by A. J Tata
Those three soldiers had either made the decision to bomb the convoy or execute its survivors. Russell would be difficult for him because of the power she held over him, but he could do it nonetheless. He was angry, standing in the middle of the gravel parking lot in front of the headquarters, surrounded by the circle of cabins about fifty yards away in each direction.
He looked to the southeast, toward the mine shaft where he had secured some of his captives. He would begin his mission tonight by killing Savage. Yes, kill Savage.
But first he summoned two of his best men.
Takir and Nadr, both from Syria, both motivated, both six feet tall with ripped muscles, stood before him, dirty and bloody from the advance on the tower.
“Go find Jake Mahegan. There will be a helicopter hovering near his position in the vicinity of this address,” he said. He handed Takir a piece of paper with Alex Russell’s townhome address on it. “Don’t kill the woman, but Mahegan is fair game. Would prefer him alive, but”—Zakir waved his hand at the dead bodies lying on the ground with olive drab wool blankets pulled over their faces—“he did this to us.”
The two men nodded in understanding. Zakir watched as they grabbed their rifles and rucksacks and loaded a new Mitsubishi pickup truck.
After watching them bounce out of the valley toward the Blue Ridge Parkway, Zakir looked at the mine shaft again and whispered, “Savage.”
CHAPTER 19
SPECIAL AGENT TOMMY OXENDINE SAID, “THEY’VE GOT TO BE DOWN here somewhere.”
“Roger. I agree,” McQueary said. “Is the sheriff getting anything out of that Army major?”
“Says she’s just talking in circles. One minute she’s at the door, the next minute Mahegan has a knife to Bagwell’s throat and he’s out the door. She said she took aim, but she couldn’t get a clean shot. I think I saw that, so I half believe her, but I ain’t trusting many people right now.”
“Get me on top of them again and we’ve got him and we’ll save her,” McQueary said. “This is big time.”
“Still trying to sort out what was happening in the mountains. Damn Stinger missile isn’t small potatoes. The National Guard Armory in Ashe County said they’re missing two. Means they’ve got one more.”
“Also means that somebody’s getting fired,” McQueary said.
Setz was making lazy circles in the sky. Oxendine knew that they were probably getting close on gas, but he wanted to get the SWAT team on the ground smoking out Mahegan.
“I’m thinking those caves at the north part of the French Broad where it bends,” Oxendine said, looking at a map.
“Got about fifteen minutes of fuel, Agent Oxendine. Just a heads-up,” Setz said.
“Roger.” Oxendine looked out of the starboard window. The afternoon sun was heading toward the mountains. Plenty of daylight left. The river and the trees that gathered on either side were the dominant terrain features. The map sat in his lap, seemingly taunting him to find Mahegan.
“You got anything near those caves? Thermal? Infrared?”
“Nothing so far—wait, I’ve got movement. Two bogeys, one carrying a long rifle walking down the ridge.”
“That’s them. Where can we drop ropes? Land?” Oxendine asked.
“I’m twenty yards above the trees and I’m one hundred eighty feet AGL,” Setz said.
Oxendine calculated the math and asked McQueary, “How long is your fast-rope?”
“Can’t go more than eighty feet on that thing. We’ve got two rappelling ropes that are your standard one-hundred-twenty-foot nylon ropes. Dangerous without a belay down below, but we can do it.”
“Danger is your middle name,” Oxendine said. “Rig the rappel ropes. We’ll drop you in the river.”
“Bitch is cold and night will be colder. Be better to get me and my men on hardpan,” McQueary said.
“I’ve got a spot,” Setz said. “About a half mile from the caves.”
“That’s good enough,” Oxendine said.
“Roger that.” McQueary nodded.
McQueary and his men had premade tactical Swiss seats that they retrieved from their rucksacks and stepped into in the back of the yawing aircraft. The SWAT team members pulled on their leather work gloves to prevent burning their hands against the L4 Nylon Type 4 rope. The two crew chiefs manning the M240B machine guns on both doors waded into the mass of men prepping for combat in the back of the aircraft, opened the sliding doors, and rigged the ropes by securing them into the half-inch steel cable secured to the anchor points in the floor of the aircraft by twelve-inch steel U-bolts and seven parachute static line snap hooks.
