Arabian Collusion

by James Lawrence

  We waited on the sidewalk with the rest of the crowd that was distracted by the burning pickup truck. Most in the crowd divided their time between trying to make their phones work and watching the truck melt. Migos, Burnia, and Jankowski were running up the sidewalk toward us. Jankowski handed a bag to McDonald; in it was his replacement comm set.

  “The van is parked two hundred yards back, the corner of Horeya and Gabal. Here are the keys; it’s a black Mercedes van.” Migos handed me a bag, and I put my new comm set into operation. I tucked the flashlight into my pants pocket. It had been five minutes since the EMP fired and nobody had left the building yet. The four of us headed toward the entryway.

  When we entered the building, we were stopped in the lobby by a security guard. He was holding a pistol in his right hand. The entry had a metal detector and two turnstiles that required key cards to pass. Behind the turnstiles was a bank of four elevators and a stairwell entrance. A second security guard was stationed by an X-ray machine. At the sight of the drawn pistol, I held my hands up. The guard appeared confused. He had the microphone connected to his hand-held radio in his other hand, and he appeared to be trying to get directions on what to do from his supervisor, but he had no way of knowing a CHAMP EMP weapon had fried his radio. From behind me, Burnia shot the security guard through the forehead. The second guard who was still seated behind the X-ray machine was taken out by Jankowski. I hopped the turnstile and went for the stairwell.

  The four of us raced up eight flights of stairs with our flashlights in front of us to guide our steps. The stairwell was pitch black, and the lack of air conditioning was beginning to heat things up. We didn’t pass anyone on the stairs. When we reached the eighth floor, I opened the door and let Alpha Team through. Burnia and Jankowski burst through. They weren’t the slightest bit winded; I hate youth. Migos and I followed. Unlike the other floors, the eighth had a lot of windows.

  Burnia and Jankowski were standing in the reception area with pistols drawn. The receptionist was lying flat on the ground. The poor woman was in a lot of distress; she was morbidly obese, and she had her hands and feet flex cuffed and a cloth gag wrapped tightly around her mouth. I led Migos past Bravo Team into the corridor leading to the offices. We entered the first office; it was empty.

  Burnia and Jankowski hopped past us and entered the second office.

  “Jackpot, Shriner 2,” I heard over the comm set.

  I walked into the next office. Shriner 1 was sitting behind his desk. Another employee was sitting on the opposite side of his desk. I walked up to him and leveled my pistol at his face.

  “Doctor Zahron, you can either come with me, or you can die where you stand.” He held up his hands and began to walk toward the door. The second man stood to protest, and Migos, using his flashlight like a baton, whipped him unconscious with a single forehand stroke.

  The trip down the stairs was a much slower affair than the run up. A trickle of people from the other floors had begun to attempt to navigate the pitch-black stairwell. The EMP pulse made sure there were no working flashlights in the building. We passed through the turnstiles and entered the street. The truck was still burning. It was a black, smoking fire now.

  Migos and I guided Zahron around the building and down a side street. Jankowski and McDonald were doing the same with Sakhowi.

  “Driver, are you set?” I said into my comms.

  “Affirmative,” McDonald replied.

  We found McDonald and the van and tossed the two Shriners into the back.

  We dumped the stolen van and transferred our cargo to our rented van. We dropped two heavy pelican boxes off to our CIA Liaison at the US Embassy. Inside the boxes were two heavily sedated Egyptians with supplemental oxygen tanks. The boxes marked with a diplomatic exemption were escorted by embassy personnel through customs and loaded onto the C130 less than two hours later. We dropped the cargo at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and handed the Shriners over to a team of waiting CIA interrogators.

  Chapter 25

  Bainbridge, Washington

  Evan Moskowitz leaned forward from the couch and with a rolled up hundred-dollar bill snorted a line of white powder into his nose. He looked up at the skylight fifty feet above him as he felt the blood rush to his head and then he bent forward again and licked the remnants of the cocaine powder from the navel of a young girl.

