The briefing had been just that – brief. A tip off. A location, abandoned, far out to the south of Basra. Unreliable source, a hostage sighting. Proceed with extreme caution. Everybody knew what that meant. As a former regular US Army soldier and now Georgian reservist supporting the fledgling Iraqi army as it fought to control the country against the ferocious rise of Islamic State, Larry was well used to combat situations, but this one was a tight–wire even for him. Just get us in there for Christ’s sake and get it over with.
‘Eagle eye, in position.’
The snipers were ready, covering from higher vantage points further back in the district. There was little wind and they were “sun down”, the sun behind them and thus not restricting their vision, perfectly placed to pick off any ambush attackers.
There was a moment’s pause and then the commanding officer’s voice crackled down the radio.
‘Entry team, fire team, go now now now!’
Larry burst into motion and dashed into the compound as behind him twenty more soldiers, all heavily festooned with webbing, weapons, water and other battle kit thundered across a deserted courtyard. Larry’s eyes swept the scene as he moved, hyper–alert for any sign of a threat.
Debris was strewn across the courtyard, desiccated weeds poked from cracked cement, broken down walls surrounded open doorways that were as black as night inside. The walls were pockmarked with impact craters from mortars and small arms, the ageing signs of conflict from two major wars fought by US forces over the decades. No vehicles, few footprints, no enemy fire.
Larry made straight for the main entrance, the doors hanging from their hinges having been blasted in long ago by some other fire team, probably clearing the building of insurgents a decade before. He slammed against the wall alongside the entrance as two of his men hurled flash–bangs inside and took up positions alongside their lieutenant, eyes down, gloved fingers in ears. Larry pulled off his sunglasses, his eyes closed and one finger curled over his rifle’s trigger.
A double boom thundered through the building and Larry whirled and rushed inside, his M–16 held before him as he hunted through the gloom. A cloud of gray smoke swirled from the flash–bangs as he plunged through it, all around him soldiers shouting as they advanced through the long abandoned home.
‘Clear left!’
‘Clear right!’
‘Eagle eye, no movement.’
‘Fire team, advance! Bravo, hold position!’
Larry’s command echoed around the hollow walls as they moved, half of the fire team holding a defensive position as the rest of the men followed Larry through the building. He could already see the rear courtyard down a long hall, a bright rectangle of flaring sunlight, rooms splitting off either side of him filled with debris and the rusting springs of old beds. A hotel or guesthouse maybe, sometime long in the past.
‘Enemy!’
Larry flinched and dropped down into a firing position as he saw a figure lunge into sight further down the corridor and the flash of an assault rifle muzzle. Bullets zipped past him as he fired, both of the men behind him likewise opening up on the silhouette confronting them with a withering hail of automatic fire.
The figure shuddered as multiple rounds tore into his body and slammed him onto his back on the ground, the rifle in his hands clattering down alongside him.
‘Advance!’
Larry, his eyes and ears supernaturally attuned now as adrenaline soared through his bloodstream, advanced in his crouched posture to the edge of the doorway, which opened out onto a small courtyard and an outbuilding perched in one corner.
The body of the man before him was riddled with bullets, blood seeping from each wound and the man’s chest rising and falling rapidly as he struggled to take his last breaths. Pink bubbles frothed around the corners of his mouth as blood leaked into his punctured lungs, and his dark eyes stared up into the hard blue sky above.
Larry watched him for a moment and then waved his men past. They bolted out into the courtyard, weapons aiming this way and that as a second fire team entered their field of view ahead, cutting off any potential enemy’s escape route.
‘North entrance clear!’ Larry called into his microphone.
‘South entrance clear!’
Larry advanced toward the outbuilding, its crumbling walls and shattered windows long abandoned. As he breached the entrance with his rifle held before him he was beginning to wonder if this whole thing had been a bust when he saw the bright white walls of the rearmost room to his right. He slowed, glanced over his shoulder and indicated to his men that he had seen something ahead. Then, he positioned them on the left side of the dark hall so that their weapons would more easily come to bear on anybody hiding in the room.
Larry crept to the edge of the door’s jam and crouched down, then nodded his head once, twice and a final third time. On the third he burst into the room in a low run as behind him two more soldiers rushed in, aiming over his head and bringing all three rifles to bear at once.
An empty room, perfectly whitewashed walls, glass in a new window. A single bed and upon it the naked form of a young woman, her eyes closed, long blonde hair. Larry lurched upright, cautious as he searched the bed for any sign of a bomb or other improvised explosive device that had taken the lives of so many troops.
‘Could be inside her.’
The gruesome suggestion of the trooper beside him was none the less tactically sound; the enemy could have inserted a motion–sensitive Improvised Explosive Device inside the woman’s body. Nobody took chances out here, not with Islamic State moving around and seemingly devoid of the tiniest morsel of compassion.
‘Check her out,’ Larry ordered.
Within seconds, an explosives specialist in the team was inside the room and scanning the body. It took only a few moments to ascertain whether the woman represented a lethal threat to the company.
‘She’s clean.’
