by A. J Tata
She hoped it was blood.
Ameri saw the drone stabilize and lock on Mahegan and Cassie with a missile. She felt Alex coming back to scream, “No!” but body checked that thought and fired again. Ameri was in charge now. She would get revenge for Fatima.
Then the missile launched, Cassie fell, and Mahegan flipped off the back side of the ridge.
* * *
Zakir stood in his base camp and watched the trucks line up. They were on schedule and making their final move.
He had less than fifty percent of his fighting force still viable, but that was enough to get the Mack truck to its target by noon today. He had about nine hours to get there and execute the mission. They had rehearsed every detail, and he expected success.
He walked into the small building on the opposite side of the mountain from the mine shaft and stared at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his wife. They were completely broken. At some point in the night one of his men had chained the chairman to the iron bars in his cell and whipped him with a set of tire chains until the chairman’s back was oozing blood.
Mrs. Bagwell was weeping.
“Is he alive?” he asked her. The general was motionless on the dirty floor of the cabin he had converted into a cell. Mrs. Bagwell stared at him, eyes fixed, mouth open, unable to speak.
“I’m alive, you bastard.”
“Everything comes full circle, doesn’t it, General? You defraud Syrians departing the chaos there. You get caught with millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account. You use your daughter to pass along bad information to General Savage and his men. And instead of paying us to protect this information, you kill my two best friends? And you thought you were killing us, too. That’s why you had Jake Mahegan inspect the wreckage. We would be dead, except for a faulty transmission on our Suburban. American technology. Not the best, right?”
“Bart, what is he saying?”
“Be quiet!” Zakir said to Bagwell’s wife.
Turning back to General Bagwell, he said, “And now you have your wife and daughter in jeopardy.”
“What does Cassie have to do with this?” General Bagwell asked. His eyes darted nervously. His mouth contorted. Gray stubble peppered his face. Spittle had dried on the corners of his mouth, like a clown’s permanent frown. The general was up on his knees now and holding the bars with his hands reaching out from manacled wrists.
“Everything,” Zakir replied. He took a few strides and grasped two of the bars of the general’s cell just above the general’s head. Staring at the man’s tortured back was difficult even for a hard man such as Zakir.
“You used your daughter, General, in a way that no man, much less a father, should have used anyone. You gave her the contact with Mr. Dupree. Eager to please her father and to make her mark, she met with Dupree, who told her to bomb the wedding party, only he didn’t mention that it was a wedding party. He said the wedding was a ruse for safely moving al-Baghdadi. She even provided JSOC the name for the operation. And you wanted them killed simply because we were blackmailing you? And you wanted it to appear as a mistaken act of war, collateral damage? Without your Cassie to manipulate, there would have been no Operation Groomsman.”
“How do you know that?” the general growled.
“What do you care? You publicly humiliate her for attending a man’s school. Where I come from, both men and women can be tough. What is your problem with strong women? I, for one, love strong women. Your Cassie is a strong woman, General. She has shown great fortitude in the face of her mistake. She is reconciling.”
“How do you know about . . . about all of this?”
“I make it a point to know everything about what I am doing. I know, for example, that you and Yves Dupree met routinely when you were the commander in Iraq and Syria. He was French DGSE, you know? I also know that you had a joint business venture with Mr. Dupree.”
“Where are you getting your information?” Bagwell shouted.
“France is known for its wines, no? Germany for its cars? America for its . . . football? What is Bulgaria known for?”
“Dogshit,” Bagwell said.
“Good one, General. We are known for our hacking capabilities. I am inside your Pentagon. I am inside your automobile manufacturers. I am inside your life. Your bank accounts. I know what you watch on Netflix. Orange Is the New Black? Really?”
He stepped away from the cell and continued.
“I know that you and Yves Dupree lost millions of dollars when we stole it from you. Good for us that Mr. Dupree has mixed loyalties, mostly to himself.”
“Yves Dupree is a lying sack of shit,” Bagwell said.
