by A. J Tata
“What assurances are you giving me?”
Adham held up a flash drive and said, “Right here. This is the antivenin, so to speak. This flash drive holds the key that will remove the virus from your server and you can have your gold. No one will be the wiser.”
“How do I know that’s real?” Falco asked.
“How do you know the virus is real?” Adham countered.
“Maybe we should just kill you anyway,” Falco said, anger rising in his voice. To Adham it sounded like fear. While Falco had seized on Adham’s scheme, the Navy man had never fully trusted him.
“I assure you. The virus is real and the minute I don’t update my computer at my preprogrammed time, signifying my presence, my Facebook site will announce to the world the latitude and longitude of your gold find in the Long Shoal River, as well as your subsequent reverse-find operation in the ocean.” Adham opened his arms to Falco and finished. “So, have it your way.”
Falco, feeling played but vulnerable, motioned for Adham to continue.
Adham turned back to the server farm. It was state of the art. He spent thirty minutes with his laptop hacking into the system and gaining access to the main drive so that he could control the data flow back and forth. He could hide in plain sight for all to see, establishing the perfect illusion.
The Teach’s Pet was Adham’s lair; only, he was rarely physically present. He was mostly in Buffalo City, communicating through the elaborate Internet infrastructure J.J. had built.
As he finished, Falco was anxious. He heard a boat approaching.
“What the hell?” Falco asked. Leaning outside, Falco saw a white Boston Whaler center console Montauk twenty-one-foot motorboat approaching. He used the remote to submerge Vader One because there wasn’t time for them to get out, remount Vader One, and depart without being seen.
“Get up on deck and lock the damn door from the outside and then let him board,” Adham said, pulling Falco back and closing the cargo hold side door. Falco raced onto the deck to lock the side door. He climbed back through the hatch, locked it from below again, and joined Adham in the dark corner.
Soon, they heard the motor shut off and two men were arguing.
“Hey, Miller, why the hell we have to come out this late?”
“I need to download some data in a secure place, J.J. You run this joint out here for Dare County, so I figure this would be as good a spot as any. I’m already worried they’re on to me.”
“I need to know what it is, man. I can’t be letting you upload some bullshit onto all these servers and shit. We’re a hub for the feds, state, county, everybody, man. I jack this up and I jack it all up.”
“You said you’ve got super-high-resolution display in here. I’ve got images from Copperhead. They found gold, I think, and they’re trying to hide it.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
There was a long pause, as if they are thinking or looking. Maybe they noticed something?
“Do we get any if it’s true?” J.J. asked.
“We can talk about it.”
“Okay. Let’s take a look.”
Adham and Falco moved into the dark recesses of the room as one of them unlocked the door. The two men entered and paused.
“Over here,” J.J. said.
J.J. powered up a computer and display monitor, and noticed an unhooked Ethernet cable.
“What the hell? This wasn’t unhooked yesterday. You been out here, Miller?”
“Naw, man. I wouldn’t come here without you.”
“Huh.”
J.J. loaded the flash drive Royes gave him into a small computer as he punched up the high-definition display screen.
His fingers worked the keyboard like a concert pianist as he pulled up the digital imaging that the Merlin optic ball had been recording.
Falco thought to himself, sonofabitch. He traded glances with Adham, who was holding a knife. Adham gave him the signal. He would kill the one called Miller, but they needed to keep J.J. alive. Falco nodded.
The two men stepped out of the dark corner before either man could react. Falco had J.J. in a hammerlock while Adham drove the knife into the other man’s kidney and a few other places.
Falco used the butt of his pistol to knock out J.J. and said, “Man, you’re getting blood everywhere.”
“Take the boat and do something with this guy,” Adham directed Falco, who suddenly realized that they had flipped from prisoner-warden to the other way around. Adham tossed Falco the knife and now he had him for blood, prints, and motive. Adham owned him.
