by A. J Tata
He heard the door near the street open above him and the sound of footsteps beating along the hallway. Rogers had to have deviated from the plan to support by fire from the edge of the urban village. No one else was left to respond to his intrusion unless they were random Copperhead employees, but he didn’t believe that this part of the operation was fully disclosed to all Copperhead members.
With no time to waste, he kicked the metal door open and saw a camera, a large green backdrop like they use in television studios, two thugs who could pass for Arabic or Pashtun, both of whom were holding large swords, and a kneeling prisoner. He didn’t see Falco or Adham.
His eye caught the glint of steel as one of the thugs raised his sword in an attempt to sever the head of the prisoner, whom he was certain was Lindy Locklear.
He shouted, “Stop!” and fired a double tap into the chest of the guard on the left, leaving time for the guard on the right to flick his sword under the neck of the prisoner, severing the head at the same time two of Mahegan’s M4 bullets stopped his momentum.
All of the action, from time of entry into the chamber until Mahegan’s final double tap and the concluding roll of the sandbagged head toward Mahegan’s feet, took less than three seconds.
Still, he was too late. The prisoner’s jugulars were spewing blood until the heart quit pumping. She was dead, so there was no sense in wasting time. He needed to find Falco and Adham.
The footsteps drew near and he turned toward the door, not fully understanding the layout of the complex behind him. He knew Falco was back there somewhere and he moved across the door to be adjacent to its opening.
The first man through was an Arabic man wearing a black jumpsuit and carrying a long rifle. Mahegan felled him with a single shot to the head from ten meters away. Three more men came stumbling through the kill zone and met similar fates.
He didn’t see Rogers or anyone who could be Rogers. This was a diversionary tactic and told him that Rogers had seen him enter the building when he’d left the manhole cover and had moved to the stairwell.
He heard a voice behind him. It was Adham.
“Mahegan, so nice to finally meet you. Too bad you could not save the prisoner. But it just so happens that I have another one.”
He turned and looked at the fifty-five-inch large-screen HDTV. Adham’s face was filling most of the screen. The camera panned away and showed another prisoner, slight and feminine, at Adham’s feet.
Snatching the blood-soaked sandbag, Mahegan dumped the head of Sam Nix onto the concrete floor. The man had died knowing what was coming and the grimace on his face showed the fate that he had anticipated.
“Such a good man, don’t you think, Mahegan? I think Vinny’s got something for you there.”
He saw Adham’s television image nod and Mahegan immediately ducked and rolled as a pistol exploded in the cavernous hideout.
Mahegan shot out the one lightbulb, figuring he was up against a Navy man in a dark room and that close-quarters combat would not be his forte. With his night-vision goggle he saw Falco scamper behind a wall that Mahegan had not seen. Mahegan flipped on the infrared flashlight on his device and began moving slowly toward Falco. He knew Rogers was still out there and he figured that Falco and Adham would have communications with Chikatilo, who could easily turn around and deploy his ten fighters into this fray.
Falco came lunging from the darkness wearing his own night-vision goggles. He had cued on Mahegan’s infrared light, and with his pistol firing rapidly, Falco ran headlong toward the distant beam, putting him in Mahegan’s crosshairs.
Mahegan shot the pistol out of Falco’s hand and closed the gap between them. He grabbed Falco from behind, putting his neck in a vise. He pressed hard on the carotid artery until Falco went limp in his arms.
The only safe way out that he knew was the way in which he had come in. Undoubtedly, Rogers would be waiting with a decent sniper shot on him as he emerged. He could risk the tunnels, but knew that they would be rigged for explosions.
He knew where he believed Adham and Locklear to be, but had to extract himself from this tightly knit web first.
As he dragged Falco from the dungeon littered with bodies, he heard Adham’s disembodied voice.
“Remember a year ago, Mahegan? I was in Hoxha’s tunnel, you idiot. I triggered the bomb that killed your man, Colgate. And now I will kill your woman.”
