by A. J Tata
She peeked upward through the Plexiglas of the pod and saw a man in a uniform, wearing a helmet. He was looking away from her. It seemed as if the man was looking at another person. She saw a rifle in his hands as the man turned. He was dressed differently than the guards, and she concluded this man was not one of her original captors. He walked up onto the mound next to her pod, as if he was trying to see farther away.
She held her breath. If he turned toward her, he would not be able to miss the camouflage netting over her pod. Misha still held the screwdriver, as if it would do any good against the rifle.
When he stepped to the other side of the mound, she let out a breath. Two other men joined him, and they were talking. She could hear them, though their voices were muffled. They weren’t speaking English. She wasn’t sure what language they were speaking. She struggled sometimes to speak English herself. She could speak it perfectly in her head, but sometimes her brain worked faster than her mouth and the words didn’t come out right.
The men moved away from her until she heard no more footsteps. She heard some commotion at the very top of the building, maybe on the roof. She wondered if someone was watching from up there, because that would certainly make a difference in whether she could get out and explore again.
She had to admit that she was feeling a sensation that was maybe not new but was more intensely personal. She wasn’t sure why, but she sometimes heard people talk about the “range of emotions,” but she could never really understand the emotions. There were just facts, and her mind processed facts very well.
She was recalling the look on her father’s face before she pulled the trigger, and she believed it would be correct to call her emotion fear. She calculated the facts: Daddy saw the gun. She pulled the trigger. She knew he had to die, which was something to be afraid of. She applied those facts to her current situation, and they were pretty much the same. There were men with guns walking around the eco-pod. She was being held as a prisoner. Perhaps she should be afraid, also?
But her mind continued to race with thoughts, and the glasses helped block out the sensory overload, maybe keeping emotions from coming to bear on her thought process. The facts she considered mostly were that before, the man had at least brought her food and water and had checked on her. Even though she was his prisoner, she sensed that she had value to him and he would take care of her. Now these new men, with their different language and their machine guns, were here. What did that mean for her? They weren’t her initial captors, but were they friends of the men who had captured her? Or did they have a different plan altogether? It was another puzzle to solve.
She slid over to her refrigerator and opened the door as she pressed her thumb against the white button that kept the light off. It was one of those small refrigerators like her father had in his office. With her hand, she counted the number of water bottles, five, and the number of cheese packets, seven. That would get her through the next day, and then she could try to explore again at night.
She closed the door and slid back under her blanket. She had to pee, but she didn’t want to risk sitting up. The toilet was in the corner. It was like a camping toilet, with chemicals at the bottom that absorbed everything. She knew it was important to drink water, so she finished the half bottle she had sitting next to her sleeping bag. A prickly sweat broke out on her skin. She could feel it on her forearms and face mostly. She guessed that meant she had lost some fluids while running back from the building.
She couldn’t seem to settle her mind, as her mother called it, enough to sleep. Thoughts kept speeding around her, as if they were on a racetrack. She was thinking about the new men in uniforms and then about the other men in black jumpsuits. About the code she had written for her father and how worried he had looked after taking it into work that day about a month ago.
Her father’s face hung in her mind, stopping the racing for a minute. He had been big and strong, with dark hair and sometimes what she called a “scruffy face.” He hadn’t shaved on the weekends, and when he would lean forward to kiss her, she would use both of her hands to rub his cheeks and then would say, “Scruffy Daddy.”
That night when he’d come home, he wasn’t smiling and didn’t hug her mother or her, which he had always done. She had followed him into the basement and had found him with his head in his hands.
“We have to undo this, Misha. Something terrible is happening. Can you write the code so that we can stop it if we need to?”
“I can do that, Daddy,” she’d said to him.
She had written for about an hour as he watched over her shoulder. She had got lost in the numbers and had been having fun until she was reminded that her father was worried. He would pace behind her every few minutes, running his hand through his hair. She focused because she knew this was important. When she was done, she downloaded the code to a flash drive.
“You know, Misha, I’d be better off dead,” he said to her.
She could be quite literal, and so she took him at his word. They talked for a few more minutes, and then she got down to work. He left her alone in the basement, which he rarely did.
A few days later they met the two men in the warehouse, when they were supposed to be shopping for a new server and computer because she had done so well.
The next day they found his blood in the warehouse and in a boat. She did not remember anything about a boat that night, but it might have been locked up tight in that filing cabinet in her brain that she couldn’t open. Neither she nor her mother had been the same since then.
By now, her mother was probably super worried about her being kidnapped. She should have told her mother what she intended to do—allow to happen—but Misha knew her mother wouldn’t go along with it.
So here she was, thinking, her mind spinning, as if on a racetrack.
She heard the light purr of the air conditioner as it kicked in, which made her think of the disabled pod display that she had turned on previously. The pod was receiving power, but someone had disabled the television and Web-browsing functions on the interior.
