by A. J Tata
That was the best list she could think of, at the moment. The nurse’s pressure was helping her. She liked the pressure. Her only explanation was that it helped her focus on one sense, touch, as opposed to all five at one time.
Mr. Mahegan’s plan was to fight the man he called “the commander” of the enemy. He’d said he would lure the man away from the computers to allow her to “do her job.”
She had agreed to do her part because she thought any Daddy’s girl would do whatever she could to get her daddy back. Yes, she understood that there was a terrorist attack happening and that she could play a role in stopping it. But if she had to be totally honest, she was primarily concerned about finding her father alive. It had been her plan that had gotten him in trouble, and now she might have killed him for real.
It was working. The nurse’s pressure was helpful.
My glasses. Daddy. Calm down.
She sat in the chair the commander had been sitting in and immediately got to work. They had told her she didn’t have much time. She thought she could do it, though, but that was with her glasses, which helped her. Now she wasn’t sure.
Calm down.
She found a locked screen, a keyboard, and several monitors.
“Keyboard!” she said, louder than she’d meant to.
She looked at the weird keys and squiggly lines on the keys and then at the nurse, who said, “Oh, my God. We didn’t think of this. It’s a Persian keyboard.”
Not wanting to set off any alarms inside or outside of the system, Misha didn’t touch the keyboard. Looking to her left and right, she saw other computers and monitors, all with the same keyboards.
“Office,” Misha said. “English keyboards.” She remembered seeing the offices when she had sneaked in here. The windows had just been shot out of two of them, though.
The nurse let go of her and ran to the offices. The release of pressure was not good. Misha needed the pressure. She began swaying and rocking, and that was when she looked down and saw the dead man at her feet.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.
The nurse was back, carrying two keyboards. It seemed like she had been gone forever, but it was actually only seventeen seconds.
“I brought a backup just in case,” she said.
“Man!” Misha said, again louder than she’d wanted, pointing at Colonel Franco. She was swaying and rocking and trying to get everything under control, but she was the opposite of blind. She could see everything! Even the things she didn’t want to see. She saw the dead man had seven buttons on his gray shirt, and there were three bullet holes in his chest and one big hole in his head. She saw the black residue from the gunpowder where someone had put a gun close to his head. One hole was small compared to the other side of the head, where the hole was large.
The nurse dragged him away and came back to hold her.
“Tighter,” she said.
The nurse squeezed tighter, and Misha took a few deep breaths. Her father had always told her to take a few deep breaths whenever she was losing control. The problem was she sucked in the smoke and the gun oil. She leaned over and vomited in the spot where the dead man had been. She was not going to be able to do this.
But the nurse kept holding her, squeezing her tighter.
“Please, Misha. You can do this. Your daddy knows you can do this,” she said.
Something clicked in Misha’s mind that made her “get control, be strong, own it,” as her father would say. You’re in charge, Misha, not anything or anyone else.
“In charge,” she said to herself.
“That’s right. You’re in charge, Misha,” the nurse said.
Misha plugged in the new keyboard. Her hands were shaking, but after a few missteps, soon she was clicking away. She found the root drive and was inside all the activity that had been programmed. The entire attack plan was laid out right in front of her. For a minute she clicked around, looking for where her father might be, but when she couldn’t find any reference to him, she came back to the attack plan. A minute was a long time inside a computer network in which she wasn’t supposed to be, and an even longer time when two men were fighting less than fifty yards away and a terrorist attack was under way.
She pulled up a text box and typed for the nurse.
Three ships are going to dock at the Port of Wilmington today and off-load tanks, helicopters, and troops.
“What else?” the nurse asked.
There’s a fourth ship, which is twelve miles offshore. It has something called attack drones, which are to partner with one hundred eighty Cefiro cars that are each carrying four artillery shells. This is what they needed the code for, so those two systems could communicate and attack, regroup, and continue to move.
“Is that it?”
No. They have things called Sparrows and drones that are attacking the Marine Corps bases in North Carolina.