Falco began to struggle, awakening from the sleeper hold. Moving into the hallway, Mahegan dragged a now resistant Falco over the dead bodies that lay strewn about. He slapped Falco once in the face, drawing a protest.
“Two questions. Either you answer or you die.”
Falco opened his eyes, blinking, realizing what was happening.
“Where are Locklear and Adham?” Mahegan pulled his knife from its sheath.
“You’ll never find them in time.”
“Answer the question or I will slit your throat.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Mahegan said nothing. He raked the blade across Falco’s neck. It was a close, personal kill. It felt better than it should have.
He dumped Falco’s dying body amid the dead ghosts and moved along the hallway until he reached the stairwell. He opened the door to a burst of automatic fire. Stupid move on Rogers’s part, Mahegan thought. He just gave away his position. Mahegan had him at about two o’clock, so he could move to the right side and be protected. Keeping the door open, Mahegan withstood the hail of bullets chipping away at the opposite end of the stairwell. He moved silently along a culvert that ran perpendicular to the stairway along the frontage to the street, like an Arabic open sewer.
Soon, Rogers was in his sights. Mahegan aimed his M4 on the prone body of an American male about fifty meters from his location and pumped two rounds into his torso. Certain the man was dead, he picked up and began moving quickly to the west, back toward the pier.
He tripped two explosives, but they were delayed and behind him. Returning to the pier, he could see the Lindy was unguarded and that the remaining underwater anomaly was where he had left it less than an hour ago. Stenciled on the side of the underwater fighter jet, just beneath the cockpit, was the inscription: Vader 2.
He lowered himself into the cockpit of the Vader, closed the hatch, and spent a few minutes figuring out how to make it go. With “autopilot,” it appeared simple enough. He charted a course out of Milltail Creek, into Alligator River, and over to the northern tip of Roanoke Island.
Where Adham, Lindy, and the Teach’s Pet awaited him.
Chapter 50
As he navigated the shallow waters of Milltail Creek, he used the slow pace to learn and adjust the controls as best he could. The heads-up display had a variety of instruments representing speed, water depth, and thrust capacity, which was showing ninety-five percent thrust available. He took that to mean once he was in the open water, this thing could move.
On the dash of the cockpit was a thermal and infrared radar system that constantly scanned to the front and sides, alerting him to potential hazards with beeps. The visual was constantly updated in three-dimensional, grid-mapped relief. He saw a fallen tree through the system and tried to turn the “steering wheel,” similar to one in a video arcade game, but it turned without his assistance.
The machine had been programmed to avoid hazards.
This feature gave him more time to learn how the machine operated. It was fairly intuitive. Having flown in the cockpit of airplanes and helicopters, Mahegan was familiar with the fundamentals of flying, though he hadn’t flown himself before and would have to depend on what he had observed. This machine was made to fly underwater.
The alarm sounded again and he felt the Vader turn sharply. On the grid, he saw the elongated forms of alligators swimming in the widening creek. One appeared to have an animal, probably a deer, in the clutches of its jaws, and a free-for-all for possession was taking place. The Vader made a wide swing around the melee and then reset its course to find the deepest part of
the creek.
The alligators made him think back to three days before, when he had bumped into the mutilated body of Miller Royes. He wondered what had happened to J.J.’s body and guessed he now knew. He had probably been Adham’s first beheading and then was promptly fed to the alligators. Why hadn’t they been as careful with Royes’s corpse?
He dialed out the view so that he could see the panorama that included the tip of Dare County Mainland and the northern section of Roanoke Island. Using his index finger, he plotted a course along the touch screen that took him into East Bay, north into Croatan Sound, and directly toward Locklear’s cottage, near where the Teach’s Pet was anchored.
The onboard computer immediately charted a path around known underwater obstacles, beneath bridges, and through the deepest portions of the bodies of water. The display showed him it would be thirty-point-four miles, even though straight-line distance was probably less than half of that. The bulk of the effort was in getting out of the creek and around the northern tip of Dare Mainland.
