Running the Maze

by Jack Coughlin

  He wondered only momentarily about the fire, because there was nothing at all he could do about it. Burning to death or a bullet in the head would have the same result. Instead, he ran a mental diagnostic of his body. His arms and legs were all still secured by straps, with two more bands of strong woven plastic running across his hips and his chest. For some reason, the clamp around his head had been removed, or perhaps it had slipped off while he thrashed about in the nightmares. Irrelevant. At least he could see around him now.

  He surveyed his situation. He was still in the infirmary, with the rolling curtain hiding the rest of the room from view. The usual hospital apparatus was near the bed but was not connected to him. He sucked in a deep breath, then blew it out hard to expel the old, stale air from his lungs. When he did it again, the heartbeat slowed to normal as his mind shifted from a place of uncertain fright to cold analysis. Al-Attas was not afraid. He just settled in for the long wait, until whatever was to happen happened. Insh’Allah.

  He wondered about Sergeant Hafiz and the al Qaeda inspectors who had examined him like a goat. There was no doubt that he was tagged for death, but then everyone is, and there was no need to fear it. The chief engineer understood that if he had been an ordinary man of ordinary skills, he would have been dealt with some time ago. Since he wasn’t, his guardians in Islamabad and Washington were still protecting him, at least for the time being, but he could not count on that.

  The alarm was irritatingly loud, and he wished he could shut it off. He wanted to be back in the chair in the defense systems control room, operating his digital domain, supervising the workers to finish the bridge project. Everyone wanted it completed, and the pressure was on him to get it all running. No one else could do it! Another part of him, the invisible part, wished he could be outside, running free beneath the bridge, loose in the valley.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the opening of the infirmary door. It closed quickly, and the lock snapped into place. Soft footsteps, not the usual stride of normal workers, came from the far side of the curtain. He saw the silhouette of someone cautiously approaching, and the curtain was thrust aside.

  * * *

  KYLE SWANSON PUSHED THE curtain back with his left hand and brought up his pistol with his right, pointing it straight at the startled face of a dark-haired young man lashed down to a bed. The decision not to shoot was made in a split second, and Swanson moved around the bed to be sure the rest of the area was clear of potential threats. Satisfied, he holstered the pistol, ignoring the bound figure, and removed a satellite phone from his pack. Beth covered the front of the room with her finger resting on the trigger guard of the CAR-15.

  “Trident Base, Trident Base. This is Bounty Hunter.” His voice was unhurried and clear. He heard only static in return and tried again. “Trident Base. This is Bounty Hunter. Do you read me? Come in.” Still, only the hiss of interference.

  “Your sat phone won’t work down here,” said the patient on the bed. “You’re beneath tons of rock. The signal can’t get out.”

  Swanson was startled. The words were clear English with only a slight accent. Ledford pointed her rifle at the man. “Who the hell are you?” Kyle asked.

  The man shifted the weight of his shoulders, as if trying to get comfortable, but was held tightly by the chest strap. “My name is Mohammad al-Attas.”

  “Why are you tied down?” Beth Ledford had not lowered her guard.

  “They are going to kill me,” the young man said.

  “Who is? Why?”

  “I am considered a security risk by the New Muslim Order. I suppose I am, because I know too much, and don’t say my prayers all the time.”

  “The Order?” Swanson put away his radio and sat beside the man. “You’re saying the NMO is involved here? How do you know that?”

  “Oh, they surely are involved,” the man replied, with a small, sly smile. “I know that because I am the chief engineer of the entire project. I know everything about it.” He relaxed even more. “Other things as well.” This encounter was going better than he could have dared hope. Americans: one the usual hard-case commando type, but the other a pretty young woman.

  He asked Beth, “I assume you people are the reason for the fire alarm? Did you set it off?”

  “We don’t know anything about that. Where did you learn English?” She was fascinated. A man tied to a bed in the infirmary of a hostile facility, and apparently under a death sentence, was carrying on a casual conversation, as if he had not a worry in the world. His clothes were bloodstained, and his face and hair were filthy.