“That may be, General. You can trick a Frenchman, perhaps, but not me. I did Carbanak, General. The greatest bank heist of all time, online or actual. So I have the money you stole from the Syrians trying to leave their country. And we’re giving some of it to Dupree for helping us out a bit, but I doubt he’ll live long enough to enjoy it. And thanks for getting him that job at United Bank of America. We told him to ask you for it.”
“Bart, what is he saying?”
Zakir turned to Mrs. Bagwell and said, “If the general doesn’t appreciate the fact that Cassie is an Army Ranger, then how on earth can you even speak to him that way?”
Zakir then lifted his pistol and shot Mrs. Bagwell in the forehead. Her head kicked back, and blood painted a dotted line up the light green wall.
“No!” Bagwell shouted. He was rattling the cage and forcefully shouting from his diaphragm. “You son of a bitch!”
Zakir bent down and whispered, “Come here, General.”
Bagwell leaned forward. Zakir placed the pistol against the general’s temple. “This is for Cassie,” he said. “And, yes, Fatima and Malavdi, also. Yes, it’s mostly for them, you son of a bitch.”
He pulled the trigger. The bullet bore through the general’s brain and tumbled out the other side onto the wall. Bagwell hung by his shackled wrists, slumped over, his face a tortured mask, frozen in death.
Zakir had pieced it all together. Hacking their way through the Operation Groomsman report and then tracing the deposits to the Swiss bank account, Gavril and Zakir had learned of the “cash for green card” scheme that Dupree had established.
The rest was easy. With Zakir’s job as a UNHCR refugee placement assistant, he and Gavril developed their plan after they watched the Americans bomb and destroy the wedding party.
While Zakir planned on making Bagwell’s transgressions public eventually, he enjoyed solving the puzzle and watching the reaction of the general.
Busted.
Why kidnap and kill one general when you could kidnap and kill many in order to mask your true purpose, Zakir had figured. The same was true for the Trojan in the cars. Why stop just one Mack truck and four Suburban SUVs when you could stop millions?
He removed the handcuffs from the general and his wife. Placing the pistol in the general’s hand, Zakir aimed it at Bagwell’s wife in the adjacent cell and used the general’s index finger to pull the trigger, ensuring gunpowder residue would appear on his sleeve. Murder–suicide.
He dropped a copy of the general’s secret bank account statement next to the dead officer. It had a balance of nearly $17 million at one point in time. Then he slid the West Point ring from the general’s ring finger and slipped it onto his middle finger, where it fit snugly. He admired the black onyx stone and twenty-four karat gold rubbed soft from years of constant wear.
Zakir thumbed the ring as he walked outside and saw that his convoy of Mitsubishi trucks and the lone Mack truck were idling with their parking lights on. The drivers all wore night vision goggles. He strode confidently to the Mack truck and stepped up to the driver’s compartment, asking Ratta, “Have we secured our new passenger?”
“Yes. The team recovered Captain Bagwell. The drone kept eyes on her until the team could recover her. She is still alive. Injured, but still with us. I have her in the truck,” Ratta said. He motioned to the
cab with his chin.
“Good. And the weapon?”
“Yes. I have set a timer for noon today, nearly eight hours from now.”
“And, finally, I see we all have the proper uniforms,” Zakir said.
“Of course, Zakir. I issued U.S. Army combat fatigues to everyone.”
“We must move now if we are to make our deadline.”
Zakir walked around the front of the Mack truck, climbed into the passenger seat, and radioed his man in the lead Mitsubishi.
“Forward,” he said.
There was no reply, but the convoy began moving with three trucks in the front and three behind. Their convoy looked similar to the one they had attacked, with an extra truck in the front and the back.
They snaked along the Bible camp road up the valley to the gravel road where the fire tower was located. They hooked a right onto that road and passed where he had found two of his men dead earlier yesterday. They turned onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and headed east, toward Asheville.
CHAPTER 32
“DAMNIT, THAT’S HIM!” SPECIAL AGENT OXENDINE SHOUTED INTO the headset.
