Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “Sure. I was thinking the same thing.” Two hours would be perfect.

  He stood, held out his hand, which she clasped as she did a miniature pirouette as her legs unraveled from their lotus position. She came to him, as if in a slow dance, placed her hands on his chest, and leaned up on her toes, kissing him lightly on the lips.

  “That’s all you get,” she said. “I prefer women, remember.”

  She pulled him to the bed. Mahegan lay on his back, and she cuddled into his body as if she were custom fitted for it. Mahegan’s mind spiraled and slammed shut, attempting to compensate for two nights without sleep. Shortly, they were both asleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN MAHEGAN AWOKE TWO HOURS LATER, GRACE WAS GONE. She had left her computer and her backpack, and he assumed she had gone to work. Stumbling out of bed, Mahegan stretched. He peeled off his T-shirt and studied the lightning bolt shrapnel scar on his arm, a physical reminder of agonizing loss. While he wanted to run and swim, he had a mission to accomplish. The workout would have to wait.

  A note was propped on the kitchen counter. All it said was, I trust you ;). He fished through his pockets and found his burner cell phone. He had three text messages, all from Grace, who was the only person with the number.

  Walked a mile and Uber got me. You sleep peacefully;)

  Be “home” about 5:00 p.m.

  Super-weird vibe at crime scene!!!

  Mahegan was not accustomed to unsecured communications, and he began to wonder if someone had tapped Grace’s phone. After listening to Grace explain why Ted the Shred was nervous, and knowing the Chinese were involved, it would not surprise Mahegan if these EB-5 commandos, as he decided to call them, had handheld International Mobile Subscriber Identity scanners. The devices were the size of a walkie-talkie and could intercept nonsecure cell phone communications. Mahegan had used an IMSI device called a Stingray in combat to intercept enemy communications. He understood the risks.

  He removed the battery from the phone and stuffed them both in his pocket, hopeful that no one had drawn a bead on his location yet. He showered and washed away some of the grogginess. While he had adapted to a life of little sleep and high adrenaline missions, he couldn’t deny the wear he felt on his body at the moment. He dressed in cargo pants, a lightweight fishing shirt, and a heavier coat that had pockets for secure and unsecure phones and for one of the EB-5 Turk weapons, the Glock 17. He didn’t like the thought of using a weapon he had not personally zeroed or shot, but he could quickly adapt. He checked the action, saw that a round was chambered, and pocketed the pistol.

  Next, Mahegan pulled out his Zebra smartphone and clicked on the GeoTech Map app, which showed latitude, longitude, and granular detail at least as good as Google Maps did. He had access to real-time, live streaming satellite feed if he needed it.

  He thought about the information he had gathered so far. There seemed to be a nexus between Gunther, Throckmorton, and Cassidy. That could work out well for Mahegan. Two birds with one stone and all that. Still, though, his primary mission was to retrieve Cassidy. Savage had told him precious little beyond Cassidy’s off-the-books mission involving shale gas in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  His secure phone buzzed with a message from Savage.

  Reports of asymmetric attack against nuclear power plants in Southport and Charlotte.

  Southport was just below Wilmington on the Carolina coast, and Charlotte was the state’s largest city, with over one million people, and was home to the largest financial center outside of Manhattan.

  Roger. What do you know about James Gunther or son, James Jr.?

  James KIA your mother. Junior in Afghanistan with Cassidy.

  Where is Junior now?

  You tell me. Cassidy had classified information and skill sets. Why we need her back. Connection to nuclear threat?

  Roger. Talking to Pete Cassidy this morning, then will find Ted Throckmorton and Junior.

  Roger. Charlie Mike.

  Charlie Mike. Continue mission. As if he had any choice. Even if the threat went away, he would continue with his pursuit of Gunther. Staying in North Carolina until he had resolved the Gunther issue was a precondition of Mahegan’s deal with Savage. While they had a testy relationship, Savage understood, as indicated by the text message.

  James KIA your mother.

