Direct Fire

by A. J Tata

  He looked over his shoulder at Cassie Bagwell, who was sitting in the sleeping cab with her back to the wall. They locked eyes. Zakir nodded at her as if to say, I did what you surely wanted me to do.

  Cassie stared back at him. Approval, he wondered? She was hurt, and Zakir had done his best to stabilize what looked like a broken arm. His men had found her in a small grouping of sapling pine trees that had been strong enough to absorb her fall without breaking but flexible enough to bend and not cause her severe harm. Somehow she had managed to hang on to her rucksack, which they had collected with her. Zakir watched her head bounce with the bumpy road and wondered if she understood the enormity of what was happening. The wheels that she had set in motion with her intelligence report, which led to Operation Groomsman.

  As they exited the town limits, Ratta was able to pick up some speed. They grinded up a long grade called Kings Mountain, then flew down the back side into the valley and turned northeast onto Interstate 85. From there, they were less than an hour from the United Bank of America Stadium.

  The football game was to start at twelve-thirty, with the pregame activities peaking around noon, which was when Zakir wanted to be there. He knew that the closer he got to the stadium, the tougher it might be to gain full access. Just being in the proximity would be good enough. The entire world was going to come down on him. He might die fighting, but he was finally feeling the sense of justice he had been seeking.

  For Malavdi. For Fatima.

  The Mack truck barreled along I-85 at eighty miles per hour like a cruise missile with programmed attack coordinates. The traffic was steady and growing.

  As they were passing the town of Gastonia, he looked in the passenger side-view mirror.

  The helicopter was bearing down on them.

  Zakir smiled.

  * * *

  Jake Mahegan stepped into a crewman’s vest, or monkey harness, and clicked his snap link into the rappelling D ring in the floor of the Blackhawk helicopter. The wind buffeted his face through the open door, and Setz, the pilot, tilted the helicopter’s nose forward to gain on the Mack truck in the distance.

  There had been a brief debate about crew rest and flight safety, but Setz was having none of that, Mahegan had noticed. The pilot had started this mission and she wanted to finish it.

  Mahegan leaned into the wind until the monkey harness strap was taught. He felt like a jumpmaster performing a door check, but now he was scouting for the best possible way to stop a Mack truck with a nuclear device on it. They sped away from the Hendersonville Airfield and toward Charlotte, using U.S. 74 as a centerline guidepost. By being able to track Cassie’s iPhone, they would be able to interdict the truck prior to its reaching the Clemson versus UNC–Chapel Hill football game in the Carolina Panthers football stadium.

  The problem was that a nuclear device would destroy everything within five miles and most things within fifteen miles. Their window to stop the Mack truck was very small if they wanted to minimize damage.

  Mahegan had studied the map and recommended that the best place for a standoff would be the bridges over the Catawba River. Those were equidistant between the town of Gastonia and the big city of Charlotte. If the device was on a timer, there was very little they could do about it except try to get inside what he expected to be a well-defended truck with jihadists surrounding both the truck on the outside and the bomb on the inside. The Syrians had become a phalanx of suicide bombers.

  Mahegan had asked McQueary to direct that the local fire departments near those two crossings mass their trucks and create an impenetrable barrier. He didn’t give specifics of the threat but did tell McQueary to use the term “national security emergency” when talking to the police and fire chiefs of Gaston and Mecklenburg Counties. At a minimum, Mahegan wanted that truck in the river to deaden the blast and occlude its lateral burst radius. While the blast would still be devastating, its impact might be mitigated.

  It was at times like these that he needed the backup of General Savage, Patch Owens, and Sean O’Malley. For example, if Savage was on hand, Mahegan might be able to get a Chinook helicopter to do what he was going to try to do with a Blackhawk.

  Wondering where his teammates might be, Mahegan continued to focus on his resources at hand. He had four SWAT team members, including their seemingly reliable leader, Lieutenant McQueary. He had asked for and received one truck driver from the small crowd that had gathered near the airfield as the sun had risen on the crazy morning. They had a Blackhawk helicopter with two General Electric T700 engines pushing the aircraft over Shelby, North Carolina, en route to the Catawba River crossing of I-85 and U.S. 74. In the Blackhawk helicopter were two pilots and two crewmen that served as door gunners. They had mounted on the pintles the two M240B machine guns in the crewman’s doors.