“Just like the ships in the ports,” the nurse said.
And they’re going to launch a missile at Washington, DC.
“They’ve thought of everything.”
Make sure you’re watching for the bad guys. Misha needed to focus, which meant the nurse needed to stand watch.
The nurse turned away and asked over her shoulder, “Can you stop the code? Can you make it so it’s not automated?”
“Trying!” Misha said.
And she was. She was focused on the monitor. The keyboard’s buttons flew under her fingers. She began to get into the rhythm she’d had before her father made the glasses. She was seeing her numbers and letters fly across the screen. She found the Cefiro Code and saw that someone had pushed it to all the cars and airplanes, like an app update. It was on the hard drive of each of their onboard computers. There was nothing she could do to change that.
On a side-by-side monitor display, she could see code on the left-hand monitor and a map on the right-hand monitor. On the map monitor she saw icons that indicated the location of every car and airplane. The cars were spread out between North Carolina and Washington, DC, mostly. The attack drones were all bunched together in the ocean, on a ship, she guessed. And the Sparrows, thousands of them, were at their location near the warehouse. The autonomous code would synchronize the attack, destroying the closest military planes with the Sparrows, preventing a military response to the three ships that the map showed. One was already at the Port of Wilmington, another was almost there, and a third was entering the mouth of the Cape Fear River twenty-six miles away, according to the map.
All these systems had downloaded the code, and it was impossible to independently overwrite each system’s code. Well, it was possible, but she just didn’t have the time.
The fighting continued. She could hear the two men speaking angrily to one another, and then she heard some loud gunshots. They were almost out of time, and she had done nothing.
She determined right there to write a new code and push it out over whatever satellite they used. Hopefully, she could get it to load onto the cars and airplanes before everything happened. She began by modifying the old code and then took a couple of minutes to create a line of code that would simply make every order a system received invalid. She wrote a special code for the Sparrows that were at their present location.
She packaged the two codes into bundles and then searched for how they had auto-loaded the software onto the systems. She had found it and was readying the bundles for push when she heard a man’s voice say, “Stop right there.”
The commander was limping back toward the command center. The nurse raised her pistol to shoot him. Misha’s finger hovered over the ENTER button that would send the bundles of information to every car, airplane, and Sparrow, even to the missile right behind them.
She was frightened but somehow found the inner strength to focus, as if her glasses had trained her to function normally without the sensory filter. Was it possible that they were training her mind to dampen her sensory overload? Regardless, she didn’t have time to think about it.
; The enemy commander had a gun aimed at her. Between the nurse holding her and her belief that Mr. Mahegan would protect her, she had been able to get herself under control briefly.
“You stop where you are, Mirza,” the nurse said. Misha could tell her voice was weak because she was worried about what had happened to Mr. Mahegan. There was only one possibility. He was dead. Misha couldn’t think of any other way that he would have let the commander get near them.
“Drop your weapon,” the commander said. “I’m holding in my hand a remote detonator for this ballistic missile. Either drop it or I’ll ignite the missile. The flames will kill us all before the missile takes off and destroys Washington, DC.”
From what her father had said about Washington, DC, and all the dirty politicians, that didn’t seem like such a bad thing, but Misha knew this was no time for jokey thoughts. She was still proud of the way she kept her cool without her glasses. She was strong. She could do this.
The nurse seemed hesitant at first, but Misha believed she recognized the severity of the situation. The nurse knelt down and placed her gun on the floor. Of course, she could see Mr. Mahegan’s bigger gun on the table behind her. The nurse had snagged that off the floor when the commander and Mr. Mahegan were in the big fight.
Misha honestly didn’t care what this man was saying, so she lowered her finger slowly, almost imperceptibly, and hit ENTER.
Then she said, “No broken promise,” as loudly as she could, as Mr. Mahegan had instructed her to.
She watched the code scroll across the screen in a series of numbers and letters. It all looked perfectly fine until the lights went out and the power shut down.
