by A. J Tata
But on the two right looks, he had seen the hatch on the outside also. It was a service panel that had several cables running from the control panel to the underground tubing outside. He had decided there, in McCarthy’s safe room, that it would be their escape route, should they make it that far.
Casey handed him his knife, which she had confiscated off the floor. He used the tip of the blade to pop open the hatch, and he fed Misha outside first, then Casey, then squeezed through himself. He barely fit through but managed, the wet suit catching and tearing in a few places. He stepped into the darkness outside, Casey and Misha two silhouettes against the weak moonlight.
He had packed two sets of bolt cutters: one in his rucksack, which they had left behind the blast wall, and one in Casey’s, which she had lowered to the floor in the control room, as if she had been struck by a knife and had fallen. Thankfully, after that bit of quick thinking, she had blacked out her phone and kept her rucksack with her.
He had intentionally left his rucksack behind the blast wall, its timer still counting down.
Once outside, they heard the airplane propellers’ distinctive whine. Casey shined her phone flashlight function on her rucksack so he could grab the bolt cutters inside. Then she shined the light on him and said, “Jake, you’re bleeding.”
“Not bad,” he said. “First De La Cruz and now Mirza. I’m okay.”
Mahegan had to talk loudly above the din of the buzzing propellers. The aircraft were on the other side of the R & D facility, near the river. The test road doubled as a landing strip, as he had guessed.
He led Casey and Misha to the first of the mounds he had seen on that day he walked the compound. Mahegan had also studied the mounds earlier using Misha’s glasses, doing recon the best he could based upon what she had seen and recorded.
As they stood at the rusted metal door that looked like a square mouth on a ten-foot-high mound of grass and dirt, Misha said, “Eco-pod.” She was moving and flailing her arms, but he could see she was trying to get it under control.
He looked and saw the faint outline of camouflage netting and a twenty-foot Plexiglas egglike structure beneath it. Registering that they were in the right place, Mahegan saw in the darkness that the door was open. Casey stepped into the small four-foot square opening, and he heard her gasp.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. But there was something in her voice. He could smell the decay wafting out of the mound. There was a dead body inside. He peered in and saw Casey shine her light on the chewed face of someone who he hoped was not Roger Constance.
“Let’s go,” he said, tugging on her arm. Misha was moving about, running in circles, whispering, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”
They moved to the next one and repeated the process, finding a similar scene. This time he inspected the body, and it was that of a young woman who had a Z carved in her face. Under the light shining on her gnawed skin, her face looked like a horror movie poster.
The third mound was similar. He was losing hope. On the fourth bunker they actually had to use the bolt cutters to snap the lock. He and Casey stepped in and saw a man hanging from his belt, an iron pipe securing it at the top. Certainly, he took the easier way out, Mahegan figured. These were Detective Patterson’s four missing people. The Persians had captured them as treats for Mirza, who had demonstrated himself to be a barbarian of the worst variety.
They approached the last mound, and Casey said, “This isn’t good. We’re running out of time.”
Then on the last mound, the one farthest away from the eco-pod, he snapped the lock, and Casey shined her light inside and at the bewildered eyes of Roger Constance.
He looked like an animal, caged and lost. It was obvious to Mahegan that he had never expected to see another human being, except perhaps his executioner. He was sitting on a pile of discarded combat-ration wrappers and empty water bottles. The ammonia stench of urine permeating the entire cavern inside the mound was a welcome aroma compared to that of the previous four. He was alive, at least for now.
Misha shouted, “Daddy!” She ran inside the old ammunition storage bunker and hugged her father.
Mahegan turned to Casey and said, “We need to get moving.”
“Come on, Misha,” Casey said. She removed a water bottle from her rucksack and gave it to Roger, who just stared at it, as if it were a precious gem. Mahegan imagined in his case it might as well have been. Misha’s father looked severely dehydrated. The empty bottles were dusty and crumpled, obviously several days old.
“Focus, Misha,” Mahegan said.
And then, just like that, she did. She knew the stakes. She knew that they had to get to the front of the R & D facility in less than a minute or two.
Casey pulled Misha away, and Mahegan stepped into the mound, lifted Roger onto his shoulders, and backed out of the hole.
“One minute,” Misha said. “Planes.”
Standing outside of the mound, they saw the headlights of a dark SUV approaching the gate to the R & D compound. Mirza’s reinforcements. Maybe it was all he had left, or maybe there were five more SUVs coming. They weren’t going to wait around to find out.
They ran quickly around the south side of the R & D building and saw two CASA-212 twin-propeller airplanes taxiing for takeoff. No doubt they were the autonomous launch aircraft for the Sparrows, Mahegan thought. The plan had been for Misha to program them so that they could catch a ride out of the compound, most likely the only “safe” way out, and land at Wilmington International Airport. The Little Bird helicopters were focused on the Port of Wilmington, several miles up the river and were therefore not an option for Mahegan’s egress.
