Revenge of the Dog Team

by William W. Johnstone

  The heavier firepower, and there was plenty of it, was secured in an arms locker in the separate, baggage area in the after part of the car. The arsenal included assault rifles, lightweight machine guns, and grenades, plus some specialty items. Each man had a key to the locked bulkhead door connecting with the after area. At the rear of the car was a locked, solid metal door that gave onto a metal apron platform.

  Behind the Team car was a troop car, carrying the train’s official defenders, a squad of military policemen and a few officers. They were all Army, but they, too, wore civilian clothes. There was nothing civilian about the M-16s and sidearms they were equipped with, though. The Army was minimizing its official presence on this run, due to its quasi-covert nature.

  The next two cars in line were flatcars carrying a couple of Humvees and the customized Klondike, as well as side ramps for quick loading and off-loading. Behind them were nineteen boxcars. Placed in the middle of them was a second locomotive for added power. It was crewless, being guided via computerized remote control by the engineer in the locomotive at the head of the train. Bringing up the rear was a tool car, filled with a variety of equipment, everything from sledgehammers, picks, and spikes to steel rails, cross ties, hoists, jacks, winches, even a forklift. If emergency repairs were needed, the train crew was equipped to remedy all but the most drastic fixes on the spot, without having to wait for the arrival of a special repair train.

  Ahead of the Team car was another crew car, this one housing both train personnel and a handful of civilians associated with the transport. Forward of that was the vanguard, the locomotive, the head of this mechanized snake that was gliding west through the green and pleasant precincts of rural Maryland.

  No snake ever carried deadlier and more potent venom in its poison sacs than the train was hauling in those boxcars. The quiet, peaceful towns through which the train periodically rolled wouldn’t have been so quiet and peaceful had their occupants known the true nature of the cargo borne by it.

  The locomotive was a diesel-electric job, the diesel engine powering a monster alternator that powered its steel wheels and not so incidentally supplied the current for the sophisticated computerized controls for the long trail of cars in its wake.

  Like the other crew cars, the one ferrying the three Dogs had lights, air-conditioning, and power outlets for the radio/scanner, computers, even the mini-refrigerator and microwave oven in the galley.

  Steve Ireland would have been happier if the boxcars were airtight and pressurized to help prevent leakage of their lethal contents, but apparently that was not the case. The cars depended solely on stacked and secured sealed hazardous material containers, HMCs, to contain the cargo’s contents. He thought that was pretty damned casual. Not that he’d ever given the matter much thought until a day ago, when he’d reported to the Holloman Research Associates office in the Gall Building to receive his orders from Doc Wenzle.

  He and the other two survivors of the mission, Osgood and Mantee, had been extensively debriefed the day after the raid by a three-man fact-finding panel in another anonymous, tightly secured covert Team facility secreted in plain sight in a civilian, commercial office building in D.C.

  Steve was plenty steamed, and he didn’t mind sounding off about it to Doc Wenzle when he was alone with him at the office. He said, “We lost two good men on that mission, Bryce and Nevins, and for what? Because we were handcuffed by red tape! If we’d have gone in their with heavier firepower, even some grenades, we might not have taken any casualties—”

  The corners of Wenzle’s mouth were turned so far down that the creases practically reached his chin. “No one’s sorrier about their loss than I am, Steve—”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it!”

  “Neither does getting sore about it,” Wenzle said, his tone and expression unchanged, unflappable. “That’s the nature of the beast. This peculiar service of ours can only operate under tightly restricted circumstances. Secrecy is paramount, never more so than on domestic operations. If it ever became public knowledge that the Army was running what amounts to its own death squad, it’d blow the lid off this country. A lid that, due to political, economic, and cultural conditions at this particular time, is fastened none too securely in the first place.

  “You can imagine the stink the world press would raise about it, starting right here with our own homegrown mainstream media, including certain papers and TV news channels whose names we both know. By the time they got done, the Pentagon, by God, would have to hold a bake sale to fund what’s left of the military.”

