Direct Fire

by A. J Tata

  Mahegan briefly studied the man. Dark, stringy hair hung to his shoulders. Thin facial hair covered his jawline and chin. He had a soul patch beneath his bottom lip. Then Mahegan assessed the contents of the car. Old vinyl seats, cracked and dull. Two plastic Harris Teeter shopping bags in the backseat. He could see a carton of milk, some eggs, and other groceries through the tan bags. More important, no weapons were visible, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything beneath the seat.

  “You carrying?” Mahegan asked.

  “I’ve got a right to,” the man said.

  “That you do. What have you got?”

  “None of your business, actually. I’m just trying to get out of Dodge and find a partner in case it’s like that movie World War Z,” the man said.

  “Something’s happening. Not trying to make an enemy here. Just making sure you’re not after us.”

  “Should I be?”

  The man was becoming obstinate, and Mahegan was done with him. He had to investigate the last clue that could lead them to the locations of Savage and the chairman, assuming all of this was connected.

  “Just FYI, I’m carrying also.” Mahegan produced his Sig Sauer Tribal and flashed it briefly. “Probably in your best interest to head home and deliver those groceries.”

  “You might be right,” the man said.

  “I know I am.”

  Mahegan turned and walked back to the Subaru, two spaces over. Cassie was already out of the vehicle and rummaging through a trash barrel.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Footprints here,” Mahegan replied. “But they could be anything. Two different sets of large boot prints.”

  “I double-checked the pin and our location. This is right.”

  Mahegan had a thought. “If they put the patches on a car or something, they don’t register?”

  “No. Activated and powered by human body heat. DARPA invented it, and it is in the advanced pilot stage.”

  Mahegan recognized the acronym for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Her father being the chairman would provide him—and her, by extension—access to such technology. Mahegan took a step back. The Nova was still there, the driver doing something on a cell phone. He huffed and stormed out of his car toward the rest stop building. Mahegan noticed the bulge at the back of his dungarees. He was carrying.

  “There’s a wild card there,” Mahegan said. “Been following since the cars shut down. Maybe even before then. Know him?”

  “Never seen him before in my life,” Cassie said. “But he’s got a purple heart license plate from Buncombe County. Probably served in one of the wars and was wounded.”

  “Prob.” Mahegan absently stared to the north and west, where he could see the Blue Ridge Parkway snaking along the mountain rims. He gently took Cassie’s phone and looked at the Google Maps function, zooming in and out, following roads, studying terrain features.

  “I’ve got Google Earth on that, too,” Cassie said.

  She punched it up for him and he repeated the process, pinching the screen and then using his thumb and forefinger to widen it. There were three possibilities: a Bible camp, a summer camp, and an old mining village. Asheville had been a micro-version of San Francisco during the gold rush days. Speculators had dug their fair share of gold from the Blue Ridge, and the federal government had given Charlotte its own mint, its beginning as the second largest financial capital in the world.

  “Which one is the closest to some sort of communications network?” Cassie asked.

  ‘There are power and cell phone towers near all three. How much gas do you have?”

  “A little over half. Filled up at that station where I had the flat.”

  “So we prioritize and go inspect,” Mahegan said.

  Cassie was pensive, standing next to him as they gazed out over the valley falling away to the north. “Seems so random. If we think for fifteen minutes it might save us fifteen hours.”

  Mahegan, who was accustomed to acting on operational intelligence immediately, was growing impatient.

  “If we wait fifteen minutes, we might miss something. We can talk and drive at the same time. All three points are on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We go there and decide north or south.”

  “You’re everything they said. GI Joe action figure.”

  “No, just know we don’t have much time to waste.”

  The owner of the Chevy Nova came running from rest area and dashed up toward them as Mahegan drew his Tribal and held it low.

  “Shit’s happening everywhere, man. All across the country. It’s like that zombie movie!”

  Mahegan replied calmly, “Except there are no actual zombies. This is a cyberattack. My guess is that your car doesn’t have a GPS and isn’t serviced through the automated system most car dealers use nowadays.”

