Devil's Due

by Robert Stanek

  Back at the helm, he repeated the distress call, then tried to get to the foreword gun position. Working his way around the bulletproof shielding protecting the helm wasn’t easy. He held onto the man-high shield while he walked along the air-filled sponson.

  It was a wasted effort. There was nothing he could do to help. The sentry was dead.

  Scott made his way back to the helm. Fluids. Edie and the SEAL—Ben—needed fluids. If there were IV kits, they weren’t anywhere he’d searched. Not that he was sure he could start IV drips, but it would have been something.

  Every SEAL had a personal kit, perhaps one was a field medic. He didn’t like the idea of picking over the dead, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of choices. Where were rescue ops? Why weren’t they racing onto the scene already?

  RIB’s had a long range, but their launch ship, the USS Kearsarge, had to be close. Launching helos, fighters or another pair of RIBs should’ve taken minutes. He should be able to hear and see something by now.

  Finding two bottles of water, he started aft. He stopped, twisted about defensively, hands and feet at the ready while his eyes panned down as a perceived shifting caught his attention. A gloved hand floated ghostly for a moment, then disappeared.

  Scott dropped the water bottles, scrambled over the side, reaching out as he went. His arm sank into the dark waters up passed his elbow. He found a hand, gripped the other’s arm around the wrist and pulled.

  Retrieving the body from the water was a bit like pulling in a shark hooked to a tow rope by its tail. It took both arms, all his strength. He knew from the weight it wasn’t Kathy or Angel or Lian. What he was hefting was too big, too heavy.

  What he’d found was clear as soon as the body was stretched out on the deck. It was one of the SEALs and not just any SEAL. It was Lieutenant Ansely, bleeding and looking exhausted.

  Scott rolled the lieutenant onto his side, helped him through the coughing and sputtering. “Lieutenant, it’s Scott Evers. You’re safe aboard, wounded.” He ran off, shouting as he went. “I’m getting medical supplies.”

  “Don’t bother,” Ansely said, his voice low and gravely. “Blood’s not mine.”

  “Like hell it isn’t,” Scott shot back, already kneeling near the helm which had only been a few steps away. He scrounged for what he thought he needed, but it was slim pickings. He’d already used up most of the supplies. What was left pretty much amounted to gauze and tape.

  He hurried to the lieutenant’s side, put a hand to the wound, showed off the blood. “Looks like your blood to me,” Scott said. He ripped through the lieutenant’s uniform to get to the wound. The trauma shears were somewhere, he just couldn’t remember where at the moment.

  The wound was a deep gouge at the base of the neck on the right side. Not as bad as Scott expected--he’d expected a bullet wound. “Gauze and tape,” he muttered to himself as he did the best patchwork he could under the circumstances.

  “Two other wounded aboard,” Scott said as he worked. “Edie from the Sea Shepherd and one of yours. Stay strong, lieutenant.”

  Scott remembered the water bottles as he hurried back to Edie. “Edie,” he said, squatting down beside her with a capful of water. “Drink this if you can. You need to stay hydrated.”

  Even though Edie was wrapped in the thermal blanket, her skin felt so cold. Her pulse and breathing were steady, if shallow. “No luck with IVs,” he told her. It didn’t matter whether she could hear him, only that he said it to her.

  He climbed over and around seats. “Ben, if you can hear me, stay strong. Fight,” he said. As he kneeled down to check Ben’s vitals, Ben convulsed and then his breathing stopped. Scott started chest compressions. “Breathe, damn it, breathe.”

  Scott counted compressions, stopped and was about to start re-breathing but remembered it was no longer recommended. He went back to steady compressions. “Breathe, breathe… Ben, don’t you die on me.”

  Compression by compression, Scott kept on. He was sweating and cursing aloud. “Don’t you die on me, Ben,” he said. “Not like Munich, not again. Never again.”

  Minutes passed. He lost track of how many. It could have been 2 or 3 or 5. He only knew he was getting tired. It’d been a long swim, and he hadn’t rested yet.