Setz was hovering the Blackhawk over a high mountain ridge near where they had taken fire from a surface-to-air missile earlier in the day. They had returned to pick up McQueary and his SWAT team that had a brief firefight with three men, none fitting the description of Mahegan. After the initial exchange of gunfire, they made no further contact with the three-man patrol and subsequently moved to a pickup zone, where they boarded the helicopter.
Once in the helicopter, McQueary reported gunfire on the ridge, and Oxendine convinced Setz to brave a return at night. Through his night vision goggles, Oxendine could see the outstretched form of Jake Mahegan lying motionless on the eastern slope of a rocky mountaintop ridge.
“I can’t land up there. Too windy and too narrow. We’ll have to send down a penetrator.”
“Get it ready,” Oxendine said to Setz. The crew chiefs were listening and opened the port door, shoved the cable wench perpendicular to the aircraft, and spooled out some cable with a small T-seat at the end. The crew chief sat on the seat, hugging the cable, while his crewmate began to lower the cable into the rotor wash and the wind.
Oxendine unfastened his seat belt and shouted above the din of the turbine engines, “Stop!”
The crewman in the seat stared at Oxendine, who dangerously pulled at him and brought him back into the aircraft, pivoting the arm of the wench.
“I’m the one going down. This is my guy!” Oxendine shouted.
“You’re crazy,” McQueary shouted back at him. Oxendine was creating chaos in the back of the Blackhawk.
“I don’t care who goes down there, but I’ll remind you that we had a surface-to-air missile earlier in the day and two reported firefights. So somebody get down there,” Setz said.
Oxendine used his large frame to muscle the crewman off the T-seat and straddled it himself, used his foot to push off the floor and rotate the winch perpendicular to the helicopter. He pumped his right fist while holding on with his left hand and shouted, “Send me down!”
The cable lowered Oxendine to within twenty feet of Mahegan’s motionless body. Immediately Oxendine had his pistol up and aimed at the former soldier. He stumbled as he walked across the windswept ridge, the breeze stiffening as the morning wore on. Perhaps a front was coming through. He could smell diesel and cordite wafting upward from the valley below.
He reached Mahegan and placed his knee in the man’s back. Mahegan’s body was warm as he removed the Sig Sauer Tribal from the belt clip on his holster and pocketed the weapon. An AR-15 was on the rock outcropping about twenty feet away—probably Mahegan’s weapon and not a threat to him. He placed his hand against Mahegan’s neck, feeling for a pulse, and whispered in Mahegan’s ear, “If you’re not dead now, you will be before you get up in the helicopter, traitor. I am Lumbee and will not have you embarrass our people. Better to die a hero than grow old? No, better that you die right now before we are all embarrassed by you.”
Oxendine felt no pulse, but he was not an expert at such things. As such, he loosened his knee against Mahegan’s back, removed his knife from its sheath on his own belt, and cuffed the handle and blade along his forearm.
He slid the blade toward Mahegan’s upper abdomen and felt with his free hand for the gap between the ribs, but all he felt was ropey muscles.
Finding what he thought was an opening, he slowly slid the knife into Mahegan.
* * *
Mahegan felt the knee press into his back, but he was actually wondering about the sound of a diesel engine in the valley below directly prior to the helicopter hovering above him.
But now he knew this was the SBI agent who had been chasing him for the past day and a half. He was aware of the man’s knee on his back. He heard the man whisper to him a Native American saying that had always been his creed: Better to die a hero than grow old.
Mahegan guessed that Oxendine believed that he had killed the Sledge family. He didn’t know what the man knew or believed beyond that. Perhaps that he was involved in the terrorist base camp in the valley below?
Waiting for the right moment when the agent would be focused on his own task and not Mahegan’s status, he delayed until he felt the sharp edge of the man’s knife press against his abdomen. With a quick movement, Mahegan used his left leg and hip to rotate the agent in the direction he was already leaning. Then Mahegan used his left arm—hurting from holding on to Cassie—to jab his elbow into the agent’s left rib cage. Those two motions reversed their positions quickly. Mahegan used an old wrestling move to slide on top of the agent and clasp his knife hand. He beat the hand against the rocks until the man’s knife came loose and skittered away.
