by A. J Tata
On one vacation to a Caribbean island, she met a man who was a psychiatrist. Their brief affair led to a discussion about her anxiety when the doctor awoke to Alex standing over him at three a.m. holding a kitchen knife. She had little memory of doing so but did recall him sitting her on the sofa and quietly taking something from her hand. He spent no more nights with her but encouraged her to visit Dr. Charles Boras, who specialized in PKCzeta protein inhibition and blocking. This experimental treatment focused on erasing trauma from the brain and blocking memories. Alex visited Dr. Boras in northern Virginia, and he changed her life. She was now sleeping most nights, though the nightmares still came.
She took four seven-day vacations a year. The first and last days of each vacation always included a visit to the doctor to get the shots and stock up on supplies of the medicine. She explained to her bosses, including Savage, that for the last four years she had medical and family commitments that were set in stone. Even General Savage supported her work–life balance, especially after Operation Groomsman and the trauma created for all. And because of the doctor visits, she never worried about the lie detector tests she had to take when she returned from these absences.
Did you visit any foreign countries?
Did you have any contact with known terrorists?
Have you given away any classified information?
Did you receive any large sums of money you have not disclosed?
Do you have any bank accounts which you have not disclosed?
Alex always passed those tests easily. She never even worried about them. The PKCzeta shots temporarily erased her memory, especially the memories of Operation Groomsman. At the beginning, the PKCzeta shots nibbled away at the fringes of her most traumatic memories. Dr. Boras was able to isolate the portion of Alex’s brain that stored the more stressful, long-term memories. Protein kinase C zeta, or PKCzeta, was one of two proteins doctors believed stored long-term memories. Boras had been working on experimental treatment in addressing posttraumatic stress that focused on isolating the proteins that harbored the memory. Boras, seeking a Nobel Prize most likely, believed he had been able to isolate the protein that would play the Operation Groomsman video in her mind, like selecting a movie on Netflix, but instead of Alex selecting the movie, it selected itself and played at its own choosing. All Boras had to do was disable the movie or at least diminish its ability to play. Just like some benzodiazepines controlled anxiety by enhancing a neurotransmitter that muted the anxiety response, Boras’s PKCzeta treatment that he modestly called Boradine muted the video held within the protein in Alex’s brain.
At this moment, she stood on the ridge looking through binoculars into the old Bible camp about twelve miles to the east of Asheville. Alex felt the Boradine wearing off, the memory climbing over a ledge in her brain, pulling itself up so that it could return to its dominant, haunting form.
She heard more rifle shots and decided to back away and see what Cassie Bagwell was doing up here and how she might have gotten involved in all of this. True, Alex remembered that Cassie’s parents had been kidnapped, but surely Cassie did not believe she could rescue them on her own.
Or did she want to rescue them? Alex and Cassie had been friends at one point in time, even doubles tennis partners. Cassie had played at West Point, and Alex was a natural athlete with ability in most sports. Immediately after Operation Groomsman, Alex had returned to Fort Bragg on the same plane as Cassie Bagwell, who had been an intelligence officer in Mosul with the coalition forces. They had discussed the mission that had gone so wrong, and while Alex’s primary angst was that she had delivered the go-ahead to drop the bombs, Cassie couldn’t stop talking about how much she hated her father because he had taken a public stand against her attending Ranger school.
So perhaps Cassie was happy her father was kidnapped, Alex thought. She smiled. The world was twisted and dark, and why would Cassie Bagwell be any different from Alex or General Savage? Cassie had even provided some of the preliminary intelligence on Operation Groomsman, so as far as Alex was concerned, she was as liable as anyone else. It had been Cassie’s report that al-Baghdadi’s cell phone was in one of the SUVs in the convoy.
She needs to pay, too, Alex thought.
Alex next thought about Jake Mahegan. She knew that she should have killed Mahegan. It had to be him who had led Cassie in her white Subaru to the periphery of this base camp. Truthfully, Alex was glad he had done so. She needed him here.
