Team Red

by David DeBatto

  Bonnie turned the sound off.

  “I hate it when these guys speak English without an accent,” Caroline said. “It’s creepy. At least when they have an accent, you can tell they’re foreigners.”

  Downtown, near the intersection of Kneeland and Tremont, the lights burned in the basement windows of an old brick building where Gillian O’Doherty regarded the patient before her. She’d arrived frozen and sealed in plastic, festooned with yellow and red biohazard warning stickers, a seven-year-old Holstein thought to have been afflicted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more commonly called “Mad Cow disease.” The “downer” had been sent to Gillian because her laboratory, connected to Tufts University, the nation’s leading college of veterinary medicine, was one of the few equipped to handle large-animal tissues under level-two biocontainment protocols. Most animal procedures were handled by the day shift, but the cow had come in with an urgent memo attached; news of the cow had leaked to the press, and the National Dairy Association was afraid the public might panic and stop buying milk, even though Mad Cow could only infect people by way of the diseased animal’s sweetmeats, and not via the milk.

  “Hello, Bossie,” Gillian said, grabbing the animal’s carcass by the horns and turning the head to improve her angle of attack. “Wouldn’t it be nice if people’s heads had handles on them like yours does? Make my job so much easier. One minute now. I promise you, you won’t feel a thing.”

  She adjusted her lights, then checked the laminar flow hood above the table. The hood, the HEPA filters, the gloves, and the mask she wore over her nose and mouth were all largely superfluous, given that the only way she could really catch the disease would be to dig a spoon into the animal’s brain and scoop out a mouthful and eat it, but all the same, she’d been in the business long enough to know better than to alter standard operating procedures.

  From a tray, she took a scalpel and inserted it just below the animal’s left supraorbital foramen, slicing in a semicircular motion above the eye itself and peeling off the animal’s three eyelids. She dropped the tarsal glands and the first and second eyelids into a square stainless-steel pan but set aside the third eyelid, which contained the lymphoid tissues. It took her a few minutes to prepare a slide of the lymphoid tissue, which she then examined under an electron microscope. She was looking for PrPscs, the telltale clumps of misfolded prion proteins that would indicate transmittable spongiform encephalopathies, but also scrapie and a few other nasties.

  The lymphoid tissue looked normal.

  “I guess we’ll have to go a bit further, love,” she said. “Think happy thoughts.”

  She set the blade for the circular saw to make an inch-deep cut and began her first pass just behind the left horn, working her way through the lateral parietal bone, across the occipital, then the medial parietal, taking care to keep splattering to a minimum. The work beneath the horns took a bit longer. She cleared the meningeal integuments with a scalpel and lifted the skullcap. A quick glance beneath the skull told her further microscopy would not be necessary. The right hemisphere of the brain looked good, but the left hemisphere had been pushed aside. In its place, she found a rather large endogenous budding of metacestode Coenurus cerebralis, or tapeworm larvae, which had evidently caused acute meningoencephalitis and explained the ataxia and motor deviations reported by the farmer. Coenurus cerebralis was an intestinal parasite common to dogs. The cow would have ingested the eggs while grazing somewhere where an infected dog had recently defecated in the grass.

  She took a sample of the larvae and sealed it up in a glass tube, to send to the National Dairy Association to reassure them.

  “Well, Bossie,” she said. “No wonder you were acting strange. You must have had a terrible headache.”

  She then regarded the carcass. She could have left it for the morning crew, but she liked to leave the lab spotless, just as she liked to arrive to see the lab in spotless condition. Using a hand saw, she removed the animal’s extremities, then began to disassemble the carcass. She placed the animal parts in a large plastic bucket mounted to a rolling dolly, and when the tub was full, she pushed the cart over to the digester, the largest of its kind, big enough to dissolve a large horse, and pressed the button that hydraulically raised the stainless-steel lid. It took her seven trips, but after nearly an hour’s work, she’d managed to load all the pieces into the machine. She set the timer and then pressed the button that lowered the lid. She listened as the lid sealed itself, then watched to make sure the green light indicating complete closure came on, at which point the timer began to count down from sixty minutes. Over the next hour, the animal parts would be washed in an alkaline bath at high temperature and under pressure, until every cell wall and molecular bond had been denatured, at which point the bath would be brought to a neutral pH and then the slurry would be flushed into the sewer system, safe as flushing tap water. In the morning, the lab assistants would find only a pile of bones, rendered soft enough to crush between your fingers.

