by Mark Donovan
Davis shot four rounds in a smooth repetitive order. Rat-tat-tat-tat. He then leaned back out of the line of fire just as Jones rolled the grenade in. Two seconds later, in the middle of returning fire, a concussion explosion went off. Jones and Davis immediately rushed into the vestibule after the explosion. Three men were laying semiconscious on the floor at the far end of the vestibule. Jones shot two of them dead, while Davis did the other.
Jones, Davis, and Dave stepped over the three bodies and made their way further into the bedroom suite. Just as they entered the massive room a voice yelled out over the din of the smoke alarms, “Don’t come one step closer or she’s dead.”
Dave froze at what he saw standing in front of him. Though it was dark, a night light from the adjoining en suite spilled just enough lumens into the bedroom area for Dave to make out a man holding Dana. He was standing semi-crouched down behind her and holding his left arm around her neck tightly. It was his right hand, however, that caused Dave to freeze. The man’s right hand held a side arm to Dana’s head.
“Step the hell back or she’s dead,” yelled Aref.
“Just give us Ms. Cogswell and we will leave,” said Jones. “That’s all we came for.”
“You lie,” said Aref viciously. “Henson may have come only for his wife, but the rest of you are here for something more.”
“That’s not true,” yelled Jones over the sound of the bleating smoke alarms. “Let her go and we will walk away.”
“You came here for me,” snapped back Aref. “You filthy Americans came for me. To take me out. Before I did something in your heartland.”
Dana suddenly tried to free herself from Aref’s grip by twisting her body sharply. However, Aref maintained his arm tightly around her neck while he kept his eyes locked on the three men and the pistol pointed at her head.
After preventing further movement from Dana he said, “But you are too late. The clock has already started ticking and you can’t stop it.”
Dave came up beside Jones to speak. “Aref, we already know about your plans,” lied Dave. “And we have already stopped them. We saw Spencer leave here tonight and he was captured, along with the canisters of bioweapon material that he was carrying.”
Again Dave lied, but Jones looked at him for a second, as if Dave knew something he didn’t. Which he hadn’t, until he saw the look on Aref’s face. Even in the dim light, Dave could see he hit a raw nerve.
“You lie,” yelled Aref. “You may know of Ahmad, however you know nothing about our plans. Plans that are in motion and that cannot be stopped.”
“Even if you have additional plans beyond Spencer, it doesn’t matter,” said Dave. “We already have a way to counter your terrorist weapon. To neutralize it and make it inert.”
“Impossible,” hissed Aref. “There is no defense for Waterkill. There will soon be no Big D in America,” he laughed tauntingly.
Suddenly Dave saw a flicker of movement behind Aref and Dana as Aref taunted them.
In the Escalade Graves glided his finger effortlessly over the tablet computer screen, the micro-drone responding to his every move. On the screen, Graves began to see the back of Zarin’s neck come into view. Slowly he guided the drone forward. Holding his breath he brought the drone to within a millimeter of touching the man’s neck. Graves saw the glitter of something just as his index finger tapped the kill radial button on the screen.
Above the clamor of the smoke alarms, Dave, Jones and Davis unexpectedly heard a loud crack. As they did, Aref’s body instantly collapsed on itself behind Dana, blood spurting from his neck in all directions, the gun falling from his hand.
“Yahtzee,” yelled Graves to himself in the Escalade.
It took a second for Dave to realize what had happened, but he quickly put two and two together. The flash of movement had been the micro-drone, and the cracking noise was the sound of the C4 pellet it carried exploding just behind Aref. The detonation must have severed Aref’s spinal cord instantly.
Dana ran to Dave’s open arms, tears streaming down her cheeks. Tears brought on by the overwhelming sense of relief and by the horror she had just witnessed. As they embraced, Jones and Davis walked over to Zarin, and again Jones fired three shots into Zarin’s head to make sure he wasn’t going to get up.
“Collect every file, paper, computer, thumb drive and memory disk in this room,” barked Jones to Davis and Dave. “We need to get out of here fast.”
Jones pulled out of his jacket several large heavy duty plastic bags. “Put the evidence in these.”
Davis grabbed a bag from Jones and immediately moved over to a secretary desk sitting across from the master bed and began to rifle through it. As he did all of the smoke detector alarms in the house went silent. Davis looked over at Jones.
“Stewart must have found the main circuit panel and shut them off,” said Jones.
With the alarms finally silenced Dave could feel Dana’s body calming from the shock of standing by Zarin when his head was decapitated. He walked her over to the master bed and sat her gently on it. Seeing in her eyes that she was in control of herself once again, Dave stepped away from her and took a bag from Jones and also started searching the room for evidence. As he stepped over Zarin, he noticed something shiny lying next to Aref’s severed head. He bent down next to it, Aref’s dead eyes looking up at him, and saw a large gold chain necklace hanging on the stump of Aref’s neck. The chain had a pendant hanging from the end of it consisting of odd lettering and surrounded on one side by a crescent moon. Without hesitation Dave reached over and removed the gold chain from the bloody stump. The chain must have weighed several ounces, thought Dave as he held it up in front of him to inspect. As he marveled at its size and weight it dawned on him what to do with it. He dropped the gold chain in his front pants pocket before moving on to look for additional evidence in the room.
