“You’re up early, Mykola,” Yuri Poderev said as he stumbled into their computer room in his underwear. “Did you make the coffee yet?”
“I talked to Ghazi. He’s coming over later. This is probably A-Day,” Mykola replied. “I bet when he comes today, he tells us it’s time. Then I play with the DC Metro, and BART, and MARTA in Atlanta. Big day.”
Yuri stretched. “Did you make the coffee?” he repeated, as he walked into the dirty kitchen and found a fresh pot already made. As he began to pour the coffee, a loud alarm sounded, “Intruder! Intruder!” and then a series of loud blurts. Yuri poured the coffee on the floor, and on himself. He moved quickly back into the living room they had converted into their computer room.
“All the intruder sensors are going crazy,” Mykola said. “And the perimeter ones. Look at the cameras, there are SUVs on the road.”
“Pull out the hard drives. Smash them,” Yuri yelled, but by then they could both hear the loud rotors of a helicopter directly above the house. As a blindingly bright light shone through the window, there was a blast and the front door flew across the room, quickly followed by two, then four men in dark blue helmets and body armor, swinging automatic weapons with lights on them, wildly from left to right.
“Do not move, if you move you die!” one of the stormtroopers yelled. “All right now, arms out to your sides. Show me your palms. Open hands facing me. Now, slowly, down on your knees. Slowly, facedown on the floor. Do not breathe.” In seconds, Yuri and Mykola had their hands tied behind their backs and then their ankles laced together by a strong plastic belt. They heard a helicopter landing, but the light from another hovering aircraft still darted in and out of the window.
“It’s clear, bring him in,” one of the blue men said into a microphone on his helmet.
Dugout, wearing some of the blue body armor suit, walked gingerly through the blasted doorframe and struggled to take off his helmet. “Next time, I want the white suit. Which one of you guys is Vader?” he said to what were by then twelve body-armored blue men crowding the living room.
“I’m the senior FBI Special Agent on site,” one of the assault team members said dryly. “I am supposed to ‘facilitate your exploitation of the computers’ for an hour or so. Then we start ripping them out and taking them to our computer forensic lab.”
“I’ll tell you when they get ripped out,” Dugout said, sitting down at one of the chairs in front of a bank of three screens.
Two FBI agents in body armor were lifting Yuri off the floor and dragging him out of the house. Dugout spun around in his chair and pointed at two more agents about to drag Mykola out. “Hang on a minute.” He looked at Mykola. “I know you. Dovgo ne bachīlīs. Berlin, dah?”
“I speak English,” Mykola replied. “Yes, it was Chaos Communication Congress, two years ago in Berlin. You spoke on finding flaws in encryption routines. Is that what you did? Is that how you found us?”
“Next time when I submit a paper at Chaos, maybe you should read it,” Dugout replied. “Listen, you’re hosed, so all you can do now is buy yourself a better prison roommate. I can get you a safe one, or your own private room, but you better talk to me now. Passwords, the attack plans, you know what I need. No tricks. Trick me and you get shot resisting arrest. Shot dead, man, fatal, right Darth?”
Ray was not supposed to do tactical missions. There was a bright red line against that in his job description. It had taken him years to stop people from saying he should not be “operational.” The advent of drones had made him very operational and no one could argue against that, at least not successfully. The PEG Director, however, was supposed to do analysis, not race through the suburbs in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans. As they drove, he noticed the streetlights go out and the sky turn a pinkish orange. He wasn’t supposed to be with the gun toters and, he thought with a smile, Dugout certainly wasn’t either.
He held on to the door handle as the big truck cornered without slowing down and began speeding down the straightway, past the high school campus, over the rise, and into the open desert. Then he saw the 747 above.
“Stop,” he yelled. “Everyone out, out of the truck. Incoming. Get away from the truck!” He opened the door and leaped while the vehicle was just starting to slow down. He hit the dirt hard, but curled and rolled in the military parachute landing style, keeping his head off the ground. He scrambled to get up and ran into the sand and rock at the side of the road as he heard the second Suburban rear-end the first with a metal on metal crunch.
Then the explosion knocked him down, face first into the dirt. He felt a rock cut into his left cheekbone just below the eye. Facedown, he could still see the light from the blast and the fire. He felt the heat.
Ray forced himself up. He knew there was blood coming from somewhere, or maybe a couple of places, his cheek, his nose, his left ear. He saw the FBI men trying to make sure that everyone had made it out of the first two vehicles. Their windows were shattered into giant spiderwebs. He staggered ahead, away from the wreck. Was this what a concussion felt like? There was a ringing in his ears and he was squinting, trying to focus. Then he saw the C-17 model lifting off at the end of the long flat, dirt road. Three models waited for takeoff, a B-17, an A-380, and a B-29. Ray tried to yell back to the agents, but he couldn’t get the words out, coughing, choking.
But the large model C-17 banked left after lifting off, flying its programmed flight path, seeking a homing beacon.
