by A. J Tata
Down below he saw the girl’s pod. Just fifty yards away, he saw the opening to the tunnel, now teeming with men pulling the wounded from the hole and working to make the opening more secure against infiltration. He walked to the southeast guard post and stared at the fence that protected the ammunition depot. Beyond that was a town called Southport. He could see the rough outline of buildings silhouetted against the morning sun rising from the Atlantic Ocean.
“Give me two SUVs in Southport, another watching the bridge to Wilmington, and two more in downtown Wilmington,” he said into his radio.
His men replied, “Copy,” and left the gate. Five vehicles, two men per SUV.
He watched them split in three directions.
Farrokh was leading the team that was watching the bridge, and he was the first to call in that he was in position.
Malik was leading the team into Southport, and he gave Mirza a status update within ten minutes that they were entering the outskirts of the town.
“All quiet,” Malik said. “Suspects not visible at the moment.”
Tourak was leading the team into Wilmington, and about ten minutes after Malik had rendered his spot report, Tourak radioed that his SUVs were in position.
These three team leaders were his best men. While his team was handpicked, Farrokh, Tourak, and Malik had been with him for fifteen years, since the beginning really. His eyes were their eyes, and theirs were his.
Farrokh at the bridge called in to report that he had set up a camera on his dashboard. Mirza checked, and confirmed he had the feed coming into his command center. He was parked at a petrol station across from what at home would be a souk, or marketplace. Route 17 separated his position from the marketplace across five lanes of highway.
They were looking for a big man and a small girl. While Mirza had done extensive reconnaissance for his mission to the north, he had limited understanding of the road networks and terrain to the rear of his position toward Southport.
But he had the technology to compensate for this lack of planning. Any commander with respectable combat experience understood that very few plans were completed without interruption of some type, and he was not one to become aggravated when plans gave way to reality. The truth of the matter was that he was thrilled to be inside the Cefiro compound with all five containers and thirty men. He could make a good stand here, at worst, or he could be the vanguard of the rest of the plan, at best.
He had full confidence in the latter.
At his disposal were two intelligence drones about the size of hawks. In fact, that was what they called them, Hawks. Standing on the roof, he watched as one Hawk lifted off and flew like a mechanical bird, its wings flapping with hydraulic precision. It flew toward Southport. The next Hawk skidded along the gravel on the roof, with its miniature wheels fitted into its claws. It lifted into the air and flew across the river to circle high above Wilmington. Once Misha completed the code, the Hawks and Sparrows would be able to communicate with the autonomous automobiles in a seamless combined arms fashion, minimizing the need for human intervention.
The air smelled of a blend of musty river, fuel, detritus from the ships in the port, and a salty breeze from the southeast. The sun was peeking just above the clouds that hung off the coast. Mirza could see the ammunition depot, the nuclear power plant, and a large grain operation, all with piers and docks along the river.
Boat traffic along the river was minimal. Conditions for the attack were perfect and, if the hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean stayed offshore, would remain so. The question in his mind now was about how much the big man or even the girl had seen. If he never recovered the girl, he still had the basic code she had written, and he was hopeful that his cyber warfare team could find a way to bridge the automobile system to the Hawks and Sparrows. But hope was a flimsy support upon which to launch an attack.
The attacks on the ships had occurred as they were supposed to. The Sparrows could fly only a short distance, so Mirza’s sleeper cells trucked them to locations near the narrow points in the channels in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia, where he wanted to sink the ships. Shipping schedules were public information, and it was easy for the Iranians to track where ships were and when they would be at the right locations. The engineering of the Sparrows was different in many respects than the engineering of the Cefiro cars that they had positioned on car carriers along the Interstate 95 corridor to Washington, DC.
The Sparrows were small jets propelled by rocket fuel, which aided the explosive qualities of the hexolite, which Mirza’s teams had been stealing from the warheads in the military ammunition compound next door. Mirza’s scientists had determined that four hundred Sparrows impacting simultaneously were the equivalent of one massive bomb just short of something nuclear.
The key was their simultaneous movement and impact, which was part of Misha’s contribution.
Mirza’s Quds team had invented the Sparrows in Iran, whereas Cefiro was a legitimate Cuban business operation that the Iranians were commandeering. He thought of the pieces that had to come together and realized that he couldn’t discount the girl. One of the lessons learned time and again in Israel, Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan was that the synchronization of effort was the key to victory. It really was the only way to achieve the utter destruction Mirza and his commanders were seeking.
He could wait twenty-four hours if that meant getting the girl back and ensuring synchronization.
Mirza walked to the stairwell and nodded at the guards standing watch over the medical triage by the tunnel entrance below. He counted at least three men who had dark red stains on their uniforms and weren’t moving. As he navigated the metal stairs back to his command center, he felt the urge to kill Americans at close range. Once there, he looked at the five screens streaming video from the two Hawks and the three SUV teams.