  She was tired. In the freezer, she saw the package her friend David DeLuca had sent her. She would have gotten to it right away if the American Dairy Association hadn’t been so pissy about getting quick results. She would get to David’s syringe first thing in the morning.

  In his study above his garage, attached to a barn-red two-story colonial in the town of Peabody, Walter Ford sat at the antique walnut roll-top desk his wife, Martha, had bought him to celebrate his retirement from the police force, going over his lesson plans for the next week. This semester, the was teaching two graduate classes at Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, one in “Research and Evaluation Methods: Surveys, Observation, Archival Data, and Procedures,” another in “Statistical Analysis: Probability Distributions, Sampling, Hypothesis, Correlation, Regression, and Forecasting.” It was a good fit for him, despite the fact that he sometimes clashed with a couple of the academic stars on the faculty who taught the more theoretical classes, “Justice and Society” or “The Philosophy of Violence,” but who’d never actually carried a badge or walked a beat.

  He’d decided to give both classes a new section that hadn’t been on their syllabus at the beginning of the semester, assigning them a hands-on nuts-and-bolts sort of contemporary case survey. Their task would be to learn and list the names (and biographical material, including immigration status) of every Arab scholar or touring Muslim polemist, whether of Islamic national origin or otherwise, teaching, lecturing, or traveling within the United States in the last five years, examine their rhetoric (academic papers, essays, criticisms, class descriptions, and so forth) to arrive at their terrorist potential index (after first agreeing on a methodology and the parameters for defining that), calculate their travel and communication patterns, look for data clusters cross-referenced against intelligence chatter concerning keywords including “Lanatullah,” “God’s Justice,” “Alf Wajeh,” “Thousand Faces,” and a number of other variants, and then make predictions about who might be doing what, when, and where. Tom Miecowski, at the New York office for Homeland Security, had given Walter the telephone number of a man in the Washington office named Katz who’d already been compiling that sort of information, though Katz still lacked the manpower to push his analysis forward. Walter had promised to share his results with Katz, who, in exchange, gave him a starter list of 643 names of Arab academics he’d come up with so far. DeLuca had also given Ford his SIPERNET password, and with it, access to the federal Secure Information Protocol database on terrorists shared by Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, DIA, NSA, and nine other intelligence agencies. The SIPERNET information was for Ford’s eyes only, but he could use it to support or refute the things his students came up with using Google. Between SIPERNET and Google, Walter wasn’t so sure that Google wasn’t the more useful tool.

  “How to protect and ensure the rights of the innocent?” Ford scribbled in longhand on a pad of yellow legal paper, in the section where he listed questions to raise with his students. />
  DeLuca had also given Ford a set of code templates that SIGINT had derived from deciphering speeches by Al Qaeda members and insurgency leaders inside Iraq. DeLuca said they’d found messages hidden inside press releases and public statements, messages often broadcast on Al Jazeera television in the Middle East. It was possible that whoever he was looking for was using the American media in a similar way. It was worth looking into, though they were going to need typed transcripts of those speeches deemed suspicious, which was going to be a lot of work.

  “Freedom of speech—how it makes it easier to catch the bad guys,” Ford wrote.

  He had twenty-five students, thirteen in one class and twelve in the other. He anticipated a number of them were going to grumble about how boring the work that they were about to perform was.

  “Impatience is the chief characteristic of the criminal mind,” he wrote. “Tedium is therefore law enforcement’s best friend and surest ally. Not one out of a thousand criminals has true patience, because they invariably lack true inner peace. Tortoise vs. hare analogy: The prisons are full of hares, and the tortoise gets the doughnut.”