  “Nah, man. I do my own stuff. I’m a mechanic. Live just up the road in Avery Creek. Got a garage and everything.”

  Mahegan felt the seconds ticking away. Could Nova guy be any help? Doubtful. He looked at the map and saw that Avery Creek was about ten miles adjacent to one of his three best guesses. Then he thought, mechanic.

  “What’s your name?” Mahegan asked.

  “Ronnie. Why you asking?”

  “You followed us, remember? Just trying to get to know you. Let me ask you, Ronnie. Over the past year has your business picked up, been steady, dropped off? Anything change?”

  “Not much change that I can say. One of my main competitors was bragging about some pick up, but not me. I’m thinking things are looking good for me right about now, though. Good time to be a mechanic.” Ronnie looked across the parking lot at the stalled vehicles and their frustrated owners.

  “Who’s your competitor?”

  “Look, man. If you need some work, I can do it. Don’t pick that douchebag.”

  “This is important, Ronnie. It’s got nothing to do with future work. Did the competitor talk about the uptick and what kinds of vehicles?”

  Mahegan was thinking it was a long shot but worth a phone call or a visit given Avery Corner’s proximity to one of his suspected hideout locations.

  “I’ll call him,” Ronnie said. He wasn’t happy but retrieved a Droid phone from his jeans pocket and pressed a few buttons. He repeated the process several times before saying, “This mass shutdown of cars has everyone on their phones. Can’t get through. Might as well follow me.”

  They got in their cars and picked their way along several narrow, winding country roads. Ronnie, it seemed, knew the back way around all of the stopped traffic.

  “Where the hell’s he taking us?” Cassie muttered. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Mahegan watched her, eyes focused on the road, but he also sensed that her mind was working through something else. How to get her parents back, most likely. But he wondered about her relationship with her father. The chairman had been an outspoken opponent of women training as Rangers, and Cassie had been the first to graduate without being recycled. Sucked it up for sixty straight days. Probably a fair amount of hazing and abuse prior to and after that. How would that lack of support from her role model impact her?

  “This is our best lead to find a starting place. Other than this, we’ve got nothing.”

  “I’m just worried. Mother doesn’t do well in small places. She’s claustrophobic.”

  “What about your father?” Mahegan asked.

  Cassie swerved the Subaru and pulled back into the lane, avoiding an obstacle unseen by Mahegan. She didn’t answer the question, and soon they were pulling into Jasper’s Garage and Repair.

  Ronnie was already out of his Chevy Nova. Cassie pulled up next to him, then they exited quickly. A man about Ronnie’s age—maybe late thirties—came barreling out of the shop office door with a shotgun, aimed it at Ronnie, and said, “What in the hell do you want, you slimy weasel?”

  “Hey, man. I’m just bringing you some business.”

  The man whom Mahegan assumed was Jasper kept the shot
gun trained on Ronnie but averted his gaze to Mahegan and Cassie.

  “You ain’t never brought me nothing but trouble, and I’m sensing you’re doing it again. They look like cops.”

  “They’re soldiers. They’re trying to stop whatever is happening,” Ronnie said.

  The shotgun came down a fraction.

  “What unit?” Jasper asked.

  “I was with Delta Force. She’s with military intelligence at Fort Bragg.”

  “Bullshit. Ain’t nobody with Delta says they’re with Delta.”

  “Fair enough,” Mahegan said. “I said I was with them. I’m out now.”

  The shotgun came down another fraction.

  “What do you need?” Jasper asked.

  “Need to know if you’ve had any unusual pick up in business. Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Other than Ronnie the Weasel here trying to steal my customers, not really. One new steady customer. That’s it,” Jasper said.

  “Who was that?” Mahegan asked.

  “What’s this got to do with?”

  “We’re looking for someone who might have wanted a car fixed without computers involved.”

  The shotgun came all the way down.

