The Missile Game (The Dr. Scott James Thriller Series Book 1)

by Glenn Shepard

  The driver’s eyes widened as he looked at Farok. “But Bin Garza directed Shakel and you to continue to pursue a moderate course with Al Qaeda. To steer from the brutality of ISIS. To gain the confidence of the people we control by treating them like our own family.”

  Farok’s fists knotted. “You know I spoke in opposition to his gestures of kindness to the people in Bin Gaza’s control. A true leader is strong and gains respect by making people fearful of his vengeance, as God invokes the fear in all of us. Strict discipline is the new direction of our Islamic State. I will slay all who disobey me.”

  “You cannot disobey Bin Gaza’s directive. We must continue on in Al Qaeda,” the haggard driver said. “And I will fight your disobedience.”

  Farok jerked a pistol from his shemagh and fired five shots. His driver fell to the dirt. His mouth opened to speak, but his head fell slowly to one side before words came out. Farok shot him three more times, then shouted, “God tells me to join the Islamic State! I will dispense with Bin Garza’s weakness!” He looked upward. “Allah, I swear on your blessed name, I will make the American pigs quake in fear of me.”

  Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan

  6:05 am

  Colonel Edwards and the forensics team cheered.

  Alpha Charlie did not celebrate, even as the refueling aircraft came in and saved his drone from sputtering to the earth on its last pound of fuel. He was pleased about the millions that he had made from this kill. The extra money would allow him to shift his drone control station and missiles back home and continue his missions from there, but still, he wasn’t about to jump up and down and cheer. He’d done his job.

  He stood as bottles of Dom Perignon were uncorked. Without fanfare, Charlie grabbed a drink and downed it. Then he poured himself another. As he swallowed, he thought to himself, “All in a day’s work.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ICU, Jackson City Hospital

  Jackson City, North Carolina

  7:16 am

  RESUSCITATIVE ATTEMPTS ON DR. CAREY had failed, even though the paramedics had labored over him for an hour.

  After that, I’d been up all night, going between the police station for questioning and the hospital to check on Elizabeth Keyes. She’d been transferred from my surgery center to Jackson City Hospital, and even after twelve hours she still hadn’t awakened from her surgery, which concerned me. I had recounted in my mind every detail of the procedure on Keyes but I couldn’t think of anything that had gone wrong.

  The surgery had gone smoothly. It wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t reconstructing an accident victim’s entire face—this was just a routine cosmetic procedure. I’d placed silicone implants in Elizabeth Keyes’ cheeks and chin and had taken a little fat from her neck. I didn’t think she really needed any of this done. She was beautiful before surgery. I did it because she insisted. But it was just a minor thing—nothing to it. The procedures I’d done on her didn’t even require bandages, and generated little bruising.

  But I stood now in the ICU and took in the whole nightmare. I almost felt like breaking down and crying. Boyd Carey was dead. And Keyes wasn’t waking up. I couldn’t believe what had happened.

  I again called my wife. “They haven’t done the autopsy,” I said to her, “but it’s definitely a homicide. Someone jabbed a needle into Carey’s neck, and probably shot him with a big bolus of a drug. It might take a few days to resolve all this.”

  “Who … ?” Her voice was suspicious. “Why would someone … kill … Dr. Carey?”

  “I don’t know”

  “Who … ?” She paused. “You should have just kept doing your surgery at the hospital. You should have never spent all that money building your own surgery center. And operating on that girl in your office ... after hours. Is there something going on between the two of you?”

  “Alicia—please … You know there’s nothing between us, or between me and anyone.”

  “I know that? No. I don’t know what you’ve been doing at the office late every night. Maybe this explains a lot of things.”

  “Please believe me Alicia. I’ve never lied to you.”

  Alicia didn’t respond.

  “Please believe me”

  “Hmmp. I hope everything works out at the hospital. I mean, you’ll need to still see patients and operate even though your office is closed ... I need money to pay all the bills.”

