by A. J Tata
Mahegan didn’t waste much time. He used his knife to cut the bowline, sending the Bombard careening into the black water. In a seamless move, he half turned his upper body and flipped the knife into the chest of his challenger, who had drawn his pistol.
The man flipped over the gunwale, grasping at the knife and letting loose a couple of errant shots. Mahegan was certain these were reflexive shots, his fingers clutching at the pain of the knife in his chest, but they would alert the crew. His attacker actually flipped over the gunwale onto the base of the swim platform. Mahegan clasped his knife, secured it in his scabbard, hugged the man, and slid effortlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. He held the man for a few seconds as they rocked through the turbulence created by the twin screws propelling the boat.
Still, the abrupt change in plans had separated him from the Bombard by at least one hundred yards, which Mahegan knew could be a lifetime in the powerful currents off Cape Hatteras. He released the bleeding man into the cold Atlantic, certain the blood gushing from his chest would draw sharks within thirty minutes, if not sooner.
He watched the corpse bob in the water and twist so that he was floating facedown. Mahegan swiveled his head and kicked away from the dead man. He saw the diminishing plume of the rooster tail heading into the darkness. In the opposite direction, he detected the faintest sliver of gray breaking over the horizon. The Bombard would be headed in that direction. He spied the rapidly evaporating wake of the Lucky Lindy, and it was enough to get him started in the right direction. A line of bubbles marked the centerline where the two Mercury engines had propelled the boat westward toward shore.
Without the weight or drag of his backpack, Mahegan glided about twenty meters, stopped, scanned the horizon, and repeated the process. The swells were at least five feet and he had to elevate himself by timing his kick into a rising swell. A cool wind pushed the swells higher and he knew the weather could change quickly, especially at sea. His wetsuit was a four-millimeter; not the worst, but not ideal by any standard for the deep Atlantic.
He bobbed in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, the sound of the Lucky Lindy no longer detectable even to his excellent hearing. Swells shoved him as he rose and sank with the constant sloshing.
He swam about one hundred meters to the east, where he predicted the Bombard had splashed into the water. Searching for ten minutes and seeing nothing, he let his body feel the general flow of the current. South.
He began chopping through the increasing seas in the direction the raft would be floating . . . if it hadn’t sunk.
Another ten minutes, twenty altogether and he saw nothing but black water against a black horizon.
Even with the wetsuit, Mahegan knew he wouldn’t last long in the freezing Atlantic Ocean.
Bobbing hopelessly in the sea, those mustangs that wanted to escape from Mahegan’s mind and gallop were pushing at the corral. But he could least afford at this very moment, with hope fading, to do anything but concentrate on the task at hand.
To find the Bombard, which was nowhere in sight.
Chapter 37
@TuffChik, come to Mama!
Standing near the pier on Milltail Creek in Dare County Mainland, Chikatilo looked at his Droid phone and deciphered the innocuous tweet to determine that Mullah Adham had ordered the MOAB into action. The Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The Mother of All Bombs.
It would take two days to reach its destination, so Chikatilo figured Adham wanted to get it moving now, for the big finale. Fine with him.
Chikatilo had driven from Virginia Beach to the Copperhead compound two hours ago when he’d learned Mahegan had attacked the operation.
He turned to Lars Olsen, who had survived Mahegan, and said, “You ready?”
They were standing at the pier in Milltail Creek. Below them were Vader One, Vader Two, and Vader Three. Vader Three was a large submersible that had been built with extra payload capacity to carry personnel or ordnance. It looked like a small submarine, motionless at the end of the pier. Copperhead had acquired it from the Drug Enforcement Agency at the low, government-subsidized price of $200,000. The DEA had seized it in a drug raid. Falco had added it to the second option year of the bomb-clearing contract once they had developed their entire plan for gaining back their market share.
When under way, the submersible could make thirty knots and was small enough to evade most radar. If Vader One and Vader Two were “Smart Technology,” which they were, then Vader Three was basic blunt force, dumb technology powered by a three-hundred-horsepower diesel motor.
