Besieged

by A. J Tata

  He slipped into a black 3/2 millimeter wet suit, double-wrapped his phone and placed it in a waterproof pouch built into his wet suit, slipped his Sig Sauer P226 Tribal into its own special pouch, and strapped his Blackhawk! Crucible knife to his ankle. He wasn’t anticipating a showdown, but it never hurt to be prepared. He slipped reef boots on and took a few deep breaths, listening to the night.

  As he walked toward the river, he noticed the memorials to the fallen servicemen and women in all the nation’s wars. He wondered if there would be a new memorial soon or if they could stop whatever was happening in time.

  He found the river’s edge, which was thankfully short on marsh. He waded through about twenty yards of muck and then pushed off into the river. The current was strong, so he had to swim at a northwestern angle to arrive where he wanted on the first island, which he did after about twenty minutes. That four-hundred-yard swim felt good. He walked to the northern tip of the island just as the sun was setting. A hawk soared above him and landed on a barren tree just to his left. It was a red-tailed hawk with a huge wingspan, and it flapped its wings once to show him its power. The tip of the island was hard mud carved by the flow of the river. The hawk swooped down into the copper water and snatched a fish that had made the mistake of surfacing for its own meal.

  Mahegan slid into the river and swam another two hundred yards to the next island and walked to the northern point there, as well. From here, Mahegan could see the pier and the tunnel into the Cefiro compound. He had just enough light to distinguish where his landing point was going to be as he slid into the water and sliced through the remaining four hundred yards. He didn’t discount the fact that Cefiro might have underwater detection devices or cameras, especially around the pier area. With that in mind, he came in farther north of the pier, betting that the additional defenses would be primarily around the R & D portion of the compound. He made landfall about a hundred yards north of the pier. The river bluff was about twenty feet high here. Atop that was the well-constructed security fence that he had studied earlier in the day on his walk around the perimeter of the manufacturing plant.

  His goal was to get inside the R & D grounds and to assess the mounds he had seen when Rhames had stopped him. If caught, his angle would be that he had been hired as a security consultant and he was testing the defenses, as any good security consultant should do. Hence his comment to De La Cruz that he would stop by later this afternoon.

  He low crawled to the pier, a standard wooden one with round pylons driven into the clay bottom of the river. On the south side of the pier was the tunnel he had observed from the island. Staying off the pier and sliding under it, he eased into the water and slowly swam into the dark cavern. He was in complete blackness. By now it was full dark, no moon. The farther he edged into the tunnel, the less the ambient light of the stars or Carolina Beach assisted him. His stealthy strokes echoed off the walls of the man-made cave, and he was glad that he had brought a Maglite. He tapped his knife strapped to his leg and his Sig Sauer in its pouch as a reassurance.

  After swimming about one hundred yards, he pulled out the Maglite and flipped it on. In each direction the light just poked at darkness. It was hard to tell if the blackness was the side of the cave or just more black space. He shut off the light and kept swimming.

  After another two hundred yards, according to his stroke count, he felt his hand hit bottom on a downward stroke from his Australian crawl. His mouth was filled with the taste of dank river water, especially this deep into a canal/tunnel that didn’t flush the way a river continually flowed.

  Mahegan turned on his Maglite again, aiming it down directly in front of him, and saw at least three of the fattest water moccasins he had ever seen. Growing up in Frisco, on the Outer Banks, and then in Maxton, along the Lumber River, he had seen his share of these aggressive, remorseless vipers. He slowly backed away, and they remained dormant. When Mahegan was able to stand, he shined the light in all directions until he spotted a ladder to his two o’clock, just past the snakes. It seemed that if he could navigate past one of the snakes, they wouldn’t feel threatened.

  Mahegan knew that snakes didn’t have ears but felt vibrations in their jawbones, not unlike how humans processed some sounds. It would be impossible to stay completely off their radar, and he noticed them begin to unravel from the coil and set into their strike positions as if on cue. It randomly occurred to him that these could be “fake snakes,” the same way the Sparrows Patch had mentioned were fake birds. But that didn’t seem to be the case. He had always had an easy presence around animals, including snakes, so he simply stared at them as he slid to the wall on his right. He was maybe four feet from the nearest cottonmouth, which remained tight in an S-shaped strike position. Once Mahegan was beyond its reach, he focused on the ladder.

  Shining the light up the metal rungs, he saw that he had about thirty feet to climb. He pulled hand over hand and found at the top a manhole cover, which pushed away easily.

  As he stepped out of the tunnel onto firm ground, spotlights stabbed into the night like lasers.

  CHAPTER 9

  MISHA CONSTANCE

  MISHA’S FIRST THOUGHT WHEN SHE AWOKE WAS THAT SHE HAD not intended to kill her father, but she really had no choice in the matter at the time.

  Now she was just trying to make things right. To reconcile before her Day of Judgment, as her mother would say.

  She made a list of things she would do with her father if he were to come back alive:

  Hug him so he could hug her back real tight.

