by A. J Tata
Then he noticed that he had a text from the number Johnson had programmed into the phone.
Out of Time, it said.
Tell me something I don’t know, Mahegan thought to himself.
Mahegan replied, reiterating the detailed instructions he had given in the first text. Then he disassembled the phone, stuffed it in the bag, and repacked his rucksack. There were three means of attacking this objective, he figured: over land or water, from the air, or from below.
Mahegan had looked at the MagicAir Merlin ground-penetrating radar tracks that covered this portion of the bombing range. The radar had clearly shown tunnels. The manhole covers, Mahegan figured, were probably entrances to the tunnels.
It was a risk, but dusk was enveloping the forest, and he decided it was time to move from the Indian ruins. The broad shadows from the tall pines and oaks provided a false sense of security, and the thermal cameras would have an easier time of finding him in the dark than during the day.
His reconnaissance had highlighted that he would also have to navigate his way through a minefield of cluster bombs that were sticking in the ground like lawn darts. One misstep and he could detonate a single bomb that would then sympathetically detonate dozens of others. Obviously, the pilot had been a tad off on this bombing run whenever it had occurred, as Mahegan knew the actual range was another mile south. He was fifty meters from the base of the camera. To his right was a sensor, active and scanning. He had to have alerted the Copperhead command center at some point, but he knew they were busy.
And short on personnel.
As he watched the radar spin, he made sure he was concealed from the camera and removed the MVX-90 from his rucksack. Mahegan understood counter-jamming techniques and the ground surveillance radar that used Ku Band in the 16GHz range. If he could feed back to the radar the same power it was pushing, the radar would detect no change and therefore report no activity. Locking the MVX-90 battery into the casing, he began to turn the frequency dial, but could see on the digital display that the MVX-90 had already found the radar and that it was recording it at 16.4 GHz. Mahegan looked at the power display, which presently read zero. Here, he dialed in the amount of power he wanted pushed back at the radar and set the frequency at the same GHz. Like two mirrors aimed at each other, the MVX-90 would create an endless feedback loop.
He flipped the power switch and a green light registered, indicating it was pushing against the found device, the ground surveillance radar. Mahegan waited a few minutes and there was no movement of the radar and no movement of the camera. Good enough for him.
Mahegan then navigated the cluster bomb field carefully while staying in the zone of the duped radar. He moved quickly to the base of the camera trailer and its telescoping stand that looked like a poor man’s Eiffel Tower. He calculated that whoever installed this system had made a tactical error. The manhole cover was inside the detent range of the camera, meaning the camera could not see if someone was trying to break into the tunnel. Dead space, like on the landing craft and in the Indian hollow.
Exercising due caution, he crawled low to the manhole cover and paused. It was about three feet wide and made of cast iron. Probably weighed about a hundred pounds. He saw the pick hole and noticed that it was not worn, meaning that if anyone used this cover, it was from the inside.
It was a risk, but he used his knife to pry open the lid, which gave slightly without snapping the blade. He slid a hand underneath and pushed up on the cover.
Still not certain what he might expect, he found himself face-to-face with the elliptical eyes of a rattlesnake. The tail was rattling like an African shekere. What he figured to be an Eastern Diamondback was coiled and prepared to strike. With his left hand holding the cover at a forty-five-degree angle, he flashed his right hand across his face as the snake struck, its fangs clicking off the metal of the knife blade.
Mahegan flipped his wrist as the snake bit into the knife, pulling the serpent forward from its perch on a small shelf. The snake fell into the pit. Mahegan heard its body make a scratching thud after about a second or two, which put the tunnel, if it was a tunnel, at fifteen or so feet below.
He used a stick to prop the cover up, allowing him to pull the Maglite from his bag. Using the light, he saw the small shelf the snake had been resting on. How it had arrived at that location, he didn’t know. Perhaps someone had left the lid open and then backed down the steps he now saw. After a thorough study, he repacked his bag, slipped it over his shoulder, and descended into the darkness. He used one hand to support the massive weight of the cover and another to push the tree branch out of the way. The cover slammed shut as he climbed to the bottom.
He heard the snake rattle, but it had moved from beneath him. Using the Maglite, he scanned the bottom and was pleased to see a snake-free cement floor.
He jumped to the cement and looked in each direction
Mahegan. Alone.
Moving to the sound of the guns.
Chapter 46
Mullah Adham looked down at the hostage sitting cross-legged on the dusty, cement floor. The tan sandbag read, “Life’s a Bitch!” on the front, but he could also read, “And Then You Die!” on the back because the captive’s head was slung forward, as if sleeping. This was not the television room. It was more like a locker room, and he was giving a halftime speech to his team. The hostage was the chalkboard, which he would break.
But first, he paced slowly in front of his troops, recalling himself cowering in the tunnel of Hoxha’s compound, his subsequent “capture” by Vinny Falco and the Copperhead Document Exploitation Team, and the deal he had made.
He was the first shipment for Copperhead, Inc. In Afghanistan, the troops called them ghost detainees. So many men were captured that the military had to turn to contractors to help keep track of all of them. Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the field detention sites in Afghanistan remained disorganized thoroughfares for detainees. Adham stopped, stared at his ghosts, and paused, a football coach conjuring the right words at halftime. He had come a long way from the night he’d been captured.
