Rogue Threat

by AJ Tata

  “Commander Krachev,” said Sung.

  “Thank you, Comrade Sung. We have necessarily kept a low profile, but are ready to execute our portion of the plan. Everything is in place and we will perform with precision.” Krachev sat back in his chair, his large shoulders slumping over.

  Eduardo Sanchez stood as the final speaker. The Cuban nationalist was a tall, light-skinned man sporting a pencil mustache just above his thin upper lip.

  “Everyone understands Cuba’s role in this operation,” Sanchez said. “We have been preparing for this for many years. Our country has been suffering the economic and political sanctions of the United States for nearly fifty years now. They have driven my countrymen into economic despair and we stand ready to unite with all of our brothers and sisters across the globe to destroy them. On order, we will begin operations to initiate the remainder of Phase Two operations and support Ballantine’s actions as well.”

  Sung stood and spread his arms wide. “I thank you all for your commentary and for your support in this operation. I intend to speak with General Ballantine soon.” He paused for effect and translation. “Our thoughts and best wishes go out to all of our men and women who are about to begin the remainder of Phase Two operations. We will await the code word from Ballantine, indicating that conditions are set, before launching our attacks.”

  Everyone nodded. They had been over this portion of the plan before. They all had agreed that Ballantine’s final attack must be successful before they would sacrifice their soldiers. Destruction of the United States’ command and control architecture would facilitate their attacks greatly.

  “Together we conquer the enemy!” Sung shouted, holding his fists in the air.

  “Together!” they responded, each in their own language, raising their arms and pumping their fists.

  Sung lightly touched Sue Kim’s arm as he guided her outside into the muggy Panamanian early morning darkness. The monkeys howled in the background, as if to signal the joy that was to come.

  Sung, Aswan, Sanchez, Cartagena, Radovic, Kahtouma, and Lin had all waited a long time to strike utter fear into the heart of the United States. In retrospect, they viewed the events of September 11 as unfulfilling. Fear had not reached any level of resonance to which their citizens were accustomed. The American people had simply moved ahead with their lives while their volunteer military fought on their behalf. “Go shopping,” their president had said.

  With Sue Kim lightly grasping his arm, Sung proudly walked to his cabin.

  As the group dispersed one man remained in the corner, sitting with his chair propped up against the wall, an AK-47 across his lap like a sleeping pet.

  Chapter 34

  Middleburg, Virginia

  “Meredith, get in here now!” Hellerman shouted down the hall of the operations center.

  She rounded the corner, holding her cell phone and needing to hear the words over and over again.

  “I saw Zachary, Meredith. He was alive when I saw him!” Matt’s voice was hoarse from his lack of sleep, but his words were laced with adrenaline.

  “What happened, Matt? Is he okay?” she asked, stopping before entering Hellerman’s office.

  “He’s been shot, and Ballantine took him.”

  “What! Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Who cares? Are you guys trying to track down Ballantine? He’s got Zachary, and I want in on anything going after him. He can’t be too far. A Sherpa can only fly so far on a tank of gas. Do you guys have the airports and air-fueling sites covered?”

  “Matt, slow down. We’re working it. I know how important this is. Trust me.”

  “Okay. I’m at Walter Reed now. They flew me here early this morning. The Pave Low came in with a rescue team and got me, Hobart, Van Dreeves, and Rampert. All three are wounded. I got lucky. You seen Peyton? She was hurt, too.”

  “She briefed Hellerman this morning, but she’s resting now. She’s a bit shook up. The Pave Low landed her back at Andrews. They took her to Walter Reed, too. Treated and released. She was grazed by a bullet somewhere along the way.”

  Matt’s mind was racing ahead, his words following suit. “Okay, tell her I’m okay and that I need to talk to her as soon as possible.”

  Meredith hesitated, feeling a twinge of jealousy. “I’ll do that.” She figured it was no time to let petty issues get in the way. “I’m glad you’re okay, Matt. And I’m glad you saw Zachary. We’ll find him.”

  “Meredith?”

  “Yes, Matt?”

  Matt hesitated, considering his words, then chose a conservative statement.

  “Thanks. I might have never gotten on that plane if it hadn’t been for you.”

  Meredith’s rushed response was the antithesis of Matt’s. Her self-imposed emotional blockade since breaking off their engagement suddenly dissolved. “Matt, I love you.”

  He paused and whispered into the phone, “I love you too, Meredith. Very much.”

  “Meredith, get in here now!” Hellerman shouted.

  Meredith dropped her head, shaking it, wondering why she couldn’t grab thirty seconds of intimacy with this man Matt Garrett.

  “Matt, I’ve got to go. Please be safe.”

  “Bye.”

  She pushed through the doors into Hellerman’s office.

  “We’ve got serious—” Hellerman said.

  “Did you hear that Zachary Garrett—”

  “—problems.”

  “—is alive?” Meredith finished. She instantly quieted when she noticed the dour look on Hellerman’s face.

  “Ballantine is on the loose, and we can’t seem to stop these attacks. Thousands are dead, and the number is only going to grow. The press is all over our ass, and the president has a press conference in two hours. Our allies are concerned and are taking precautions within their own countries. Yet there have been no attacks anywhere but here, as far as I’ve heard. We have a video teleconference with the National Security Council in fifteen minutes. Now what ideas do you have?”

