Direct Fire

by A. J Tata

  “What about Savage? What’s this murder got to do with anything?”

  “Someone killed his ex-wife, who lived in Myers Park in Charlotte. Killed her husband and son, also. The husband is CEO of one of the biggest banks in the country, United Bank of America. CEOs and generals are the targets. It’s almost certainly a precursor to some follow-on attack. In particular, the cyber capabilities of this enemy appear formidable. I missed a call from Yves Dupree, the number two at United Bank of America. He’s supposed to be calling me back soon.”

  Mahegan processed this information. He already knew about the news report on Savage’s ex-wife but wanted to see what Alex Russell knew and didn’t know. If she was correct, four of the Army’s eleven four-star generals had been neutralized in some way, plus Major General Savage, who led the Joint Special Operations Command. Alex Russell had used the word decapitation, and he thought it fit the situation well. The Central Command general was prosecuting the war efforts across the Horn of Africa to Iraq and Syria and into Afghanistan and Pakistan. The JSOC commander—General Savage—supported that effort by employing Special Operations Forces throughout the region to accomplish strategic and tactical objectives in support of national security.

  He did not know the general who led the effort in Afghanistan or his family but couldn’t imagine the dilemma in which that put the general and the president. Does he leave the combat zone permanently to bury his family and grieve, or does he return and drive on with the fight? And while it was unfortunate that the four-star general in Iraq was killed, they would just pump a new general in there to keep the machine rolling. The cumulative effect, though, of a felled four-star commander, coupled with the other actions, was significant.

  And he recalled Al Qaeda putting out a fatwa, or assassination order, on American chief executive officers nationwide a year ago through their trade magazine, Inspire. Perhaps the murder of Vicki Sledge was a by-product of her husband’s assassination, consistent with Al Qaeda’s edict. But why would the JSOC JAG be talking to a murder victim’s friend?

  “Why are you trying to talk to this Yves guy?”

  “Because he reached out to me. Said he had some information that could help.”

  “Help who? I’m assuming Sledge was his friend. Wouldn’t he want to get after me or whoever did this?”

  “Apparently it’s more complicated than that,” Alex said. “He has information.”

  Mahegan nodded, thought for a minute, then asked, “Where’s Savage now?”

  “Thought he’d be here,” she said. “We were supposed to meet at the compound. When he didn’t show, I came here. Protocol.”

  “Patch? O’Malley?”

  “That’s different. I’ve got distress signals from both of them. Those came in before I realized Zebra was compromised.”

  She walked over to one of the idle MacBook laptops and opened it, then typed in a password and logged into a map function.

  “I’ve disabled Zebra but kept the tracking function enabled. These two red dots in the mountains just west of Asheville represent the last known locations of Owens and O’Malley. At least the last two locations of their phones.”

  Mahegan looked at the map, leaning over her shoulder a bit. She smelled of freshly washed hair with a whiff of laundry detergent. Alex Russell’s cleanliness permeated her space. He looked at where a well-trimmed and manicured nail pointed at the two dots somewhere south and west of Asheville, North Carolina.

  “What the hell are they doing there?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “They both must have recognized that someone had compromised Zebra, because they went into stealth mode about the same time. Only we can track them in stealth mode.”

  Owens and O’Malley could have called each other on burner cell phones to coordinate going into stealth mode, but it made no sense that they didn’t come to the rally point. After all, it had been his first instinct and they were both good soldiers as well.

  “Not right,” Mahegan said. “They’d come here if they knew Zebra was compromised.”

  She looked over her shoulder and stared at him a minute. She nodded. “You may have something there, Mahegan.

  “Look at that,” she said, pointing at the screen.

  Mahegan looked at the monitor and saw a third red dot appear next to the ones representing Owens and O’Malley.

  “General Savage is with them?” Mahegan asked.