First, the two men discussed his fate outside of the container. They clearly knew who he was and were not telling the lieutenant in charge of the small base camp. Adham could see that the lieutenant left them alone and was tending to his troops across the base camp.
“This is the effing American Taliban that everyone has been talking about,” the voice said. He remembered the voice and placed it with the man who wore the goatee and earring.
“So, what are you thinking?” the man with the Afghan accent said. He was the interpreter, Adham concluded, but he found it odd that the man had such gravitas with the military contractor, almost as if they were equals. They were whispering in conspiratorial tones. Then again, if they were both private citizens being paid by the military, they were both contractors.
“I don’t know, man. It seems too easy. I mean, this is the dude. It shows up in Identi-Kit. There’s his fingerprints right there. Adam effing Wilhoyt.”
“That transmitting anywhere?” the interpreter asked.
“Chikatilo, I’m not a dumbass. This is all on the hard drive. It’s only when you connect it to the secure wireless system does it upload.”
“Speaking of using names, Vinny.”
Adham heard the tension in their voices. They were trying to decide whether to put him in the system officially or make him a ghost. He knew about the ghosts. Good Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters disappeared every day from the battlefield and were never logged into the system. He knew this because a network of terrorists was inside Bagram Prison on the airfield where the Americans had their main base. Every day they got an update on who was admitted and they matched that to who was missing. There was always a delta.
The other voice, the one “Vinny” called “Chikatilo” broke the silence.
“Copperhead’s in deep shit with the DoD. The Army Inspector General is all over you, how do you say, like white on rice. You’re going to lo
se contracts faster than you can say you are broke, and this may be your last chance to do something big. This is about as big as it gets. All of my people, here in Afghanistan, they listen to this guy on the radio and television. He taunts you Americans like you are idiots. No, he is not the top dog, but he is an important target with connections. I say we ghost him and take him home.”
“We? You coming with us?”
“This is the opportunity of a lifetime. The possibilities are endless.”
“Such as?”
“We ghost him. No one will know. We put him in a container, drive it to Karachi, put it on a ship, and get his ass to Fujaira. Throw him a few MREs and bottles of water and he’ll be able to suck it up.”
“Then what?”
“Then we get him on your airplane back to North Carolina and hide him. Use him for information. Sell it to the government. It’s all about competitive advantage. Your boss, Nix, is making all these big bucks and we’re out here dodging RPGs.”
“Come on. You ain’t broke.”
“I’m not rich either. And neither are you. Why should we take all of the risk and let Nix make all of the money?”
Adham pressed his eye to a crack in the container, his temporary prison cell, and peered at the two men. They were about twenty feet away and trying to whisper.
“It’s risky, but I like it. It’s innovative. Only downside is that he probably has intel the Army could use here,” the man called Vinny said.
“And we can sell it back in your country. I am a business major from university. I know supply and demand. They will think we are geniuses. We can invent some name, call it TerrorFinder, or something like that and say it’s all proprietary technology when all we’re doing is ripping off his fingernails and giving the government tips in exchange for contracts. We produce some high-value target within the first few months, we are, as you say, golden.”
Adham banged on the thin metal wall of the container with his hand.
“Water.”
The two men stopped talking and looked at him, realizing their mistake. They walked to the front, opened the container, and tossed a bottle of water to him.
“You hear all that?”
“Don’t like the idea of you guys pulling off my fingernails.”
Vinny looked at Chikatilo.
“Now we either kill him or ghost him.”
Adham decided to share his idea.
“Ghost me. But I have a better idea. Ghost some others, too. You guys want business? I can increase your market share. Sure, I can give you high-value targets. But even what I know will perish in weeks. You need a sustainable business model. I can give you that.”
Since that day, Chikatilo, the interpreter, had become Adham’s most valuable partner in conducting jihad in America.
The Fort Brackett and Suffolk attacks were already bringing offers into Copperhead for security contracts worth millions of dollars. Adham’s idea was to attack military compounds initially and then branch out to corporations. The chief executive officers of corporate giants would have no choice but to increase security the same way the 9/11 attacks had led to the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, which doled out millions of taxpayer dollars to private security contractors. Now the American public was going to make them all rich. Cause and effect.
Back in the basement below the Buffalo City compound, with each step Adham heard the crunch of his Doc Marten boots crushing the fine gravel of the floor, making him think about the sound of crushed lives to come. He observed his charges, and then eyed the prisoner. Should he behead the captive now to motivate his troops? Or should he delay, to frighten the Americans as much as possible? It was a fifty-one to forty-nine percent decision for him.
On either side of him were his two most trustworthy lieutenants: Hamasa and Uday. They were standing on opposite sides of the room, facing each other with the ten recruits sitting cross-legged on the gravel flooring. Well, trustworthy was a relative word. The last shipment had brought him eight men, but only these two seemed worthy of leadership in battle. The others were pawns, puppets.
“Men, tomorrow morning we will attack the Americans. Not far from this location is a United States Naval fleet in port.”