The crewmen secured the ropes inside the aircraft by tying proper bowline knots, and when the first two men were prepared to rappel, the crew chiefs snapped them into the line and then dropped the ropes into the small clearing that Setz had found. Oxendine watched as the two crewmen inspected each man and then looked at each other, gave a thumbs-up, and pointed at the two men, simultaneously saying, “Go!”
The first two men, one of whom was McQueary, were out the door and sliding quickly down the ropes dangling from either side of the helicopter. Oxendine had a bird’s-eye view and secretly wished he were going with them, but he needed the communications capability in the helicopter.
The ropes went from taut to loose as they bounced against the side of the aircraft. The crewmen hooked up the next two men, who leaned out butt first into the wind and began their rappels on the crewmen’s word. The final two men were out a minute later. Six men on the ground, moving toward the caves.
Oxendine had Setz methodically patrol the sloping woods from Alex Russell’s backyard to the French Broad River. He had worked the terrain using thermal and infrared imaging, but other than some deer and bear, they saw nothing, convincing him that Mahegan had taken Cassie Bagwell into the caves that were the infamous make-out spots for Asheville High School kids and the occasional satanic cat sacrifice.
“Blackhawk One, this is Mike One,” McQueary said over the radio.
“Roger, send it, Q” Oxendine replied into his headset. Setz had opened a UHF channel for Oxendine and McQueary to communicate from air to ground.
“Team assembled, moving to objective,” McQueary said.
“Roger that. Happy hunting,” Oxendine replied. “You’ve got about three hours of daylight left.”
CHAPTER 20
MAHEGAN LOOKED AT CASSIE’S RUCKSACK AND SAID, “WHAT ARE you hiding in there?”
“I’ll show you,” she said. “But first I want to know what you saw from the tower.”
Mahegan nodded. The cave was dark and moist. He heard the sound of water dripping deep in the recesses, a ping that echoed like sonar. He knew bats were probably directly above him in their inverted slumber, dreaming about nighttime air raids under some streetlight. He looked toward the mouth of the cave, some fifty yards away, then at Cassie’s face, which he could barely see.
“Fair enough. Your parents might be in that stronghold. My friends might be in there. You have a flashlight?”
“Roger,” Cassie said.
He withdrew his knife and started scratching in the dirt where Cassie shone her light.
“Here’s the tower,” he said, making an X. “Here’s where you were. The trees were mostly blocking your line of sight into the compound.” He scratched another X into the dirt. “And here’s the compound. It’s about a mile down the valley. It’s a circular grouping of cabins, maybe an old summer camp, maybe something else. It looked pretty run-down and shuttered. Obviously it was vacant. Now it’s got at least twenty foreign fighters in there. Judging by the two killed on the road by Alex, they’re Arabic—Iraqi, Syrian, or somewhere else in the Levant.”
Cassie nodded.
“I was slightly delayed in shooting because I was studying what looked like an old miner’s cave over here,” Mahegan said. He poked the knife at a spot indicating the southeast corner of the valley. “Can’t be sure, but it looked like one. Small trail, dark opening distincti
ve from the face of the cliff. There’s one road in and two roads out of the valley. All three have barricades and guards. Nothing’s getting past that very canalized terrain. There’s a swift creek that runs through it, but I lost sight of it and focused on the mine shaft again. Even from above, the canyon is framed by three sharp cliffs—the one we were on to the northwest, another to the east, and another to the southwest. The cliff faces were sheer rock, straight drop longer than one-hundred-twenty-foot climbing ropes. Regardless, we’d be spotted climbing or rappelling down. If we do a brute force attack against a gate, they’ll have time to reposition on the interior from this central area.” He pointed at the circular row of cabins he had drawn.
“So it’s impenetrable?”
“Nothing’s impenetrable,” Mahegan said. “But this is tough. We drew them out and gathered some intel. It was a good probing attack.”
