Besieged

by A. J Tata

  Mahegan recalled his wizened ebony face, always serious, and how he rarely smiled when he spoke. “Other than our families, we’re all we’ve got. Nobody else gives a rat’s ass about us, so we’ve got to take care of each other,” Judge had said.

  There had been about ten of them sitting around the unit mission room in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, including Patch Owens, Tony “Al” Pucino, and Sean O’Malley. Wesley Colgate had been there, too. Colgate had later been killed in a roadside bomb blast near the Pakistan border. Shrapnel from Colgate’s vehicle had cut the lazy Z into Mahegan’s left deltoid, which he expected—hell, hoped—would be with him all his life. It was like a brand now. Instead of a rancher pressing a hot iron into his flesh, American technology had ignited a bomb that seared the memory of his fallen men into his body forever.

  Patch had been his alpha team leader, the first one in on any objective. O’Malley had been his radio guy. He was a whiz with communications and Internet apps and was making decent money on the side developing useful apps for communication. Pucino had been his bravo team leader and had always been reliable, until he started experiencing some posttraumatic stress. He didn’t call it a disorder. He had told his men to think of it as an opportunity for growth. Posttraumatic growth. Learn and adapt.

  “Seek justice,” Judge had said. “And defend the honor of what we are doing and have done.”

  That pretty much had become Mahegan’s creed since leaving the service three years ago and working in secret for Major General Bob Savage, his enigmatic controller at Fort Bragg. Because Savage kept him off the books and was not part of his tight circle of Army teammates, Mahegan felt no need to tell Savage about Promise just yet. Patch had been the one who had texted him No broken promise, so he knew something, most likely a result of an early warning network they had set up to monitor distress signals from the family of his teammates.

  The ambulance parked at the emergency room front door after a twenty-minute ride. Promise was still fogging the oxygen mask, but she hadn’t moved or opened her eyes. Coma was a definite possibility. The back doors opened to a team of doctors and nurses ready to do their jobs. He jumped out and peeled around the corner to get out of their way.

  As Mahegan watched them carefully move Promise into the emergency room, he felt a pocket on his board shorts and was surprised his phone was still there. He retrieved it and saw a text from Patch asking, Status? He looked up as a nurse approached.

  “You need to be looked at, too, there, boss,” she said.

  He turned away after saying, “I’m good.” He texted Patch. Go to Zebra.

  Zebra was Mahegan’s informal team’s secure internal e-mail and telephone application. Sean O’Malley was a tech genius and had developed an encryption capability for Mahegan, Patch Owens, and General Savage to communicate. The application was not unlike What’s App, Wickr, or Viber, but better, more secure. Texts and e-mails were erased fifteen seconds after being read and automatically if not read in twelve hours. Phone conversations bounced off the team’s own encrypted platform on their unit’s satellite, making them as secure as any form of communication.

  He punched on his Zebra app and walked into the parking lot, toward the road, which was noisy. He didn’t want anyone overhearing him, and the nurse stood at the entrance of the ER with her arms folded, staring at him. He felt the cut on his head, blood soaking his fingers. He wasn’t sure if he was getting out of there without a few stitches.

  “Mahegan,” he said when Patch dialed in.

  “Owens. Status?”

  Patch lived in Charlotte. He spoke with a Texas drawl, having been born and raised in Tyler. He had retired shortly after Colgate had been killed three years ago. Sometimes when people died, it impacted Mahegan and his men in unpredictable ways, and sometimes when buddies got the shaft from the military they loved, it hurt equally bad. Put the two together and that was what Patch had faced in the space of less than a year.

  “Promise is alive, but possibly in a coma. I disabled one school shooter rigged as a suicide bomber. He was controlled remotely. Two car bombs, one autonomous, maybe two. One missing girl, Misha. Blue dress, blond hair. And an ambulance that never showed at the hospital, apparently.” He looked around for a second ambulance but saw only the one that had transported him and Promise.

