by Basil Sands
Charlie smiled and leaned forward, cocking his head as if he were about to tell a secret. “Well, two things come to mind.” His voice was just above a whisper.
“First, the power was knocked out through the whole electrical intertie system simultaneously. This substation does not control the whole intertie, which runs from Anchorage, through the Mat-Su valley up to here, then across to Delta and down to Valdez. That means these guys were not working alone, but with others in at least two or three other cities along the intertie.”
“Okay, that makes sense.” She recalled what Commander Stark had said about the findings at the other outermost substations.
“Second,” Bannock continued, “what would be the reason to black out Alaska? I mean, we have a lot of strategic military sites and oil production facilities, but most of those have their own backup power sources. The population in the cities up here, except maybe for Anchorage, isn’t big enough to be a prime target for a terrorist strike. Most Americans don’t relate emotionally to Alaska, so there would not be the psychological effect that there would be if they struck New York or L.A.”
“Okay, so what’s your point, Bannock?”
Bannock sat up straight, his face serious. “I think it was either a test of some new technical weapon, or simply a diversion.”
“Diversion?” she asked. “From what?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, “but it seems like a diversionary tactic to me. I mean, in twelve hours of darkness, nothing was destroyed, and other than your officer this morning, no one was hurt or killed. The outage only served to draw the eyes of the authorities away from anything else that may have been going on.”
“How did you know about the connection with the officer being killed?” Trooper Wyatt asked.
Charlie let out a sly grin. “Heard about the shooting on the radio this morning, that it was related to the theft of a truck, and assumed it was Adem and Nikola. Your reaction has confirmed my thoughts.”
“All right, Sherlock Holmes. How do you think they did it, and where would you look next?”
“I’m not an electrical or computer engineer. But I have heard of computer networks that are run over raw copper wires in the electrical outlets in homes. Maybe it was something like that. I know Al Qaeda has a lot of western-educated geeks in their ranks who could figure it out.”
“Hmmm.” Wyatt looked down at the floor pensively. “I am not a computer nerd either, but I know someone who is. Maybe I’ll run it past him.”
“Well, that’s my two and half cents.”
“Thanks, Charlie. I’ve got to go check some other leads. Keep me apprised of anything else that comes to mind.” She handed him her card. “Here’s my cell phone number, in case something happens to come to mind.”
He took the card from her.” Trooper Wyatt, can I give you a piece of advice?”
“Sure.”
“Watch yourself. These are not mere criminal types—they’re killers. They make the Mafia or Hells Angels look like pussycats. They will kill any perceived threat with no hesitation. You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in some very serious business.”
“Thanks again, Charlie.”
She turned and walked out the door. It was time to try Marcus’s cabin again.
Chapter 14
Marcus Johnson’s Cabin
Salt Jacket Alaska
18 December
19:00 Hours
Chief Wasner and his SEAL team were to meet Marcus at his cabin. From there, they were going to stage for the trip into the woods to find the North Korean agents. He gave them directions, then left while the SEALs gathered their gear.
At 19:00, he pulled back into the parking area in front of his small homestead cabin. As Marcus’s Jeep rolled up the tree-lined driveway, he noticed another vehicle parked in front of his home. The long, white car had the word TROOPER emblazoned across the trunk. Marcus’s headlights illuminated the side as he pulled up parallel and saw the Alaska State Trooper emblem set in a blue diagonal stripe across the driver’s side door. A shadowy figure sat inside.
Marcus parked his Jeep and stepped down from the boxy vehicle onto the hard packed snow. His boots crunched noisily against the silence of the night.
“What? Is that trooper back to give me a speeding ticket now?” Marcus muttered as he stepped around the front of the vehicle.
The trooper got out of the cruiser and slowly started toward him. This guy’s kind of short for a trooper, and thin
He stood in the darkness as the officer approached. Watching the way the body moved, it gradually dawned on him that this was not a male trooper.