  It was both a statement of fact and an acknowledgment that his boss knew his true motivations. Savage was a practical man. He knew Mahegan was one of the best, while at the same time he understood he was haunted by the death of his mother. Mahegan had sought and achieved justice for Sergeant Wesley Colgate’s death, and he believed that Savage would let him pursue this personal endeavor.

  Mahegan caught a movement out of his periphery and walked to the side of one of his two windows. One faced south and provided a view of his landlords’ home. The other, which he was standing next to, faced east and provided a view of the dense forest. Mahegan often saw deer and black bears roaming in the area.

  This time he caught a whiff of an anomaly, a hard outline against the jagged contours of the forest. The sun was edging over the treetops, pushing through a foggy morning. The density of the trees could provide someone plenty of concealment, unless another someone was watching him from above, as Mahegan was doing now. Mahegan nudged the curtain aside to provide a better view. Actually, there were two men focused on his landlords’ home. Maggie and Andy Robertson and their two young children would either be sleeping or just waking now. Maggie was a teacher in the local school system, and Andy worked as a banker in Raleigh.

  Their kids were in elementary school, and right now all Mahegan could imagine was that his or Grace’s unsecure phone had led two assailants to this location. They either had employed an IMSI tracking device, such as the Stingray, or had retrieved the phone number from spyware on Grace’s phone, then pinged his number with tracking software to get a general location. Had Mahegan not removed the battery from the burner cell phone, the team would be focused on his above-barn apartment, as opposed to the luxury home nearly fifty yards away.

  Mahegan figured that these two men were like the two men he had fought the night before. These were the EB-5 commandos, the recipients of visas for foreign direct investment. It fit with what Grace had told him earlier, that Throckmorton or Gunther had created an army to enforce and operate their fracking operation. Grace had become a liability when Ted Throckmorton gave her information she didn’t need, and now they were tracking her here. There must be a centralized command and control, Mahegan thought, where Throckmorton or Gunther dispatched these home invasion teams to do the wet work.

  Mahegan kept a long gun in his apartment. It was a 7.62 mm x 51 mm, custom-built, long-range, suppressed interdiction rifle. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast, he thought. Moving with deliberate speed, Mahegan secured his rifle and knelt at the window. He softly eased the latch and used his thumb to push the window up about six inches, just enough space to get the rifle onto the ledge and to look through the 5-25 x 56 mm scope. He really didn’t need the scope at fifty yards but used it to study the two men.

  They were military-aged males, as the Army had taught Mahegan to call them. Under twenty-one years of age. Dark hair, broad shoulders, black coats and pants, like Maxim Petrov. These guys could be Russian, Mahegan thought. Or they could be Afghans or Turks.

  What he needed to see before he pulled the trigger was a weapon. His patience was rewarded when the far man knelt behind a tree and slowly aimed a long rifle at the home. Mahegan looked away from his scope and through the adjacent window to see the garage door opening. He didn’t know the precision with which the EB-5 commandos could operate or what their orders might be, but he couldn’t risk having his innocent landlords in jeopardy.

  He placed his cheek on the buttstock of the weapon and sighted on the man with the long rifle. The man’s head was large in the scope optics, the crosshairs placed directly on his temple. There would be very little wind or drop at this distance. He went through the
sequence in his mind: Pull the trigger, shift to the second man, aim, pull the trigger, and then wait for others, if there are any.

  Fog drifted across the lens, but Mahegan maintained a steady site picture. He heard the car backing out of the garage, saw the man tense, his grip tight on the weapon, and begin to pull back on the trigger.

  Mahegan had set his rifle’s trigger weight at three and a half pounds, a tad heavy for most people, but he was larger and stronger than most. He felt the release of the sear, the snap of the trigger, and the cough of the suppressor. And he saw the hole in the side of the man’s head. The man slumped, and the weapon fell to the ground. Mahegan heard the sound from his perch.

  His site picture was already on the man nearest the barn, who was looking at his partner, wondering what had happened. Mahegan blew the back of his head off with a second shot. An eruption of white brain matter shot into the air as the man fell into the underbrush.

