Direct Fire

by A. J Tata

But Oxendine continued to struggle and said, “You’re going down.”

  Mahegan then quickly slid his left arm around Oxendine’s waist as he removed his left leg and the arm bar, latching his hands together as he deadlifted Oxendine’s body onto his stomach. He was vaguely aware that a small crowd had formed, including the doctor, who must have been wondering what the hell she had been brought into. Oxendine flailed his arms, reached for his knife, realized Mahegan had already tossed that on the ground, and tried back-kicking Mahegan with his legs.

  But Mahegan walked step-by-step about ten yards up to the wall of the metal hangar and then flipped out of the way, released Oxendine, watched the man thud into the ground, and then put his knee firmly in Oxendine’s back as the man struggled to get up.

  They were parallel to the hangar, and Mahegan slowly repositioned Oxendine so that his face was pressed up against the corrugated metal. He grabbed Oxendine’s hair, lifted the man’s head against the forceful pull of his neck in the opposite direction, and thought, Why is he making it easy on me?

  “That’s enough, Mahegan!”

  Mahegan didn’t know who was talking, and he really didn’t care. This mustang needed to be broken.

  He let go of Oxendine’s head, which slammed into the metal wall with a loud thud. While the agent was stunned from that moderate blow to his hard head, Mahegan squatted to one side, placed one hand in the man’s tactical belt and the other at the top of his tactical vest, lifted him in a straight deadlift, gauging him to be about two hundred twenty pounds, swung him back from the metal hangar, took a step back, and then lunged forward leading with Oxendine’s head, which banged loudly against the metal.

  It didn’t go through, but he did feel Oxendine go limp in his hands. He dropped the agent on the ground and turned to find five SWAT team members with their rifles aimed at him.

  “What? You’ve spent two days with that prick. You can’t tell me none of you guys wanted to do that,” Mahegan said.

  A few of the men smirked. He sized up the team and chose the man with the name tag. “McQueary.”

  “Officer McQueary. I suggest we go sit in a room where we can pull up a map and have a conversation. I heard a Mack truck or other kind of rig firing up in the valley when the helicopter came down on me. I saw a large weapon crate in the mine shaft. The crate was wooden. Like all ammunition crates, but maybe fifteen feet long and five feet wide. Like a missile or a bomb. This was when we were pulling out General Savage and two of my former Delta teammates.”

  “Shit. We had a firefight with those guys,” McQueary said.

  “No, you didn’t. They warned you away. None of you would be alive if they wanted to kill you,” Mahegan said.

  McQueary nodded in apparent agreement.

  “Let’s sit down in there while the doctor stitches my leg again,” Mahegan said.

  The four SWAT team members, initially confused, followed their boss’s lead into the brick terminal. A man dressed in a light blue UNC–Chapel Hill Tar Heels jersey and overalls smiled and gave Mahegan a thumbs-up.

  “I’ll be selling those tickets,” the man said. “Be nice to have a genuine asshole on display.”

  Mahegan nodded. “I’m glad to help.”

  “Just get me out of here in time for the Heels game, y’hear?”

  Mahegan kept walking and nodded. He guessed it was a Saturday college game.

  They huddled in the office that Oxendine had used earlier. His iPad was still there on the desk, connected to something. The FaceTime display presented itself, and Mahegan pressed the green ANSWER button.

  “Who’s that?” Mahegan asked, lifting the device.

  A young woman’s face came on the screen and said, “Better question. Who are you and where’s Agent Oxendine?”

  “I’m Jake Mahegan here with Officer McQueary of the Charlotte–Mecklenburg SWAT team. Agent Oxendine is resting,” Mahegan said.

  “But . . . you’re the guy we’ve been trying to catch,” she said. The woman was midforties, hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, thin lips, no makeup, tired eyes but alert. Her face was the size of the screen.

  “They caught me. What’s your name?”

  “Can you let me see Officer McQueary?”

  Mahegan handed the device to McQueary, who said, “Hi, Lucy, it’s me. Everything is cool.”

  Mahegan listened for code words. “Cool” could have been an alarm, he wasn’t sure. McQueary handed the iPad back to Mahegan and said, “Go ahead. You’ve seen more than we have.”

