He shot all but three mortar rounds before American soldiers surrounded him.
“Cease fire!” one soldier wearing night vision goggles shouted.
As Kruklis raised his hands, he heard the familiar whistle of artillery rounds screaming overhead. Russian counter battery fire. He smiled. He would kill some American paratroopers after all.
The heavy artillery tossed him into the air, along with the Americans. It was incessant and unrelenting.
His last thought was that these were big bombs, not the little ones he had been shooting at the Russians. As he lay there dying, he stared at the open eyes of a dead paratrooper and smiled again.
* * *
Ian Gorham, the CEO and founder of Manaslu, Inc., the conglomerate that had overtaken Facebook, Amazon, and Google in the social media, retail distribution, and advertising marketplace, sat in the back of his chauffeur driven Tesla S70. He stared at the information being piped to his iPad via Manaslu’s microsatellite constellation he called ManaSat.
He had four such satellite constellations in the atmosphere as he prepared for his mission. Gorham viewed himself as a bona-fide genius. A Mensa member at an early age. Trouble understanding and relating to others as a child. His lineage was of average education—rural farmers and manufacturers. He had somehow hit the jackpot in the brains department. A one in a million chance. An odd mutation that combined the best of everything from both lineages—separated wheat from chaff—and distilled into his cerebral cortex.
Algorithms and code were a first language, English a second. Rapidly acquired wealth led to newly interested parties—women, men, transgenders—in his late teens. It was all so confusing.
In his early twenties—a few years ago—he’d read about the Jungian study of deep psychotherapy and realized he needed to unpack his brain so he could understand it better. With his wealth, he’d hired the best deep psychiatrist in the world. Given his exploration of the Deep Web, he’d thought it was fitting that he was going through therapy with an expert of deep psychology.
As the Tesla idled, exhaust plumes rose like fog. The bar was the target. It had a sign that read MOTOWN MIXER. Actually, a cook in the bar was the real target. In a few seconds, Gorham had a complete dossier on the bar and its owner, Roxy Bolivar, who was no longer alive. She had bequeathed the bar to her son, who ran the place. He was gay and had the beginning stages of pancreatic cancer. His medications had just started, but the doctors didn’t believe there was much hope.
He had mined this information through the ManaWeb, Manaslu’s own private domain within the Deep Web, where algorithms and machine learning matched information and automatically continued to dig and match until a complete profile had been developed. . . within seconds.
During his search, he had profiled everyone associated with the bar. One profile frustrated him. The apparent cook, reported for duty at six pm, had hacked the ManaWeb. This person had penetrated the domain Gorham thought was impossible . . . and improper. It was like penetrating his own psyche without permission.
In response, Gorham had launched a delivery drone with a spy camera to the Internet Protocol address location. It had followed someone wearing a hoodie pulled over the head and face, a chef’s white shirt hanging beneath the hoodie, and black pants. The cook went into the back of the Motown Mixer. The drone had attempted to gain facial recognition, but the hacker’s hoodie was like a tunnel hiding the face way back in a cave.
On the brink of executing his elaborate plan, Gorham could ill afford a minor issue. The hacker was an issue. Gorham’s considerable business experience taught him that minor issues often became major problems. And this hacker was an issue. He began to spin, cycling faster and faster, thinking of possible outcomes, some not so good, others very bad.
With a shaky hand, he looped his Bluetooth earpiece around his right ear and pressed a number from the RECENT selection in his phone.
“Yes, Ian,” the voice said. Part melody, part syrup, part Eastern Europe. She always gave him pause.
“Doctor Draganova,” Gorham said. “Spin cycle, again.”
“Please. As always, I must remind you, it’s Belina,” she said.
There was noise in the background. Banging, as if she were in a construction zone or kitchen somewhere.
He couldn’t call her Belina. She was as beautiful as the name. He stared at the picture on his phone. Long black hair. Light blue eyes. High cheekbones. Full lips constantly pursed. Fashion model collarbones. Long neck. Slim hips.
