The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

On the plus side, the enormous volume of the boat’s engines concealed his movement, augmented by the rush of wind and lapping water of the Potomac.

  But that was where the good news ended.

  The same roaring engines that would cover their movement were likewise speeding the boat north toward DC, and if his team didn’t stop the attack before then, no one else would.

  He ran toward the next section of stairwell marking the far wall to his front, his infrared laser swinging from side to side as he moved, prepared to engage any emerging threats. But before he reached the door to the stairs, he slowed to observe an item on the floor that he nearly tripped over—at first he thought it was a body, but then he realized it was too symmetrical, with squared corners marking the dark shape.

  The duffel bag was a long rectangular block, like something used to store hockey equipment. Its placement on the floor was too haphazard to be a boobytrap, and yet too out of place to be a holdover from the ship’s previous crew, whoever they were.

  He nudged the bag with the toe of his boot, felt the clanking of heavy metal cylinders—and didn’t need to open it to know that it contained a bundle of rockets.

  However many enemy fighters were aboard the ship, they must have been ferrying the bags up to the top deck. Worthy suspected that the majority of them would be busy loading the tubes—and with over six hundred rockets, that was going to take a considerable amount of time. Bari Khan didn’t have unlimited manpower in the States; after all, this wasn’t Syria, and he’d already committed two assault teams with suicide vests to the seafood processing plant in addition to the five-man blocking position he’d seen on the trail.

  How many men could he possibly have aboard the boat?

  He received a partial answer a few seconds later, halting in place to take aim at the doorway to the stairs, silhouetted with the brightening glow of a flashlight descending from the top deck.

  It wasn’t one man who appeared then, but two—and the first fell dead amid the sparking flashes of ricochets that erupted in the stairwell as Worthy opened fire along with two other members of the team.

  But the second man darted out of sight, headed up the stairs as Worthy broke into a run. If the jammer was forcing his team to operate without radios, then it had the same effect on the enemy—so he could be racing headlong into an ambush, but what choice did he have? If the escaping fighter got word out to the main enemy element, Worthy’s team could be overrun by a massing force of terrorists who could then proceed to fire the rockets anyway.

  Worthy ascended the stairs three at a time, vaguely registering dark splashes of blood in the stairwell—this fucker was wounded, but that alone wasn’t enough to help the team. He needed a definitive kill to know that their clearance was proceeding undetected for the time being, and as this thought crossed his mind, he emerged onto the carpeted surfaces of the highest enclosed deck. An open lounge with a full bar was positioned against one wall, and the far end of the room held a doorway leading to the final short stairwell separating them from the ship’s open roof with its launch assembly.

  A shadowy figure was loping toward those stairs, the wounded enemy calling out as Worthy opened fire on him from behind.

  It was sloppy shooting by anyone’s standards, the first rounds lacing into his thighs and buttocks as he sprawled headlong to the ground, rolling onto his back. Worthy raced forward, stopping just as the man’s head became visible at the end of his infrared laser beam to deliver the kill shots.

  But the man was rolling over below him, shielding his face with a hand amid groans of agony. Worthy opened fire, seeing his rounds tear open the man’s throat—at this close range, the top-mounted laser offset caused his bullets to impact below his point of aim—and Worthy quickly adjusted his barrel to send four rounds tearing through the man’s palms and into his head before he finally went still.

  The team flowed past him as he reloaded, Cancer whispering over his shoulder,

  “Nice shooting, hotshot.”

  Cancer strode past Worthy, assuming position as the lead man as he closed with the stairwell to his front.

  Each step brought with it searing pain from the quartet of steel ball bearings in his right thigh, and he pushed through the discomfort with the knowledge that speed was their only remaining ally—Worthy’s suppressed gunshots had been quiet, but the enemy had already tried to call out, and subsonic rounds did little to aid in stealth once they punched through wood and tumbled off metal surfaces.

  At any rate, the next flight of stairs was the final one before the rooftop deck, and Cancer intended to be the first one atop it.

  He was about to cross the open doorway when a man leapt down the stairs, so close that they almost collided with one another—whether he’d heard the sound of bullet impacts or come to search for his comrades was anyone’s guess, and Cancer cracked off three shots in the time it took him to register the figure before him.

  The man grunted in pain and grabbed Cancer’s rifle, driving him forward out of the doorway as more fighters came charging down the steps.

  Cancer vaguely registered the men moving to his left and right, the two ranks now mingled with one another.

  His own wounded opponent was still struggling to keep Cancer’s rifle down, and after a moment of crippling pain in his leg as he resisted the effort, he let his barrel dip toward the ground and fired a bullet into the man’s shin.

  Then Cancer body-checked the man as hard as he could, shouldering him backward as the enemy fighter stumbled in a failed attempt to stay upright on his injured leg. Driving his suppressor into the man’s chest, Cancer fired a double tap and watched the flashes momentarily illuminate his target before he collapsed dead.

  Turning to assist his teammates, Cancer saw them engaged in a fight marked by the suppressed gunshots at near-point-blank range before finding a sight that struck him as somewhere between absurd and comical—Reilly, wisely choosing not to fire his unsuppressed pistol at risk of warning additional enemy overhead, now held a man in a headlock, wheeling him sideways to prevent him from being able to effectively grasp his slung rifle.

