Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  The solution Harrabi came up with was acoustic transmission using a digital processing system. This particular level of expertise, he supposed, was what had drawn al-Awlaki to him in the first place, fate playing the ultimate hand. Another member of the team, tragically oppressed just as he had been, had created a diode and chip encased in a waterproof plastic shield capable of receiving the acoustic signals as much as a thousand feet below the surface. It had vibrating sensors programmed to the specific wave pattern that would trigger the charge with the simple internal element akin to touching two wires together. The broadcast devices themselves were scattered strategically throughout the target area in buoys that were exact replicas of ones deployed by the Coast Guard.

  It had been a long and painstaking process that required direct contact with the barrels and, thus, their toxic contents. Precautions only went so far and mistakes were inevitable in the arduous toil and labor that would have cost one of his team members their life had a car accident not done the job first.

  Harrabi had expected he would’ve felt better about this moment. Instead, all he felt was empty, his great victory of vengeance lost in the fact that it would do nothing about the sadness filling his soul. It wouldn’t bring his boys back, make his beautiful Layla whole again, or even improve his people’s plight. But Harrabi was no longer a big enough thinker to care about any of that. He knew only that America would never recover from what he was about to unleash upon her, just as he never had. That might not have been enough, but it was something, all he had.

  “We are heroes in the eyes of God, my brother,” al-Awlaki said, continuing to lead him toward the Mariah’s elevated command center.

  A trio of the great man’s guards fell into step behind them amid the machinery squeezed and cluttered everywhere. Harrabi stopped to tie his shoe, crouching down and knotting his lace as al-Awlaki’s biggest bodyguard ground to a halt over him dragging a lame leg.

  Something cold gripped Harrabi’s insides. His fingers shook and he retied his shoe again, his mind flashing back to the night that had changed him forever.

  The man who had brought the baseball bat down on his oldest son’s skull …

  That man had walked with a limp.

  The big man he was looking at now walked with a limp.

  Harrabi closed his eyes, trying to recall more of the man’s face as he’d glimpsed it in the darkness. The face looked the same, the hair looked the same, the eyes looked the same.

  Because it was the same man! Sent that night not by locals intent on stopping a mosque in their town of Wolfsboro, Tennessee, not by fate at all …

  But by the great Anwar al-Awlaki himself.

  97

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “You got something more to say or not?” Tepper asked Young Roger.

  Young Roger looked up from calculations he’d been working out on his BlackBerry. “Well, think of it this way. Ten parts per million is considered safe when it comes to radioactivity. We’re looking at something on the level of a hundred million times worse than that.”

  “Remind me never to hire anyone as smart as you again.”

  Young Roger grabbed a half-full bottle of water off the hood of one of the still warm SUVs parked in the freight yard. Then he picked up a handful of gravel from the ground at his feet.

  “Make believe this is the Gulf,” he said, holding the bottle up for them to see. “This would represent a safe level of contamination.”

  With that, Young Roger dropped a pinch of gravel dust into the water, swirling it around until it quickly dissolved.

  “Now here’s the equivalent of what we’d be facing if five thousand barrels of radioactive waste were released.”

  And here he sifted the remaining gravel dust in his hand into the bottle. He shook up the resulting contents, turning the water dark and gritty, though a large portion of the gravel dust remained undissolved on the bottom.

  “The toxicity level,” Young Roger finished, “would be virtually immeasurable.”

  “What’s that mean exactly?” Caitlin asked.

  “First off, there are actually differing opinions on the dangers of using the oceans as a toxic waste dump. Best example I can site is the nearly fifty thousand drums of low-level radioactive waste dropped in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary off San Francisco between 1946 and 1970. There are also huge dump sites in the Barents and Kara Seas used for decades by the former Soviet Union. In the case of those and the Farallones, there’s virtually no empirical data to suggest any danger to marine or human life, even though the drums have long been leaking.”

  “Got a feeling there’s a ‘but’ coming here,” said Tepper.

  “And that ‘but,’” Young Roger continued, “is introducing the explosive element, since now you’re not just talking about slow seepage but the release of 275,000 gallons of the most toxic of all nuclear waste all at once. Because the waste itself is much heavier than water, if just dumped—poured out—it would sink to the bottom. Plenty of damage, yes, but nothing of the order of what will happen when blowing up those drums softens the material’s molecular composition so it ends up mixing with and dissolving into the water. And that’s not all.”

  “Oh, shit,” was all Tepper could say as he fumbled for a cigarette.

  “In addition to the inevitable spread up the East Coast, we’d be looking at the toxins coming ashore not just with the currents but also in the rain.”

  “Rain?”

  “Let me put it this way. Even a storm well short of hurricane proportions anytime for the next several days, weeks maybe, would dose residents stretching hundreds of miles inland with radiation equivalent to a few thousand chest X-rays. The run-off could also poison every ounce of drinking water in the same radius up the entire eastern seaboard.”

  “What about a storm not short of a hurricane?” Caitlin posed.

  “More water whipped up would mean added toxicity and a deeper spread. Let me put it this way,” Young Roger said, repeating himself. “Chernobyl and the recent nuclear disaster in Japan were both sevens on a seven-point scale of radiation spread and intensity.”