A muzzle flashed from a fire tower. Down below men in black clothing were taking well-aimed fire at the tower. She determined that it could only be Mahegan at the top of the mountain. He had most likely memorized the locations she had shown him of the Zebra indicators for Savage, O’Malley, and Owens. Now he was playing hero and had come to rescue them.
How noble.
A dark-skinned man moved quickly to the edge of the base camp and knelt next to two men fumbling with a rocket-propelled grenade and launcher. One man placed the launcher on his shoulder while the other man secured the rocket inside the tube. As the loader knelt down next to the shooter, Alex heard another loud shot echo throughout the valley. The binoculars provided her a front row seat. The loader’s head exploded in a fine spray of pink mist. The rocket launched, but it was wide, poorly aimed if aimed at all. The white smoke trail of the rocket wound harmlessly through the sky, landing somewhere unintended. If the pilots were still flying that state helicopter, they would think another missile had been fired at them and put themselves in for air medals, she figured.
She watched a few men with AR-15 rifles on semiautomatic fire three round bursts at the tower. It was too far away, maybe five hundred yards, but perhaps they would get lucky.
The men moved through the woods. Black-clad soldiers were taking the hill, shooting, moving, and communicating. They were getting close to the tower. If this were a lone shooter, even Jake Mahegan, he wouldn’t be able to fend off the balance of the advancing force.
She needed to act quickly.
Before she could move, though, the stress immobilized her. She took a step and crumpled to one knee, heaving and sucking in deep breaths. The emotions were like a python, strangling her, choking the life out of her. The scene replayed itself again and again in her mind.
Four words scrolled across her mind’s eye as if they were on a Jumbotron.
“Yes, sir. Valid target.”
Then she was back in Mosul, in the Joint Operations Center, not on this ridgeline watching terrorists defend a base camp.
The Netflix in her mind had chosen to replay the movie. The PKCzeta shot was wearing off. Now, in her mind, she was on the Iraq–Syria border. The Predator drone launched the Hellfire missile, which was winding its way to an SUV. Exploding in a giant fireball of dust and flames, the missile had been enough to kill everyone in that one vehicle and probably injure the others. But no, Savage took her “valid target” designation to the extreme and had a B-1 bomber drop five JDAM precision guided missiles on the entire convoy. All that was left were five smoking holes in the ground and some shards of metal.
She remembered watching from the forward command post in Mosul. The grainy live streaming video feed delivered by the Predator showed the two helicopters as they swept into the picture, landed, and disgorged eight soldiers.
“That’s Jake Mahegan,” she remembered saying. Though she had never met him, she recognized his bulk from pictures and other videos she had seen. She had also seen him walking in the compound before, but he was a recluse, always 100 percent professional, cleaning his weapon, shooting on the firing range, or lifting in the gym. Now it was Mahegan’s team looking for the confirmation that Savage had killed al-Baghdadi.
Mahegan’s team took a long time on the target. Were they killing the survivors? She didn’t know. Were there survivors? There were no enemy counterattacks. That was the first clue that gave Alex a sinking feeling in her stomach that they had done something terrible.
But when Mahegan returned and met with General
Savage privately, she knew that something was amiss. She was not authorized to attend the meeting between Savage and Mahegan.
Savage had emerged from the unit compound on the other side of the base in Mosul and met her in the vehicle that drove them to the JSOC headquarters.
“It’s not good,” Savage had said.
In the end, they had killed her sister, Fatima, and Fatima’s fi-ancé, Malavdi, along with their friends. She was experiencing her own form of shell shock from saying that, unbeknownst to her, her own sister was a “valid target.”
She screamed, grabbed her hair, and pulled it straight outward, torturing her scalp.
She had unwittingly approved the murder of her friends and family.
The trauma had been so great, Alex had visited the unit psychiatrist several times. She had cried most nights until there were no tears left. Sleep rarely came, if ever. The sun was a knife blade every morning, poking her bloodshot eyes. The Predator footage was a continuous reel playing in her mind.
