by A. J Tata
The stock video footage of Adham showed him sitting cross-legged, mouthing something indecipherable and sitting next to an AK-74. The anchor continued speaking.
“The young American Taliban Internet phenom, Adham, has sent all news stations the following message. ‘This hostage will live for twenty-four hours and then will be beheaded. As I did before, I will post the video on Facebook and YouTube and other locations. It will go viral before you can even think about taking it down.’ We checked with our American forces in Afghanistan and the few remaining in Iraq and we are getting no word of any hostages taken, though we are cautioned that the head count is still pending from all of the non-governmental and private organizations. News Channel 4 will continue to bring you the latest on The American Taliban as well as updates on the bombings.”
“Why didn’t you kill that bastard when you were over there, Mahegan?”
Mahegan looked at Johnson, wondering the same thing.
“No excuses. But I’m not done yet.”
The anchor was now interviewing a retired military general talking head. “Bob,” he said, “our most current information indicates that Adam Wilhoyt is the son of Barbara Wilhoyt of Davenport, Iowa. We have it from an exclusive confidential source that the mother of The American Taliban worked at the US Army’s Rock Island Arsenal as the executive assistant to a senior officer.”
Mahegan stared at the television screen, all of the puzzle pieces beginning to take shape and fit together.
Rock Island Arsenal was in Illinois. Just across the river from Davenport, Iowa.
Where General Stanley Bream had served twice, once as a captain twenty-seven years ago and most recently as a two-star general.
Interesting, to say the least.
Was Mullah Adham the son of General Stanley Bream?
Chapter 41
Johnson opened a small door off the bunker, as he called the secure room he had built. In the alcove were a cot, toilet, and shower, not unlike a prison cell.
“I’m going to see if I can’t buy us some time with the Feds. You need some rest. So knock out a few while I go into town.”
Mahegan looked at the cell and then at Johnson and smiled.
“I’ll have to lock you in the bunker,” Johnson said, “but I’ll let you have access to whatever you want down here.”
“Guess this is better than dealing with Johnnie Walker and his nightstick.”
Johnson chuckled. “Hell, Walker’s a pussycat. Played linebacker for ECU, but the coach couldn’t ever get him to hit hard enough. Anyway, the deal is that I got you off the boat and now you’re going to help me. We’ve got a few witness statements and all, but I think the secret is in those tapes. That’s what J.J. and Miller were worried about.”
“I think J.J. and Miller saw the gold and then got sucked into trying to alert somebody to it. Or wanted in on it themselves.”
“No, they’re not like that. Neither of them.”
“I saw those big, giant bricks of gold, sheriff. That would be hard for any person to turn down.”
“But you did. That’s my point. Each of them is just as good a man as you are. Or were anyway. That’s why you’re standing here in my bunker and not in some Coast Guard prison down in Atlantic Beach.”
Mahegan ceded the sheriff’s point with a nod.
“See you in a few hours,” Johnson said, motioning toward the cell. “I’ve got some explaining to do and some ass to kick.”
Mahegan went inside and heard the door lock from the outside. The front door closed as Johnson departed. He didn’t like being caged like this, but it was better than most of his current options, and he appreciated talking to someone who was not an asshole.
He was tired, but his mind was reeling with the possibilities based upon the information he had just learned. Sitting at the computer, he opened the file labeled “Green Run Daylight,” which he presumed was the eastern run. He watched about five minutes of the daylight flight before putting it on fast-forward. He recognized the video as shot by the same kind of technology they used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The camera had all of the latest lenses with significant intensifying power. Occasionally, the image would zoom in on a spot that might look like a bomb. He worked his way through the first tape in under an hour, seeing nothing of interest except a double pass toward the shore of the Long Shoal Creek. He recognized the terrain as that where he had tied up Lars. He saw the intricate network of roads and ditches that closed in on the bombing range like a series of concentric moats.
He clicked to “Black Run Daylight” and watched similar footage, but over entirely different terrain. There were two flights over water to the west of the bombing range and then the standard flights north-to-south and south-to-north as the MagicAir Merlin canvassed the terrain. He stopped the video about halfway through its run when he saw two buildings at the northern apex of a flight. He zoomed in as best as the software would let him, but the images lost resolution.
Standing, Mahegan looked at the map and figured that the airplane was probably turning just south of Buffalo City. He remembered Locklear mentioning something about Buffalo City and some construction in that area. And he remembered seeing some buildings on his escape run out of Copperhead.
Back at the computer, Mahegan ran the rest of the way through the tape without stopping. He selected “Black Run Night” and saw the thermal replay of what he had just watched. He admired the crew’s attention to detail by staying on essentially the same headings back and forth and considered that they may be veterans of change detection runs in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew that this technology would be able to find significant anomalies up to five feet underground.
At the apex of the run that put the airplane just south of Buffalo City, Mahegan noticed something that a layperson might not see. With thermal night-vision imagery, the individual operating the equipment could select either white-hot or black-hot, meaning heat would show as either white or black. Mahegan didn’t have a preference; he just needed to know what the setting was. In small letters at the bottom of the screen, he could see “white-hot” as the setting.
