Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  He drove his black pickup truck to the line of waiting journeymen. He jumped out, sized up the lot, selected two strong-looking men, opened the tailgate, and motioned for them to hop in the truck. His boss had told him that he would need more men later to complete the outer security fence, but he needed the cell built immediately.

  From downtown Chapel Hill, he drove to the isolated construction site about fifteen miles away. With the two day laborers bouncing in the back of the truck, he entered the site off U.S. Route 1. He made a series of right and left turns through an increasingly wooded area and arrived upon a mile-long tangle of trucks, water tanks, pipes, valves, and drills. It looked better than a junkyard, but not by much.

  Petrov turned right again, being careful to stay out of the line of sight of the nineteen other men, like himself, who had been brought to the United States as fracking roughnecks. He followed a minor two-track trail around the eastern side of the hill, where he stopped after a mile of bouncing through the ruts. He shut off the engine and waited, checking again to make sure he had avoided detection by the roughnecks, especially the two Chinese guys. They couldn’t know about this part of the mission, at least not yet, if ever. Certain he was undetected, Petrov issued instructions to the Hispanic men in broken English.

  The two workers dismounted and moved to the preconstruction area Petrov had already completed. They helped him lift and place the floor, walls, and roof. They were good workers, steady men who knew how to build. Petrov didn’t ask their names, because he didn’t care. They wouldn’t be alive long enough for it to matter. Once they had the plywood sawed and nailed to the walls, ceiling, and floor, save the eight-by-six-by-three-foot opening in the floor, they took a break.

  He offered both men a bottle of water, which they gladly accepted. They sat on the hill, looking to the southeast, toward Shearon Harris Lake, less than five miles away, and to the single cooling tower of the nuclear plant, its steam rising lazily into the early morning sky like drifting cigar smoke. He heard them speaking in Spanish, wondering why he was using plywood and what the hole might be. They guessed it was for a latrine.

  Close, he thought. He was going to use it to dispose of something he no longer needed.

  Their part was done. He approached from behind and shot each of them in the head using a Glock 17, the gunshots signaling nothing more than a deer hunter on this bucolic hillside. He dragged their bodies into the cell and dumped them into the remaining hole in the floor. He poured two bags of limestone on top of them, filled the hole with dirt, laid the perfectly cut sheet of plywood on the studs, and hammered the floor shut.

  It took him the rest of the day to finish the holding cell. Using a shovel, he spread two feet of dirt on the roof, which was even with the crest of the hill. He sprinkled fescue grass seed and straw on top of the dirt. In less than a week, the only part of the cell that would show would be the door, which faced toward the woods, which were about one hundred yards away. He camouflaged the door with brown and green paint.

  He walked to the woods and down to a rill running into Shearon Harris Lake. Petrov studied the swampy area and determined that no one in their right mind would cross anywhere within a quarter mile in either direction. But if they did, he wanted to know what they would see. Petrov walked directly toward the holding cell and didn’t notice it until he was out of the woods and within fifty meters of it.

  And he was looking for it.

  Soon there would be others looking for it also, but by then it would be too late.

  At least that was the plan.

  Tomorrow he would visit another gas station and find a different work crew, who would need to last a few more days so they could build the rest of the security fence.

  As darkness enveloped him, he drove the mile to the graded lot between two hilltops. He saw the crew of roughnecks wrapping up their work, a few of them staring at him as they smoked cigarettes, the orange tips glowing hot.

  Sitting in his truck, looking at the lights on the crew trailers up the hill, where they would all sleep tonight, he received a text message.

  Package wrapped. Delivery tonight.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, JAKE MAHEGAN STOOD IN THE LINE LIKE any other unemployed, perhaps homeless, man down on his luck. He had not shaved in a week, and the black stubble of a beard contrasted with his dark blond hair. He wore old, greasy Army battle dress uniform pants, scuffed Doc Marten boots, and a loose-fitting, ripped NC State sweatshirt atop a tan Army T-shirt. But what set him apart from the other day laborers was that he was a good foot taller than most.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, keeping his eyes cast downward at the abused sidewalk next to the Wallaby gas station near Apex, North Carolina. He was fifth in a line of about twenty people looking for work, part of a human assembly line. A truck arrived; a few got on. Another appeared, and some more left. Every day was the same.

