The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  There was a moment of silence before David responded, “Well as the wise man said, ‘This too shall pass.’”

  Then he hung up, and Duchess’s face turned to stone.

  Leaving the phone beside her ear, she tapped a button. A man replied, “Go ahead, ma’am.”

  “Notify the Charlottesville PD, Virginia State Police, and FBI. I want an APB out on David and his team for suspicion of involvement with last night’s factory raid as per a classified informant. Once they’re in custody, the Agency will take control.”

  55

  Now alone at the helm of his team house workstation, Ian continued his search for further intelligence.

  The team had been staged in Fredericksburg for seven hours now, waiting for his word. And as he continued to analyze every scrap of intelligence at his disposal, it occurred to Ian that no team of shooters could ever truly understand the lonely vigil of the intelligence operative endeavoring to support them from behind a computer. There was no glory in it, no glamour, no war stories for future grandchildren.

  And while it wasn’t manual labor per se, the essence of it was much the same: you report to your place of duty, and continue the rote work until your shift was done and often long beyond.

  You could argue there was an artistic process behind it, too, because as the work progressed, a canvas was indeed painted, a sculpture crafted where there was only clay before. Like the artist, the more pains Ian undertook, the more his customers appreciated the finished work.

  Except at the moment, he wasn’t making any fucking progress at all.

  It wasn’t just that his resources were limited, it was that Duchess and some windowless office full of analysts had infinitely more to work with, the full resources of the CIA and NSA and God-knew-who-else toiling away at the same data he was, and probably much more. It was a Catch-22 of sorts—even if he miraculously uncovered some vital location, Duchess would have found it first, and have forces arriving not only to stop an attack but arrest his team.

  And once that happened, Ian’s own incarceration would follow in short order.

  Still, what choice did he have? The bond with his team exceeded rationality, and was every bit as strong as that of family with the added bonus of a complete and total willingness to die for one another. Ian would never betray his team just as they’d never betray him; but right now, he seemed to be the only one who understood the lunacy of their situation.

  For Cancer, Reilly, and Worthy, there seemed to be an almost autopilot response to follow David’s guidance into oblivion. They were used to split-second tactical calls that couldn’t be questioned without endangering everyone involved, combined with an unspoken addiction to both adrenaline and the teamwork aspect of what they did.

  Only Ian seemed to retain a grounding in logic and a bigger picture that indicated the obvious: their team had hours of freedom remaining. It was one thing to stretch the rules when you had a tenuous satellite radio link to higher command and no UAV coverage contradicting your official version of events. It was completely another, he thought, to murder a couple people in the continental United States, then violate an official order to turn yourselves in. There was no coming back from that, no conceivable return to legitimacy. This would end with either the grave or jail for all of them, and yet he continued to toil away regardless. If his team was going down, then Ian would support them until the moment the cuffs were slapped on his wrists.

  So his present obstacle wasn’t a matter of willpower.

  It was a simple matter of data.

  He’d scrubbed the hard drives forward and backward, seeking any connection to his Fredericksburg clue and finding none. For the past hour he’d resorted to speculation, spinning every possible version of events in his head and trying to find evidence that supported it.

  Ultimately, though, he came to the grave realization that he was chasing ghosts, looking for links that simply weren’t there. The possibility that an elaborate relay was used to ping the outgoing calls to a cell tower in Fredericksburg as a mere decoy was very real, and growing larger with every second that Ian didn’t uncover some new evidence.

  Falling back in his seat, he leaned against the headrest and stared at the ceiling, then spun his rolling chair in a circle. His team was counting on him as their last line of support, and Ian recalled his team leader’s haunted face when he returned to the team house after a night of evading the Charlottesville PD. How David had stared at him with hollow eyes, delivering his final guidance in the moments before Duchess called.

  I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Just ask yourself what your dad would do.

  Recalling those words made Ian question exactly what his dad would do in this situation—and with nowhere else to turn, he reached for his phone and dialed.

  A man answered, “You a telemarketer?”

  “It’s me,” Ian said. “Is this a bad time?”

  “Hell no. Smoking a cigar and looking at the lake. Though I’m guessing since you dialed me from an unlisted number, this isn’t a social call.”

  Swallowing, Ian replied, “No, Dad, it isn’t.”

  Ian hadn’t been the best son, but it wasn’t easy to grow up in his father’s shadow, to have every professional associate he met distill his existence down to an association with his family lineage the second he mentioned his last name. Particularly when Ian wasn’t some gun-slinging legend, but an intel man whose every effort fell short of his father’s legacy.

  “Well,” his father replied, “out with it, then. What sage advice can I impart?”

  “I’m looking for something important. There’s a mountain of data, I only have one clue and a hunch to go off, and I’m not even sure it’s right.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  “My gut tells me that my hunch is correct.”

  “If there’s one thing I taught you, it’s not to second-guess your intuition. So why are you?”

  “Why am I?” Ian asked, feeling irrationally angry at the question. “Because I’ve been looking for hours and I haven’t made any forward progress.”