  He turned off the light and set his reading glasses on the desk. He looked at the clock on the wall. It was twelve-thirty. He was tired.

  At the door, he looked around the room one more time, then turned off the overhead light. He paused at the window on the landing. Crickets chirped loudly in the night.

  In his boat The Lady J, docked in Gloucester harbor, Sami Jambazian tried to sleep. The air was cool, the boat barely rocking in its slip, a quiet night, save for the occasional sound of music coming from the jukebox at Jolly Roger’s Tavern, whenever a drunk opened the door and stumbled out onto Harbor Street. He rarely slept on the boat, but he had a party of ten from a medical convention in Boston who wanted to hit the water at five.

  The boat was a thirty-eight-foot Bruno Stillman with a ZF twin-speed transmission. He’d bought the boat used off a Portuguese captain for fifty thousand dollars, a loan he’d be paying off for some time, the way things were going, what with alimony, child support, and college tuition on top of that. He’d been thrilled when his oldest daughter Briana got into BU and figured he’d find the money somewhere to pay for it, and it had been tough, but he’d managed; now his ex-wife Caroline had called to tell him the good news—their youngest daughter, Kate, had been accepted at Amherst College, one of the most expensive schools in the country. Where was he going to come up with that kind of cash?

  Tomorrow was going to be another one of those unpleasant things you do for money. Doctors weren’t the easiest customers to deal with. Their checks cleared, but they tended to be obnoxious and demanding.

  On such days, he wondered what he’d been thinking when he’d planned for a second career after retirement. He was only forty-two, a young man—there was still a lot of good he could do. Taking guys out fishing was okay, but he couldn’t fool himself into thinking it was important.

  The trip the next day went well, good weather, even seas, and hungry fish. Everybody caught enough to fill their coolers. They tipped Sami an extra hundred, which was nicer, and when Sami complained to one doctor about the high costs of health insurance and how his monthly bill was now higher than his mortgage, the doctor gave him his card and suggested they work out a barter arrangement, medical care (within limits) in exchange for fishing trips. Sami said he’d think about it.

  He was cleaning up when he saw the car stop at the end of the dock, a blue sedan with the words U.S. Army in white letters on the door. A pair of neatly dressed specialists approached, saluting him as they neared.

  This wasn’t what he wanted to see.

  His service status was IRR, for Individual Ready Reserve, which meant that he was eligible to be called to active duty for eight years after completing his voluntary service commitment. It was a mobilization tool dubbed “the backdoor draft” and something that, as far as Sami knew, hadn’t been used since 1968. Technically, the army was within its rights to call him up, though Sami had long since considered himself retired. The specialists apologized and told him his country needed him, and that he had twenty-four hours to get his affairs in order before he was to report to Fort Devins, for immediate deployment to Iraq, where his orders were to report to one Sergeant David DeLuca, at the counterintelligence battalion working out of Camp Anaconda, in Balad, thirty klicks north of Baghdad.

  “Motherfucker,” Sami said under his breath.

  Chapter Eight

  DELUCA WASN’T BIG ON FLYING.

  It made no sense whatsoever, he knew, but he just felt that airplanes were bad luck, or rather that if his own luck ever ran out, as one day it surely would, it was going to be on an airplane.

  Helicopters were worse, and he was in one, flying north to the Air Force base at Kirkuk where SIGINT and IMINT had their headquarters. The city of Kirkuk, 255 klicks north of Baghdad and just over 200 from Balad, was too far away to risk sending a Humvee convoy, so he’d hitched a ride on a Blackhawk, one of two flying north that morning, with a full bird colonel and his aides in the second chopper, both birds skimming the ground at nearly two hundred miles an hour.

