The Wreck Emerged

by Joseph Webers

“The Larry Williams? Of course. I feel like I know him already, with all that you’ve said about him.”

  “Please bring your sampler from Emergent. I want him to see what’s there. What time can you come?”

  “If it’s okay, Lisa and I will see you for breakfast. Gert already told us she’d love to watch Madeline, the three-year-old, whenever Lisa and I go out. I think she had shopping in mind, but I’d like to spend as much time with you as you’ll let me. I have one other thing, too. You’re still coming with me back to England, right?”

  “I’ve been asking God about that, Maggie. I’d love to go, but I haven’t gotten an answer from the Lord yet. I don’t know if his job was you, or if there is something else.”

  “I still have this envelope full of money you promised me you’d help me spend.”

  “Ah, yes. There is that!”

  And so it stood.

  125

  It was 9 p.m. on the East Coast. As the US Marine Corps heavy-lift MH-53K King Stallion helicopter settled onto the tarmac at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, a small band struck up the Marine Corps Song, and several hundred family members and other well-wishers cheered, waved, and held up welcome-home banners.

  In the background, the base Sergeant Major turned to the base commander. “Sir, the best part of any deployment is when you come home!”

  “I’m glad we did this for them,” he replied. “They earned it. Did you see the paper this morning? The story’s been all over the news for the past week, and not a single mention of our Marines. Now that they’re back, we can make sure they get the press they deserve.”

  When Lieutenant Colonel Paul Washington alighted from the aircraft, he looked around at the crowd and spotted Lance Corporal Juan Wilson. LCpl Wilson caught his eye, and gave a quick salute and a thumbs-up, grinning broadly.

  After all the Marines had deplaned, a man and woman in civilian clothes came out and edged away from the crowd to a waiting sedan bearing official government license plates. When the crowd had dispersed and the Marines started unloading the helicopter, the car drove to the rear of the aircraft. Phil and Penny retrieved their belongings and were taken by the waiting FBI courier flight to Dulles International Airport.

  126

  The next morning, JC and Harper scheduled their flight to Washington, DC, then returned to the warehouse to complete their study of the items from the two locations. They took a break halfway through to discuss their Internet searches from the previous evening.

  “My list had six cities in India,” JC began, “then four cities in eastern China, five cities in eastern Europe, and five cities in California. Some big, some small. Some had multiple locations, like Naples could be in Italy but also in three different states in the US. Madera could be in Portugal but also in California or Pennsylvania. There are two Raipurs in India. So I assumed they were grouped logically, but didn’t really see any connections. I suppose it could be another wild goose chase, but I’m more inclined to think this list got put in by accident. How about your list?”

  “I started off assuming they misspelled Baghdad. Bad assumption. I googled Dudhkundi, and there’s only one of them in the whole world. It’s an abandoned airfield in India. Here’s where it starts to get exciting, based on what you told me about your list. When I looked up Bagdad the way they had it spelled, I found it was an abandoned airfield in California. Zeljava and Mostar have abandoned airfields in eastern Europe, and Hangzhou is an abandoned airfield in eastern China. There is a new Hangzhou Airport, but the old one is still there.”

  “Wow, places to hide MiGs!”

  “But for what?”

  They finished their analysis, wrote a list of pertinent findings for Harvey, and developed a set of questions that needed to be asked of the prisoners. Harvey’s driver picked them up and brought them to the hotel where they retrieved their belongings, then headed to the airport.

  127

  At 7 a.m. on July 5, two vans and two unmarked police cars met in the police headquarters vehicle yard in Bakersfield, California. Jon Whitaker, FBI WMD Directorate, addressed the group as they made final plans. “Surveillance reports no traffic has entered the parking lot yet. My personnel will enter and apprehend all persons in the warehouse. Wilson’s Bakery is a cover for the terror cell you were briefed on this morning.