  “Hell, son, if that’s the case, there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a rule about military retreat that applies just as well to intelligence, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Which is?”

  There was a pause before his father continued.

  “If you absolutely can’t move forward, then move back.”

  Ian felt a cool, tingling sensation race down his spine. His mouth went dry, an eyelid twitching in response to some mental connection spurred by his father’s statement.

  “Dad, I have to go.”

  His father sounded like he was smiling as he replied, “Happy hunting, son.”

  Ian hung up, pulling his chair close to the desk as he reoriented himself at the keyboard with a renewed sense of determination.

  He assumed the launch assembly had been constructed in Charlottesville, and his gut instinct about the phone clue told him it had since been transported to Fredericksburg. And if it was still there, it was for one of three reasons: because it was being welded to the mobile platform from which the launch would occur, because the rockets hadn’t yet arrived, or a combination of both.

  The only other alternative was if the mobile platform had already departed toward its final target, and if that was the case, he was already too late.

  So he focused on the only vector he could, doing what his father said and moving backward.

  Ian went back in time with his intelligence picture, trying to determine how the rockets had made landfall in America. If he could figure out how they’d arrived, he could potentially figure out where in Fredericksburg they’d been sent to.

  And a trans-Atlantic crossing from Syria to the US had only two options: by air or sea.

  Ian doubted the former; few possibilities short of a privately-owned jet would allow for air travel of such a large cargo load, and even then, the somewhat insane
classified security measures of airports in the post-9/11 world made such a smuggling effort almost inconceivable. Zhao could have sent a private jet into Syria, of course, but Ian doubted that would have gone unnoticed by the massive Agency efforts to interdict the rockets.

  The sea, by contrast, was a different story altogether.

  International waters were the maritime equivalent of the Wild West, a space so vast that any regulatory enforcement became a virtual guessing game of ship locations and cargoes. Even on legitimate freighters coming into major US ports, customs agents could only inspect a tiny fraction of containers. The rest passed through with the aid of little more than thin, serial-numbered metal bands routed through the lock assembly along with the padlock itself. Those bands were replicated easily enough, or bypassed altogether—enterprising smugglers could simply remove the hinge bolts on the container doors, lay them down without disturbing the seal, and load whatever cargo they pleased before reassembling the unit intact.

  The end result was a thriving trade for drug transit along international trade corridors, with an untold volume of narcotics reaching their destination among the millions of sea containers transiting the ocean every hour of every day. Hundreds of tons of cocaine were seized each year, and even the most optimistic of law enforcement leadership estimated that massive volume represented less than ten percent of the total.

  But they’d last seen the rockets five days ago in Syria, and a quick search told Ian that such freighters took between ten to twenty days to cross the Atlantic.

  That wasn’t to say that numerous other vessels weren’t capable of making that voyage in a fraction of that time; and it was those faster ships Ian directed his attention to, accessing maritime transit records and customs reports in what quickly devolved into a bottomless pit of information.

  So Ian changed tack and went with a more granular approach: he hacked the US Coast Guard.

  Well, he thought, “hacked” was perhaps a strong word for what he did. Many of the records were accessible with an easily penetrated login, owing to the unclassified nature of their exhaustive documentation of all US-flagged vessels, to say nothing of incoming reporting from civilian vessels. There was an open line of communication between any vessel off the US coast and the Coast Guard emergency frequency, and Ian scanned that line of communication for anything amiss.

  Most of the reports were banal: engine trouble at sea, victims of heart attacks or divers with decompression sickness who required aerial transport to land-based medical facilities. But another record caught his eye: a joint Coast Guard and DEA raid of the Scyllis, a yacht belonging to one Wei Zhao.

  Rather than being excited about this development, Ian felt dismayed—Duchess had already investigated the possibility, which was troubling on two fronts. First, she made the connection before he did. And second, she’d exploited it without any apparent results.

  So he went back to scouring the banal Coast Guard reports, scanning the data and hoping something would trigger his intuition. It took Ian another six minutes to find it, and when he did, he zeroed in on it with a laser-like intensity.

  On the morning of July second, the offshore fishing vessel Amelia filed a report of a man overboard. The captain’s account, corroborated by the rest of the crew, was that a rookie crew member named Robert Swanson had gone out for night watch and never returned. They ostensibly reported his absence as soon as they noticed the next morning, and Coast Guard investigators had boarded the ship to take sworn memorandums. The event was ruled an open-and-shut accident—an inexperienced man had either fallen asleep, lost his footing as a wave struck, or been stumbling drunk when he’d gone over the side. His cries would have gone unheard over the sounds of the boat engine and sea, and he’d never be seen again.

  Except for Ian, the report stood out among a long list of others far too unremarkable to invoke suspicion. He did the math on the boat’s course, and its return to port—there was at least a theoretical possibility that it had recovered some cargo deposited into the sea by the Scyllis, and the timing of its return was consistent with transfer of its catch to a Virginia-bound truck prior to the team’s raid at the metalworking factory.