“May I help you?” he asked aloud.
“I hope so,” said a voice.
Marcus’s stomach suddenly fluttered like a million butterflies had just hatched from cocoons deep in his gut. He hadn’t heard that voice in years, but it was unmistakable. “Lonnie?” he asked.
“Hi, Marcus,” she replied. “I was sent out to ask you some questions regarding the two men you met yesterday at the Salt Jacket Store. And I ….”
“What are you doing here?”
“I told you. I was sent out to ask you some questions…”
“I heard that, but why you? Did your dad set this up?”
“Possibly, but I don’t think so. I was on regularly scheduled duty in the area this week.”
“Look, Lonnie, I don’t have time to talk to you right now.”
“This isn’t a personal visit,” she said. Her voice was cold and professional. “I need to verify that these are the two men you saw yesterday, and ask you some questions about what you heard them say.”
“Let’s step inside, then,” he said, “It’s too dark here to see the pictures.”
“You need to get an electric light out here,” she answered.
“No,” he blurted. “I don’t need anything.”
Lonnie was taken aback by his curtness.
They entered the cabin and were immediately greeted by the warmth of a fire glowing in the stove at the corner of the room. Despite the comfortable heat, an icy chill hung on Marcus’s demeanor. He reached up to the gas lamp suspended from a log support beam in the center of the room. He turned the small knob that jutted from the side of the lamp’s metal base. The light became as bright as a hundred-watt electric bulb.
Marcus held the papers in the light. He stood with his back to Lonnie.
“Yes, those are the two men. This one is Nikola. The others name I didn’t catch, but Bannock told your dad it was Adem.”
He turned to hand the pictures back to her. As his gaze moved from the pages to the blue-uniformed trooper, Lonnie took off her blue smoky hat. Her face came out of the shadow of its wide brim and glowed in the light of the Coleman lamp. She was beautiful. Just as she had been the last time he had seen her so many years earlier. Just like she was in his dreams.
Marcus stopped mid-motion and stood there staring at her, unable to move.
“What?” she asked.
Marcus’s expression softened, but only for a moment, then the iciness crackled back across his face. He snapped out of his temporary paralysis and handed her the papers.“Nothing.” Marcus turned aside, then continued, “They said something vague about how when they complete their mission, they want to get into the slave trade business. Then Nikola smiled and told me he was going to cut my balls off and sell me as a eunuch on the slave market in Yemen. He obviously didn’t know I understood him, and I didn’t let on.”
“What was your impression of them?” she asked. “Your military impression?”
“They are terrorists,” he said flatly. “They’re up to no good, and I expect you are going to find out what.”
“That’s what we are working on.”
“Well, if that answers your questions, I have some work to do. So you need to leave.” He walked to the door, grasped the handle, and pulled it open.
“Look, Marcus.” She let out a sigh. “This was not my idea, me coming out here, that is. I know
there are a lot of issues we need to work out, and ….I … uh…”
Several vehicles crunched across the snow of Marcus’s front yard, interrupting Lonnie mid-sentence.
“Now is not the time,” Marcus said as he motioned her out the door.
They stepped outside to see three large, white Ford F350 crew cab pickup trucks, each hauling a trailer with two snowmobiles. A dozen men got out of the trucks, all wearing white smocks over their clothing. Chief Wasner and Staff Sergeant Beckwith approached Marcus and Lonnie.
“Okay, Mojo, what next?” Chief Wasner asked. “Is the trooper coming with us? She doesn’t exactly seem to be dressed for it.”
“No, she’s not. She’s not involved in this.”
Lonnie looked at Marcus. “What is going on?”
“You need to go.”
She glanced over to the men at the trucks. They were unloading equipment. Several of the men took assault weapons from duffle bags they had lifted from the backs of the trucks. The men quickly checked the weapons, then strapped them around their bodies.
