by Aiden Bates
They had to be up to something, and if they were up to something it was up to America to respond. Sure, the Wolves were out there, and they were clearly not terrible at what they did, but that didn't make them the same caliber as an empire with virtually boundless resources.
There were other threats, too. Trent couldn't think, off the top of his head, of any threats that would demand such subterfuge. He wasn't a high-level strategist. He didn't have to be the one that thought of such things. All he had to do was execute. He could do that.
Different guys had different theories about their ultimate destination. Some thought they were going up against ISIS. Some thought they were taking out Al Qaeda. Some suspected they might be going after some of the lesser-known terror groups out there. Toledano even helpfully suggested they might be taking action against the Wolves, which just about gave Trent hives.
It was all speculation anyway. DeWitt, or Chief, would tell them what they wanted them to know, when they wanted them to know it. In the meantime, they would ride out the rough autumnal seas and look forward to reaching their destination.
Chapter Thirteen
Mal groped for his phone. It lived by the side of his bed, no matter where he was or how optimistic the term "bed" was that day. At the moment, the bed was a couch, and the "side of the bed" was a milk crate, but Mal didn't need more than that. The important thing was that when his phone split the air at five in the morning with his father's distinctive ring tone, Mal was able to answer it without groping for more than half a second.
"Good morning, sir." Mal tried not to sound too groggy as he answered. Da hated that. It was a losing battle, though. It was as if the baby was stealing every scrap of energy in his body, an ounce per millimeter.
"Are you still in bed? Jesus, Mal, what the hell is wrong with you?"
Mal rolled his eyes. He could always get it over with quickly and tell his father exactly what was wrong with him. That would solve a lot of problems, up to and including the problem of his father calling at five in the morning.
"What do you need, Da?" He forced himself to smile, which kept his tone light and easy.
"Well, I need you to stop being such a damn sluggard for one thing. You're twenty five years old now. You shouldn't need a wake-up call. You probably haven't done any training in a month!"
Mal pressed his lips together. Trying to explain himself, or deny the accusation, wouldn't get him anywhere. "I'll do better, sir. Forgive me saying so, but you don't generally call for social reasons."
Da snorted. "We're not here to be social, Mal. We're here to get things done. How fast can you and her get to the south of France? I'm talking about Narbonne."
Mal rubbed at his eyes. "Maybe a day, give or take. Why?"
"Jesus Christ, man, this is what comes from sleeping as much as you do. Someone drove a truck loaded with explosives into a hotel while you were curled up in your damn bed." Something in the background crashed and shattered. Had Da thrown something and broken it, or was it simply background noise? Mal decided not to ask. "Wake that fool you travel with and get your asses moving. That was a Daesh attack and no mistake."
Mal was already getting off the couch. "Have they claimed responsibility?"
"Do they have to? It's their MO. The truck attack is always their MO. It's what they do." Da's voice shifted, became less belligerent. He'd never been much of a morning person. How much of Mal and Morna's lives would have been different if their father had just slept in a bit? "Anyway, get your asses down there, check it out, do what you can, and report back."
"Roger that."
Mal waited for the phone to click, indicating his father had hung up, and then he ended the call. For someone who'd never been in an actual military unit, Da had an unhealthy attachment to hierarchies and what he saw as chain of command.
He headed into the bedroom to wake Morna, who greeted him with some choice words. Mal didn't blame her. He was thinking them, he just didn't say them out loud. He let her keep cursing while he slipped into the bathroom. Once he slipped out, clean and with his toiletries, she was ready to head in.
Neither of them had unpacked much during their stay in Lille. They rarely unpacked at all. The last place Mal could remember unpacking was in Souda, and before that — well, it had almost certainly been when he'd been a child, back in Antrim.
They drove from Lille to Narbonne by driving right down the center of France. It was a beautiful drive, and Mal and Morna could easily forget that they were driving to a scene of utter devastation. France in autumn was one of the most beautiful places to be, and of course Mal was delighted to head south as the weather got colder.
As the hour became more reasonable, Mal called a local hotel to make arrangements for a place to stay. He found them a room in a fairly decent hotel not too far from the older part of town, since the hotel that had been attacked turned out to have been in a more modern area.
Once they arrived in the city and checked in, they got to work. Mal was exhausted, but he could smell the wreckage from outside their hotel. Fortunately, their room had air conditioning, so the windows were tightly sealed and they could get away from the stench.
They couldn't get away with going directly to the bomb site, not during the day. There were still too many police around and too many journalists. Television and film made it look easy to just waltz right onto a crime scene, but given the nature of the crime, places like this got locked down tight. It was fine. Mal and Morna weren't likely to learn anything from the blast site that the authorities wouldn't.
