by AJ Tata
Matt grabbed him by the shirt and jerked him down between the seats, freeing the yoke to respond to his command. A calm female voice began a surreal mantra. “Terrain. Terrain. Pull up. Pull up.” Matt pulled back hard on the controls, leveling the aircraft out of its steep dive. Just as he thought he had bought a moment’s reprieve, the soothing voice was replaced by a shrill buzzer that seemed to increase in volume and intensity as he lost airspeed.
“C’mon, man,” he muttered in frustration. He grappled with the controls, cast a quick glance over his shoulder, willing Peyton to step forward and say, “Just push that button.”
Turning back, he stared intently at the flashing lights on the instrument panel and then grasped the throttle and pushed forward, not sure how the aircraft would respond. The engines’ whine dissipated and Matt felt the hollow sensation of weightlessness.
The jet yawed to the right and steadily fell toward the toothpick, which now, in the ambient light of the airfield, actually looked the size of a decent country road. Matt knew the plane was going to crash. There was no doubt about it. He vaguely recalled Peyton telling him that landing gear had lowered before he shot the pilot. It occurred to him that he was fodder in the nose cone of an unguided missile destined to plow unceremoniously into the asphalt and break apart wherever the hell he was. And he was curiously reminded of the old adage that all landings are controlled crashes.
Nothing controlled about this crash, he thought.
It all happened very fast. The wings tilted port, then starboard. Bright lights and warnings came alive in the cockpit. The now-familiar, automated female voice warned him of fast-approaching terrain. “Pull up. Pull up.” Matt brought the nose up and lined it up with the runway before he lost sight of it and the evening sky filled the windscreen. He was testing the response of the rudder pedals when he felt the aircraft pound into the ground, the landing gear absorbing much of the impact before rebounding him aloft.
Matt observed that he had at least hit part of the runway. Whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen. He frantically switched on buttons to off, pulled back on the throttle, and felt the airplane smack the ground again—hard this time—belly-flopping on the blacktop.
His neck snapped back, and the last thing he remembered was thinking, I should have told her about the UAVs.
CHAPTER 6
1800 hours, Friday
Lake Moncrief, Quebec Province, Canada,
Jacques Ballantine landed his lightweight Sherpa with ease along the rocky bank of Lake Moncrief, Quebec Province, Canada. Stepping from the aircraft, he absently touched his fingers to the scar above his eye. A crisp north wind stung the wound that would never heal. The smell of jet fuel in his nostrils reminded him of the oil wells burning twelve long years ago and further fueled his sense of purpose.
The scar also reminded him of his purpose today, so many years removed from the fury that was the mother of all battles. He had not aged well since his capture in Iraq and the loss of his brother. With every thought of Henri he could feel the burning in his eyes, black onyx that faintly concealed his endless desire for revenge. While Jacques had been unable to secure his insurance policy before Garrett had blended anonymously back to his combat outfit, he was fortunate to have been funneled to the right interrogator in Riyadh. Simply the idea of what might be in the backpack had been powerful enough to motivate his questioner into negotiating for his release. Jacques’ part of the deal was now coming due, his interrogator having lived up to his end of the bargain. Jacques was more than happy to fulfill his obligation.
Ballantine stared into the Canadian evening sun as it dipped into the horizon. To the north he could see the oxbow lake that had been his home for the last two years.
He found his way along a small trail, past a clearing on his left, and entered the forest. Picking his way through the undergrowth and towering fir trees, he found the dilapidated shaft. Rotten four-by-fours crisscrossed the entrance to a cave. Years of rain and sun and insect infestation had worn the wood to its core. He carefully stepped through the weeds and stooped below the fallen logs into complete darkness.
Jacques laid his AK-47 against the timber and pulled open a small wooden door that gave way to an unusual series of lights and sounds that contrasted sharply with the serenity of the countryside.
Inside the mineshaft, Ballantine found his staff and the communications systems with which he would lead the war against America. The Central Committee was calling this Phase Two. The first phase had been the 9/11 attacks. Now was the time the Central Committee would best be able to achieve its goals, catching the Western world leaning hard in the wrong direction, the United States and Great Britain having committed hundreds of thousands of troops to the attack on Iraq in March. Off balance was how he had described it to the others.
“Virginia, are we ready?” he said to an attractive black woman standing near several muted television screens flickering a variety of images.
“The Central Committee in Panama City has delivered its message,” she said, handing him a printed e-mail.
Jacques looked at the piece of paper. His anonymous Yahoo! e-mail account had worked just fine. His exchanges with the committee had allowed them to plan their attack as if it were a wedding. He was the groom, coordinating with all of his groomsmen around the country for a wedding that was to take place tonight.
“Congratulations on your long-awaited marriage,” the note from the North Korean read. “We hope to see you at six p.m. tonight. We are sure it will be a wonderful affair.”
It was innocuous and direct. Of the billions of e-mails sent every day, this one would surely not raise any suspicion.
“Jacques, it’s time,” Virginia said, handing him a satellite phone. “We do this. We pick up Matt Garrett and retrieve your rucksack. And we’re done.”