No, he had to call her Doctor Draganova. He couldn’t think of her as an object of desire and a therapist. It was counterproductive. “I’m spiraling a bit,” he said.
“This is not a regular session, Ian. You pay me well, but we schedule our sessions. I’m almost always available, but right now I have little time.”
“It’s . . . okay. Just soothe me. I’m about to do something . . . high stress. I know my motives. You’ve helped me understand them. I know the purpose of my genius. I’m bringing all of that together. We’ve unpacked my mind, layer by layer. Now I need to bring it back together so I can execute.”
Depth psychology focused on understanding the motives behind particular mental conditions in order to better resolve them. Draganova had been focusing Gorham on discovering the catalyst for his actions whether they be conscious, unconscious, or semi-conscious. All the big names in psychology had contributed to this field of study: Jung, Blueler, Freud, and so on.
“It’s . . . it’s not that simple, Ian.”
Was she worried? Ian thought she sounded concerned. Her soothing voice took him back to that place he didn’t want to be—viewing her as an object of desire instead of the mechanic of his mind.
More noises in the background. Some shouting. She was busy doing something. It never occurred to him that she may have a personal life. Perhaps she was entertaining guests and preparing a big meal or just in a noisy restaurant with friends . . . which made him a little bit jealous.
“I know,” he whispered. “It’s been a month since I’ve seen you.”
“We’ve talked on the phone since. Sixteen times. We’ve even used ManaChat,” she said. Manaslu’s equivalent of FaceTime or Skype.
“What are you doing?” He realized his question sounded too familiar, and said, “I mean, what are those noises?”
“Ian, we can talk tomorrow. You know your drills. Please do them. Good-bye.”
The silence in his ears was a screwdriver through the brain. Just like a Ferrari needed the world’s best mechanic, his mind needed Dr. Draganova. Regardless, no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t unpack his drive and desire for her. She had become shorter and shorter with him on their phone sessions. In person—always in a neutral place to which they both had flown at his expense—her clothing had been more and more provocative. Was she teasing him or challenging him to focus? Like Tiger Woods’ father rattling change when he was a kid practicing putting. Perhaps that was her technique for getting him to focus on the matter at hand.
But she had helped scramble his mind, unpack it completely to its core. The drive and ambition to create a dominant global tech conglomerate came with personality traits that he needed to understand. Draganova had helped him reach in his mind and more objectively observe his mania, his fears. Obsessed with success and power, Gorham was relentless, but to his credit he wanted to know more about himself. Or was that just more megalomania coming out? He didn’t have time to think about all that now.
He was at the moment where he needed to be able to synchronize a global operation. He could do it, of course. It would just be harder. Require more thinking. More individual construction of his mental faculties. Put everything back together himself instead of with her help. And he needed to do it right now.
You know your drills.
He did a few body meditation drills, working his hands into his quadriceps and hamstrings, massaging and pulling. Then he pulled at his face, stretching it in every direction, relieving the tension. Dax St
asovich, his faithful bodyguard, was outside pacing, impatient.
After a few minutes, Gorham felt well enough. He needed to move now. The car with his commandos came rolling around the corner, parking two blocks away. Stasovich looked at him through the car window and shrugged.
It was go time.
Gorham stepped out of the car, tugged the Tigers cap down low over his face, thinking, get your shit together, Ian. He was one of the most recognizable men in the world. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, and all the other brilliant entrepreneurs were equally recognizable. In the last two years, though, he had become the hot property. He had to be careful.
He pulled the ball cap bill low over his forehead. Stasovich, a giant of a man, walked in front of him about ten yards. The man’s legs pushed out and forward with every step. His bulk swayed. His arms barely moved. The man was nearly seven feet tall. Hard not to notice. That was part of the drill. Like a magic trick. Everyone look at this freak of nature friend, not the normal looking curly haired guy walking behind him.
They entered the bar and Gorham grabbed a booth. There was a slight crowd. He immediately noticed a good-looking short-haired blonde sitting at the bar. Next to her was a big man with a Mohawk haircut. He wasn’t as big as Stasovich, but close. What did she see in him?
