Hidden Threat

by Anthony Tata

  She lightly pawed the photo, as if to touch her father. She flipped the last page and saw her handwriting again: It is my goal to one day help the invisible children of Africa. They are invisible because they have no parents . . . and nobody cares, except me and my daddy. Amanda Garrett.

  She closed the book and placed it back in the box, aware of what might occur if her mother caught her with it. Perhaps to distract herself, she picked up her cell phone to check it for messages. To her dismay, the battery was dead, and she had forgotten to plug in the charger. She leaned over and connected the black cable to her Razr.

  Amanda walked to the bathroom in her pink flannel pajamas. She stared at herself in the mirror, rubbing her reddened eyes and wiping away the stains of her tears. She ran a stream of toothpaste onto her toothbrush and started brushing her teeth as she walked back into the bedroom. Absently, she picked up the phone with her free hand. She had no messages, which she thought was odd. For two days now she hadn’t heard from Jake, but the North Carolina cops had put the fear of God in both of them, so she cut him some slack.

  Now it was Monday morning and with the full realization that Jake might still be in North Carolina, she freaked.

  She realized that she had stopped brushing her teeth, the toothbrush dripping saliva and paste onto the carpet. She stared straight ahead at the window that opened onto her front yard.

  She tried Jake’s cell, which went straight to voicemail. Dialing his home number Jake’s father answered.

  “Amanda, we’re going to have to ask you not to contact Jake anymore,” he said.

  “Huh?” she said, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand. What’s happened? Where’s Jake?”

  “Jake’s in jail and is charged with burning down your father’s house and the attempted murder of Ms. Riley Dwyer, your psychiatrist.”

  “Burning down my father’s house?” Amanda said. “It’s not burned! He did none of those things.”

  “This is a legal matter now and we can’t have you discussing any of this with Jake. Thank you for your cooperation, Amanda.”

  Jake’s father, the lawyer, hung up the phone. She stared at her cell phone blankly for several moments as the gravity of his words settled over her.

  She could feel the vivid memories in her mind beginning to recede as if someone had picked up the remote of her life and punched reverse. It was as if she was the patrol leader, and her team behind her was being picked off one by one.

  Then, in a moment of pure realization, when she realized what she had done, she screamed.

  CHAPTER 41

  Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

  Monday Evening

  Mary Ann Singlaub sat at her computer terminal in the small cubbyhole of the public affairs office known as the RLB, or re-locatable building. Amongst the twenty some journalists that had to elbow through it’s narrow spaces each day, it was, more affectionately known as “Really Lousy Bullshit.”

  It was a basic four-walled structure with plywood shelves tacked into the walls at waist level, like chair molding, and held up by two-by-fours hammered at an angle from the outer edge of the plywood to the wall. About thirty computers were perched precariously along this makeshift workspace. An Internet drop was the only perk, and once a Web site loaded, a task that sometimes afforded one the time to retrieve coffee, use the latrine, and take a smoke break, it would work reasonably well. She typed in her password and pulled up the Google Web site. Typing in “Colonel Zachary Garrett,” she hit Return and watched 72,116 hits appear.

  “Wow,” she said to herself, and hit the News tab, which narrowed the search considerably to 127 articles.

  She blew a small tuft of hair away from her forehead as if it were a fly bothering her, swatting at it as well. She scrolled through the articles, most having been posted within a few days, naming him as the senior U.S. officer killed in the War on Terror. Scrolling and scanning, Mary Ann zeroed in on an article that mentioned the colonel was survived by a daughter in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Bingo. Another potential source.

  She quickly Googled “Amanda Garrett” both in a Web search and a news search, which turned up a trove of swimming meet times. Deep into the search of the 237,124 hits on Amanda Garrett, Mary Ann found two court documents. She printed those out and continued to scan until she found her address and home phone number. She then went back to Zachary Garrett in the news.

  She froze on an article released only hours ago on the Associated Press wire and published in the Charlotte Observer by a freelance journalist named Del Dangurs. While it was possible that he was new, she found it curious that she had never heard of him, especially since he was reporting within a military domain, her area of expertise.

  Her curiosity at who the reporter might be was replaced by shock at the content of the article.

  Colonel With Spartanburg Ties Dies In Afghanistan

  Leaves Behind Questionable Legacy

  By Del Dangurs

  Colonel Zachary Garrett was killed in a helicopter crash last week in Afghanistan in the U.S. military’s continued failed attempts to find any of the leaders of the 9-11 attacks on America. A review of the officer’s life raises important questions about his death and the suitability of the senior officers we have fighting the War on Terror today.

  Court records show that Colonel Garrett was divorced, estranged from his daughter, and had twice been summoned to defend himself against breaking-and-entering and child-abuse charges.

  But today’s revelation that Colonel Garrett allegedly provided Al Qaeda reams of top secret documents detailing the U.S. military intentions to withdraw from Afghanistan on a more rapid timetable have shattered the revered commander’s reputation and perhaps set back the war on terror by years. He is also implicated in the massive leak of classified operational documents to the Wiki-Leaks website. This is a developing story and the Charlotte Observer has exclusive inside sources providing up to date information.