  CHAPTER 4

  ABOUT 193 MILES AT NEARLY A PERFECT 270-DEGREE AZIMUTH FROM Wood Lake, North Carolina, was a man who hated Jake Mahegan and General Bob Savage with great passion. His name was Zakir Lecha, and he walked the perimeter one final time to ensure there were no campfires or other indicators that might reveal their hideout near Asheville, North Carolina.

  He had a Mack truck to hijack tomorrow morning, which was no small task.

  But now he sat at his command center and looked at the large Ultra-High-Definition screen that served as a monitor. He pulled on a Bose headset that he used to cancel any external noises, allowing him to focus on the mission at hand.

  Through the lens of a butterfly drone, the monitor showed his five-man team dressed in Army blue uniforms. The feed used Ku band satellite; it wasn’t high definition, but it wasn’t grainy. His men walked through the white headstones of Arlington National Cemetery looking as if they had just concluded a burial detail.

  The five men quickly stepped over a low stone wall that separated the cemetery from adjacent Fort Myer. They walked to the parking lot of the commissary and then began walking toward Generals row nearly a mile away. They didn’t walk in formation and appeared to be a group of officers returning from an evening at a formal event, perhaps. It was Thursday night, and officers’ social calendars would be full. One man walked with a severe limp, as if he might have an artificial leg.

  Zakir and his adopted uncle Gavril had hacked the calendar of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bartholomew “Bart” Bagwell. He and his wife would be returning from Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington, DC, in fifteen minutes, about the time his five man team would be arriving.

  Previously, Zakir had one of the men launch the butterfly drone that flew nearly invisibly above the men, like a member of the team, which in a way it was. The butterfly piped back images of the five men, the streets of tranquil Fort Myer, and the homes of the high-ranking officers.

  They cut through a set of tennis courts across the street from the chairman’s three-story brick mansion that overlooked Washington from the bluffs of Arlington. The butterfly drone showed that the driveway was a narrow alley, something they had already reconnoitered.

  The moon was high, and streetlights shined like stage lights. The man with the limp actually carried a disassembled Sig Sauer Commando assault rifle with a noise suppressor screwed to the muzzle. He knelt behind a low wall that separated the tennis courts from the General’s home, quickly assembled his weapon, and then lay down so that no one could see him except his four “friends,” who were talking casually, as if discussing the merits of tactics and strategy.

  In Arabic.

  None of the men turned as they saw the armored Mercedes and its chase car pull into the driveway, but one of them rubbed his hand across his sleeve, like a signal to a base runner to steal second base, which the sniper noticed.

  As the security team stepped out of its car, the sniper rose quickly and fired two rounds from fifty meters using a Leupold scope. The butterfly drone was actually over the chase car now, and Zakir could see two security guards, one male and one female, drop to the ground from headshots.

  The group of ersatz Army officers chuckled and continued walking across the street, remaining calm. The butterfly drone was flying in front of the windshield of the armored Suburban, and Zakir could see the driver pointing at it and laughing to the guard in the passenger seat. The drone was slightly larger than the average butterfly, with a wingspan of six inches.

  As the driver was smiling and laughing with the
chairman and his wife in the backseat, one of the men dressed in blue knocked on the window, so the driver began to roll it down. The pistol was quickly inside the car and pressed against the man’s head. It fired, and brain matter splattered on the security guard in the passenger seat. The second shot killed the guard as he was reaching for his weapon.

  Zakir secure chatted Gavril, who was in a safe location in Charlotte, and said, “Good job, but get the locks.”

  Gavril secure chatted back, “Didn’t forget. Doing it now.”

  Gavril was able to hack the fully electronic vehicle and unlock the doors. With two men on each side, they used Vipertek VTS-989 heavy-duty stun guns to subdue the chairman and his wife.

  The limping man moved from the tennis courts to the chase vehicle and secured the keys from the driver, who was dead. He opened the trunk to the up-armored Mercedes and stepped aside as the four men carried the chairman and his wife to the back of the car—the most vulnerable point in the mission—and dumped them into the trunk side by side. The team had quickly zip-tied their hands and feet and placed duct tape over their eyes and mouths. The man who could possibly have an artificial leg passed the keys to another man and then walked to the end of the driveway, where he stood with his hands clasped in front of him, as if he belonged, like an aide-de-camp.

