I thrust my shovel into the ground again. This time I hit something else. Looked like a collarbone. I shoveled it aside. Somebody had been buried in the dirt. Correct that. More than one somebody. With the next thrust of my shovel, I hit another skull.
“Meryem,” I said.
“Yes, Michael?”
“You see what I’m finding here?”
I glanced back at her. She looked sad, vulnerable.
“Keep digging, Michael.”
I could have sworn I had heard her voice tremble. I kept digging and the bones kept coming. Clearly, I had hit upon a grave. I dug two more skulls out of the dirt and rubble before the wooden crossbar was half exposed. Then I heard a rapid staccato pop!! Loud, but not overbearing. It was gunfire, which meant that whoever was after us was still coming. A rock and more dirt fell from the ceiling of the tunnel above. I redoubled my efforts with the shovel.
I dug up more bones. A few femurs, a hand, a spine, but I managed to expose the wooden crossbar. It was held in place by two large iron U-bolts. I kicked the wooden bar from one end, slowly moving it all the way through the U-bolt. But the door didn’t exactly swing open. It didn’t move at all. It was all I could do to stick the shovel in the crack between the doors and lever them apart, because on the other side of the doors was more dirt.
Another shot reverberated through the tunnel, this one closer than the last. Bones crunched beneath my feet, the gritty earth lodging in my fingernails, as I rocked the big door back and forth. But I knew I was making progress. Slowly but steadily, I opened a big enough gap between the doors for me to stand between them.
There was more earth on the other side of the doors, but when I stabbed it with the shovel, the blade went through it more easily than I had expected. I speared the shovel into the dirt again and it went in even easier than before. On the third try, the shovel cut through the dirt like butter. I knew right then that my luck had changed. It was almost too good to be true. Because when I twisted the shaft of the shovel and wiggled it back and forth, a finger of light shone through. I could see blue sky. We were out.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Meryem!” I called out.
I turned and found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.
Chapter 50
MERYEM AIMED THE barrel of the AK-47 squarely at my head. The machine gun didn’t bother me as much as the grenade she held in her other hand. But most disturbing was the smartphone she clutched alongside the grenade. Because the fact that she possessed the phone told me that Meryem was not what she seemed.
She stared down at the bones beneath my feet.
“These are my people,” Meryem said.
“These are bones,” I replied. “They haven’t been people for a long time.”
“These are the Kurdish people who gave their lives to hide the Device. I am a Kurd. I am sorry for not being honest with you about this, but it’s time you learned the truth, Michael.”
Not good, I thought. Not good at all. I knew that Meryem was Turkish. But I had dismissed Kate’s notion that Meryem might be Kurdish because Kate was a liar. Of course, sometimes liars told the truth.
“My people died in this place long ago so the Device could be hidden and not found. They knew they would not see their families again and they accepted it. They hid these weapons and built this tunnel. They sacrificed themselves so we might one day have a homeland. But the location of this place was lost. Now that you have helped me find it again, my people will not have died in vain.”
Meryem stepped forward, keeping the AK-47 leveled at me. The bandolier fit nicely over her shoulders, causing her breasts to swell where it cut between them over her damp T-shirt. I laughed to myself. Not only had I read the situation wrong, I had been betrayed.
“Get a new phone?” I asked.
“The telephone is not your concern, Michael. Dig.”
I dug. A basic tunnel to the outside was beginning to take shape.
“So you want to tell me who you’re working with?”
“No. I would like you to dig.”
I stayed quiet only because Meryem made a call and I wanted to listen to what she had to say. The conversation was very brief and in Turkish. I couldn’t make out much of it, but I managed to pick out the word, kale. A second later she hung up. Then she pulled the pin on the grenade.
“What are you planning on doing with that?” I asked.
“Please, Michael. Enough questions. Dig the hole.”
The tunnel in the dirt was bigger now. Big enough that I could see through it. I was looking into some kind of dilapidated, roofless structure, the blue sky visible above. I was happy to be getting out of there, but for whatever reason, Meryem considered me the enemy. Azad, I thought. The whole situation with that guy had never sat well with me. That’s why I had asked her about him again on the gulet. But she had told me that he was just a job and I had believed her. Or was it simply that I had believed her kiss? I needed to buy time. Lucky for me, she had her hands full. Literally. Mobile phone, grenade, and machine gun. Not a great combination.
I heard more gunfire from farther down the tunnel. It was loud this time which meant it was close. I turned back and Meryem smiled sadly. Then she tossed the grenade. Not at me, but backward, above the truck and through the tunnel. It was a decent throw. But she had to turn away from me to lob it. And I used that precious fraction of a second to burrow my way into the hole I had dug.
I didn’t think Meryem would shoot, and even if she did, I was now behind the barn door and surrounded by earth. But I knew that I didn’t have much time to get through the dirt pile and out into the open. And the tunnel was tighter than I had anticipated. There was a pause followed by a thunderous shock wave, after which I felt the hard barrel of a gun jam into the small of my back. I had been quick, but not quick enough.
