by Jamie Marks
“I don’t think I have ever said no to food, but as much as I am going to regret asking this, honey, would you like to visit your sister before we both begin our new jobs? You know, once we start, we won’t have a great deal of free time, even with your sister living so close by nowadays.”
Kathy’s sister, Amanda, lived in Macon with her husband Craig and their three children Tarin, Sophie and David; all three of them were monsters in the Japanese tradition.
Steve wasn’t particularly fond of Amanda or her husband Craig.
“I don’t think so, honey, it maybe a little too soon...” Kathy said, and continued speaking in reference to when Steve and Kathy hosted a small family barbecue shortly after they had moved to Forest Park. The beers and wine flowed easily, and for once, the kids were relatively quiet, but with Steve being a painfully honest type of guy when he was drunk, the night suddenly took a dramatic turn for the worse and ended in tears.
Steve had little recollection of what had happened that night, but he did remember Craig telling him to go and fuck himself and the horse he rode in on. Steve then replied exuberantly, “That it was a fine horse and Craig wasn’t fit to kiss its ass.”
The next day Steve woke up on the living room floor with a sore jaw and an angry wife.
“How about we have a picnic in the park instead?” suggested Steve.
“Sounds great,” Kathy said, as they leisurely cruised by the gates of Fort Gillem.
THE CAPTAIN
As Steve and Kathy drove by Fort Gillem, an army-green Humvee came to a stop at the front of the gates. Its driver removed his cap and wiped his brow --- it was warm out.
The driver was Captain Louis Tyler of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the man responsible for the removal of any remaining ordnance from the grounds and the surrounding acres that encompassed Fort Gillem.
Tyler joined the military at the age of eighteen; he was a tall, lanky, southern boy who had a history of misbehavior, and a love for poor science fiction and B-grade horror movies.
Tyler’s first assignment after joining the USACE, was during the crisis in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the old jazz town. Tyler was one of many set to work rebuilding New Orleans’ smashed levees. Then after New Orleans, Tyler completed two tours in Iraq.
In Iraq, Tyler’s assignment was to restore power and water services to a small hamlet just outside of Baghdad, but in reality, being in country saw him spending much of his time bribing officials, and setting up hidden cameras to detect insurgents attempting to plant IEDs.
The days were long and it was tough and thankless work, with little reward. What advances his team had made were normally short-lived, either because of the insurgency, or because of cost. At best, Tyler could only manage to achieve a restricted power supply for a few hours of the day, while water services ran at a trickle.
His time in Iraq was disheartening. He found the people either resentful or at best eerily over-friendly. Tyler found it difficult to trust anyone who was not American, and it was in-country where he saw another view of life, one that saw human beings as cheap and expendable.
When he boarded the transport to leave for home, Tyler had the feeling that his being in Iraq had made very little difference to the local people and surrounding tribesmen. His only achievement was in keeping his own men alive, and that was the most any leader in such a conflict could be asked to do.
THE ODD COUPLE
Susan Shaw, a stunning, intelligent and extremely ambitious reporter with a sharp tongue, that was rarely holstered, was waiting at an intersection on Scott Boulevard, directly next to Hendrix Elementary. However, time can move slowly while waiting for traffic signals to change, and even slower for someone like Susan.
Finally, to her relief, the light turned to green, and Charlie, Susan’s cameraman and driver, slipped the truck into first and raced away.
Both Susan and Charlie worked at Channel Five, Atlanta, otherwise known as Fox-5. Fox-5 was in a major tussle with its main contender CNN. The rivalry between the two opposing networks was becoming close to unmanageable for local producers. No story was too small; no rock was left unturned, or phone untapped.
Both networks, realizing that local audiences liked to hear the name of their hometown in news bulletins, provided it wasn’t due to a hurricane or a college shooting, were in constant competition with each other, and with their own audiences. Each were armed with I-phones --- searching for the next quirky story to fill the thirty-second gap after the weather report, and would alternatively, post on YouTube.
Charlie didn’t mind driving the extra miles in his brand-new Wolfpac; a news truck which was a studio on wheels, capable of broadcasting world-wide.
Charlie, in his spare time, preferred online gaming to the difficulties of offline relationships. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t like real flesh and blood women. It was more a case that they were not interested in him. He didn’t know how to approach women and struggled to read their signals; apart from the obvious ones, they were like an enigma to him, confusing and nigh impossible to crack. He wanted a relationship. He just didn’t know how to go about getting into one. He certainly liked Susan --- she was his kind of woman --- but someone like her was definitely out of his league. The way things were headed, he’d considered himself lucky if he ended up with a female version of himself, another loser, for a loser.
He didn’t need a relationship with another loser. He wanted someone like Susan, but she despised men like Charlie. She hated his constant sweating and his compulsive overeating. She especially hated how he left greasy fingerprints everywhere --- God! You’re a fucking pig! She’d scream at him.
He was dead scared of her.
Susan was beautiful and vivacious with a killer body, and Carl Sagan smart. Even so, Carl Sagan didn’t have lips like hers. Thick, voluptuous, ruby-red lips that made her look even hotter than Lara Croft, Charlie often thought.