  He had been here enough days without getting picked that he knew the system. Arrival time equaled line queue number, unless your name was Papa Diablo, who always got the first job regardless of when he arrived.

  Mahegan guessed it took about five trips to the Wallaby gas station to earn any bona fides with the perennial group of Hispanic men who lined up here for the assorted odd jobs that came their way. Most frequently, the routine included a pickup truck, a farmer or a construction foreman leaning through the passenger window, and the barking of a number, usually in bad Spanish, such as “Tres!” Three men would then clamber into the back of the pickup, and off they would go to do landscaping or ditch digging, something manual and menial.

  But the pay was apparently okay, as Mahegan noticed the same faces in the short time he had been lining up. Every morning there was a new topic of discussion among those in the line, mostly normal locker room scuttlebutt, like the talk Mahegan would hear from his soldiers when he was active duty Army. The chow sucked. Not enough combat action or, in this case, work. Someone’s girlfriend or wife left him, and so on. This morning, though, the chatter up and down the line tested Mahegan’s limited Spanish skills. He heard words like camion negro, idos, no estan en casa, ricos, and borrachos. Apparently, the rumor was that two men from a different gas station’s line had been selected by a black truck, were now missing, and most likely had been so well paid that they had gotten drunk and had never come home.

  This line of conversation piqued Mahegan’s interest because he was looking for a black, late-model Ford F-150 being driven by a dark-haired man with a long scar running along one cheek. What Mahegan had learned through his network was that the man driving the black pickup truck was looking for men who could do fracking jobs. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale gas deposits would soon be big business in North Carolina, and the men lined up with Mahegan prayed for steady jobs that would provide for their families.

  The Ford would have the name of a construction company on the side. Mahegan knew the name of the construction company. Other than losing his best friend in combat, it had been all he had thought about for the past fifteen years. One name. One man.

  Since Mahegan’s cycle of deployments to combat had ceased when he was dismissed from active duty Army, he was now able to focus his attention on this entirely personal matter. He was catching up on old, unfinished business, the way a normal person might use a Saturday to run errands. Before his dismissal from the Army less than two years ago, his life had been full of workweeks, 24-7. He had been either engaged in combat or prepping for combat. Now it was nothing but weekends, with no real kind of job and a lot of time to think.

  Mahegan watched trucks come and go, and the line shorten accordingly, until he saw a Ford pull into the parking lot and then turn to the gas pump island. He saw white letters arcing across the door, with mud splattered across most of them, making the words illegible. A buzz like that from a lit fuse sizzled through the line of men as a stocky man of average height, with black hair, climbed out of the truck and began to pump low-test gasoline. Out of his periph
ery, Mahegan saw the man look at the nozzle and then across the truck bed at the two dozen hopeful men, including him. He felt the man’s gaze settle on him, calculating perhaps how much Mahegan could bench-press. Or it may have been a reckoning that he didn’t belong in the group.

  Mahegan appeared bored, eyes cast downward. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to detect the man’s scar from over thirty yards away, so he didn’t look. So far, everything matched up. Mahegan was in position number five, unless Papa Diablo suddenly appeared. Then he would be sixth. He hoped the man needed at least six for the job.

  Mahegan took a sip of water from a water bottle. He had started bringing a case of it every day and putting it at the head of the line so the workers could grab a bottle as they went with their rides. This act had earned both the praise of the common line dweller and the suspicion of Papa Diablo, who now came walking around the back side of the gas station to jump the line. No doubt he had been waiting for the fracking job, also. It was a different kind of work, and the line had been burning with rumors for weeks that hydraulic fracturing was going to provide not just daily chances for work but also steady jobs. This morning’s news of the happy drunks had only fueled that yearning.

