Dangerous Ground: The Team Book Five

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Dangerous Ground: The Team Book Five Page 6

by David M. Salkin


  “That, I understand. I feel safer in the jungle, myself.”

  “So what happens next?”

  Chris looked around at the beautiful apartment. “We unpack, clean up, christen this place, and then call in.” He smiled and gave her a longer kiss.

  Two hours later, they called Darren on his cell and caught him coming out of a meeting. Darren gave Chris a new e-mail address and password set up just for him for this mission, and told him to check it. Chris and Julia read their e-mails, which included the security code for the alarm panel at the secretary’s home in DC.

  “The alarm code?” said Julia, suitably impressed.

  “It’s the CIA. If they can’t get a residential alarm code, we have a problem.”

  “No guards?”

  “Secret Service is only there when she’s there. They routinely sweep the place for bugs and bombs, but they aren’t there twenty-four/seven. Darren says he left night-vision equipment for us in the bedroom closet. We’re going tonight to snoop around. The secretary’s schedule shows her out of town at a function for another two days. Davis will have the cameras turned off at 0300. We’ll key in the codes, get inside with the night viz, and take a look. Anything that looks like imported art gets photographed.”

  Julia smiled. “You know, when we were running around in the jungle getting shot at, I was out of my element. I’m not a combat soldier. But spying and sneaking around? It’s my specialty.”

  Chapter 15

  Kampong Aht

  Mohammed and Hamdi sat in the chief’s lodge, now theirs, looking at a map on their laptop. Hazrol had their men clearing an area in the jungle where they would be training. It was heavy jungle, and in four days there had barely been any progress. One of the men had suggested burning an area to clear it, but Mohammed was worried about the smoke being spotted by a Labi forest ranger. It would have to be done by hand, but that was okay—it made them stronger.

  Them. Not him. He and Hamdi stayed in the hut watching and planning future attacks.

  “We can make this the largest training camp in the world,” said Mohammed. “With the sultan’s promised cooperation, and this heavy jungle to hide us from satellites, we could have ten thousand fighters and no one would even know.”

  Hamdi nodded. “Have we been given a target yet?”

  “We had a target before we left Syria.”

  Hamdi waited, slightly annoyed that he hadn’t been told earlier. He understood the need for secrecy and his role as second in command, but it bothered him nonetheless. He sat and waited for Mohammed to share the information. After making Hamdi wait for far too long, an expression of his power, Mohammed finally spoke.

  “We shall kill the lion.”

  Hamdi waited, not understanding.

  “Singapore, the Lion City, is a commercial and banking world center. Disruption of such a regional powerhouse will impact the entire globe. The Chinese, the Americans, even the house of Saud. A large-scale event in that city can be as devastating as attacking New York or Paris or Brussels.”

  “Singapore . . .” repeated Hamdi, lost in thought.

  “Did you know it was the Jews that developed their armed forces?”

  Hamdi’s face fell. “How can that be correct?”

  “It’s true. When the British left and Singapore became a sovereign nation, the new government was worried that Malaysia would invade. Israel supplied and trained the new city-state. Singapore has one of the most sophisticated militaries in Southeast Asia because of the Jews. They even fly American jets.”

  “The Jews don’t have good weapons,” said Hamdi.

  Mohammed looked at Hamdi, realizing the man was simply uneducated. He leaned forward and spoke in a quiet, serious tone. “Don’t let your allegiance to the Prophet blind you to the truth. Israel survives only because it has excellent weapons and soldiers.”

  Hamdi grew angry. “Those murdering Jews will all be killed!”

  “Yes, in time, they will be exterminated. But don’t underestimate them. In any event, their planes and ships can’t save them. Our forces will enter the country quietly and detonate weapons all over their city. Their financial system will collapse, as will their entire government.”

  Hamdi was still sulking over the notion that Israel had decent weapons. “When?”