  With a senior leader such as Colonel Garrett living a life of familial abuse and abandonment, and potentially even guilty of treason, is it any wonder we are not further along in the so-called Global War on Terror?

  It is true that Garrett played some nominal role in defeating the Ballantine attacks last year. Yet conspiracy theorists make much of the fact that he actually captured Ballantine in the first Gulf War, arguing that their relationship might have actually strengthened over the years and led to a role in the attacks for Colonel Garrett. After all, they ask, how did he mysteriously wind up in Lake Moncrief, the terrorists’ den? The explosive treason charges against Colonel Garrett seem to strengthen the critics that argue Garrett was in collusion with Ballantine.

  According to a Defense Department official, selection of military commanders is conducted by a group of officers, picked at random every year. . . .

  “No way.” Mary Ann went back and read the first part of the article again, her jaw agape.

  She knew all of the sayings about what goes on behind closed doors, but also had spent a considerable amount of time at Fort Bragg, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. Few officers were accorded the respect that Colonel Garrett received from the Special Operations community. There were none that she knew of that maintained the respect of everyone at Fort Bragg the way Colonel Garrett did.

  So, either the good colonel lived a double life or someone was doing a hatchet job on him. Having never heard of the reporter, she had her guesses.

  As she was printing the article, she heard a commotion near the front door. There was some jostling, and someone shouted, “Hey, where are you going?”

  As Mary Ann Singlaub stood and turned, she found Sergeant Lance Eversoll staring her in the face.

  “This your idea of a human interest story, bitch?”

  Stunned, she looked at the piece of paper in his hand. The story was being broadcast all over the Web to millions of people. MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews, and all the dot coms were publishing the story.

  “I had nothing to do with that story, Sergeant, and if
you call me bitch again I will throw this coffee in your face and kick you in the nuts. Do we understand each other?”

  She had been raised in the South, too.

  They squared off, the public affairs office a tense set of bystanders in Dodge City, Kansas, waiting to see who would draw first.

  “I’m pissed off, too. I’ve never heard of this reporter. Even if it were true, which I don’t believe it is, it would be wrong to publish this bullshit. Now is there somewhere we can talk?”

  She followed him out of the newsroom, leaving behind a whirling vortex in their wake.

  ***

  Matt Garrett paced the floor of the Special Operations joint operations center, or JOC. He would stand at the large plasma-screen television that was displaying the Predator satellite feed and then break away, walk across the room, and stare at a map that included Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  “You see that bullshit article on Zach?” Matt fumed.

  “That’s the point. It’s bullshit. Settle down,” Rampert said.

  “Easy for you to say, General. Not your brother.”

  “Not your solider. So, it affects both of us. I’m going to have some pasty white inspector general over here seizing all of our computers and investigating us probably by sundown.”

  Matt stared at Rampert and nodded, ceding the point.

  “We think Rahman leaked it, but we can’t be sure. I mean, why the Charlotte Observer?”

  “North Carolina maybe? Make it seem more homespun kind of thing. It’s already gone viral,” Matt said.

  “Or you’ve got a mole in the CIA that knows about Searing Gorge.”

  “Always a possibility,” Matt said. “Also you may have a mole here. No matter how much it pisses me off, though, the story helps in a way, you know? I’m sure some of this is already leaking out from AQ central”

  Van Dreeves interrupted, pulling them to the map.

  “Matt, we’ve got about twenty AQ with flashlights moving up this ridge here.” Van Dreeves was talking to him at the map, pointing with a stick at the exact location. To Matt, on the map it looked less than a few inches. So close, yet so far. “It’s about five miles into Pakistan from the border of Kunar Province. We’re violating all kinds of shit by looking over there.”

  “Who gives a rat’s ass?” Matt paced back to the Predator feed.

  “Sir, see that right there, that’s enemy looking for something,” Hobart said, pointing at the screen.

  “Maybe they’re just infiltrating, you know, coming this way,” Matt countered, not wanting any hope to blossom too soon.

  “Too far away,” Van Dreeves chimed in. “Bastards usually take an SUV up to the border area, some small village, get their weapons, and cross into the country in tough terrain.”

  “Okay, so what are we going to do?”

  Rampert turned away from studying the map and walked over to the group. “Let’s see if we can get closer with that Predator.”

  “No way, sir. Paks will shoot it down. I’m flying over the Afghan border and angling in.” Matt knew that the Predator operator was actually at an air force base in the United States. Van Dreeves was on the phone telling the guy what to do. The wonders of technology.

  “Can we look ahead of the group to see if they really are chasing someone?”

  “We can try. I’ve already done one scan, but it’s hard to find just one. I’m not sure we would have found the twenty if they didn’t have flashlights.”

  The group listened to Van Dreeves give a “Move to the left, okay, that’s it, now up some” to the operator over the secure phone. They watched the camera slide to the left of the screen and then toward the top where it was obvious, even in the darkness, that a trail led up the mountain.