As easily as she had opened the canopy, maybe she could enable the built-in Wi-Fi and browser functions. That way, if she couldn’t explore physically inside the building to find who she was looking for, she could continue to explore the server, read e-mails, text messages, and other forms of communication.
It took her about twenty minutes in the dark, but she was able to direct the power to the pod back into the display monitor, which provided power to the Wi-Fi and browser.
She watched the Wi-Fi indicator scroll up and down, looking for nearby Wi-Fi hot spots. It locked on two sources. One was named Cefiro R & D. The other was named Saifu.
She clicked on Cefiro R & D because she had been in there before from home, got the password box, typed in the password—which worked—and went to work. The first thing she did was open another Wi-Fi dialogue box, enter the Cefiro network, as she had been doing for the past few months at home, and access her home computer. In a way, she was reverse hacking into her hard drive at home.
The keyboard and browser functionality in the pod were very basic. There was no hard drive or computer. She needed her Weaper software and backup disk that she had used to break into the Cefiro database.
Routing through her home computer, she then found the Saifu Wi-Fi portal. After another thirty minutes, she got a log-on screen and was inside the Saifu portal, which interested her because she had not seen it before. She knew she had limited time to be inside this portal, but with everything going on, she figured she was okay. Plus, it would appear that she was hacking from her home in Wilmington if someone saw her digital footprint inside the portal.
She immediately saw that she had access to a video camera that was positioned on one of the heavy metal boxes the trucks had delivered inside the R & D facility earlier. Misha saw men dressed in the same new uniforms walking past the pod. They were carrying guns slung across their chests. The picture was color and not quite high definitio
n, but close. She couldn’t hear anything, but she could see the men moving small airplanes and loading something, which looked like boxes with trapdoors, into the backs of the airplanes.
She felt her heart quicken as she realized that she could explore inside the building without the risk of having to go inside again.
Looking at the far end of the picture, she saw two bodies in black uniforms. They were slumped against the wall, as if they were sleeping, but she suspected they were dead.
Misha pulled up another dialogue box, which allowed her to track the Internet activity of the people inside the building. She saw writing that looked Arabic or of some Middle Eastern persuasion, but without being very good at languages, she couldn’t be sure. She determined pretty quickly that the Saifu hot spot was new, because it came in with the containers. The new men who were carrying machine guns were most likely communicating using this server. She was glad that she had breached this portal.
Pulling up Google Translate, she cut and pasted the characters into the box. The left-hand box told her that the characters were Persian. The right-hand box read “Ready for Picnic.”
She was seeing raw streaming data and information from the Saifu Wi-Fi portal. She typed more commands in and saw that whoever was typing was posting to a Facebook page. She cut and pasted the Facebook page information into the browser and saw a picture of a family at a picnic. In the feed there were several comments about picnics and ants.
While languages might not be her strength, numbers and codes were.
And what she thought she was looking at was a string of code belonging to a fake Facebook page. This was Deep Web stuff.
How much of a family could the men in the video picture really be?
Misha didn’t get to wonder about it for long, though, because she heard footsteps outside of her pod. She unplugged everything and grabbed her screwdriver.
CHAPTER 13
DARIUS MIRZA
MIRZA STEPPED INTO THE WAREHOUSE, WITH HIS PISTOL READY. His intelligence had told him that there would be just two men working tonight. Mirza had specifically requested it of his ally, Colonel Franco, of the Cuban Army.
What two countries had suffered longer from Western economic sanctions than Cuba and Iran? Mirza wondered. With the lifting of sanctions, both Iran and Cuba had seen their defense coffers become flush with cash. Mirza’s and Iran’s deal with the Cubans was to use the billions of dollars freed up by the nuclear deal to build offensive military capability to exact revenge on America. Cuba’s job was to get Cefiro into North Carolina.
The negotiations were simply a maneuver in the long history of competition between nation states. It was foolish for anyone to believe that any nation would act in any manner other than in its own self-interest. Unless, of course, you were America under naive leadership, Mirza thought.
And so the trend continued. The Persian Empire would extend to this land, whose security Americans had taken for granted for so many years. In Iran, for decades Mirza and his comrades had been in daily battles with Iraq, the United States, or other members of the coalition in Iraq. He and his fellow Iranians understood security and threats. And now America had projected itself overseas, forgetting that it had its own borders to secure. Once viewed as helpful deterrents, the oceans were now the pathways into the heart of the beast. Ever since the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mirza had been the leader of the operational planning team that would eventually carry out this mission.
Certainly, he had fought with Hezbollah against the Jews. He had fought with the Shi’a against the Americans in Iraq. He had even trained some Taliban in Eastern Iran, near the Afghan province of Nimruz. Iran’s goal had been to bleed the Americans dry, to kill their soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and subsequently, to distract their strategic focus. All those actions had been in preparation for this moment.
After his men wounded the two guards, he had them dragged to the far wall, where he stood with his knife. He knelt in front of them. Cubans? Americans? He didn’t care. They looked the same to him. White faces, black uniforms. One was bleeding from the mouth and was dying quickly. His eyes were retreating into the distance.