Inside the servers of his command center, his cyber team had loaded facial recognition dimensions of the girl. He had also asked the cyber team to look for the same car crossing from Wilmington toward Southport and then back within a two-hour period of time.
Meanwhile, he directed his in-country cyber support to go into overdrive. Prior to their arrival, the Iranians had five experts data mining the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security databases to determine vulnerabilities that could aid the mission. They operated out of a small apartment complex in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the Cefiro location near Southport. They had played a role in shutting down the cell towers during the mission to retrieve the girl from her school, as well as implement the girl’s code for the autonomous suicide bombs. He needed them again.
With everything in motion, he ordered Colonel Franco to take him to the mounds in the rear where the girl had been. His intent was to teach him a lesson. He walked past his wounded and dead men on the ground in the dawn mist. They had failed, so he felt no sympathy for them.
“This one,” he said, pointing at one of the small mounds. It had a metal hatch with a lock on a hasp.
Franco opened the metal door and shined a light inside the dark cavern.
“Which one is this?” Mirza asked the colonel.
Two eyes, like those of a trapped animal, peered at him. He smelled piss and fear all mingled together.
“He sells land, Commander,” Franco answered.
“Watch. And learn, Colonel.”
Mirza removed his knife and slaked his needs as a lion devoured raw meat.
He stepped out of the cavern, blood running down his wrists, and wiped them on Franco’s uniform.
“Find the girl, or you will get an initial on your face, as well.”
He walked away, retrieved his smartphone, and called Bouseh to give her instructions.
CHAPTER 16
JAKE MAHEGAN
MAHEGAN HELD MISHA BY TUCKING HER UNDER ONE ARM. THEY stood waiting at the ferry dock. Seagulls flapped overhead. Fog rolled in from the ocean, providing a cool misty spray to their faces.
The sun was burning through the fog as they stood atop the wooden pier. Mahegan noticed it was in need of a good stain job.
As the sun had risen, he and Misha had hurried into the small coastal town of Southport. He had considered calling Casey and asking her to meet them, but had changed his mind when he considered the capabilities of this invading force. His guess was that they were Iranian, based upon the Farsi he’d overheard and their appearance. These men were hurting people and had much more danger in store. After fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last decade, he felt angry that he was now fighting on the American five-yard line, not theirs. It was a tough reversal of fortune for him to accept.
The enemy commander would be looking for Misha, and perhaps for him, but he wasn’t sure if they had a good fix on who he was or what he looked like. What he did know was if they were capable of jamming cell phone towers and launching remote vehicles, they had to have a considerable cybersecurity contingent. With that, they could monitor everything, including ferry stations. He didn’t want Casey to be the only SUV between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. to traverse the bridge from Wilmington to Southport and back. Surely they would be monitoring the choke points at the bridge.
From his burner cell phone, he texted her. Meet at Civil War Park.
After a couple of minutes, she replied, Roger.
It was Saturday morning, and the first ferry was at 7:00 a.m. They had fifteen minutes to wait. His guess was that it was a thirty-minute ride, give or take a few minutes. There was a line forming. Lines weren’t his friend, so they stayed offset, near a small equipment shed about fifty yards from the ferry pier.
“Looking for something?” a man dressed in khakis asked Mahegan.
Misha tightened her grip on his leg. He got the impression that she didn’t speak much, but that her mind processed some types of information as well or better than any adult.
“Captain Gorham. I’m the skipper,” the man said, introducing himself.
“Jake,” he said. “This is my daughter, and we’re just trying to get over to Fort Fisher.”
The captain eyed him warily, like the wizened salty dog that he seemed to be. He had a baseball hat layered with salt stains that nearly blotted out the words NC Ferry System.
“We’ll get you there. Push off sharp at seven. Boarding now.”
“Have you always had this route?” Mahegan asked.
“Used to do Hatteras to Ocracoke, but they needed some help down here, and I volunteered for a change of scenery.”
“From Frisco myself,” Mahegan offered.
“No kidding? Marine?” The skipper eyed his fresh haircut from Casey.
“Former Army.”
The skipper paused. “The way that little lady is clinging to your leg, I’d say she’s scared and you’re scared for her, though you don’t look like you get scared of much.”
“We’ve had a rough night, skipper. Any way to slide onto this thing and avoid the cameras?”
Mahegan could tell the man was gauging what to say. His weathered hand was rubbing what looked like three-day-old gray stubble.
“Ain’t running from the law, are you?”
“Just the opposite,” he said. “I need to get this young lady back to her mother, and our ride is waiting at Fort Fisher. We think someone has breached the cameras and is watching every portal.”
“Anything to do with what’s happening at these ports?”
“Might be everything to do with that.”
“Looks like y’all have had a long night. Give me a few minutes and I’ll send someone to come get y’all.”
They had waited about ten minutes when a jean-clad young man approached from the back of the ferry vessel and said, “Follow me.”