  He picked up his drink and sat back on the couch. The naked, blonde B-list actress whose teeny bopper vampire romances he’d never seen, rolled onto her stomach and with a razor blade prepared a line of coke for herself on the smooth glass surface of the coffee table. Pounding electronic dance music filled the room. Through his drug-induced haze, he looked out through the huge glass windows that made up the east wall of the great room. It was dawn, and the first rays of sunlight were filtering through the lush greenery of the virgin coniferous forest outside. Through the gaps in the giant tree trunks, he could see the cold, dark waters of the Puget Sound. He felt arms gently wrap around his neck. He reached back and pulled Ziggy, his popstar girlfriend, over the couch and onto his lap. The twenty-two-year old music sensation from Barbados had two songs in the top ten of the charts. She was glassy eyed, smiling and playful. The two had shared a hit of acid hours earlier, and Ziggy was just now coming down for a soft landing.

  Evan had been celebrating all week. In his last conference call with his blood-sucking investors, he’d announced that his electric car company had stopped hemorrhaging cash. For the first time in the company’s history, he’d achieved a positive cash flow and the company was only months away from realizing its first profitable quarter. Skyrocketing gas prices caused by the crisis in the Middle East had rescued his sales and drowned out the bad press from the exploding battery fiasco that had been irritating him all year. Production problems had been resolved and five thousand cars a month were now rolling off the assembly line. The long position he’d taken in the futures market produced the final two billion dollars he needed to avert defaulting on the upcoming rollover on part of his company’s gargantuan sixty-two billion dollars of debt. Life was going his way; he’d escaped disaster yet again. The founder, original programmer, and forced-out CEO of the largest internet search engine company on the planet owed his salvation to his friend and business associate, Prince Turki.

  He couldn’t resist spiting his detractors, especially his most hated enemies, the hedge fund managers who had been so outspoken in their criticism of his management decisions. Especially galling was the public shorting of his stock as they foretold his imminent demise. At the height of his acid trip, he’d taken a picture of the lithe B-lister dressed only in a pair of his oversize, custom-made boxers. The blonde sex symbol had to hold the shorts up by the waist to keep them on. He sent a waist-down shot of the girl wearing his underwear with the caption “Volta Stock Surges, Eat my Shorts” out on Twitter to all of his followers. The recent 27% surge in his stock price, combined with this apparently witty double entendre Twitter message, had gone viral and set the fawning tech media aflame. He was once again being hailed as a genius maverick visionary forging America’s path into the new economy. It felt great to be back on top.

  Chapter 26

  Tangiers, Morocco

  Prince Turki typed into the private messaging on his God of War game: “Cairo has fallen,” he wrote.

  Seconds later a response came from the username XOES: “How?”

  “Both professors were taken. All of the hardware has been destroyed.”

  “Destroyed? In what way?”

  “I don’t know. All of the electronics were fried, the data destroyed. Two security guards were killed, Zahron and Sahkowi captured. This is a huge setback.”

  “We can still reach the goal. This will only slow the inevitable; it won’t prevent it.”

  “Zahron and Sahkowi will talk.”

  “Do they know about me?”

  “No, but they know there is help from the platforms and that could lead an investigation your way.”
<
br />   “Who’s doing the investigating?”

  “The CIA and a contractor.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Egyptian Intelligence is piecing together the attack. A CIA contracting company, Trident, landed a Hercules transport in Cairo three days before the attack. They departed hours after the attack, but not before receiving a diplomatic shipment that bypassed customs. The Egyptians believe Zahron and Sahkowi were in that diplomatic shipment.”

  “Has the Egyptian government filed a protest?”

  “No, the Egyptian government doesn’t want to pick a fight with the US Government. They were harboring an organization that was actively destabilizing Saudi Arabia, and that’s not exactly something they want to advertise.”

  “Trident? is that the same group you asked me to take offline?”