“Jones, you there,” came the sound of Stewart’s voice over Dave’s earpiece.
“Roger. What’s your status?” responded Jones over the com.
“We’re all good here,” reported Stewart. “All hostiles have been terminated, but we need you down here. You’ve got to see what we’ve found.”
“Copy that, we will be right down,” replied Jones.
“Alright everyone, let’s move it. We’ve already been ten minutes. I want us driving away from this place in the next five.”
Davis took the point and Jones the rear. In between them, Dana walked by herself and Dave helped support Gomez as they made their way down to the first floor. On the first floor, they left Gomez at the top of the basement stairs, while the rest proceeded into the basement.
When they reached the bottom step of the basement staircase their eyes fell upon a grizzly scene. Bits and pieces of at least a half a dozen bodies, all hostiles, were splattered on the basement floor and walls.
“Looks like Stewart had a field day down here with his grenade launcher,” said Jones nonchalantly.
“Where are you Stewart?” he asked over his throat mic.
“We’re in the far room opposite the staircase,” responded Stewart.
Hearing Stewart’s response the four carefully stepped around the bloody carnage in the main room of the basement as they made their way to the back room approximately ten meters away.
When they entered the back room Dave was shocked at both the enormity of the space as well as its contents. The room was as large as a typical wine cellar found in a Napa Valley vineyard. However, instead of one large room, the space had been divided up into several medium sized laboratories. Walls constructed from wood, and large plate glass windows extending halfway down their sides, acted as partitions for creating the individual laboratories. Each lab would have made any biotech company jealous, as they were filled with sophisticated chemical and biological test and measurement equipment.
“Come over here and see this,” said Stewart who had seen them enter the large laboratory area and was in the furthest lab from them.
As
they approached the lab that Stewart and his wingman Patterson were in, racks along one wall came into view. Each rack consisted of three shelves and went floor to ceiling along the entire back wall of the lab for approximately ten meters in length. The racks were filled with metal canisters, canisters that looked identical to the one that Dave had recovered in Alaska.
“Damn,” said Dave slowly as he gazed at the hundreds of metal canisters. “It looks like Zarin and his Al Qaeda brethren were really intent on carrying out their murderous plot on millions.”
“You’re talking past tense,” said Dana. “You only killed Zarin and a handful of his fanatical terrorists tonight. There are many more just like him out there in the world who are still alive, and who are plotting their next attack. There could also be many more canisters of this “Waterkill” stockpiled in other places.”
Dave nodded his head in agreement as he continued to marvel at the sadistic audacity of Aref Zarin. “You’re right, and most likely Spencer is on his way to the United States to deploy one or more of these canisters.”
“There is no way we can carry these canisters out,” said Davis.
“And you certainly cannot blow them up,” interjected Dana. “You would ultimately kill millions of innocent Iranians by exposing them to the cholera bacteria.”
“I suggest we take as many of the computers from here as we can and get the hell out of here quickly,” replied Davis.
“Patterson and I will stay behind,” said Stewart. “At least long enough to call in for additional support to remove all of these canisters.”
“No,” said Jones. “You won’t last the hour. Other Al Qaeda members will be here soon, and if not them, the Iranian government. You’d either be killed immediately by Al Qaeda, or captured by the Iranian police and never be seen or found again, at least not alive.”
“So what do we do with all this?” asked Stewart, as he swept his hand around towards the racks of canisters.
“We notify the analysts immediately of our discovery and they will flow the information up through the chain of command,” responded Davis. “This is a White House level problem.”
“What if we make it a bit more difficult for these containers to walk away?” asked Davis.
“What do you mean?” asked Jones.
“We rig as much of this building as we can with explosives, except for this area, so that we can at least delay the removal of any of these canisters. This way the White House will have more time to develop a more permanent solution on how to deal with them.”
“I like it,” said Stewart, as the others chimed in with agreement.
“Alright,” said Jones. “Stewart and Patterson, wire the residence while the rest of us load up with as much evidence as we can carry. However, I want us the hell out of here in the next three minutes before we have company.”
Three minutes later, the six of them, along with Gomez, piled into the two waiting Escalades. As they drove away, Stewart and Patterson simultaneously activated detonators via radio control transmitters. Dave and Dana both looked back just in time to see multiple flashes shoot from Zarin’s house as the explosives detonated.
Chapter 40 (April 18, Monday 3:00am, West of Tehran, Iran)
They were fifty kilometers outside of Tehran, heading west, into the desert lands, en route to a rendezvous point with a Blackhawk helicopter. In ten minutes Dave and Dana, as well as the surviving members of Jones and Stewart’s Special Ops teams, were all to be picked up by the Blackhawk and flown out over the Persian Gulf, to the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier.
The Escalade with Dave and Dana in it were in the lead position. Graves was still driving, with Jones in the front passenger seat. Dave, Dana and Davis sat in the back. They had just passed another green sign praising Allah, signs that appeared every few kilometers along the side of the motorway, when Graves said, “It looks like we have a police check point up ahead.”
