Binder - 02

by David Vinjamuri

  We’d divided the horseshoe-shaped ridgeline around the mine into eight sectors. The rapid response teams had cut around the mine and were waiting to comb the woods as we identified the shooters. To conduct the search at ground level, we paired the NEST scientists with State Police cruisers and sent them in through the main entrance. They started with lights flashing but no sirens, so we’d hear if someone started shooting. And someone did.

  Sergeant Quigley took one of the FBI Suburbans in through the main entrance and Dr. Harris rode with him. Nichols and I followed the rapid response teams around the perimeter of the mine, cutting off-road to avoid the half-hour it would have taken to connect the main roads. We stopped pretty quickly, choosing a spot on the extreme southern end of the site, nearly at the beginning of the cliff wall. It made for some long shots to the opposite canyon wall, but gave us a wide field of vision. We had parked the Suburban at the base of the hill and stripped down quickly, donning the white camouflage artic combat uniforms I’d asked Alpha to send along with my care package. I averted my eyes when I caught a flash of a sports bra and remembered briefly that Nichols was unmistakably a woman. We sorted and divided the rest of our gear before scrambling up the hill and settling in before signaling the others to proceed.

  “Third target, 2300 yards, two o’clock. Check that, third and fourth targets.”

  I might make a shot like that in a competition, or on a nice day at the range. But the odds weren’t good with the wind picking up and snow pelting us and melting off the barrel of the Barrett. I went through the routine anyway, calculating how much the round would drop, guessing at the wind, calming myself and holding my breath before I squeezed again.

  “Unbelievable! Hit! On the shooter. Spotter is on the move.” Nichols put a hand on my shoulder as she said it.

  I didn’t wait, chambered another round and sent it flying toward the second man. He was bent over the shooter for a second, then sprang to his feet.

  “Miss. Two feet left. Spotter is moving away from the hill.” A pause. “Hammer, we have another target moving in sector...ah, sector 5.” An instant after Nichols said the word, a mound of snow erupted just in front of us, temporarily blinding me. I rolled over Nichols with the rifle as a second round struck where I’d lain. I reached my feet and grabbed Nichols’s hand, pulling her behind me. She sprang forward as a third round puffed behind her, the crack of the rifle following it. I ducked behind an old oak and pulled the rifle back to my shoulder. She settled next to me and was back on her infrared binoculars.

  “I think I’ve got him,” she said after a moment. “He’s thirty yards north of the third shooter. Say three o’clock.”

  I dropped to the ground and took aim at the fourth shooter. I went through the calculations quickly but I knew that in these conditions, the shot was a Hail Mary.

  “Miss. Four feet to the right. Target is up and moving.” Nichols relayed the last man’s location to the SWAT team. I raised my scope and watched. I briefly got a bead on the man again, but he was darting and weaving. The Barrett rounds can penetrate the steel plating on an armored car, so I didn’t want to take the chance of hitting a state trooper when the shooter was heading right for them.

  Nichols and I must both have been tracking the man because I heard her gasp as I saw a streak of light flash onto my scope. Then suddenly the man was down, wrestling with a ball of light.

  “What was that?” Nichols asked.

  “Unless I’m mistaken, that was Officer Cody.”

  41

  Nichols and I had done our part.

  Even though I’d missed half my shots, we’d spotted five men. The three I hadn’t hit fled straight into the SWAT dragnet. I watched through the scope as a swarm of white bodies appeared along the ridgeline. There might have been more than five National Front guys dug in out there, but any soldier with half a brain would have turned tail by now given the combination of counter-sniper fire and mop-up teams.

  “We’ve got three in custody now,” Nichols said, “and two confirmed kills.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you think it worked?”

  “We’ll have to wait a little longer to know.”

