Besieged

by A. J Tata

  “Cefiro is the name of the autonomous vehicle company in Brunswick County,” he said.

  “I’ve heard of them. It was a big deal when the state landed an auto manufacturer, because jobs and more businesses moved to the area a couple of years ago. Their headquarters is actually in downtown Wilmington, on Third Street.”

  He pulled the card from his pocket and looked at the address of Ximena De La Cruz. Casey was right. The card also read CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER.

  “Where’d you get that?” she asked, looking at the card.

  “She was why I was late. She was at the school when I went back, and she wanted to talk to me. She told me Misha’s father was dead and had once worked for her.”

  “That’s odd, don’t you think?”

  About the time he was going to answer, they heard an audible beep from her MacBook Air, which redirected their attention to the screen.

  “I get these terrorism news alerts. I guess it’s a holdover from Carver.”

  The headline read SHIP SINKS IN PORT OF SAVANNAH: EXPLOSION SINKS FIRST POST PANAMAX VESSEL.

  “What is Panamax?” Casey asked.

  “It’s the company that just widened the Panama Canal so that the world’s largest tankers can get through. The tankers are three football fields long and float like skyscrapers on the ocean. Instead of having to go around Cape Horn in South America, they can shoot through the canal now.”

  They continued scanning the story, their legs touching on the sofa. Despite the stress of the day, he felt a current flowing between Casey and himself. He figured it was probably normal sexual attraction, which peaked during times of stress. Funerals, weddings, and combat all catalyzed something deep inside the human brain, urging someone to be the most alive he or she could possibly be, which in some form included sex, among other things. But, of course, she might not have felt it at all.

  “What do you think this means?” she asked, pointing at a paragraph that said,

  Eyewitness accounts say that a flock of birds dove into the ship and then suddenly it exploded.

  He didn’t have a chance to respond, because Patch texted him on his Zebra app.

  Savannah not an accident. More to follow.

  CHAPTER 4

  DARIUS MIRZA

  DARIUS MIRZA WAS EAGER TO MAKE HIS FIRST KILL IN AMERICA.

  As the commander of a Quds Force splinter cell whose mission it was to destroy the economy of the United States, he felt his chest swell with pride. After years of training in Iran and on the battlefield in Iraq, he was excited finally to fight on America’s home soil.

  He stood upon the bow of a Chinese merchant ship as Atlantic Ocean waves crashed against the metal hull, sounding like the chains of ritual Shi’a self-flagellation. His mission was in many ways a hajj, but instead of a pilgrimage to Mecca, he was leading his men into the mouth of the serpent. They had sailed to the south of a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean, and he believed the storm to be a symbol, a precursor, of the fury he would personally deliver to America.

  His plan was intricate, detailed, yet designed to absorb risk and still be operational. Already the news of the capture of the child had reached him. Misha was a threat to the plan, and he had to neutralize that threat. He felt no particular emotion at the capture of an eleven-year-old child. In Iran, children had suffered for years as a result of the American-imposed economic sanctions. What was one American girl compared to the thousands of Iranian children who had died of malnourishment? Once he was done with Misha, he would deliver her a quick, merciful death. To dispatch her with such alacrity would be a blessing, given what her country was about to experience.

  This journey had been long, but he saw the lights of Fort Fisher and Southport, North Carolina, to the west. He had studied the maps for two years and knew the names of the towns and the terrain features as if they were those of his home country. As the ship approached the United States Coast Guard’s Cape Fear inspection buoy, his heart rate accelerated. He knew that this was the first critical point in securing undetected passage into America. With a stop in Havana, Cuba, he had been able to conduct some final training with his attack units, upload necessary supplies, equipment, and ammunition, and add one final container to the mix. Thanks to the relaxation of U.S.-Cuba relations, he anticipated that this stop would not raise suspicions among the Coast Guard.

  He also was able to perfect the plan for that fifth and final container.