Falco and Olsen had cut the submersible, inserted the MOAB, and then arc welded the two parts back together. Limited test runs had proven it reliable. It sat at the end of the pier, facing west, the way out of Milltail Creek and into the Alligator River. The creek was broad and deep, running dark with the rich elements of the refuge.
The two modern Vader prototypes were on either side of the pier.
“I get two ghosts, right?” Olsen asked.
“Aye. Two ghosts. You take Vader Three up the intracoastal, into the Chesapeake, and up the Potomac. You can jump off somewhere near Mount Vernon. Best to be as far away from this thing as you can. It has old chemicals in the warhead and we’re not quite sure what they will do. It’s fully rigged and will steer itself. Just program it. You’re just there to babysit the ghosts, so that they ride it all the way into Buzzard Point and Fort McNair at about six a.m.”
“What’s the blast radius of the MOAB?”
“Bitch will kill everything within two miles. You fry all those generals in the big houses and that should do the trick. They will definitely be asking for security contracts.”
Olsen nodded. “Any way we can have Mahegan up there so I can fry his ass?”
“Word I’m hearing is that Mahegan is dead and gone.”
“If that’s true, would be none too soon.” Olsen nodded toward the shore. “There’s O’Leary.”
A large, bearded man dressed in camouflage fatigues was escorting two ghost prisoners, his hands pushing them forward. The ghosts emerged from a manhole cover near the pier and walked through the forest toward the men, their faces sunken and hands secured with cuffs. They were dark, of Arabic descent, and dressed in brown jumpsuits.
“Okay, men, time to do the jihad thing,” Chikatilo said.
They lowered the two ghosts into the semi-submersible. Olsen looked at his two partners and said, “I know Falco’s got our back on this, but I still get a bit uneasy, you know? We’re attacking our own military.”
He shivered, perhaps shaking off the thought of how far he had drifted from his enlisted days in the Navy.
“Those generals and admirals bankrupted our company, Lars. Bow up, big guy,” Chikatilo said. “Plus, not my military. Not my country, remember?”
Olsen nodded. O’Leary and Chikatilo did the warrior’s clasp of hand to forearm with Olsen and each gave him a half-shoulder bump.
“Last mission for you. We’ve got some loose ends to clean up here and then we conduct linkup and Rainbow is a reality.”
Olsen lowered himself into Vader Three. Chikatilo put a foot onto the top of the submarine hatch, and then silently slid a Master lock through a hasp, sealing Olsen’s fate along with that of the ghosts. O’Leary pretended not to notice Chikatilo’s betrayal of Olsen.
“Teach him to let an Indian kick his ass,” Chikatilo said.
The submarine was soon under way on its programmed 276-mile circuitous route through the intracoastal waterway to Washington, DC.
Chapter 38
Hopeless.
The word had never entered Mahegan’s vocabulary. He steeled himself against the despair that the situation warranted. There had to be a way.
Thirty minutes had passed and he knew that with each second the odds of him finding the Bombard diminished. He continued swimming south, feeling a slight push of cold water: the Labrador Current.
Then he felt it.
There was a subtle push against his momentum coupl
ed with noticeably warmer water. And he actually felt himself crab a bit to the east, perpendicular to his line of travel.
He paused and floated, feeling the unmistakable current pulling him eastward, away from the coast. Salt water slapped him in the face as he rapidly crossed his arms to tread water. He looked left, to the east, and thought, Gulf Stream.
Could he be at that point where the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream joined? If so, what would that mean for the Bombard? It might be farther east than he had anticipated.
He turned east and swam, cutting through growing swells.
Then he saw it.
On the horizon, he spotted an unnatural outline bobbing at the crest of a swell about fifty yards south of his path. It was backlit by the dawn easing over the horizon. The current had been moving north to south and taking the lightweight craft with it. But here it had turned east, as the vector of the Gulf Stream pushed against the Labrador Current.
