by AJ Tata
Two years earlier, after his release from the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, he was contacted by an old Earth Liberation Front buddy, who invited him up to do some muskie fishing. After a week this friend, Chasteen, had sold him on Ballantine’s plan. It sounded like a good thing—a second chance. Besides, he had grown tired of spray-painting sport utility vehicles and setting fire to new housing developments, clearly the minor leagues for eco-terrorists. And Chasteen’s offer to strike a blow against the largest symbol of capitalism in the Midwest held an additional attraction for him. It would graduate him to the next level.
Moreover, knowing Chasteen like he did, the groomsman understood that once he had been made aware of the plan, he would either accept the invitation onto the team or wind up as mulch around Ballantine’s boxwood hedgerow. He preferred option A.
He opened his cell phone as he watched the green flashing light turn red, indicating an incoming call.
“Anything on sale today?” a voice asked.
“Wedding gifts seem to be the item of choice,” he responded.
“I’m sure the bride will be impressed.”
That’s it, the groomsman thought, shutting the phone. Time to get to work. He stuffed the phone in his pocket, looked to his right, and armed the first of twenty-nine high-explosive devices placed near structurally important supports. He then moved out like a rat in a sewer to arm the others.
Groomsman No. 2 moved quickly along the tunnel, checking the last few arming switches, making sure the explosives were synchronized to detonate at precisely the same time. Arriving at his destination, he stooped low to avoid some water pipes and then stopped at his last set of explosives.
He worked quickly as he flipped the metal toggle and watched the red numbers begin their countdown.
He had chosen his route so that he would finish arming his last igniter near the restrooms downstairs. This would allow him to exit up the escalator and out through any variety of doors on the main level. He could get in his truck, which he had parked near Macy’s, and escape the carnage about three minutes before it occurred.
The groomsman grabbed the metal knob and pulled the gray door open. A burst of light met him as he stepped onto the tile floor of the mall’s bottom level.
“Hey, Mister Saunders,” a little boy said, smiling as he stepped away from the ladies’ room door.
Groomsman No. 2 stopped, nearly tripping over his feet, as he noticed eight-year-old Erik Larsen standing by himself. Quickly regaining his composure, he said, “Hey, Erik, where’s your mom?” He had graduated from Braham High School with Erik’s mother, Joan. They had dated for a time and remained friends ever since.
“She’s in the bathroom with the girls,” he said. Erik looked down, and noticing that he had drifted from the spot where his mother had told him to wait, he took two steps back toward the wall and looked up. “Mama told me not to move.”
“Then you best stand still.”
“Yes, sir.”
Saunders wiped his sweaty palms on his tan workpants and then pulled his baseball cap down over his forehead. His eyes shifted left and right, his body telling him he needed to move out, and quickly.
“Tell your mom I said hello,” he said.
At that moment, Joan Larsen came tumbling out of the ladies’ room with her three other children in tow, all relieved and ready to go shopping.
“Hey, Johnny, what are you doing here?” Joan smiled, happy to see a familiar face so far from home.
“Oh, hey there, Joan. Just doing some window shopping,” he said nervously. “Look, I gotta run.”
Joan frowned. “Oh. Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
In all his time walking the maintenance tunnels beneath the mall, Johnny had stayed out of contact with the people above, like a bridge troll who never came out of hiding. He walked over to Joan Larsen and kissed her on the cheek. He rubbed a hand in three-year-old Chelsea’s hair.
Chelsea hugged his leg and said, “Bye, Mister Johnny.”
“Goodbye, Joan,” Johnny said, his eyes beginning to burn. He promptly turned and began running toward the exit, leaving Joan confused. He figured he had about two minutes.
Joan watched as her childhood friend sprinted up the steps and through the Macy’s door. She stood a moment, staring into empty space, until Erik said, “What’s wrong with Mister Saunders, Mama?”
It took a minute, but in typical fashion, she shrugged it off and gathered up her troops.
“Okay, gang. Where we going first?”
Chelsea started to say, “Camp Snoopy,” but the explosion prevented her from ever uttering the words.
Groomsman No. 2 pulled out of the parking garage in his rusted Ford pickup truck, turning his head as he heard the detonations. He knew that those not killed by the explosions would suffer from anthrax poisoning.
His job done, he would never be heard from again.
CHAPTER 9
Friday, Delaware River
Groomsman No. 3 waited impatiently, toying with his cell phone. Did it work? Would they call? He continued to check the black Motorola StarTac. Sure enough, it was on.
His forty-two-foot Newport sailboat rocked softly in the gentle current of the Delaware River. His left hand rested atop the captain’s wheel, his right hand palming the phone. He looked at his mainmast, the sail wrapped tightly around the aluminum pole. The stiff breeze funneling down the valley caused him to huddle against himself, and he wondered whether there were others performing the same tasks this evening, or if he was the lone operator. He guessed the prison network had produced other operators looking for an easy payoff, and perhaps a bit of revenge against the system.