  “And where would this fall?” Tepper asked him.

  “A ten.”

  “And even if we had a way to stop them, we’ve got no idea where they’re at.”

  “I think I do,” said Caitlin.

  98

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Harrabi felt numb, al-Awlaki’s words no longer reaching him in the cramped confines of the bridge. He had been betrayed.

  Again.

  First by his own friends and neighbors, who had turned on him. And now by this man, who saw in him nothing more than a potential stooge with the expertise required to do his bidding. His former friends and neighbors had chased him back to the world he had forsaken where he became fodder for the very extremists he’d spent much of his life renouncing.

  The whole tragedy had been a setup, Harrabi’s sons murdered, his wife reduced to a vegetative state, his entire life destroyed so he could be enlisted, manipulated, to make al-Awlaki’s murderous cause his own. The cleric had seized upon his weakness, taken advantage of his great vulnerability

  A lie, all of it, every bit!

  He thought of the other Arab-Americans and American Muslims who’d joined him in the cause. All victims of terrible tragedies apparently driven by hatred and racism when, in fact, they were victims instead of one man’s singular purpose and vision. Anwar al-Awlaki had caused their pain so he could use it to his own purpose.

  “You did not answer my question, my brother,” al-Awlaki was saying, his voice suddenly ringed with suspicion.

  “I’m sorry, sayyid,” Harrabi told him. “I was swept away by the scope of all this, the fate we are visiting on our enemies in spite of the failure of the plan’s initial phase.”

  That seemed to satisfy the cleric. “I was asking about the precise timing, the heavenly moment when Allah himself will smile on us from heaven.”


  “High tide is six-fifteen, ten minutes before dawn,” Harrabi told him, recalling his earlier calculations. “To achieve the desired effects we will detonate the drums at six a.m. precisely.”

  But he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, not for this man, this fraud who had killed innocents and would kill tens of thousands more to serve his own cause. Anwar al-Awlaki, the man he so revered, who had lent meaning to his life when all else had failed and offered him redemption, was about nothing more than glory, self-gratification, and hatred. He served no higher power, only himself and his own twisted ambitions.

  And in that moment, as if on cue, a lightning bolt lit up the sky, accompanied by a roar of thunder that shook all on the bridge except al-Awlaki who smiled tightly.

  “A pleasant omen for the fires we are about to bring,” the cleric said. He was standing before a bank of controls and monitoring gauges below the windows where Harrabi had set up his transmitter. Besides those controls, a few filing cabinets and the operations installation manager’s desk made up the command center’s sole contents. The walls were adorned with framed photographs of other offshore rigs, mostly of the deepwater variety, captured to make them look almost romantic when framed against the horizon they seemed to dwarf. “Tonight we change the world forever.”

  Harrabi looked over at al-Awlaki, sick to his stomach again, then closed his eyes to the sight of his sons, happy and smiling. Playing baseball, taking driving lessons, the junior prom. Things that would now never happen because of the cause and man he found himself serving.

  Go pigeon bird, don’t believe what I am saying,

  I just say it so that Rima will sleep

  And now Harrabi saw the true meaning of the lullaby, the fact that he was the pigeon his wife, Layla, had been singing about.

  99

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Makes perfect sense,” Caitlin said, after explaining her theory. “It’s where this began last week and where al-Awlaki will want to end it.”

  “You damn Strongs are so spooky when it comes to these damn feelings, I swear you’re in touch with different plains of existence,” Tepper said, shaking his head.

  “You ever know my dad or granddad to be wrong?”

  “Not when it mattered most, which certainly applies here.”

  “I feel it too,” Cort Wesley said, breathing hard from the sprint from the police car that had just dropped him off.

  Tepper finally lit his cigarette. “You got that look,” he said, before he turned to Cort Wesley. “You too. Problem is we got no way to figure out whether this theory’s on the mark without getting on board that rig.”

  Caitlin took a step closer to Tepper. “Guess that leaves us with only one option.”

  “It does indeed,” added Cort Wesley.

  “Gonna take more than the two of you to get this done,” Tepper told them both. “Gonna take a small army that’s done this kind of thing before.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we’ve got one,” said Caitlin.

  “Captain,” Young Roger said suddenly, looking up from his BlackBerry.

  “What is it now, son?”

  Young Roger’s face was ashen. “A storm, sir, a big one.”

  100

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  The Zodiac raft bucked the swirling waves, riding them like a roller coaster, its outboard engine steered by Cort Wesley while Caitlin sat up front. Paz and his six former Zeta Mexican Special Forces commandos were clustered tightly in the middle, checking weapons currently sealed in waterproof pouches to shield them from the elements as long as possible.

  The tropical storm making its way through the Gulf already seemed even stronger than forecast and still building. Cort Wesley held his face to the pounding rain and wind, as if trying to gauge their ferocity.

  “Remember what you told me that Roger guy said about wind and rain, Ranger?”