  The black-haired man jumped in his truck and pulled to a stop directly in front of Mahegan, who noticed red clay had etched red stains around the edges of the tires like dark lipstick. The mud was caked on thick, but the red clay was a good sign. The fracking job would be off-road. The fracking fault lines were in the rolling hills of western Wake, Chatham, Lee, and Moore Counties, where red clay was dominant.

  The driver walked with an intent focus that Mahegan had seen before. The man was task driven to find the biggest, hardest-working men possible. He had quick black eyes, which rapidly scanned the crowd again. He paced along the row of downtrodden men, who were too proud to act desperate, but too desperate not to act interested.

  To Mahegan, the driver’s strut looked like that of the goosestepping Schutzstaffel, whom he’d first seen in a middle school social studies class on Nazi propaganda. The man took long, lazy strides just outside the range of the work-worn boots of his potential charges. His black combat boots resonated like a dropping guillotine blade with each footfall, the red clay rimming his boots looking like dried blood splatter. Mahegan took in his mud-stained dungarees, his sweatshirt, and his black leather coat, which was listing to the right, an indication of something heavy in his pocket, perhaps a pistol.

  The driver stopped in front of Papa Diablo, nodded to him, as if to acknowledge Diablo’s authority in the group, and said, “Uno.” Then he said, “Dos,” as he pointed at the biggest man in the group other than Mahegan. The driver’s hands were large extensions of thick, powerful arms. When he pointed, the driver aimed his finger like a gun.

  Mahegan watched “Dos” and Papa Diablo jump to their feet, open the tailgate, and scramble onto the truck bed.

  Turning away, the driver looked over his shoulder at Mahegan, pointed at him, and said, “And you.”

  That was when Mahegan saw the scar. He paused, purely an act intended to demonstrate submission and hesitation. Then he walked to the truck, stepped on the tailgate, which shifted the weight of the truck considerably, and slid in next to Papa Diablo. The driver climbed back into the truck, slammed his door, and sped out of the parking lot, as if time was critical.

  Mahegan didn’t know the protocol about talking on the way to a job, so he stayed quiet, which was natural for him, anyway. He watched homes and stores pass by from the unobstructed vantage point of the truck bed. Shortly, they were on U.S. Route 1, heading south toward Pinehurst, with populated Wake County falling away behind them. But they didn’t go far. By Mahegan’s estimation, the driver turned the truck off an exit ramp less than fifteen miles from where they had entered the limited-access highway. He pulled onto an asphalt road called old U.S. Route 1 and raced the vehicle to about seventy miles per hour.

  As Mahegan rode in the back of the pickup truck, he thought about the many elements at play. He was one of three people selected to go to an undisclosed location to do an unknown type and amount of work for an undetermined wage. Times were tough, and they were tougher, obviously, for the two men sitting in the truck bed with him.

  The truck bed had a standard plastic liner that wore the scars of hard labor: heavy metal things tossed in the back; tools, like rakes and shovels, bouncing and gouging the floor and the low walls. The back window was a slider but was tinted dark. He couldn’t see inside the cab.

  “Dos” was probably six feet tall in Mahegan’s estimation. His face was square, and he had the flattened nose of a boxer. He wore a buzz cut like a cage fighter. His shoulders were round and appeared powerful. He wore a long-sleeve Under Armour T-shirt, which poked out from beneath a brown and gray Carhartt coat.

  Pablo Diablo was thin and wiry. He had a beak-like nose and a cool, confident demeanor. Mahegan could see he was comfortable in his role as the informal leader of the Apex Wallaby work crew. He didn’t know, but Mahegan figured there was a rite of passage here that was similar to the way village elders gained status in Afghanistan.