“No, I’m not leaving!” Lonnie insisted. “These men are armed with assault weapons! What in the hell is going on here, Marcus? Who are these men?”
“Trooper Wyatt, these men are old friends of mine from Spec Ops. I offered my house as a staging ground for an exercise they’re having up on Eielson. That’s all this is.”
Lonnie looked back up at him. “Mr. Johnson, you are one poor liar. You had better let me in on what is going on here. Or…”
“Or what?” Marcus growled. “You’ll arrest more than a dozen men armed with machine guns and take us in for questioning? I have work to do. Trust me. When the time is right, I will tell you what’s going on. For now, just believe me when I say that it’s in your best interest not to know yet. Now unless you have a warrant, you’d better get in your car and go.”
In the light of the headlamps, she could see some of the faces of the men present. They were hard-looking faces. Their eyes bore the cold glare of the professionally violent.
“Is this related to the two men I showed you?” she asked, regaining her professional tone.
“That’s what we are going to find out,” Marcus answered. “I’ll let you know when I get back. In the meantime, just trust me.” He paused and looked straight into her eyes. “I have never let you down.”
The words stung like a hot needle piercing her heart. She was at once furious that he would hurl such barb at her when she could not defend herself, and racked with guilt at the truth of his statement. He had always kept his word to her. It was she who hurt him. She was the guilty one.
Lonnie walked quickly to her patrol car and got in. She had to get out of here before her emotions boiled over and she made a fool of herself in front of all these men.
As Trooper Wyatt drove away, the group of Navy SEALS returned to their preparations.
“Seems like you know her pretty well,” Wasner said.
“Yeah, I used to. We’re old acquaintances,” Marcus replied.
“Yeah, right. Old acquaintances, my big hairy gluteus maximus. You sounded like ex-marrieds to me.”
Marcus’s face was hard and angry. He abruptly turned and walked back toward the cabin, ignoring Wasner’s comment. “I’m going to get my gear. Let’s get moving.”
As he walked away, Beckwith said, “Wow, Chief, sounds like you touched a nerve on that one.”
“Hmmm.” The chief scratched his head. “I never knew old Mojo had been married. Imagine that.”
Ten minutes later, Marcus came out of the house, dressed in over-whites like the other men. He crossed the yard to where his snowmobile was parked beside the house, mounted it, and started its engine. The machine’s high-performance engine fired right away and Marcus slowly turned it around, driving up to where the others stood.
As the last of them loaded their gear, they mounted their snowmobiles and started the engines. The sound produced by the mass of suppressed snowmobiles was an eerily quiet rumble, like a gang of other-worldly beasts, a deep hunger growling in their throats as they crouched in the snow, preparing to leap up and devour their unsuspecting prey.
The band of warriors took off down the trail next to the road. Wasner’s SEALS rode two to a sled. The man in back held his weapon at the ready in the event of danger. They drove with no headlights.
Every man wore the latest 5th generation full-field, color night vision goggles which allowed them a complete field of view in near total darkness. The goggles looked like large wrap-around sunglasses with thick lenses. Rather than rest on the tops of their ears, the night vision glasses were held on by a custom-fitted, over-the-head strap that contained micro-technology to translate the slightest light waves and heat signatures into visible objects. They were equipped with anti-flash technology that registered unexpected bright flashes, such as vehicle headlamps and gunfire, and instantly suppressed the area of the lens where the flash occurred to avoid eye damage. In the light of tonight’s three-quarter moon, the visibility was as good as if it were noon on a sunny day.
They gunned the machines quickly up Johnson Road to the trail Marcus had taken earlier. Without having to stop to check traps, it would take less than an hour to get to the spot where Marcus had earlier taken his lunch. Silently, they stalked through the night in an eerie, snow-covered replay of the Ride of the Valkyrie.