  Mohammed smiled. “Patience, brother. We need to train these soldiers of Islam first, and add another hundred or so to our numbers. For this attack to be effective, we’ll need a lot of men. One or two bombs won’t be enough. We need to cripple the city for months. This takes planning and lots of explosives.”

  “When do we get the weapons?” asked Hamdi.

  “We’re working on that now. The sultan’s minister, Abdul Ali, has promised us we will have everything that we need, God willing.”

  Hamdi still couldn’t get past the thought of the Israelis having decent arms or soldiers. He randomly blurted, “We should have kept a few of those villagers.”

  Mohammed shook his head and pointed at Hamdi sternly. “We need the men focused! This isn’t Syria, Hamdi. No distractions!”

  Hamdi thought about the sex slaves he had enjoyed in Syria and sighed. Once Sharia law was instituted all over the globe, and he was a ruling member of the new order, he would have whatever he wanted.

  “Very well, Mohammed. I’ll be patient . . .”

  Chapter 16

  Oil Rig off Honolulu

  Eric Hodges was lying on his belly, with his new sniper rifle set up on bipod legs. Moose had watched the current and then dropped an empty plastic bottle into the water from two stories up. He watched the small bottle float away quickly. In only a few minutes, it was almost a mile away. Even with his binoculars, Moose could barely see it. Eric had loaded a Lapua .338 round into the new Mk 21 Precision Sniper Rifle, or PSR.

  “Five bucks says he hits it,” said Jon.

  No one would take the bet.

  “C’mon. Nobody? Book says 1,500 meters. He’s over 1,600!” They all shook their heads.

  “It is pretty small,” said Eric in his Oklahoma drawl.

  Ripper sat next to Eric with a spotter scope. “Wind five knots from the west. Target sixteen hundred fifty meters and moving away.”

  Everyone shoved fingers in their ears.

  Eric focused on the tiny bottle and felt the slow rhythm of the oil rig moving in the ocean. It was a slow, steady rhythm, like his heartbeat and breathing. Within a few seconds, everyone around him disappeared, and it was just him and a tiny speck bobbing on the water.

  Eric squeezed slowly and the barrel jumped with recoil. They were so far away it actually took a second for the bullet to pass through the bottle, blowing it to tiny pieces.

  Ripper watched through the spotter scope. “Outstanding. You still got it, kid.”

  Eric smiled only slightly. “Kinda hard with the deck moving.”

  “That’s what my buddies said when they hit those Somali pirates. But none of them missed, either. Good shootin’,” said Ripper.

  Moose nodded. “Okay, show’s over. Everyone cough up their hundred bucks they bet me.” He smiled, but no one thought he was funny.

  They watched the helicopter come in a little while later and land on their helipad. A tall, lanky fellow got out of the bird wearing a jumpsuit and hard hat and looking like a guy that would actually work on an oil platform.

  He was introduced and brought to the office, where he would spend the next week trying to teach six SEALs and a Force Recon Marine how to operate the basics on a multimillion-dollar oil platform. Fortunately, they didn’t have to learn the most dangerous and complicated part, which was the actual extraction of pressurized gas and oil. For their purposes, they just needed to learn how to deploy the anchor cables and, later on, to operate a special winch which would be on their actual rig for lifting two nuclear bombs. Anything else would be a mat
ter of faking it with computers that would “look busy” should anyone inspect their rig.

  By the time the man left, the team was ready to fly west and begin their real mission.

  The team left the rig by helicopter and flew back to Honolulu. From Hawaii, they said goodbye to CWO Gautreau and traveled to the Philippines on a commercial jet in plain clothes, under false names with Canadian passports. They were all employees of Interglobe Oil Exploration, out of British Columbia. Once in Manila, they checked into a high-end business hotel, where they showered and slept a few hours, and then assembled in the lobby bar where they were met by their friend Apo Yessayan and a new man named Bruce Wang.