“Yes, sir. Valid target.” Then the Hellfire missile. Then the JDAMs. Then Mahegan. Then the confirmation that her sister was gone.
And then the forced amnesia.
Alex was now on all fours. She looked up through the stringy hair that fell across her face. The commandos had deployed smoke grenades to cover their movement. A thick haze of gray and white smoke was boiling up the hill. The wind was moving the curtain to the north, toward her. The leading edge of the acrid smoke filled her nostrils.
An idea began bouncing around her increasingly deranged mind. She tried to clutch it. Pushing off the ground, she clumsily stood and hung on to a pine tree branch as if it were her only grasp of reality. Perhaps it was.
The idea. There it was. It stopped long enough for her to see it, then sped off again in her mind like a taunting motorist.
Fueled by the idea, Alex stumbled and then ran to her vehicle hidden in the trees, cranked it, and sped out the back way, taking rough trails along the ridge that led to the Blue Ridge Parkway. From there she sped past the disabled cars littering the roads. A few tow trucks were hauling cars in different directions, undoubtedly to dealerships or service centers. She wondered how long it would take for the auto manufacturers to reboot the cars. She knew that some would do it “over the air” to the shark fin satellite antennae for the newer cars, while many of the cars would need to be manually rebooted at the service centers that had originally unwittingly planted the bug in the cars in the first place.
Alex drove her Land Rover onto the Blue Ridge Parkway, found the turnoff, and then sped toward Cassie’s Subaru.
Again, she wondered what Cassie was doing. Cassie was an intel officer. Was she piecing bits of intelligence together and deducing enemy locations? Cassie was a “friend,” but only in the sense that it helped her maintain her appearances at Fort Bragg. The sisterhood of Army officers and all that happy horseshit.
She stopped her SUV, noticed Cassie crouching at the base of the tower. Cassie was providing supporting rifle fire for someone—probably Mahegan—in the tower. The attacking men were probably a half mile down the mountain, but she realized that the weapons were now aimed in her direction. She backed up the SUV so that it sat behind a small knoll where she could still see the top of the tower.
The cloud of smoke was rising into the sky to her southeast. The tips of trees were visible as if poking through a low-hanging cloud. The sound of gunfire popped at a steady rhythm. She found it interesting that there was an assault on an enemy base camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the same day a vehicle service hack had stopped the majority of the cars on the road, if only briefly. She had no illusions about the speed with which some of the major manufacturers would solve the problem. But for now, there were no first responders arriving on the scene.
She pulled out her cell phone and punched up Cassie Bagwell’s number. Cassie answered on the third ring.
“Hello? Alex?”
“Hey, Cass, I know you guys are in a shitstorm right now. I’m behind you and can provide covering fire if you want to escape and evade back this way. It looks like a damn army coming up at you.”
“Where are you?”
Alex braved a walk up to the top of the knoll and waved at Cassie, who was turned around, looking in her direction. Just then a machine gun from the Syrian commandos opened up and began peppering the tower. No way that Mahegan would live through that if he stayed up there. Cassie spun around and began firing again with what looked like an AR-15.
This was a full-fledged firefight.
Mahegan was spiraling down the staircase, realizing perhaps that the tower’s usefulness had run its course. Cassie was intermittently waving him down, shooting at the black-clad commandos, and shouting something at him. Somehow, Mahegan reached the ground, and Cassie lay next to him. He glanced back at her with a furrowed brow, perhaps trying to figure out if she was friend or foe. He knew the answer, she was certain, but in this case he was probably choosing the devil he knew—sort of—as opposed to the devil he didn’t—the apparent army rushing up the mountain to the tower like Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
Cassie and Mahegan low-crawled off the backside of the ridge and then began running in her direction.
Alex found a tree to the right side of the road and leaned against it with her left shoulder as she knelt on her right knee. After retrieving her Berretta, Alex rested her left elbow on the thigh of her left leg and took dead aim.
She would need the stable firing platform at the distance she was expecting to shoot.
With Cassie Bagwell running her way, Alex thought of her sister, Fatima.