“You okay, sir?” It was an agent from the third vehicle, one of three men in body armor who were now standing with him.
“Hey, there’s a guy down there in the middle of the road,” one of the agents called out, raising his HK33 assault weapon.
“Don’t shoot,” Ray said. “Let’s take him.”
“We’ll give that a try, sir, but we have our rules,” the Special Agent replied.
The four men walked slowly down the road toward Ghazi, who had placed a flight controller module on the ground and was walking toward them with his arms hanging by his sides, his hands empty.
“Stop there,” the Agent yelled. And then in low voice to Ray, he said, “Could have a suicide belt on.”
“Take off your coat and drop it on the ground,” another Agent yelled.
Ghazi stopped, but kept the coat on. “You thought you were invulnerable here, didn’t you? No one could get your drone pilots here. You could kill innocent people everywhere in the world, but no one could kill you, no one could get their revenge? Never be any payback? Thought you were the only ones with drones, didn’t you?” His right hand darted into his North Face windbreaker. “Vengeance!” he yelled and started to run toward them.
“Gun!” one of the agents cried out. All three FBI agents fired their HK33s in short bursts of a few bullets each.
Ghazi had no gun. Instead, he held a detonator and as soon as he hit its switch, the three large model radio controlled aircraft on the road behind him blew up in what seemed like a single, massive explosion.
The blast knocked the FBI agents and Ray to the ground again. Ghazi’s lifeless body lay bleeding out on the pavement.
First, the Global Reach drone got to the target outside of Kiev.
“Five SUVs, one pickup in the yard. Guards inside at the gate. Guards outside. Guard on the roof. No signs of civilians. Getting multiple, human life forms readings through the windows. Laser is having trouble getting the conversation, but the voices are all male,” Major Jaimie Hernandez was calling out. It was his first day at the GCC, but he had flown birds from Eglin Air Base in Florida. Now he was stepping up to the big time, to the place where the important national missions were flown and on his initial shift there, he realized, he was already part of a mission like none he had ever heard about.
“Weapons check?” Erik asked.
“We’ve got two laser-guided 250-pound bombs, Mark 82s, and four Hellfire missiles, two with high explosives and two with fragmentation warheads.”
“Let’s drop the two bombs on the first pass, ten-second interval. On my mark, and fire.”
The warehouse erupted on the Big Board and then disappeared as the Global Reach banked to avoid the explosion it had created. There was no second bird to provide a video feed. Erik had been lucky to find a Global Reach already over eastern Turkey, looking for PKK terrorists and arms being smuggled into Syria.
“Okay, Jaimie, finish them off and set course for home. Do you have enough fuel to get back to CONUS?” Erik asked.
“No way, sir, I was going to bring it back to Turkey, to Incirlik,” Major Hernandez replied.
“The Turks may get a little touchy about our blowing shit up in the Ukraine and then landing in Turkey. If you can’t get to Sicily, Sigonella, bring it in to Ramat David and I’ll let the Israelis know not to shoot it down,” Erik said.
Looking at the Big Board, at the missiles ripping into the flaming warehouse complex, Erik walked down the line of flight controllers to Sergeant Rod Miller’s cubicle. Miller was flying a Reaper over the target in Pakistan. As Colonel Erik Parsons looked over Miller’s shoulder at the images from Pakistan, Communications switched a call from the Pentagon for Parsons to a red phone in Miller’s cubicle. It was Admiral Johnston.
“Colonel, are you the acting Officer in Charge?” the Admiral yelled down the line.
“Yes, sir. Under the Continuity of Ops plan, I took over when the Director was … was no longer available.”
“Well, what the shit did you guys just do in the Ukraine? There’s been no authorization to fly in there, let alone bomb in there. You trying to start a war there, son?”
“Admiral, I am operating a mission today under the Intelligence chain of command, not military. And, with all due respect, sir, I am still in the middle of that mission, so if you will forgive me, sir, I need to get back to work. I’m sure the White House will—”
“Colonel, you are to stand down. Now. You are relieved of any billet you have in any Intelligence outfit. Let the Agency do that stuff. I will not have a serving officer starting a Goddamn war. You get in your car and you drive over to Nellis Air Base and report to the Inspector General. Colonel?”
“Sir, I think you may be mistaken. I am not in your chain of command, sir.” Colonel Parsons hung up the red phone and looked at Sergeant Rod Miller.
“You get to DG Khan city yet?”
“Been there about thirty mics, sir. Nice villa Qazzani’s got there, but it’s no family manse. This is clearly the workplace, lots of guys with guns. No kiddie toys. No clothesline. Last time we profiled this place it came up clean for collateral then, too.”
“How do we know Qazzani himself is there, the big guy?” Erik asked.
“That step van out front is his personal war wagon, we know the plates,” Miller replied. “We’ve also been listening to his bodyguard’s mobile. He ordered up two boys to be delivered to the villa. Then Qazzani’s step van showed up about two hours ago.”
