly my guys home and get reacquainted with my wife. Liz has been gracious enough to ask for my bill for all the help we provided you. She’s also offered to stay over while they continue the investigation here and drive you home when you’re ready.” He reached across the bed to give his friend a secret handshake.

  “Thanks Mike, tell your kids Uncle Adam will visit them before Christmas.”

  “I expect I’ll see you before then, if you continue working with this lady.” Casey nodded toward Liz and walked out of the room with a wave to Margo and Paul Benning.

  “We should be going too,” Paul Benning said. “Margo’s had enough excitement for one weekend, and I need to get back to work.”

  “Thanks for running down that license plate for me,” Drake said, “and for working with Larry at the polo field. Burgers and beer on me when I get back.”

  Margo leaned down and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “I don’t like seeing you in a hospital bed. Come back to work soon, because your desk is a mess,” she said. There was a trace of moisture in the corners of her eyes when she turned to leave.

  “I should go too,” Liz said. “Paul got the sheriff to let me use an office. I need to make a full report to the Secretary on what we learned about the nuke and Barak. He’ll want to talk with you when you’re feeling up to it, and he wants to update you on the company he wants you to visit in San Francisco.”

  “Stay at the Senator’s place tonight, if you want,” Drake said, “and use my car. If you’re sure you want to drive me home, you should get use to the racing clutch in it.”

  “All right, I will. Now rest and enjoy the Jello and juice. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said
and gave his hand a squeeze.

  Drake watched her leave. He had never let anyone else drive his Porsche.

  After a moment, he raised his right hand and opened his fist close to his eyes to see the challenge coin Casey had passed to him with the secret handshake. It was from Casey’s old Night Stalkers unit, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment that provided helicopter aviation support for special operation forces. Under the unit insignia on the shiny medallion was the Night Stalker motto, Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.

  If you wore a military uniform, you carried a challenge coin and could produce one immediately any time you were challenged drinking inside an NCO or officers’ club on any military post or base anywhere around the world. Once a challenge coin was slapped down on a bar, tradition demanded that everyone else had to quickly answer the call by slapping down their own coins or pay the price and buy drinks for everyone.

  Drake smiled and closed his hand over the coin. With the secret handshake and the unseen exchange of the challenge coin, his friend had acknowledged their victory that day and thanked him for not quitting. Casey knew he couldn’t quit. They had both taken the same oath to protect the country and it was an oath that never expired.

  Author’s Note

  In my first novel, THE ASSASSIN’S LIST, I created a plot that involved American criminals who had converted to Islam while in prison and were trained as assassins.

  Assassination has always been a terror tactic and still is, as the October, 2011 assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., demonstrates; our prisons are recognized by prison officials as recruiting centers for homegrown terrorists, both here and abroad.

  Since 9/11, 209 Muslim-Americans have been indicted for violent terrorist plots, an average of just under 20 indictments per year. So, I wrote about one threat to our national security that some Americans might not have heard about.

  In this, my second novel in the Adam Drake series, I developed a plot that involved a strike at a vulnerable part of our infrastructure—our dams.

  The Department of Homeland Security issued a report in 2012 that examined 25 terrorist attacks on dams around the world between 2001 and 2011 that were similar, although fortunately not as destructive, as the attack depicted in this work of fiction.

  It’s another age-old tactic that is being used by today’s terrorists.

  The projected casualties mentioned in OATH TO DEFEND are based on existing and current assessments made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for this particular dam.

  My purpose in creating stories that involve potential terror plots isn’t to alarm readers, although I think we have become complacent about terrorism since 9/11, it’s just to tell a story that’s plausible as well as entertaining. I hope I have done that.

  Excerpt from THE ASSASSIN’S LIST

  1st in the Adam Drake Series

  At the back of the executive office building, Kaamil Sayf waited in the shadows outside an emergency fire door. At midnight, the security system his company installed and maintained would crash and go offline for five minutes. In those five minutes, he needed to run up four flights of stairs to the CEO’s office, retrieve a keylogger device he’d placed on the CEO’s computer a month ago, and get back out before the security system rebooted.

  On the outside, after his prison conversion to Islam, he led a covert cadre of assassins working as employees of the International Security and Information Services, or ISIS. The mission he trained for, and was selected to lead, aimed to assassinate powerful American leaders. Mighty America killed its enemies with cowardly high-flying drones, but the world would soon know how jihadists killed enemies, up close and personal.

  Before the first strike next week, he had to ensure encrypted passwords for the security plan at the chemical weapons depot had not changed. The only way to know was to retrieve the keylogger that recorded every keystroke on the CEO’s computer.