  It was a busy bar-restaurant, and everyone stayed in character. Apo walked over to Moose and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you in person, Al. This is your supervisory crew, eh?”

  “Hey Frank, nice to meet you, too. Yeah, these are my supervisors. We’ll pick up the rest of the crew in Brunei once we’re set up with the rig.” Apo introduced Bruce to Moose, ordered drinks at the bar, and then the team took a large table for an epic meal. Bruce and Apo sat at opposite ends of the table, where they could quietly chat with the men. The loud conversations were about oil, hockey, beer, and women. The quieter conversations were about nuclear warheads, terrorist activity around the globe, submarines, and ships. The men enjoyed a fun night of eating and drinking in between serious briefing information. Tomorrow they would fly to Brunei, a country that didn’t allow alcohol unless you were the sultan or attending one of his large parties.

  Chapter 17

  Langley

  Darren Davis and his assistant, Dex Murphy, sat in Darren’s office. Darren was in his usual state of grumpy and exhausted. He rubbed his face and started catching Dex up on the latest aggravation. “DHS has one of their highest level IT people looking at Wallace’s computer. This woman has top secret clearance, but still, this is insane!”

  “Unfuckingbelievable. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s secure computer, being examined for kiddie porn? It’s beyond ridiculous. Does anyone on the whole fucking planet believe that Holstrum would download that shit into his secure computer?” Dex threw his empty coffee cup into the trash can with extra velocity.

  “No one I know. But then again, I don’t get to hang out in the same circles as the secretary of state,” mumbled Darren.

  “Look, chief, I don’t like that woman either, but you really think she’d start something this big just to screw the director? And how would she even get it done? What are our people saying about all this?”

  “That was a lot of questions. First, if she knew what we were looking at, then yes, she might go after us any way she could . . .”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was a very compartmentalized operation, Dex. I’m looping you in now in case they find shit on my computer next.”

  Dex sat back and folded his arms.

  “Top secret,” said Darren.

  “Understood,” replied Dex quietly.

  “We’ve had the secretary of state under surveillance for months.”

  “What?” Dex turned red.

  “Yup. It would be illegal if we had opened an investigation on her. But we didn’t. We opened it on a man named Ali Sawaad. It just led us to her.”

  “Holy shit, Darren.” He leaned forward and absorbed every word.

  “Ali Sawaad is a mid-level piece of garbage that sells art for ISIS. ISIS uses the money for ammo and guns, of course. It just so happens that one of the world’s largest art collectors happens to be the secretary of state.”

  “I don’t even know what to say,” replied Dex. His face showed his shock.

  “Yeah. A real can of worms. Anyway, the case officer is Cheryl Cook. Cookie. You know her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “She’s thorough and competent. When the bank routing numbers came back as a US government account . . .”

  “A government account?” blurted Dex.

  “You don’t think she’d use her own money for this, do you?”

  “Holy shit, this keeps getting better and better,” said Dex, incredulous.

  “Yeah. The secretary uses a little slush fund that covers confidential informants et cetera in the Middle East. Pretty impossible to prove that this weasel Sawaad isn’t one of her CIs, except for the fact that we’ve been following his art smuggling for months trying to use it to find ISIS top-tier targets. We never guessed it would lead to Reynaud. But here it is, and now we have a problem.”

  “And you think she knows you found out, and this was to bury the boss? That won’t make the case against her go away. I don’t get it.”

  Darren shrugged. “You don’t get it because you think like an honest guy too much. In her mind, she’s the next president. Once she’s in the big office, she makes the rules. It’s not that far away. If she drags this thing out, it keeps Wally under wraps and maybe she has leverage to keep his mouth shut in exchange for his reputation, who knows?”

  “Who else knows about this?” asked Dex

  “Wally, Cookie, and us. That’s it. As far as I know. I haven’t been able to have a private conversation with the director since this happened. He’s unofficially under house arrest and on unpaid leave until they finish searching his computer.”