“I was just leaving,” I said.
I couldn’t see Meryem, but I could feel her behind me.
“The grenade was to stop your friend Kate.”
“Kate is no friend of mine.”
“Maybe so, Michael. But your allegiances do not matter now. Now we do what must be done.”
There was no sense arguing with an armed woman, so I pulled myself out into the daylight. Meryem wriggled through the tunnel after me. She kept the AK aimed squarely at me, but I still believed I knew her. I believed that I could get through to her. That bit of arrogance proved to be my first mistake. But my much larger error, was to think that I knew Meryem at all.
Chapter 51
I ROLLED DOWN the pile of dirt to find myself crouched inside what remained of an old barn built into the hillside. There were four walls, the roof long since caved in to the dirt floor below, weathered ceramic tiles crunched beneath my feet. Aging agricultural implements took up the space on the left of me, and there was nothing to my right. The wall opposite the pile of dirt consisted of another set of barn doors even more gray and weathered than the ones I had just climbed through. I pulled what I thought was a pebble from my ear, but when I looked at it more carefully, I saw that it was a tiny bone. Not my own, but almost as unnerving.
“Raise your hands, Michael Chase,” Meryem said.
I turned to see that she was carefully keeping me covered with the rifle as she scrabbled through the hole in the dirt.
“Meryem, enough with this crap. We’re on the same side here.”
She slid to the bottom of the pile, ten feet away from me, the barrel of her rifle carefully trained on my center mass.
“We were never on the same side, it is time you understood this.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I don’t have any kind of deal with Kate.”
“Maybe you do not. Maybe you do. I don’t care.”
“What are you trying to do here?”
“Hands on your head. I won’t say it again.”
“Or what?”
She lowered the barrel of the gun and shot the ground at my feet. Dirt flew and I did as I was told. I p
ut my hands on my head. I was beginning to doubt my plan to reason with her. Then I heard the distant rattling of a diesel engine. I figured we were probably by a road.
“You want to tell me what’s up?”
She looked at me warily, her long, dark hair slightly mussed, well-defined arms straining against the weight of the weapon.
“I told you my brothers fought in the army and died. I told you my mother died of grief.”
“You told me that they were conscripted. That they died fighting the Kurds on the Iraqi border.”
“On this point, I was not so truthful, Michael. My brothers, like me, were Kurds. They died at the hands of the Turkish Army.”
I didn’t like what I heard. I realized that Meryem had been fundamentally wronged in her past. Whatever I said would not change that. I was dealing with a true-believer.
“I would have thought that was the kind of thing MIT would screen for in their applicants.”
“When my mother died and I left home, I had no paperwork, no identity. The Kurdish people, they helped me with this. They gave me new papers so I could join MIT. Do you know why they did this?”
“You were young and impressionable. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there.”
Meryem smiled.
“Yes, maybe so,” she said. “But this is not the reason.”
“Then what is the reason, Meryem? What’s the reason you’re holding me at gunpoint?”
“You know the man who wrote in Tesla’s journal? The man who hid the Device?”
“Bayazidi,” I said.
“This man, Bayazidi, was my grandfather.” Meryem said.
I thought about it. I knew how intelligence organizations worked. I worked for one. They loved to recruit based on need. And a woman in Meryem's position would have had need written all over her. Bayazidi being her grandfather, that was just the icing on the cake. These Kurdish terrorists must have thought they’d hit the lottery with Meryem. When they had recruited her she was a scared teenager. She had matured into the ultimate sleeper agent.
“The truck? Did you know it was hidden underground?”
“I knew I was looking for a vehicle, yes. I saw it in the shadows when they were moving their flashlights.”
“And the bones? The human remains? Did your grandfather hide those as well?”
“Those people gave their lives so no one among them but one would know the Device’s location. Sacrifices needed to be made.”
“So is that what I am, Meryem? Another sacrifice?”
The distant diesel clatter got louder. It was accompanied with a rhythmic squeaking.
“Please, Michael, do not test me. The current Turkish government is the enemy of the Kurds. But there is opposition. There are those who want the Turkish people to live in harmony with my people. But that government will not be allowed to be. Those in power will not allow it.”
“So you want to blow up a city to make a statement? How many innocent people are going to die?”
“I do not intend to blow up a city.”
Not what I was expected her to say, but I went with it.
“Then put the gun down.”
I stepped forward, but Meryem raised a hand. She wasn’t about to let me get any closer.
“Do you know who is on tour in the Mediterranean as we speak?” Meryem said.
“I don’t know, Lady Gaga?”
“Your United States warships,” Meryem said. “I do not intend to blow up a city, Michael. I intend to blow up the American Sixth Fleet.”