  Kiss him on the cheek.

  Ask him to go in the basement with her so they could write code.

  Tell him about the bad things Mama had done.

  She remembered part of the night on which she shot him about four weeks ago. She had been with him in the car. He had told her that a man had asked to meet with him about the code she had written. She knew that her father had previously given someone at Cefiro the code, and the man had said there was something wrong with it. Apparently, the code wasn’t working as they had expected it to. Of course it wasn’t. She had built trapdoors into the system so that if they didn’t pay her father, then they would have to ask her to fix it.

  That day, Misha and her father were already out at the computer store in downtown Wilmington, near the riverfront, buying a new server with more power and storage. It was nighttime, and they were walking on the river walk toward the dark end, near a warehouse under construction. She remembered that her father held her hand and that his palm was sweating. While Misha had a hard time understanding emotions, she could tell he was nervous.

  Two big men wearing suits asked them to come into an empty building near the river. She was not completely surprised by their presence. It was dark inside and smelled musty, like when she used to go to her grandmother’s house in Sampson County. She could hear water dripping in the background. The floor was concrete. One of the men started yelling at her father to give him the flash drive with the code. He used the “F” word, which her father had told her to never use.

  Then she saw her father reach for his pistol, which she hadn’t known he was carrying. That wasn’t part of anyone’s plan, she didn’t think, certainly not hers. She instinctively reached out to hold on to him, maybe even grab the pistol. She felt the pistol in her hands. Remembering the weight of it surprised her again now.

  But that was all she remembered. She kept searching her brain, looking in all the filing cabinets up there, but she couldn’t pull anything out. She just couldn’t remember. It was like someone had moved that filing cabinet. It was the first time Misha was aware of that she had tried to recall something but had not been able to. She usually had the opposite problem; she remembered too much. She remembered everything. But this time was different. Her next memory was of the following morning, waking up in her bed, with her mother stroking her hair, saying sweet things to her. Even though she didn’t want to hear them from her.

  Now she had to reconcile.
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  She quit thinking about that night and started thinking about what she needed to do to get out of this eco-pod.

  Katniss Everdeen would try to escape.

  Temple Grandin would tell her to use her special gifts to think her way through the problems.

  Henry Cavendish would tell her that there was a scientific solution to what she needed to know.

  Daddy would tell her that he loved her.

  All of them motivated her to act.

  She had been paying close enough attention to the man dressed in black who had delivered her food that she knew the code to unlock the Plexiglas cockpit of her pod. Her special glasses helped her with that, too. All she had to do was hit a button on the stem, and the glasses would replay the beeping noises she heard when the man punched in the code. It was not that she couldn’t remember it—she could—but she realized that this was a different environment. More stress, but stress that she had anticipated and tried to think through as she had developed her plan to kill her father and then infiltrate the Cefiro compound.

  It was nighttime already, and she was ready to explore. She wasn’t sure, but she believed it had been a full day since the shooting at the school. She looked at her shaking hands as she remembered the tense moments yesterday. Today she was noticing that every now and then her hands shook, which was different from the way she would move them to block out the sensory overload. These were tremors, which she didn’t understand. Also, she had a headache. It was a dull, throbbing pain in her temples, which her glasses didn’t seem to be stopping.

  Waiting until it was completely dark, she used her hair clip to remove the screws to the control panel, which someone had deactivated. The article she had read in National Geographic showed a scientist working in her eco-pod, with the display unit in front of her lit up with clear instructions on how to set the temperature, open the capsule cockpit canopy, and even browse the Web.

  But someone had turned off the control panel, so she couldn’t do any of that. They still had to run power to the pod, or she would suffocate or burn up from the heat. Pretending she was that scientist and improvising as much as she could—as much as code writing had taught her—she used the hair-clip fastener to loosen the screws and the faceplate to the control panel. It wasn’t perfect and took some time, but it got the job done, as her father would always say. After carefully removing the panel, she recognized all the circuitry and wiring. By listening to the beeps and watching the finger movement of the guard whenever he opened her pod, she had learned that the code was two, three, three, four, seven, six. She played it back in her glasses just to be sure, the heads-up display confirming what she had heard by showing a series of light green LED numbers in her left lens. She quickly realized that the code numerically spelled Cefiro on a phone keypad.

  She found this to be an amateur move on their part. Having spent almost two years exploring the Dark Web, she was not a normal hacker. Her ability to see inside the computer and understand the code had also made her feel empowered. She felt the same way now.

  She was solving a problem, one of her favorite things to do.

  She found the wire that controlled the power to the panel inside the pod and crossed it with the wire that controlled the power to the entire pod. It was like undoing the kid locks on a car. Suddenly the panel lit up, flickered a couple of times, and then showed steady numbers, such as the inside and outside temperatures. It was seventy-four degrees inside, which was comfortable with the blanket. She preferred it cool. Her father would always open his bedroom window in the winter to let a sliver of cold air in so that it would brush her cheek like an angel’s kiss.