  A distant sound caught his ear. It was a steady whop-whop-whop. The sound of air being whipped into submission.

  Every helicopter had a distinct sound, determined by size, weight, and blade configuration. He didn’t know the sound of many, but he knew the sound of the Rescue Hawk.

  Between compressions, Scott looked up to what he imagined could have been a scene from Apocalypse Now. Two Rescue Hawks were bearing down on his position. The HH-60H Rescue Hawk was developed from the SH-60B Sea Hawk. Its primary mission was combat search and rescue. It carried AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and its heavy-caliber machine guns were sure to be manned by left- and right-facing door gunners.

  A pair of AV-8B jets circled in from a wide arc, each moving in the opposite direction, and the roar of their engines soon became the only thing he could hear.

  Fast boats were on the water too. These he didn’t recognize until they were closer. They were Marine Corp camouflaged, not SEAL gray, and he’d seen them only a few times before. They were CCM Mk1’s, Combatant Craft Mark 1’s. He’d been told they were like floating Bradley Fighting Vehicles that could race in at 40 knots. Each had four mounted and manned heavy-caliber machine guns topside in addition to many below-decks gun windows.

  One of the Rescue Hawks hovered almost directly overhead. Two two-man rescue teams began repelling down. “Marine Rescue,” one of the team members shouted as he touched down on the deck.

  “Scott Evers of the Sea Shepherd,” Scott said. “Three wounded. Sucking chest wound here, stopped breathing. Needs a re-breather. Two forward in urgent need of assistance.”

  One of the rescuers took over the compressions. Scott moved back, took a few steady breathes. He tried to stand, but found it nearly impossible. Someone at his elbow steadied him as the world went black.

  Chapter 6

  Bluffdale, Utah

  Afternoon, Previous Day

  Outside it was a scorching 82 degrees and that was oddly hot for the mountains of Utah, even if it was the height of summer. Dave Gilbert powered down the window of his black BMW X5 as he pulled up to the security checkpoint outside Camp Williams. The Harman Kardon sound system was playing Slow Cruel Hands of Time, a beautiful acoustic performance by Band of Horses, one of his favorite groups.

  After showing his ID to the guard at the gate and getting waved through, he cut across the camp’s six square miles of flatland and made for the more mountainous area at the back. He was headed for the National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, aka the DC.

  Entry into the DC perimeter was secured as well. He stopped at the second checkpoint and flashed his NSA contractor badge.

  “Afternoon, Mitch,” he said as the guard on duty waved him through the checkpoint.

  Although Camp Williams was an army garrison, most of those on duty here were from the Utah National Guard. Dave liked that since he’d served in the Guard years ago. Plus, the guardsmen were more relaxed than the soldiers he occasionally encountered.

  The area around the DC had been used as an airfield previously, but there was little left from those days. Now the area was largely occupied by the massive data halls, multistoried buildings that housed the high-speed computers and enterprise data storage equipment used for mass global surveillance. There were also various administration and support buildings.

  His destination was the administration building where he did most of his work as a senior data mining and analysis specialist. He preferred the admin building to the data halls. Mostly because the admin building was usually a comfortable 72 degrees, rather than the cooler 68 degrees of the data halls.

  Before he could get into the administration building, he had to pass through a third security checkpoint, which largely amounted to him touching his NSA con
tractor badge to a card reader while a guard made sure the reader light turned green and not red.

  His workspace was on the third floor, all the way on the far side of the building. He made a sharp right to the stairs, walked up to the third floor, and then hurried along the main corridor to the 3C suites where he worked.

  When Dave logged into the main system, he was an hour and 45 minutes early for his shift, but he had promised to prep the query engine updates for the swing shift analytics team and so he immediately started work on setting up the precursors. Following the mandatory revisions checklist, he validated the backups of the existing query structures, notified users the systems would be going down at the previously announced outage time, and then accessed the new code in the version control subsystem.

