by Ted Bell
“He stops at stop signs but he won’t stop for us. Jesus.”
“Hey! Watch it! You trying to kill me?”
Joey had pulled one car length ahead of the truck’s cab, then put the wheel hard over, jumping in front of the truck and then getting on the brakes, slowing to five miles an hour.
“Is he slowing down?” Joey asked, looking in the rearview. You could hardly see because of the snow and fog.
“Yeah. I think.”
“All right, that’s it, I’m stopping.”
“He ain’t,” Darius said, turning around in the seat and peering through the frosted rear window. The red and blue flashers lit up the snow-covered cab. “Jesus, he’s pushing us off the road.”
“He skidded. That’s all. He’s stopped now. Okay. Let’s go introduce ourselves, make this cracker feel at home here in our nation’s capitol.”
They both got out of the car and went back to the truck cab. Big Peterbilt, bright red. The windshield so dark you couldn’t see a thing inside. Tommy stepped up onto the running board and rapped on the driver’s window with his flashlight.
“What’s this guy, playing possum or something?”
“Bang harder. Break the fuckin’ thing.”
“Police!” Tommy said, rapping harder. “Open your window!”
“This guy’s unbelievable. I’m going to get the ram out of the trunk. We’ll bust his window for him he doesn’t open up.”
Joey jumped down from the truck and came back with the lightweight metal ram they used for taking doors down in a hurry. Tommy looked at him, then jumped down from the running board, shaking his head.
“Still nothing?”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“Fuck it. I’m freezing my nuts off out here.”
Joey climbed up and used the ram on the driver’s side window. The glass was unbelievably thick. It took three tries. On the third, the window imploded inward in a shower of Saf-T-Glass. A weird smell came from the cab. Not sour sweat stink and tobacco like Joey and Tommy were accustomed to, stopping these rigs. Nothing like that. More like machinery and hydraulic fluid.
Tommy aimed his Mag-Lite inside.
“Holy shit.”
“What?”
“Nobody in here. Get up and take a look. Fucking Buck Rogers.”
Joey climbed up and peered through the window. “What the hell is all that stuff?”
“Some kind of remote control driving thing. I don’t know. Weird shit, huh? Listen, it’s beeping.”
“I don’t like beeping.” Joey said.
Tommy played his light across the polished stainless steel steering mechanism; saw that there was more elaborate machinery mounted on the floorboard where the pedals and transmission normally were. A split-screen monitor on the console showed four live views: front and rear, and on both sides. The two police officers stared at the screen for a moment, transfixed.
“Is that TV snow? Or, real snow?” Tommy said.
“Can’t tell. Should we call it in?” Joey said, staring at the little red light that was blinking rapidly.
“You see any cameras? You think we’re on Candid Camera?”
“Off the air. Reruns only. We gotta call this in. I don’t like it.”
“Let’s go see what’s in the back first. Must be some freaking hi-tech seafood, man.” Tommy jumped down into the snowbank and ran toward the rear. He was pumped about the robot truck. It was bad. But it was cool, too.
“I’m calling it in first,” Joey said, running back to his squad car.
It was a Rol-R-Door, which meant it rolled up from the bottom like a garage door. Slid up into the roof. There was a big steel padlock securing the door to the truck frame. Tommy used the ram on the lock, basically just took out the bottom third of the door. Joey was back.
“Call this thing in?”
“They think I’m crazy, but, yeah, I did.”
“They sending back up anyway?”
“Beats me.”
Patrolman Darius nodded and stuck his flashlight inside the opening. He leaned forward and peered into the dark body of the trailer.
“What’s in there? Baby robot Jobsters?”
“I dunno, but it ain’t seafood. Something big. Black and shiny. Two of them. Heavy plastic sheeting covering them up, whatever the hell it is.”
“Rip it off. The plastic. You want my knife? Here.”
“Thanks…hard to get my arm far enough inside to—”
The horrific explosion killed the two young police officers instantly, vaporizing them. It blew down every tree within a radius of a hundred yards and created a black hole in the frozen ground fifteen feet across. The blast completely destroyed the truck from Louisiana and its contents, as well as the Crown Victoria cruiser parked in front of it on the shoulder. Automobile alarms a quarter of a mile away were activated. Windows rattled at Walter Reed Hospital.
No one seeing the black hole gouged in the earth could quite believe it. A lot of neighborhood kids came out to see it. It looked like a flaming meteor had hit. Debris was scattered in the snow as far as you could see.
It was January 17.
The Day of Reckoning was near.
74
THE BLACK JUNGLE
D eep below ground. In La Selva Negra’s heavily fortified underground communications bunker, Muhammad Top and Dr. Khan were silent eyewitnesses to history. Neither said a word. It was cold in the Tomb, but it was the safest place in the jungle. The walls were steel reinforced concrete, six feet thick. Hardened steel blast doors could be found on both the dormitory level and the one above it, where the electronic heart of Top’s world buzzed day and night. A massive antenna tower, disguised down to the rough bark and air roots as a tree, rose directly above the compound. It was, Top thought, a brilliant work of sculptural art.