  Mahegan continued to scan the wood line to determine if there were more than two. Since yesterday he had encountered two teams of two. His singleton encounters had been with Scarface and Ted the Shred. Keeping the rifle trained on the dead men, Mahegan pulled away and scanned with his eyes. Nothing.

  He saw Andy Robertson’s Mercedes back out. Maggie came running from the house, smiling, and handed him something through the window, probably his lunch. She was dressed and ready for work, also. Wearing a light blue dress, Maggie leaned in and kissed Andy. Mahegan saw two girls at the door, wearing jeans and pink sweaters and carrying backpacks. The Robertson family was rolling at eight o’clock in the morning. What Mahegan knew was that the teacher mom usually took the kids to school with her.

  He waited another thirty minutes, and then the rest of the family was away from the house, doing their daily routine. Moving swiftly down the steps, Mahegan opened the barn door and backed his Cherokee into the driveway, about parallel to the man with the rifle. Mahegan did a quick search of both men and found their wallets, flush with EB-5 green cards. These men were Russian. Probably buddies of Petrov. Either they were seriously stupid or were highly concerned about being stopped and questioned by the police. Or both. Perhaps their mission briefing did not include the fact that they might run up against a former soldier who had skills. He found a key fob for an automobile and a smart phone. He quickly removed the batteries and the SIM card from the phone.

  Mahegan knew that Petrov’s crew had suffered enough setbacks that they would now take a threat seriously. He pulled out a general-purpose tarp he kept in the back of his Cherokee, spread it out over the cargo space, and then lined up the bodies side by side. His body count was increasing as this operation continued. Two dead and four wounded, counting Petrov and Ted the Shred. The Shred might not be a terrorist, but he was still an asshole.

  He drove the bodies along a firebreak to Jordan Lake. One at a time Mahegan carried the bodies to a thirty-foot drop-off where the stream ran narrow through a tight gorge. There logs were piled up, and a beaver was working on a dam. Two boulders leaned against the stream, and the trees lining it were dense. Two hundred yards from the firebreak, the best he could do given the circumstances, he tossed the bodies over the ledge. The animals would get to them before nightfall. He thought about what they might have done to Andy and Maggie and felt no remorse. In fact, he felt pretty damn good.

  What didn’t feel good was that he was no closer to Maeve Cassidy, though intellectually, he thought he understood part of her captors’ plan. He returned to the barn, swept his apartment for brass, placed the rifle back under his bed, got back in the Cherokee, and trolled for the most likely parking spots where the men would have ditched a vehicle to crawl through the woods to the Robertson place. On his third pass he found a stray car parked along a feeder road to the old highway. He tried the key fob and saw the lights flash.

  After parking behind the late-model pickup truck—another theme with the EB-5 commandos—Mahegan stepped out of his Cherokee and entered the pickup from the passenger side, away from the road. The truck cab was relatively clear of debris and information, but the registration showed the vehicle was part of the fleet registered to James Gunther and Sons Construction, Inc. He found a mounted Garmin GPS device, which he dismounted and pocketed. He also grabbed a second cell phone from the center console. His sensitive site exploitation, or search in civilian terms, complete, Mahegan backed out of the truck and locked it. He performed the same drill with the battery and the SIM card of the other phone he’d discovered.

  As he turned, he saw a police cruiser pull in behind his Cherokee. After walking quickly to his vehicle, he leaned in and retrieved his Army CID credentials from the passenger seat, then flipped them up in the face of Raleigh detective first class Griffyn, who had climbed out of the cruiser. The daylight accentuated the man’s ruddy complexion.

  Raleigh native all my life, Mahegan thought, remembering.

  “A little bit out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Detective?”

  “I was getting ready to ask you the same thing, Hawthorne.”

  “And so here we are,” Mahegan said.

  “What were you doing in that vehicle?” Griffyn asked.

  “I was driving by and saw it parked on the side of the road. I thought there might be a distressed motorist, but upon further inspection I found it abandoned. Probably just some kids fishing in one of these farm ponds.” Mahegan waved his hand across the open land on either side of the road.