  “I know.”

  She hung up. I called her back twice and even texted her, but she didn’t respond.

  I did not want to hear that.

  Regardless, I went back to Keyes’ bedside and waited.

  I’d been dealing with the police almost constantly since Dr. Carey’s death, but none of that had really meant anything. It was just a prologue. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to talk to Harris—Detective Sergeant Pete Harris. He and I had always been on friendly terms. Until now.

  Harris nodded to me as he walked into the ICU. He strolled up and stood at Elizabeth Keyes’ bedside. Harris was wearing his orange and brown-checkered sport coat and his usual embroidered western shirt, with string tie. He never used his police uniform. Harris’ father, “Pop” Harris, had been a cop in town and always treated his son as he would a police academy student. His dad taught him that, “It’s a cop’s job to see things that other people miss.” Pete benefited from his father’s teachings when he attended the Police Academy. While his high school grades were marginal, he made straight A’s in the Academy.

  He was offered a job first with the Raleigh Police Department, about twenty miles away, then offered one at Chapel Hill, which was slightly closer, turned them both down, and took a job on the Jackson City Police force, instead. His promotions came quickly. With just eight years under his belt, he was asked to be police chief, a job he turned down. Despite a large salary differential of the two positions, he kept his rank and his job just as it was. All he wanted to be was a homicide detective.

  There was a long period of silence as Harris considered his words before speaking. He looked at me through slits of eyes narrowed by thick, bushy eyebrows and heavy eyelids that gave him the look of a bulldog. He was a large man, six foot one inch tall and, though muscular, was overweight at 264 pounds. In a low, gravelly voice, he said, clearing his throat first, “Ahem … You know anything about Doc Carey’s death?”

  He stared at me until I looked away. His look was accusatory. I hadn’t done anything wrong. “As I said last night, I heard an odd noise—”

  “Why don’t you just step over here with me.”

  I followed Harris out of the privacy curtains and to the reception area. “Now,” he said, “what were you saying?”

  “We had just finished operating on Keyes.”

  “This is you and Dr. Carey.”

  “Yes. It was just the two of us. We were operating on Keyes. We were waiting for her to wake up from sedation.”

  I told him about the whole incident, the loud thumping noise of the body hitting the floor, my attempts to save him, as well as the reason I hadn’t been in the OR when the murder occurred.

  Harris asked, in a quiet, calm tone, “Do you know this Duke woman? Is she a member of your staff?”

  “Anna Duke? No. I’ve never met her. Of course, Elizabeth Keyes is my office manager. But I don’t know Anna Duke. And there was no record of her in the patient’s files, either, which is kind of strange. Anyway, she wasn’t there.”

  “Well,” Harris said, “the two needle marks in Dr. Carey’s neck are tellin’ me drugs were injected by the killer. Someone with ‘nough medical skill ta hit the big artery.” He paused as he stared at me. I was really uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be there.

  A man wearing a white lab coat over police-issued black trousers and shoes ran down the hallway toward Harris. He stopped short of the detective and said, as he breathed hard from his exert
ion, “Mr. Harris, I have to see you right away.”

  Harris and the police lab technician huddled in a corner, and I was alone again with my thoughts.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BBC/World News

  11:06 GMT/UTC

  A SPOKESMAN FOR THE Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, is claiming responsibility for the bombing of the offices of an American defense contractor in Abu Dahbi on Sunday. A spokesman for the group called the office “a control center for American drones.” American officials have repeatedly denied using civilian contractors to operate missile-firing drones. The Brookings Institution released a report on Tuesday accusing the U.S. Government of operating so-called “black sites,” or secret drone control centers, inside the United States. The U.S. State Department, addressing accusations of the existence of drone-operating black sites inside the U.S., said, in a prepared statement, “Those types of rumors are extremely irresponsible.”