  He watched from the bow as the Coast Guard cutter’s searchlight swept the merchant ship like an artist’s paintbrush, a golden arc moving from left to right, then right to left. His mission included five containers, three carrying personnel, one as his command bunker, and one with a special weapon. He anticipated the stringent standards of the Coast Guard and had the stevedores load the three self-contained commando containers and the special weapon container deep in the belly of the vessel, with other containers stacked to the sky on top of them. His command bunker was on the ship deck to provide him freedom of maneuver. Otherwise, the ship was carrying manufactured goods, mostly televisions, furniture, and dishware, which were certainly on board.

  In the three commando containers belowdecks were three squads of ten men. One squad per container. The containers were self-sufficient refrigerated living units with bunks, rations, and toilets. It was tough living, but his men understood the mission. Once the nuclear negotiations with America had resulted in the release of sufficient funds for the operation, the supreme leader and president had given him the order to board this ship, which had been docked in Fujairah in the Persian Gulf. Their Saudi Arabian shell company had loaded the three commando containers and his command and control bunker, all labeled as furniture.

  The fifth container, which he had loaded in Cuba, was the most important of all.

  Other than his, these containers were now deep in the hull of this ship, with dozens of other containers stacked on top. His men couldn’t leave if they wanted to, as other containers surrounded them, metal touching metal in every direction. Even a thorough inspection would most likely not involve searching those four containers. Mirza’s, on the other hand, was accessible. He needed to be able to move about the ship and commandeer it if necessary, though that now seemed increasingly unlikely.

  He felt a warm wind blow against his face. The sea breeze was thick with salt, reminding him of their training in the Persian Gulf. Once done with the inspection, Mirza knew that the ship would have a few miles to go until the captain would begin to navigate the channel past Bald Head Island and press forward to the Port of Wilmington, the Quds Force’s intended lodgment.

  In his mind Mirza reviewed the plan, which included multiple attacks on the passageways into the ports of Norfolk and Baltimore, Manhattan, Boston, Savannah, Charleston, and Jacksonville. The less active Port of Wilmington served Iran’s strategic purposes and therefore was its target. Lightly defended, the port’s only security was a thin, overworked line of Coast Guard vessels on Oak Island and farther north in Morehead City. Mirza had studied the maps, and while he never underestimated his enemy, he was confident the Trojan horse would be viewed as one of the merchant ships the port welcomed. He had no particular reason to be assured. He was simply a superb planner, and so far his execution had been flawless. The success of this mission would be a direct reflection of his superior capabilities, if he did say so himself.

  And he did.

  Now the Coast Guard ship pulled amidships, and their vessel slowed to a crawl in the shifting seas. Mirza returned to his command bunker to report the contact with the U.S. Coast Guard. Using a handheld remote control, he pressed a button that triggered hydraulic pumps to lift the heavy doors to his container as one complete unit, not disturbing the tamper-proof security seal. The two container doors remained shut and raised under the power of two collapsing arms on either side. He glided underneath and pressed another button to lower the doors. He crawled over mahogany desks secured in cardboard boxes until he reached a false wall, pressed another button, and slid
inside his bunker hidden within the container.

  The dimensions of his command bunker within the forty-foot-long container were fifteen feet by eight feet. The rest of the container held desks and chairs made in China, which any inspector would have to move out of the way to get to the false wall. If someone tried to open the wall, Mirza would empty an MP5 machine gun into the intruder and would then commandeer the ship from the captain. Almost all the containers aboard were what the shipping industry called double twenty-foot equivalent units, a standard large-sized container. His container looked exactly the same on the outside but was wholly different on the inside.

  Mirza’s design had cables connected to a small fiber-optic antenna that ran nearly invisibly upward to the top container on the ship. This antenna served as his link to Iran’s communications satellite named Fajr, which the Iranians had launched in February 2015, in preparation for this attack. Fajr was the Persian word for “dawn,” and Mirza believed their mission would usher in a new dawn for his people and the world. It would be a world in which the West did not dominate and control the resources, a world free from dependence on capitalist markets, a world that respected the strength of the Iranian people.