  “Hi, Lucy. What’s your job?”

  “I’m the officer on duty in Raleigh at the Joint Operations Center in the National Guard building. We’ve got the governor and secretary of public safety coming in at ten a.m. for an update. Basically, I’m in charge until they get here.”

  “This thing might be over by then,” Mahegan said. The clock on the wall read ten minutes after nine. Realistically, whatever was supposed to happen would occur in the next twenty-four hours. The Syrians knew that they couldn’t sustain this thing much beyond that.

  “Well, then we better get to it,” Cartwright said.

  “Okay, first of all, I didn’t kill the Sledge family, but right now think about the concept of ‘Among many, one.’ It’s an old Native American proverb about creating multiple events to disguise the one event you wanted to have happen. Someone killed the Sledge family. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is kidnapped. A family on Fort Bragg is slaughtered. A general is assassinated in Iraq. A general is arrested in Tampa.

  “Which of those things did they really want to happen? Of course whoever planned and executed all of those missions is thrilled they all achieved success. There were probably others that failed. But my guess is, because they used a pistol I gave Savage, they wanted to frame Savage and disable him. And if whoever did this knew that Savage hadn’t properly registered the gift, they wanted the police after me, too. Why, though? Someone perhaps knows that Savage has a means to disrupt attacks on the homeland and by kidnapping him and putting Oxendine on my ass for two days, that capability would be disrupted. To what end, you ask?”

  “As they say on Law and Order, ‘Asked and answered.’ Please continue,” Cartwright said.

  “I saw a large crate about fifteen feet long inside the mine shaft where we fought about thirty or so Syrian terrorists. Your local murder in Charlotte is connected to an international terrorist plot. Savage thinks it’s a nuke. My question for you is, have you gotten any reports of missing weapons?”

  “No missing weapons,” Cartwright said, looking away for a moment.

  Officer McQueary spoke up offscreen. “Lucy, we already know that a surface-to-air missile fired at the helicopter. I was on that. It had to be a Stinger missile. So checking our National Guard armories might be a good place to start.”

  “Roger that, Q. The general will be coming in with the rest of the brass,” Cartwright said.

  Mahegan stared at the screen, forgetting that Cartwright could see him. What was he missing? A lot, he was sure, but something was hanging right in front of his face. The cars that stopped suddenly. There was something there.

  “You still with us Mahegan?”

  “Among many, one,” he whispered.

  “Right, you asked me to think about that. All I got right now is . . . nothing,” Cartwright said.

  The crate Mahegan had seen was big enough for a JDAM missile or even a small, tactical nuclear device, but that seemed beyond comprehension. Why stop all the cars at once? Because it was a cool thing to do? To psyche the American people? A prank that cost lives in accidents? He didn’t see any of that.

  Among many, one.

  “Lucy, can you pull up on your computer the transit routes for ammunition? There’s the Military Ocean Terminal at Sunny Point in Brunswick County on the coast. I-40 starts there. Do you track shipments there?”

  “We do. Those shipments come in almost entirely on rail,” Cartwright said. Her voice was confident. This was something she knew.<
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  Mahegan continued to think about the options. He could hear the hissing of the tires on the interstate as the morning picked up. It was Saturday. People whose cars were operational were going to the mall or the big city of Charlotte.

  “What about Interstate 26?” Mahegan asked.

  “That’s classified. You’re not cleared,” Cartwright said quickly again.

  “Okay, that’s something,” Mahegan said. “I have clearance at the highest levels, but I can’t prove any of that to you right now. I’ll step out and you can tell Officer McQueary whatever travels on that road. But I would ask you to check your logs or whatever you’ve got that monitors weapons moving along our interstates and rail lines, specifically I-26. And specifically what was moving at nine yesterday morning and where it was supposed to be—”

  “Oh my God,” Cartwright said.

  “What?” Mahegan asked. He was about to hand the iPad to McQueary but stopped and looked at her. She was staring at something to the side, as if she had put her phone down and was now working at a computer station. Mahegan could see the side of her head and the white reflection of a computer monitor, but he couldn’t read any of the words. She looked back at her phone.

  “Put Officer McQueary on, please,” Cartwright said.