  “Boston,” al-Attas said. “Actually, across the river over in Cambridge, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Picked up my master’s degree there. Trust me, your sat phone is useless in this location.”

  “Can you make it work?”

  “Of course. Let’s do a deal. Like I said, I know everything about this place, including how to get out. I will be a gold mine for your intelligence people. Take me back with you.”

  Swanson was still hesitant. “You talk a good game, dude, but why are you so messed up?”

  “Basically I outlived my usefulness, and they really did not like that I helped some strangers, particularly an international medical team that wandered in here by accident a few weeks ago. I tried to help them escape, but they caught all of us. It was horrible; they killed those unfortunates after torturing them for sport for a while. They made me continue my work, and when I tried to escape on my own, they put me in here to await execution, probably tomorrow. We’re wasting time, sir. Help me get out, and I’ll help you in return.”

  “You built all this?” Kyle knew the man had potentially vital information.

  “Yes. I designed every inch.”

  “Why? For what purpose? All the weaponry?”

  Al-Attas shook his head. “At first, I thought that I was just building a bunkered and well-protected bridge. Then it turned out that the New Muslim Order plans for this to be a new hideout for Commander Kahn so he can carry out his attack on America while protected against reprisal.”

  “What new attack on America?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said, “but I know everything. I listened to a lot of conversations that I was not supposed to hear.”

  Swanson began to unlash the patient. “Let’s get the sat phone working,” he said.

  Al-Attas sat up and rubbed his wrists, then pointed toward a nearby door that was set meticulously into a steel frame. “Sure. Right this way,” he said.

  23

  THE ELEVATOR MADE A smooth descent that ended with a slight bump and opened onto a pale yellow corridor with directions painted on the walls in bloodred lettering pointing to the infirmary. After the fire alarm had cleared out the workers, an unusual stillness had settled throughout the big project, where the deep rumble of construction work had been such a constant noise to the ears of Ayman al-Masri that its absence now was startling to the inspector.

  He recognized the area and led the other two men directly to the outer door of the airlock that shielded the sterile clinic. “Come,” he said. “We can all go through it at the same time.” The three stepped inside, the door shut tightly behind them, the rubber seals locked into place, and the automatic fans blasted them for ten seconds. Al-Masri closed his eyes against the force of the wind and remained immobile until the fans cut off and the automatic inner portal opened with a hiss to admit them into the infirmary.

  The startled inspector came to a halt. The cloth screen at the far end had been pushed aside, and the bed behind it, where the chief engineer had been subdued, was empty. The restraints hung down to the floor like sleeping snakes. There was movement at the far doorway, through which a figure dressed in black and carrying a weapon was disappearing. Al-Masri shouted an order to stop, fumbled out his own pistol, and snapped off two shots. The bullets flew wide and chipped the wall.

  The unknown figure immediately spun back and answered with a hard rip of automatic rifle fire, a raking s
tream of bullets that crashed through the room left to right and hip high. The three New Muslim Order men went sprawling on the floor, hugging the cool tiles as a hail of glass and wood and plaster chips splattered into a rising cloud of debris and dust, while ricochets sang wherever the slugs hit metal. When the firing stopped, al-Masri looked up again, pointing his weapon over a flipped table, but no one was there. The door was closed, and the empty room smelled of burned gunpowder.

  He eased his weapon down, and they all got to their feet, shaking off the surprise assault. There had been no forewarning of any danger. Both of the others had their own weapons out, too late to join the fight. “Who was it?” the bigger one asked.

  Al-Masri surveyed the wreckage, taking quite a bit of time to process his thoughts before speaking. He knew what he had seen clearly before the shots were fired: the diminutive size, the white feminine face, and the short blond hair were unmistakable. A woman had made him cower like a whipped dog. Impossible. It could only be a little Satan from the Zionists, who were the only people that used women to actually fight their battles for them. He would never speak of it, at least until after he killed her; slowly. “It is a Jew special operations team,” he concluded, walking to the bed where the technician had been strapped. “The Zionists have stolen the chief engineer. They must not leave this bridge alive.”