Chapter 52
I WASN’T SURE that I had heard Meryem correctly. Blowing up the Sixth Fleet was crazier than blowing up New York. How was hitting the American Navy going to change anything? But then I began to see her logic. It might not change anything if the attack came from a terrorist group. But if the attack came from within the Turkish government itself, if she was somehow able to convince them that MIT or the army were responsible, for instance, then there was no way the Americans would let the current government stand. An unprovoked attack of that nature would be an act of war. Those in power would be out. Moderates would take over the Turkish Parliament. It was a plan that might just work. Except for one potential problem.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I said.
“What is that?”
“The Tesla Device is an old piece of experimental technology. Even if you could pinpoint the location of the Sixth Fleet, you don’t know whether the weapon will work.”
“It will work, Michael.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we will be silent no longer,” Meryem said.
Which was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Because it didn’t sound like an answer. It sounded like extremism. And there was no way to argue with it. The distant diesel clatter had grown to a low rumble. It was loud enough that though I could see Meryem's lips move, I couldn’t hear her speak. I raised my hands farther above my head and moved another step toward her, even though it meant walking into the barrel of a gun. Then the wall behind me came crashing down in a billow of dust. It just slammed down in one piece, doors and all, as a huge orange excavator crawled in on its creaky metal tracks, its scratched silver bucket gleaming in the sunlight.
I DOVE TO the side, but Meryem didn’t waver. She kept me covered from the front as the big excavator crawled toward us. A second gunman, hanging off the cab of the excavator, covered me from behind. Clearly, I was rapidly losing control of the situation. Whatever my previous assumptions regarding Meryem, it was now evident that she was a much bigger problem than I had anticipated.
My point about the Tesla Device not necessarily functioning as advertised was probably wishful thinking. If the CIA tech team feared it enough to produce that simulation of New York being flattened, I was a believer. So were the Green Dragons, MIT, and now, apparently, the Kurds. I kept my hands raised above my head as I considered my options. The problem was, I wasn’t seeing many.
Thy guy hanging off the excavator jumped down and herded me into the corner of the barn. It was the soldier with the chipped tooth from the yacht—the one I had made eat his shirt. He grinned at me, but I didn’t smile back. No need to encourage him. The entire barn now consisted of two walls, standing only because they were nailed to the buried doors leading into the tunnel. The excavator’s big shovel lowered with a hiss of its hydraulic boom and I saw that it was Faruk in the operator’s cage. Meryem pointed him to the pile of dirt in front of the barn doors and the mechanical shovel began to move the earth aside.
It took only one bucketful for me to realize that I was in even more trouble than I had previously thought. The big bucket picked up a quarter of the dirt in the pile in one scoop. Whatever their plan was, they’d be done quickly, which meant that they’d soon need to deal with me. Faruk dumped the dirt near the eastern wall and swung back for another load. I counted off the seconds in my head. The first shovelful had taken him roughly twenty seconds to move. At that rate, I had maybe a minute before I needed to act.
Meryem covered me from the front, the guard from behind, as I watched the big bucket swing back toward the dirt pile. Hydraulics buzzing, the excavator’s boom hummed toward its target smoothly and efficiently. But then it kept going. It swung past the pile and came to an abrupt stop two feet away from me, digging down and taking a big bite out of the earth. Within seconds there was a three-foot-deep hole beside me. You didn’t need to be a genius to see what he was doing.
Faruk was digging my grave.
Faruk dumped the earth from the bucket, and then came back for a second bite, the big shovel digging deep. Then he paused his shovel for a moment and shouted something in Turkish at Meryem. Meryem shouted back. I thought I recognized one of the words. A word I had heard before.
Kale.
The shovel started working again, but I had my opening. I looked Meryem in the eye. Her AK remained sternly leveled at me.
“This isn’t you, Meryem. Are you going to stand by and watch them do this?”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I didn’t get it.
“No, Michael. I will not stand by. Fools and civilians stand by. I will finish my family’s work.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Faruk manipulated the excavator. He swung the shovel up and over us this time, dumping it near the opposite wall. This was it. Action time. I took another step toward Meryem. Another step toward the barrel of her gun.
“Do not come a step closer,” she said.
It was all about the timing now. It would be a careful ballet. I waited for the shovel to swing back behind me. I needed cover. Cover from the rear. The bucket was a big piece of steel and while it was behind me, it would shield me, but it wouldn’t take care of my problem on its own, I needed to work to do that.
It’s counterintuitive, but the closer you get to your opponent’s gun, the more you increase your likelihood of survival. It’s because in close, if your opponent is within your reach, you can make a difference. And I was close to Meryem, just a few feet away. But I took her advice, I didn’t take a step closer. She did, though. She took a half step forward, steadying herself. And that split second when her left foot was off the ground spelled one word: opportunity. A walking human is more precariously balanced than most people realize. I swept in with my right foot and snapped out with my left arm, sweeping the barrel of the Kalashnikov up. I knew I risked a nasty burn from the gun as I took hold of its barrel, just as I risked being shot in the back by my favorite guard. The move was fluid, focused, and smooth. The barrel of the gun went up and Meryem went down.
Blown Circuit Page 20