  Steve said, “I know, I know…”

  “I’m an old man, Steve; I don’t fancy being raked over the coals by congressional subcommittees for doing what I consider my duty, my proud duty and my privilege, and maybe spending my retirement years in Leavenworth or some federal prison. You, you’re still a young man, you could do a twenty-year stretch and still have something of a life yet, but I don’t have the luxury. And if you think that’s an exaggeration, you must not be keeping up with current affairs.”

  “I’m not arguing,” Steve said. Easing up, he settled back in the chair, only to be painfully jabbed by one of the busted springs in the seat cushion. Irked, he said, sneering, “You’re laying it on pretty thick, Doc. What comes next, the violins playing ‘Hearts and Flowers’?”

  Wenzle, pious, said, “I prefer the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’”

  Steve couldn’t top that. “All right, you’ve made your point.”

  Wenzle drank some coffee. “The planners wanted it to look like a gangland kill so that’s how we played it. It worked; the media bought it and that’s how they’re featuring it.

  “Mayhew’s boat blowing up was the crowning touch. It made it look like a real Mob hit,” he added.

  Steve said, “When it blew, I thought for a second maybe you had fixed up Mantee with some torpedoes or an antiship missile.”

  “Mantee was just as surprised as you, from what he tells me.”

  “I guess the only one more surprised than either of us was Mayhew.”

  Wenzle said, “It all worked out for the best. Better that the boat be blown to bits than for it to be sent to the bottom of the bay riddled with fifty-caliber machine gun bullets, for somebody to haul up for examination later.”

  Steve scratched his head. “Hell, maybe it was a Mob hit. Who knows?”

  “We do,” Wenzle said, “thanks to the Danner woman. Taking her alive was a real bonus.”

  “She talked?”

  “Try and stop her. She’s still talking. Mayhew and Piersall may have frozen her out of the wet work, but she still knows plenty. A real gold mine of information.”

  “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “We’ve got her salted away in a nice secure location free from outside interference. The interrogators will squeeze her dry of everything she knows, including things she doesn’t even know she knows,” Wenzle said. “After that, if there’s anything left of her, maybe we’ll turn her, double her, and use her to plant disinformation on her former clients. Or park her in an institution and keep her on ice until her final dispensation is decided. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  Steve shrugged, indicating it was no matter to him. He turned to a subject of greater interest: “So who killed Mayhew?”

  For reply, Wenzle opened a folder, took out a photo, and handed it across the desk to Steve. “This man, we think.”

  The photo was a candid shot obviously taken without the subject’s knowledge, a surveillance photo depicting a tall man with wavy silver hair and a long, rectangular-shaped face. He was well groomed, in a well-tailored suit. Steve studied it, but came up blank. “Don’t know him.”

  Wenzle said, “Danner and Mayhew, too, knew him as ‘Darius.’”

  Steve shook his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Darius is just a nom de guerre; that’s ‘war name’ to you.”

  “I know what it means,” Steve said curtly.

  “His real
name is Khalid Khan. He’s a top international agent of the Pasdaran, Iran’s most deep-black spy service. Ultra-black,” Wenzle said. “A lot of Western intelligence agencies have been trying to get a line on him for a long time. We didn’t even know he was operating in this country, no less than right here in Washington, D.C. Turns out he was an ISS client, doing business with Mayhew. A dissatisfied client apparently.”

  Steve said, “Must be if he blew up Mayhew. Can’t get more dissatisfied than that.”

  Wenzle said, “ISS was in the information business, among other things—information as commodity. Mayhew always had his hooks out for whatever sources of intelligence he could develop. Then he sold it to interested parties, primarily agents of foreign powers either unfriendly or actively hostile to Uncle Sam.