Chapter 15
Thursday, May 14th, 1998
Airfield Loading Area
Plymouth Naval Base, England
01:00 AM
The men sat quietly around the tarmac, awaiting the final preparations of the C130 crew that would transport them, with the assistance of two in-flight refuelings, to a wide jungle airstrip four miles outside the village. They would be inserted via a touch and go maneuver wherein the aircraft descends to the runway, slows enough for the men to run out the back ramp, then ten seconds later is pulling up again and leaving the area.
This maneuver, while being highly effective, is also quite dangerous. The pilots have to work within the constraint of a minimum runway length of 5000 feet. The airfield the Royal Marines would be using for this operation was exactly that long, according to intelligence records. Just in case, the C-130 they were flying in was equipped with JATO, or Jet Assisted Take Off, propulsion tanks. These fuel-filled canisters reduced the minimum runway length to less than 4000 feet, as long as the Marines disembarked without incident.
The tactic, successfully employed by the American Army Rangers during the invasion of the island of Grenada in 1983, allows for a fast-moving aircraft to drop a large number of troops without parachutes and leave the area before the opposing forces can figure out exactly what is happening.
Operation Brothers Keeper, as it was being called, would insert the Royal Marines of 2nd Troop, Mike Company, 43 Commando, and Gunnery Sergeant Marcus Johnson USMC, in that manner. The Marines would then move on foot three miles to the orphanage. Once there, they would offer to extract the British nationals and any other Europeans in the immediate area, then move everyone willing to go to a field two miles to the west of the village. A squadron of Sea King helicopters would then pick up the entire group. The helicopters were already on the way to Guinea from a Royal Navy fleet based in the South Atlantic.
Once the extraction was complete, all persons would be taken to a safe airfield in Guinea, loaded aboard the waiting and refueled C-130, and returned safely to England. That was the plan as laid out in the briefing room. Plans seldom happen as intended.
While the Marines waited on the airfield tarmac, Marcus took advantage of the downtime to pull out the letter Pops had brought him in the mess hall. He examined the envelope for clues as to where it was from. It was remarkable that the letter had made it to him at all. The whole thing was a smear of ink and forwarding labels that rendered it almost double its original thickness.
Unable to determine from whom it came, he pulled up a corner of the glued-down flap, pushed a finger in, and ripped the top open in a smo
oth, sliding motion. Inside was a single-page letter written in ink, by hand. It took him several minutes to recognize the script. It was not his mother’s handwriting, full of big looping letters that rolled across the page. This handwriting had a more regular, almost squarish, appearance to it. Marcus glanced over the front of the letter, then turned the page and saw in the bottom corner the name and signature of Lonnie Wyatt.
Marcus,
I know it’s been a long time. I’m sorry in every way you can imagine for the things I have done and not done over the years. I wish I could make up for the mistakes I’ve made and the pain I’ve caused you. I’m writing this letter to let you know that things have changed. I have changed.
I love you.
I always have, but in my own selfish understanding, or lack of understanding, I could not comprehend how you could want to stay in the Marines and claim to still love me. It hurt me so much because I thought you loved your precious Marines, and the violence of that lifestyle, more than me. I couldn’t understand how you could reject me like that. When you wouldn’t leave the Corps, I was so angry and broken that after I returned home, I would yell and scream at my parents or my students, then break into tears for days.
That has changed now—my understanding, that is. I don’t know if you were aware of it, but I am now an Alaska State Trooper, stationed in Palmer for the time being, but soon to be sent out for a bush assignment. I left the school district about two years ago and started this new career in order to help change the world in a more active manner. About the middle of the academy in Sitka, something clicked in my mind and I had a sudden realization of what you must feel for the Marines.
Until I became a trooper, I had never known what it was to make a physical difference in the lives of other people. A few weeks ago, I found myself face to face with a rapist who had hurt several young girls. He tried to escape, but I was able to chase him down on foot, and took him into custody. As I cuffed the beast, it felt as though I had just saved the lives of a dozen girls, maybe more. The feeling was good, very good.