  Drone Control Center, “Alpha Charlie”

  United States

  3:04 am

  In a small, dimly lit room, Charlie turned his attention to the thickly padded executive office chair, still in its factory wrappings. He stripped the bubble wrap and neatly folded and stuffed it in the trash. The chair tilted in all directions. The two armrests were fourteen inches wide and featured dials, black plastic knobs, and detachable control handles. He sat in the chair and twisted his body all around. It leaned back too much and not far enough to the right. Manipulation of control buttons on the chair arms corrected these problems.

  He leaned from side to side and adjusted the comfort panels on the seat and back. Lifting two heavy rubber handles, grooved to fit his fingers and thumbs, he touched the rounded tops, and activated his computer screens. The two hand pieces were magnetically held to the armrests but otherwise had no restrictive attachments. He moved his arms in every imaginable position and touched each finger to its own control. Every finger touchpad activated controls on the screen and boxes that magnified sections of the landscape on the primary screen.

  With activation of this sophisticated control system, his drones were responsive to his every command.

  Charlie surveyed the three computer screens attached to the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, Unmanned Aircraft System (BAMS/UAS) workstation. He put on a head set with half-inch earphones and a quarter-inch microphone on the end of a thin wire. He flipped the switch and began to talk. “Colonel Edwards, are you with me?”

  “Yes sir, Alpha Charlie.”

  “Do we have a secure vocal transmission?”

  “That’s an affirmative, sir. The audios are so protected, the only people that know they exist are our aircraft crews in Kandahar, and Creech Air Force base in Nevada.”

  “Do I have control of everything now?”

  “You’re A-OK to go from there. Your new chair is connected to everything now, your Global Hawks, the Reapers, and your Predators.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Trenton, New Jersey

  10:15 am

  NICOLE BANZAR’S FATHER PURCHASED the missiles when they were decommissioned from Russian service, after the 1987 Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. Since then they’d been stored in a warehouse at the end of a pot-hole infested road, lost in rows of other old warehouses.

  A week earlier, Nicole Banzar had received a five-word text: TARGET IS SOUTH OF YOU.

  Her reply had been, simply: UNDERSTOOD. SEND HELP.

  She’d quickly recruited eight “soldiers,” most of them from a Chicago Al Qaeda splinter group eager to get into some “real action.” If she were able to assemble maybe five more, she would have thirteen—maybe fifteen, if she got lucky—soldiers and operatives for the attack against Alpha Charlie.

  To prepare for the operation, she’d sent four men ahead of her to the warehouse.

  A rusted Chevy truck filled with four uncomfortable-looking men made a path through the high weeds that had taken over the crumbling parking lot. The pickup stopped at a building with flaking paint and an old rusty sign that said, “Property of J.J. Hussam Import Furniture.”

  The four men didn’t give a damn about the doors of the place. They weren’t coming back. Using crowbars, they tore off the heavy boards that had been nailed across the front of the warehouse and drove their truck into the building. Twenty, tarp-covered boxes and a dusty tractor-trailer were sitting alone in the large empty space.

  The four men quickly exposed the boxes and took inventory. One grabbed a toolbox from the pickup and lifted the hood of the vintage Mack truck. Another carried two, 5-gallon containers of diesel fuel to the truck’s cylindrical tanks and began refueling. A message was quickly texted, and soon a Pontiac Grand Prix with dented fenders and crackled blue paint drove in behind the pickup. Two men in dungarees and soiled white T-shirts got out, followed by Nicole Banzar.

  Nicole had tousled black hair, big brown eyes, and wore tight black jeans that hugged her long legs and slim hips. A pink camisole contained her full bust, but her age was belied by fine lines on the deeply tanned skin of her face and arms.