  Mahegan gave Patch the spot report as if they were in combat, which his gut was telling him they were. After a pause, he asked, “What was your cue to text?”

  “Two cell towers on either side of the school went out simultaneously. Had to be a JackRabbit. Should have sent en fuego code phrase but knew Promise was carrying. My bad.”

  Mahegan knew that a JackRabbit was technology that could both passively listen to the calls and read the texts funneling through a cell phone tower or shut down the tower with electromagnetic pulses. It was most effective for short periods of time, such as during a raid . . . or a school attack.

  “Misha Constance,” Patch said. “Eleven years old. Parents are Layne and Roger Constance. Only child. Layne is a part-time attorney and homeschools Misha, apparently at the collegiate level in calculus, differential equations, probability, and statistics, and other high-end math. Says here she’s an autistic savant. She attends the elementary school to receive tutoring from Promise, who, as you know, has advanced degrees in math.”

  He remembered Misha’s slight emotional disconnect, and it fit with what Patch was saying.

  “Wait, get this. Roger Constance was reported dead a month ago. Blood, personal belongings, and eyewitnesses say he was shot and killed. Never found the body, but an anonymous tip says he was dumped offshore out of Southport. Lots of blood in a riverfront warehouse in downtown Wilmington. Lead detective on the case is a guy name Paul Patterson.”

  Interesting, Mahegan thought. Was it connected to the school bombing? He knew Patch was reading from a classified database that collected criminal information and mined for possible links to the families of deceased unit members. That one of Promise’s students had a father who was murdered had most likely automatically elevated Promise on Patch’s watch list for protection.

  Listening to Patch, he recalled the brief conversation Misha had with Promise as he was tending to the cut on her back.

  “Misha mentioned something about ants. And Promise said, ‘We don’t talk about the ants.’ Something like that. Does that mean anything to you?”

  After about five seconds of a keyboard clicking in the background, Patch said, “It could. ANTS could be an acronym for Autonomous Nanotechnology Transportation Systems or autonomous nanotechnology swarms. You said one of the car bombs was autonomous.”

  “Probably both of the cars. I saw only one. And there was an ambulance that left before the police got there, but that could be legit. Not sure.”

  “Why bomb a school?” Patch asked. “And why use an autonomous car?”

  “Probably the jihadists get over here, get a little bit westernized, and realize that they want to live while they attack our country. Best of both worlds. Probably figured out the whole seventy-two virgins thing is BS, too.”

  “You mean it’s just like fifty or so?” Patch chuckled.

  “Seriously, using an autonomous car is more reliable. You and I both have seen the frozen look of a suicide bomber handcuffed to the wheel of a car loaded with artillery shells.”

  “True that,” Patch said.

  “I’m going to head back to the school. Check it out.”

  “Keep me posted,” Patch said.

  “Wilco. And keep looking at that ANTS stuff.” Wilco was the military acronym for “will comply.”

  Mahegan ended the call. After turning around, he saw that the vigilant nurse was still staring at him, arms crossed. He walked toward her, and she said, “Seriously, we need to fix your head.”

  “Many people have tried,” he said. The joke didn’t work on her. Turned out, though, she was calm, beautiful, and no older than he was, meaning she might have just reached her thirties. She had silky hair th
e color of pine straw, a reddish-brown mix held back in a ponytail. The name tag on her swipe card hanging on a lanyard around her neck read LIVINGSTONE. The blue scrubs she was wearing lit up her green eyes.

  He reached out his hand and said, “Jake Mahegan,” as she grasped it. Her grip was firm but not in an overbearing way. More like she was used to being in charge.

  “Casey Livingstone,” she said, giving him a slight smile. She wore Nike running shoes that looked like they had some miles on them. The short sleeves of her scrubs showed off respectable muscle tone. She was an athlete, he guessed.

  “Would it be okay if I promised that I’ll be back in an hour? Your team is busy with my friend Promise, and we have to investigate something back at the school.”

  “You’re the one who threw the body out of the school? Saved all those kids?”