He stared at her, remembering why their love affair had ended. He had tried to love her, and maybe did, but the sorrow he carried with him since his brother’s death had turned to hate—to poison—melting any positive emotions he would experience. A former American military intelligence officer, she was a traitor to her country. Although that was cause enough for him to be smitten with her, she also had an elegance that he could not resist.
He took the Qualcomm satellite phone from her hand, his fingers lightly brushing hers.
“I wanted to kill Matt Garrett while Zachary Garrett watched,” he said, blankly staring past her at the television screens. “I can still see that man killing my brother every day. It never leaves me.”
“Zachary Garrett is dead,” Virginia said. “Someone else took care of that for us.”
“That was my mission,” he spat. Then he forced a half-smile. “But it is done.”
She paused. “Did you ever think that we would be able to get all of the weapons out of Iraq and to their destinations?”
“I always believed it was possible.” Ballantine saw that the Americans had fallen for everything. Saddam’s last stand would go down as a strangely reversed Trojan horse. Instead of offering a gift, Saddam lured the Americans into his own country after Ballantine and the others had positioned his WMDs elsewhere. Brilliant, he thought.
He turned toward his executive officer and said, “Chasteen, are all cells ready to go?”
A burly, blond Canadian parolee from the Quebec province, his head almost touching the low-hanging beams in the command center mineshaft, Chasteen had proven crucial to helping Ballantine get his ersatz fishing guide service up and running two years earlier. Since then, the Sherpa had been invaluable in running supplies across the Canadian border into a small airfield in Vermont.
“Yeah, boss. They’re set. All met their reporting windows this morning,” Chasteen said. All of the groomsmen had notified the best man that they were attending the wedding.
Ballantine felt the cool air of the damp mine shaft crawl across his skin. He turned and walked toward the center of the room. A few of the other staff members were monitoring radios and satell
ite communications. This was a state-of-the-art command and control center.
“Okay, team,” Ballantine said, “today it begins. This is Phase Two.”
They nodded.
Ballantine pressed the green button on the phone and transmitted.
CHAPTER 7
Charlotte, North Carolina
Groomsman No. 1 felt the weight of his cell phone in his pocket as it vibrated against his leg. Opening it just outside the Charlotte Sting locker room in the coliseum, he said, “Hello?”
“What does the attendance look like tonight?”
“Looks like a full house,” the groomsman replied.
“The groom appreciates the tickets.”
“Anytime,” he said into the small handset.
The groomsman flipped the phone shut, took a deep breath, and moved toward the first concession stand.
The benefactor of one of the most controversial presidential pardons ever, Groomsman No. 1 had been released fourteen years early from a mandatory, no-parole, sixteen-year prison sentence at San Quentin. He had been caught by DEA and FBI agents, operating the largest cocaine ring in the Southwest. His father had laundered and funneled his drug money into massive political payoffs that wound their way up the channel, resulting in said pardon.
It had been nearly seven years, and the groomsman had been a model citizen, obeying the speed limit, paying his taxes, avoiding the gangs and cartels—except for being caught within Jorge Cartagena’s long reach. Cartagena, baron of the infamous drug cartel in Colombia, was a key player in the Central Committee. He was leveraging the fact that when Groomsman No. 1 had gone to jail, he was nearly one million dollars in debt to the organization. Supply chain problems. Cartagena gave the groomsman one option, which was to get a job in North Carolina as a concession manager.
The groomsman wiped the sweat from his forehead, reasonably confident he could get away with what he was about to do. Hell, if his father was able to bribe the president of the United States, well, then, that added a whole new perspective to things.
The groomsman was dressed in his typical work attire: an old Hornet’s No. 12 shirt, baggy, black dungarees, and Nike high tops. He kept his hair cropped close to his glistening black scalp and wore black wraparound sunglasses.
He walked up the ramp to his first concession stand, which he found stacked with lines twenty-deep. Each concessionaire was doling out popcorn, hotdogs, and beer. Keg beer fed through taps, each keg containing forty gallons of beer. Five hundred such kegs, thirty of which the groomsman had personally delivered in his coliseum work truck early that morning, were emptied by thirsty fans every game. He had driven right through security, tipping his hat at the attendant he had known for five years.
Cartagena had put the groomsman in touch with the keg supplier, an oily-looking man who nervously stacked and secured the kegs inside the extended Chevy van sporting a large, teal and indigo Sting symbol on a white background. “Most are loaded with a hundred pounds of explosives. Three contain enough VX nerve gas to kill the first responders. Should kill just about everybody,” the supplier said. “Be careful, bud. Watch those speed bumps. Oh, and make sure you keep the remote with you, or nothing will work,” Cartagena’s contact added, handing him a box of remote-controlled fuses as if it were a box of doughnuts.
Groomsman No. 1 had driven the short way from the link-up point at no more than twenty-five miles an hour, palms sweating the entire way. He off-loaded the kegs one at a time and used a modified golf cart to move them in pairs to each of the fifteen concession stands. He tucked these special kegs into the back of the storage coolers so that that they would be the last to be used.
