Team Red

by David DeBatto

  “Bunker-busters,” somebody shouted.

  “I got a 130 directly above us,” Sykes called out, staring up in the sky with his night vision goggles. “I’ve got a parachute.”

  They all knew what that meant. C-130s were used to drop the largest nonnuclear bomb in the Air Force’s arsenal, the BLU-82 or “Big Blue,” also called a “Daisy Cutter.” The “Daisy Cutter” had been originally developed during the Vietnam War as a device used to clear landing zones for helicopters, the shock wave blowing down everything that was more than half an inch high for hundred of yards in all directions. BLU-82s were considerably larger than the weapons used during the Vietnam War, massive fifteen-thousand-pound devices packed with 12,600 pounds of GSX gas slurry explosive, used to clear minefields, wipe out tank divisions, or delete entire building complexes from the face of the earth. They were also called “vacuum bombs” for the way they sucked all the air out of the sky. Too large to fit through the bomb-bay doors on any of the Air Force’s conventional bombers, Daisy Cutters were dropped from C-130s by parachutes attached to static lines, and if DeLuca remembered correctly, it took about thirty seconds from the time they left the plane to the time they went off, about twenty or thirty feet above the ground.

  Zoulalian’s foot pressed the accelerator to the floor, but the car was old, the road slushy with dust and sand, and it was impossible to go fast enough.

  From nowhere, a set of headlights appeared. DeLuca saw a Bradley M3A3 fighting vehicle approaching them at top speed. Both vehicles slammed on their brakes and came to a stop, facing each other.

  A man ran from the back of the Bradley, waving his arms to hurry them into the armored vehicle. It was Preacher Johnson. As they scrambled in on top of each other, Johnson handed them oxygen bottles.

  “Seatbelts if you can, and if you can’t, hang on to something!” Johnson shouted as the massive vehicle spun 180 degrees on a tread and roared away, its six-hundred-horsepower Cummins VTA-903T diesel engine at full capacity. A second later, the inside of the Bradley was lit by a flash of light through the rear portholes. DeLuca struggled with his five-point harness, hearing it click just as the shock wave hit them.

  The thirty-four-ton Bradley was lifted off the ground by the blast, as easily as a spring breeze might blow an empty French fries bag across a McDonald’s parking lot, tumbling three times end over end in one direction, then barrel-rolling four times in the opposite direction as air rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the blast before the vehicle came to a stop upside down.

  All was quiet, save for a soft hissing sound.

  “Is anybody hurt?” he heard Johnson call out. “Report, please. Anybody dead, speak up now. Check your buddies. Who we got? Y’all sing out now.”

  “MacKenzie, okay,” DeLuca heard Mack report, coughing from the dust.

  “Vasquez okay.”

  “Sykes good.”

  “Khalil okay.”

  “Sergeant Pink okay.”

  “Sergeant Green fucking all right. Hoo yah.”

  “Mr. David?” Preacher Johnson asked. “Are you still with us?”

  “I’m thinking,” DeLuca said. “Just gimme a minute.”

  A minute later, they were standing on the desert floor, looking up at the stars, and at the salt works in the distance, where a carpet bombing from what Vasquez guessed were vintage B-52s launched from the Air Force base on Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, were dropping wave after wave of firebombs, probably five-hundred-pound MY-77 Mod 4s, Vasquez suspected, and no one had the strength to argue with him. Preacher Johnson guessed they were making sure that any escaped viruses were thoroughly incinerated. Al-Tariq was gone. So was Adnan. There was no need to look for bodies.

  DeLuca reached into his shirt pocket and removed the floppy disk. It was undamaged. Zoulalian reported that the laptop computer Al-Tariq had been using was intact as well.

  DeLuca reached into his pants pocket and found the plastic bottle of pain pills that Sergeant Zoulalian had been kind enough to bring him, but he was discouraged to discover that at some point during the previous skirmish, a bullet had shattered the medicine bottle, blowing a hole in his pants as well. He reached in again and dug deep until, at the very bottom of his pocket, he found a single capsule.

  “Anybody got any water?” he asked. “I think I’m going to have a headache.”