Mahegan chased it down after five minutes of struggling through the chop. The Bombard had capsized so Mahegan climbed on the underside, which was facing skyward, and grabbed a rope running along the top rib of the raft. Standing, he did a backward flop into the ocean while holding the line, which pulled the boat right side up.
Altogether, he had spent less than an hour from the time he cut the raft loose until he was sitting inside the Bombard. Not bad, he thought, but not good enough.
Mahegan took stock of his position. The first rule of a paratrooper was to tie everything down. His backpack was still on the boat, flipped upside down but still present for duty. The three gas cans had remained secured by the same line he had tied through eyelets atop the gunwale of the Bombard. He unscrewed their tops, checked the reservoirs, and retightened them. They were all full. The real question was whether the engine had sustained any damage in the drop from the Lucky Lindy.
Mahegan opened his backpack and removed his pistol from the airtight bag. He released the magazine, checked its contents, and secured it back in the magazine well. Though the AK-47 was forever lost, he was grateful for the pistol. The Bombard rocked constantly in the tossing ocean as Mahegan waited for all of the fuel lines to readjust to being upright. The wait was agonizing as he visualized the Lucky Lindy reversing course to look for their missing comrade.
His patience having run its course, he opened the fuel line from one of the red gas tanks, gave it a few seconds to feed into the engine, and then pulled the choke on the Tahatsu. After two cranks, the motor spit white smoke and rewarded Mahegan with a steady purr.
He looked over his shoulder at the breaking dawn and turned the nose of the Bombard into the western darkness. He opened the throttle to full and began to power through the growing swells.
He estimated in his mind that he had been on the Lucky Lindy for ninety minutes after the explosion. Estimating that the Copperhead crew was cruising at fifty mph, he figured he had no way to catch them. He would make landfall in two more hours if he reached a top end speed of thirty mph. So he would have to improvise.
Locking the wide-open throttle, he opened his backpack and retrieved the radio he had acquired from Le Concord. He turned up the volume, hoping to hear some traffic. After five minutes of static buzz and relentless bouncing in the Bombard, he began switching channels, listening for a few seconds, and then switching again. It reminded him of trying to find a decent radio station when driving through the country. Instead of fading music, all he heard was a whining squelch until he caught a faint whisper on one of the higher spectrum channels.
“. . . BOLO . . . hegan . . . Coast Guard . . . he . . . say again . . . terrorist”
The words faded quickly and he held the radio high in the air to see if he could get better reception. Mahegan knew what the term “BOLO” meant—be on the lookout—but he couldn’t put together the rest. He pulled the radio down when a series of swells rocked the boat until he needed to hang on to the ribs of the Bombard with two hands.
After twenty more minutes of trying to find another station, he returned to the frequency where he had heard the fragment of information. If that frequency was the common bandwidth for the Coast Guard, then anything he heard might be helpful.
But he thought he had heard enough. Be on the lookout for Mahegan. This, coming through government channels, was a problem. Coast Guard, FBI, CIA, and DHS would all be descending on him. He had gotten inside the wheelhouse of somebody much bigger than a small-time military contractor. He knew firms like Blackwater or Xe, Triple Canopy, and others were powerful and had big-time connections, but Copperhead had gone south in a big way. They were lepers among the defense industrial complex and no public official or military officer in their right mind should want to have anything to do with Copperhead, Inc.
As he steered the Bombard into the gray morning, the sunrise was outracing his ability to get into Croatan Sound under the cover of darkness. He knew of the treacherous opening through Oregon Inlet. Buzzing along the tops of the swells, he finally saw a speck of light that he figured to be Bodie Island lighthouse, which would guide him into Oregon Inlet.
With a faint shimmer of hope buzzing through his body, Mahegan saw the orange tracers arcing through the gray dawn before he heard them hiss past him. Immediately, he altered course, knowing he would be a tough target to hit from a floating platform.
From the south he saw the boat bearing down on him. It seemed bigger than the Lucky Lindy, but he had only seen the craft in the dark, and light could play tricks on visual perception. Still, this looked more like a ship than a fishing boat.