  “That was Clearwater, a company owned by Trident.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “The cyber-attack didn’t work. We can’t have any more interference from Trident. We need to do something that is more permanent. More physical.”

  “Let me look into it. I’ll get back to you.”

  Evan Moskowitz closed the game program. He felt terrible, his head was pounding, and his hands had a mild tremor. He contacted his helicopter service and dressed for a trip to his headquarters in Seattle. He owned the company that stored the servers used by the FBI and other government agencies. He was also a leader in the private space industry. He had built backdoors into the software of his old search engine company. He had all the private sector and government resources he needed at his disposal; this wouldn’t be hard. Once in his office, he would access the mainframe and unlock the Clearwater program he was holding ransom. He would find out everything he could about this group that was antagonizing his friend Prince Turki and then put an end to it.

  Chapter 27

  Paphos, Cyprus

  I woke early. I could hear the waves gently lapping against the hull of the Sam Houston. I used the remote, and the large screen TV across from the bed came to life. I scrolled through the Apple TV menu and found MLB.TV It was a little after 4:00 a.m. in Cyprus, but it was 9:00-something in the evening at Boston’s Fenway Park. It was the seventh inning and the Red Sox were losing 1-0 to Tampa.

  I went upstairs and returned with a cup of coffee. I lay at the edge of the bed, leaving Cheryl undisturbed in the center. She was asleep, but like a heat-seeking missile she crept across the bed until she was next to me, and eventually she rolled over and blanketed me. She made it impossible to sip my coffee, so I gave up on it. I put my arms around her and held on as the Sox went hitless for the final three innings. When the game ended, I decided somebody from Boston needed to score this day, and so I woke her with a gentle persistent touch under the covers.

  We drove to the hangar together. Cheryl went into the Clearwater wing. I stayed in the open hangar and talked with the guys. Migos was operating a remote-controlled forklift, moving air pallets from the hangar floor into the cargo hold of the C130. The five aluminum pallets still in the hangar were covered with yellow nylon-mesh webbing. Each pallet was stacked shoulder high with 82mm mortar rounds. Later in the morning, the Hercules was going to deliver the load to the Peshmerga in Northern Syria.

  The C130 was parked outside the hangar with its tailgate open and ramp down facing the hangar. Inside the cargo plane, I could see Bill Sachse tying down the first pallet. Off to the side of the open bay area of the hangar was the gym. Burnia and Jankowski were inside the open-air enclave. Jankowski was swinging a kettle bell. Burnia was alternating between the chin up bar and snapping two heavy ropes up and down. I’ll never understand this CrossFit stuff. Mitch Dornan and Bryan Patton, the two pilots from the flight crew, were at a table in the room next to the gym, both seated in the open kitchen area drinking coffee.

  I was near the ramp of the C130 when I first noticed it. A refueler truck was rolling toward our location. This was not an uncommon sight and it seemed likely the Hercules needed to be fueled before takeoff. The vehicle moved slowly as it chugged toward the plane. Instead of stopping, it narrowly missed the wing tip of the airplane and kept moving forward toward the hangar opening. The truck continued into the hangar. I watched it helplessly. When the truck reached the center of the hangar area, it exploded. I was standing next to the C130 back ramp and the blast knocked me backwards onto my ass. I lay back and flattened my body on the tarmac as a wave of searing heat swept over me. Secondary explosions from the mortar rounds inside the hangar began to cook off.

  I was sitting on the ground looking into the hangar when I heard the tail ramp of the C130 begin to rise and the engines come to life. A quick-thinking Sachse gunned the propellers and taxied the aircraft away from the conflagration. The hangar entry was a curtain of smoke, and every few seconds I could hear another mortar round explode. I saw movement, and then a body emerged from the smoke. It was Migos. He collapsed when he reached the sunlight. I ran to him and dragged him to safety out on the tarmac.