Larry eased forward, and he didn’t need to pull out the image that his team had been provided with to tell that the woman on the bed was the target of their mission even through the blood on her face where she had been punched, blood oozing from her nose. He slipped off a glove to press two fingers to the woman’s neck and felt a pulse throbbing vibrantly beneath his touch as the woman yelped in fright.
Larry flinched as she bolted upright on the bed, sucked in a deep breath of air and screamed as she saw the heavily armed men surrounding her. Larry jumped forward and wrapped his arms around her as she flailed in panic, and he spoke slowly and clearly.
‘You’re safe, ma’am. Lieutenant Larry Bryant, 18th Infantry, US Army. You’re safe.’
It took three repeats of the sentence before the woman stopped thrashing in his arms, and Larry turned to look over his shoulder.
‘Contact C&C, tell them we found Kiera Lomas.’
***
X
DIAC Building,
Washington DC
‘We’ve got another one.’
Ethan looked up as Jarvis hurried into the office, which was filled with paperwork as Lopez and Ethan ploughed through the onerous task of searching back through every deployment that General Thompson had ever been a part of in his long career with the U.S. Army.
‘Where?’ Ethan asked.
‘Persian Gulf, less than an hour ago,’ Jarvis replied as he tossed an image of an aircraft carrier deck engulfed in flames onto the table. ‘A pilot in the Navy took his F–18 Hornet and bombed his own carrier before he flew it straight into the carnage he’d created.’
‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered in horror, ‘casualties?’
‘Seventeen dead, thirty plus severely injured, reports are still coming in,’ Jarvis informed her. ‘This just got real serious, folks.’
Ethan looked down at the terrible images of what had happened. ‘Any details on the pilot?’
‘Commander, twelve years in the service,’ Jarvis replied, clearly angered and moved by the horrific images. ‘He was on his third combat cruise with
the USS Carl Vinson. Patriot, all American boy, happily married with one young son back in Norfolk.’
‘Any radio calls? Anything to connect him to our case at Fort Benning?’ Ethan asked.
Jarvis sighed.
‘His jet was vaporized by the impact and there was nothing left of the pilot to study as he did not eject. However, we do have his last radio call and it suggests a lack of complicity in what happened.’
‘How so?’ Lopez asked.
Jarvis appeared visibly shaken as he replied.
‘He doesn’t make a sound until the last instant, when he suddenly screams in horror. It lasts a second and a half before his plane went in and the radio was cut off.’ Jarvis sucked in a deep breath. ‘The pilot deliberately targeted and bombed his own people, then flew his plane up over a loop at low speed and dove straight for the deck. Then, suddenly, at the last moment he’s afraid?’
Ethan bit his lip.
‘That’s not enough to convince us that this incident is related to what happened at Fort Benning,’ he said, knowing how bad it sounded. ‘It could be something else, no matter how bizarre.’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘I had the NRO analyze the voice recording from the carrier’s data, and they picked up an unusual transmission burst as the plane entered the carrier’s circuit. The transmission continued sporadically throughout the landing cycle and ended abruptly with the pilot’s death.’
‘What kind of transmission?’ Lopez asked.
‘The data’s too sketchy right now, but we’re trying to pin it down. Either way, something was being sent to that aircraft, a signal that may have caused this entire event to unfold. Somebody on that carrier was in control of the pilot when he died.’
Jarvis had a file tucked under his arm that he opened and laid down on the table before them as Lopez, Ethan and Hellerman gathered around.
‘Commander Sandy Vieron,’ Jarvis announced. ‘The Navy’s keeping this under wraps for now as it occurred in the Persian Gulf and there were no media aboard the ship to cover the event. It’s not going to take long though for the word to get out. I’m guessing that the Navy will put this down to a tragic accident or catastrophic mechanical failure once they’re apprised of what truly happened.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Veiron’s record will remain clear of any wrong doing but this whole thing is already in motion. We’re too late, there could be any number of military personnel both former and serving with these things in their heads and we won’t be able to stop them being activated.’
‘What’s Veiron’s medical history?’ Lopez asked. ‘Anything there that could connect him to General Thompson?’
‘The Navy’s looking into it right now,’ Jarvis replied.
‘What about the carrier?’ Hellerman asked. ‘Whoever was behind this must still be aboard.’
‘Again, we’ve informed the ship’s captain of what we know and he’s already going through the process of organising a search of the ship in order to try to root out whoever was behind this. Trouble is the aircraft carrier has no less than five thousand personnel aboard, so it could take a long time to figure this out as they couldn’t triangulate where the signals they detected were coming from with any accuracy, only that the transmitter was aboard ship when the event occurred.’
‘And that transmitter is likely now sinking to the bottom of the Persian Gulf,’ Ethan said. ‘In the confusion after that crash it would have been easy for the perpetrator to dispose of any evidence connecting them to the event.’
Lopez leafed through Sandy Veiron’s file and something leaped out at her from a page as she studied the pilot’s medical history.
‘This might be worth something,’ she said as she laid the file down on the table. ‘Veiron was admitted to a medical institution in Germany a year ago for a routine procedure to clear his sinuses.’
Jarvis leaned closer as he studied the same page of the file.