  Nicole’s soldiers began loading the heavy boxes on the truck. Their voices echoed in the large building. Nicole knelt beside a stack of six boxes, all of them covered in Chinese lettering. Only two words were written in English, in a position where the sender would be listed: Astana, Kazakhstan. Inside, lay the parts for a Silkworm missile.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ICU, Jackson City Hospital

  Jackson City, North Carolina

  11:15 am

  THE ICU WAS STARTING to come to life. More people were coming and going as another busy day was in full swing. Keyes was finally awake, which made me feel better. She’d been out for a long time.

  I still hadn’t had a wink of sleep. I stood at the nurse’s station, propped up, while Harris stood off to one side, talking on the phone to his people, going over the details of the previous night.

  Standing there, I was suddenly overcome by the very strong feeling that there was something going on with my patient, but I was worn out, fuzzy, and wasn’t sure what to think. I could hear an attendant back there, talking to her. “Here, honey,” he seemed to say, “Take these pills. You’ll feel better.”

  The attendant suddenly slipped through the parted privacy curtains and then walked out the door. He was an enormous man, gigantic, with a blond ponytail. His sudden appearance and disappearance definitely caught my attention, and though I was still unsure about what was going on, I called to the nearby attending nurse to follow me in to check on Keyes.

  We parted the curtains and started to run our typical checks. I took Keyes’ pulse. It was slow, only 48. I tried to awaken her. She didn’t respond. Her breathing became slower, as did her pulse. I shook her shoulder to arouse her. No response. Something was wrong. I looked at the vitals screen: Her oxygen was only eighty percent, her blood pressure a dangerously low seventy over thirty. Her skin was gray. Keyes was in trouble.

  I threw back the privacy curtains and shouted, “Where’s this patient’s ICU doctor?”

  The doctor in charge of the ICU, Stewart, and two nurses, came immediately.

  “When I was here an hour ago, my patient was awake and talking to me. Now, she’s totally unresponsive. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Stewart answered. “When I checked her thirty minutes ago, she was responsive and her vitals were normal.”

  “Why the hell didn’t the attendant who was just in here notice this patient was decompensating?”

  “Which attendant?”

  I looked around but didn’t see him.

  Stewart called the head nurse on duty. I described to her as best I could the person I’d seen leaving Keyes’ room just as I’d arrived: tall, muscular, wearing green scrubs, a surgical mask, and having a blond tail of hair hanging down.

  “Not one of mine,” she said. “I haven’t seen
anyone like that here today—or ever.”

  Stewart turned to me and through clenched teeth said, “Maybe the real question here is: What did you smack her with in your surgery center? It must’ve been potent stuff to last this long.”

  “What did her drug screen show when she came in last night?”

  Dr. Stewart pulled Keyes’ chart from the rack at the foot of the bed. “Hmm. You’re right. The nurse’s reports show she ‘came around’ after admission. Toxicology shows she had only a trace of Demerol and no Valium upon arrival, certainly not enough to do anything but make her a little groggy.”

  “I know. What medications has she been given since then?”

  “Absolutely none. She’s received no medication from this hospital since being admitted last night,” Stewart responded.

  Then, frowning, he looked me in the eyes and said, “This patient was just fine a little while ago. What’d you do, give her something strong to shut her up?”

  I resisted the urge to tell him to go screw himself. Instead, I appealed to his sense of reason. “Look, forget the finger-pointing and let’s help her. She’s in trouble. She’s overdosed on something or there’s something else going on here; this is not a delayed reaction to yesterday’s meds. Repeat those blood studies. Check her out neurologically. Rule out a cerebral vascular accident. And find that tall male attendant with blond hair. He might have given her something.”

  The commotion had aroused Harris, who had come over to see what the problem was. Dr. Stewart looked at me and then at Keyes, and his expression changed. I could tell that he, too, sensed that something wasn’t right. He took his stethoscope from his neck, moved it over her chest and then the carotid arteries. With his ophthalmoscope, Stewart looked through her pupils to the inside of her eyes. After testing her reflexes with his rubber mallet, he yelled across the room to the charge nurse, “Call the blood lab STAT and send for X-ray. I need a portable skull X-ray.”