Dark Winter

by Anthony J. Tata

  “Soldier down! Soldier down!” Mahegan repeated.

  The futility of his words grew more profound with every chop of the rotor blades that pulled them away from danger—and Cassie—and toward the designated refuel point in the middle of the desert in Iran.

  As he struggled with his tactical vest, hands were pulling him inside the helicopter.

  Soon, the valley where they had fought was gone from his view, replaced only by the emptiness of the black void through which they flew and the hollow pang of failure he felt in his soul.

  CHAPTER 13

  GORHAM AND KAL RAN UP THE STEPS TO HIS JET, DAX STASOVICH behind them carrying the unconscious American soldier over his shoulders. Behind Stasovich, the Iranian Olympian thundered along.

  Like Noah’s Ark, Gorham thought. The ambush had been devastating, but he had two of the biometric keys with him boarding his plane.

  Kal had traveled with Gorham at his urging. When the attack occurred, lights were flashing like strobes. They met in the outer ring of the conference tunnel, security busy rushing to the entrance, concerned for their principals. The North Korean general ran scared, got in the wrong Mercedes, and apparently didn’t make it. Gorham had clasped Kal’s hand and pulled her into the lead car. Persi followed. Glad to have the North Korean and Iranian Biometric Keys with him, Shayne was somewhere behind, apparently captured.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Gorham shouted to the pilots, who had the 777 rolling along the dark runway before anyone had found their seats. He sat in the forward cabin leather reclining chair while Kal sat on the bench seat next to him. Stasovich and Persi lumbered into the next section of the cabin, Stasovich dumping the captured female soldier on the floor. He placed her rucksack on a leather seat, tied her legs and hands with some rope, and then sat next to the rucksack as he pawed through the contents.

  Gorham noticed Kal and Persi taking it all in, most likely wondering if they were going to escape whatever attack had come. They locked eyes briefly as Gorham looked over his shoulder as Stasovich retrieved grenades, ammunition, water, IV bags, and other combat supplies from the soldier’s bag.

  “Careful,” Gorham said.

  Stasovich lifted his head and met Gorham’s gaze with the dead-eyed look of an assassin.

  “Careful,” Gorham reiterated, as if repeating a command to a dog. Sit. Aware enough to understand that every man had the drive for wealth and the need to feed their own beasts, he considered his predicament.

  Stasovich was a mercenary and a deadly killer. That he was also a maniacal savage was at times unnerving to Gorham. However, the half-million-dollar annual salary he paid the thug afforded the man a life of luxury. His work to this point—protecting Gorham as he traveled the world ostensibly meeting with clients as he grew his social media/retail/search engine empire—had been child’s play. Having overtaken Facebook, Amazon, and Google with the Manaslu platform Gorham was constantly fending off lawsuits much in the same fashion those companies had done as they had competed against like entities, all vying for the lead. He had determined that the only way to win was to beat them all. It was like a game of high-low poker where he had to have the winning hand in both directions.

  And then there was the matter of Shayne being captured or more likely dead. He truly relied upon Shayne’s skills. Thankfully, everything was already in motion. Perhaps he could survive without him? Doubtful.

  Two additional elements, Kal and Persi, had been added to the calculus. He had no idea who the woman was other than someone the North Korean government had entrusted to be their biometric key to unleash their fledgling nuclear arsenal. As for Persi, he looked like he could be useful muscle to help the severely wounded Stasovich.

  “She’s alive, but her ankle is broken,” Stasovich said.

  “Set it, fix it, do what you have to do,” Gorham directed. “I want her healthy.”

  He used his phone to snap a picture of her and then a few seconds later ManaRec—Manaslu’s facial recognition software—confirmed her identification as Captain Cassandra “Cassie” Bagwell. He scrolled through dozens of articles about how she was the first female graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School and how her parents had been killed by Syrian terrorists in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her father had been a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he was killed. Newspaper articles had been written about the testy relationship she had with her father. He had not wanted her in the army, much less attending Ranger School.

  “Interesting,” Gorham muttered to himself. “Same woman from the bar. They’ve been following us.” He picked up the phone wired to the cockpit. “We’re going to Amman, Jordan.”