  “We will make our move as soon as the first workers arrive. We expect we will be able to take them by surprise and avoid a shootout. Officer McArty’s team will control the parking lot. There is only one way in and out. Officer McArty, as you pointed out earlier, vehicles entering the parking lot will not see any of the action until they have pulled in.

  “There is a chemical delivery scheduled for today. The drivers will most likely not have a clue what they’re hauling, but until proven otherwise, they are accessories. The trailer will have a Department of Transportation placard identifying the contents as a combustible insecticide. It must not be allowed to enter the warehouse.”

  “Will you be wearing chem suits?” Officer McArty asked.

  “No, Sean. What they have inside is inert until it’s mixed with the component coming later. If the surveillance team reports them entering the building suited or masked, however, we will also suit up just to be on the safe side. Once we give the all-clear, your team will process all personnel while my team sweeps the building.”

  There was about a two-hour wait. At 8:55 a.m., the call came from the surveillance team that three vehicles had pulled into the parking lot, and three white males not wearing suits or masks had entered the warehouse.

  “Here we go!” Jon Whitaker said. “Sean, call your backup and have them ready to come on our alert.”

  It took the teams less than five minutes to arrive at the warehouse. The two vans pulled into the parking lot while the police cars loitered near its entrance. The vans pulled to the end, swung around, and stopped just short of the entry door. All agents rushed out of the vans. The first agent getting to the door twisted the knob, and when it opened, the entry team carried in the battering ram and dropped it on the floor. Jon Whitaker shouted, “FBI! Everybody freeze!”

  Everybody froze. The FBI team quickly rounded up the three in the warehouse. The one in the office was fumbling with his phone, but one of the agents, Paul Ramirez, grabbed it out of his hand before he could lock the screen. Jon called Sean McArty on the radio and gave him the all-clear.

  In all, the police team apprehended five more workers as they entered the parking lot. The eight were read their rights, and seven of the eight were loaded into the vans brought by the police backup. The eighth, Michael Walker, the man in the office who appeared to be in charge, declined the invitation to give a guided tour and tell what he knew of the operation there, so he joined his comrades, and they were all brought to the jail.

  The agent with Walker’s phone immediately changed the automatic screen lock time to Never and opened up the recent calls list. “Jon,” he said, when he brought the phone out to where the other agents were starting to look through the warehouse bay, “he must have been on the phone with a Rishaan Chabra when we busted in here. Look, Chabra called him at nine o’clock and was on for one minute.”

  “Make a list of his entire recent call list, Paul. Note those that are foreign, and see what you can find out about them from his contact list.”

  “I’ve already started that list. In the last twenty-four hours, he’s talked to Chabra only once but to a Rushil Singh three times. Same country code and area code. Do you know those names?”

  “No, but perhaps Bob does. I’m going to do a video tour with him now, to show him what’s here. I’ll ask him.”

  The warehouse bay was mostly empty. A delivery truck bearing the name and logo of Wilson’s bakery was in the center of the bay. All the doors were open, and several agents were taking pictures.

  “Look, Jon,” agent Kimberly Hall said, “it’s a dually. A heavy duty one at that. Why would they need that to deliver bread and cake?”

  “See if the floor
is beefed up, Kim. And what is that frame in there?”

  “Perhaps it will hold that steel tank by the loading door. It looks to be the same size.”

  Jon called Bob McGee on a video chat and showed him the warehouse. Besides the truck and steel tank, there was a plastic five-hundred-gallon tank labeled “SYRUP”, a ten-ton forklift, and a chain-driven hoist with a capacity rating of five tons.

  “Is the front cab separate,” Bob asked, “or does it connect with the rear?”

  “It is separate. The driver would have to get out of the truck and open the rear doors to get any bread.”

  “That’s odd. Delivery trucks usually have access right from the driver’s seat. Did you see the photos of the steel tanks they brought back from the island?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll send you one. You should be able to open the top of the one there and see the insides. Take pictures of that and send it to me with the others. Show me the office now.”

  The office was rather plain. There was a desk, filing cabinets, several tables, and four maps on the walls.