  Mahegan handed the iPad to McQueary but stayed where he was. Evidently Cartwright didn’t care, because she began speaking.

  “The Office of Secure Transportation put out an alert late last night that it lost signal on one of its armored tractors during Friday morning’s rush hour network attack.”

  “What’s the—” McQueary began.

  “It’s the guys who move nukes around,” Mahegan said. During his time as a special mission unit operator it was his business to track some sensitive weapon movements. He took the iPad back.

  “Where was the rig when they lost signal?”

  “On Interstate 40, just west of Asheville. Oh my God.”

  “Roger that. So we’re looking for a nondescript black cab and gray trailer. Somehow these guys overpowered it and among all the noise, the reports got lost and some bureaucrats didn’t want to admit that they couldn’t find their truck.”

  “This explains the firefight we heard about in that location. We were getting calls of road rage all day long. We were overwhelmed. Says here that a search team is leaving this morning from Washington, DC, to look for them.”

  “It’s a little late for that. The Syrians have been inside every computer network they want for the last three days. I’m sure they knew to disable the GPS on the truck. Can we call this Office of Secure Transporation and ask them if they can light it up somehow? I’ll get McQueary here and the Blackhawk, and we’ll chase it down,” Mahegan said.

  “Are you saying that they’re using it as a weapon?” Cartwright asked.

  “It is a weapon. And why steal it if you’re not going to use it?” To McQueary, Mahegan said, “Grab your guys and tell them we’re going to chase a Mack truck.”

  “What about Oxendine?” McQueary asked.

  “Is he awake? If so, I’ll knock his ass out again. He’s useless. Let’s go,” Mahegan said.

  “I’m awake,” Oxendine said. “And you’re under arrest.”

  Oxendine was holding his pistol up with an unsteady hand.

  “Agent Oxendine,” Cartwright said. “I’m the watch officer on duty. I have placed Officer McQueary in charge of this operation. You are to stand down. Anything you do from this point forward that countermands my orders will be considered insubordination.”

  Mahegan liked Cartwright.

  “Stand down, Agent,” Mahegan said. “You heard the officer.”

  Oxendine lowered his pistol slowly and looked at McQueary. “I’ll listen to you, but not to him.”

  McQueary nodded, looked at Mahegan and then at the iPad.

  “Any word?” McQueary asked Cartwright.

  “I’ve secure chatted with the watch officer for the OST, who says that they’ve been trying for a day and a half to turn on the truck’s GPS and other RFID tags. Someone must have pulled that thing apart,” Cartwright said.

  Mahegan reflected for a moment. Where was Alex? Where was Cassie? They were both part of this somehow. He had last seen Alex on the mountaintop, and he had heard the diesel engine of the Mack truck, so unless Alex had moved quickly, there was no way she was with the truck.

  Cassie had fallen some distance. The terrain below had looked brutal and unforgiving. Mahegan’s bet was that Cassie was dead, broken on the rocks below the ridge above the terrorist valley. But still, there was one way to check: her cell phone. The FBI had tracked her using her car GPS and then her cell phone. If she was still alive and if she still had her phone, then there was a possibility.

  “Lucy, the FBI has Cassie Bagwell’s cell phone number. See if they can ping it. It was questionable whether it was working, but it’s in her cargo pocket. There was a Velcro pouch inside the pocket. That’s where I put it. She might be dead on the side of a mountain not far from here, or she might be in that Mack truck.”

  “Roger. There’s a joint operations center in the Pentagon that has an interagency task force set up. That’s who I’m secure chatting with. Apparently we are now the main show. Ever since we asked about OST. They probably got their ass handed to them, but who cares? Okay, secure chat sent. FBI has rogered. Says, ‘wait one.’ It’s bubbling.”

  Mahegan assumed the “bubbling” was the indicator that a text was being prepared by the individual on the other end. Cartwright was talking in excited but precise tones. She was professional and in her element. The way she had shut down Oxendine was classic, without hesitation.

  “Okay, here it is. Holy shit. They’ve got it,” Cartwright said.

  “Where is she?” Mahegan asked.

  “She, or rather her phone, is moving sixty-five miles per hour on U.S. Seventy-Four just outside of the town of Shelby heading east toward Charlotte.”