Having conducted several parachute free falls from CASA airplanes before, Mahegan knew that the planes had a side door and a cargo ramp. The cargo ramp on each of the airplanes was slanted upward at a forty-five-degree angle but not completely closed. As they ran, the first airplane began taking off, like a jet from an aircraft carrier. It catapulted forward and was airborne in seconds.
The second airplane was their only chance.
The four of them were astride the second CASA, which was in takeoff position, its propellers revving at max throttle. Mahegan slid Roger Constance off his shoulders and into the opening at the ramp. Then he and Casey placed Misha into the same opening. Then Mahegan boosted Casey up, and she dove in headfirst as the airplane began to take off.
Mahegan held on to the hydraulic arm that raised and lowered the ramp as the plane shot like a rocket along the runway.
CHAPTER 38
DARIUS MIRZA
THE SOUND COMING FROM ACROSS THE R & D COMPOUND HAD TO be that of the nurse and the girl escaping, probably dragging Mahegan’s lifeless body away. Instead of giving chase, Mirza walked back to the command center to make sure the attack was still on schedule.
On the monitors he saw the merchant ship off-loading containers at the Port of Wilmington. The large overhead cranes were moving back and forth, pulling the double-sized containers off the ship. Each container held a team of ten infantry soldiers. These were tough, combat-hardened men who had fought in Iraq and Syria for stakes far lower than what were at hand now. He was confident in their abilities to secure the Port of Wilmington as a base of operations.
On the next monitor he saw the interior of the fourth ship, which was holding the attack drones. Iranian Air Force crew members were maneuvering the drones into position to launch from the catapult runway on the Chinese-inspired merchant aircraft carrier. The attack drones had received the Cefiro Code and would be able to communicate with the cars.
On the third monitor he saw his top ten locations of parked Cefiro cars, which were ready to conduct their bombing raids on critical infrastructure and destroy the economic vitality of the United States.
Everything was computerized. Once the port began off-loading the first ship, the CASA airplanes would take off. Once the CASA airplanes took off with their Sparrow birds, the Cefiro cars would move toward t
heir attack locations and the attack drones would take off.
He heard the buzz of the CASA airplanes just beyond the walls of the R & D facility and decided to turn on one of the monitors to be able to view their automated takeoff.
It didn’t work. He punched the button again. The monitor that should be showing the planes was instead still showing the attack drones and the crew doing basically the same things over and over again. He looked at the Wilmington port monitor, and it showed the cranes still working, but it didn’t appear that they were making any progress. He could still see containers stacked to the sky.
Looking at the Cefiro top ten monitors, he saw that none of the cars had moved. How could that be? They had targets to attack. He could hear the planes taking off. The cars should be positioning themselves by now.
The girl, Misha, was smart. He knew that, because she had written the code. But there was no way that she could spend less than five minutes on this command center’s computers and make him blind to his operation.
He had defeated Jake Mahegan. He had successfully held open the Cape Fear River while destroying other ports along the East Coast. The Iranian lodgment was secure.
The attack was beginning. So while she might have been smart, if all she could think of was to spit in his eye before leaving, wasting her only time on fussing with the computers to block the sight of his victory, she was just a stupid kid, after all. She wouldn’t even succeed at that, he decided. Instead of sitting inside, staring at useless computer monitors, he walked outside. Things were well here at least. The planes were still taking off.
He scanned the planes, narrowing his focus on the second CASA. Just in time to see Jake Mahegan climb inside as it lifted into the gray mist of the early morning.
CHAPTER 39
JAKE MAHEGAN
MAHEGAN WAS ABLE TO HOOK HIS LEG ONTO THE RAMP AND ROLL inside the ascending airplane. The sticky wet suit and reef boots helped him maintain a grip and flip inside as the plane released its brakes and sped along the runway. The sun was just beginning to nudge above the horizon, the beginning of morning nautical twilight. The blackness was giving way to gray, making determining shapes easier both above and on the ground.
The CASA was called a STOL aircraft, meaning “Short Takeoff and Landing.” The runways didn’t need to be long, and this one wasn’t. They were up in the air in a quick few seconds. As he rolled into the airplane, he slid on top of Casey, Misha, and her father, all of whom had been forced to the base of the tilted ramp by the sharp angle of ascent.
Misha held on to her father as the airplane lifted off, banked hard to the right, and began to spiral up in the air, seeking some unknown release point for the boxes of explosive Sparrows Mahegan could see anchored to the floor of the airplane.
Once they leveled off at a somewhat stable cruising altitude, he helped Roger Constance and Misha up and walked them to the mesh seats along the starboard side of the aircraft. He sat them down and buckled them into the red webbing. There was nothing more they could do. Misha had done what she could, and they had her father alive and, hopefully, well.
Casey walked to the front of the airplane and then came back to Mahegan. “You know, there’s no one flying this thing.”
“I sort of figured that,” he said. “Hopefully, Misha was able to do her thing.”
They both looked at the little girl, who was looking smaller and meeker in her ill-fitting clothes as she hugged her father. She began pawing at her father’s shirt, as she had done with Mahegan’s when he had lifted her after the car bomb exploded three days ago. He guessed there was some psychological explanation for the dichotomous swings from calm computer hacker and code writer to insecure and doting eleven-year-old daughter.