He looked at his ManaWatch, what he called his equivalent of the Apple Watch. The ManaWatch used the ManaSats and was therefore encrypted. Two messages popped up from Shayne with little green check marks next to them.
Estonia
NoKo
The plan was in motion. He glanced at Stasovich, a bull scraping his hoof looking at a red cape.
Gorham typed a message and hit SEND. “Go.”
CHAPTER 3
MAHEGAN STARED IN THE MIRROR, WHICH REFLECTED A MAN IN A baseball cap across the room hunched over his beer in a booth on the far wall near the entrance.
The cap’s bill was curved enough so that the man’s eyes were hidden. It was a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. The man didn’t look like a baseball player, didn’t have the build. Wisps of light brown hair curled up onto the blue material. Not that curly brown hair disqualified a man from the major leagues, but Mahegan thought he looked too slight. Maybe he was one of those skinny middle relievers that went a few innings. Or a lanky first basemen. But Mahegan didn’t think so. The man looked more like a fan, if that.
But still, that face. He was trying to place it when Cassie elbowed him in the ribs.
“Don’t stare,” she said.
“I’m looking directly at three bottles of tequila,” Mahegan countered.
They were in downtown Detroit because Mahegan’s teammate Sean O’Malley had found a nugget of information in the Deep Web indicating an attack would begin in this musty bar. The purpose of the pending raid was unclear, but was supposedly related to something much larger. That was all O’Malley knew. Something big. So, they watched and waited.
It had been O’Malley pounding on their door on Bald Head Island and Patch Owens who had been in the back of the helicopter to pick them up.
Something big had already happened, though. Hours ago, news of the death of the North Korean leader had cycled through the top-secret information circles. Mahegan was surprised that after a few hours the news programs were not covering the story. News of a provocation in Estonia was just leaking out. Apparently the Eighty-second Airborne show of force in Estonia had gotten into an artillery mix up with the Russians. Not good. Something big.
Mahegan and Cassie sat on barstools in the Motown Mixer, a trendy, hipster place intended to look like a seedy bar. The bartender had placed in front of him a tap poured Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was his first beer of the night and he had only taken a sip, which was mostly foam still settling from the pour. It was all for show. Not that he didn’t want a beer. He could use one. But he had bigger urges to satisfy than drinking a beer. Stopping a raid. Getting the intelligence. And then moving to the next level of unraveling whatever it was that O’Malley had discovered.
Cool October wind rushed in every time someone opened the front door to Mahegan’s eight o’clock. A sticky dark wood bar with a vertical hinged opening at the far end ran the length of the establishment. A dozen different taps shouted the names of popular draft beers, the bartender working the levers like a slot machine. An ancient color television was set to a cable news program in the corner. A reporter was speaking from a windswept field in Europe somewhere. The crawl at the bottom of the program read Russian artillery causes casualties in Eighty-second Airborne Division deterrent force.
“At least we had a week,” Cassie said.
“Roger. Time to focus,” Mahegan replied.
Cassie nodded.
“Paratroopers got hit with artillery,” Mahegan said. He showed her his phone, which had practically blown up when he finally turned it on after O’Malley rushed them onto the helicopter this morning.
“Saw that. Any chance it’s connected?” Cassie asked.
“Anything is possible.” Mahegan scanned the growing crowd, not sure what they expected to find. “But we’ve got to have something to connect it to.”
Earlier, when the place was nearly empty except an old guy hunched over his whiskey, Mahegan counted exactly ten bar stools, each one stained and sticky from years of beer spills and marginal maintenance. Five booths lined the wall and six tables occupied the floor.
An old time circular battery powered clock showed it was seven o’clock in the evening, which explained why the place was packed with hipsters, prepsters, college students acting twenty-one, and older men trying to pick up younger women.
Two had already tried to hit on Cassie, his “date.” She was dressed in hip-hugging blue jeans, a loose, untucked button down shirt, and sharp toed leather cowboy boots. Mahegan was wearing his standard olive cargo pants, tight fitting black pullover, black leather jacket, and Doc Martens boots. With his hair looking something like a Mohawk down the middle, Mahegan, a Croatan Indian from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, was feeling the kinship with his ancestors.