He stroked his beard for effect, attempting to project an image of Muhammad for his Muslim charges.
“You have trained in close-quarters combat. You have fired your weapons at targets and at mannequins. You have prepared yourselves for this day and you have traveled far.”
He eyed a nervous young man looking at his feet, pulling at his camouflage pants with a twitching hand.
“Do not be scared, men. You were all prisoners once, remember? You had been captured and now you are free. Your freedom comes with a price, does it not? But I demand that you fear no one. Some of you will travel by land and some of you will travel by water, but all of you will reach your intended targets tonight.”
He paused for effect.
“Men, you have but one path to your freedom. You began it in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it is a warrior’s trail that leads to the freedom of your spirit and your soul. If you are killed in battle, you will die with the highest dignity. And if you live, you will have served the cause you hold most dear with the greatest honor.”
Adham raised his arms, lifting them upward, and his men stood.
“Steel your nerves, grab your weapons, and go fight!”
“Fight!” the men shouted back in unison.
Hamasa and Uday led the men through a small doorway and into the arms room, where each fighter secured an M4 carbine, ammunition, grenades, pistols, night-vision goggles, and rucksacks in which to secure all of the equipment.
In the cool night outside, two vans were waiting.
Chikatilo was standing by one and Vinnie Falco was next to the other.
Mullah Adham grabbed Lindy Locklear from their grasp, dragging her by the armpit, and pulled her into the tunnel system that led to Milltail Creek.
Chapter 47
Mahegan followed the tunnel system until he found signs of life at a T-bone intersection: lightly shaded footprints in the sand beneath a manhole cover, food wrappers carelessly discarded, and water bottles left behind. He could not detect any alarm system or monitoring devices. There were motion-activated spotlights every fifty meters or so. At the first one, he inspected it for a fiber-optic camera or transmitting device. He found neither, but he did detect a power line running in serial between the lights. He removed his knife from its sheath on his leg, wrapped rubber medical gauze from his first-aid kit around the handle, slid the blade between the rubberized grommet, and peeled away the insulation to determine what types of wires were encased. To Mahegan the wires looked strictly electrical. There were no fiber optics that he could see, which surprised him. He figured their security would be tighter, but wasn’t complaining.
He reached another T-intersection and moved away from what appeared to be the primary opening. He wanted to attack with surprise, not be surrounded when he entered.
His first goal was to find Lindy Locklear. No matter how badly the government had treated him lately, she was a federal agent in captivity. He couldn’t ignore that, and he hoped that the text message he sent would bear fruit.
He hooked a left, away from the obvious route that had the most debris, and followed a long tube of concrete until he stopped at a dead end and a ladder. There was mud on the concrete and the ladder rungs were wet. He looked up and could make out a circular design not unlike the manhole cover through which he had entered this labyrinth. He climbed the ladder and pushed on the cover, which gave. Mahegan pushed so that his night-vision monocle could perch on the rim of the casement. With his infrared light, he studied the immediate surroundings. He saw what looked like pine straw, mud, and footprints. Farther out, he could make out some tall trees that he assumed were pines and a creek bed. It looked broad enough even to be a major terrain feature, such as a river.
He circled back in his mind and recalled the map
s he had studied. He had to be looking at Milltail Creek. It connected Boat Bay on the interior of Dare County Mainland with East Bay, which was, ironically, west of the Mainland and a major brackish body of water that led to sea.
Another tumbler clicked into place.
He pushed the cover up slightly more and continued to expand his field of vision . . . and fire.
Exiting the tunnel, he propped the lid up using a small branch in case it auto-locked when closed. He moved swiftly to the nearest cover, which was a sturdy oak tree about ten meters toward the creek. Through his goggles he saw a small pier that looked as though it was in fairly good repair. The pier went about twenty meters into the middle of the wide creek. He presumed this was for fully loaded boats to dock in the deepest portion of the waterway to allow for their drafts. He moved toward the pier and stopped when he saw the Lucky Lindy tied to the end.
There it was, sitting still in the motionless ebb of the stream like a statue. It was silhouetted against the wide creek with the waxing moon bouncing off the water’s surface. As far as he could tell there were no personnel on board, but it had some space belowdecks that he could not account for through simple visual inspection.
He moved swiftly to the pier, his M4 at the ready with his thumb on the detent button of the Maglite fastened to the rail. As Mahegan crossed the pier, he picked up an anomaly in his peripheral vision. It was on the west side of the pier and appeared oblong as it protruded ever so slightly from the water. Not wanting to break his momentum or be caught flat-footed in the middle of an ambush area, he kept moving to the Lucky Lindy. He wondered by how much time it had escaped the dragnet that the Coast Guard had placed. It made some sense, in a tortured way, that the Lucky Lindy crew had heard the Coast Guard transmissions and when presented with the dilemma either to return back for their fallen comrade or beat the blockade, they hauled ass.
He swept through the fishing vessel quickly, finding only the unwashed blood from where the crewman had murdered one of the prisoners before Mahegan had killed that man and cut the line on the Bombard. Belowdecks, he found what he figured to be a piss bucket, the usual fishing gear, expended water bottles, and MRE wrappers. Ghosts.