  Where was Sergeant Hafiz?

  * * *

  “DAMMIT, COASTIE! DON’T DO that.” Swanson barked at Beth, who was changing magazines. She had emptied a full clip into the room when the man fired at them and had seen three of them dive to the floor as she hammered away with long bursts.

  “They were shooting at us,” she explained, a calm, empty voice. She had not given the possibility that she had killed anyone a second thought. Worrying about that sort of thing was part of another life, a distant memory of an lowa farm girl who no longer existed.

  “We have limited ammunition, so stop hosing down things like this is some action movie,” Kyle said. “Be selective. Short, targeted bursts.”

  “Huh,” she said, turning away, angry. She had just saved their asses and all he could do was bitch, although she knew he was right. There had never been a shortage of ammo in her HITRON helicopter, but they were using NATO 5.56 mm rounds today and had only had what they carried. She would not make the same mistake again. Beth made a mental note to pick up the next AK-47 she saw and a bunch of magazines. There was certainly no shortage of AK bullets in this place.

  Swanson found himself in a large, well-appointed suite that would have fit in well at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston: walls of finished wood, well-made furniture, and an open balcony that extended outside. “Will the satellite phone work out there?” he asked their new guide.

  Mohammad al-Attas shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps. No guarantee. May I make an alternate suggestion?”

  “Sure.” Kyle was ready to try anything. The mission had been blown, and the bad guys knew they exactly where they were. It was time to call the birds and get out.

  The engineer moved to a small desk on one side of the room and pulled open the center drawer to reveal a computer keyboard, then unfolded a seventeen-inch flat-screen monitor. “This has a separate hard drive but is wired into the main computer system to get a clear wireless link. Can you send an e-mail, or do a Skype face-to-face video connection?”

  For a moment Kyle considered Commander Kahn of the New Muslim Order sitting before this keyboard, playing chess by himself, adding new friends on his Facebook page, updating his MySpace profile, checking out porn sites or launching an attack on the United States. The beauty and the bedevilment of social media was its anonymity, and it was so simple that a caveman could do it.

  Swanson grunted assent. The control room of Task Force Trident was manned 24/7 when an operation was in progress, and Commander Benton Freedman would be plugged in, constantly trawling his electronic universe. Kyle shifted his gear so he could sit at the desk, pulled the keyboard close, and sent a quick note to lizard@lizard.com. “Liz?” He signed it “Bounty Hunter.”

  There was a brief pause; then a pop-up window appeared in one corner of the screen to show the Lizard had created a point-to-point connection. “Yo,” came the response.

  Kyle typed, “Launch extract.”

  “Confirming extract, Bounty Hunter. Cords?”

  Swanson referred to his map and typed two groups of numbers, and the Lizard confirmed.

  “When?”

  The engineer had been watching over Kyle’s shoulder, impressed by the knowledge being demonstrated at the other end of the conversation. Whoever it was had cracked his security wall with ease and put up a private window that no one else could control. For the first time, he entertained a doubt about the security of the entire project. There were other smart people in the world.

  “How long will it take for us to get from where we are right now up to the top of the bridge?” Kyle asked the engineer.

  “Maybe ten minutes,” al-Attas replied. “If we are not slowed down too much by fighting.”

  Kyle knew that was unlikely. The battle had already begun and would only get worse. “T-minus-twenty,” he wrote. “Start time now. Hot LZ.”

  “On the way. Lizard out.” The image of a green gecko scurried up the screen, ate the window and the words in it, then crawled off the screen, leaving it blank.