  “The case files on the investigation into the secretary are on that computer?”

  “No. Even their IT people can’t access this. They can look all they want. It isn’t on his computer. This was run out of my office, and they don’t have access to my computer.”

  Dex stood up and walked around the office for a minute, thinking in frustration. “It still leaves the question of ‘how’? If it was her, how the hell would she get that crap on his computer?”

  “I don’t know. I told DHS that this was our issue to deal with, but they wanted an outside agency.”

  “We’d do the same thing.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we need to see what they’re seeing. Damn it. I want to know where the IP addresses are located,” snapped Darren.

  “No way in?” asked Dex, cautiously.

  “They separated his computer immediately. He’s totally off-line.”

  “No logs or cloud storage?”

  “No. The director’s computer can download from the cloud, but there’s zero backup that route. It’s all on his personal server backup, which DHS has as well. Believe me, I’ve thought about this nonstop. We’re stuck waiting for them.”

  Dex was still in shock. He stood there shaking his head in disbelief. “The director of the CIA’s computer is being scoured by another agency. The Russians and Chinese are going to laugh until they piss themselves. Only in America.”

  “You know, it could turn out to be the Chinese or Russians.”

  “And if it is?”

  “Then we start World War III via the World Wide Web.”

  “Interesting. We’ll call it WWW dot three.”

  “Very funny. Except it won’t be. If you think Stuxnet was big, this would open up a whole new level of cyber warfare.”

  Dex shook his head again. “Hard to believe that the secretary of state planting porn on the director’s computer could be the good news.”

  Chapter 18

  Kampong Aht

  Mohammed smiled as he watched the boats unloading at the muddy shoreline. Dozens of men carried crates and boxes as they off-loaded the boats that had ferried them and their supplies fifty kilometers down the brown river to the small village. For almost three weeks, Mohammed’s men had been clearing the jungle enough to make firing pits for target practice and create a small obstacle course to get the men into shape. The men had been living mostly on boiled rice with whatever animals they could shoot in the forest or pull from the fish traps. The now-extinct villagers had created a system of fish traps across the river that supplied a
steady diet of carp and catfish. Mohammed hoped that there might be some more food in the new supplies.

  He watched for almost an hour as the men unloaded the boats under Hamdi’s supervision. The new men were assigned to huts around the village. These weren’t just deliverymen; they were reinforcements. Hamdi walked up the rickety plank and found Mohammed.

  “We’re now a real army,” he said proudly. “One hundred and seven faithful servants of Islam. They brought enough explosives and supplies to makes vests for everyone. They also have assault rifles and ammunition.”

  “Excellent. You’re in charge of having the vests assembled.”

  Hamdi bowed. He had spent much of his career teaching others how to make exploding vests as well as IEDs. “It is my honor. When do we leave for Singapore?”

  “We have enough men now. Once you have the vests made and the men trained proficiently on the assault rifles, we will coordinate the boat to Singapore. The sultan has promised we’ll have whatever we need. It’s over 1,200 kilometers to Singapore and will require a large ship that can enter the port.”

  “And how will we get past the security?” asked Hamdi.

  “We’ll pay the right people and enter at night. The sultan’s men may also be able to help. The next morning, Singapore will begin burning, God willing.”

  Hamdi hesitated. “Will everyone detonate a vest?”

  Mohammed hesitated. He had no intention of blowing himself up. “The leadership must survive to run the next missions.”

  Hamdi waited.

  “I will need you for the future,” he said.

  Hamdi tried not to show his relief. He would martyr himself if necessary, but preferred the option of enjoying the conquered foes and serving as a new ruler.

  “Have you selected targets?” asked Hamdi.

  “Many targets,” replied Mohammed with a smile. “You will set the timers on the vests for the same time of day, and we will send our martyrs out to their largest businesses, their stock exchange, their casinos, their tourist hotels, and their hospitals. We will shut down their entire economy and leave them in chaos.

 

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