  Meredith had rarely, if ever, seen the vice president so flustered. Even during the Philippines situation last year, he was the one who had kept his cool and steered the neophyte president through the crisis.

  “Mr. Vice President, I think we need to find Ballantine’s airplane. We’re already mobilizing the National Guard across the country and calling up the Reserves. What few active-duty forces we’ve got stateside are preparing to move out and protect key sites, such as nuclear reactors and power plants. We probably need to review Posse Comitatus as well.”

  “Right. Have you and Palmer discussed that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Meredith said. “He’s talking to the president about it right now. The president is not keen on allowing the military to be involved in police activity. You know that once you lift those restrictions, we really have a police state.”

  “Let’s crank up this VTC.”

  The communications operator in the Middleburg alternate command post pressed some buttons, and a large plasma television screen lit up. Immediately, Meredith could pick out several of the National Security Council members seated at the cherry meeting table in the basement of the White House. She saw Air Force General Shepanski; the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dave Palmer, the national security adviser; FBI Director Peter Dortsch, Secretary of State Catherine Arends; and Secretary of Defense Stone.

  Meredith cringed at Stone’s presence, but knew that she had parlayed her knowledge of his involvement with the Rolling Stones last year into a high-level position in the White House National Security Council. Besides, Stone’s voice had been muted post-Philippines. She moved on, eying the assorted aides situated in a few chairs around the periphery of the small room, noticing all of them had a tense, almost wild-eyed, look about them.

  “The president will be down in a couple of minutes,” Palmer said.

  “We’re up over here. What’s the agenda?” Hellerman asked.

  “We’ve got you loud and clear, Mr. V
ice President.” Palmer continued, “General Shepanski has developed a few positions . . .”

  Meredith watched on the VTC as the president entered the Situation Room.

  “Gentlemen,” President Davis said.

  “Mr. President,” Palmer said after they had all stood and begun to sit down again. “Sir, we’ve got the vice president and his team up on VTC from the alternate command post.”

  The president looked strained. “What do we have?”

  Hellerman immediately took control. “I would like for General Shepanski to give you a quick status report on what we know about the enemy activity, friendly losses, and then a couple of courses of action.”

  “Fine. Shark, go ahead,” Davis said.

  Shepanski had replaced Admiral Sewell as the chairman of the Joints Chiefs last summer. Sewell had stepped down in protest after the president had not fired the secretary of defense in the wake of the Philippine action last year. Meredith found it instructive that Davis had turned to Shepanski and not Stone.

  Shark was Shepanski’s call sign when he flew F-15s. The general was typical of modern-age Air Force generals. He had been an F-15 fighter pilot most of his career and had logged a hundred combat hours during the Gulf War and Kosovo.

  “There have been more attacks. The Texas Capitol has been destroyed, and three more shopping malls have been attacked. Luckily, Atlanta police, with the help of the Georgia National Guard, uncovered a series of bombs set to destroy Lennox Square Mall and Phipps Plaza simultaneously. Two bombs exploded in Phipps Plaza, the less occupied of the two, and claimed at least five hundred lives and still counting. Burlington Mall near Boston and Seattle Mall were destroyed completely by a complex series of command-detonated bombs, killing thousands in each location. We’ve had three apartment buildings destroyed, the first in Seattle and two in Chicago.

  “The operation to capture or kill Jacques Ballantine was not a complete failure, but neither was it a success. Our operative got close but was captured. We still do not have control of our operative, and Ballantine has escaped despite the best efforts of some very brave men.”

  Meredith felt a twinge of pride knowing that Matt was one of those men.

  General Shepanski continued, “We are still getting spot reports on that operation, but we have secured the command post and accompanying equipment. Our intelligence analysts are going through everything as well as talking to two captured Ballantine operatives. Ballantine himself escaped, we know, in his plane. We’ve got radar teams scanning everywhere, but it is an impossibly small aircraft that is quite difficult to pick up on radar, so we’re not optimistic in that regard. Also discovered, thanks to Matt Garrett and Peyton O’Hara, was a Predator UAV terminal. There is no indication of where the actual UAVs are. As you recall, at least two of these ground control stations went missing a few years ago, we believe to the Chinese.”

  “Shark, do we know how much contact Boudreaux had with Ballantine?” the president asked.

  “No, we do not. But it was apparent that he was in captivity for several hours at a minimum. Boudreaux was last seen alive and is believed to still be in Ballantine’s captivity.”

  Meredith watched the men talk, again thinking it odd that they would be discussing a single commando. She logged that part of the conversation away and continued to listen.

  “As I was saying, we have found reference to eighteen missing Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. There was a chart in the command center indicating employment in some capacity of multiple UAVs across the nation. The question remains, What would be their purpose? UAVs are primarily reconnaissance platforms. However, this particular technology allows for the transportation of a payload as well. Each UAV has a range of approximately 500 miles from the control station. What we know is that there is one terminal still out there that can control all the missing drones.”

  “What kinds of payload?” the president asked.