  As the ground raced past, he saw the vegetable and date palm plantations of the Diyala River floodplain, the Khan Seyyid palm oasis, which the pilot gave a wide berth to, then the Delli Abbas region with orchards full of fruit trees planted in rows. He watched herds of goats and flocks of sheep scatter as the chopper roared overhead. His stomach started to lurch up and down in his gut as the chopper hugged the terrain of the Jebel Hamrin highlands, with more fertile farms and plantations, then the wadis of Salahiyeh and Aq Su. His gut turned over again as the helicopter suddenly rose to slice between the peaks of Neft Dagh and Ali Dagh, and then it dipped again beyond the defile, plummeting down its steepest incline like an out-of-control rollercoaster. He glanced below again and saw some sort of mosque or sanctuary, four large white domes arranged in a square configuration. He considered asking Allah for safe passage but figured the guy had to be pretty busy, with everything else that was going on in that part of the world. Then he saw oil facilities, well fields, pumping stations, refineries, and tank farms, and he knew he was getting close to Kirkuk. He wondered how much better off Iraq would have been if it never had any oil. First the French came for it, until they were displaced by the Germans after Kaiser Wilhelm II negotiated with the Ottoman Empire for the rights to build a Berlin-to-Baghdad highway, the Germans in turn ousted by the British, who weren’t about to let Germans either control the oil or stand between them and the shortest land route to India. As far as the Iraqis were concerned, the United States was just the latest invader to give it a go. They were wrong, but he could see how they felt that way.

  Finally he saw, below, the post, identifiable by its hundred-foot-tall antennae anchored with steel cables against the desert winds, satellite dish arrays and microwave transceivers, a cinderblock building newly constructed to house all the electronic equipment, and a massive generator next to it to power it all, the whole complex painted desert tan and draped with desert camouflage netting.

  Scott was waiting for him next to the LZ, standing apart from the larger contingent there to greet the full bird colonel. DeLuca hadn’t seen his son since Christmas, though they’d been in the same country for months. He looked good, taller than his old man, leaner, his hair short now where it had been shoulder length in high school, but he was still the same kid DeLuca loved with all his heart. He saluted his son with as much respect as he’d ever saluted anybody.

  “Hey, Pops,” Scott said. “How was your flight?”

  “I’m going to walk back,” DeLuca said. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” Scott said. “I’m swell. I’m in Kirkuk. What can I say? How’s Mom?”

  “Okay,” DeLuca said. “I haven’t called her in a while but she was good, last I checked.”

  “You want a quick tour?”

  “Absolutely,” DeLuca said. “I want to see all your toys.”


  The young lieutenant wore a security pass clipped to the pocket of his DCU and showed it to the guards at the door leading to a large hangar. Another sentry stood guard at the far end of the hall. Scott showed his pass again and the sentry stepped aside.

  The ceiling of the hangar was made of vaulted concrete, hardened against bombardment or aerial attack. On the floor of the hangar, DeLuca saw an odd array of strange-looking winged vehicles of varying sizes, many of them being attended to by maintenance technicians. Closest at hand was a drab gray vehicle about forty feet long.

  “This one of the Predators I’ve heard so much about?” DeLuca asked.

  “This piece of shit?” Scott said, wiggling the wing. “This is an Iraqi UAV we seized when we got here. Officially a Czech Aero Vodochody L-29 ‘Mayo’ trainer that’s been modified. This one is over thirty years old.”

  “They had unmanned aircraft?”

  “The joke around here goes that Saddam was trying to develop UAV capability because during the first Gulf War, all his live pilots got in their MIGs and flew across the border into Iran and surrendered at the first sign of trouble. Note the spray nozzles and the wing tanks.”

  “For?”

  “Well, probably not for crop dusting,” Scott said. “Chemical dispersal. We didn’t find any residue so this one was never loaded, but who knows?”

  Beyond the Czech vehicle was a row of four airplanes about the same size as the L-29 but clearly of a more modern design, white as snow with long narrow wings, like those on a glider, and a fuselage bearing a slight resemblance to a beluga whale, with a hump where the head would be and a single jet engine mounted atop the tail, with two fins in a vertical vee configuration.