  After some back and forth with the pilots, the plane banked and headed west.

  Stasovich sat across from Gorham as Kal remained silent and watched. Persi sat in the very back of the airplane, perhaps wondering what would happen to him for abandoning his boss.

  “Why Amman?” Kal asked. Her first words since joining him.

  Gorham studied her. Beautiful. Smart. Deceptive. Seductive. Lethal. All those adjectives came to mind as he looked into her almond-shaped eyes. Her black hair was cut in an angular bob just above her collar. She carried a small backpack that most likely had a variety of weapons. He was doubtful she wasted space on makeup.

  “You speak English?” Gorham asked.

  “Very well,” she replied.

  “Can I trust you?”

  “Do you have a choice?” she replied.

  “I do, actually. I can have my man kill you or at least incapacitate you.”

  “Doubtful. He’s wounded badly. We are on the same airplane and the same team. We want victory just as you do. Why not share information, Mr. Gorham? Isn’t that what Manaslu is all about? You call it publicy—a word you invented—where others argue for privacy. Tell me. Why Amman?”

  Gorham paused again.

  “Okay. First, publicy for everyone else, not Manaslu. Our secrets are ours. Next, with my operations officer, Shayne, in the hands of the Americans, I want to get lost under the satellites for a while. I need to think. They’ve got his satchel and iPad. They can probably track me. While I’ve activated the code to wipe it clean, nothing ever gets wiped clean. Perhaps our own fault, maybe even our own undoing, but to monetize information, we made a conscious decision to never completely erase anything. We have nearly a billion users of ManaMail and we archive everything. A politician’s e-mail to a lover from five years ago? He may have erased it. She may have erased it. But we’ve still got it. If he becomes prominent, we can resurrect it and use it discreetly against him to win votes as we take another step toward stripping the public of their privacy or leak it to the press if he doesn’t agree with our position. Either way, we win. So, Shayne’s iPad is dangerous to us if they find the right people to work it, which is questionable. Because that risk exists, I want to spend the next twenty-four hours close to the front lines, which I’ve always wanted to do anyway.”

  Kal said nothing, but nodded, thinking.

  The 777-jet roared through the sky as Gorham switched on his ManaMap system. Without Shayne by his side to keep him informed, Gorham would have to provide his own situational awareness.

  “Here’s a thought,” Kal said, nodding at the woman on the floor. “You trade her for your Shayne. You offer up the intelligence officer for Shayne.”

  “What’s your interest?” Gorham asked.

  “I’ve listened to everything you said. I know your plan. Where you’re going. What your needs are.” She paused and looked at Stasovich. “What your vulnerabilities are.”

  “I can kill her now,” Stasovich said.

  With an invisible flick of a wrist, Kal spun a throwing star at Stasovich. It landed and stuck in the wood paneling above his head and to the left of Persi, who continued to stare, unflinching, his only worry being his fate for having left the president’s side.

  “That was an intentional miss,” she said. “You can’t kill me. I mean that i
n both senses of the word. You cannot, because I will kill you first. And secondly, you cannot because you need me alive.”

  “Why? The North Korean nuclear arsenal is free to launch wherever.”

  “Ne vse v nem kazhetsya, Mr. Gorham.”

  Nothing is as it seems, Mr. Gorham.

  Stasovich spun his head from the throwing star to the Korean. “She speaks Russian.” Being of Serbian descent, he was partially fluent in basic Russian and Ukrainian. “Nothing is as it seems.”

  “You work for the Russians?” Gorham asked.

  “I never said that,” Kal replied.

  The plane gained altitude and Gorham thought for a moment.

  “Back to the woman,” Kal said, chinning at Captain Bagwell laying in the aisle. “Is it worth it to us to make the trade? Will the Americans even make that trade?”

  Gorham turned his iPad and pinched the screen, then spread it using his thumb and forefinger. He punched the screen twice with his index finger and then repeated the process of pinching and spreading. “This picture, tells me she is.” He showed Kal and Stasovich the iPad screen.