  Chapter Twenty

  WALTER FORD WAS ON THE PHONE WITH A doctor from the CDC, describing in greater detail what he’d done and found, when he saw an FBI helicopter disappear behind the trees, about a quarter-mile off. Ten minutes later, a man in an orange moon suit walked up the driveway toward the house, carrying a large suitcase in one hand and his oxygen supply in the other. The man identified himself as Agent Peterson, an FBI epidemiologist. He said not to be alarmed, but he was there to sweep the house for any signs of biological or chemical toxins. He opened his suitcase and took from it an electronic sniffer that collected potentially dangerous chemical elements, spores, bacteria, or viral particles, broke them down into their molecular building blocks, gave each molecular building block an electrical charge so that it could be read, and then compared that recombined signature against those stored in its onboard computer. The first pass of the house showed everything to be clean, Peterson said, as had a pass over the garbage can where Ford had put the vials he’d found. However, Peterson apologized, as an extra precaution, the three men in the house would have to be transferred to a quarantine unit for testing and observation while the house, boathouse, and car were sealed and pumped full of bleach to kill any residual agents the sensors might have failed to detect.

  Agent Peterson spent the next hour securing the vials for testing. Out the window, Ford saw two other moon-suited members of the FBI epidemiology team going over the boathouse. As darkness fell, a truck arrived, a semi pulling a shiny steel trailer with a pair of tinted windows toward the front. There was a door in the back of the trailer, with steps that folded down, leading up to a decontamination chamber. A hatch on the other side of the decontamination room opened onto a mobile level four medical laboratory that formed the midsection of the trailer, and beyond that, a third door led to an isolation room, where Ford, Jambazian, and Chief Svoboda were escorted, changing into white overalls while their clothes were sterilized. They met a man who identified himself as a Colonel Roger Seligson, with the CDC, who’d flown up from Washington in a military jet that landed at Otis AFB, Cape Cod. From there he’d taken a Coast Guard helicopter to the site. He had three assistants with him, and said more people would be arriving throughout the night, some coming all the way from Atlanta. He explained the tests they were going to have to do and said he was afraid it could be a while before anybody could be given a clean bill of health.

  Walter said he understood. He asked, via the intercom, if he could plug in his computer and hook it up to the Internet while he waited. Colonel Seligson thought that could be arranged. He stood outside the lab window and gave the men in the isolation chamber two thumbs-up.

  Walter Ford logged on. He wanted to make sure all the concerned parties were kept informed of what was happening. He got a piece of good news from Tom at Homeland Security, who told him CDC scientists in Atlanta, working on the blood sample Gillian had left for them, and on the tissue sample from Anthony Fusaro, the dockworker, had discovered that the virus was unable to survive above temperatures of 180-85 degrees, a discovery made by looking more closely at Fusaro’s charred flesh, where particles of the variola-modified virus were broken down and denatured in the outer, more charred portions of the tissue but remained virulent in the more protected internal tissues.

  It’s not much but it’s something. Now all we gotta do is hope for a 180-degree heat wave.

  Tom

  Walter forwarded the information to DeLuca. Seligson told him that DeLuca had been right about the clear brown-green fluid in the vials, which tests had shown to be green tea and nothing more.

  He also forwarded DeLuca an e-mail he’d received from
O’Leary at the FBI. Of the six individuals other than Jaburi represented by the DNA found on Jaburi’s hairbrush, four had been identified as young women who’d been sexual homicide victims, and their bodies had been arranged and posed (a practice not uncommon among serial killers), their hair neatly brushed. They were still trying to identify the other two samples.

  It was approaching dawn when Seligson finally told the men in quarantine he had some good news for them. His team had been running antibody/antigen challenges all night, and all of them had proven negative, as had comparisons of workups done on the blood of Gillian O’Doherty. “Two more to go, and if those are negative, you’ll be cleared for release.”