  “I’ve had one new steady client for the past ten, eleven months. You don’t see too many people nowadays that insist you don’t use a computer, but I’ve had some trucks and the owner insisted. Hit them for a grand or two a pop for my trouble, and that’s some good income right there,” Jasper said.

  “Same person, different people bringing the cars in?”

  He paused, looked at Ronnie, then Mahegan, and then Cassie. “Y’all ain’t mechanics, so I ain’t so much worried about you stealing my business as I am that asshole, but I’m still curious as to how this might help.”

  “We think that whoever did this to the country,” Mahegan said, waving his hand at some of the stalled cars, “may be holed up somewhere in the mountains.”

  “Like that Atlanta bomber guy?”

  “Like that, but different. More lethal and still planning stuff,” Mahegan said.

  Cassie joined the conversation. She pointed at Jasper’s pickup truck parked next to the garage. “We see your purple heart license plate. Which war?”

  “Both. Two of them damn things. Now I’m all jacked up in the head and the VA wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire. But I’m better off than that weasel,” Jasper said, pointing at Ronnie.

  “So you’re a veteran and someone who cares about his country,” she continued.

  “Care about my buddies. Country can kiss my ass for all they’ve done for me.”

  “Okay, well, some of your buddies are probably being impacted right now by whatever is happening. So tell us, who’s bringing you the cars?”

  Jasper paused, scratched the scraggly hair on his chin, and sighed.

  “Two people. They have a fleet of Mitsubishi trucks and some other cars. A lot of them camps do that. I’m glad to have the business, so don’t go messing it up. Plus, one of them is a hot babe. She gets a rise out of me every time.”

  “What’s this babe’s name?” Mahegan asked.

  “Prettiest name ever. Ameri. Asked me to inspect her Land Rover to include her chassis. I told her I’d be happy to inspect her chassis.”

  Mahegan looked at Cassie, who rolled her eyes.

  “Smoking hot,” Jasper said.

  Mahegan paused. “You got a picture?”

  “Nah, man. We don’t take no pictures of our customers. She’s got brown hair, gorgeous body, carries a pretty, black Berretta pistol with her everywhere.”

  Mahegan turned to Cassie and said, “Do you know Alex Russell?”

  “Of course. She’s part of the Fort Bragg female officers’ informal hangout group.”

  “Got a picture?”

  Cassie pulled up her Facebook page and showed a picture of her and Alex at the beach.

  Jasper looked over her shoulder and said, “Yep. That’s her. Smoking hot. Told ya.”

  CHAPTER 12

  THE MACK TRUCK SKIDDED TO A HALT, BRAKES LOCKED, TIRES SMOKING, the smell of burning rubber filling the air as it was making a turn down a steep incline. Zakir understood that he would never be able to get the timing perfect and so had established an ambush zone of a five-mile radius. His team was within a mile. Not bad.

  He led fifteen of his men through the rugged terrain with steep crags in the mountainside, where the North Carolina Department of Transportation had blown a gap in the granite to make the road grade navigable.

  Zakir had the sniper teams set up on a ridge overlooking I-40 from about eight hundred yards, essentially a half mile.

  “Shoot anyone that gets out of any vehicle,” Zakir said. “Kill everyone.”

  His two sniper teams had SR-25 sniper rifles with Leupold Mark 6 scopes and suppressors. They had been training in the base camp for a one-mile shot. Zakir figured that a half mile would be far enough to protect them and allow for their eventual egress to the base camp several miles away.

  The chaos of the network attack reigning around the country, of course, was his and Gavril’s doing, and it served multiple purposes, the theft of the Mack truck being the primary one.

  With his four-man support team in place, Zakir led the remaining men toward the truck, which had jackknifed.

  How appropriate, Zakir thought.

  “Two vehicles in the front and two in the back,” he said into his handheld personal mobile radio, alerting the assault and support teams as to the defenses they would face. Four Suburban SUVs that had also stopped near the truck disgorged three men apiece, each with helmets and rifles.

  Twelve men, plus the drivers.

  Time for the snipers to get to work.