  The first order of business was to put the camera on automatic loop so that whoever monitored the pod would still see her. She found the wire to the small camera eye and crossed it with the wire to the memory chip where her first twenty-four hours were stored. In case someone was looking at her at this very moment, she kept her thumb over the camera to prevent anyone from seeing what she was doing. Once she had the loop going, she got to business on the keypad.

  As Misha looked at the control panel, which was hanging loose in her hand, she entered the code and listened as the seal on the pod broke with a hiss. The Plexiglas canopy lifted about six inches. She pushed against it with her hand, and it rose with hydraulic pistons, offering slight resistance.

  Outside the pod was a number keypad that the man in the black jumpsuit had used. Now she did as he had, entering the code and watching the canopy shut and lock with a click. She stared at the lit instrument panel for at least two or three minutes, until it automatically dimmed. She looked up and noticed the camouflage netting that was over her pod. She guessed it was to keep anyone from seeing it from the sky. It also provided some shade during the day.

  She still had on her blue dress but had taken off her black shoes. She was barefoot. Misha was used to running around barefoot near her house in New Hanover County and had pretty tough feet. Her father would always tell her that you could tell a good summer by how tough your feet were the day before school started. The truth of it was that her feet were always pretty tough. Just because she was quiet and “autistic” didn’t mean she couldn’t play and have fun. She had a slide and a swing set in the backyard, and she never wore her shoes out there, which drove her mother crazy. She and her father would laugh about it, and Misha thought her mother did, too, just not in front of her.

  She turned around, and to her right was a bunch of mounds that looked like grave sites. They looked creepy, so she walked in the other direction. The sand and dirt were loose beneath her feet. Occasionally, she stepped on a few sand burrs, which hurt, but thankfully, her feet were tough enough, and she was quick enough to pull them out. After walking about the length of her backyard at home, she turned around and really couldn’t see the eco-pod. It was mixed in with all the other mounds, and the camouflage did its job.

  She looked in each direction. To her left was a big warehouse, twice the distance of the forty-yard dash she had to run in elementary school. To her right was a fence about three times the distance of the forty-yard dash. The fence had wire at the top, which reflected the moonlight. The wire looked sharp, like the kind she had seen on TV shows that might have a prison scene. Turning her back to the pod, she saw a building in the distance, separated by a fence that was farther away than she could really calculate. She figured she should walk toward the closest building—the one that was two forty-yard dashes away—and count her steps, in case she couldn’t find the pod in the dark. That was exactly what she did.

  She was relieved to find a path that was next to the building after sixty-seven steps, counting just the times her right foot hit the ground. She walked 112 steps using the same method of counting until she hit the corner of the building.

  That was when all the spotlights came on.

  Maybe she had activated remote-controlled floodlights like the ones her father had installed at the house after he got the job at Cefiro. Or maybe there was some other trigger for the lights. The maps she had seen inside the Cefiro database didn’t indicate where the security lights were, at least not the maps that she had seen. Maybe the lights came on just like lamps sometimes did in houses to make burglars think someone was home.

  There was no light shining directly on her, so she remained where she was. Her feet were fine standing on the packed dirt around the building, but then she wondered whether a guard walking around in the daylight tomorrow would be able to see her footprints. There were probably not too many people with feet her size walking around here barefoot. She didn’t want to give up her secret that she was able to sneak out of the pod.

  Misha remained perfectly still and observed. She saw two deer frozen in a powerful light beam probably 150 steps away. She wondered how they had gotten inside the fence, and concluded that there must be a gate somewhere. She saw millions of bugs flying around the floodlights, which were evenly spaced along the top of the building and shone outward at a forty-five-degree angle. One
of them was shining on the mounds, and she thought she could see a faint glint off the canopy of her pod. She hoped there wasn’t a camera looking from the roof. Bats were diving in and out of the light like military jets she had seen in the movies.

  She was in a real pickle, as her mother would always say. But she wasn’t worried. Obviously, they needed to keep her alive and healthy, or they wouldn’t have given her such a good place to stay, with a refrigerator stocked full of water and cheese sticks. She did what she did best, though, and that was listen and learn. Her mind raced with information, processing everything. Her glasses helped, too, but she took them off for a minute so she could let her “gift” help her absorb her environment. It was a risk, she knew. The glasses helped her filter, but she wanted to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel where she was.

  She heard a million crickets chirping, the call of birds everywhere, the bang of some machinery inside the building, the hissing of the floodlights, the sound of water rolling—not rushing, but rolling—and footsteps.

  The footsteps were far away, but she heard them. One of the gifts of autism was that her senses were finely tuned to receive significantly more sensory input than those without her “problem” could receive at once. While her facial expressions might not communicate to someone that she was hearing them or recognizing something, her mind had probably already catalogued that information and was on to the next thing a regular person hadn’t even heard yet.