  All in all, Mahegan saw he could have been paired with worse teammates, if that was what he could call them. He had once been a member of the military’s most elite team, Delta Force, but Mahegan had killed a handcuffed enemy prisoner of war, which was against military law. His rage had been unleashed only after a bomb maker’s improvised explosive device had killed his best friend. In the mayhem caused by the blast, the prisoner had tried to escape, and Mahegan’s attempt to disable the fleeing enemy had resulted in the man’s death. The buttstock of an M4 carbine to the temple would do that to a person, especially when propelled by Mahegan’s powerful forearm.

  As Mahegan stared past the bed of the truck at the woods, which moved past them like a movie reel, he thought about freedom. He had fought for freedom but had actually never felt truly liberated. As a kid, he had had school. His parents. Rules. Authorities. Responsibility. When he was a soldier, the same trappings had applied, just in different formats. He had had commanders and soldiers. Authority and responsibility. He had thrived in that environment.

  Yet now he was devoid of authority and had little responsibility beyond taking care of himself. And, still, he wasn’t free. A memory chained him to his past like prison shackles, binding him to his anger and guilt. His mind pulled against the mental trusses, as if attempting to yank anchors from a brick wall. The memories were of his mother, the only person who had ever shown him what true freedom looked like. Her words and actions had provided Mahegan guideposts by which to live his life. As Mahegan left the Army and decompressed, he had wrestled with the loss of his best friend, Sergeant Wesley Colgate. But he was haunted by the recurring memory of his mother from fifteen years before.

  He was a Croatan Indian, born on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. He had spent his youth there and in Maxton, in Robeson County, with his parents—at least until he’d walked home from school one day and found four men smelling of booze and sweat manhandling his mother, calling her an Indian lover bitch. He was fourteen, and by then he was over six feet tall. Young Mahegan had been lifting weights in the gym with one of the assistant wrestling coaches, who was a paratrooper at Fort Bragg.

  His mother, Samantha Austin Mahegan, had been a beach-variety blonde. Her skin had been tan and smooth. She had had freckles that dotted her face like a distant constellation and that filled in during the summer, so mostly she’d looked almost as dark as his Croatan father. Mahegan had loved her as much as any child loved his or her mother, in an adoring, protective way. With his father drifting so much, looking for work and chasing his roots, she had often been all he had.

  She had been an elementary school teacher and had had the clear countenance and upbeat attitude that all teachers seemed to share. She had taught him to read, ride a bike, and say the blessing at the dinner table. Her parents had called her Sam, placing her initials together to make a cute nickname, which had st
uck. His favorite memories revolved around her teaching him to be a waterman, which included swimming, free diving, and surfing near Frisco, in the Outer Banks. Other memories included sitting on the back porch of their modest home in Maxton as the sun set over the sandy hills to the west. She had shared her life philosophy with him, which essentially centered on making a difference.

  Sam Mahegan had been no fool, Jake knew, and she had been a tough woman with a gentle heart. She had loved nature and had harbored countless stray animals, from dogs to cats to injured wild pigs and even wounded deer. She had led the Save the Turtle efforts in the Outer Banks and the litter cleanup campaign in Maxton. She’d been a mother with a cause, he liked to say. She had shown him how to be generous while standing up for himself against the bullies who invariably picked on him until he began growing at age thirteen.

  “Always give them an out,” she had said. “You are strong, Chayton, and you will hurt them.” Chayton, which meant “falcon” in Iroquois, was his given name, but he had had trouble saying it as a child. His version had sounded like “Jake,” which had stuck, much like “Sam” had for his mother. Mahegan had evolved “a long time ago,” according to his father, from Mohegan, which meant “wolf.”

  Mahegan had tried to let some things go as a teenager, and his mother’s advice had mostly worked.

  Until that day.

  He had walked home from school along the freshly graded dirt road that a construction company was building between his school and their neighborhood. There’d been a pickup truck parked in front of his house. The truck had had a construction company name stenciled on the side. He had found four men in his house.