  Then he dug deeper, penetrating the transfer records for fishing boats returning to the Amelia’s last port. The collective catch was transferred to trucks owned by three separate companies, each taking possession of cargo categorized by tons of fish. One of the names looked inexplicably familiar to him: Blackwood Seafood Company.

  And upon tracing the business’s corporate lineage, he realized why he’d recognized it.

  Ian had seen that name once before, when researching the ownership of Steno, LLC, the company that had purchased the metalworking factory from Laila’s mother and stepfather. Six other businesses fell under the corporate umbrella beneath the multinational conglomerate Palvita International, owned and chaired by Chinese billionaire Wei Zhao.

  He knew what he’d find even as he hammered keystrokes into the computer with all the speed he could manage. Ian’s suspicions were confirmed as the screen flashed to the logistical records of Blackwood Seafood Company—a single truck had departed the port for a distribution facility in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and now he had an address.

  56

  The hotel room in Fredericksburg was average in size, but under the circumstances, Worthy felt like it was claustrophobically small.

  He was seated on the lone armchair, surveying the team in their current resting places—Reilly stretched out on one of the twin beds, Cancer on the other, both men looking like reflections of one another with their arms folded behind their heads as they stared at the ceiling.

  David should have been sleeping, recovering from his long night on the run from the police.

  But he’d refused not only to sleep but even to sit—so far, he’d been passing the time by pacing the room, making everyone nervous, his hollow stare becoming more so with each hour spent awake.

  “We should get tacos for dinner,” Reilly said to no one in particular. “And what the hell is Ian doing?”

  “Well,” David responded, “he’s either searching through intel at the team house or he’s halfway to Mexico and laughing his ass off. Either way, you’re right. Tacos would really hit the spot.”

  Cancer gave a long sigh. “If Ian doesn’t have something for us soon, I might just drive back to Charlottesville and wring his scrawny neck. Hard to imagine that kid swam out of his dad’s enormous balls.”

  Sitting up to take a seat at the edge of the mattress, Reilly replied, “You’re still pissed about having to ditch your knife, aren’t you?”

  “’Course I am. Know how many people I killed with that thing? I was going to pass it down to my son one day.”

  “Well I lost two guns, including my grandfather’s 1911,” Reilly pointed out. “And you don’t even have a son. Or a wife or, to my knowledge, even an ex-wife.”

  Cancer looked hurt to his core, the first time Worthy had seen an indication of humanity in the team’s second-in-command.

  He responded, “That’s just…fuckin’ hurtful, man. Why would you say that?”

  David walked to the bedside and set a comforting hand atop Cancer’s shoulder.

  “Cheer up, buddy,” he said. “If Ian delivers, you’ll have another chance to kill people again in no time. Just means you’ll be using bullets this time, is all.”

  Some measure of hope returned to Cancer’s eyes.

  “Thanks, David.”

  Worthy wasn’t sure what to make of the scene before him. Now that the team had gone rogue in direct violation of Duchess’s orders, and faced incarceration in the best-case scenario, it seemed everyone’s maturity had regressed by a decade or two. They’d spent nearly eight hours in the hotel room, eating delivery food, watching movies, and shit-talking one another over the most minute trivialities, waiting for a no-notice raid on an objective that Ian had yet to find, without anyone mentioning the obvious—the world had shifted on its axis the second David had,
in as many words, told Duchess to go fuck herself.

  They were disavowed, roving fugitives with a dwindling shelf life.

  And there was nothing they could say in their own defense. Their Agency-issued weapons, ammo, and equipment were stockpiled in the two vehicles outside, and that infraction alone brought with it any amount of jail time that Duchess cared to threaten them with. Add in a couple dead bodies in the metalworking factory and the fact that they’d driven an hour and a half in the hopes of some further lead to follow, and the sky was the limit with regard to how this Independence Day would end.

  But no one was discussing any of that, nor the somewhat glaring possibility that Ian’s theory about a cell tower in Fredericksburg was wrong, and had simply been a call relay like they used on their own phones. If that was the case, their time would be better spent trying to flee the country.

  When David’s phone rang, it felt as if all the oxygen were sucked out of the room. Cancer and Reilly bolted upright, and Worthy followed them to surround their team leader in a semicircle.

  David put the phone on speaker mode as he said, “Tell me you have some good news.”

  Ian responded, “That depends on your definition of ‘good.’ It wasn’t easy, but I found a lead. The key was identifying a suspicious man-overboard report from an offshore fishing boat—”

  “Ian,” David interrupted, “the clock is ticking. We just want breakfast—no one cares how the sausage was made.”

  There was a pause then, and Worthy suspected it involved a moment of Ian fuming on the other end of the line.

  Finally he said, “It’s a seafood distribution facility, twelve thousand square feet, and from what I can see, a lot of that is refrigerated processing and freezer space. The address is 204 Southern Avenue, fifteen minutes away from your location.”