And, given that the authorities did all of their reporting online these days, anything the authorities learned Mal learned within minutes. He accessed their network within an hour of check in. "Looks like there's an extra reason for us to not have gone out to the crime scene," he told Morna, as he sipped the coffee she brought him.
"Why's that? Is the smell of gelignite bad for developing babies?"
Mal had to think about that one. "You know what? I have no idea. It's not something they cover in most parent-to-be materials. I'll have to look that up. You never know what the next job will be." He pointed at the screen. "The hotel that got bombed wasn't around here, in the city center. It was in an industrial area toward the edge of town."
Morna pulled up a chair. "That doesn't make a bit of sense. Daesh doesn't attack obscure targets. They always go for targets in the middle of town, yeah? That's part of the point. They want to be seen. It's not terrorism if it doesn't scare anyone. It's just being an asshole."
Mal acknowledged this with a tilt of his head. "Maybe they got confused? Changed direction or something?" He tapped his fingers against the sleek desk for a moment. "I wonder, do you think Narbonne has gone as camera crazy as London or Paris?"
"No idea. It's worth looking into." She sat back and watched him.
Mal opened up another window and started searching. Twenty minutes later, he found what he was looking for. The Narbonne police department did have security cameras set up at strategic points around the city. More to the point, those cameras were digital. Mal could sit back and watch as the truck attacked the hotel.
It wasn't his first choice in entertainment, not at all. Mal did a lot of things he'd rather not do in the name of justice.
He found the moment of impact and froze the frame. "What can we see about the hotel or the truck?"
Morna frowned at the picture. "The first thing is that I'm glad you splurged on the posh LCD screen. We're going to need it." She gestured to the few people outside the hotel. "This isn't a posh hotel. These clothes don't go together. And the shirt that man is wearing there, that's not the team that won the Six Nations Cup last year."
Mal didn't follow rugby, although he knew Morna did. "They're leftovers," he identified. "A lot of the time, when a major championship is held, the companies that make merchandise will make shirts and whatnot for both teams. The stuff that turns out to be wrong — the stuff that says the second place team won — gets sent abroad and given to de
stitute people who have nothing else, hopefully in places where it won't be stigmatizing."
"Like refugee camps." Morna pursed her lips. "This hotel is full of refugees. Look, you can see this woman here has a headscarf on."
Mal scoffed and pulled back from the screen. "So Daesh decides to ram a truck bomb into a hotel full of Muslims when they could just as easily ram it into a hotel full of wealthier Europeans in a city center filled with historic buildings and priceless artifacts? No. I'm not buying it."
"Maybe there were too many security provisions in the center of town." Morna worried at her lip, and little crinkles formed around her eyes.
"Did you see many obvious security measures? I mean, we're pretty much in the middle of things here and we came rolling on up. No one wanted to look into the car, no one wanted to see our ID, nothing." Mal shook his head. "Something about this is very fishy. I don't like it." He drummed his fingers on the tabletop again. "You know what else I don't like about it?"
"Getting up at five in the morning with Da bellowing in your ear." Morna elbowed him. "Also, the addition of the explosives here." She grimaced. "They've used vehicles in a few of their attacks, but so have some outside groups. Even in America people are using motor vehicles. We saw that attack in London, when they combined a van and stabbing attacks. Yeah?"
"That's still pretty low tech. Using a truck and a bomb?" Mal snapped his finger. "The last time I heard about that happening was in the States, and it wasn't any of the Daesh precursors that did it."
"Nope." Morna waved her hand at the screen. "Rewind that, would you? I want to see what came before. I want to see if we can get identification from the vehicle, or get a view of the driver."
"You don't ask for much, do you?" Mal danced his fingers across the keyboard. "You know, governments would pay a lot of money for someone to make this happen."
"Right. But you're not doing this for money. You're doing it out of passion for justice and because it needs to get done." Morna crossed her arms over her chest and stared intently at the screen. "So get on it already and quit bellyaching. You think I don't know you're funding this hotel stay out of some slime ball's pocket?"
"Duke Phillip's personal funds, actually." Mal winked at her and kept working.
It took him some time, but he managed to sync up cameras to get a good picture of the van as it barreled toward the hotel. He wouldn't have thought it could have gotten up to such speeds on the narrow streets of the industrial zone where the Hotel Mardi so recently stood, but here they were.
There was one frame where he hit gold. He was barely able to spot it, and only then with the help of a facial recognition program he'd altered years ago. He paused the video at the perfect moment, with the vehicle registration and the driver's face perfectly visible.
He ran the plates. The box truck was registered to a Milos Rastoder, from Tivat, Montenegro. Given that Montenegro wasn't part of the European Union, the presence of a commercial vehicle from such an out of the way location should have raised a few eyebrows. Maybe it had, and Mal would look into it in just a moment. The face in the photograph matched not the Milos Rastoder linked to the vehicle's registration, but a much younger Milos Rastoder who was also from Tivat.