  Those machine guns might be useful when the Blackhawk slowed to a hover above the Mack truck. Mahegan had developed the plan in the Hendersonville brick building, working with the SWAT team, assigning each man a mission. It would take the entire crew to accomplish the task, and even then he wasn’t certain. He had gathered four thick fast ropes, lifting shackles, and other materials flown in from the Air National Guard base in Charlotte.

  Mahegan had the pilot lower the cargo hook at Hendersonville Airfield, where he secured the four ropes with lifting shackles. At the opposite end of each rope were similar shackles that each of the four SWAT team members would have to secure to the trailer.

  Mahegan had the task of escorting the truck driver to the connection between the cab and the trailer. Ideally they would do this before the bridges, because Mahegan did not believe the enemy would stop and could possibly blow through whatever defenses the locals were able to construct.

  As he hung outside of the helicopter, the four thick ropes swayed and bounced with the rapid hum of the rotor blades. He looked over his shoulder at the SWAT team, each man lost in his own thoughts. Then Mahegan looked over his other shoulder and saw the trucker, Jimmy Ray Cranston, who had turned his Catfish Junction hat around and was praying. The man had said he’d never been in a helicopter before, but if his country needed his help, then who was he to say no. He wore an Aerosmith T-shirt over blue dungarees and scuffed work boots. He had a denim jacket that he had removed because he was sweating despite the 150 mile an hour wind blowing through the open doors of the helicopter.

  They crested Kings Mountain, the isolated terrain feature of Crowders Mountain loomed ahead. The highway was a small ribbon of asphalt angling through the valley. The helicopter banked northeast, and then there it was.

  The Mack truck was surrounded by its own escort of pickup trucks with gunners in the beds of each truck.

  Beyond the Mack truck the blue and red lights of police and emergency vehicles flashed maybe six miles away. They immediately began taking fire, and the door gunners pivoted the machine guns toward the nose of the aircraft when Mahegan said, “Enemy, twelve o’clock. Pickup trucks. Avoid the Mack truck.”

  Both gunners raked the pickups and did an impressive job on the first pass. Setz flew past the convoy and spun around for one more gun run before lining up and matching their speed with the truck. Two of the six trucks had caught fire and one more had wrecked. That left three trucks and their associated gunners. The second pass of the helicopter included a broadside sweep first of the south side with the starboard gunner firing at max rate into the one pickup on that side. Setz swung around the tail end of the Mack truck and sped past the two pickups on that side, with both gunners now unloading massive amounts of lead. The port gunner had removed his machine gun from the pintle and laid it on the floor of the helicopter next to Mahegan’s feet for better aim. One of the pickup trucks exploded, and the other careened into the guardrail.

  Immediately Setz had the helicopter matching the speed of the Mack truck. They dropped the four ropes, with Mahegan going first without gloves. They didn’t have enough, so he gave the trucker his gloves, which seemed to be working fine as the man slid down the r
ope and landed clumsily on the roof of the trailer.

  “I’m a fireman, too,” the man said, smiling as his baseball hat blew off his head.

  “Get on all fours,” Mahegan said.

  Next the four SWAT team members slid down the ropes and began moving to the lifting points for the trailer. All trailers were constructed to have multiple lifting points so that port container handlers could most easily move the cargo. Mahegan was praying that the top rail of this nuclear-carrying container was an extension of a solid-state body of the container. Otherwise, when they began to lift the container, they would peel the roof off it and lose any opportunity to mitigate the nuke. But it was all they had, because the ropes weren’t long enough to reach the bottom of the container.

  Mahegan led the truck driver to the front of the trailer and climbed down the security ladder onto the metal arms of the trailer hitch. He noticed that the cab had a sliding metal plate with a wire mesh window behind it. Spreading his feet on the yawing truck base, he had Jimmy Ray lay down on the base and used his metal fifth wheel puller to reach beneath the trailer and partially unlock the jaws of the fifth wheel.