  Jake Mahegan and Cassie Bagwell were holding hands as they sat on the ferry from Southport, North Carolina to Bald Head Island.

  “We’ve got Cassie Bagwell, and judging from the size of the operative with her, that’s her lover.” Gorham pointed at the screen.

  “I saw that guy in the bar. You’re correct,” Stasovich said.

  “He was in the bar?”

  “Yes. He’s the one who led the counterattack. Why it wasn’t a successful mission to snatch the cook.”

  Gorham scratched his head and cracked his neck by leaning it in each direction. A habit he’d been meaning to stop, it reflected nervousness. To burn off that energy, he began digging through social media Web sites, then the proprietary facial recognition software until he got a random hit from the Department of Homeland Security black/white/gray list.

  “Shit. He was listed as gray, possibly detain.”

  “His government doesn’t trust him, but they let him do this mission?” Kal said.

  Gorham grimaced. “Yeah. America can be fucked up like that. Chayton “Jake” Mahegan. Age, thirty-one. Almost six and a half feet tall. Two hundred and thirty pounds.”

  “Yes. That’s him. I saw him twice. In the bar and when I fought him hand-to-hand. And in a different life in North Carolina.”

  “Seems he got the best of you,” Gorham said. He looked at Stasovich, who looked away.

  Kal looked at Gorham and said, “Your man survived, though. Don’t be so hard on him.”

  “That’s right. I’m here. In their haste, the soldiers did not check my sleeve.” Stasovich extended his right forearm and rolled back his black shirt sleeve. A SOG Trident tactical knife with built in seatbelt cutter was resting in its sheath open toward his hand. “They were rushed, thankfully.”

  “Yes, thankfully,” Gorham said.

  “So. The girl for Shayne. Where should we make the trade?” Stasovich asked. It was a rhetorical question. Stasovich was just the muscle. But he was also a tactician and a survivor. The fact that he was on the airplane with Gorham was testament to his tactical savvy.

  Gorham and Kal exchanged glances.

  Stasovich continued, “You don’t have Shayne, and you don’t have the cook. Shayne was your thinker. You think of me as just a strong guy.” He leaned forward so that his face was inches from Gorham’s. “I’m here. I outsmarted them. You’re here. You outsmarted them by leaving in the first vehicle. We both have good instincts. You treat me like just muscle? I could snap your neck right now, but I won’t. You know why? Because I’m loyal.”

  “And you’d have to deal with me,” Kal said. “I’m not so easy.” Her voice was level. The tones were smooth and easy.

  Gorham’s eyes widened. He could smell Stasovich’s stale breath. It occurred to him that Stasovich could snap his neck right here, right now. Gorham wasn’t a small man by any measure. Over six feet tall with an athlete’s build, he could hold his own, but he doubted he was a better fighter than Stasovich. Having Kal in the forward cabin suddenly brought him comfort. Whose side was Persi on? he wondered. Or was Persi in shock, suffering from post-traumatic stress?

  “I know that we will get out of this alive. I also know that you have a nuclear attack planned on the United States that is supposed to start in the next forty-eight hours or so. I would be foolish to kill you because you are going somewhere safe and I will be with you,” Stasovich said.

  “That’s right. So, let’s stop this talk about killing. And back the fuck away from me, Dax.”

  Stasovich smiled. His teeth were yellow and uneven, some overlapping. “So where do you trade the girl? You have less than forty-eight hours to do so because the cook is still a problem.”

  Disarming the Americans was key to the plan. It was those weapons upon which mutual assured destruction rested. Like two sheets of metal leaning against each other in perfect balance, the United States and Russia pushed against one another, but neither fell because each had thousands of nuclear weapons ready to respond to any attack. While Gorham was confident that the submarine and B-1 bomber based weapons had been sufficiently disabled, the cook posed a threat to his overall plan. On the second day of ComWar in North Asia, Southwest Asia, and Northern Europe, burning swaths of land were smoldering in the RINK alliance wake.