The helicopter was yawing above him, but he didn’t care. Mahegan removed his Tribal pistol from the man’s belt and then used the agent’s handcuffs to lock his arms behind him.
He stood and aimed the pistol at the agent and then the helicopter, then back at the agent. He made a circling sign with his hand intent to indicate that he was going up in the helicopter. As the hoist was being lowered, Mahegan walked to the cliff where Cassie had fallen. It was a straight drop with a few trees poking out along the way. It was unlikely anyone could have survived that fall.
Mahegan pulled the large agent onto his shoulders like a sack of flour and sat on the wobbly T-seat. The cable began to pull them up as he listed beneath the Blackhawk. There was no wooden block or protective ceramic plate on the edge of the helicopter to shield the cable from the sharp edges of the helicopter chassis. As the cable swung, it banged against the metallic edge of the cargo floor. He watched as a cable strand frayed, and then another.
They were at about fifty feet above the rock ledge, and any fall would be fatal. As they approached the cargo door opening, the cable swung outward and then inward. He used the momentum to dump the agent’s body onto the cargo floor of the aircraft. The cable swung out again as the pilot attempted to maneuver the helicopter against the buffeting winds.
Another cable strand snapped, and now there were fewer strands of the twisted cable holding him in the air than those that were severed and frayed. As the cable swung back toward the helicopter, his weight was too much for the remaining wires, and the cable snapped. Mahegan leapt from the falling T-seat and grasped the bottom of the floor of the helicopter, hanging in the air. He strained to pull up, but his left shoulder wouldn’t function properly. It was separated from attempting to save Cassie.
Mahegan held on, looking up at the confused men who were tending to the cuffed agent and looking at him. One man reached over and grasped his wrist while another clasped his opposing forearm. The pilot tilted the aircraft to the left to try to make it easier, but it just made things harder. Mahegan looked up and then down and saw he was now hundreds of feet above ground level.
He also saw Alex Russell aiming her pistol at the helicopter. Perhaps the pilot was conducting evasive maneuvers.
The SWAT team members managed to get his torso into the helicopter, and from there Mahegan kicked a leg up and rolled into the cargo space between the seats.
Immediately he had four AR-15 rifles in his face with men shouting at him. Mahegan looked up and saw a still-cuffed agent standing in the back of the helicopter, balancing himself as he raised his boot and kicked Mahegan in the head. For the second time in the last hour, Mahegan lost consciousness.
* * *
“Get these cuffs off of me now!” Oxendine yelled as the SWAT team members helped retrieve the hoist arm by turning it from perpendicular to inside the helicopter.
McQueary placed the headset on the cuffed Oxendine and said, “I’ll remove these cuffs on one condition and that’s that I’m in charge now, Agent.”
“Sure thing, buddy,” Oxendine said. McQueary removed the cuffs and sat Oxendine down.
“That kick was total bullshit. He saved you. That man could have killed you, and don’t think I didn’t see what you were doing down there. I’m beginning to wonder what you’ve got to hide. Why you want him dead so badly,” McQueary said.
“He’s bad seed,” Oxendine muttered.
“Where to, Q?” Setz asked McQueary.
“Any sign of Captain Bagwell? Let’s scan the ridge for her,” McQueary said. “This guy’s hurt bad, but let’s give a quick look. We’ve been asked to look for Bagwell, so let’s make a run along this ridge. If he kidnapped her, maybe she escaped.”
“I’ve got movement to my eleven o’clock. One hundred yards. Female,” Setz said.
“That’s got to be her,” Oxendine said. “Let’s go!” He had replaced his headset, and regardless of what McQueary said or Mahegan had done, Oxendine was still in charge.
As the helicopter began to slowly pitch forward, Setz shouted, “Holy shit, she’s shooting at me!”
Oxendine looked into the cockpit and saw the Plexiglas windscreen shattered so that navigating would be nearly impossible. The helicopter pitched to the right and began careening past the ridge. Was Setz hit? The copilot had been quiet the entire time, and as Oxendine studied the bullet patterns in the windscreen, it appeared she might have been struck.