  Before taking the system offline, he entered a simple query using the native query language: BASE X:MEDSEA -24H SS:* & 2>1 TEST.LOG. Aside from the final part that displayed the result totals to his screen and also stuffed the full results in a log file for later comparison, the query was a standard one. After serving in the National Guard, he’d been a crypto-analyst at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade. His last assignment had been the Mediterranean desk and the query was one he’d used often to check live activity levels.

  As soon as he pressed Enter, the query ran and the * ensured it was applied to all NSA surveillance systems. Soon encapsulated summaries for the past 24 hours from the Mediterranean region were being logged. The rapidly updating report totals told him most of the summaries were coming from PRISM, the super secret surveillance program that allowed the NSA to monitor all Internet communications.

  Although this was all work he usually enjoyed, his thoughts wandered. The other reason he’d come in early was to review the results from his latest D-Wave tests. The latest version of the D-Wave was decidedly different from its predecessors, though still a 10-foot high black box containing a cylindrical cooling system wrapped around a niobium computer chip chilled to about as close to absolute zero as mankind could get. There were only three of the latest generation of the multimillion-dollar chips in existence, and one of those was sitting in its massive black box inside his testing room on loan from In-Q-Tel, the high-tech investment arm of the CIA.

  Quantum computing was still so radical and strange that even some of the most advanced engineers in the world were still trying to figure out what it was for and how to use it. As one of the few people with access to the exotic technology, he was working to create optimized algorithms that allowed anyone to tap into quantum computing’s unparalleled potential for solving the world’s problems. At times, it seemed he was tapping into the very fabric of reality in ways no one had ever previously thought possible.

  Chapter 7

  Mediterranean Sea

  Early Morning, Tuesday, 19 June

  To the east, the first faint light of morning was consuming the darkness. On the deck, the crew hurried about their tasks. Hidden from view, a powerfully built woman with bright blue eyes watched with the intensity of a leopard waiting to pounce on its prey. Her gaze was sharp. Her traditional robes covered her black scuba suit. Her hijab covered her close-cropped blond hair and was up around her face so that only her stunning blue eyes showed.

  Though many prepared themselves for the mission, everything was quiet and calm. It was the kind of reassuring tranquility that steeled her heart to her task.

  She watched as the men checked their weapons and she watched for her target, knowing the target was somewhere below decks. The target was the one complication. The one kink in an otherwise flawless plan. A kink she’d soon eliminate.

  Still in the shadows, she crossed to the port side of the boat where a dozen strongboxes and crates were piled high. She opened one of the boxes and retrieved its contents—in this case, the instrument of her target’s demise.

  She laid out the 7.62mm semi-automatic rifle, using the stack of crates in front of her as a base for its tripod. As she relaxed her breathing and set her right index finger alongside the trigger, she peered through the sight of the 6x48 riflescope, made a two-click adjustment for the slight breeze and the distance.

  Today would be the prelude of tomorrow’s glorious beginning. The culmination of a masterful work—and the next 48 hours would decide everything.

  Nothing left to chance.

  She switched off the safety on the rifle, signaled to the captain to set the boats on a drift course toward the Sea Shepherd. On her signal, the attack began. No weapons at first, only the heavy chain links the fishermen would have used—if there were actual fishermen on any of the boats in her tiny fleet.

  Predictably, those she watched responded by sounding a ship-wide alert. She watched and waited as they responded with fire hoses and stink bombs. Any other day such a response would have sent the fishermen running, but today wasn’t any other day.

  The L129A1 Sharpshooter she used was effective at a range of up to 800 meters. Her target would be much closer and she was confident there would soon be one less complication.

  She stared through the sight, blocking out everything else as she controlled her breathing and prepared to take the shot that would change everything.

  One bullet. One bullet to erase the trail and blaze the way to tomorrow.