  The butterfly drone showed the trunk close. Then the four men entered the car, backed out, and picked up the man at the end of the driveway. Then the drone itself dove inside an open window.

  It hovered inside the car as the team drove toward the exit at the bottom of the hill. They passed a security guard who was checking identification credentials of vehicles entering the base but not those departing.

  They steered onto a series of roads that led them to Interstate 66, and began driving west. The team would ditch the stolen chase car in Haymarket and transfer to a cash-purchased Buick SUV, and then in Asheville they would transfer to a new car waiting for them in a Walmart parking lot.

  Zakir looked at his watch and thought, Perfect timing.

  He knew that simultaneity was the key to his operation and that Jackknife wanted everything to happen very quickly. His snatch team should have the chairman and his wife in their mountain redoubt before sunrise.

  With the kidnapping under way, Zakir walked into the small cabin and saw the final two jihadists that he had smuggled in with his Syrian refugee immigration scheme. The two men had arrived yesterday from Birmingham, Alabama, and brought his total to thirty-eight fighters, five of whom were in Washington, DC, right now, plus another two on Fort Bragg as Zakir began this phase of the operation.

  As his boots crunched the gravel road, Zakir remembered his path to this point. He was a Chechen war orphan, raised in a refugee camp along the Syrian border with Iraq. He quickly learned to speak the languages of his tentmates from Iraq, Syria, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, and his homeland of Chechnya. Now thirty years old, Zakir had befriended a Bulgarian boy and a Syrian girl in the refugee camp when he was ten. Four years later, when America was attacked in 2001, Zakir was fourteen and his friends, Malavdi and Fatima were sixteen. The boys were both ripe for the picking by the jihad recruiters who patrolled the camps looking for mujahideen to fight the West. The girl, Fatima, was striking and tough, fighting off predators daily.

  Zakir, Malavdi, and Fatima had no interest in fighting anyone. In their dusty tent, they slept on straw mats and talked about a world beyond the concertina wire. A world beyond the pallets of water bottles and combat rations that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees fed them. When Fatima recommended they escape, Zakir and Malavdi were on board with the plan.

  Because their refugee camp had minimal security, fleeing was relatively easy. They slid under the wire in the middle of the night. Zakir stole the sleeping guard’s keys that unlocked a Renault 19. But with no money and little fuel, their trip to Bulgaria was fraught with peril. Ultimately, they had avoided sex predators, criminals, police, and the jihad recruiters to find Malavdi’s uncle Gavril in a small apartment in the Bulgarian town of Burgas on the Black Sea.

  While not thrilled to have three additional mouths to feed, Malavdi’s balding, stout uncle was happy to see his long-lost nephew and the nephew’s apparent love interest. Zakir viewed Fatima as an older sister, and he understood why Malavdi viewed her as a potential mate. They were in love.

  Gavril saw that, also. Shining to the idea of having three young people in his life, Gavril told them he could use some help with a new thing called the Internet. In his dining area, Gavril had several keyboards and computer monitors. Zakir, Malavdi, and Fatima knew what these computers were because the Red Cross and UNHCR had used them to process the refugees. And every day at the refugee camp when they had to line up to be accounted for, they walked past the gray-haired Italian woman who counted them as present, filing some report somewhere.

  Today, Zakir was sure of two things.

  First, “Uncle” Gavril and his computers had taught him and Malavdi to be two of the best computer hackers in the world. Fatima had balked and said her passion was to help the orphans back in Syria. As their love grew, Malavdi and Fatima vowed to be married and to visit the refugee camp where their love had blossomed.

  Second, four years ago, the American military’s Operation Groomsman had changed their lives forever. And that operation led Zakir to this very moment in time.