  The airport firetrucks and EMS arrived within ten minutes. Migos was standing unsteadily next to an ambulance. The firefighters waited until the mortar rounds stopped cooking off before turning on the foaming hoses. The metal roof of the hangar was partially collapsed, with smoke billowing out the top. I tried to go into the hangar, but a firefighter stopped me. I ran to the C130 Sachse had parked a thousand yards distant and came back with a HALO mask. I put the mask on my face, turned on the small bottle of compressed air and made my way toward the hangar. The same firefighter stood in front of me and pointed for me to go back. I swept him aside with a brush of my arm and headed into the smoke.

  Visibility was only a few feet in the main hangar. I had a good air supply and the mask kept the smoke from my eyes. From memory, I paced the route and direction to the Clearwater office. The entry door was blown off; I entered the corridor. The fabric-covered hallway walls were burning and flames ran up the sides of the walls. I passed the reception area and headed to Cheryl’s office. Visibility was only a few feet. When I didn’t see her, I looked for the entry into her sleeping area. The door was still intact, which was a good sign. The door, as it opened, swept aside a wet towel that must have been placed by her to prevent smoke from entering under the door. The smoke in the bedroom was not as bad as outside. I looked around and still couldn’t find Cheryl. I went into the bathroom and found her sitting in the glass shower with her arms around her knees. A pall of smoke hung above her in the air.

  I removed my mask.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, what happened?”

  “Explosion. The hangar is on fire; we need to leave”

  “OK.”

  “Outside this room, the smoke is very bad. I’m going to give you my mask. You lead the way out. I’ll hold on to you while I hold my breath.”

  “OK.”

  I put the HALO mask onto Cheryl’s face. It’s a full-faced mask and I could see her expression brighten as she drank up the clean air. I took a towel from the bathroom and put it over my mouth.

  “Let’s go!”

  When we opened the door into her office, the smoke was heavy but manageable. When we entered the reception area it became impossible for me to either see or breathe. I held onto Cheryl’s shoulder as she led our way out. By the time we made it to the hangar, my lungs were screaming for oxygen. I kept my right hand on her shoulder and followed her every step. Eventually, through eyes streaming with tears, I could see a lightness from the hangar opening. I almost made it; my head felt like it was about to explode, my lungs were screaming for air and, out of desperation, I took a breath. I dropped to my knees, hacking and filling my lungs full of black smoke, and then I blacked out. We were close enough to the exterior that two firefighters in oxygen gear saw what was happening, rushed into the hangar, and dragged me to safety.

  I regained consciousness in an ambulance wearing an oxygen mask. Cheryl was next to me.

  “Where’s everybody else?” I asked in
a raspy voice.

  “Migos, Sachse, and McDonald are outside,” she said.

  “McDonald?”

  “He just got here.”

  “Burnia, Jankowski, Dornan, and Patton?”

  “They didn’t make it out,” she said, without any hint of expression.

  I fell back onto the ambulance stretcher and let that news sink in.

  Chapter 28

  Abu Dhabi, UAE

  We moved the cargo operations to our alternate site at Darfur Air Force base, where Trident maintained a hangar. Cheryl was in Scotland, working with Doctor Forrest at the GSS office near the University of Edinburgh. ALICE 1 was back online. ALICE 2 was no longer a hostage; it had been completely destroyed in the fire and with its backup destroyed weeks earlier, its very existence had been erased. Cray had already shipped a replacement to Edinburgh and Doctor Forrest was working marathon hours recreating his lost love.

  It was going to take much longer to rebuild the hangar in Paphos. In addition to the tragic loss of our personnel, we lost most of our tactical equipment. The Cyprian police were augmented by the American Joint Terrorism Task Force in the investigation of the incident. The refueler had been weaponized. Somebody had placed an explosive in the cab of the full fueler. Then they hacked into the brain of the vehicle and drove it via remote control into the hangar. The bomb was detonated by a cell phone signal that was untraceable. It was a complex plan that required somebody skilled enough to hack into the drive-by-wire controls of a Mercedes airport refueling truck, and then to navigate the vehicle across a busy airport using hijacked security cameras as a guide.