  In the meantime, Scott DeLuca had e-mailed to say they’d located and identified the Aafia’s Ark from UAV photographs. The sailboat’s position, N42º 59¢ and W63º 29¢, was roughly 230 miles east of Cape Cod, not far from the fishing grounds of Georges Bank, which had been cleared of all traffic. The sailboat was being monitored via radar by the 280-foot Coast Guard cutter Cuttyhunk, and by the USS Livingston, a 400-foot Navy Landing Ship Transport that had taken up position beyond the horizon, awaiting instructions. The intelligence community wanted to take Jaburi alive for questioning, while the Navy simply wanted to blow him out of the water and go have breakfast. Scott had sent Ford a set of digital photographs of the boat and told him if he wanted to, he could go to an IMINT website and use the password Scott gave him to watch the UAV imagery in real time. When Ford clicked over and logged on, he saw a revolving sequence of images, the boat from a distance, the boat closer in, closer still, and then the image zoomed back out to a plot of the ocean sector with the participating boats marked, the Coast Guard cutter, the LST, and closer in, a pair of fifteen-foot Navy CRRC “rubber ducks” from the Livingston carrying SEAL teams, circling Jaburi where he slept.

  Ford forwarded the information he had to DeLuca, then left a note for his wife, who would be waking up about now. Sami had been right about the weather. Dawn had broken overcast and gray over the Cape, with a storm moving up from the south along the Atlantic coast, possibly the first Nor’easter of the season.

  Mornin’, Martha my dear. Sorry I couldn’t make it home last night. I gotta take a little trip with Sami this morning when we’re through with the paperwork here, but I’ll call you when we get back within range. All is well. Don’t forget to give Kirby his flea medicine.

  Walter

  At the TOC, David DeLuca was feeling better, with a bag of ice around his neck, a change of clothes, and a cup of army coffee in his hand. The show tonight on the TOC’s plasma screens would be the apprehension of Mahmoud Jaburi. DeLuca hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d boarded the Osprey for the trip home, when the flight engineer offered him an MRE like a stewardess passing out peanuts, and he consumed it without complaint, his body craving nourishment.

  Mack brought him a plate of food from the mess hall to supplement the MRE, adding, “Don’t get used to this—I’m not your waitress, but tonight I’m going to make an exception.” It was good to hear she was back to her sassy self. He’d slept for perhaps forty-five minutes on the return trip to Balad, and felt slightly less blurred and ragged. Mack was bruised, her left eye black and blue and bloodshot where something, she still didn’t know what, struck her, she didn’t know when, in addition to a sprained left wrist. Hoolie had cracked a rib. Dan Sykes had a ruptured kidney and a collapsed lung from where he’d landed on a piece of jagged metal when he’d long-jumped the gap in the catwalk, and had been taken to the CASH for treatment. Preacher Johnson hadn’t a scratch. Dr. Thomas wanted DeLuca to get X-rays and wear a neck brace, but DeLuca told him it would have to wait.

  “If I were you, I think I’d be in tremendous pain,” Dr. Thomas had said.

  “If I were you,” DeLuca said, “I’d stay you.”

  Phillip LeDoux had joined them in the ops room, as had a full bird colonel named Eagan from IMINT (Scott at his side) and an Admiral Bishop from the Navy, now that it was involved. Kaplan was there to provide expertise on the science side. A team of techies was already working on Al-Tariq’s computer files, networked to an NSA lab back in Virginia where the government mainframes were pulling apart the Alf Wajeh data as fast as they could. LeDoux was at a corner table, consulting with Generals Abizaid and Sanchez, who’d flown in to consult, more brass at the TOC tonight than a marching band. Captain Martin told DeLuca the Pentagon and the head of Homeland Security wanted to go to Code Red again, but they were getting resistance from the White House and the secretary of defense, who said he didn’t want to sound too many alarms. The argument for keeping Jaburi alive was that he had all the names of Alf Wajeh in his head and might be persuaded to part with them. The argument for blowing him out of the water was that he might have some alternative means of triggering the attack, even though his SSB had been jammed as soon as the boat was located, which prevented him from sending or receiving e-mail.

  When DeLuca read the e-mail from Walter Ford, he called Dr. Kaplan over and asked him to look at it. Kaplan had worked with Seligson and knew him well. He said, reading, that the virus denatured at 180 degrees sounded about right. They’d found several JPEGs on Al-Tariq’s laptop of the bottles of “olive oil” that had been used to transport the smallpox virus, so they knew what to look for. The question was, even with an NSA mainframe crunching the data and tracking down the members of Alf Wajeh, how would they find them all in time? There were twenty-four names in the send block, indicating twenty-four terrorist cells—even if there were ten members in each cell, a high estimate, it was still far fewer terrorists than the “thousand faces” that Alf Wajeh had claimed. It was still more than enough to get the job done.