That was when she totally lost control.
CHAPTER 36
DARIUS MIRZA
HAVING DISPATCHED THE BEAST THAT HAD BEEN HAUNTING HIM, Jake Mahegan, Mirza turned to go back to the command center. He was surprised to find that they had drifted into the far corner of the dimly lit R & D facility.
It had been a tough fight, but he had expected it to be. Only the toughest of men chose to fight him. Most turned and ran. Mahegan had wrestled before, and Mirza could tell by the way he’d countered some of his most definitive moves. Mirza considered himself a purist when it came to boxing and wrestling. Two different sports with their own rules. He took pride in one combative form winning over the same form, as in a duel.
It would be unfair to pace ten steps in the opposite direction, turn, and use an Uzi or MP5 against a dueling pistol. Wrestle him or box him, but don’t mix the two. But Mahegan had mixed the two, which was when Mirza had decided that if Mahegan could cheat, so would he. The knife tucked in his combat vest just beneath his rank epaulet was well hidden and easily accessed.
During their last Greco-Roman lash-up, he let Mahegan have the headlock, putting Mahegan above him, with his head practically on Mirza’s back and Mirza’s head buried in Mahegan’s massive chest. While he was holding one arm, Mirza used his free hand to grab the knife, which he quickly thrust at Mahegan multiple times. The first stab was into Mahegan’s right arm, which was choking him. He immediately felt Mahegan lessen his grip, if only slightly. Mirza was using both of his arms to control his upper body and the range of his hands now, especially the one with the knife.
Because he knew Mahegan’s left arm had been hurt from a war injury and now his right arm had a stab wound, Mirza tried to stab him with uppercuts to the torso. The blade made contact on multiple occasions until Mahegan’s body went slack and slid off of Mirza and onto the floor.
He had slayed the beast. Mirza stood above him, breathing hard from the fight. Staring at Mahegan’s lifeless body, he felt that this victory was symbolic of victories to come. Mahegan was vanquished, as America would be soon.
Mirza heard a noise at the command center and turned. He had been considering a coup de grâce stab to Mahegan’s heart, if he hadn’t already punctured it, but then he saw the nurse and the girl working at the computers. How had they gotten in here? Had Mahegan’s presence been a decoy for them to take control of the autonomous swarm?
He collapsed the knife and held it in his hand like he might hold a remote control detonating device, something he had used so many times in Iraq on American soldiers. He saw the nurse was holding a pistol. She did as he said and dropped it. She knew his threat was not an empty one. He was in command of the situation. Walking toward her, he heard more gunfire outside, and then the lights went out. Everything was black. Even the computers. There was supposed to be a generator that would kick in if there were ever a power loss. He worried for a moment but then considered that this might not be a bad thing.
His job was done. The cars, attack drones, and Sparrows all had the code. They would execute independently, which was the entire point of having the code in the first place.
The blackness was absolute.
Until the nurse’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket and lit her up like a robot with a power pack. He opened his knife, grasped the blade, and flipped it end over end toward a spot just left of the rectangle of light.
He heard the knife stick with a wet, smacking sound, which, he assumed, meant it had landed in flesh.
He stood there in the dark and watched the dimly lit phone, and the body to which it was attached, crumple to the floor. He waited, listening for sounds, hearing footsteps moving away toward the door, then a skittering sound, like someone falling or dropping something. With the power out, though, the door would not open for her, so he took his time, measuring his steps until he would have Misha in his hands. There was more random gunfire outside, but it seemed irrelevant to his situation. Perhaps it was at the ports where the Persian Army would soon be off-loading, but he didn’t think so. The sounds were close, like the earlier gunshots, but they were not hitting the building. About a minute after the power had gone out, the lights came back on and were so bright and vivid that he could not believe his eyes.
The nurse and Misha were gone. He turned to the floor where he had slayed his enemy. Jake Mahegan was gone, too.