  He walked up the steps of a small camp cabin a few hundred yards from his command post, entered, and nodded at two men.

  “Take off your clothes,” Zakir directed. He spoke in Arabic, though his native tongue was Russian.

  One thing Zakir had in common with the fighters who stood before him today was that he no longer had any reason to live and so it didn’t matter what chances he took. Death and danger had always been twin reapers waiting in every refugee camp tent, every Raqqa street corner, every Turkish souk, and even every grungy Burgas basement where Internet thieves were beginning their boot camps that would fifteen years later make Bulgaria the number one producer of the most proficient hackers. If hacking were an Olympic sport, Bulgaria would receive the gold medal every four years. The difference now, though, was that the twin reapers didn’t scare him. Death was inevitable, and he would prefer to die seeking justice for his friends than to grow old and weak.

  The two men stared at Zakir with wide eyes, as if expecting some kind of torture. These were strong, military-age men, but despite their shaved heads and prominent muscles, he needed to ensure the U.S. government had not sent him any spies. Zakir himself was a strong, military-age man who had, since the U.S. military Operation Groomsman, fought alongside ISIS forces solely to inflict as much damage on the Americans as possible. Then, when the American president had called him and his fellow Islamic State warriors “The Junior Varsity,” he had begun cycling between Bulgaria and northern Syria as he wrote code, planned logistics, and determined to demonstrate to the Americans that they were the real junior varsity.

  Working with his commander, codenamed Jackknife, Zakir had marshaled a sizeable force over the past two years. The sanctuary cities in America and their religious charities had welcomed the Syrians with open arms and lax documentation inspection procedures. Even without the bribes to American security personnel and the resultant cut corners, Zakir was confident that the passport and document creators he used produced authentic-looking paperwork that would have passed muster regardless.

  In the end, though, Zakir had the best of connections.

  His thirty-eight men had been dispersed all over the country for the past year. His objective was to infiltrate one fighter with every five hundred refugees. Sometimes he got three per five hundred, and sometimes he got none. His goal had been thirty within the year. When Interpol found a Syrian passport on one of the November 2015 Paris bombers, he decided to stop his flow for a few months. He had resumed terrorist migration in the spring of 2016, when the Americans had not led NATO to enact Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, despite President
Hollande’s call to do so. Then came the attacks in Belgium, Turkey, Bangladesh, Orlando, and so many others. Again, Zakir had to delay each time. He found the American attention span for terror to be about two months.

  Zakir had resumed migration the following summer and now had two teams. One team was focused on home invasions and kidnapping senior military personnel and corporate chief executive officers. The second group was with him in his mountain redoubt awaiting the arrival of a Mack truck.

  His fighters had received their American Instagram accounts in Raqqa prior to deployment in the United States. They were told whom to “follow” on the application and to look for the code words “fall colors” accompanied by a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside the city of Asheville, North Carolina. Zakir had selected “fall colors” because everyone raved about the changing of the tree leaves in the mountains in the months of September and October. Two months ago, he had posted a picture of the mountains covered in colorful splendor as the green leaves were turning red, orange, and yellow. Zakir had taken the picture from a scenic overlook with the mile marker evident in the photograph. He had met the first few men at the overlook, the rendezvous point, then trained those men on the route into the base camp where he stood now. Those men became the guides using the scenic overlook as the link-up point. Each man was on his own to find his way to the scenic overlook using resources at their disposal and field craft.

  He looked at the two men, knowing that he had other missions to execute tonight.

  “Now,” he said. “You received your briefing in Raqqa, correct?”

  The men nodded in unison, appearing almost like twins. The Nexus Command in Syria—an ISIS splinter cell—had briefed all of the sleeper agents prior to their infiltration with mass exodus refugees. The instructions were basic: get to America, stay alive, and watch their Instagram accounts. So far, the plan had worked. The two men stripped naked, revealing honed bodies that were devoid of fat but showed the scars of combat.