  Cancer closed on Reilly with two quick steps, and delivered a hard punch to the man’s head.

  Reilly held his opponent in a crushing headlock, squeezing his throat in a viselike grip as Cancer’s first blow impacted against his skull.

  Ordinarily Cancer would be Johnny-on-the-spot with his fighting knife, but he’d had to ditch that particular tool after the metalworking factory raid—and now he resorted to pummeling the man’s face with a fist.

  But physical strength was Reilly’s area of expertise, not Cancer’s.

  After three blows failed to knock the man unconscious, Reilly was fed up.

  “Hold this,” he said, releasing his headlock and shoving the man toward his teammate.

  Cancer struggled to grasp the disoriented man, turning him just in time for Reilly to deliver a savage blow that cracked across the man’s face and sent him and Cancer flying backward into the wall.

  Then Reilly drew his pistol, ducking into the stairwell to provide security for his teammates currently dispatching the remaining enemy fighters behind him.

  He held his aim toward the closed door atop the final stretch of stairs, waiting for the suppressed gunfire to abate and hearing the last subsonic bullet impact the floor without a follow-up.

  The stairwell was too tight to fit two men across, and the seconds it would have taken him to descend and allow his teammates to go first were apparently deemed too long by David, who whispered sharply behind him.

  “Go!”

  So Reilly did, his left arm throbbing in agony, mind keenly aware that the pistol in his right hand was no match for whatever enemy were waiting on the top deck, prepared to launch their rocket attack against his nation’s capital.

  He charged upward nonetheless, closing on the rooftop deck with the single thought that he’d have to clear the doorway as quickly as possible, then get the hell out of the way so his three team
mates could put their rifles to good use.

  But as if in a dream, Reilly reached for the handle only to feel it turning of its own volition. Then the door was pulled outward by a single man whose face was lit by a shifting cascade of light under his night vision.

  The face-to-face encounter lasted a fraction of a second.

  Reilly’s thoughts were remarkably clear and linear. He was unsure if one of his teammates could take a suppressed shot from their angled position on the stairs, and briefly considered ducking out of the way to let them try and thus preserve the element of surprise.

  But this man held a submachine gun in one hand, and a single burst from that could wound or kill Reilly’s entire team in the time it took them to hear it opening fire.

  There was only one thing to do, and Reilly did it with astonishing speed—canting his pistol upward, he fired a single shot that passed through the man’s lower jaw, propelling through his brain and killing him in place.

  Then Reilly plunged forward to tackle the man out of the doorway, slamming him onto the top deck to clear the way for his teammates and struggling to aim his pistol forward as he registered a dazzling display of neon color illuminating the night sky.

  I vaulted Reilly’s body in a single long stride, cutting left to clear the doorway as I took in the incomprehensible sight beyond.

  The rooftop deck was almost completely filled by metal tubes angled upward in neat rows, linked by daisy-chained wires that would fire them in a near-simultaneous succession.

  But that was only the second most stunning feature of the view atop the ship—to my front right, the Washington, DC skyline was stark against the deep, booming explosions of fireworks, a brilliant and blinding cycle of colored sparks that turned the night into a shifting sky of radiant color.

  I registered the incoming and outgoing gunfire from my team battling an unknown number of fleeting shadows darting amid the network of rocket tubes, the vast majority of which held a payload whose lethality was going to be sent screaming into the capital within the next twenty seconds.

  I visually traced the cords as they snaked between rows of metal tubes, seeing that they descended on a single point at the front-right edge of the deck. I took off at a sprint, running toward the spot with a speed beyond anything my exhausted condition should have allowed.

  Then I saw another figure doing the same, running five long paces ahead of me.

  I knew at once this was Bari Khan. He was going to fire the rockets himself, and whatever device waited to initiate that process, he was making his way toward it now.

  To my right, I saw a shifting view of the Washington Monument reaching skyward, its vertical height coming abreast of the ship as we fought to overtake the enemy.

  The boat began slowing then, at what had to be the designated stopping point on the river, a calculated position that every rocket tube had been aligned off of to send their deadly cargo screaming toward the National Mall.

  The entire crux of my team’s efforts since targeting this man across two continents now fell upon me amid the fireworks exploding overhead.

  I fired on the run, blasting imprecise shots toward Bari Khan’s fleeing figure until my rifle bolt locked backward on an empty chamber—but at least one bullet had found its mark.

  He lurched forward, stumbling as he struggled to regain his footing. Still running at full speed, I closed the distance between us and, with a final leap, tackled him from behind.

  We crashed to the ground, him on his side with me on top of him. I sat up on my knees, taking hold of his head in both hands and jerking it upward.

  Before I could smash his skull against the deck, every muscle in my body went rigid with blinding pain.

  A cold metal blade was sliding into my abdomen, the soundtrack of firework blasts fading into a vague white noise as the air rushed out of my lungs. I instinctively braced my hands against his right arm, forcing it down to the deck as the blade withdrew from my stomach.