They walked right up the back of the ferry, boarded with the rest of the passengers, and pushed off directly at 7:00 a.m. About halfway across the Cape Fear River, the skipper came off the bridge and whispered, “Sometimes these damn cameras don’t work at all. State government. Go figure.”
When they docked, he saw Casey’s SUV and could feel the skipper watching him, confirming his story. Misha stayed close to him, and he placed her in the backseat of the SUV. He slipped in next to her, and she lay down, placed her head on his thigh as she stared between the seats at Casey.
“Thanks,” he said to Casey, who was dressed in her scrubs.
“You can fill me in later,” she said.
As they pulled out of the Fort Fisher Ferry parking area, he noticed the old Civil War redoubt and welcome center. Here at the mouth of the Cape Fear River during the Civil War, the Confederates defended against a Union Army pincer attack upriver to Wilmington. He had the curious notion that the area was more protected then than it was today. Other than a Coast Guard check at the offshore buoy, inbound ships had few deterrents to keep them from penetrating the nation’s heartland.
While he wasn’t certain if the containers he had seen in the Cefiro R & D compound had arrived by ship through the Port of Wilmington or by truck from some other area, his instincts told him that the ship they had flown over in the Cefiro helicopter yesterday might have delivered the assault team to American shores.
As Casey drove past the Fort Fisher Museum, he noticed the security cameras on top of the gateposts. Mostly a cultural site preserving the history of the fort, the beachfront location also featured the North Carolina Aquarium. With so much state property came the surveillance monitored by state building managers and county emergency responders.
And possibly the terrorists in the R & D facility.
Misha lay on the backseat, her glasses still strapped to her head, despite all the activity. For the first time he noticed that Misha’s hands were shaking. Not constantly, but enough for him to think that perhaps the blast at the school had given her a concussion, perhaps a traumatic brain injury. The military had learned volumes about brain injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and still knew very little about their impact on human behavior. He couldn’t comprehend the impact of a concussion on an eleven-year-old autistic girl. Once they got to a stable, secure area, he would ask Casey to examine her.
He watched Misha stare at Casey, who was driving intently on Route 421 toward Kure Beach and Wilmington. Weekend tourists were stacked up as they came to the aquarium and Fort Fisher. He looked up and saw vehicles filled with families or couples as far as he could see. Each one was similar. Two parents in the front seats and two or three children in the backseats, or young couples taking in the sights all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum with older couples who were probably there to walk the grounds of the fort.
Two things registered with him as he was studying the inbound faces. First, there was an SUV parked to their right up ahead, with two military-aged males in the front seat. The skipper’s blackout on the cameras had probably triggered the commandos at the R & D facility, giving them thirty minutes to move a team into position.
The second thing was that he could partially see through Misha’s eyeglasses, given the angle at which she was leaning against him from her spot on the floor. He saw a hologram that looked like a car’s head-up display.
Before he could consider this further, he said to Casey, “Two men, two o’clock. Black SUV parked. I’m ducking.”
He lay down on the backseat parallel to Misha, who asked, “What’s happening?”
“Just resting,” he said.
“No. You said, ‘Two men.’”
“You’re right,” he said. “We just need to get you back to your mother safely.”
“Stay with you,” Misha said quickly. Her voice had a high pitch to it, and she began rocking severely.
He tightened his grip on her as Casey said, “They’re looking at me hard.”
“Don’t say anything,” he said.
Mahegan couldn’t see her face, because his was below the window and pressed into her seat-back cover. About a minute went by, and she said, “I think we’re good.”
He stayed down to be on the safe side. Misha gas
ped when Casey said, “I spoke too soon. They’ve pulled out and are closing in fast behind us.”
“Misha, get on the floor,” he said. She complied and tucked herself into a tight cannonball position behind the passenger front seat.
“Can you lower the rear window to this thing if I ask you to?” he asked Casey.
“Yes.”
“How far away are they?”
“About fifty yards, but speeding. Five seconds maybe.”
“Either they saw us get in the car at the ferry dock or the cameras picked us up.”
“They’re right on us now.”
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a black Suburban tailgating them. The passenger was leaning forward over the dashboard, trying to get an angle into the rear of the car to see if he could spot Mahegan or Misha. Mahegan saw that the man had an MP5 strapped across his chest, and he knew that these men were from the R & D facility.
“When I say, ‘Now,’ I want you to push the button to lower the back window, then slow down rapidly. Don’t slam on the brakes, but go from sixty to, say, forty in a few seconds.”
“Don’t do any crazy stuff, Jake. We’ve got a little girl with us.”
“That’s exactly why I’ve got to do something drastic.”
He studied the rearview mirror again and saw that the SUV was riding their tail like Dale Earnhardt Jr. did at Charlotte Motor Speedway before bumping and passing. Neither of the men had their hands on their weapons, but one was talking into a radio, most likely passing along the vehicle make and license plate. Not good.