  “Your fingerprints are on the sliding glass door of the Throckmorton home. We need you to come into the office for some questions.”

  “You saw me put my hand there, Detective. Talk to the Army.”

  “We have a way to determine the difference between a new print and an old print. The oils were different. Grace did an excellent job of differentiating the old prints and the new prints.” Griffyn smiled, indicating he knew something of Mahegan’s interaction with Grace. “And we did call the Army. Seems no one really knows who you are.”

  “Then keep calling,” Mahegan said. He took a step toward Griffyn, towering over the reedy man. Mahegan’s sheer bulk dwarfed Griffyn’s rail-thin presence. A slight wind blew a few wisps of hair on top of the detective’s balding head. Sweat beaded and began to trickle. Mahegan sensed he had won this brief chess move, but the match was far from over.

  “I’ll do that. Next time I’ll have a warrant. I promise,” Griffyn said.

  Mahegan looked over his shoulder at Griffyn’s Crown Victoria, the pickup truck, and the road that stretched beyond. Then he looked over Griffyn’s head at the empty road stretching in the other direction, like an unused runway. His anger began to boil. Whether this was an intentional effort to block his pursuit of justice or merely a bureaucratic machination, Mahegan didn’t have time for a modern-day Javert chasing his Valjean.

  “Tell you what, Detective. I’ll come in and participate in your investigation, even answer your questions, once you get clearance from the Army.”

  It was exactly the opposite of what he wanted to say, but he chose to play nice given his time constraint.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Griffyn said. The detective gave Mahegan a confident nod and stepped into his Crown Victoria.

  Mahegan watched Griffyn drive along the lonely stretch of road and wondered how the detective had tracked him there. Or if Griffyn had been tracking the EB-5 commandos.

  He stashed that information as he climbed back into his Cherokee and drove past the entrance of the Gunther and Sons construction site where he had pinned Maxim Petrov to the ground with a posthole digger.

  Parking his Cherokee a mile away to the east, Mahegan decided to walk through the waist-deep swamp to approach the property. The day before, Petrov had disappeared over the eastern ridge for some time. Trudging through the swamp, Mahegan saw water moccasins coiled tight, basking in the morning sun. Two foxes eyed him warily, and a small herd of deer splashed through the water.

  Emerging from the water, he stood up tall and saw a construction crew w
orking on the northeast corner of the fence they had been installing. The outer fence with all the security sensors did not reach the eastern side of the hill yet. It appeared that Petrov, or whoever, had secured the necessary labor to continue the job. Mahegan wanted to see inside the bowl where he had seen the fracking drill, the water and chemical tanks, and the pipes.

  There was a small ridge that gave him cover if he stayed to the south side as he worked his way west. Mahegan stayed low for two hundred yards and then caught another anomaly. It was a flat surface against the rounded shape of the hillock. Inspecting it further, Mahegan saw that it was a wall, painted with the camouflage colors brown, tan, and green. It was a respectable job, but not great. He noticed two locked hasps and suddenly got hopeful.

  Cassidy had been kidnapped ostensibly to perform some type of fracking mission. Was this her cell or just an equipment shed?

  Mahegan found a rock the size of his palm and approached the wooden structure. The sun was up now, almost 9:00 a.m. The work crew was about four hundred yards away, doing the posthole and cement job for the fence. He smelled the new paint and the fresh wood and got even more hopeful. If she was in the cell, he could extract her and retreat quickly to the woods. Her rescue would allow him to transition back to his Gunther mission.

  But the warrior in him told him it wasn’t going to be that easy. With a couple of powerful swings, he smashed the rock on the hasps, and both of them swung free. Pushing the door inward, he climbed into the structure, still holding the rock high as a defensive measure. He found a blanket, some combat rations, and a few bottles of water. After a quick search, Mahegan found a standard issue army wristwatch and a piece of cloth stuffed in the corner on the floor behind the piss bucket. He instantly recognized the cloth as a Velcro-backed Army combat uniform nametape.

  It read CASSIDY.

  CHAPTER 13