  Zakir had his assault force brace in a ditch next to I-40. He could hear people shouting, asking what was happening. There were innocent bystanders whose cars had stopped, and there were armed men protecting the truck cargo.

  “Execute,” Zakir said, losing patience.

  The metallic ratcheting of the SR-25 hissed with each shot, coupled by the coughs of the sound suppressors. The idea was to kill as many guards and witnesses as possible and then attack to secure the truck and its contents.

  After six shots from his snipers, the security personnel began to return fire, but it was not accurate fire. His snipers were doing well.

  “Medic! I need a medic here! Five down. We’ve got five men down!” someone shouted several times. Then his voice was cut off in midsentence.

  Six down.

  After another minute of sniper fire, Zakir said, “Follow me.”

  He wound his way out of the ditch, over the guard rail, and took up position behind the last black SUV. Three men lay in the road, dead from head shots. The SUV driver was slumped over his steering wheel. Beyond the Mack truck were several dead civilians with a few scrambling away from the onslaught. His instructions were clear. No one lives in the ambush zone. He couldn’t afford to have video or pictures make it to the media. Zakir raised his rifle and snapped off several rounds, killing each civilian whose car had the misfortune of stopping near the Mack truck. He couldn’t rule out that someone had not already uploaded the video or had been streaming live on Facebook, but he hoped that Gavril was monitoring all of that and erasing anything that appeared on the Internet.

  His guidance to his assault force was to secure one vehicle for cover and potentially as a getaway vehicle. Zakir carried a flash drive with the antidote to the virus that Gavril had attached to all the major auto manufacturers’ service center software updates.

  The flash drive would work on the Mack truck as well. The eleventh man in his team was a techie named Ratta, and when the time was right, Zakir would give Ratta the flash drive.

  His assault force moved to the second SUV as the snipers provided deadly accurate suppressive fire. Having killed all eight men in the last two SUVs and every civilian they could find, his team swarmed around the jackknifed truck, its cab at a ninety-degree angle to
the trailer with its precious cargo.

  They were taking sporadic small arms fire from the lead two SUVs. Zakir could hear the supersonic zips of 7.62 sniper rounds buzzing past him. One of his men was shot in the leg, but they kept moving.

  He approached the passenger door and had his penetrator team use a crowbar to pry open the door while two of his men fired repeatedly against the bulletproof windows. Once the door was open, the close-quarters combat resulted in two of his men wounded and two dead men in the cab interior. Using an Uzi submachine gun, Zakir sprayed the sleeping compartment of the cab, where two more security personnel were lying in wait.

  Blood sprayed in his face as both men caught multiple bullets to the neck, severing their carotid arteries. He backed away and had another member of his team help him pull the driver and passenger from the two truck seats. They dropped them from the cab on the rumble strip of the interstate shoulder.

  “Ratta, now,” Zakir barked.

  Ratta scrambled up to the open passenger door and climbed into the well of the driver’s side. He opened the access panel with a screwdriver set he carried specifically for this mission.

  “Turn the ignition off and then on,” Ratta said, lying on the floor of the cab.

  Zakir placed one foot on the brake, just above Ratta’s back, another foot on the clutch, and shifted the truck into neutral. Then he removed the key and immediately replaced it. The dashboard lights flickered, and a warning light for the parking brakes shone red.

  He watched Ratta insert the flash drive beyond an access panel. They waited thirty seconds, then Ratta looked up and said, “Try to start the motor.”

  Zakir placed his foot on the brake and punched the start button. The diesel engine coughed to life. Zakir then engaged the parking brake and slid out of Ratta’s way.

  Ratta climbed into the driver’s seat, racked it forward, and then began a series of Y-turns to remove the truck from its jackknifed position.

  Meanwhile, Zakir’s men had subdued the remaining security personnel. Zakir leapt from the cab and shouted, “Rally on me!”

  His men moved from one SUV to the next, firing suppressive shots simply to provide cover from any survivors. Soon he had four men in the sleeping cab sitting on the dead bodies and another four men holding on to the sides of the cab.