For you, Fatima, she thought as she pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER 16
OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS ZAKIR HAD COORDINATED THE RESETTLEMENT to America of thousands of Syrians. His standard was to have one of his aspiring terrorists in every batch of one hundred. One percent. That was all Zakir needed, and he was able to easily obtain his goal.
At first he was a clean-shaven UN High Commissioner for Refugees midlevel politico who processed paperwork. He could speak Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, English, and Russian. The UNHCR processing teams were glad to have him on board. Because of his fluency in English, he had been assigned the U.S. desk, something that he had wished for when he had applied but did not want to seem too eager about. In fact, when they asked him, he said he would prefer processing the Syrian refugees to Bulgaria because he had lived there for so many years. The project director had insisted he take control of the U.S. processing station even though the bureaucrats in America were moving the refugees at a snail’s pace.
Zakir accepted and enjoyed partnering with a French woman named Isabella. She was beautiful with long black hair, a soft voice, and slender hands that he watched as she talked and smiled. Joining Isabella and Zakir on the U.S. processing team was a young political appointee from the previous administration who believed that everyone deserved a chance at the American Dream. Rodney Leland was a light-skinned African American who eagerly wished to process as many Syrians into America as possible.
“Because that’s what my prez wants, you see?” Rodney would say. And every time he stamped “Approved” on an application, Rodney would say, “Cha-ching! Welcome to America!”
Isabella was dutiful and efficient in their Damascus office, and Zakir was able to report to ISIS leadership in Raqqa that if they did not get greedy, they would be able to infiltrate somewhere between fifty and one hundred terrorists into America.
Zakir’s cyber teams in Raqqa and Damascus created for the terror immigrants false paperwork that looked faded and crumpled, just abused enough to appear legitimate. Many of the Syrian refugees did not even require paper other than what they filled out at the processing stations. Rodney was very welcoming to all who sought asylum in the United States. To Zakir, it was almost as if Rodney and his president wanted terrorists in the country.
Based on the ease of immigration, Zakir focused on how his terror immigrants would commun
icate once in America. He established a Facebook page and Instagram account allowing him to communicate with his charges as they scattered to the winds across the lower forty-eight of the United States of America.
Over the past several months, they had rallied here in this abandoned religious camp near an old gold mine. Purchasing AR-15s around the country was not an issue. Once placed in a sanctuary city, the terrorists secured driver’s licenses and then soon thereafter purchased assault rifles. He had also pilfered two National Guard ammunition depots of some ammunition, to include two Stinger missiles.
His men had just demonstrated that one of the missiles actually worked. With the automobile Trojan being so effective, Zakir wasted no time in preparing for the next phase of the operation. Working closely with Malavdi’s uncle Gavril, who was now in Charlotte commanding and controlling the cyberattack phase of the operation, Zakir and Gavril had been able to easily hack the state Division of Motor Vehicles mainframe, one of the most unsecure computer networks they had ever seen. From there, they planted the remote access Trojan, or RAT, to be downloaded by every service center that conducted state inspections. While they had been able to infect the auto manufacturers as well, because of their encampment in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains, they chose to attack every vehicle being inspected in a single year. Because more than seven million trucks and cars are inspected every year, each time a service station plugged in the inspection cable to the car, the RAT would leap into the car’s computer, provided it was built within the last ten years. By Zakir’s assessment, that portion of the operation had been a success so far, based upon reports he was listening to on the news.
Now he thought about General Savage.
Yes, General Savage. The one who had killed Malavdi, his best friend, who was engaged to be married to Fatima Assad. Savage was the one who had ordered the strike on the convoy of Operation Groomsman. Zakir had Gavril hack into the private server of a senior cabinet official who had reviewed the documents at her convenience on an unclassified system. From there, he downloaded all of the investigation documents on Operation Groomsman. Zakir had pored over the documents and learned that all of the intelligence had indicated that the convoy was just a simple wedding party, but then the voice of al-Baghdadi had appeared almost as if out of nowhere. They tracked the cell phone in the third vehicle of six SUVs. Center mass.