  My strength began fading then, vision registering the knife in Bari Khan’s right hand as I looked to his opposite side, searching for a firing device.

  I found it clutched in his left hand, with the handle pulled to extension—the time fuse was already burning, and it was too late to stop the launch.

  My eyes followed a thin wire toward the first metal tube in an array of hundreds linked by a single snaking wire, and while pinning Bari Khan down with my full body weight, I searched for someone who could help.

  The only figure I saw was Reilly, running toward me with a pistol in one hand.

  My breaths were constricted, each gasp of air shallower than the last. I used my remaining breath to cry out, “Doc! Break the chain!”

  Reilly’s gaze followed the wires to the first tube. He flung his pistol to the deck, drawing a grenade and slowing to a halt in three stuttering steps as he used his injured arm to yank the pin free.

  Beneath me, Bari Khan was struggling to bring the knife back into my side, the point breaking skin as another searing torrent of blood spilled out. The pain brought with it a momentary surge of adrenaline, and I wrested his right hand for control of the knife before the rest of my strength gave out.

  I fell atop him, feeling hard metal against my sternum—the knife’s handle.

  The blade plunged inside Bari Khan’s chest, penetrating his breastbone under my weight. He gasped as a bloody froth formed at his lips, bubbling and spewing across the side of his face as he said with impossible calmness, “This is just the beginning.”

  He was mortally wounded, and used his final breath to rasp the words, “Meryem, Patime...wǒ yào huí jiāle.”

  Then he went still, my vision beginning to narrow as blackness closed on the periphery. I tried to focus, looking up to see Reilly heaving his grenade, its spinning black orb crossing a sky of dazzling color on its flight to the first rocket tube.

  It descended to its final point of impact, one that I desperately hoped would destroy the daisy chain before it began.

  I watched in horror as it fell short, detonating in a fireball between the second and third tubes. Shards of metal flew outward from the blast, hissing through the air as the grenade’s echo faded to a second explosion—this one a deep popping sound that originated from the first tube.

  The next seconds proceeded as if in slow motion, a terrible progression lit by the nightmarish red and blue glow of fireworks blasting in the sky.

  I was moments from blacking out, struggling to focus as I saw a single rocket launch. It appeared as little more than a flashing shadow that sailed twenty meters out of the tube before its motor ignited. Then a sparkling orange glow appeared at the tail, marking the rocket’s progress until it streaked out of sight, arcing through the night on a flight path toward the National Mall.

  Then a jet-black veil overtook my view, and I passed out atop my enemy’s corpse.

  64

  Laila Rivers watched the fireworks burst overhead, casting flares of brightly colored light across the Lincoln Memorial.

  She squeezed Langley’s tiny palm in her own, looking down to see her awestruck daughter staring skyward, completely absorbed with the blazing glow overhead.

  This should have been an utterly perfect moment, and it was, save one glaring inconsistency: David wasn’t there to share it with them. Even her parents had bowed out with head colds, leaving her and Langley to attend alone. Laila had used her last text to David—unanswered, like all the rest she’d sent that day—to tell him that she loved him.

  And it was true, she knew in her heart. She loved David unconditionally, knew that despite his many shortcomings he meant well as a husband and served as the best father that Langley could ask for.

  But the harmonious interludes of domestic bliss had become less frequent, and more often than not marked by the incessant lies that rolled off his tongue as seamlessly as he breathed. Laila had never caught him in the act, though judging by the nature of his work it remained unlikely she ever would.

  Instead, she
registered his words with the distant recognition that their marriage was second place behind some great secret, the ultimate lie whose source she was unable to determine. David didn’t strike her as the type of serial adulterer who’d deceive her for years. By all appearances he loved her and Langley, and he loved his country, though Laila questioned which had the foremost place in his heart.

  Ordinarily, moments like this would make her proud of her husband’s patriotism. Here she was in Washington, DC, the focal point for the ideal of human freedom if not always the perfect implementation. She got goosebumps as the national anthem played before the start of the fireworks, felt a very real sense of pride at the sight of these great monuments that embodied the principles on which her country was founded.

  But the dazzling display meant little when weighed against the deceptive farce that her marriage had become, the late-night returns home by a husband who’d been gone too long, and offered far too little information in response to her own career updates if and when they had a chance to reconnect.

  In the end, Laila knew one thing for certain. She didn’t just need David; she wanted him as well, and in return she’d received not so much as a call after he failed to show up today.

  And as she watched the radiant fireworks in the night sky over DC, she wondered not only where David was at that moment, but what his thoughts were about the state of their family. Because Laila could toe the line for her child, to an extent—but beyond that she was only one woman, and she hadn’t signed onto a marital contract to be the one upholding the only true end of commitment in the years or decades ahead.

  But her thoughts halted abruptly with an imminent sense of danger, and Laila perceived an odd noise penetrating the cracking fireworks. It was a thin, whistling howl, crescendoing to a deafening level as she pulled Langley into her breast. She fell forward onto their picnic blanket, shielding her daughter from danger as horrified screams erupted among the crowd.