CHAPTER 37
JAKE MAHEGAN
HE HAD NEVER TRUSTED THAT MIRZA WOULD BE TRUE TO HIS WORD and would drop all his weapons before the fight. It was true that he was a proud egomaniac. It was also true that he had never won a medal at the Olympics in either wrestling or boxing. He hadn’t even made it to the platform for a bronze medal. Maybe the Iranians had just put their Special Forces guys on these teams to travel and collect intelligence or conduct covert operations every four years. Still, Mirza was good. Good enough to make an Olympic team, even if strings hadn’t been pulled.
But for someone like Mirza, it was all about the perception, the image. Did people view him as an Olympian? As a Quds Force special operator? That was what was important to him. Winning was less important than the perception of winning. If he was delusional enough to think that having lost the bulk of his thirty-man team was a victory of any kind, then he was the kind of person who would take the slightest indicator of Mahegan’s defeat and blow it beyond proportion in his own mind.
When Mirza had pulled the knife out of his combat vest, Mahegan heard it click and knew that Mirza had only been controlling his right arm with the headlock. Mirza’s left hand had extracted the knife and had come up lightning fast and found his right triceps. It was a glancing blow, though. The blade was angled flat against his skin, and the razor-sharp tip managed to scallop out a chunk of skin, but it was superficial. Even so, he went with the idea he wanted Mirza to have in his mind: that the Iranian had outsmarted him.
Mahegan slackened his grip with his right arm but continued to fight him as he bowed his buttocks out and tried to keep his chest away from the reach of the knife. Increasing his control of his left arm, Mahegan was able to reduce Mirza’s range, but not fully. The knife punctured the slack and damp wet suit multiple times, sounding like it was piercing his skin more than it was. The wet suit still held the water from the Cape Fear River, and every time the knife hit the neoprene, it sounded much lik
e a knife going into flesh and drawing blood. He grunted to add to the misdirection, though some of the groans were from the knife piercing his skin.
Amid the flurry, he heard Misha say, “Trying!” The kid was cool under pressure, as he had known she would be.
After hearing Misha, and knowing she was close to accomplishing her mission, he fell backward and slumped to the floor, ready for Mirza to come after him. If he had done so, Mahegan was prepared. He listened as Mirza walked away and moved quickly toward the elevated command center. Mahegan waited for his cue, keeping watch in case he needed to revise the plan to keep Misha and Casey alive.
From the floor of the facility, he saw Mirza walking toward Misha and Casey. He watched as Mirza focused on them and then silently stood. Mahegan found the electrical junction box that had been part of the recon they had done using Misha’s video from her glasses. He had been able to spot it on the wall, with all the tubes and cables entering and exiting from the top and the bottom. It was critical intelligence about the site that he’d figured might be helpful in shutting down at least part of the attack.
He opened the thin metal door, using the latch, and saw one master ON/OFF switch and about twenty smaller switches.
When Misha said, “No broken promise,” he paused and then hit the OFF switch.
Then he turned and texted Casey, who had stored her phone in her rucksack. A second later, he heard Mirza’s knife thwack into the rucksack, which included a few intravenous fluid bags for Roger Constance, should they find him.
Now he had a fair fight with Mirza, but he let that go, because Mahegan already had beaten him hand to hand.
Instead, he met up with Casey and Misha at the hatch next to the control panel, as they had planned. Casey pulled Mirza’s knife from her rucksack and tossed it toward the door, fifty yards away. It skittered along the concrete, creating enough of a distraction to provide them a few precious seconds to remove the thin metal hatch from the wall of the R & D facility.
He had noticed it on the glasses recon they had watched in McCarthy’s house. Misha’s video had shown that while there were just two doors into the facility, there was also a hatch that appeared to lead either outside or underground. Then they had looked at Misha’s earlier video from her glasses, when she had broken out of the pod and had considered which direction she would go. They’d watched on McCarthy’s television as Misha looked right, then left, then right again before deciding to go to her left.