  We held our breath. Whoever had put the snipers on the ridge wanted the dirty bomb to detonate, but didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when it did. Instead of setting it on a timer and leaving, he’d left snipers to protect the device. That only made sense if one of the snipers had a remote detonator to trigger the device when they were pulling out. They’d figured the authorities would turn cautious when they started shooting and that it would bog things down for hours. That’s not what happened.

  One of the pieces of equipment I’d requested from Alpha was a high-power signal jammer. We were hoping they’d constructed the dirty bomb with a commercial rig, because we could jam that part of the radio spectrum effectively. If they had military-spec equipment, Nichols and I might be covered in radioactive dust very soon. We waited for what seemed like an eternity. The snow was coming down harder every minute. It was cold—absurdly so for a place that had been eighty degrees a couple of days earlier. I tugged at the sleeve of my jacket and peered at my watch. It was past midnight. Nichols crept back toward the edge of the cliff and grabbed the thermal blanket. She shook it off once. It had a hole in it. She pulled it over us and we crouched close, waiting. I pulled the rifle back up and kept my eye on the scope. There were patrol cars slowly moving around the mine site, trying not to get stuck in the snow, sand and muck.

  Then Nichols put a hand to her ear, listening intently.

  “They found something.”

  * * *

  “This would have done the job quite nicely,” Dr. Harris said. They’d already disassembled the device by the time we got there, and separated the radioactive material from the high explosives, blasting caps and assembly. Harris had just pulled the headgear off of a radiation suit and motioned us to join him after taking a radiation reading. He showed me the trigger mechanism.

  “Does this look familiar?”

  “Sure enough. It’s rigged the same as at Gilroy.” Walters answered for me. I looked down at Cody, who was sitting alertly at Walters’s side, as if he hadn’t just taken down a veteran sniper.

  “They over-engineered this device. There was enough plastic explosive to send a dust cloud over Charleston with the prevailing winds. I doubt it would have killed anyone, but you could be sure there’d be a lot of cancer ten or twelve years from now...”

  “That’s a cheery thought.”

  We walked away from the NEST team and drove back to the mine entrance. We’d just gotten out of the Suburban when one of the SWAT vans approached the pool of cruisers parked around the purple RV. Sergeant Ogletree hopped out.

  “That was some damn fine shooting. What the hell was that, two thousand yards?”

  “Twenty-three hundred,” Nichols said.

  “I was Marine recon and I’ve never seen anything like it—not in these conditions.”

  “It was a lucky shot,” I said. I saw from his face that I would never convince him, but I was telling the truth. It was amazing I’d hit anything at all with the wind swirling and gusting to forty miles per hour. I changed the subject. “Did you get them?”

  Ogletree nodded. “Three alive and two dead. Even had a bomb dog take down one dirtbag.”

  “I’d like to see them.”

  “The live ones aren’t talking,” Ogletree said, “and we’ve got someone from the U.S. Attorney’s office here now so we have to play it by the book.” This he added with some regret.

  “I just want to take a look at them. I’m looking for one man in particular.”

  “Ah, gotcha. Hang on,” Ogletree said as he spoke into the radio he’d clipped to his vest. “Okay, the live ones are in the back of our MRAP and the meat wagon is coming around with the other two.”

  We walked around to the back of the armored vehicle and Ogletree pounded on the back. The doors swung open and another black-helmeted trooper swung do
wn.

  “Haul ’em out for inspection,” Ogletree said to the trooper. Two more state troopers carefully brought out the three men. A man in a hooded raincoat over a suit scrambled after them. He interposed himself between the prisoners and us.

  “I’m Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sweeder,” the suit said. “These men have invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and asked for their attorneys, and I’m afraid I’ll have to direct you not to question them until he arrives.” From my perspective, Sweeder looked to be about nineteen years old, but I had to assume he’d finished law school.

  Sweeder addressed Nichols. She pulled out her I.D. “Special Agent Sabrina Nichols, FBI. I’m invoking the public safety exception to Miranda—New York v. Quarles. The Nuclear Emergency Search Team just defused a radiologic weapon one mile down that road. Do I have your attention, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sweeder?” she snapped as Sweeder looked down the road that led past the mine office into the mine.