He was also feeling the mission the way someone with a bum knee senses a low-pressure system. “Notice baseball hat guy?”
Cassie didn’t look at the throng of people drifting through the bar, but replied, “Roger. You were staring at him. Seems twitchy. Think that’s him?”
“Not sure, but he keeps looking at his watch. Pressing it, like he’s reading e-mails on an Apple watch. Looks familiar, too. Can’t place him, but I’m guessing his Bumble date either stood him up or we’re moving any moment now,” Mahegan said.
“I’ve got back door,” Cassie replied.
“Gotta be quick.”
“Roger that.” Cassie scanned the room casually and said, “Use the mirrors above the bar. See shaved head guy in the corner? Like he’s watching a tennis match. Us. Then baseball hat guy. Then us again. He’s huge. Out of place. Like you.”
In the mirror behind the whiskey and tequila bottles Mahegan studied what Cassie mentioned. It was likely the large, bulky man with the shaved head was protection for the guy in the baseball hat, their possible target. Turning back to Baseball Hat, it was impossible to discern his age. From across the room, he looked average in every way.
Was he the target?
The front door slammed open. Cool air rushed in again. A man stood with an assault rifle assessing the throng. The surreal moment hung there suspended in air. The patrons continued their revelry until someone saw the rifle, but even then, the slack-jawed observer could only open her mouth; no words came out.
Mahegan pushed away from the bar, picking a line to the rifleman the way a running back finds the gap in a defensive formation. As he found his own opening, he realized there were two ways into the pub, the front door and the kitchen door in the rear. Mahegan wasn’t sure, but by the look on the face of the man with the assault rifle, the potential assailant was studying, looking for a specific person . . . and probably had an accomplice coming in the back way.
That meant Ca
ssie would have a target. As an army intelligence officer and the first female ranger school graduate, she could hold her own.
The man at the front door was wearing all black with what looked like an outer tactical vest. He was short with Asian facial features and black hair cut to a crew. The intel had predicted assault rifles, not suicide bombers, but they couldn’t be sure.
The lights went out and all hell broke loose.
As Cassie chose her line to the backdoor, he retrieved his Sig Sauer Tribal, sliding seamlessly through the throng, most of them seeing the look in his eyes, or the pistol, and stepping out of the way. But with the lights out, half the crowd was whooping it up as if the darkness was their newfound friend.
Enough ambient light came from outside to guide Mahegan to the front door. As he approached, the man raised his assault rifle to fire. Mahegan kicked the weapon to the side as the attacker popped off several rounds.
Mahegan shot the man in the leg, snatched the assault rifle, and quickly inspected him for other weapons, yielding a Makarov pistol and Bowie knife. He kicked the man in the head and ran toward the back door where another man had entered through the kitchen. Flashlights crisscrossed like lasers. By now, Mahegan had his night vision goggle on his head. In the green haze of the NVG, this attacker appeared stocky and white, wearing basically the same black uniform. There was a glint of an insignia on the tactical vest.
Cassie used the light of the gas flame to take aim at the man’s legs and squeezed off two rounds. The man spun around, the AK-47 spitting 7.62 bullets into the kitchen hood. Smoke poured everywhere, like steam hissing from a pipe. Cassie was on top of the man, knocking him unconscious with a rap of her cowboy boots.
A third man, this one dark skinned, almost Arabic or Persian in appearance, caromed into the kitchen and shot the cook, who was wearing Backbeat Pro earphones, most likely with rock music cranked at full volume. In fairness to the cook, only five seconds had passed since the action at the front door.
Mahegan fired two center mass shots at the black clad intruder and realized he was wearing body armor. Quickly closing the distance, Mahegan leapt over Cassie, who was kneeling and making sure her target was incapacitated and tackled the third intruder. Mahegan carried him to the floor using an inside trip, an old wrestling move he’d learned in high school.
Dark Winter Page 2