“Boys?” Erik asked.
“Intel says that’s what he likes,” Miller replied. “He didn’t take too long with them. We saw the two kids walked to a car and driven away about twenty minutes ago. The bodyguard’s mobile was on again. Looks like he is the one driving the car away from the compound with the kids. I think in the compound now is just Qazzani himself and some other bad guys.”
“Wonder how we got the bodyguard’s cell phone number?” Erik mused aloud to no one in particular. He then switched the image on the Big Board to the target in Pakistan. It was a nice, clear High Definition image from the Reaper.
“Colonel, two questions,” Miller began. “First, aren’t the Paks going to be rip-shit about us hitting down there, long way from the kill box they approved up in Waziristan? And, two, would you like to fly this, because rules are we need an officer flying when we pull the trigger.”
“Different rules today, Rod, different rules. Imminent threat to Americans, exigent circumstances,” Erik explained. “Yes, the Paks will be pissed. Think what the Ukrainians will be saying once they figure out it wasn’t a meth lab that blew itself up out at that gang’s compound. Are you willing to fly this one, Sarge?”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Miller replied and looked back at this controls.
“Hit the main building with two now,” Erik ordered. “Wait fifteen minutes and see who shows up to rescue and then hit it again with the last two, the frag warheads, so we get the rest of them, too.”
Erik looked down at Miller’s hands as the sergeant flipped switches and moved the joystick, causing weapons to release thousands of miles away a fraction of a second later. He noticed the pack of Marlboros next to Miller’s wallet in the cubicle. Then his eyes moved to the HD explosion on the Big Board and then the same view from a Predator higher up. There were secondary explosions, bombs or ordnance cooking off inside the building.
“You can’t smoke in here, Sergeant,” Erik said as he took the Marlboros and the lighter. “Major Hernandez, you’re in Control. I’ll be back in ten.”
The last of the night sky was disappearing and the sun beginning to brighten the day as he stood in the parking lot and lit up. He had stopped smoking eight years ago, but the smoke felt so good just now as he leaned against Jen’s white Ford Edge. It was a nice crossover, but he missed his Camaro. He missed Bruce Dougherty, who had died in that Camaro. And he was still trying to come to grips with losing Sandra Vittonelli. So many good friends, fellow war fighters. The fun had gone out of this job a long time ago, he thought. Too much killing, maybe time for him and Jen to find that place on the islands in the Juan de Fuca.
As he was thinking of Jen, his mobile vibrated. The caller ID said it was Ray Bowman phoning him.
That’s when he saw the C-17 diving for the Edge. He had no time to react. It hit the Edge in the middle of its large moon roof, bursting into an orange sunburstlike flash flame. Colonel Erik Parsons’s last thought was half formed when his brain was shattered by the blast. He had seen scores of attacks from the perspective of the attacking aircraft. For a second, he thought he was seeing one from the other side, and then he thought no more. The explosion was big enough to blow in the front doors of the GCC and channel a blast down the corridor, cracking interior glass walls, but the center survived the aircraft attack.
A few miles away, a B-17, an A-380 and a B-29, laden with explosives, destined for the GCC, were now in little pieces on the ground near Ghazi’s dead body. Ray Bowman, still dazzled by the concussive effect of their explosion, dusted off the dirt on his clothes. He had tried Erik on his landline in the GCC, then on his mobile. Nothing. Now he tried Dugout at the North Vegas ranch scene and got through. “How’s the exploitation coming?” he asked Dug.
“I think I stopped the preprogrammed cyber attacks on the subways in DC, San Fran, and Atlanta. Got good leads on guys in Boston, Chicago, and Philly. The Fibbies think they can set those guys up for meets and then bag them before any attacks,” Dugout explained. “How’s things at your end?”
“Guy had huge model planes with some high explosive in them. He launched one. Don’t know where it went. I guess we will find out. He tried to kill us by blowing up the three others. The Bureau guys dropped him. They’re going to go through what’s left of him and his car. I’m not going to wait around. Thought I’d go by the ER and get some nicks tended to,” Ray said walking toward a waiting Sheriff’s car. “I guess I’ll advise Burrell to hold off issuing a public warning. Let the Christmas shopping go on.”
“Who was the guy piloting the RC models?” Dugout asked.
Ray used one hand to shield his eyes from the bright morning sun coming up over the mountains, and with the other hand held his mobile. “Dunno. Was yelling something about our not being invulnerable here, something about payback. Vengeance. Sounded American.” Ray sounded tired, his mind seemed focused elsewhere. “We’ll try to figure out who he was. See where in the never-ending circle of retaliations this guy fits in.”
As he walked away from the smoking wreckage of the radio controlled model aircraft, past the dead body of the terrorist, Ray heard a buzz and looked up. The white drone circling above the scene had large block letters in blue that read SHERIFF.