“Alright everyone,” said Jones as he turned to face the others in the back seat. “Most likely they are only looking for drug smugglers or illegal aliens and not us. We will attempt to play it cool and pass through the check point normally. If it looks like it’s going to shit in anyway, or it takes more than two minutes, then Graves, I want you to floor it and push through any barriers.”
Jones glanced down at his watch briefly before looking back at everyone. “Our pickup point is only a few kilometers from here and we are expected in just under ten minutes. So we don’t have a lot of time to waste or very far to run if we have to. Also, we’re going to need to look as civilian as possible, so remove your flak jackets now and toss them in the back of the Escalade.”
After Dave and Davis had tossed their flak jackets in the back of the Escalade, Jones handed his and Graves to them. Jones also radioed Stewart and communicated their plan.
Graves slowed to a halt on the road, with Stewart, Gomez, and Patterson’s vehicle pulling up behind them. There was only one other vehicle in front of them. It was a small sedan and the Iranian police seemed to pay it little attention. While one policeman leaned over and spoke to the driver, another walked around the vehicle, visually inspecting it from about a meter’s distance away. Both had automatic weapons hanging off their shoulders and were wearing holstered side arms. Three other policeman stood by their vehicles similarly armed. Dave noticed that the police vehicles were positioned at odd angles to one another such that they effectively created a maze for authorized vehicles to slowly worm their way through.
“Should be a piece of cake,” said Graves confidently.
Jones didn’t seem to share the same level of confidence thought Dave, as he looked at the expression of concern on Jones’s face. Dave also had a foreboding feeling about the situation and was doing some quick math in his head. He was estimating the weight of the Escalade, and how much speed they would need to have for sufficient momentum to plow through the police cars ahead of them. His quick analysis suggested it was going to be very close.
The Iranian police officer interrogating the driver of the sedan stepped back and the sedan pulled forward to begin its trek through the maze of police cars ahead. The officer then looked back at their Escalade and motioned them to approach.
“Alright, here we go,” said Graves as he lightly pressed down on the accelerator pedal and simultaneously hit the button on the driver’s door to roll down his window.
When he had drawn up next to the waiting police officer he applied the brake to bring the vehicle to a stop, but left the vehicle in drive.
The police officer immediately spoke to him gruffly in Farsi. Graves raised the palms of his hands upwards and responded in Farsi, explaining to the officer that his command of the Farsi language was minimal. During his response to the officer, the other check point guard began to walk around the Escalade. This time, however, he was inspecting their vehicle much more closely than the sedan. Dave noticed that the guard had also glanced back at the other waiting Escalade and paused for an extended moment. Dave could see in the way the guard returned his gaze back to their vehicle that he was analyzing something in his mind. Why, for example, are two vehicles of the same make, model and color traveling together on a nearly empty desert road in the middle of the night? The guard suddenly yelled out something to the police officer who was interrogating Graves.
The interrogating police officer looked back at the vehicle inspection officer and briefly listened to him. He then responded curtly back to him and yelled something over to the other officers standing next to their vehicles. Two of them started walking forward, in the direction of the Escalades.
The police officer standing next to the driver’s side of the Escalade then faced Graves and ranted something in Farsi to him that sounded like an order. Graves looked over at Jones and said, “I think he asked me to step out of the vehicle.”
“Play dumb and stay cool for a few seconds longer,” whispered Jones. “If you see any of the guards start to draw their weapons floor it.”
Graves ever
so slightly nodded his head in acknowledgement while he left his hands up on the steering wheel.
The interrogation police officer barked the same sounding order again into Graves’s ear.
“I think he is losing his patience with me,” said Graves quietly to Jones.
Graves had no sooner completed his sentence when the two approaching police officers slid their automatic weapons off their shoulders.
“Punch it,” ordered Jones.
Graves stomped on the accelerator pedal and the Escalade immediately lunged forward taking all of the officers by surprise. The two officers that had been approaching the Escalade never had a chance to aim their weapons or get out of the way. The Escalade simply plowed over them as it accelerated, the sound of their crushing and braking bones clearly audible from within the vehicle.
Patterson had also floored his vehicle when he saw Graves’s Escalade start to shoot forward. Patterson literally had the nose of his vehicle kissing the back bumper of the Escalade in front of him as both vehicles accelerated headlong into the parked police vehicles. However, the police officer who had remained back with the parked vehicles had just enough time to react and draw his automatic rifle. As the two Escalades rammed themselves forward through the maze of parked cars, the officer stepped out of the way of them and began spraying both vehicles with rounds. Fortunately Graves had hit the window switch at the same time he punched the accelerator pedal. The bullet proof glass window had just closed when the automatic weapon began to strafe the side of the Escalade.
Patterson, however, was not as fortunate. He had opened his window while waiting at the checkpoint and forgot to hit the window switch when he floored his Escalade. Two rounds hit him in the side of the head sending his blood and brains spattering everywhere inside the front cab of the vehicle. Steward instantly reacted by hitting the window button on his passenger door. However, the vehicle had stopped, due to Patterson’s foot no longer applying pressure on the accelerator pedal.