The call needed to come within the next ten minutes for his attack to be successful. After that, the window of opportunity would close for twenty-four hours. And then it would be too late.
The call came.
“Hello,” the groomsman said.
“How are the winds today?” a voice asked.
Those were the words he was waiting to hear. “Perfect for a honeymoon sail,” he said.
“We’ll see you at the wedding.”
The groomsman’s heart leapt at the thought that he was going to make history. He cranked the engine and maneuvered the sailboat to the middle-support pylon for the Amtrak rail bridge. The track carried the daily Metroliner from Washington, DC, through Philadelphia and Trenton, finishing at New York City’s Penn Station.
He had seven minutes.
He lifted a coiled rope and fed it through one of the pulleys and into a rusty piton drilled into the concrete pillar. The bridge maintenance personnel used the pitons to hold their barges against the current when they were making repairs on the bridge trusses. The sailboat adequately secured to three pitons, the groomsman dashed below to the galley and armed the explosives. The red light came on and began its countdown.
He had five minutes.
He took one last look around the galley, where explosives were stacked to the ceiling like boxes in a moving van. This will be perfect.
He emerged onto the aft deck and stepped over the taffrail onto the teak platform. He untied the half-hitch in the nylon rope and stepped onto the bobbing Zodiac. He figured there were about three minutes and change remaining.
In the rubber boat he crawled to the outboard motor and pushed the ignition. The motor coughed and spit white smoke at him. Not good. It always started on the first try. He waited a few seconds, trying to be patient, careful not to flood the engine.
Another push on the starter produced more coughing, more smoke.
“Come on . . .”
He was starting to worry. There were five hundred pounds of explosives sitting less than a hundred feet from his rubber boat. He knew who would lose that contest.
The boat merged into the painfully slow current, but it wouldn’t carry him beyond the blast radius in time if he didn’t get moving. With less than two minutes to go, he heard a faint noise in the
distance, and looking up, he saw the train approaching the bridge. Right on time.
The groomsman had rehearsed this part many times in his sailboat, dropping anchor about a quarter mile away and just watching, timing the train every night, taking the mean average of the time the train would hit the lead portion of the bridge and calculating his timing from there. The train never varied more than a minute from its scheduled time of 6:07 p.m. Blow up the bridge too soon and the conductor would have the opportunity to stop; too late, of course, and the train would continue safely on to the next stop. Whoever kept the train running on time was doing a good job, the groomsman thought.
Less than a minute now.
Sweat was dripping from his forehead onto the manifold cover of the motor. Please, God, he thought, unconscious of the incongruity of his prayer and his objective, as he tried again.
The Evinrude 125 engine roared to life, drowning out the sound of the fast-approaching train.
The groomsman opened the throttle, snapped a 180 in the Zodiac, and aimed his nose south, away from the bridge.
He felt the heat from the explosion lick at the back of his neck, coaxing him to turn around. Groomsman No. 3 watched the fireball arc skyward, highlighting the smoke against its orange brilliance. The pylons crumbled as though they were made of plaster. He held his breath as he watched the middle span of the bridge buckle and then sag, swinging as if on a hinge and dropping toward the base of the northern supports.
He had opened a gap in the bridge by dropping a thirty-foot span into the river. The train was entering the lead edge of the chasm and there was nothing, nothing, the conductor could do.
The groomsman slowed for a second to take in the beauty of his work. It was almost an art form. There, against the roar of the fire, screeching metal, and the sputtering of his Evinrude 125, he watched the Metroliner dive into the Delaware River. First the engine and then the passenger cars careened off the severed rail and plunged, almost in slow motion, into the water.
Groomsman No. 3 was certain none of the 530 passengers would survive. He steered his rubber boat silently along the black water, stopping at a boat ramp five miles downstream. He leapt into waist-deep water, holding the boat by a rope. Leaning into the raft, he flipped the timer on another set of explosives, giving him five minutes to get out of the water and into his pre-positioned vehicle.
Pulling away, he watched the small boat explode and burn.
He would never be heard from again.
CHAPTER 10
Middleburg Command Post
Meredith Morris shook her head in disbelief. How could this happen? Less than an hour after Matt and Peyton had lifted off toward Fort Bragg, the call came into the Suburban that Charlotte Coliseum had been brought down with explosives. Then, immediately after the first report, they received the information about the Mall of America in Minnesota and the Amtrak train in New Jersey.
Meredith traveled with the vice president back to the Middleburg command post, where the vice president immediately put his team to work gathering intelligence and monitoring developments and where she had a temporary office in one of the cottages, owing to the increased amount of time she had been spending with the vice president’s command team over the last several months. Since 9/11, the administration had divided the government into halves, so that if more attacks came, there would be fully functional primary and alternate command posts.
Hellerman had the domestic security, or Homeland Defense, portfolio while the president focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since her performance during last year’s Japan-Philippine crisis, Meredith had assumed a central role on the vice president’s team, even though she technically worked for the national security adviser. Hellerman had asked Meredith’s boss, Dave Palmer, to lend her to his detail and straight-away promoted her to senior executive service status, meaning she had the same rank as a general.