  “What’s on the maps?” Bob asked. “It looks like maybe their sales routes or clientele.”

  “One is a map of central California. There’s a route drawn from Madera through Hanford, back-and-forth with Visalia, on to Bakersfield, and finally Long Beach. The other three are city maps of Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with several routes highlighted in each going from north to south. I’ll send you pictures of those, too, along with a scan of all the documents in the office.”

  “Thanks, Jon. If this is a legitimate bakery, there may be another Wilson’s Bakery somewhere, with flour, sugar and ovens. Find it, and check them out. I’ll see what we have on those names you gave me. Send me everything you can get from the phone. Contacts, emails, pictures, where he’s been on the Internet, everything. Make that first priority.”

  “Roger. I understand you have a meeting with Phil first thing tomorrow. I’ll try to have everything to you by then.”

  Officer McArty was still there, waiting for instructions. “When that other delivery gets here,” Jon said, “have him take his load to your vehicle yard or other suitable place. Whatever you do, don’t let it be stored here. It’s relatively harmless, but don’t open the tank.”

  “How about the eight apprehendees?”

  “As soon as the other shipment gets here, it will be intent to produce a weapon of mass destruction. Will that be enough?”

  128

  Jimmy Branson did not know a lot about weather, but Jacob Strauss had given him a rudimentary understanding of Sand and Dust Storms before the helicopter carried him back to civilization. At 11:30 a.m., he was watching from his station in the Gulf of Mexico as the outer band of the SDS reached Emergent. To the north, a high-pressure cold front sweeping south from the arctic regions caused the storm to stall over the island, dropping thousands of tons of western African farmland, wastelands, and desert as the winds died down.

  The warm moisture the storm had picked up from the ocean during its trek north mixed with the icy arctic air to create a massive hailstorm pummeling the island. It would be three days before the tail of the SDS caught up with the leading edge. What was left of it would wander northwest toward Nova Scotia, finally petering out about four hundred miles offshore.

  129

  Just before midnight, Rishaan Chabra locked his wallet and keys in his desk, locked his house, and walked to the bus depot.

  When he had gotten up that morning, he was still in a funk from the night before. Something deep within him was telling him that Dasya was right, that the appearance of the plane on that damned island spelled doom to the project. Fear had replaced the anger he felt toward Rushil by the time he finished breakfast, but his rage was intensifying toward the airplane survivors.

  He couldn’t imagine what Rushil’s ulterior motive might be. He was beginning to realize that perhaps he was merely a pawn instead of the king which Rushil had spent a whole year building him up to be. No, that was impossible. God had put him on this mission and he would see it through. It was his mission, not Rushil’s, and all the plans, chemicals, and processes he had developed with the dead coward needed to be hidden, so Rushil would never find them if he were going to try to commandeer the project.

  It had taken him until after lunch to gather and wrap all the important papers in oilcloth and to bury them in the yard, deep under his trash receptacle. When he finished, the brick base for the trash receptacle looked like it been there, undisturbed, for years.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon fretting, pacing, and outlining several speeches he would give to the world as the project developed.

  At 9 p.m., he decided to call one of the team leaders to check on progress, if for no other reason than to calm his nerves. Wilson’s Bakery in Bakersfield should be open; the team leaders in Gwalior and Xingtai would be in bed and all Tetovo would be eating supper. He waited the half hour until 9 a.m. in Bakersfield and dialed Mike Walker.

  “Hello, Rishaan,” Mike said, “you called at a good time. We all just got here. The mixing bowl arrived yesterday, and we’re expecting the spare on Tuesday.”

  “Good. Call me when you get it. Are the ingredients for the latest recipe on schedule?”

  “As far as I know. We got five hundred gallons of syrup in a tank so far. A smaller barrel of canola oil is on the way as we speak.”

  Rishaan was about to answer when there was a commotion at the other end, followed by a clanging noise.

  “Gotta go! Call you back,” Mike said.