The two men, bathed in soft blue light, stared with greedy eyes. They embraced the vision displayed on the monitors: a humbled America, blown apart at the heart. There, on multiple flat-screens mounted on a curving, twenty-foot wall, were images of violence, hatred, and destruction. A hot wind was blowing through America. Few realized yet that it was coming up from the south.
The bunker building had been designed by Khan. Men manning the five rows of ten monitor stations were facing northeast toward Mecca. Before dawn, each man in the room had washed himself according to ritual, then knelt and bent his head to the floor, praying for martydom. An attack could come at any time. They were ready.
It was succeeding. Top knew, because the hand of Allah was with him, lifting him toward the sun. Top had seen the future. All was going according to Destiny. His destiny. His alone.
Various monitors depicted units of the American National Guard units now manning the borderlines of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Too little, too late, in the eyes of Top and Khan, this vain effort to suppress the violent eruptions along those fragile 2,000 miles.
It was only a feint, at any rate. Khan had predicted a full-blown war with Mexico over the border. For all they knew, it still might happen. Two nations, one border. Always an opportunity. For two years, Khan had held secret meetings with the Mexicans. These had been arranged with the help of a certain German Ambassador, a man named Zimmermann, now dead. Zimmermann, accompanied by certain high-ranking members of the government in Mexico City had traveled to Sao Paolo and brokered a deal with Khan.
The Mexicans’ motives were clear. It wasn’t the spread of Islam that ignited them. Or drew them into Khan’s coterie. With the exception of the German, it wasn’t even money. It was the chance to avenge the abuse and perfidy suffered at the hands of their northern neighbor. And to reclaim precious northern territories seized by the Yankees in the bitter U.S.-Mexican War of 1848.
The movement of the few remaining American reserves to hotspots along the southern border meant major cities, including Washington, DC, were woefully exposed to the impending attack. When the time came for the second wave of his planned attacks, there would be plenty of fireworks
in Chicago, New York, Boston. But the Big Bang, as Top gleefully dubbed his first strike, was reserved for the sacred capital.
The only real misfortune thus far was the loss of the Muammar Massaouri family, three of the faithful, devoted sleeper comrades, who seemed to have been sacrificed at the farm in Virginia. The Massaouris had missed a scheduled sat com call with the UCB. This was to be an internet data burst, subsequent to the successful launch of the unmanned vehicle. The message never came. All attempts to contact them had failed. It was assumed Dr. Massaouri and his family had been killed.
To their everlasting glory, the Massaouris had successfully launched the unmanned underwater weapon. Even now, Bedouin was en route to the target thirty miles north of Morning Glory Farm. The video images streaming from the submarine’s nose camera were murky and dark but of no crucial importance.
The sophisticated UUV, an unmanned underwater vehicle developed over the years by Dr. Khan for littoral area incursions, was transporting the 150-kiloton nuclear weapon. After undergoing months of successful sea trials here on the Igapo River, Bedouin had been preprogrammed with GPS waypoints for navigating the Potomac en route to her destination in Washington. Every hour, a needle-thin antenna broke the surface for a data burst to the com sat traveling far overhead.
So far, God willing, the little torpedo-shaped craft was performing perfectly.
She weighed just less than two tons. She was powered by a large bank of lithium batteries, quiet and undetectable. In the busy river, the noise of Bedouin’s propulsion system would also be unnoticeable. The underwater robot’s forward-looking radar allowed it to make constant course corrections to avoid obstacles or other craft in its path. At its current speed, twenty-two knots, it would reach the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC, well ahead of schedule. The thick lead shield inside the hull would prevent its detection by any nuclear-sensitive probes along the way.
Once inside the basin, Bedouin would remain there, inert and immobile, buried in the mud a few thousand yards from the White House until the appointed hour.
The Appointed Hour. It was drawing nigh. Top sighed, and gazed at the over-sized digital clock above the monitor bank. It continued to roll down inexorably to the zero hour, now a thousand minutes away. He was thinking in minutes now. Even seconds. And every one counted.
“Where is Hawke?” he shouted to one of the technicians manning the perimeter defense system. “Get the map up on the screen.”
“The blinking orange dot is Hawke’s vessel,” Dr. Khan pointed out.
“I don’t want a fucking dot, I want a live picture.”
Khan looked at him, but held his tongue. They had come a long way together. It was no time to let the man’s intemperate behavior distract him from his destiny. Any blasphemy could be tolerated now. In a few hours, it would be his finger on the button.
A technician said, “We have no drone on him at this moment, sir.”
“Why not?”
“The enemy shot it down, sir. A missile.”
Silence, save the electronic hum of the equipment, settled over the room.
“He has missiles on this fucking speedboat? Why was I not informed?” Top asked, trying to keep his voice low and controlled.
The short technician with the bushy beard was visibly trembling now. “It only just happened, sir. A few minutes ago. I thought you’d been told.”
Top waved him away. “Assuming the vessel maintains current speed, when does the enemy enter the mined portion of the river?”
“Two hours, perhaps less.”
“Track his speed. Any change, let me know.”
Suddenly, Khan’s hand was on his shoulder and his lips were close to his ear. “I think you should take him out with attack drones,” Khan said softly, eyes up on the screen. “Take him out now, my brother, and be done with him.”