  “Promise helped. She deserves the credit.”

  “I get that. But you picked him up and carried him fifty yards away from the children. That’s the story, anyway.”

  “It’ll be that I carried him a hundred yards before the night’s over,” he said. “And that’s one of the things I need to go check out. I’m not sure this was an isolated incident, and I want to see what kind of ammunition they used.”

  “I have friends who have children in that school, Mahegan. Go do what you need to do. But get back here. I’ll get in real trouble if I don’t fix you up and check you out. My shift ends at six p.m. You’ve got two hours.”

  “Thanks. I owe you, and I’ll be here before six,” he said. He started to turn but felt her hand on his left arm, the one with the scar from Colgate’s destroyed vehicle, as she reached up with her other hand and touched just below the cut. As she came close, he felt her breath on his neck as she spoke.

  “You’ve got a hematoma beneath that cut. You could have a concussion. Just a sec,” she said. Casey Livingstone pulled a flashlight out of her pocket and had him look at her. “Look up . . . right . . . left . . . straight ahead.” As she checked what he assumed was for cranial nerve damage, Mahegan noticed she was a tall woman, maybe five feet ten inches in the running shoes. Take away an inch for the shoes and she was still up there. She pocketed the flashlight and said, “You’ve got some ocular issues, which we’ll discuss in less than two hours.”

  “Roger that,” he said, then turned and looked for Deputy Register, who was watching from one row over. He waved, and Mahegan waved back as he held up his index finger, indicating he would be just one minute. Turning back to Nurse Livingstone, he asked, “Was there another ambulance before this one? From the school scene?”

  Casey shook her head. “No. You’re the first. Why?”

  “No reason,” he said. “Can you give me a quick update on Promise?”

  “What makes you think I can do that?” she responded.

  “Because your smock is heavier on the left than on the right, and I assume you’re not carrying a pistol, though I might recommend it, given what happened today. So that tells me you’ve got a personal mobile radio in there. This seems like a professional hospital, and you’re in mass casualty drill mode, which means you’ve got a radio now if you don’t always carry one.”

  “You could have just said, ‘I think you’ve got a radio,’” she said, retrieving a black Motorola from her pocket. She turned the volume button up and pressed the transmit button.

  “Two-one, this is two-zero. Status on patient in Echo Romeo,” she said, sounding not unlike a commander in combat. “Echo Romeo,” he was certain, stood for emergency room.

  “This is two-one,” a voice returned. “Patient in critical condition but holding on. Coma is current diagnosis.”

  “Roger, out.”

  She looked at him and said, “I’m sorry. She’s hanging in there, though, and if she helped you, she sounds like a tough woman.”

  “She’s tough,” he said. “Thank you. See you in two hours.”

  He was worried about Promise. He had lost his best friend, Wesley Colgate, during a combat mission. He had lost his mother to four brutal killers in their trailer in Maxton, North Carolina. One of the two murderers that Mahegan hadn’t killed that day when he was fourteen years old later executed his father. He had lost soldiers beyond Colgate. Every loss stung in a way that was hard for him to comprehend. Sometimes he powered through each day unbidden by the gravity of their individual and collective absences. Some days, though, each memory was an anchor, nearly incapacitating. And other days, some memories were like bomb triggers, leading to what his Delta Force shrink had called “impulsive and aggressive behavior.”

  He never knew when the trigger would flip. He was pretty sure he could not handle losing Promise, too. In the Army, especially in small special operations units, the teammates became a family, and Promise and he had become close. All the time he had spent at her house, drinking beer with her father and other teammates, meant something to him. In a way, her dad had been a paternal figure to all of them. They would listen to his stories about missions in Colombia when the drug war was raging or about his combat operations in the Persian Gulf using aircraft carriers as mobile platforms from which they would launch night raids into Iran.