  Swanson ripped out the hard drive and checked his weapon. Another problem solved. A pair of Boeing V-22 tilt-rotor Ospreys had been orbiting safely out of harm’s way and beyond radar range since Kyle and Beth had parachuted into the night. With in-flight refueling and relief crews aboard, the high-speed, long-range birds could remain on station almost indefinitely and were perfect as an exfiltration vehicle. They could take off and land like helicopters, and the large turbofan engines on each wing could rotate to provide conventional flight, which made them much faster than a chopper. The Lizard was even now alerting them to break out of orbit and head in. One would supply covering fire while the other did the pickup.

  A new checklist was forming as he surveyed the room one last time. “What are the exits here? Just the two doors and the ledge? Is there an emergency way out?”

  “Of course.” Al-Attas remembered the original instructions he had been given to design the living facility so that the resident would never be trapped, no matter what. “The easiest way is a long rope that can be snapped to that big ring secured into the rocks out on the balcony.”

  “Too exposed.” Kyle did not like the idea of dangling from a rope over the side of a cliff with people shooting at him.

  “Then there are hatchways in the floor and ceiling of the closet over there. The top one leads directly into a gun bunker, and the lower one is a service tunnel for wiring and maintenance. From either one, you can get into the tunnels and go anywhere, even beneath the river to reach the east tower, or out into the valley.”

  Pounding was heard at the door to the infirmary as the NMO security men shook the handle and tried the locks. Kyle knew they would not stay there long, and the other door would soon be under attack. He had no idea how many enemy troops would be involved.

  “Beth, listen to me. The Ospreys are inbound and will land on the helicopter LZ up top, beside the road, in exactly twenty minutes. You know the place?”

  Ledford nodded. She had studied the bridge minutely during the recon, and Kyle had pointed out the large flat area. They were going to run into opposition on the way out, but she was confident that she and Kyle would be more than a match for whoever it was. “I’m ready.”

  “We split up now. You take this guy and the maps and go through the lower hatch; get to the east tower and go up and out that way. I’m going to stick around and cause some diversions to draw them off.”

  “Shouldn’t we stay together, Kyle, to increase our firepower?” She didn’t relish the idea of being on her own.

  “Trust me, Coastie. In a few minutes, they will be coming after me with everything they’ve got. The main mission now is to g
et this guy and his information back to base. Now move. You have twenty minutes, and that’s all. Remember Quantico; don’t miss the pickup, and you go with or without me.”

  “Kyle—” she started again, but he cut her off.

  “Shut up and do what I just fucking told you. Get him and the intel out of here. If an attack on America is imminent, we’ve got to get him back safely. I’ll run interference. I trust you.”

  She looked at him with steady blue eyes, wanting to stay in his zone, while knowing it was inevitable that she had to go out on her own. She wasn’t afraid but had to push down the troublesome question of what she was doing here in the first place. Three weeks ago I worked for the dang Coast Guard, but now Kyle Swanson trusts me! That changed everything. “Come on, Mohammad,” she finally said. “Into that service tunnel.”

  Al-Attas bristled and turned to Kyle. “I do not take orders from women,” he said.

  “In that case, I will just shoot you right now and make our egress a lot easier. We will settle for the information that we already have, that hard drive, and the maps. Don’t think for a moment that you are indispensible. If you give my friend any macho shit on the way out, she has my permission to blow your head off. She never misses.”

  “Very well, but I intend to report this rudeness to your superiors.”

  “You do that. If any of us live that long.”

  * * *

  AYMAN AL-MASRI LEFT HIS doctor at the infirmary door and sent the bodyguard around to the second entrance, returning to the elevator alone and rising back to the surface. His eyes glowered like burning stones as he looked out at the vastness of the construction area. It was all such a sham, such a waste. The Pakistanis and the Taliban had both promised that it was a fortress for the new age, a place in which Commander Kahn would be totally safe, because no enemy force could possibly breach the bridge and its mighty array of techno-weapons. Those promises were worthless. They had planned on methods to turn away massive assaults, yet a small special operations team had breached all of the security devices and snatched the man who had put it all together. That chief engineer should have been disposed of immediately, for disaster seemed to follow in his footsteps. Now he and his secrets were in the hands of the infidels.