Soon he felt the vessel pick up speed and he noticed the depth finder was showing him traveling at seven feet below the surface of the water in a fourteen-foot channel. Mahegan calculated that the craft itself had to be at least four feet deep, top to bottom.
Not much margin for error.
Through the windscreen he could see the broadening expanse of the Alligator River. The vessel continued to the middle of the river, where he imagined it was deepest, then banked to the right and suddenly shot like a rocket to the north. The gauges showed him moving at forty mph. At this rate he would be at his destination in forty-five minutes.
Images flashed by in his heads-up display as well as the thermal dash display. To Mahegan, the sensation was a cross between playing a video game and what it might be like flying through outer space. The Vader was now in eighteen feet of water and traveling at the mid-depth point of nine feet. Mahegan figured the basic algorithm most likely calculated the deepest part of the channel of any body of water and then split the difference. The controls turned slightly every few seconds without his urging. Studying the dashboard, he saw that the autopilot light was glowing a deep orange. Next to it was a protected toggle switch that would allow him, he presumed, to go to manual override.
His hand reached out as he noticed on the thermal display a flashing warning indicating they were approaching bridge pylons. Of its own accord, the Vader slowed, adjusted its depth, centered on a gap, and cruised through it. Once on the far side of the bridge, it adjusted its depth again and increased speed as it began to bank to the right. On the GPS map they were rounding the northern tip of Dare County Mainland; they had covered nearly half the distance toward his objective.
Suddenly, he began to receive a series of signals indicating some type of radar activity coming from his target destination. The visual display showed semicircles bounding outward from what he believed to be his target destination in dim purple light. The heads-up display began to slowly flash, RAM, RAM, RAM.
Having lived a life of deciphering military acronyms, Mahegan guessed that “RAM” stood for Radar Avoidance Mode. Key to his success would be at least getting inside his destination undetected, if that was even possible.
As the Vader pierced the bounding semicircles on the GPS display, a female voice erupted in the cockpit, “Undetected.” The farther Vader probed into the radar field, the more frequently the mechanical voice said, “Undetected.”
To Mahegan, she sounded like “Bitchin’ Betty,” the mechanical female voice that warned fighter pilots of impending disaster.
Suddenly, the target destination loomed large in the thermal display. He was three hundred meters away and coming at it broadside. He saw no point in abandoning a winning strategy thus far with the Vader, so he continued to plow ahead, though he did flip from autopilot to manual.
“Manual,” the voice said. Then added, “Meshlink active.”
Mahegan did not know what “Meshlink” was, but so far everything else was advantageous to his advance. He did notice that he had been able to discern the front nose cone of the Vader up until now. The entire craft had now blended perfectly with its environment, as if it were a chameleon.
Undetectable to radar and to the naked eye, Mahegan thought. Perfect.
Just like the MVX-90s and other radars, the radar he faced, Mahegan presumed, must have a minimum range as well, typically around the fifty-meter zone. This information guided Mahegan’s decision to get to within twenty meters. He suspected that there were audible alarms built into the defenses as well.
When the thermal image showed his target less than forty meters away, Mahegan slowed the Vader to a crawl and stopped it at twenty meters.
He surfaced the vessel slowly, the hatch even with the meniscus of the sound. Silently, he eased the hatch open, grabbed his rucksack full of weapons, and began to exit the Vader, when he heard the voice.
“Vader One at twelve o’clock,” the female voice said. “Vader One. Twelve o’clock. Current position acquired. Target lock. Defensive measures required. Meshlink reactive.
“Missile fired.”
Chapter 51
Adham looked down at the bound and gagged Locklear.
“A federal agent? Gotta love poetic justice. Did you know I had my entire life destroyed by a federal agent?”
Locklear shook her head. She must be wondering where Mahegan or her government might be. Why hadn’t they rescued her? Well, Adham thought, there would be no rescue. Even though the incompetent Sam Nix and his faithful sidekicks had served their purpose of getting him a band of loyal fighters to spread throughout the countryside, Adham was now focused on this single entity.