  All of that was important to Gorham’s plan. The proxies of America were being destroyed, the primary purpose of the attacks. Japan and Europe, rebuilt by the Marshall Plan following World War II, would be rebuilt by Gorham. Under Gorham’s guidance, the world would migrate toward a borderless Utopia as opposed to a series of over 200 nationalistic states focused on their own well-being. Just like the mega corporation he had built with talent from all over the world, Gorham would use those same principals of diversity and equality to reshape the world. His social media empire would unite in common cause, either confirming everyone’s beliefs or influencing them to believe what he sought.

  He turned and looked at the fifty-five-inch HD screen to his front. One of the ManaBlade insect drones had entered one of the U.S. helicopters and used its magnetic properties to adhere to the fuselage of the airplane. It showed the helicopters landing somewhere with lots of dust in the air.

  “Or maybe,” Gorham said. Perhaps he could create a crash that might kill Shayne—no way he would hold up under the pressure of waterboarding or other American tactics for extracting information—and if they couldn’t make the exchange in forty-eight hours, a better trade was the woman for the cook, though he doubted Captain Bagwell was worth that to the Americans. By now they had to know what they had with the cook, an unrivaled hacker who could penetrate any database or architecture in the world. An army ranger or a hacker? Easy decision to Gorham. The hacker would take primacy. The ranger was less important.

  He watched the screen as two helicopters ferried up to what looked like a hose behind an airplane, apparently took on fuel, and then repositioned somewhere else.

  One of the mechanisms he had built into the ManaBlade devices was that the Niobium encasements contained a small quantity of high explosive urea nitrate the size of a blasting cap, or to the layman, a slender cigarette. Originally, it was intended to destroy the high tech, proprietary device to keep it from becoming useful to unwanted parties. The ManaBlade not only piped back live streaming video, but it automatically calculated the dimensions of the aircraft to which it was affixed. Using grid style engineering graphics, the monitor showed a Blackhawk helicopter with fifteen personnel aboard.

  Gorham had a thought. While the ManaBlade was not situated to provide facial recognition of the individuals, there were two transport helicopters in the formation and he figured he had a 50% chance of killing Shayne.

  Decent odds, especially if he could get a chain reaction out of it. He could potentially destroy everything in that location in one stroke.

  As a Blackhawk shifted and moved toward the fuel hose
, Gorham adjusted the ManaBlade camera—the eyes of the insect—to get the best possible view of the gas line. Because of the swirling dust, there was no way to determine where the other helicopters were located. A soldier ran beyond the camera eye and stood next to the helicopter. While the drone transmitted no sound, he could only imagine the chaos and noise associated with the refueling operation.

  With the power of the downdraft created by the helicopter rotor blades, he did not want to move the ManaBlade. Instead he trained the lens as far to the rear of the cargo bay as possible. Soldiers were all looking toward the back of the aircraft, tired eyes peeking from beneath helmets, alert and anxious. He turned the lens toward the hose, which bulged from flat to swollen. The aircraft was refueling.

  “I see what you’re doing. Killing your Shayne. Big decision. If you’re lucky enough to get the right helicopter,” Kal said.

  “He’ll never hold up under pressure.” Gorham pressed some buttons on the MacBook monitoring and controlling the ManaBlade, typed in the control number of the device, and clicked DETONATE.

  As he began to click the confirmation dialogue box, the soldiers in the helicopter began scrambling, mouths open in silent screams.

  * * *

  Mahegan ran from his helicopter, which had refueled already and was over one hundred yards to the north of the MC-130 Combat Talon wetwing refuel airplane. Normally a paratrooper dropping workhorse, the MC-130 was versatile with advanced avionics and the ability to carry fuel bladders in the cargo bay that could pump JP-8 jet fuel into the aircraft. The two Apache gunships had refueled first and continued providing protective cover for the refueling of the two personnel aircraft.

  He shouted at the refuel operator, “Last one! Roll this up when you’re done and get back to Farah!” He briefly considerd turning around all four helicopters but he decided that regrouping and planning was better than heading piecemeal into an unknown situation. Plus, the MC-130 could maybe pull off one wetwing refuel in the middle of the Iranian desert but the odds were against two successful missions.