  He used his fake Facebook account to send a signal to his land-side vanguard unit, which was already in place.

  I’m bringing the drinks. Everyone, please join us.

  The message indicated that the United States Coast Guard was boarding their ship for routine inspection, which was the trigger to prepare to attack and disable the main seaports along the East Coast.

  All the Iranian operatives had Facebook pages, which were facades: happy white families with children smiling, updated almost daily to highlight their suburban bliss. Their posts funneled through the Fajr satellite, where an algorithm sanitized their actual location and created a false geo-location, which was represented on Facebook and other social media, like Twitter.

  The confirmation that land-side preparations were finalized appeared on the Quds Force “go to” page, which belonged to one of Mirza’s operatives named Sam Swanson. Swanson in turn immediately posted a photo of a park and a picnic table with a red-checkered tablecloth, with the caption “Picnic about to begin!”

  The name Swanson meant nothing. Mirza’s cyber operators randomly selected the names from one of the hundreds of databases available for purchase in the United States—political donors, registered voters, and credit card holders. Mirza had the addresses and phone numbers of thousands of Americans.

  After receiving the confirmation, he waited. From his command bunker he was able to watch four television screens that monitored activity aboard the ship via fiber-optic cameras. One camera was in the captain’s bridge. Another was aimed at the stack of containers housing his troops belowdecks. A third watched the top deck of the aft portion of the ship. And the last showed the narrow gap leading to his container.

  After about thirty minutes two uniformed personnel walked through the view area of the camera covering his bunker. They walked past and then turned around and inspected the security seal on the container. One of the men held a clipboard and turned toward a third man, who had just appeared.

  The third man was the ship’s captain. Mirza saw them talking, and the captain shrugged, as if he had no idea what the Coast-guardsmen were asking him. As if he were responding, “It’s just another container. Nothing special.” Which, of course, the captain believed.

  The shrug must not have satisfied the Coast Guard, because one man pulled out of pair of bolt cutters and snipped the seal and the lock. He guessed they believed this was their prerogative.

  Now he could hear them enter the container. They were inside his container, a mere twenty-five feet away from him. As he sat motionless behind the false wall of the same container, sweat began to run down his back. It was warm in his command bunker, and he tried his best to remain calm. He quietly reached for his MP5 submachine gun, standard issue for the Quds Force. He saw that the captain waited outside the container as the two men inspected the inside.

  He heard them rustle through some of the boxes, snapping ties and inspecting equipment.

  “Container forty-seven contains desks and chairs made in China,” one man said.

  “Everything’s made in China now,” another voice replied.

  “Okay, lock it back up, and let’s call in that the ship is clear,” the first voice said.

  The footsteps moved toward the doors, and then they stopped.

  “Is it weird that this thing has Chinese furniture in it, but it originated in Fujairah and stopped in Cuba?”

  “That’s the way of the world today, my friend. Shit’s made everywhere except for in the U.S. of A.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, we’ve done a thorough check. Our meters show no signs of radiation. The crew list matches up completely. We’ve inspected twenty containers, which is fifteen more than we normally inspect, and the paperwork tracks. Don’t forget they made stops in Le Havre, France, to pick up wine, which we found in two containers.”

  “Roger that.”

  Mirza heard them step out and lock the doors. He turned his attention to the television screen that showed his container, and he watched as they applied another lock and security seal and handed the keys to the ship’s captain.

  He felt his hand lighten its grip on the MP5.

  After another thirty minutes he saw the men climb down the hull ladder to their cutter.