The buildings appeared a lighter shade, holding the heat from the day, as did the concrete streets. The ground had cooled, though, and Mahegan could see the black surrounding the two buildings and the street that fronted them.
There was a faint gray line that appeared four to five feet wide running perpendicular to and beneath the road, as if it were a shallow buried sewer system.
Or an underground network.
Mahegan had seen this anomaly in combat zones and had studied similar tapes in preparation for combat missions. He forwarded the video footage slowly, frame by frame, and watched as the gray line had white spots flash on the screen inside what Mahegan saw now as an underground network.
Rewinding the video, he replayed the flight path at normal speed and watched as it banked over the two buildings. The gray line was barely discernable as were the two white flashes that appeared on the screen, then disappeared less than a second later. Most other people watching this boring film would glaze right over that and keep droning, looking for bombs.
Mahegan watched the rest of the thermal video and then closed out the window. The sheriff was right. He was tired.
He lay on the cot in the cell and thought about what he had just seen. He opened his eyes briefly, stared at the ceiling, and everything fell into place.
But sleep captured him first.
Chapter 42
Mahegan wasn’t sure how long he had slept but his internal clock told him it had been about four hours. It was four hours too much and four hours too little. He needed to be out of here, to act now, but he also needed the rest. Two solid days of high-adrenaline combat and he was smoked. The breakfast had been good and the sleep better. He opened a small refrigerator in the sheriff’s homemade cell/makeshift tech lab and pulled out a bottle of mineral water, drank it, and then pounded another.
With no windows, it was difficult to get his bearings. It
was near one p.m. and if he was right about what he saw in the video, he had to act tonight. He checked the computer clock and it was set for midnight 1997. It didn’t seem that Johnson used this computer much, though it was powerful enough to run the MagicAir videos.
He turned on the television and flipped through news channels. They were all replaying the video of The American Taliban announcing his second American hostage. The crawl at the bottom of the television on Fox News showed that the time was 1:17 P.M. Eastern time. He also saw the words, “Update” flashing across the bottom of the screen. Turning the volume up, he listened:
“And we are still monitoring the status of Mullah Adham’s second hostage. He has threatened to behead the hostage tonight. He has given no specific time, but we will be watching both Twitter and Facebook for updates.”
With grim inflection, the anchor reviewed the events of the past few days. He talked about the dozens of deaths at Fort Brackett, South Carolina, and in Suffolk, Virginia, and the promise of millions more. Then the television showed an image of him, Jake Mahegan, wanted for acting in concert with The American Taliban. It made for good news copy and fit into the overall picture that the Secretary of Homeland Defense had painted about returning veterans being a threat to national security. And certainly highlighted the threat Bream had made to him.
For Mahegan, everything was beginning to fit into place. Copperhead was merely a pawn in a much bigger scheme. Even the gold was a diversionary errand. While he felt good about destroying Le Concord and, he presumed, the Ocean Ranger, he had always had this nagging feeling that there was something much larger at play.
Now he knew.
He needed to begin collecting the means of combat, and he needed out of this cell. But instead of burning energy trying to figure a way out, he inspected every crevice of the cell Johnson had constructed. Certainly this was not a new structure. The room had too much wear and tear, as if the sheriff had been using it for a year or two.
First, he stared at the map of Dare County Mainland, committing to memory the area around Buffalo City, the abandoned lumber village. Once the land had been deforested, the place had become a vacant wasteland like a ghost town after the gold rush. Johnson had blowups of the bombing range and the electronic warfare range, but little in the way of detail on Buffalo City. Until he found the set of blueprints on Johnson’s wall, he had wondered if he’d have to go in blind.
As he studied the roll of papers, Mahegan flashed back to his streak through Copperhead’s operation. Off in the distance he recalled seeing a village of sorts. He had calculated it to be a live fire range for training in urban areas. Now as he studied the blueprints, it became clear that was exactly what it was intended to be. Underground tunnels. Speakers for blasting music and messages, shops, homes, and the rubble of combat, all done in a fashion to make the training as realistic as possible. Mahegan noticed the range was set at the northwest corner of the impact area so that the surface danger zone, or SDZ, for live-fire training would be oriented into the middle of the impact area.
During his year in Afghanistan and his year off, the military must have constructed this range to give soldiers and Marines more practice at fighting in urban terrain. Mahegan knew the technical acronym was MOUT, Military Operations in Urban Terrain. In short, he was staring at the blueprints of a MOUT facility.
But he believed it to be much more. The map and the blueprint confirmed what he saw on the night run of the black sector using thermal capabilities.
Tunnels.
And people.
There might have been a training exercise ongoing to account for them, but he doubted it. Copperhead would have scheduled the flights so that there was no chance of live ammunition being fired into the million-dollar airplane and optics ball overhead, not to mention the pilots. The plane had flown directly through the surface danger zone, as depicted on the blueprints, of the MOUT facility. This evidence led Mahegan to think about the slaves he saw strapped into Le Concord and transported ultimately to the Lucky Lindy.
Was he about to face an army of ghost prisoners?