  Promise had been right there, often sitting next to him, listening intently. First, she had been a skinny, rebellious teenager and then, suddenly, a beautiful young lady. Even during her rebel stage, Promise had remained a respectful and mindful person. She had loved to read, especially during her later teen years, so Mahegan would always bring her a book that he thought was maybe just a bit out of her range. She would devour the book in a couple of days and then smile the next time he would bring her one, saying, “I know what you’re up to, Jake Mahegan. Think I can’t read these big books you’re bringing me? Keep it coming.” Then she would give him a body check with her shoulder, her version of a love tap, he presumed. Already a tall woman by the time she was a senior in high school, she was the North Carolina high school state champion female miler, running just under four minutes and fifty seconds.

  Riding back to the school in Deputy Register’s patrol car, Mahegan played the scene in Promise’s classroom over in his mind, focusing on the interaction between Promise and Misha. It had seemed as if Promise was trying not to let on that she knew Misha well, yet according to Patch, Promise supposedly had been tutoring Misha.

  As they pulled into the parking lot, he saw the crime-scene tape, about fifteen patrol cars, two fire trucks, and several ambulances.

  “Army favor? Get me in the building, please,” he said to Register.

  “No problem. I know all these guys except the suits.”

  He was speaking about the unmarked cars and their inhabitants. Sunglasses, one-thousand-dollar suits, shiny shoes, white shirts, and ties. Had to be the FBI or some version of a Homeland Security Task Force.

  “Anyone else hurt?” Mahegan asked.

  “None reported. Word is you got them enough time to get out of the building and to the safe area by the soccer field.”

  That was good news, but still, Misha was missing and Promise was in a coma. He had to do everything he could to find out why this had happened, who had done it, and what they were after.

  They parked, and Mahegan followed Deputy Register through the growing throng of parents and guardians hugging their children. As Mahegan wove through the crowd, people stared at him, and he overheard some whisper, “That’s him.” He stared straight ahead, as if walking in New York City, avoiding eye contact. He was happy that no one else had been hurt, but the teachers’ and parents’ gratitude only accentuated in his mind Promise’s condition. He didn’t need or deserve praise. He needed for Promise to be okay and he was determined to figure out who did this.

  Then he saw a lone woman inside the yellow crime-scene tape, holding a tissue to her face, wiping her eyes, her shoulders heaving as she talked to some of the local police officers.

  “Who’s that?” he asked Register as they ducked under the tape.

  “The cop is Mike Matthews, from the c
ounty. Paul Patterson is over there, too. Real piece of work, that one. I don’t know the woman.”

  Paul Patterson, the detective who had worked the Roger Constance case, Mahegan thought. He was a short man, with a stubby cigar sticking out of his mouth. It didn’t look lit. His face was round, and his head was bald, save a white rim around the base. He looked maybe sixty years old, and his countenance suggested veracity. Mahegan made a point to talk to him at the first opportunity.

  “Misha’s mother,” Mahegan said. “Layne.”

  “Probably right.”

  They approached, and Register introduced him to Deputy Matthews, who introduced him to Layne Constance.

  His first impression of her was that she was frightened. His second impression was that she was more in control than most men or women might have been in the same situation. Layne Constance had thick blond hair, like her daughter, that fanned across her back. Her face had a striking resemblance to Misha’s, as well. High cheekbones, wide blue eyes, and a firm jawline were all devoid of makeup of any sort. No eyeliner, mascara, or powder anywhere. She was a naturally beautiful woman. She wore a moderately priced navy blue skirt and blazer suit with a white cotton shirt underneath. Her shoes were practical yet stylish heels. He didn’t know enough about women’s shoes or clothing, but he had seen Jimmy Choo shoes and Michael Kors outfits, and this was a cut below, but still nice and professional.

  Patch had said Layne Constance was a part-time lawyer, and she looked the part. He guessed she worked for a small firm that handled DUIs or family law or personal injury claims, something that would allow her to pick and choose her cases around her homeschooling schedule with Misha. As today was a tutoring day for Misha, her mother had probably been at work when the bomb hit.