‘Commander Veiron had suffered from headaches and blocked sinuses,’ he read out loud. ‘The condition was believed to have been further inflamed by a series of long–range, high altitude flights during a brief deployment to forward operating bases in west Germany. Naval aviation doctors diagnosed the blockages and scheduled him for the procedure.’
Lopez looked at Ethan.
‘The US Army deploys to Germany from time to time, doesn’t it?’
‘Along with the Air Force,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘There’s a good chance that Thompson would have been stationed at some point in Germany, and if we can tie him to the same hospital or the same surgeon…’
Jarvis pulled his cell phone from his pocket and speed dialed a number. Within a few minutes, data was spilling across a screen in Hellerman’s office.
‘Got it,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Major General Thompson was stationed for two weeks at the Dagger Complex, a military base in Darmstadt, Germany and part of US Army Intelligence and Security Command. According to this, the complex houses the National Security Agency’s European Cryptologic Center, the agency’s principal Signals Intelligence unit in Germany.’
‘When was he there?’ Ethan asked.
‘Two years ago,’ Hellerman said, ‘and while he was stationed there he was treated for a minor sinus infection.’
‘Just like Commander Veiron,’ Lopez said. ‘What’s the time frame for their presence there?’
Hellerman looked at the data on his screen. ‘Veiron was never stationed at Darmstadt, but he was treated at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, an overseas hospital in Germany operated by the US Army and the Department of Defense. That makes sense as the hospital’s near Ramstein Airbase, where Veiron would likely have landed.’
‘Was Thompson treated at the same hospital?’ Lopez asked.
Hellerman nodded. ‘Yes, and the hospital is only fifty clicks south of Darmstadt.’
Ethan closed the file he was holding. ‘Who treated them? Is there a name of a surgeon or anybody on the teams involved that links both men?’
Hellerman scanned through the pair of files on his system and then he looked up at Ethan.
‘Doctor Heinrich Muller,’ he said. ‘The surgeon conducted both of the procedures under general anesthetic.’
‘I want to know where Muller is, right now,’ Ethan snapped.
Hellerman started work hunting the doctor down as Ethan glanced through the office windows and across the Watch Room’s ranks of desks. The massive television monitors arrayed across the walls portrayed news events from around the globe, and right now half of them were carrying the same story.
‘Kiera Lomas,’ Lopez identified the image of the reporter, her bedraggled features captured by a sharp eyed photographer as she was helped off the back of a C–130 Hercules aircraft somewhere in the Middle East.
‘The abductee,’ Jarvis acknowleged as he too caught a glimpse of the reports, ‘looks like they got her out.’
‘Here we go,’ Hellerman said as he pointed at his screen. ‘Heinrich Muller is still in Germany, runs a private practice south of Ramstein.’
Ethan grabbed his jacket and looked at Jarvis.
‘We need to have a chat with the good doctor and we need to be quiet about it.’
‘We can’t just snatch him,’ Hellerman pointed out, ‘he’s one of ours and still enlisted as US Army Reserve. We don’t have probable cause to pick him up.’
Ethan looked expectantly at Jarvis.
‘We’ve had two major incidents in the space of a few hours already and we’ve no idea what Muller might have done to countless subjects during otherwise routine surgeries. We can apply for an international arrest warrant, wait for the required clearances, hope that Muller doesn’t make a run for it and then talk to him for weeks with his lawyers present and hope that he ‘fesses up while crossing our fingers that nobody in the military stationed at nuclear silos has also been hacked and launches a bunch of ICBMs at Russia while we’re doing all of that…’
Lopez picked up the thread.
&
nbsp; ‘Or we can go to Germany, grab him and find out who he implanted.’
Jarvis nodded as he dialed another number on his cell phone.
‘Go, now. Get a flight down to McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. I’ll liaise from here and arrange your transport to Germany.’
***
XI
FBI Field Office,
Virginia
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘I’m not,’ Hannah Ford insisted as she drove the pool car down the highway and tried to keep from getting too animated. ‘That’s what he wants us to do. Direct order from the top, from the horse’s mouth in fact.’
Special Agent Mickey Vaughn was a junior agent not long out of Quantico and assigned to Hannah. Hannah was a ten year veteran of the Bureau and had already been disciplined twice for aggression in the field and an unlawful discharge of her weapon that had brought some disrepute to her field office and the wrath of Valery Jenkins, but now she held all the cards and was enjoying herself immensely.
‘Director LeMay’s got you on a covert operation and Jenkins has no control over what you do?’
‘That’s what he said,’ Hannah replied. ‘I report directly to LeMay until further notice.’
Vaughn let out a soft whistle. ‘Jenkins is going to go ape when she finds out about this.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping for,’ Hannah replied as she pulled into the field office lot and parked.
They walked together toward the office as Vaughn continued interrogating her.
‘So what is it that we’re after here? Did LeMay ask you anything about the research you’ve been doing?’
‘He’s interested in seeing Warner and Lopez brought to justice, was pretty much the run of it,’ Hannah replied.
‘Sounds like a revenge mission,’ Vaughn pointed out. ‘Is that even something you want to get involved with? What’s LeMay’s stake in this? Why does he want Warner’s ass hung out to dry?’
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 6