  Caitlin looked at the black world swirling around her, the sheets of rain like curtains drawn over the Gulf. “They blow those barrels anytime soon and we’re looking at a world of hurt,” she said back to him, as a fresh blast of lightning illuminated the white-capped seas.

  * * *

  A chopper pilot who’d flown combat missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan had ferried them to Baffin Bay through the first of the storm where a Coast Guard patrol boat was waiting in port. The Largo was part of a new generation of Sentinel class patrol boats that were easily the most advanced for their time of any the Coast Guard had enjoyed since being conceived by Alexander Hamilton in 1790. The Largo’s captain and his exec asked no questions as Paz and his Zetas trailed Caitlin and Cort Wesley aboard, perhaps pretending not to notice them or the weapons they were carrying. The patrol boat would get them as close to the Mariah as possible, after which they’d board the Zodiac to cover the remaining distance, hoping the raft would be able to overcome the winds and waves.

  Caitlin’s thoughts aboard the Zodiac churned crazily, focusing mostly on the boat trips her dad and granddad had made to Galveston Island. The Strongs and D. W. Tepper had gone to Galveston on the trail of killers who turned out to be Alvin Jackson and Teofilo Braga. It all, every bit of it, seemed fated to connect with the terrorist attack they were facing today. Only by investigating Braga had she learned the truth and been given at least a chance to save who knew how many lives.

  “Let’s go to work,” Cort Wesley said as the shape of the Mariah appeared in the next flash of lightning.

  * * *

  “If this don’t beat all,” Leroy Epps said, as Cort Wesley steered the Zodiac the last stretch to the oil rig.

  Cort Wesley was glad to see Leroy seated there next to him in the raft’s stern, as soaked to the gills as a live person.

  “You and the Ranger guns going again,” Epps continued.

  “Just me this time, champ.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting, bubba.”

  “Can’t risk leaving my boys alone. That means one of us stays with the ship and it’s not gonna be me.”

  “You sound rattled.”

  “I don’t like the feeling I got about this, not one bit.”

  “Go back to what you said before.”

  “What’s that?”

  “About not wanting to leave your boys alone. The Ranger’s made herself right at home, ain’t she?”

  “Her own mom died young. I wonder if that’s part of it.”

  “Like, what, some kind of second chance?”

  “Don’t know, champ. It just feels like this is something she needs or, maybe, just deserves.”

  “Even though it be against her nature?”

  “I’m not convinced of that. She gave up her guns for a time.”

  “But they chased her back down, bubba, didn’t they?”

  “What’s your point, champ?”

  “Believe I was wrong about the nature being hers alone. Believe the picture may be bigger than that. You’d think from where I sit now I’d be able to see different. Truth is the view’s clearer but no more complete.” The whites of Epps’s milky eyes seemed to shine in the night. “Wish I could tell ya how this all turns out, bubba, but the truth is tomorrow’s like a corner I can’t see around.”

  “You and me both,” Cort Wesley told the ghost of Leroy Epps.

  101

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Paz managed to hold the Zodiac steady against one of the Mariah’s legs long enough for Caitlin to tie it down just short of the ladder lifting upward into the storm-soaked night. The torrents of rain had grown so thick that the deck of the Mariah, just sixty feet up, was virtually invisible, creating the impression that the ladder climbed literally toward nowhere.

  “What time is high tide?” Cort Wesley shouted toward Caitlin.

  “Twenty minutes from now!”

  “Means we gotta get a move on!”

  Paz took the lead up the ladder, followed by his Zeta commandos, Caitlin holding fast to the rope tie at the mooring leg’s base. She
fought the Zodiac’s sway, feeling herself mashed against the cold steel each time a powerful swell carved its way under the Mariah’s deck six stories up. The rig itself seemed to be listing one way and then the other, Caitlin unsure whether it was a storm-fostered illusion or the way it had been constructed to avoid being toppled in heavy winds. The final Zeta reached up for the ladder and started to climb, and Caitlin felt Cort Wesley’s breath against the back of her neck.

  “Don’t even think about following us up there, Ranger.”

  “You say that again I might shoot you myself, Cort Wesley.”

  “We lose this raft, we got no exit strategy.”

  She turned as much as she could to face him without giving him her hold on the rig’s mooring leg. “That what this is about, an exit strategy?”

  He kissed her hard on the lips, the force of the swirling winds seeming to hold their faces together.

  “Check your radio,” Cort Wesley said, reaching up for the ladder.

  Caitlin moved her wrist-mounted microphone. “Test one, two.”

  “Three, four,” Cort Wesley followed, before disappearing into the night and the storm.

  102

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  “Sixteen minutes,” al-Awlaki said, eyes glued to his watch.

  Beyond the bridge, the deck of the Mariah was lost in a blur of storm-driven rain and wind. The torrents pounded the bridge windows with such blinding ferocity that they might as well have been a curtain drawn over the glass.

  “We’ll never be able to chopper out in this,” Harrabi said from the control panel. “We’re trapped.”

  Al-Awlaki smiled, calmer than Harrabi had seen him yet. “This storm is a blessing from God, my brother, one that I have prepared for accordingly. Rest assured that my planning has taken the good fortune He has bestowed upon us into consideration.”