  When his watch flashed 12:00 a.m., Kaamil used a key to open the steel fire door and ran up the stairs. He knew the old security guard posted at his station at the main entrance wouldn’t hear him, just as he knew the security cameras wouldn’t record his visit for the next five minutes. No one was expected in the building.

  He raced down a long hallway to the middle of the top floor. Through Janice Lewellyn’s office, he entered the CEO’s inner sanctum. Kaamil was under the large rosewood desk when the elevator doors chimed. Somebody besides the security guard was in the building. Kaamil pocketed the device, getting up as the office lights came on, and froze.

  Sweat formed on his forehead when he heard someone walking into the office.

  “What are you doing in here?” Janice Lewellyn demanded. “Why are you hiding in Mr. Martin’s office?”

  “Take it easy, Mrs. Lewellyn, you know me. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m just checking to make sure the upgrade for the security system is working.”

  “Since when do you do middle-of-the-night upgrades without my clearance? I think you better stay here while I call security. You shouldn’t be in Mr. Martin’s office.”

  “Call security. They know all about it. I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Lewellyn.” Kaamil feigned a smile, hoping she didn’t notice the beads of sweat on his forehead.

  As Janice Lewellyn turned toward the phone on her desk, Kaamil took an Emerson combat folding knife from his pocket. Moving quickly, he caught her from behind and pulled the razor-sharp blade across her throat.

  Lowering her body to the floor, he cursed his rotten luck. He would keep on the surgical gloves he was wearing until he left the building. And pray to Allah nothing was left behind to identify him, because his five minutes were almost up.

  He would have enough trouble explaining the collateral damage to his leader without worrying about the police.

  Excerpt from dark trojan

  3rd in the Adam Drake Series

  Ryan Walker parked his Mercedes under the porte-cochere and had his finger on the brass doorbell to the right of the massive, carved mahogany door when it was opened by a tall, heavy-set man in his late thirties.

  “Mr. Walker,” David Klein said, “come in.”

  As Walker stepped in and shook hands with his host, he was surprised at the strength in the large man’s fleshy hand. He followed Klein through the foyer and into the great room, where he saw another man standing at the bar to the right of a stone fireplace.

  Klein made the introductions. “This is Robert Parker, the CEO of Ra Solar. Care for a drink?”

  “Single malt, drop of water, would be fine,” Walker said. “Is that your boat down there?” he asked as he walked to the floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking the lake. He knew the answer, of course, but he wanted to get a read on the man.

  “It’s a solar-powered catamaran,” Klein answered. “Biggest boat on the lake. We could take a cruise later, if you’d like.”

  “I can’t stay that long. Congressman Sanchez tells me both of your companies are in trouble,” Walker began as he took a seat in one of the leather arm chairs near the fireplace.

  “How much did Sanchez tell you?” Parker asked.

  “Not much. So I did my own research. You, Mr. Parker, couldn’t turn your company around with less than a quarter of a billion dollars. There’s no market for your solar-powered home charging stations for electric cars.” He smiled and turned to Klein and added, “Just as there’s no market for Mr. Klein’s electric cars. Despite your president’s lofty goal of putting a million electric cars on the roads, no one will be buying that many electric cars. And no one is going to be foolish enough to loan you that kind of money.”

  “Then why are you here?” Klein asked.

  “Because Congressman Sanchez also hinted that you might have something other than capital investment in mind.”

  “Assuming we did have something else in mind,” Parker said, “how do we know we could trust you to discuss it?”

  “I’ll give you two reasons,” Walker said in a level voice, “and th
en I want you to stop wasting my time. First, I think you both suspect Congressman Sanchez has connections to the drug cartels. He does, and it’s because I helped him establish those connections, which net him far more money than the paltry sums you have given him. “Second, I know the government would be happy to arrest you, Mr. Parker, on environmental terrorism charges if they knew about the logging equipment you blew up in the Northwest. You’ve always been an activist, but some of it wasn’t always legal, was it?”

  As the partners looked at each other, Walker came to the point. “Now, if I’m willing to offer my services to you and admit that I work with the drug cartels and a dirty politician, why do you think you can’t trust me to consider whatever it is you have in mind?”

  Klein turned to Parker. “Is he telling the truth about your tree-hugging days?”

  Walker saw by Parker’s steely glare there was a lot Klein did not know about his quiet, nerdy friend.

  An hour later, after listening to their rambling and sophomoric plan to crash the U.S. electric energy grid, Walker drove back to the airport in Reno with their pledge of $10 million for his assistance. As he drove, a plan began forming in his mind. He remembered learning from an old client of his that their plan had been considered and discussed. Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran, wanted to destabilize America in the very way Klein and Parker were suggesting. Walker’s new plan. If they were willing to stand up as front men for a terrorist strike of this magnitude, why not help them in every way possible?

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