“Roger. I have an idea.”
“What’s that?” Mahegan asked.
“You wanted to know what was in my rucksack.” Kneeling in the cave, she opened the pack and retrieved two nylon containers that looked like they might hold sleeping bags.
“Sleeping bags?”
“No. Not sleeping bags,” she said, holding up the black bags a bit larger than a football. “I’m a skydiver, and this is the latest rage.”
“I’ve seen them. It might work. Why two?”
“My boyfriend does it with me,” Cassie said.
Mahegan said nothing.
“But he decided to dump me a week ago. Said I was deployed too much,” Cassie said. “Never had time to change out the pack. Kept it stored in my Subaru, which is probably in the police pound by now.”
“Looks like we got all the good stuff out of it anyway,” Mahegan said. “Except maybe those muddy size twelve hiking boots.” Mahegan had noticed in the pile of stuff stacked high in Cassie’s Subaru a few things that were not congruent with a lone female driver. The shotgun seemed odd to him, but he could give her that. It was the pair of boots that seemed oddly out of place.
“Yeah, he left those at my place, too,” Cassie said. She averted her eyes, looking down and to the right, as if she were embarrassed about something. Mahegan considered that she might have been hiding something. He remembered Alex mentioning that the Mecklenburg County sheriff and Charlotte Police Department had clear tracks of size 12 hiking boots in the Sledge home. Vicki, Charles, and their son, Danny, were slaughtered in cold blood by someone using a pistol he purchased. Mahegan wore size twelve boots. Would Cassie Bagwell have any reason to frame Jake Mahegan for murder? He knew that she had a public dispute with her father about her attendance at Ranger school, but what could that have to with him? The Operation Groomsman debacle had tarnished General Bagwell and everyone else in the chain of command. Was that enough for Cassie to frame him? He didn’t think so, particularly given the hate–hate relationship she at least projected that she had with her father.
“So, knowing this, what are your thoughts?” Cassie asked.
Mahegan caught her eyes down low and with his, brought them back up so that they were looking at each other again.
“My thoughts are that we can try your nylon bags out,” Mahegan said.
“You sure you’re up for that?” Cassie said. “Can we make it?”
Mahegan eyed her. Nodded. “Your call on that. I could use the help. Getting there on these”—he pointed at the nylon bags—“will be the easy part. Getting out is the hard part. Not that getting there will be easy at all. Risky as hell.”
“There’s a chance that at night we could get in and out without anyone knowing,” Cassie said.
“There’s a chance, but it’s improbable. I deal in probabilities. I like math. Perhaps there’s a one percent chance that we hit it and quit it. There’s a greater chance one of us crashes and burns on landing and there’s one of us left to see what’s in the cave, rescue anyone in there, fight his or her way out with two to five immobile captives, and live to tell about it.”
Cassie stared at him. “Yeah. That’s a greater probability. I’ll give you that.”
“But the plan can work. Like anything, the key is that both of us make safe entry with all of our equipment.”
“What about Alex?” Cassie asked.
“What about her?”
“She’ll probably want in,” Cassie said.
“There’s no role for her,” Mahegan said.
“How can you say that? It’s just the two of us,” Cassie replied.
Mahegan looked up and turned his head when he heard a noise from deep inside the cave. Figuring it wasn’t a threat, he continued.
“Two is one more than I normally operate with, Cassie. But with the possibility of carrying or escorting anywhere from two to five hostages, I need you. I’m hoping they’ll be ambulatory, but hope is not a method. So we have to plan on their not being able to walk, which means we need a vehicle. Yours is burned. As much as I’d like to have the things you’ve got stashed in your car, we can’t get to it.”
“But maybe we can. I’ve got ‘Find My Car’ on my iPhone. Locate it and disable the shark fin and we can go.”
Mahegan had considered this. Wanting it to be her idea if they chose to use her car, he soft-pedaled the concept.
“Your car is known to the police,” he said. “They’re all over that parking lot. And that’s if it’s not impounded. No way.”