  “Yes, ma’am, er, yes Special Agent Nichols,” he said. The boy lost about two inches during the exchange.

  “We will interrogate these men at length, but first we need to attempt to identify them. Sergeant, can you please give us a good look?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ogletree replied, snapping to attention. He barely concealed a grin. The state troopers stood the three men up and hit them with the floodlight from one of the cruisers. I stepped closer. They’d lined the perps up by height. The first guy was 5’10 or so, thin and had dark hair and a bushy beard. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. The second was my height with sandy brown hair and a mustache. He kept his gaze straight ahead as well. The last guy was a true Aryan specimen: 6’2”, blond with the strapping kind of good looks you imagine all Swedes must have until you visit that country.

  “Daniel Lee Stewart. Marine Scout Sniper, 2004-2008. Twenty-five confirmed kills. Bronze Star, Unit commendation, Purple Heart. Dishonorable discharge after court-martial trial for raping an Iraqi woman in a mosque. Was he firing an M-14?”

  “Yes he was,” Ogletree answered. Unlike the other two, Stewart had his eyes on me. He was angry.

  “You very nearly got me, Corporal. That was a hell of a shot in this weather.”

  Silence.

  “Agent Nichols, I recognize Corporal Stewart because he is one of our video stars from Africa. He was part of the team that infiltrated the Koeberg nuclear power station, set an explosive device and apparently stole control rods.”

  Stewart looked surprised. It only lasted a second, just a minor facial twitch, but I knew I had him. In fact, I was bluffing. I knew his face and background from the profiles of National Front members I’d reviewed that morning. But he wasn’t one of the faces they’d matched from the reactor. He’s the man I would have taken on that job, though, so I guessed, and I could tell that I was right.

  “Let’s look at the bodies,” I said as one of the Surburbans pulled around. The State Trooper inside popped the trunk and Ogletree gingerly zipped open the bag. “Gotta be careful, here. This boy is not all in one piece. That cannon of yours nearly cut him in half.”

  This one I recognized. Bobby Glenn. He had served with the 82nd Airborne. He was one of the saboteurs the Activity had spotted in Africa. The last body was another stranger.

  I was turning back toward Nichols when I saw Colonel Smith over her shoulder. He had his hat on and he’d straightened his tie.

  “I have some bad news. I gather you haven’t been told. The first shot hit Sergeant Quigley. I know he was with you today at the Gilroy mine. They just pronounced him dead on arrival at Charleston General. There were two more troopers hit and they still have a fighting chance. I want to thank you for helping us stop these lunatics. It’s a shame we couldn’t have brought all the terrorists in like that,” he said, glancing at the body bags.

  My fists clenched involuntarily. I swallowed. I looked at Nichols and saw a reflection of what I was feeling. I remembered that Quigley had mentioned having a young boy and felt myself retreating, growing cold around the heart. Nichols and I stood silent for a moment. I realized for the first time that she’d known all the FBI agents who’d been killed earlier in the day—and perhaps their spouses and kids, too. I met her eyes.

  “None of these guys is Anton Harmon,” I said.

  “Where does that leave us?” Nichols asked.

  “With unfinished business.”

  42

  Monday

  I remember a particular helicopter ride in the Hindu Kush. It was at the beginning of the fighting season, the last year that I was with the Activity, in the Nuristan province of Afghanistan. There’d been a heavy firefight that day. The Taliban had ambushed a Special Forces team trying to extract one of their leaders. At they end they’d identified their man but had to withdraw with heavy casualties. I was sent in alone that night to finish the job. It was just past winter, in the tallest mountains in the world, in a specially modified helicopter flying at the extreme limit of its operating ceiling. Riding any helicopter in those mountains felt like being the little white ball in a table tennis match, but that one was worse. There are some times you just know that an aircraft has given everything it has but it’s still not enough, that your life depends on how severe the next burst of wind shear is and whether it slams you into the mountain.