  “Apparently, he wasn’t above selling the same secrets twice, or more than that, if he could find the right buyers. Unfortunately for him, he ultimately found the wrong buyer. He sold something to Darius and then to a second party, and Darius found out about it. Not being the sharing type, Darius got sore. Mayhew was worried about him, about comeback.

  “All this is according to Danner, but it seems to check out so far.”

  Steve rubbed his chin. “So Darius bombed Mayhew for a double cross?”

  Wenzle nodded. “Looks like.”

  “He must have had a bomb planted somewhere on the boat,” Steve went on. “But it couldn’t have been rigged to blow up the first time the boat went out, because he couldn’t have known for sure that Mayhew would be on the boat. Unless he didn’t care who was on the boat when it blew and he just wanted to throw a scare into Mayhew.”

  “Our profile of Darius shows he’s not the type for scaring people. He’s results-oriented, lethal results.”

  “Meaning that he or one of his men triggered the bomb with a remote detonator in real time. The bomber would have had to have been on-site at the Acres or thereabouts when we hit the place.”

  “I’d say that’s a logical conclusion.”

  “I didn’t see anybody, no outsiders. Neither did the rest of the squad. If we had, we’d have moved to intercept them,” Steve said. He frowned, thinking. “No, wait a minute. Mantee did mention something about seeing a light out on the bay and thinking it might be a buoy or marker. That was before the blast. Afterward, the light was gone. It could have been a boat.

  “In which case, Darius might have seen something of the raid. Hmm, I don’t like that part so well.”

  Wenzle said, “Neither do we.” He rested his elbows on the desktop, pressing his palms together so that his hands made a steeple. “Darius was already on our list to be taken or terminated, whichever is more feasible. But this moves him a few notches higher up on the roster.”

  Steve said, “Have you got a line on him?”

  Wenzle smiled, a slow, gentle smile. “Possibly. Which brings us to the point of this whole discussion.”

  Leaning forward, he delivered the punch line. “You’re going on a train ride, Steve.”

  Steve Ireland hadn’t liked the sound of that. The fact of it he liked a whole lot less. The same went for Osgood and Mantee, who’d also drawn the assignment. Wenzle or the planners or both had deliberately slotted the surviving personnel from the Acres raid for the train trek. They’d already crossed paths with Darius, unknowingly at the time. Well, they knew it now. And maybe Darius knew them, at least to the extent of having seen one, two, or all of them during the Mayhew action. If so, no other Dog Team personnel would have to risk being tagged or typed during the imminent train ride.

  Because that was the secret that Mayhew had sold to Darius, the route and timetable of this cross-country train trip. And what a trip it was.

  “You might call it a matter of waste management,” Wenzle had said, gloating from behind his desk as he described the mission to Steve.

  Which was true in its way. The Army stockpile of chemical weapons needed thinning. Originally, they had been developed as a deterrent factor. Official U.S. government policy was that, like nuclear weapons, chemical weapons would never be used for a first strike. Other nations had CW capability; we had to have it, too. In the Cold War, the Soviet Red Army military doctrine had gamed the possible use of chemical and biological warfare should war ever break out in then-divided Germany against U.S.-led NATO forces. Poison gas had been used by Iraq in its war with Iran, and to brutally suppress a Kurdish revolt at home. The Syrian dictator Assad had used CWs to quell a rebellion on his home turf.

  More recently, it had become a truism that chemical-and-biological-weapons (CBW) capacity was the poor man’s version of nukes, being far less costly and labor-intensive to develop than atomic weapons. These were the famous weapons of mass destruction that had been a prime mover in the preemptive war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime. The WMDs in question proved as elusive as a desert mirage, but that’s another story.

  The fact is that any number of regimes in developed nations and the Third World have CBWs. The U.S. has them, too. We wouldn’t use them first, but if an opponent does, we’re not going to sit on our hands without retaliating in kind.