  “Lots of things, sir, but most worrisome is the fact that chemical or biological weapons could be deployed from these vehicles. We know they were used in the Charlotte and Minneapolis attacks. I just received a report from the special operations team searching Moncrief that they have found a cave or old mine. It appears that chemical and biological weapons were being stored and manufactured there.”

  “It has to be the missing weapons of mass destruction. Hussein must have smuggled them out before we attacked,” Meredith said.

  “Strike fear into the heart of America by hitting the malls, apartment buildings, state capitols, and sports arenas, and then send UAVs with weapons of mass destruction in to high population centers to strike the knockout blow. Is that what we’re dealing with?” Hellerman asked.

  “That’s certainly a scenario, sir, which we seem to be two-thirds of the way through.”

  “But who is behind it?” Hellerman asked.

  “Well, obviously, Ballantine has an elaborate network of operatives across the country. We don’t know if this is al Qaeda or not. We do know that Ballantine is Iraqi. He has to have been planning this for several years, maybe even initially in Iraq. His fishing guide service has been operational for two years, so he has had ample time to hop in and out of the country with his airplane, distributing supplies for the operation.”

  “Do you think that Ballantine is acting alone or with the support of the exiled Iraqi government? What is the goal of this operation, General? And how the hell did we miss this guy?” the president asked.

  “In my view, this is an act of revenge. Ballantine’s brother was killed in 1991 during the first Gulf War by an American officer. But also, I think this was originally planned by Hussein. So it seems the weapons of mass destruction were in Canada, not Iraq, which affirms our policy of going after Hussein. But now we find ourselves with over half our military committed in remote lands.”

  “What were the conditions of the killing of Ballantine’s brother?” Catherine Arends asked.

  Meredith watched the secretary of state on the plasma screen, wondering where she could be going with such a question. Whatever direction, it was not a good one. The secretary of state was infamous for continuous efforts to “put the military in its place,” as she was once overheard saying.

  “We’re not sure, but it was at close range,” Shepanski said.

  “Was it an execution? Was it something illegal, where if we found the person and held him up for a war crime, it might help us convince Ballantine to back off?”

  Meredith thought she might vomit. “Surely we must presume that the soldier acted properly and was executing his mission as assigned,” Meredith said, a hint of disgust in her voice.

  Arends, the only other woman in the meeting, did not enjoy being challenged. The fact that Meredith was a young, attractive woman did not help. The portly woman turned slowly in the direction of the camera, her hawkish nose leading the way, and leveled her stone-cold eyes at the screen.

  “Secretary Arends, we must give the benefit of the doubt to our service men and women,” Hellerman said.

  “Tell that to the victims of My Lai, Vietnam; No Gun Ri, Korea; Vitina, Kosovo; and now in Iraq,” she shot back. “If our defense was an adequate deterrence, we would not find ourselves in our current position, now would we?”

  “Perhaps, Madame Secretary, if our diplomacy were adequate, we might find ourselves in a different position as well,” Shepanski replied.

  “General, don’t ever speak to me that way again,” she snapped, feeling somewhat outnumbered. Her Northeastern roots were always near the surface, and Meredith could see she wasn’t about to lose the chip on her shoulder any time soon.

  “As my favorite judge used to say,” Hellerman interrupted, “order in the court, or I’ll have all your asses thrown out.”

  “Charming,” Arends replied.

  “At least I can see you haven’t lost that tremendous sense of humor, Catherine,” Hellerman said dryly.

  “Let’s get back to the briefing, General,” the president said impatiently.
r />   “As I was saying, we are faced with the difficult but not impossible task of tracking down Ballantine.”

  “Excuse me,” Meredith said, raising her hand and giving the VTC satellite delay a moment to register her words. “It appears to me, sir, that the operation is continuing even though Ballantine may be out of contact. Is it possible that the codes were delivered to the operatives, and they are now on autopilot?”

  “It’s possible, Meredith, but we still think it’s very important to find the mastermind to the plot, primarily because we’re not sure where it ends,” Shepanski said.

  “Well, a Sherpa has only so much range . . .”

  “Right. We’ve covered every refuel stop within a five-hundred-mile radius of Moncrief Lake. But that doesn’t address the thousands of open fields, lakes, rivers, highways, etcetera in which he could land and transition to ground transportation.”

  “We have to assume that Ballantine had several contingency plans for his escape. Why not shut down the airlines? It should make it easier to spot a small, slow-flying airplane,” Meredith said.

  “We asked for that to happen right away,” Shepanski said.

  “That’s about a $10 billion hit to the economy, and half of those companies are already about to go bankrupt,” the president said. “This war is as much about preserving our economy as it is anything else. That’s our way of life we’re talking about.”

  The room was silent. It was clear to Meredith that most believed the industry should be shut down for a few days, at least until they could get a better perspective on the depth and breadth of the attacks.

  “Let’s give it another day. So far there have been no attacks against the airlines,” the president said.

  “I really think we should do it now,” Palmer said.

  “Let’s let this play out for another twenty-four hours, Dave.” Hellerman was quick to support the president. “The airlines have already selectively shut down about 50 percent of their operations.”