  DeLuca asked Captain Martin to tell Phillip he needed to talk to him. Martin came back and told DeLuca to join LeDoux at the table. DeLuca asked if Kaplan could join them. He’d seen General Sanchez in person once, but he’d only seen Abizaid on television.

  “This is Sergeant David DeLuca, the top CI guy on this,” LeDoux said. “And Dr. Kaplan. You had an idea, Dave?”

  At the door to the TOC, DeLuca saw Captain Martin restraining Colonel Reicken, who apparently was insisting on joining the briefing. He made eye contact with Reicken, who looked utterly apoplectic at the thought that one of his sergeants could meet with the top brass and he couldn’t.

  “Just one,” DeLuca said. “The doctor here can explain the science to you, but my thinking is, we have all these people, the Alf Wajeh, out there waiting for instructions, right? Right now, they’re waiting. They know that it’s supposed to be tonight. And it’s ‘Id al-Fitr here, but it’s eight hours different back in the States, so we have essentially eight hours of time lag to work with, before they see the moon or whatever. They’re not suspicious, yet, but they will be if too much time passes and they don’t hear anything. So, if we have all the addresses, even if we don’t know who these guys are, we could still send them all instructions, only we make ’em our instructions. I wrote down what I think we should say to them. We’d probably want an Arab linguist to get the phrasing exactly right.”

  He handed General Abizaid a piece of paper, on which he’d written:

  Praise Allah [etc.] Dear holy warriors [etc.], the time has come tonight for us to begin. Follow these instructions as you prepare for the jihad. To activate your weapons, place the bottles that have been sent to you in your microwave ovens. Do not open the bottle. Heat it on high for five minutes. Wait ten minutes and repeat, then wait for further instructions. If you don’t have a microwave, submerge bottle in boiling water for ten minutes and repeat. Under no circumstances are you to open the bottles before you do this, or the agent will not work. God is great [blah blah blah].

  “There’s twenty-four names in the send block,” DeLuca said. “I don’t see how we’re going to successfully bust 240 terrorists, plus or minus, without one or two getting away. This way, if we deactivate the virus while we have ’em all rounded up in one place, so to speak, we can take our tim
e picking ’em up.”

  “Maybe we could add a line, something like, ‘Reply to this e-mail when you’re ready and give me your location so that you can be contacted,’” LeDoux suggested.

  “What if this stuff boils over inside the microwave?” Abazaid said. “Won’t that release the virus?”

  “If it gets hot enough to boil over, it’ll be dead,” Kaplan said. “It only takes a few seconds, and it’s going to take more than that for the solution to go from 180 degrees to 220.”

  “The point is,” DeLuca said, “they’re all out there, waiting to hear from headquarters, and the longer we wait, the more likely it is that word is going to get out about what happened at the salt works. Once that happens, and they all start to think they’re on their own . . .” He didn’t have to finish the thought. “I’m thinking we need to do something now. Sirs.”

  General Sanchez smiled.

  “We’ll discuss, Sergeant,” he said, saluting DeLuca. “Doctor. Thank you.”

  DeLuca saluted back.

  By the time Sami Jambazian was able to put Race Point and the P-town light astern, heading out into the open sea, it was past noon and raining, with following seas rolling in three- to four-foot swells. The weather was expected to remain steady, according to the latest reports. Sami watched his compass and his GPS receiver to stay on course, heading for the coordinates where the Aafia’s Ark had last been seen. Walter had given Tom Sami’s marine fax number, and Tom had promised to keep them up to date on what was happening.

  As The Lady J approached within twelve miles of Mahmoud Jaburi’s sailboat, Walter received a fax from Tom telling him the Cuttyhunk and the Livingston were closing in on Jaburi, making an upwind approach, given that airborne biological agents were potentially aboard. Sami throttled forward to make his best speed, about thirty knots, the V-shaped hull of the heavy craft cutting through the swells, his bow crashing against the occasional wave. Walter donned one of the Helly Hansen rain slickers that Sami kept for his guests and went to stand at the bow, scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars and pointing for Sami when he finally saw the sailboat. Walter would, of course, step aside and let the Navy and the Coast Guard do their jobs, but it was also, as far as he was concerned, his case and his collar—come what might, he wanted to see it through to the end.