  He gave them another thirty minutes to depart, and when he felt the ship moving, he turned toward the keyboard of his American Dell computer. He clicked on Facebook again using the Firefox browser and again opened a profile for Jack Smithfield from Indianapolis, Indiana. This was his profile, and it obviously disguised him as an American. He had family members, a wife, two kids, a dog, and 257 friends. Each profile traced back to an operative either in Iran or America, with some in Europe. They posted selfies and other pictures that seemed normal for the average American. His ersatz fifteen-year-old “daughter,” Jessica, was actually a lethal killer named Bouseh, which meant “kiss” in Persian. He called her the kiss of death. Bouseh had been in country for some time now and had established herself in the most promising manner. Naturally, the photos were of average people around the world who most likely would never have a Facebook page.

  They had been interacting on their Facebook communications protocol for two years, building the bona fides to evade the suspicions of American programs like Carnivore and similar National Security Agency e-mail and social media monitoring applications.

  He posted a photo of his “family” at a picnic, with the word Saifu! beneath it, in the update column.

  Saifu—no ordinary picnic ant—was the code word to launch the first phase of the attack. The two conditions necessary for launch were the capture of Misha and the clearance of the Cape Fear inspection buoy. The plan was on track.

  From the bunker and through the Fajr satellite, he turned his attention to the screen responsible for monitoring the Port of Savannah, Georgia, the biggest port in the Southeast. He watched as hundreds of small birdlike aerial systems launched from a box in a vacant industrial lot near the port. Like flocks of birds, these drones, which the Quds Force called Sparrows, dove and darted using autonomous nanotechnology swarms algorithms. ANTS. And Saifu was the most poisonous of all ants, hence the use of that as the code word.

  Other Sparrow attacks would follow soon. He had targeted the largest ships in the world that were making their maiden voyages into newly refurbished and deepened harbors on the East Coast for one simple reason: sinking them at the choke points would block port activity for a long time. The congestion would cost American and other Western companies billions per day. Mirza was imposing Iran’s own form of sanctions on America. This was meaningful destruction.

  The autonomous drones communicated using the algorithms Misha had helped develop. Mirza was thankful that the Quds Force Information Warfare Group that monitored American cell phone and Wi-Fi systems
had recognized that Misha was solving the equations that enabled swarming and, equally important, disabled it. Bouseh, the beautiful kiss of death, who had been in Wilmington, North Carolina, gathering intelligence, had communicated to Mirza that his forces needed to monitor Roger and Misha Constance. As the QFIWG monitored the Constance household, they had discovered that Misha and her father were writing the code for swarming entities. Then they had monitored Misha’s activities at school with her teacher, Promise White. Home and school networks were very simple to hack and monitor. What was disturbing was that based on the whiteboard drawing in her classroom, Misha had seemed to recognize that the swarming code she had created needed to be undone. Reading the child’s math theorems and algorithms, Mirza had developed the impression that Misha was brilliant, perhaps even diabolical.

  Misha had created an algorithm that allowed the Sparrows and other unmanned aircraft, ships, and automobiles to communicate like robots with human intelligence or, better yet, like bees or birds in a swarm. Just as he would watch a flock of a thousand birds all dart to the left at once, then to the right, up, down, and so on, Misha had developed the formula that replicated this type of swarming. Scientists had studied the detailed science behind bee swarms and flocks of birds for years. Imparting that capability to the Sparrows was the key to Mirza’s plan.

  Mirza’s detailed planning and research had revealed that Promise White was the daughter of Master Sergeant White, who had been the Army equivalent of a Quds Force leader. He could not afford to keep Promise alive as a link to his work. The plan had been to kill her and capture Misha, whose presence was necessary to complete the mission. He had solid information that Master Sergeant White’s daughter had survived but was in a coma. That shouldn’t be a problem, Mirza thought. Bouseh should easily be able to kill her.

  The girl was a different story. He had to keep her alive. She was crafty. While the Sparrows could swarm just fine, her code needed to allow the cars, the large attack drones, and the Sparrows to all attack synchronously. Misha, he believed, had seen what they intended with the Sparrows and had built triggers in her multi-platform swarming code that only she could activate.