  The camera rotated back and forth between hot white and hot black, showing anything that had a heat signature—an animal, a warm vehicle engine, or even a rock retaining the sun’s heat—as white or black respectively. Switching between the two helped the observers determine living from inanimate objects.

  “What’s that?” Hobart was pointing at the mountain ridge. The anonymous operator at the unknown air force base in the United States had selected hot white as his heat signature of preference.

  All eyes focused on a white spot. Really, that was all Matt could make out. It was moving slowly, carefully along the spine of the mountain ridge.

  “Could be a sheep, camel, anything,” Rampert said.

  Matt was holding his thoughts closely. He wanted to be circumspect here amongst these warriors with whom he had so far shared two battlefields. Having personally saved Rampert, Hobart, and Van Dreeves during the Ballantine action in Canada, his stock was as high as it could possibly be within this clandestine community. He did not want to abuse what really amounted to authority. Though these men did not work for him or even in the same organization as he did, he knew that if he gave the order, as he had done last time, “Let’s go,” they would grab their weapons and say, “Where to?”

  They continued to watch the white figure slide across the screen, moving now perpendicular to the axis of advance of the flashlights. They could clearly see about fifteen to twenty white spots moving up the trail. The lone white figure was moving toward the bottom of the screen, toward the Predator flying over the Afghan border.

  “The one by itself looks similar to the ones moving up the mountain. I think it’s him.” Matt’s words hung in the air, reverberating like a gunshot echo. He had pointed out the most obvious thing of all. If they believed the twenty figures moving up the valley were people, then the one moving by itself along the ridge must be a person also.

  “Good point,” Rampert noted. He ran a leathery paw across his gray crew cut and turned to Hobart. “What’s the grid?”

  There was a tone of resignation in his voice. He did not relish doing two unauthorized missions across the border into Pakistan in less than a week, but he would. He had a soldier on the ground, and it was his responsibility to bring him home alive.

  “Grid’s actually about eight kilometers east of the border, right here.” Hobart handed a map to Rampert while Matt looked over his shoulder. Matt could see that the white heat signatures were on a ridge, about two kilometers away from where they had done their previous raid.

  “We know the flight route most of the way. We can use the same crew. We’re going to need Van Dreeves to stay here and talk us through the Predator feed.” Matt’s words came out rapid-fire, machinelike.

  “Roger. We’ll take Eversoll in Van Dreeves’s place,” Rampert added. “VD, why don’t you go find Eversoll? Tell him to be ready in fifteen. Hobart, give the pilots a call, let them know we need blades turning in ten.”

  “That’s fine. I’m broke dick anyway,” Van Dreeves responded. “As much as I hate to miss the action.”

  “Are you monitoring Rahman and our two friends in Yeman and Dubai?” Rampert asked.

  “Roger that, sir. Rahman’s not come up on the computer. I’m guessing he’s involved in this hunt, at least from a command and control perspective.”

  “Let me know if something breaks there,” Rampert directed.

  “We’re pissing away time, General, let’s go,” Matt barked. “Once VD gets a bead on Yemen and Dubai then we’ll focus on that, but until then my brother is the priority.”

  The team began moving quickly around the joint operations center. Matt stood motionless, watching them. He looked over his shoulder as Eversoll came in, slinging his packed gear over his back. Matt nodded, thinking that it didn’t take Van Dreeves too long to find Eversoll, who he surmised was most likely waiting directly outside the JOC in anticipation of this exact mission.

  “We ready, sir?” Eversoll’s voice was firm.

  “Think so. Think we’ve got him pegged.”

  “Count me in.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Soon Van Dreeves and Hobart reappeared. Rampert walked in the door with his M4 in his hand. Matt looked over at his weapon and rucksack.<
br />
  “Let’s go get my brother.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Spartanburg, South Carolina

  Monday Morning (Eastern Time)

  Melanie Garrett put down the phone and sat at the kitchen table nibbling at breakfast. Amanda would be down soon and off to school, but this was an interesting conversation, she thought to herself. She began to thoughtlessly twirl a Hermes silk scarf through her hand. Memorial Day was approaching, so she decided she’d go with a flashy pattern of red, white, and blue for her matching linen jumpsuit.

  She pulled the material through one hand and then retraced the route through the other while staring absently through the sliding glass door and across the recently stained deck. A steaming cup of coffee sat next to her elbow. She was looking at nothing in particular, just lost in thought.

  “Who was that on the phone?” Nina asked.

  “Principal Rugsdale. He just got back from some Southeast principals’ convention in Raleigh. He was extending his condolences about Zach. Why are you here so early on a Monday morning?”

  Nina stared at her a moment. “Needed an update. Lot’s going on. Dan Rugsdale? What’s he care?”

  “Not sure he does. Maybe he was just being nice.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else could there be?” Melanie’s eyes remained fixed on the horizon.

  “Sounded like you were on longer with him, that’s all.”

  “You worry too much.”

  Changing the topic, Nina said, “I checked out last night when you said Amanda probably wasn’t going to come by. No point in paying for an extra day.”

  “Bree picked her up.”