  When Jimmy Ray had the fifth wheel ready to completely set the kingpin free from the fifth wheel, he nodded at Mahegan. Mahegan’s hands were on the air brake lines. Jimmy Ray had told him if he pulled the air brake lines off, the vehicle would not be without brakes; rather, all of the brakes on the cab and the trailer would engage at once.

  Mahegan wanted that to happen, but only once the four lifting shackles were secured and the fifth wheel jaws were ready to open.

  McQueary gave him a thumbs-up. About the time he looked at Jimmy Ray, the truck swerved and hit a large pothole. Jimmy Ray bounced up, tumbled, dropped the fifth wheel puller, and was hanging over the edge of the speeding trailer, about to fall.

  Mahegan turned, grabbed Jimmy Ray by the rear of his blue jeans, and lifted. “Push, man. You’ve got to push up, Jimmy Ray,” Mahegan said. The man’s head was nearly scraping the concrete road. Mahegan risked another step forward on the unstable platform, grabbed Jimmy Ray’s shirt, and pulled hard. The trucker was able to reach back and get his hands on the platform, pushing back into the center.

  “Holy shit, I almost died,” Jimmy Ray said.

  “We’re all going to die if we don’t focus. You dropped your tool. Can you reach what you have to?”

  “No, not without the fifth wheel puller,” Jimmy Ray said. “I got it partially open, but you didn’t give me the word yet.”

  “Show me,” Mahegan said.

  They lay on the platform and Jimmy Ray pointed at the fifth wheel jaw arm handle. Essentially, pulling on that handle would release the trailer kingpin, which was the only thing holding the trailer onto the truck chassis.

  “I think I can reach it. They’re ready up top. You’re telling me as soon as I pull this, the trailer sets free?”

  “Yes. Its speed will keep it moving forward, but it will begin to decelerate pretty quickly.”

  Mahegan nodded at McQueary that he was going under. McQueary pumped his arm that they needed to hurry. Mahegan guessed they were less than a minute from the roadblock.

  He climbed beneath the trailer and saw the fifth wheel handle about three feet away. He reached out, clasped the handle, and yanked hard.

  Immediately the trailer separated from the truck. The concern now was that the helicopter had to lift the trailer up and maintain the same speed, decelerating over time. Mahegan watched as the trailer began to lift off the ground. He crawled back to the truck platform and could plainly see the greasy, black fifth wheel and couldn’t believe that was all that was holding a trailer to a truck, but it was.

  The Blackhawk was lifting the trailer now, and the operation was going smoothly. The airbrake cables were stretched to their maximum as Setz continued to slowly ascend with the trailer. The problem with disengaging the air brakes too soon was that the truck would begin to brake, and if the trailer wasn’t above the top of the truck, the trailer would strike that, causing the helicopter to nose over and face-plant into the road.

  Not to mention causing the truck to flip over, which was still a possibility.

  “Hang on,” Mahegan shouted.

  Jimmy Ray grasped an iron handle on the back of the cab, squeezing until his knuckles were white. Mahegan looked up at the trailer and thought it was high enough. Then he looked back at the truck cab and saw that the black slider was open.

  Cassie Bagwell was staring at him through the wire mesh bulletproof back window of the cab, shaking her head, as if to say, No. With no time to contemplate her actions or what she intended, Mahegan noticed that the trailer was fully in the sky above them. The air brake lines snapped off and spun into the air with a sizzling sound, like that of frying bacon. The truck brakes locked, pinning Mahegan and Jimmy Ray against the back of the cab as smoked boiled all around them. The front heavy truck began to nose up, and the driver must have turned the wheel, because it spun a full turn and threw both Mahegan and Jimmy Ray outward, both hanging on to their respective grips.