“Shut down your engines!” The voice was broadcast through a speaker system. “This is the United States Coast Guard. Stop your vessel so that we may safely come alongside.”
With no chance of outrunning the ship and no chance of swimming to shore, Mahegan slowed the Bombard. He retrieved the pistol from his backpack seconds before the searchlight found him. He calculated that this boat must have come from port in Atlantic Beach Coast Guard Station, which was well south of Oregon Inlet. He silently cursed the Lucky Lindy crew for having stopped to kill one of the prisoners. That loss of time, and the subsequent search for the Bombard, had given this ship enough of a lead to cut him off at Oregon Inlet.
“Disable any weapons that you have and keep your hands where we can see them!”
He kept the pistol in the hip pouch on his wetsuit. The Coast Guard personnel would see the weapon. Just in case they weren’t actual Coast Guardsmen, though, he would have a fighting chance with the pistol nearby.
The ship looked to be about one hundred feet long, maybe more. Its superstructure was just about as high as its length. A radar dish was spinning atop a steel frame, and a .50 caliber machine gun was mounted with a night optic on top.
When Mahegan shut off the engine, he heard a slight buzzing noise above him in the sky and realized that the Coast Guard had used an unmanned aerial system to locate him. It was a smart move. They probably had only a few patrol boats, yet had reacted fast. He had been thinking tactically about getting to Copperhead as quickly as possible and had momentarily lost sight of the big strategic picture.
He had been a wanted man ever since he’d left Afghanistan. He knew that General Savage could only do so much to protect him and it appeared that coverage had ended. He ran several courses of action through his mind, but none of them seemed to be good. He had no idea what they wanted him for. He quickly surmised that whoever was moving and counting on the gold and ghosts had just received a stark wake-up call.
And whoever that person was could put in motion the United States Coast Guard. Suddenly, Copperhead, Inc. appeared more of a pawn in this operation than he had originally suspected.
As the ship pulled alongside, the searchlight shone on him as if he were the lead singer at a rock concert. He could read the letters on the side of the vessel: Aquidneck with the numbers 1309.
The searchlight and the .50 caliber machine gun sealed his fate. He thought he remembered that this boat had secured the Navy
fleet in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of Iraq II. If so, he knew there was a hardened crew of sailors on board that were professionals.
Underscoring this thought, up above the gunwale he could see a row of sailors with M16s trained on him. He understood the play now. He was an alleged terrorist in charge of both the Brackett and Suffolk bombings as well as the sinking of an American vessel at sea. That, coupled with the murder of one or two individuals near Roanoke Island and his history of killing a prisoner of war, spelled certain doom for Mahegan.
At least, that was how he knew authorities were spinning the story, getting their charges amped up to lock him down. Capture him.
“Keep your hands where we can see them!”
Two frogmen leapt over the side of the patrol boat and were instantly at the side of the Bombard. They popped up, looking like ninjas in their dive suits. The Bombard rocked softly in the swells as they guided the inflatable boat to the port side of the Aquidneck. They had ropes, which each of them looped through eyelets atop the rib of the Bombard.
A deckhand flipped a ladder over the side and one of the frogmen said, “Remove all weapons from your person and slowly climb the ladder.”
Secure with the knowledge that he was among professional servicemen, he said, “I have a pistol in my wetsuit. I can see each of you has a weapon aimed at me along with about ten of your guys up on the deck. I’m not stupid. I’m going to remove the pistol and lay it in the boat.”
“Do that.” The voice was authoritative.
Mahegan removed the pistol and laid it on the floor of the Bombard. He reached out and secured the ladder and then began climbing. Once he was coming over the gunwale, he had about four men on top of him, cuffing him and dragging him into custody.
They sat him in a room for about an hour before a man opened the door. As he looked up, General Stanley Bream ducked beneath the lintel, stepped into the room, which was nothing more than a very small office, and closed the door behind him.