He felt like a lovesick puppy around Susan. He would suck in his gut and try not to lose his breath any time he would do anything that was even remotely physical, but he was too fat and too geeky for someone like her.
Charlie looked Susan up and down once more from the corner of his eye as he drove.
“Charlie, you do that one more time and I’ll knock you into the middle of next week,” Susan said. She wasn’t annoyed with Charlie exactly; she just enjoyed making his life hell. Susan found it fun, and was well aware one of her talents lay in dispensing cruelty.
“Sorry,” he said, while he kept his eyes on the road.
He hated that loathing look she would give him, that I despise you, you fat fuck look she did so well.
“I know you think it’s all fun and games driving around in your new toy truck, Charlie, but I don’t see it as fun, not when that bitch Tanya gets to go global behind the anchors’ desk with live crosses to London about some A-rab asshole.” Tanya was Susan’s closest rival at Fox-5, and considered by Susan’s detractors to be just as gorgeous and intelligent, but definitely much less bitchier than she was, and more willing to put her leg over. “She’s going global, and I’m going fucking where? I don’t have time for this shit. I never get the chances I deserve, I certainly don’t get the breaks she gets,” she said as a little vein at her temple begun to pulse, as it occasionally did. “It’s just not fair. I deserve more than this.” Susan folded her arms and pouted.
Charlie hated to see her upset. He wanted to say something to make her feel better, but he couldn’t think of what, if anything, he could say that would. He never could.
Slowing again for another light change, he glanced over at a C-Trans Bus. Two teenagers jumped from the buses open doors and darted across the road, ignoring the oncoming traffic. An elderly woman wearing a broad straw hat, struggled to get down the same steps as she exited the bus.
As Charlie continued trying to help Susan feel better, he saw a young Arab man reach out and gently clutch the old woman by her elbow, and help steady her as she struggled wi
th the steps.
The old woman smiled at the young man, while still clutching her bag tightly to her chest.
I wonder what Bill O’Reilly would think of that, Charlie thought. Not every Arab was a terrorist.
FBI HEADQUARTERS
Special Agent Ambrose sat across from Harris.
“I have some news for you about the person of interest MI-6 caught in London,” Ambrose said.
“Really, I’m surprised,” Harris replied. “I thought MI-6 only leaked information to the Russians. It’s amazing how times change.”
Ambrose smiled. “Indeed, times do change. Anyhow, he’s of Turkish origin...”
Harris laughed. “The entire free world knows he’s from Turkey,” Harris said as he drummed a solitary finger on his desk. “Do you have any more amazing facts to dazzle the mind?”
“Maybe. I called a friend of mine who works in data retrieval and Counter I-Defence strategies for the NSA,” Ambrose said. “I asked him if he knew anything about Batumi. He didn’t know too much, other than Batumi had been recently wiped off the face of the earth by a massive explosion. He told me that the base had been off the radar for years, but it did have a high level Bio-laboratory.”
Harris settled back into his chair.
“So I did a little more research,” Ambrose added. “Have you ever heard of a Doctor Josef Levy?”
“He and Shapinkov used to work together.”
“I’m not surprised to hear that,” Ambrose said, “because I think there may be a link to the heavy data traffic which came from the Tundra a while back, if you remember, and the data flows which started to come from Batumi soon after, just before the Georgian war. Both the Tundra and Batumi data packets contain links to Levy. And I think Shapinkov was in Batumi because of his friend, maybe they were---”
“That’s enough,” Harris said. He was astonished at just how much Ambrose had learned. “A very good friend of mine is dead. So be very careful about where you’re taking this Ambrose.”
“I believe Captain Bragin, the commander of Shapinkov’s OMON security detachment, is more involved in the explosion at Batumi than I first thought. I think he may have stolen something from the laboratory --- something Shapinkov was there to inspect --- and then sold it,” Ambrose said.
“Are you saying all this has something to with the Turk they found in London?” asked Harris. God, he was like a dog with a bone.
Ambrose smiled. “The NSA intercepted a photograph of Bragin’s decapitated head from an email account linked to a breakaway group of Al Qaeda, based in Anatolia Turkey.”
“Once you’re done talking,” Harris said, “I want the name of your NSA friend.”
“He’s a private contact.”
“He’s a Federal employee in a trusted position who talks too much. That is what he is.”
“I’m not comfortable revealing who he is---”
“I don’t care --- continue.”
“I believe the man arrested in London is a member of the group from Anatolia, and I think he was trying to use whatever Bragin had sold to the group, after Bragin murdered both Shapinkov and Levy, and then destroyed Batumi.”
Close enough is good enough --- he can have Bragin, thought Harris. “This group from Anatolia; who leads it?”
“A man named Al Rashid,” Ambrose answered.
“I doubt he’d have the network to organize a bio-attack on London,” Harris said, knowing exactly how large and dangerous Rashid’s network was. “Before you ask, I am familiar with his name. I’ve been in the business a while, you know.”
“He also has links in the United States. It may be bigger than just London,” Ambrose said.
Harris shrugged and said, “Just London. I would have thought that big enough.”