  Jimmy Ray went flying first and Mahegan followed, both landing thirty yards away in the grassy median. Mahegan rolled maybe ten times before he stood up as if he had just done a parachute landing fall in twenty-knot winds. Gaining his bearings, he checked on Jimmy Ray and found that he was injured but not badly. Maybe a broken leg.

  Mahegan pulled his Tribal from his hip holster and said to Jimmy Ray, “Stay there, I’ll get you a medic.”

  “Can’t move. Not going anywhere.”

  Mahegan took a step, turned around, and said, “Good job.” Then he was running to the cab that had stopped spinning. The driver’s side was faceup with the passenger’s door flush with the concrete of the highway. The back windshield was buckled and crushed, which did not portend well for Cassie.

  He climbed up the backside of the cab near where he had been holding before the air brakes released. He could hear movement inside the cab, and he clawed to the top of the driver’s door. The smell of leaking diesel permeated the air. Black smoke was boiling from the hood. While diesel had a higher flashpoint than automobile fuel, a fire was a real possibility with the kinetic force the truck had just endured.

  Leading with his pistol, Mahegan stood over the driver’s door and saw a man’s head moving toward him slowly. His face was a mess, rivulets of red blood running into his open mouth where he was missing teeth, fresh wounds from the truck accident. He could see the man in the passenger seat was also injured badly, but his hand was reaching for a gun. A quick glance confirmed Cassie was unconscious, maybe dead, in the sleeping compartment.

  Mahegan shot the driver in the face. Then he shot the hand of the man in the passenger seat. How he had survived, Mahegan didn’t know. Mahegan opened the door, laid on the dead man, and stuck the pistol inches from the passenger’s face.

  “What’s in the trailer?” Mahegan asked.

  The man remained silent, even with the Tribal bore speaking to him its silent threat that it could erupt with a life-ending explosion any moment.

  “Malavdi. Fatima,” the man whispered. His words were raspy.

  Mahegan figured there were internal injuries causing blood to drain into the man’s throat. He registered the names.

  “Groomsman,” the man said. “Finally.”

  All of this action had revolved around Operation Groomsman ever since Alex Russell had squared off with him in the Uwharrie National Forest.

  “What is in the trailer?” Mahegan shouted this time. He heard sirens in the background, knowing that he had maybe fifteen seconds to kill the driver if he wanted to.

  He didn’t need to. The man began to speak, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth, but his head lolled over against the highway concrete through the shattered passenger window. Mahegan quickly scrambled into the sleeping compartment and grabbed Cassie, who was dead weight.

  She had glass cuts on her face and was bent awkwardly against the cab because her captors had tied he
r hands behind her back and bound her feet. That was why Cassie was only able to signal No with her head. But what was she trying to tell Mahegan? He knew that without the extra reinforcement of this special truck designed to haul nuclear weapons, all of them would have been dead. He felt a weak pulse on Cassie’s neck.

  “Help me, Jake,” she whispered. Her lips parted slightly, and Mahegan’s heart leapt, glad she was alive.

  “I’m here, Cassie,” Mahegan said.

  He heard the ambulance arrive and then the paramedics as they began climbing onto the cab.

  “Clear in here with one injured friendly!” Mahegan shouted. He holstered his Tribal and saw the first man was a SWAT team member, but not one of the men he had met.

  “Weapons down, hands up,” the man yelled. He led with an AR-15 inside the cab. The cop’s face was a pinched expression of fear and focus.

  “Two friendlies, one injured,” Mahegan reiterated.

  “Hands up,” the man said.

  Mahegan held his hands away from his body. “She needs an ambulance now. Get her into the ambulance now. I’ll feed her up to you. Those two dead guys? They’re the bad guys,” Mahegan said, using his commander’s voice.

  After a moment, Mahegan’s heart sank. He heard the baritone of Tommy Oxendine approaching the vehicle.

  “Out of my way. This is my scene!” Oxendine shouted. Soon he was on top of the vehicle next to the SWAT team member. Oxendine locked eyes with Mahegan as Mahegan began to slide his hand toward his pistol.

  Oxendine’s hand came through the window as he said, “Feed her up to me. I’ve got her.”