The younger Rastoder had a long history of what would politely be termed "antisocial behavior" in Antrim, or at least by social workers in Antrim. He'd been kicked out of school for inappropriate behavior toward women and had trouble holding down a job due to his attitudes toward both women and Muslims.
He also had a long history of frankly appalling behavior online, where he spent a lot of time in White Dawn chat rooms. He had been banned from two popular social media sites after trying to provoke a seizure from a Muslim journalist known to suffer from epilepsy, only to resurface with a new username that differed from the old one by one letter.
"Well," Mal said, wiping his face with one hand, "the good news is that Milos here doesn't seem to have gotten out of the truck. His charming self is likely at the bottom of the wreckage of that hotel, still burning."
"Hopefully the fire will cleanse his vile, diseased soul." Morna pushed away. "So wait. White Dawn is headquartered in Montenegro, yeah?"
"Yeah." Mal covered his mouth. "And now they're recruiting their keyboard warriors to be suicide bombers."
"Maybe he decided to do it on his own." Morna sat back and turned away from the screen. "Can you minimize that picture, maybe?"
"Sure." Mal banished the image to the bottom of his screen, and opened another window as well. "Does anything about this guy suggest he's likely to do much on his own?"
"Well, no." Morna sighed. "You're right. We know he's connected to White Dawn, and we know he's got enough hate in his heart to do something like this. I guess the question becomes, what do we do with it?"
Mal stared at the form on his screen for a moment. "Well, I guess the first thing we do is report it to Da. I'm not a fan of Daesh, but they've got enough to answer for. They don't need to answer for this one too."
"Are we positive about that?" Morna rested her chin on her hand. "I mean their goal with all of these attacks on European soil is to make it impossible for Muslims to live here. We've seen them willing to collaborate with White Dawn before. Why wouldn't they do so again? We know they're not all that fussy about killing Muslims. I mean come on."
"True." Mal rubbed at his temples. He needed to get some real sleep, or his head was going to explode. "We're still reporting it to Da. Right now, it looks like White Dawn did most of the dirty work here. The damn van even originated in the same country where they're headquartered. Da and the others should at least be aware of who they should be looking for."
"Fair enough." Morna bobbed her head from side to side. "And then?"
"And then we make sure the French authorities have the information about Rastoder. If nothing else, they'll be able to calm down any nimrods who start stirring people up talking about not allowing refugees or Muslims. With any luck, people will be more accepting of their neighbors, not less."
"I wouldn’t hold my breath on that." Morna snorted. "And what do we do from there? Frolic through the museum?"
"Maybe." Mal closed his eyes. "But first, we start tracking that truck everywhere it went. If Europe insists on being a surveillance state, I have no compunctions about using it to our advantage. I'm going to find out where that truck crossed into Europe and who inspected it. That should help us figure out where the gelignite got loaded on. Which, in turn, should tell us exactly where we're going next."
Morna grinned at him. "I love the way you think."
"Before we do any of that," he said, and pulled out his phone, "I'm going to do something I should have done ages ago."
He texted his father. Reconnaissance. Going dark. Will turn phone on in the morning.
Morna laughed out loud.
~
Trent filed into the meeting room with the rest of his unit. As usual, he went to his seat next to Chief. They'd been at sea for over a week now. They should be near their destination, unless they were planning to sneak through the Suez or something. That would be new and different for their unit. Points beyond certainly fell within their purview, but it wasn't a trip they'd made as a team.
There was a first time for everything, he guessed.
Once everyone had taken their usual seats, DeWitt cleared his throat. Men stopped chattering, and all eyes turned toward him. "Men, I apologize for the roundabout way we've been doing things. There was a terrorist attack in Narbonne, France, last week. It had all the hallmarks of a typical ISIS attack, and we'd picked up on some chatter about potential attacks in the region.
"The attack happened, and it was a terrible scene as you can imagine. They usually are. The media has been reporting a disgruntled former hotel employee was responsible for the attack and set it up to look like ISIS just to frighten people."
Trent had to scratch his head at that one. He wasn't alone. The others were all giving him funny looks, too. "I'm sorry, sir," Hopp
er said after a few seconds. "Can you explain that one to me real slow like? Because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would someone frame ISIS for attacking a hotel?"
Chief smirked and leaned back in his chair. "As it turns out, an anonymous source found a way to sift through a metric fuckton of camera images and got a good look at both the tags on the vehicle involved and the face of the driver. It turns out our ISIS suicide bomber was actually one of White Dawn's pet keyboard warriors from Montenegro. The guy himself is dead, still buried in the slag heap along with a big ton of his victims. They can't get close to the wreckage yet."
Trent grinned as his cheeks got warm. He knew of someone who could sift through that much data, and who was likely to have found the truth behind the attack too.