He inserted the fuses and armed them, only needing the radio-frequency-delivered code to start the clock ticking toward a simultaneous explosion of 3,000 pounds of explosives, all conveniently stowed beneath the upper bleachers and near the support columns of the arena.
He whistled as he walked toward the first concession stand and pressed the small, black remote control that looked similar to the average television handset. He then negotiated his way past the assembled crowd, opened the stanchion, and nudged his way through the concessionaires into the storage locker.
“Hey, baby,” the sound of a voice startled him, “good to see you.” Charlene Pierce worked the concession nearest the best courtside seats because she was attractive. She had smiled her way into the position where she now waits on the wealthy patrons that would occasionally wander out and mix with the commoners.
“Hey, Charlene. Good to see you too,” the groomsman said, completing his task. Normally he would have kissed her on the cheek, but he was on a mission, and he knew that he didn’t want to be caught in the coliseum when the business went down.
But she didn’t let him off the hook. She grabbed his arm, her hand wrapped around his large biceps, and said, “Come here, baby, and give me a big kiss.”
“Not now.”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing, baby. Just got lots of checking to do, you know?” But he acquiesced and stopped, spinning around to give her a quick peck on the cheek.
She pressed her body up against his and started to push him into the storage room.
“Maybe we should just check this stuff out together,” she said, her long eyelashes fluttering close to his face.
He stared into her large brown eyes, pushing her away. “Baby, let me check you later. Boss man is really upset,” he said.
She grabbed his crotch playfully and said, “You my boss man, big guy. Come back and see me.”
“Sure thing,” he said, giving her another quick peck on the cheek. He thought to himself that he had always wanted to pursue Charlene, even though she was only nineteen. Too bad he would never have the chance.
He found the kegs and leaned over the two in which he was interested. He saw that, indeed, the timer was working: 28:15 . . . 28:14 . . .
He had wasted precious time with Charlene, but now that he was sure the remote worked, he could cruise past the others and simply press the button. He had calculated fifteen minutes to make the full circle and get outside. He would be pulling onto Interstate 85 about the time the explosives cut the building in half.
As he walked, he heard the announcer’s voice bellow over the loud-speaker system. “And we have 12,000 in attendance today. Congratulations on another smashing day of attendance for our own Charlotte Sting!” He dragged the last word along until it was dwarfed by the roar of the crowd.
The groomsman quickly proceeded around the main corridor, pressing the remote as he passed each concession stand, briefly catching a glimpse of the red light flashing, indicating the radio signal had been delivered.
It took him twenty minutes to complete his rounds. He had run into three people who wanted to shoot the breeze with him, and two concessionaires had flagged him down from a distance to complain about one issue or another. He eventually found himself looking from a distance at Charlene, back where he had started his journey. Her eyes caught his and she winked. He waved, then trotted down the ramp toward the locker rooms and out past the security guard to the employee parking lot.
Charlene smiled as she thought about the possibilities. She pulled the beer tap forward, and foam started spitting out at her.
“Time out, time out,” she shouted, laughing. Her customer stepped back, smiling. “Gotta get another keg,” she said.
Charlene opened the storage-room door and walked to the back of the keg room. As she walked, she made a mental note that she and the keg-man could do a quickie if everyone were really busy out front. She grabbed the dolly at the rear of the storage room, and instead of moving to the front row of kegs, neatly lined two-deep along the cooler wall, she slid the dolly beneath the keg nearest the back.
As she nudged the platform of the dolly underneath and pushed with her hand on the upper lip of the keg, she noticed a small black box with red flashing numbers situated where she would insert the tap in a few seconds. Not understandin
g either the weight or the black box, she edged the keg back onto the floor and leaned over to inspect it further.
“What the hell is this?” she whispered to herself.
The flashing light read 00:08 . . .
00:07 . . .
00:06 . . .
00:05 . . .
Even her simple, uneducated mind figured it out with about two seconds remaining.
“Oh, my–” she said, backing away.
Groomsman No. 1 was pulling onto I-85 when he heard a dull thud in the background. In his rearview mirror he saw dust pouring out of the coliseum in a large, billowing cloud. Oddly, he felt no guilt. Yet for some unexplained reason, the use of nerve gas seemed unfair to him. He had placed 30-minute time-delay fuses on the VX nerve gas aspirators that would release a fine, toxic spray just as the first responders were arriving to help those unfortunate few who might have survived the blast.
Regardless, it was not a bad day’s work. It would be nice to have Cartagena off his ass. The groomsman blended anonymously into society, never to be heard from again.
CHAPTER 8
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Groomsman No. 2 felt the sweat trickle down the base of his spine. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. The basement tunnels of the Mall of America were deathly quiet. The only noise was the water moving along the miles of plumbing and air-conditioning pipes.
He clipped his cell phone to a small wire that ran through one of the ventilation ducts to the roof of Macy’s department store. He had installed the wire the previous week in preparation for the “wedding.”
The groomsman’s job as an inspector working with McGraw Maintenance Systems over the past six months allowed him unlimited access to the maintenance tunnels under the mall. He engineered his route, covering nearly a mile of passageways beneath the huge complex, using the blueprint he had downloaded from the Architectural Digest Web site.