  Stores of CW weapons, some dating back to the First Gulf War, some even farther back, to the Cold War, had outlived their usefulness and were on the way to becoming active threats. Poison gas and toxic nerve agents designed for battlefield use had sat on the storehouse shelves for too long. Years, decades in some cases. During that time, the canisters and containers of the stuff didn’t just sit there inert and intact. Like all substances, they were subject to corrosion, oxidation, and decay induced by the toxic materials they carried.

  Like any other business, the business of war periodically requires that the old inventory be cleared off the shelves to make way for new, improved stock. Especially since some of the old stuff was becoming a clear and present danger due to aged and corroding containers.

  CWs present a massive disposal problem. You can’t just throw them away, buried underground or dumped at sea, because eventually those containers would rust and rot away and begin releasing their contents. No, they had to be neutralized first. This requires expensive, specially constructed incinerators. The high cost of building this ultra-specialized equipment, coupled with the fact that nobody wants to live in the vicinity of a CW incinerator, means that only a handful of such sites exists in the continental United States.

  Newest and most impressive of these facilities is the incinerator buried in the hollowed-out guts of a mountain in the Nevada wasteland, a site known as Mesa Rojo, Red Mesa. That’s not its real name, but for the purposes of national security, it will do.

  It’s a long way off from Maryland, but it was the final destination, the terminus, of the train. The toxic train, as Steve Ireland had come to think of it. A load of some of the oldest and potentially most dangerous CW stores would be cleared out of a warehouse arsenal in a facility associated with Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where such weapons were developed and refined. Hermetically sealed within hazardous material containers, HMCs, they would be loaded into boxcars—twenty in all—and transported by train across the country to Red Mesa for incineration.

  It was a most delicate undertaking for a number of reasons. Other incinerator sites were closer to the CWs’ point of origin, but lacked the capacity to process such a sizable load in the requisite amount of time. This was a bad lot, its canisters the oldest and most corroded, requiring immediate disposal. Red Mesa’s big brute of a burner could handle the job fastest and best.

  Another consideration was the route. There wasn’t a big city, town, suburb, village, or hamlet that would welcome the passage through its environs of a train hauling twenty boxcars of a hell-brew of overaged poison gas and nerve agents in corroded canisters sealed in HMCs.

  No public relations firm, no matter how good, could sell that to the citizenry along the route. Yet there was no other alternative. The stuff had to be gotten to the incinerator at Red Mesa damned quick. The stalling and delays had gone on for years until now ti
me had almost run out. The military and political bureaucracies had reached the crisis point where doing nothing was no longer a viable option.

  It was a matter of national security because if nothing was done, sooner rather than later, one or some of those storehoused canisters would spring a leak and then there would be hell to pay. Officialdom reached the inescapable conclusion that what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. The transport venture was classified and wrapped in secrecy, with knowledge of the train’s cargo restricted on a need-to-know basis. That would still entail a large number of individuals being in the know, but various Patriot Act clauses and antiterror strictures were invoked to intimidate the loose-lipped and smooth the way for the cross-country run.

  People being what they are, though, word of the imminent transport got around, reaching the ears of an ISS informant, who passed it along to Greg Mayhew. With the instinct of a born pimp, Mayhew knew where to peddle the info where it would do him the most good. His first client of choice had been Darius. U.S. relations with Iran, always shaky, were aggravated by Tehran’s development of a nuclear weapons program. The threat of a U.S. preemptive strike against an atom-armed Iran was omnipresent. Iranian agent Darius would be interested in knowledge of the toxic train’s run, it being powerful knowledge indeed. It was an equalizer, the threat of sabotage presenting an opportunity to blackmail Washington into easing up on Tehran. Or, if it came to it, it had the potential for a terror strike against the U.S. that would make 9/11 look puny.

  So reasoned Mayhew, and he reasoned right. Darius bought in, paying big money for details of the planned run. But Mayhew’s calculations did not stop there. He knew another possible client, a bunch of Iraqis who were actually holed up in Nevada, of all places. They’d been big shots in Saddam Hussein’s regime and they just might be looking for some big-time payback.