“Before 9-11, so would I,” Ambrose answered.
Harris considered his options. Ambrose wasn’t going to stop digging anytime soon, what did he have to lose? Harris sighed. “All right, investigate. However, no SWAT teams or dawn raids. Just investigate.” Ambrose understood. “Now, tell me that man’s name.”
NEW YORK
EARLY MORNING
It was an old, six-story, brownstone apartment building.
Each apartment had two windows with street views.
The basic floor plan of the building was two apartments per floor with a main central staircase. One street that was facing and rear alley exit had access to the upper floors via a roof emergency door. The use of the fire escape wasn’t an option, with much of it being eaten away by rust and deemed too unsafe to climb.
SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams had surrounded the building while sniper teams watched from a building directly across the street. There were three teams selected for the raid on the old brownstone building, Alpha, Beta and Charlie teams. Alpha team was to enter through the main doors at the front of the building and then ascend the staircase to assault apartment three.
Beta team was to follow Alpha into the building after a small delay, and then they were to offer support if required. Charlie team was to enter through the roof access door and then descend the main staircase to give flanking support to Alpha and Beta teams.
Each sniper team was to provide support where available and on request.
It was a very simple plan.
Ambrose watched both the Alpha and Beta teams from his position several buildings away, as they readied for their assault., The SWAT commander and his support team were nearby Ambrose.
After last minute checks of equipment and signals, each team member called in their final positions and readiness.
Deep down, Ambrose felt excited, but he tried to keep up a cool demeanor. He had a lot to lose if this went pear-shaped, maybe even more than just his career.
The timeline outlined for the raid, aimed for it being completed in less than five minutes, including firefights and target acquisition.
Each assault team member wore a black, fire-resistant Nomex combat suit, with extra body armor protection, including an outer tactical vest that held flash bangs and tear gas.
Kevlar helmets covered their heads, and gas masks hid their faces. They looked more like machines than men.
Each assault team member was armed with a semi-automatic pistol and a 9mm Heckler and Koch MP5, which was capable of firing 800 rounds per minute, while one member of each team also carried a FRAG-12, or 12 gauge, high explosive firing shotgun.
Ambrose saw the squad leader of Alpha team raise his thumb.
“Go!” Ambrose said to the SWAT commander who relayed the message on. Alpha team stormed into the building in single file. Alpha Point felt the pressure of his Heckler & Koch pushing tightly into his shoulder as the team entered the worn and dirty lobby, scanning the room for movement.
Nothing!
Alpha team then ascended the staircase as Beta team waited outside for their conformation.
Charlie Team, positioned on the top of the building, smashed the roof’s emergency access door wide open. The team then flooded down the staircase in single file toward the lower floors.
Moving swiftly, Charlie team’s point man was the first to enter the hallway on floor six.
The team’s adrenaline was pumping as they flowed forward to clear floor six of any hostiles that they may find.
The place seemed dead.
Charlie team radioed in that floor six was clear, and moved down to the next floor. Then Floor five was cleared in the same rapid pace. The building seemed as if it were empty.
The team then ran down the staircase to floor four, everything was going to plan.
Charlie Point swiftly moved along the hallway of floor four, with his MP5 swinging rhythmically from left to right until he came near apartment seven and eight’s door, both of which were ajar.
Charlie Point moved slowly forward and looked inside both apartments; he didn’t see anyone, but he did see blood and lots of it. Both apartments looked like a slaughterhouse. Calling his team forward, Charlie Point ordered them to search both a
partments --- no bodies were found.
The grisly find was then called in and acknowledged.
The only piece of information the squad leader neglected to mention were the wildly scattered and bloodied footprints, which were found in both apartments and the hallway.
When the SWAT commander told Ambrose about the bloody scene, Ambrose merely shrugged and said, “Dead bodies don’t just stand and walk away, do they?”
Ambrose felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. “Hello”
“Ambrose.”
It was Harris. “Yes.”
“Where are you, have you entered the building?”
“Outside the target building, and no.”
“Have you had any contact with anyone who has entered the building?”
“No. SWAT has just begun the raid. How did you know I was here?” Ambrose asked.
“If I had known you were going to attend I wouldn’t have let you off the leash,” Harris said.
“What do you mean?”
Alpha team reached the second floor within seconds of entering the building.
Alpha’s Point man, using a camera attached to his short-barreled MP-5, scoped the hallway ahead of his team; it appeared as if it was clear, his only concern being the open doors to apartments three and four and the bloody mess, which surrounded both.
Moving forward, Alpha Point saw in more detail the large, bloody handprints and smears, which had dried to the color of rusted iron.
Looking down he saw more bloodied footprints on the wooden floor and the carpet. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, and some of the bloodied tracks led to the street outside.
Alpha teams leader called the scene in, and after scanning the area, he reported that there were no bodies.
Ambrose waited for Harris to answer. “Things have moved fast. The bio-weapon is far worse than we first thought. The assault teams will become compromised. Evacuate the site and wait for the special response teams at the eastern intersection. Don’t tell anyone what I have told you,” Ambrose heard Harris say before the phone went dead.