“She gave the code, no broken promise,” Casey said, still looking at her and shaking her head in disbelief.
“She didn’t have her glasses,” Mahegan said.
“She did great. You should be proud of her, no matter what happens.”
Mahegan nodded. The adrenaline was still pumping through him, but he was beginning to feel the wear of combat. His head was light, and frankly, he was feeling less than sure-footed. Some of the nicks and cuts actually hurt. He had probably lost more blood. Between the two pints he had donated to Layne Constance, the stab wound from De La Cruz, and the jabs from Mirza, everything seemed to be having a cumulative effect.
He sat down, staring at the pallets that held big brown boxes. In them, he presumed, were the Sparrows, similar to the ones that had sunk the ships in the channels of the four ports. In three days, the news had reported that close to thirty billion dollars had been lost by companies and businesses all over the world. That ten billion per day would multiply if they weren’t able to stop the attacks.
It wasn’t about the money. It was about democracy and freedom and defending the American way of life. Countries had been conducting trade ever since time began, whether it was Mahegan’s forefathers’ bone-and-shell necklaces in trade for British beads or the global stock markets trading shares of companies bigger than most nations. But the United States’ arteries of economic vitality, upon which freedom, democracy, and social stability hinged, were the ports where ships brought in products. From them trucks moved the products to distribution centers, where even more trucks took the products to big stores and small stores. That was the foundation of the American economy.
The Iranians had disrupted that flow, and for how long it would last, no one could be sure. The intelligence community had missed the cues, and then the Department of Homeland Security had been slow to respond.
But here they were, on an autonomous CASA airplane, flying high above the Cape Fear River. Where was it headed?
Without warning, the ramp began lowering, and he studied the boxes that would deploy. There were three boxes, and he had to assume that the first CASA to take off had three, as well. Six targets. Where were they? What were they?
Had Misha been able to do what they had determined in McCarthy’s house that she needed to do?
The boxes each had what looked like an old T-10 parachute on top, which meant that the Sparrows weren’t very heavy or they needed only a short period of time to deploy from the release box. The T-10 was a personnel parachute, and not for cargo. If each Sparrow weighed two pounds and there were two hundred Sparrows in each box, which seemed about right, then four hundred pounds was no big deal for a T-10.
A light in the back of the aircraft went from red to green. The first pallet slid toward the lowered cargo ramp and the open sky beyond it. He saw a yellow static line and a snap hook sliding along the port side of the aircraft. As a box fell into the sky, the static line acted as an anchor to pull open the parachute. The delivery of supplies to ground combat forces had evolved significantly, with GPS devices steering parachutes to precise grid coordinates. He saw the small black GPS box atop each of the boxes. It would pull the risers of the parachute to steer the cargo to a specific release point, at which time, he imagined, the Sparrows would be released from the box and would do their thing.
He watched the parachute deploy, and a few seconds later the box opened and released dozens of small brown “birds,” which began flying in an autonomous swarm toward the ground. They did not fly very far or for very long, and he was curious what target the Sparrows would seek.
The plane banked hard, preparing for release number two, which came quickly. Same process. Pallet released. Static line pulled. Parachute deployed. Box open. Sparrows airborne.
The plane flew a few minutes longer and then released its final box with the same pallet, static line, parachute, and Sparrow sequence.
Now they were flying in a big oval in the air. He could see the tall blue cranes of the Port of Wilmington as the airplane banked from north to south. They were roughly paralleling the murky brown Cape Fear River. He saw the R & D facility and the Cefiro manufacturing plant at the south end of their track.
As they began to turn to the north, he saw several brown specks suddenly m
ass and concentrate on the R & D facility, which exploded, as if a small nuclear missile had been dropped on it. The fireball billowed high, licking the clouds with its destructive power. Four hundred pounds of RDX explosives had been delivered in simultaneous fashion on the facility.
He wondered if Mirza had remained in the building and if the ballistic missile had detonated. He had left behind a rucksack full of hand grenades to aid in the process.
They banked to the north, and Mahegan saw the same brown specks mass and destroy the hull of a merchant ship in the Cape Fear River, about a mile south of the port. The rusted orange hull imploded, and the ship slowed as it began to fill quickly with water.
Then the third box must have targeted the ship in the port, because it exploded, torqueing the blue cranes and splitting the ship in half with a broadside puncture into the engine compartment, like a missile hitting a tank. He hoped the operators of the cranes were okay.
Misha had done well so far. This had been the plan, to turn the Sparrows against the Iranians. That part of her revised code had worked.
They still had two more ships to worry about and 150 Cefiro cars, if their intelligence was accurate.
On a southward track, Mahegan saw another merchant ship explode and begin to sink in the Cape Fear River. Oddly, the one area that the Iranians wanted to protect, the Port of Wilmington, would have the most destruction and damage, because this was where they had to stop the invasion. Right here, right now. This was D-day for the Iranians, and the Port of Wilmington was their Normandy Beach. Mahegan and his small team could not give them that foothold.