“Anything moving will be subject to being stopped. You saw the carnage out there. We could get Alex to get it.”
“Alex could be a problem,” Mahegan reiterated.
“How so?”
“Too much detail to get into right now. Let’s just assume we are going without her help and maybe she could be a hindrance to us,” he said, understating the complications.
“So we wait until nightfall and grab my car and then move to one of the three rims?”
“Something like that,” Mahegan said. “Or more likely, we walk.”
Just then he heard the distinctive pull of a pin from a grenade, the high-pitched ping the spoon makes when it releases from the grenade body. The sound was from the mouth of the cave. He heard the whooshing of the grenade through the air and its impact on the dirt near them.
Most grenades had a five-second cook-off time. From the release of the spoon to hearing the grenade land had been two seconds, perhaps three. In that time, Mahegan had grabbed Cassie by the upper arm with one hand and her rucksack with the other hand as they scrambled deeper into the cave. He found a slight bulge in the wall of the cave, enough to protect from the blast. He pressed his back against the jagged rock while holding Cassie behind him with his left arm. He tossed the rucksack on the ground behind Cassie, figuring the contents were precious to the future missions.
The explosion came milliseconds after they had found semi-protected cover. The deafening roar and bright fireball pushed heat and smoke past them. Mahegan smelled the cordite instantly as the shrapnel peppered the wall, sounding like heavy hail on a sidewalk. Automatic three-round bursts raked the ground in a sweeping motion.
The attackers were advancing.
Mahegan lifted the rucksack and nudged Cassie in front of him, whispering, “Go deeper into the cave.”
Given Mahegan’s status on the black list for the North Carolina SBI, he didn’t know if his attackers were the legitimate SWAT team that had rappelled out of the helicopter or if they were the commandos hidden in the Bible camp in the mountains. Mahegan did not like the thought of shooting a North Carolina SWAT team.
The farther they retreated, the more Mahegan gained hope for some kind of escape without having to use force against possible U.S. law enforcement. In the sweeping arc of lights from the attackers’ rifles, Mahegan noticed the smoke moving swiftly to the rear.
“There’s an exit somewhere back here,” he said to Cassie.
“I’m a rock climber,” she said. Mahegan wondered if she had any other gear in the heavy rucksack.
As they rounded a corner, a shaft of g
ray light cut down from the top-left corner. There was a slight incline, but not much. It would be a tough climb, and Mahegan was no rock climber. He was strong and powerful but not nimble and lithe like Cassie. She assessed the shaft and grabbed her ruck, slinging it over her shoulders. Cassie began climbing the rock face as if it were a beginner’s climbing wall. She was forty feet up and had her hands on the lip of the four-foot opening. She sat down, legs dangling in the hole, opened her ruck, and fed rope down to Mahegan.
Mahegan grabbed the rope as the searchlights became more powerful. The attackers were less than fifty yards away. He would be spotlighted by the searchlights as well as the light coming from the cave opening.
He grabbed the rope and looked up, unable to find Cassie. She had probably backed away and found something against which to anchor the rope. He had hoped for some covering fire but understood she was trying to get him out of there.
Looking over his shoulder, he noticed a ledge about twenty feet to his left, back in the direction of the attackers. Forgetting the rope for the moment, he jumped up to the fifteen-foot-high ledge, grasped with both hands, and did a pull-up, swinging his leg up at the same time. Hooking his right heel on the slippery rock outcropping, he levered his body onto the ledge and laid silent, breathing hard through his nostrils, filtering the dank air.
Immediately, two men ran around the corner toward the rope and the opening. They began speaking as they pointed at the rope, the diversion Mahegan was hoping for.
They spoke in Arabic.
These were not friendlies.
Mahegan leapt from the ledge and spread his considerable wingspan to collar both men simultaneously. He landed with his heavy mass on their backs and had each of them in a choke hold as he released one man, keeping one knee in the back of each, and snapping the neck of the man on his right. In a swift move, he retrieved his knife from his ankle sheath and drove it into the neck of the man on his left.