“You can drive it. Just push autopilot. It’ll do the rest,” Falco said, handing Adham the Vader One remote.
In the rush, Adham connected the Ethernet cable he had forgotten and removed the flash drive, pocketing it. Another piece of ownership with the antivenom and the virus.
Falco took the dead man and dumped him in the boat, fired it up, and sped away.
Adham then spent another two hours in the Teach’s Pet doing exactly what he needed to do. He built a back door into the Pet’s communications network that was reachable from any Internet Protocol address. He was golden.
He snapped out of the recent memory and leaned over to remove the burlap bag from Lindy Locklear’s face. He could see she had been crying. She was certainly quite beautiful and appeared to be more of a beach queen than a federal agent with the Treasury Department. “I’m removing the gag from your mouth, sweet Lindy. You are in a place where no one can hear you and there’s nobody left to save you.”
Adham pulled the rag from her mouth, eyeing her small form as he did so.
“The Army combat uniform becomes you, Special Agent Locklear.”
“What the hell do you want from me?”
“Actually, nothing. You are of no value to me. I am taking revenge against the greater establishment that screwed me when I was just a mere child. But—”
Thinking he’d heard a noise, Adham stopped, and tilted his head.
“Probably just the wind,” he muttered. The ship was small and creaked frequently with the shifting tides and swirling winds.
“You, an American, killed American soldiers,” Locklear said. “American citizens!”
Adham cocked his head toward her.
“That, too. Most importantly, I killed our hero’s best friend, Sergeant Colgate.”
Locklear spat at Adham because, he assumed, she couldn’t do anything else. Ha, he thought. For all of her marksmanship training, kickboxing regimen, and endurance running, she was rendered helpless at his hands. If a teenager could invent Facebook and rule the world, he thought, there was no limit to what he could do with a few men, a few hundred ghosts, and the wires of the Internet.
“How is Colgate different from the others?” she asked. “He was Mahegan’s friend. So what?”
“Ms. Locklear, you are simply stalling for time, I know. But I will humor you for a moment because I would do the same. Perhaps we are more similar than you think. Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces called Mahegan’s team the Shebah Jeesh. Ghost Army. They were raiding all of our hideouts. Their intelligence was uncanny and they were getting closer every day—until I hacked the secret Internet used at Bagram Air Base. Once we got through the encryption and code, we learned more than even you would want to know. We learned the details of the missions, which were not as pristine or noble as you might like to think, and we picked them off a man at a time. Just as the US military’s goal was to kill Osama, my goal became to kill Mahegan. The al-Qaeda fighter doesn’t fear the generals. We fight the warriors, the captains, and their sergeants. Somehow they got inside our heads. They were defeating us. So—do you play chess, Miss Locklear?—we began offering our pawns in exchange for their bishops. Hoxha the bomb maker was really just another pawn. Once we changed our strategy, mission after mission Mahegan began to lose one man here, two there, and suddenly he was down to a few Shebahs. Ghosts.” He laughed. “It’s funny, that’s what Copperhead calls us now. We are ghost prisoners. No one r
ecorded our capture and no one knows we were on the battlefield. We don’t exist, except of course, here in the U. S. of A.”
Adham paused. Purging himself of this information had not been part of his plan, but it felt good to communicate his feats to at least one person, a federal agent, whom he thought would at least appreciate his genius.
“But you never got Mahegan.”
“Not yet. Our goal was never just to punish America. It was also to kill Mahegan, and we won’t stop until we do. Not that you’ll live to see it. When the opportunity presented itself to get him, knowing the corruption of the Copperhead team, we took a risk. Our best chance of smuggling fighters into the US became via the private military contractors who had their own airplanes flying in and out daily. They, by definition, were motivated by financial gain and so we played to our enemy’s weakness.”
“Brilliant,” Locklear whispered, unintentionally.
“Yes, I know. Thank you.”
“So now you take your gold and live in some palace in the Middle East somewhere?”