Mahegan began to do his battlefield geometry to measure the arena in which he would do combat, again. He wasn’t certain he could do this by himself, but he had little notion of whom he might be able to trust.
At the sound of a key entering the lock to the metal door, Mahegan moved swiftly to the reverse side of the door. He had noticed the one security flaw in the cell. The door opened inward, not outward, which gave him several options he might not otherwise have.
Prepared to launch, he watched as Johnson stepped through the doorway, pistol in hand and prepared for Mahegan’s positioning.
“I expected nothing less,” Johnson said. He was holding the pistol in his right hand and the door handle in his left while bracing his shoulder against the actual door, prepared for Mahegan’s countertactics.
“I wasn’t sure it was going to be you,” Mahegan said.
Johnson walked into the container and shut the door. He was holding a duffel bag, which he placed on a worktable.
“Your gear’s in there. I couldn’t get you much more without raising suspicions. The FBI is looking for you. They think you’ve escaped. I’ve not told anyone I have you other than my brother, who is getting his ass handed to him right now by the Coast Guard. J.J.’s his son, though, and I’m hoping you’ll get him back . . . alive. Same with Lindy. Alive.”
“Is it your impression that I am working for you now?”
“No. I’m smarter than that. It’s my impression that you are going to go into Copperhead and do what none of us can do.”
Mahegan nodded. He liked Johnson’s direct way. The man’s face, though, carried an anxious façade. The furrowed brow, downturned lips, and lack of eye contact suggested that Johnson had a lot at stake here.
“Any leads on Lindy or J.J.?”
“Some. On Lindy, there are plenty of footprints in the sand around her bungalow for Treasury to examine. This thing is going to have more three-letter acronyms than a first grader’s iPad pretty soon. Her pistol is missing.”
Johnson paused.
“And, a fair amount of blood on the porch. Splatter and stream. As if she had been struck and cut.”
“No chance it was just a bloody nose?”
“Looked more complicated than that.”
“And J.J.?”
Johnson pulled out some documents.
“Bank records. Lots of deposits from Copperhead, Inc. As far as I knew, he didn’t do any work for them.”
The deposits were all between $9,000 and just under $10,000. For the past two years, Johnson’s nephew had made nearly $200,000 in contract payments from Copperhead, Inc.
“Any idea what he did?”
Johnson shook his head. “The only thing he could do is Internet stuff. Websites. Routers. All that invisible stuff no one understands.”
Another piece of the puzzle fit into place in Mahegan’s mind.
“Then there’s this,” Johnson said, handing over a piece of paper.
“John Does for Forts Brackett and Suffolk,” Mahegan said, more to himself than to Johnson.
“That’s right. They identified all the bodies except one at Brackett and two at Suffolk. The John Does’ DNA indicate Middle Eastern or Southwest Asian descent.”
Mahegan nodded. Bream had said the same thing.
“Ghosts,” said Mahegan.
For a moment a thought slid across his mind like a dark cloud. Were Sheriff Johnson and General Bream working together? There had to be some history there. He didn’t completely dismiss the thought, but also knew he had to commit one hundred percent to this mission or not do it at all.
He stepped over to the duffel bag and opened it. Inventorying the equipment, he counted a small global positioning system, a Beretta 9mm service pistol, an M4 rifle with rail mounting system, two boxes of 9mm ammunition, what he presumed was a cut-out burn cell phone that was actually a smartphone complete with Google Maps, and some water bott
les and Clif Bars.
Mahegan looked up. “Seriously?”
“Hey. It’s better than what you had.”
“My knife?”
Johnson smiled as he reached into his cargo pocket on his paratrooper pants and withdrew the sheathed blade. “Of course,” he said. “My brother’s guys figured you’d want this back.”
“They were right.” The Coast Guard had completely disarmed him, including his knife, which Locklear had returned to him before his jump into the Atlantic Ocean.
Strapping the knife to his leg, Mahegan said, “Thanks for the gear. It will have to do.”
“And there’s this. Not sure if you need it, but I found it at Lindy’s house.”
It was an MVX-90 box with Patch’s phone number scribbled in his own handwriting. Mahegan nodded and stuffed it into his rucksack.
“I can give you a lift to Dare Mainland, but I don’t want to get too close to the gold site down south. I can either take you by boat or car. Your call.”
“We’ll be less obvious in a car, even though I’d like to come in from the water. So, let’s do the car from the north. Slow down and I’ll just roll out.”
Mahegan wasn’t going to reveal his plan to Johnson even though he believed he could trust the man. He really needed to come in from the west, but his study of the map showed no way to do that without alerting whatever was in the guard towers, whether it was cameras or people. Plus, almost assuredly the sentries would be searching the flat water for any sign of intrusion, confident that the thick junglelike forest and its predators would deter any infiltrators.
He placed the M4 in the small duffel with back straps, opened the door, and said, “Let’s go then.”
Chapter 43
Johnson backed the car into the garage and Mahegan lay down in the backseat with his duffel. He had wanted to ask the sheriff if he could work the pistol and rifle a few times off the pier, as Lindy had done as a kid. He wanted to at least zero the weapons. But in the end, he didn’t want to risk detection generated by random gunshots in the early afternoon.