  Before Mike was able to press the End Call button, Rishaan heard in the background, “FBI! Everybody freeze!”

  A black cloud began to hover over Rishaan. His heart sank, but the rest of his body filled with adrenaline. He understood exactly what had happened in Bakersfield. It wouldn’t take them ten minutes to break into Mike’s phone and get the numbers for him, Dasya, Rushil, and all the team leaders.

  He had deduced two things: one, he would have at least two hours to get out of Allahabad, and two, they didn’t know he had heard them storming Wilson’s Bakery.

  By eleven thirty he had finished filling his backpack with the contents of his emergency box, which included a million rupees in cash and a forged passport Rushil had gotten him early on, for just in case. That, along with his laptop, a change of clothes, some toiletries, and some snacks for along the way, would be enough.

  The laptop went in last. Every half hour or so during the day, Rishaan had googled a picture of Maggie Trillbey, with or without Matt Carven, and cursed them with all that was in him. She was the darling of all England for surviving the plane crash, but to him she was the ruin of all his plans to be the hero of the world and the savior of the planet. Prisha, and therefore God, would be pleased for him to be the avenger of the atmosphere by eliminating her from among the living.

  Before he got to the bus depot, he discarded the gun he had used to kill Luka Stanković in a trash can outside the store where he bought bananas every day.

  He paid cash for a ticket to the Delhi Airport and soon was on his way. He didn’t know where he would ultimately end up, but his share of the money from Hem Laghari should last him quite a while. Even Rushil didn’t know he had been able to move it to an account untraceable to his name.

  Halfway to the airport, he decided he would call Dasya in the morning. Depending on his schedule, he might even be able to see him at the airport, since he would be on holiday near there. Then he would discard his phone.

  At the Indira Gandhi International Airport, Mr. Nimit Malhotra purchased a ticket with cash for the next available flight to Zagreb, Croatia.

  130

  The fishing trawler carrying the remains of the passengers of Air World Airlines flight 94 had managed to stay about two hours ahead of the storm for the first twelve hours. After that, it was out of danger as it departed from the storm’s path. On Friday, at 3:30 p.m., it steamed into Boston Harbor and up to its pier. Wai
ting for it was a long line of ambulances, a delivery truck bearing the name Ace Movers, and several cargo trucks from Air World Airlines.

  It would be several days before the trawler was completely unloaded. The Ace Movers truck was given priority, and soon the steel tank from Emergent was on its way to the CIA lab in McLean, Virginia.

  131

  As soon as the raid was over, FBI agents Jon Whitaker, Paul Ramirez, Kim Hall, and Mark Hayes had set up shop in the warehouse office, bringing in several crates of equipment from one of their vans. They quickly discovered that there was another Wilson’s Bakery in Bakersfield, and Mark was dispatched to find any connection with the warehouse.

  Paul started photographing, copying, and scanning every item and document in the bay and office. Occasionally, he would take a break to upload everything from his phone and laptop to their data repository in DC. He sent a text to Bob McGee to give him access instructions. Kim made a list of all the data she could find on Mike Walker’s phone.

  Jon was looking over Kim’s shoulder as she wrote down the recent calls list. He copied the overseas phone numbers, and immediately started an Internet search of the callers, starting with Rishaan Chabra. There were dozens of hits, mostly from Indian scientific websites.

  One site got his attention, the annual convention of the Federation of Indian Scientists, held in New Delhi in February 2019. He clicked on the site and was rewarded with the headline, “Keynote address: India’s Contribution to Global Warming, by Rishaan Chabra, President, FIS.” He clicked the link for a transcript, selected English, and downloaded the report. It was a short read.

  Jon called Paul, who came into the office with a handful of files. “Look at this,” Jon said. “A list of the seven worst polluting cities in India, with a detailed list of their pollution: Gwalior, Allahabad, Raipur, Delhi, Ludhiana, Kanpur, and Khanna. Did you run across any list like this in any of the files?”