  The target came up from below decks like a Brahma bull out of a chute at a rodeo. She sighted the target in her scope and squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 8

  Mediterranean Sea

  Afternoon, Tuesday, 19 June

  The amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge turned slowly toward its rendezvous with the battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman. The Kearsarge was alive with activity, like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked hard.

  Scott Evers was exhausted, and only adrenalin from all that had transpired kept him on his feet. He followed Midshipman Tinsdale as she led the way from the ship’s mess. Being a civilian, former NSA operative or not, he wasn’t allowed anywhere aboard the Kearsarge without escort.

  Being designed for amphibious assault meant the Kearsarge was part aircraft carrier, part guided missile cruiser, and part troop transport. Not only was the Kearsarge 844 feet long and 106 feet abeam, but the ship also had an impressive displacement of about 40,500 long tons, which made her roughly half the size of the USS Harry Truman.

  The Kearsarge’s armament included two short-range anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapon systems; two infrared homing surface-to-air missile systems; three radar-guided 20 mm Gatling guns designed to defend against anti-ship missiles; and eight .50 machine guns. In addition to a complement of about 4000 combat-ready sailors and marines, the Kearsarge carried 22 Ospreys, 6 Harrier IIs, and 6 Seahawks.

  As Ospreys were tiltrotor aircraft with both a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and a short takeoff and landing (STOL) capability, they were essentially half conventional helicopter and half long-range turboprop aircraft. Harrier IIs also had V/STOL making them very capable ground attack and armed recon fighters. Seahawks were capable combat helicopters equipped for naval warfare missions as well as search and rescue operations.

  In the tight quarters, the crew practically had to crawl over each other at times. Midshipman Tinsdale was overly formal. She hadn’t said a word as she sat across from Scott in the ship’s mess. Scott’s mood was such that he wasn’t really hungry, but he had eaten because he knew his body needed the sustenance.

  Now the midshipman was mutely leading Scott back to infirmary, but he didn’t want to go back to infirmary. He didn’t want to sit beside Edie as she clung to life. What he wanted was answers. Answers he would only get if he made his way to the operations room. Serious obstacles to that though were his escort and the civilian clothes he wore.

  Scott suspected the clothes were donated by someone of a similar build, but he didn’t know by whom. The black, long-sleeved t-shirt, the gray sweat pants, and the white sneakers all seemed to be someone’s idea of after-hours dress. He was thankful for dry clothes after his ordeal in the water,
but he really wished he was in uniform now.

  If he was wearing a uniform, he could go just about anywhere on the ship. Looking down at the shirt that he’d hastily pulled on earlier, he grinned when he saw the Kearsarge’s insignia over the right breast with the “Proud – Trustworthy – Bold” motto stitched beneath in white letters.

  One good thing about the seat he had chosen in the mess was that the ship’s diagram had been on the wall directly opposite him. The diagram, meant to show evacuation routes, helped him deduce the location of the operations room relative to the mess and the infirmary. If his assessment was correct, the passageway ahead ran nearly bow to stern. The midshipman would turn and follow the passageway toward the stern and to the infirmary. He’d turn the opposite direction and follow the passageway toward the bow.

  He took careful, measured steps behind the midshipman, awaited his chance. The turn came. The midshipman turned right. Scott took two steps in her direction before turning sharply on his heel and then steadily pushing his way through toward the bow as fast as he could. He expected to hear shouts at any moment. He waited, steeled himself for it, but the shouts never came. Instead, he soon found himself standing outside “Sit 1.” Sit 1, he assumed, stood for Situation Room 1, which he was certain was the Kearsarge’s main operations room.

  Scott was contemplating whether to enter when he noticed the sentries standing on either side of the closed door. As he looked over at one of the sentries, a uniformed officer pushed past. As the door opened, he followed the officer into the room without hesitation.

  The situation room was filled nearly to capacity. Scott joined the uniformed officers and crew standing at the back of the room. A uniformed officer at the front of the room was slapping a situation map with a long pointer. The officer’s back was turned to him, so Scott couldn’t see the officer’s name tag.