The federal agent. Revenge. Finally.
Adham had watched from the forest when Mahegan had exited the manhole cover near Milltail Creek. Clasping his hand around Locklear’s mouth, he moved as soon as Mahegan had gone back underground. Rogers had turned around Vader One and took control of the chaos aboard the Lucky Lindy. After a brief conversation, Rogers had agreed to Adham’s plan, realizing Mahegan needed to be lured out of the urban village. Moving at warp speed, Adham had made the trip in record time.
“A delicious woman like yourself working for the feebs?”
Locklear shook her head. Adham was unable to see the tears sliding down her face because of the burlap sandbag placed over her head.
Life’s a Bitch!
And Then You Die!
Adham glanced over at the multiple computers, servers, and display monitors he had surrounding his makeshift office. He had never been that fond of boats but ultimately saw the genius in their employment to achieve his ends.
The Lucky Lindy had proven its ability to transport both gold and ghosts. The Ocean Ranger, as far as he knew, was doing its job of reversing the gold find so that he would be able to claim it with Le Concord. His terrorists on Le Concord should have by now attacked and overtaken the unsuspecting Ocean Ranger. It bothered him marginally that he had not heard yet from Le Concord, but it was only a matter of time, he was sure. Often it took a day or two for information to reach him given the layers of protection he required.
Now the Vader had served as his perfect logistical vehicle getting him to and from the Teach’s Pet as necessary. Its stealth technology kept him undetected as he ferried back and forth between the empty ship that was really a communications relay station for all of the Outer Banks. Adham had figured out how to gain root on the operating systems within the satellite and Internet protocol devices. Once he was inside the firewalls, he had written some fairly simple code that bounced his video, e-mail, tweets, Facebook postings, and all social media around a set of satellites hovering above the Middle East. Keeping the Vader in defensive mode as he had dragged Locklear through the Pet’s side hull compartment had been a brilliant move, because it would alert him to Mahegan’s eventual approach.
Adham eyed the monitors. He could see the action that had unfolded in the urban warfare training complex. His two be
st ghosts, Uday and Hasama, lay dead on the floor. The multiple camera angles allowed him to see the disfigured form of Vinny Falco and the severed head of Sam Nix.
He guessed that there had to be a few of his trainees still alive, still ready to wreak more havoc than they already had. Adham’s plan was as layered as Nix’s product lines. The initial attacks were to strike fear into the American psyche. Now, Adham planned to kill the admirals and generals at Norfolk Navy Base. His ghost army would then spread into the surrounding area, going from house to house. Finally, he had the submersible that would explode a massive fuel air bomb at Fort McNair, in the nation’s capital. Adham’s notion was that bombs and large-scale explosions, while destructive, were not nearly as terrifying as facing someone mano a mano. But he could also rise to the physical challenge, as he had with the computer techie who had come to the Teach’s Pet unexpectedly.
It was midnight and Falco docked the Vader behind the Pet, to its north, so that no one could see them from the nearest land, which was Roanoke Island. The small side door on the Pet allowed them to walk along the “wing” of Vader and into the cargo hold of what had become a telecommunications bridge for the Outer Banks. Falco had already mentioned to him this nexus of computer networking gear. The Teach’s Pet was the perfect digital island. Routers, switches, cell phone repeaters, state, city, federal, county, all on top of one another. Voice Over Internet Protocol, K-band satellite shots, and basic wireless Internet fed by underwater fiber-optic cables. The masts were wrapped with antennae wire shrouded in silicon to defend against the salt water in exactly the same manner as the thousands of miles of underwater fiber-optic cables crisscrossing the oceans. Directional satellite antennae were perched atop the crossbeams, relaying terabytes of data daily around the world.
“We let you do this, you kill that virus and forget about the gold, right?”
“Of course, Mr. Falco,” Adham said, eyeing the equipment ensconced in the hold of the Teach’s Pet.