She stared out of her office in one of Hellerman’s old servant’s quarters. She could see acres of rolling countryside and the long airstrip that Hellerman used for aerial commutes to the White House. She sighed as the gravity of the situation settled over her.
She had spent so much time in Middleburg that she decided to appoint her alternate office with Civil War paintings, a Remington bronze statue on the coffee table, and a couple of Peggy Hopper paintings she had purchased on a visit to Hawaii. She figured it was the right mix to demonstrate to her mostly male peers that she had the balls to do her job.
Meredith had lived most of her life near Appomattox, Virginia, and had been unable to escape the magical history of that area. After graduating from Virginia Tech in nearby Blacksburg, she had fought her way into the Pentagon with her political science doctorate. From there, her looks and her brains had both played pivotal roles in securing her present position.
She sat back at her large mahogany desk with a cut-glass top. The desk had come from the vice president’s personal collection, she was sure. She flicked on the small green lawyer lamp and opened the top right desk drawer. Three framed pictures of Matt stared at her from inside: two of Matt by himself and one of them both on Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Of course, the televisions stayed on CNN and Fox News, with their continuous news tickers scrolling at the bottom: Metroliner rail down in Trenton, NJ . . . Terrorism suspected . . . Five hundred believed dead . . . Mall of America implodes . . . Thousands believed killed . . . Charlotte Coliseum destroyed . . . 12,000 in attendance . . . Dead and injured tally unknown.
Meredith shook her head. All the warnings and inspections and new government offices to prevent this, but somehow we failed.
“We’re still getting information in,” a voice said behind her. “We’ll have a meeting in thirty minutes in the operations center.”
She turned and saw Hellerman poking his head in her door. He had a handsome, tanned face framed by two shocks of gray hair that gave way to natural brown on the top. Perfect, bone-white teeth flashed, even when he wasn’t smiling.
She placed the pictures back in the desk and stood.
“I was just reading some of the cables. Have you seen this?” She held up a small manila folder.
“What is it?” Hellerman said, entering the office.
“This Predator thing,” she said, “I’m thinking this might be linked somehow. Was Peyton able to get anything else out of Matt?”
For weeks she had been studying the Predator case. Highly classified technology had been given to the Chinese, and now it seemed the military was missing eighteen Predators. Those things don’t just get up and fly away, Meredith thought. Each of them was concerned that China could migrate the technology to the Iraqis, who could then put them to use in the current conflict. She knew she was treading on thin ice; most of the transfers were suspected to be political paybacks from several years ago.
“I don’t know. Let’s just hope we can put the genie back in the bottle, as they say,” Hellerman said after a moment of thought.
“I think the saying is, ‘You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,’” she quipped.
“Have you seen this?” he said with raised eyebrows, changing the topic.
She stepped forward and took the folder from his hand. Someone had placed a Top Secret cover on it. Opening the file, she saw the standard cover disclaimer telling the reader that he or she would be shot at high noon on the White House lawn if he or she ever disclosed the material within to unauthorized personnel, or words to that effect.
Turning the next page, she read the cover, “Operation Maple Thunder.”
“Of course, but do I need to read it again?” Meredith asked.
Hellerman sat in a burgundy, high-backed leather chair facing her desk. Meredith sat in its twin across the small table with a bowl of candy in the middle.
“I think Ballantine is behind the bombings today. We have an operative ready to go in alone and snatch him in his hideout in Canada. The Canadians are refusing to cooperate and assure us there�
��s no terrorist operating from their country. So the trick is doing something, but making it look like we did nothing. Our operative is perfect. He has the perfect cover. He can go in and do this thing and if he fails, we have deniability; if he succeeds, we have deniability. Read it,” he said pointing down at the folder. “We need to talk to the president shortly.”
Meredith opened the file and scanned its contents then placed it in her lap. Her first thoughts were sparked by instinct, but she fought them back in order to formulate an objective report. Huh, she thought.
“Sounds like a good idea if we really believe this guy can get close to Ballantine. So, really, what’s our deniability?” she asked.
“Complete. In the administration only the president, you, and I know about this. On the back page are the names of two people at Fort Bragg who know: the special operations commander and the doctor who brought him back to life, so to speak. And they are the only ones who know this individual’s name.”
“When I was looking at this the other day, I wondered whether you were okay with this from a moral point of view,” she said.
“What’s not to be okay?”
Meredith watched him carefully. He was baiting her. He wanted her to fight him on this one, she could tell.
“For one, the government is taking an individual and giving him a new identity without him knowing who he really is. As you say, we don’t even know who he is. The legal, moral, and ethical implications reach far beyond what any of us can imagine.” She spoke without emotion, no hint of criticism in her voice. She was just playing the role she knew he needed.
“Sure, but if we get close to Ballantine and can stop him before he kills another five thousand people, then we justify it,” Hellerman countered.