“It seems that would be a good plan. But I’ve grown fond of being a powerful player on the world stage. Would Gates step down from Microsoft in his prime? Would Zuckerberg walk away from Facebook? Bezos from Amazon? I don’t think so.”
“So you’re the Internet genius of terror? You’ve got that market cornered?”
Adham regarded her a moment, his head tilted again to the side, his adrenaline pumping. She was simply stalling, feeding his youthful ego in an attempt to better her situation, because it certainly couldn’t get any worse.
“Yes,” he said before snapping himself out of his reverie. “Well, this chat has been useful, but now I must get on with the business of killing you, a federal agent, on live video streaming. You are a symbol of what set me on this course. In many respects you can say this is your entire fault. I was just a kid developing a web game. Some other dude got rich off it. Now it’s my turn.”
Adham replaced the burlap sandbag on top of her head and picked up a remote.
“Please don’t do this,” she said, her voice muffled through the sack.
Adham paused, mustering the courage to perform one more horrible task. He thought of himself cowering in his basement as the FBI stormed his home. Then he visualized himself huddled in the tunnel beneath Hoxha’s home. Was he feeling courage or fear?
His hands trembling, he felt the whoosh of the blade lifting into the air as he prepared to behead her.
Then the ship rocked from an explosion.
Chapter 52
Mahegan stopped his exit from Vader Two as he heard the repetitive female voice saying, “Vader One has radar lock. Missile fired. Meshlink Reactive.”
He quickly locked the cockpit lid in place as he noticed a line forming just beneath the surface of the water, looking like a shark coming in for an attack from his one o’clock. Having spent more time than he cared to admit in tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, Mahegan understood the term “reactive” in its present context. He had been inside an Israeli Merkava tank that had layers of reactive armor protecting it. The Syrians had mastered the art of the penetrating rocket-propelled grenades and in a defensive countermove the Israelis had hung a series of armor belts on their tanks that exploded upon contact. When a rocket hit the reactive armor, the explosives ignited and caused the rocket to detonate early, diffusing its capability to penetrate beyond the outer layer.
In short, all the explosions happened outside the tank, a lesson not lost on Mahegan.
As sophisticated as this underwater machine appeared to be, with “Bitching Betty” calmly telling him that Meshlink had gone “reactive,” his first thought was to put the Israeli Merkava lesson to use.
Be inside when it hits.
His Vader rocked upward as a bright orange fireball flashed and then quickly dissipated. The sound was like that of a padded sledgehammer hitting a concrete wall. The flash was brilliant, then gone. Certainly, if he had been outside of the Vader, he would have, at the minimum, been shredded by shrapnel.
Bitching Betty came alive and warned, “Vader One assessing damage. Preparing.”
Mahegan quickly programmed a new route into Vader Two, opened the hatch, and then closed it as securely as possible. Pushing away, he heard the muffled voice of Betty saying, “Vader One target acquired. Vader One has launched missile.”
He dove deep, the backpack laden with weapons helping him get lower. The second missile was a muffled blast, as if he were wearing headphones. Vader Two was moving away as he had reprogrammed it to do. He felt the heat from the explosives and the shock wave from the reactive armor. He got caught in the turbulence as the sound absorbed the kinetic energy. Tumbling as if he were caught in a Hawaiian twenty-foot bone-crushing wave, he bounced off the bottom of the shallow sound and ricocheted upward. His packful of weapons was tugged hard in one direction as his body was pulled in another, but his grip on the pack was firm.
He had been blown toward the Teach’s Pet, the only helpful by-product of the blast.
Surfacing, Mahegan quickly found the cargo door, which was amidships and which he presumed was used for uploading the communications equipment. This was not the area to enter, he surmised, as it was most likely locked and proximate to where Adham was holding Locklear. He quietly guided himself to the aft end of the Teach’s Pet. Scaling the hull and climbing over the gunwale, he slipped quietly onto the deck of the ship, noticing a locked hatch near the ship’s wheel.