“Look,” he said to the man next to the dying guard. The guard slowly turned his head, knowing that he would die soon, as well. Both men had been shot in the legs, per Mirza’s instructions, and were bleeding on the floor.
He slowly worked the tip of his knife in between the fourth and fifth costal cartilages of the rapidly dying man. Feeling the softness of the tissue, he thrust the knife into the man’s heart, puncturing it. Blood gushed onto his hand. He relished its warmth.
The guard who was still alive now wished he would die more quickly, Mirza was sure. His eyes were wide. He was breathing in short gasps.
“Where is the girl?” Mirza asked.
The guard stared at him, wide eyed, as Mirza used his knife to carve a Z into the face of his friend. He licked the blood from the blade and then pressed the tip against the live man’s face.
“The girl?” Mirza asked again.
Mirza saw the guard’s eyes fading and knew he would die within seconds. He didn’t want to give him that pleasure, so he carved a Z in his face while he was still alive. He delighted in the wince on the guard’s face, knowing the man could still feel the pain. Then he sawed the blade against the carotid artery and let the guard bleed out until he died. He stood and walked toward his men, knowing that they had seen him do this before.
With a few orders in Farsi, he directed them to secure the premises. Once his men reported back, he had them set up sentries on the roof using night-vision equipment. Fortunately, there were already observation posts there. One team reported a tunnel running toward the military ammunition depot, but he already knew about that. The Cubans had been stealing explosives from the military ammunition depot for weeks.
He walked the perimeter, starting with the roof and checking each of the corners, where two-man teams had excellent fields of fire and vision. He lay down behind each weapons site and looked through its green-shaded world. These were starlight scopes fixed atop machine guns. He saw animals moving in the forest to the west, and to the east he saw the occasional vehicle driving near the port across the river, where his ship was still moored.
Satisfied that his outer perimeter was secure, Mirza moved inside and checked the guards at each of the catwalk entrances. Two men with MP5 submachine guns guarded those four entrances. On the ground level, he saw the team had completed the construction of his command center, a circular array of HD monitors and computers in the center of the warehouse. He would lead the invasion from here. Other ships would arrive at the Port of Wilmington in less than twenty-four hours.
The passenger door to one of the test cars opened. The automobile was red and was sitting in the middle of the expansive warehouse.
Out stepped Colonel Francisco Franco. He was tall and lean and wore the gray uniform of the Cuban Army. His face was tanned and ruddy, having weathered many years under harsh conditions. Mirza felt that they were brothers in spirit.
They walked toward each other. The lights in the warehouse were dim, but Mirza could see the faint trace of a smile on the Cuban officer’s face.
“Commander,” Franco said in excellent English.
“Colonel,” Mirza replied.
They clasped forearms in the warriors’ grip.
“Your soldiers did well,” Franco said. “And so did you.”
“Were those your men?” Mirza asked, nodding his head toward the two men lying dead against the wall, like two drunks who had passed out. Not that he cared.
“No. Americans. I put them on security tonight, knowing your reputation. Gave them very specific instructions regarding opening the containers.”
Mirza nodded, glad that the Cuban knew of his viciousness. “Where is the girl?” he asked.
“She is asleep in the pod in the back.”
“My men inspected and did not report seeing her.”
“The pod is we
ll concealed. There are people looking for her,” Franco said.
“What kind of people?”
“There’s a freelancer who was at the school. His name is Jake Mahegan. Former Army Delta Force. He was knocked out by our attack on the school, but our eyes on him are saying he’s bounced back.”
“I saw the video of the school attack. The Sparrows didn’t work?”
Franco paused. “There was a technical problem. Thus the need for the girl.”
“Problem?”
“I will fix it, Commander.”
Mirza could tell the colonel did not appreciate his admonishing voice, but he had no time to tolerate nonperforming fools such as him.
“Unacceptable,” he said. His voice was like a sickle.
“We have hundreds of cars, Commander. All of them can communicate and drive autonomously. We have access to the military ammunition supply depot next door, with unlimited bombs for each car. We can simultaneously attack from the ground five hundred targets.”
“But the Sparrows are crucial. You know that,” Mirza said, relentless.
“We are set to release more Sparrows. We have six boxes of two hundred Sparrows,” Colonel Franco said.
“But they must be able to communicate with the cars! That was your main mission, Colonel. Are you incompetent?”
Franco was turning red. Mirza secretly hoped the colonel would lash out at him.
“It all depends on the girl. The ground vehicles can communicate, and the Sparrows can obviously communicate, but they can’t do so together, as you know.”
“The girl was your responsibility!”
“True.” Franco paused, looked at the wall behind him, then looked Mirza in the eyes. Mirza noticed the Cuban had flat gray eyes that matched his uniform. “Tomorrow morning we bring the girl in to adjust the code. I’ve had three men working on it, and they can’t seem to do it. She built in trapdoors. Only she can fix those. So she does it, and then we kill her and dump her in the river.”