  When Colonel Paine pulled the nose of the Gulfstream off the runway in Charleston, I had that feeling again. As the aircraft powered off the white strip, a huge snowy fist slammed into us and we were suddenly staring at the ground. The stall warning went off as the fierce blast of wind pushed us downward.

  We’d figured it out in the Suburban, as we crawled back from the Hobart mine toward Charleston and the blizzard got steadily worse around us.

  “Anton Harmon was at the Gilroy mine yesterday and Hobart today, right?” Nichols asked, her eyes fixed on the road ahead as she drove with complete confidence in zero visibility conditions.

  “Definitely at Gilroy. If he was at Hobart, he left before we arrived.”

  “Why did they leave snipers guarding that device?”

  “To keep us from getting to it.”

  “No, I mean why didn’t they just put it on a timer and set it to detonate as soon as they were a safe distance away? Why risk sending men to guard it? What’s the point of that? Now we can connect the device to the National Front.”

  “What do you want to bet that those men end up swearing that Jason Paul hired them? This could be part of making him the fall guy.”

  “So if the National Front was so keen on making sure the dirty bomb wasn’t defused before it detonated that they were willing to leave snipers to guard it, why didn’t Harmon stick around?”

  “Maybe he isn’t suicide squad material?”

  “Or maybe he had something bigger to do. And maybe that’s part of the reason for the snipers...to give Harmon time to do something else.”

  “Go on...”

  “Didn’t you say that the woman you’re looking for sent an e-mail to her mother last week?”

  “Right. That’s why I came here to begin with.”

  “And in the message she says she’ll run out of insulin on Monday, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not Sunday?”

  “No, it was Monday.”

  “So if that message was a warning, then it wasn’t about what happened today. It’s about what’s happening tomorrow.”

  “It’s already tomorrow. I mean it’s after midnight now. It’s Monday.”

  “Right, but all the explosives at Gilroy were set to go off on Sunday. Even the dirty bomb at Hobart was set to go off before midnight.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe there’s another part to the plan. One that Anton has to finish himself.”

  I chewed on that for a minute. “Anton has an electrical engineering background. I think they said he was a civil engineer.”

  “Okay...”

  “So I wonder where he was actually working before he went fulltime undercover for the National Fr
ont.”

  “Why don’t we ask your magic 8-ball?”

  “He’ll love that you called him that,” I said and pulled out the satellite phone. Alpha was still awake and at the tactical operations center. He had the answer in five minutes.

  “Mr. Harmon was sentenced to three years for sexual misconduct and battery. He had relations with a seventeen-year-old girl and assaulted her when she tried to end the relationship. But he spent two of those years on work release in Illinois.”

  “And what was he doing?”

  “He was working in a power plant.” Alpha sounded angry, undoubtedly unhappy that the analysts at the Activity hadn’t asked the same question about Harmon’s background.

  But I wasn’t angry at all. The last puzzle piece slid into place. Suddenly it all fit together. I put the phone on speaker so Nichols could hear.

  “Sir, I think I know what the National Front is trying to accomplish. It’s more than just raising funds. I think I know why they infiltrated the power plants in Africa.”

  “Blackmail of some kind?”

  “No. The National Front has been building political influence for the past ten years. Part of their strength is that they’re not partisans, at least not in a conventional sense. They focus on minutiae—small, technical, local issues—and they give money to both Democrats and Republicans. They mask their real motivations behind a bunch of political action committees. And they’ve avoided national politics because that would tip their hand. But right now a black president is running for re-election. And I’m told the vote will be close.”

  “You think they’re trying to tip the election?”

  “They wouldn’t do anything that revealed their role because it could backfire with voters. That’s why it’s too dangerous for them to get involved with big national elections on the political level, right? Too many questions,” Nichols chimed in. She knew where I was going.