  “That’s it,” Mahegan said. “She’s either dead or alive, but we’ve got to get eyes on that truck.” He turned to McQueary. “My money says that they have about ten to fifteen commandos left. They’ll be in trucks or SUVs on either side, making it look official. The Mack truck and trailer are nondescript. There’s no way anyone would know there is a nuke in there.”

  “The FBI is just getting all chatty here. The missing nuke is a B61-12 that was getting transported to Tennessee to get its upgrade to make it precision guided,” Cartwright said.

  “That nuke is one of our lower yield nukes,” Mahegan said. “Just about fifty kilotons. Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons by comparison. Just FYI. So, about three and a half times as bad as Hiroshima. We’ve all seen that video.”

  McQueary turned to his four men and said, “Saddle up. We’ve got to stop it.”

  Mahegan said, “Roger.”

  Among many, one.

  And Mahegan kept thinking. He stared at a map of North Carolina on the wall. It had all of the airfields but also showed the major road arteries. He saw U.S. 74 and the town of Shelby. It was maybe an hour to Charlotte. What could they be doing on a Saturday in Charlotte?

  Mahegan looked through the window and saw a group of men talking on the apron. The man who had joked that he would be happy to sell the tickets to view a genuine asshole like Oxendine was standing there.

  Wearing his UNC–Chapel Hill Tar Heels football jersey.

  Just get me to the game in time . . .

  A nuke at a football game in uptown Charlotte?

  CHAPTER 35

  JACKKNIFE RUMBLED ALONG THE HIGHWAY, THINKING THIS IS STILL WINNABLE. The cargo was precious and deadly and would destroy precisely what needed to be destroyed.

  Mostly it would destroy the spirit of the American people, because if that venue could be attacked in today’s environment, then any venue was vulnerable. And that was an important message to send.

  If a simple wedding party in the Syrian countryside was vulnerable, then why shouldn’t one of the most sacred pla
ces in America be vulnerable as well.

  Jackknife tried not to think postdestruction. It was inconceivable, actually. Everything Jackknife had done for the past four years had been focused on this plan: recruiting Gavril and Zakir, developing the plan, orchestrating the logistics, gathering the intelligence, holding everything together, and synchronizing the entire plan.

  Jackknife had tasted the blood by shooting Vicki Sledge with her husband and child. What was it Mahegan had said?

  “Among many, one.”

  That had been Jackknife’s entire strategy all along. The kill on Vicki Sledge was masked by multiple other kills that day, forcing law enforcement to try to figure out all of those simultaneous murders in a very short period. The Trojan that disabled the cars had been designed to create enough chaos for Zakir and his men to hijack the Mack truck carrying the weapon. Predictably it was lost in twenty-four hours of chaos, which was what Jackknife had anticipated based upon Jackknife’s own experience with bureaucracies.

  With the lack of sleep for the past several days, Jackknife welcomed the bumpy road.

  Staying awake through the finale was important. Revenge would never taste so good.

  CHAPTER 36

  ZAKIR WATCHED RATTA NAVIGATE THE VILLAGE OF SHELBY. IT WAS frustrating to have to slow down, stop at red lights, and then speed back up. He had considered going all the way to Interstate 85 into South Carolina and then back up to Charlotte, but that route seemed longer. Now he wondered if he had made the right decision. This bumpy road was not good for their mission.

  Ratta had disabled all of the RFID tags, making Zakir less concerned about being tracked by the police or military. He knew that they would soon locate his position and where he might be headed. But given even the specter of what he might be carrying in the back of the Mack truck, law enforcement would tread carefully. They would not want to shoot into the body of the trailer for fear of detonation. Likewise, the police would know what the truck was carrying and wouldn’t want to cause an accident that could have the unintended consequence of explosion.

  Through the windshield of the truck cab, the stores and subdivisions sprawled through the countryside. Everything seemed normal, but that was all about to change. Zakir felt as if they were going downhill most of the way, which made sense, as they were leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains and traveling through the Piedmont of North Carolina. God’s country, as he had heard some people call it. They were racing down some hills and powering up others, the clutch and gears grinding beneath the strain of the steep inclines. But still, in all, they were falling away from the mountains and toward less severe terrain.