Kneeling next to the hatch, Mahegan first removed the Beretta pistol Sheriff Johnson had given him. Mahegan had taped a Maglite beneath the barrel and now tested the light and chambered a round after ensuring the safety was off.
Doubtful that Adham would be without a bodyguard or sentry of some sort, Mahegan proceeded with caution. He handled the heavy gauge padlock, removed a small pair of bolt cutters from his backpack, and snapped the lock. Sliding into the darkened space below on his belly, he used one hand to brace against each descending step while the other held his pistol. The flashlight highlighted a small circle of flooring where he acrobatically reversed his position and was suddenly standing.
Moving swiftly to the rear corner, he began to clear the large area belowdecks. He saw sleeping bunks lining the walls of the ship and a small galley to his front. Mahegan stepped quietly along the wooden flooring wondering how many compartments were on this vessel.
His mind was churning through all of the variables. Locklear was in imminent danger. Ghost detainees were roaming, armed and dangerous. He was unfamiliar with the layout of the ship. Adham was elusive. Was he even onboard?
Remembering that this was a communications hub, he began searching the crevices of the deck for wiring. His search was quickly rewarded as he found bunched wires held together by plastic ties every five feet or so. They were running along the floorboard where it met the side of the ship and along the ceiling as well. He followed them until they all bunched together at a far wall and poured through a circular cutout into another room.
He saw a dim light surrounding the wires, like a halo. Dust motes floated in the light, which flickered.
As if it was cast by a television.
Mahegan placed his ear against the wall and heard a soft cry.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
Locklear was begging for her life and it was too much for him to bear. He frantically ran his hand along the wall searching for a seam, a door, anything.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
As if it were a recording, the voice continued.
As if it was misdirection.
As if he was he in the wrong place.
Mahegan stopped and stood still, listening. After the fight at the urban training village, he was certain he was in the right place. Bitching Betty had confirmed that Vader One was out there. Adham had to have taken it to here.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
Had Adham alr
eady killed her and was now trapping him inside the ship?
Moving to his left, he found black canvas covering a gun port, which blocked any moonlight from seeping in. Along the hull of the ship, he found the other ports as well, all covered with canvas that hung like drapes. There were mock cannons at each of the gun ports, perched atop carriages that were slammed up against the bulwark as if they were ready to fire on a passing vessel.
Was the only way into the server room through the padlocked door? Mahegan remembered Locklear telling him that they used this ship for the Lost Colony production as well as visits for schoolchildren to see pirate reenactments. It would make sense that they sealed off the highly sensitive equipment. However, they would want some type of airflow, he considered.
He moved to the nearest gun port and inspected it quickly. He pushed the cannon away from the hull along the firing platform and it actually rolled. The gun was light, a replica. It made a slight noise as he rolled it back so that he could fit through the gun port. Sliding through, he found a rope hanging over the gunwale running along the length of the ship. He pulled on it and it held firm. As if he were rappelling a rock wall, he moved hand over hand toward the bow, where he suspected Locklear to be.
He passed above one gun port and then paused.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
It had to be a recording. Every minute or so it would repeat.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
It was unmistakably Locklear’s voice. Digital quality.
Suspecting a trap, Mahegan continued to the next gun port, where he heard nothing.
Then he heard a boat silently approach the north side, opposite of his position, of the Teach’s Pet.
“Sounds like dear old Dad is right on time,” Adham said loud enough for Mahegan to hear.
Chapter 53
Mahegan held on to the rope on the port side of the ship as he heard locks being unlocked and doors being opened on the starboard side.
He lowered himself along the hull until he could see the porthole through which he’d heard Adham’s voice. A faint light escaped through whatever sealant the maintenance crews had put in place. He reached out and touched the material. It was rubberized, probably intended to protect the high-tech equipment inside and to minimize light escaping outward.