Top’s eyes flashed. “Did you not hear what this man just said? He’s got a missile defense system! The acoustic mines will protect us from this mosquito. Nothing could survive that stretch of water.”
“With all due respect, my dear brother, I imagine we have more drones than he has missiles. His is not a warship, after all.”
“You imagine! What if you’re wrong? What then? I’m left defenseless.”
“Muhammad, calm yourself. We’ve been at this too long without sleep. I’m going to rest in my quarters until the final hour approaches. Please let me know should anything develop that requires my immediate attention.”
Without another word, the robed man strode toward the elevator at the back of the darkened room. Top watched him leave with some satisfaction. He had no need of him now. Destiny was in his hands alone.
“Any word from the Xucurus?” Top asked the room.
“Nothing yet,” a controller murmured, afraid to look up.
Before reaching the small elevator, Khan paused at the last row of flat-screen monitor workstations. Each workstation was a semi-enclosed pod and comprised a small, virtual-reality environment for the controllers. The key components were screens displaying live streaming video from the trailer trucks en route to Washington.
Once the trucks resurfaced inside the cartel-owned garage at Gunbarrel, Texas, they had been driven northeast by diverse routes to the American capital. Live video superimposed upon 3-D situation maps using satellite photos, made the controllers work possible. GPS coordinates and a multidirectional live video feed from each vehicle were fed to a COMS satellite positioned over the East Coast of the North American continent.
Inside each monitor pod sat a controller and a sensor operator. The man on the left actually drove the vehicle; while the other monitored every kind of road, traffic, and weather condition. He ensured all traffic laws were strictly obeyed. In combat, he would also provide constant battleground feedback, giving second-by-second direction to the controller. These were the men who actually operated the remote machines, using a large joystick resembling something in an arcade.
“I’d mind your trucks if I were you, Muhammad,” Khan said, just loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room. “One of them appears to be lost.”
“What?”
“See for yourself, my brother,” Khan said, tapping the monitor in question. “This one appears to be lost in the snow.”
Khan stepped aside for Top who peered intently at the image. There was so much snow whirling around the camera lens that it was difficult to see what was being broadcast. “You’re lost?” he said to the young curly-haired controller, whose name was Yashim.
“Only momentarily, God willing,” Yashim said.
“Shit. Police. Two of them. How did this happen?”
He leaned in to scrutinize the scene. Two uniformed officers could now clearly be seen standing at the rear of the truck. Both were looking up at the rear door. One appeared to have some sort of battering ram in his hands.
Khan said, “The truck was stopped by police? Why? And you alerted no one?”
Yahshim trembled visibly and said, “I am most sorry, sir. In the storm, we lost the route through the park. A wrong turn perhaps. The snow. I thought I could find it again. But, then I—”
“Where is the truck located?” Top shouted, “Now! Put up the GPS map! Show me!”
“Here, sir. In Rock Creek Park,” the sensor operator said, his voice shaky. “About three miles from its rendezvous point in this heavily wooded area.”
“What’s this large building? The one here?”
“Walter Reed Hospital. Veterans’ facility.”
“Blow up the truck,” Top said evenly. “Use the anti-tampering explosive device in the trailer.”
Each truck was equipped with an anti-tampering system that could be triggered remotely. Or, in the event that the primary contents of the truck were in any way disturbed, the explosive package would destroy both the vehicle and its contents automatically. So far, the police had only broken a window in the cab. It had not been enough to trigger the automatic explosion.
“Now?” Yashim asked.
The controller pushed a button marked FIRE and the resulting violent explosion instantly caused the screen to go black.
“Your mission is complete,” Top said to the man seated before him. He put the muzzle of his pistol to the back of the controller’s head and fired one round into his brain. The sensor operator seated next to him screamed and shoved his chair back, struggling to get to his feet.
“Yours, too,” he said to the second man before he killed him, putting the muzzle to his chest and pulling the trigger.
Top made his way to the front of the room, every eye glued to him.
“That was unfortunate. But, necessary. Victory is near. I assume there will be no further trucks lost in the snow. Correct?”
“God willing!” the controllers all shouted in unison. It was standard Arabic courtesy to give God the benefit of the doubt.
“God willing you will all be alive to share the fruits of our victory in a few hours. Now, get back to work. All trucks should be at their designated rendezvous locations and unloading their precious cargo in the next hour. Does anyone in this room see a problem with that? Tell me now.”
Silence.
“Good. Let it be.”
“A thousand pardons, sir,” a technician in the front row said, breaking the silence.
“Yes?”
“Hawke’s vessel has stopped. Here. At an abandoned village called Tupo.”
“How long has he been there?”
“Just pulled in. There’s a dock. Could be loading or unloading.”
“Tanks nearby?”
“One, sir.”
“Send it to the location. And order four drones up. Attack drones. Perhaps Dr. Khan is right. Nevertheless. I want to sink that sitting duck. Now.”
Khan smiled and slipped quietly from the room.
An old song popped into his head and he sang a lyric softly as he entered the elevator.
Send in the drones…