Besieged

by A. J Tata

  “Hello,” he said to Promise. Her face was inches from his, and he could smell her light and citrusy perfume, despite the cordite hanging in the air like a searching ghost. The contrast of scents was stark, a metaphor for so many things in his life, especially violence and love. All of about ten seconds had passed since the bomb detonated, and a total of about two minutes since he saw the shooter walking into the school. That was the difference between life and death, he remembered. Combat had taught Mahegan that hesitation killed. He could see that Promise had learned from her father that same creed.

  He studied Promise for another second, noticing the flaring of her nostrils as she pulled in oxygen to steady her heart rate.

  “We need to move, now,” he said.

  “I’ve got two magazines in my pockets and two more in my purse, which is in my classroom.” Her eyes were locked on Mahegan’s, intent and focused.

  “Go get your purse, and I’ll talk to the principal,” he said.

  Promise immediately got up and ran. He stood and looked at the doors. All the windows were bulging inward, held in place by the tight mesh, which was mostly there to keep burglars from gaining entrance. The steel doors had held fine, though they, too, bulged inward from the force of the blast. Beyond where the shooter/suicide bomber had been, the metal poles that held the corrugated roof awning in place had buckled. There had definitely been more force to his front than to his back, which told him that an experienced crew had set him up. The handlers of suicide bombers gave their mules targets and told them to stand facing them so that the blast would have the desired effect.

  He stood and observed through the shattered window. A single police car moved slowly, banking sharp left and making right turns as it wove through the car-pool lane. This was no standard black-and-white with a light rack on top. It looked like a Ferrari painted in the police cruiser colors of black and white. It stopped briefly adjacent to the middle sidewalk, as if it were thinking.

  Straining to see through the wire mesh who might be driving the car, Mahegan noticed the car seemed to be adjusting to something as its front wheels turned toward the building. It bumped up onto the sidewalk and aimed its grill directly at the doors Mahegan was using as cover. The vehicle was sleek and low, allowing it to glide beneath the buckled awning.

  Breach force and assault force, Mahegan thought. Was the first guy the breach force or perhaps even a ruse? Was this now the assault force?

  Smoke began to boil from beneath the rear tires of the fake cruiser, and suddenly it launched at the front doors like the ramrod it was intended to be. He had little time to evade its penetration. After pushing off the door, he followed Promise’s route to the right, catching a blur of blue to his left, only to find Promise heading back his way. He grabbed her mid-stride, dove into one of the first open classrooms, and slammed the door shut.

  “Bomb!” he shouted. As soon as he did, he saw dozens of little eyes widen as the children peered at him from behind furniture and cubbies. He held Promise on the waxed floor when the car exploded with a deafening roar.

  The school building shuddered but held, as far as he could tell. The sixty-year-old construction turned out to be better than he had guessed. They were in the first classroom off the main lobby, where the car had detonated. He took stock of the kids, who appeared scared but alive. The young teacher whose classroom they had used as cover was keeping her cool and remained in charge. Worry was etched across her youthful face, but she was poised, nonetheless.

  “I’m going to check on casualties,” Mahegan said to Promise. “You should go be with your students.”

  “My teacher assistant is with them. This room connects to my classroom through there.” She pointed over her shoulder, beyond the cubbies filled with frightened eyes. “I’m coming with you.” Then, to reassure him, she punched the SEND button of a handheld radio and said, “Missy, this is Promise. Status?”

  “We’re okay. No injuries.” Missy’s voice was firm, but it was anything but confident. He thought she sounded scared, and rightfully so.

  “I’ve got the ammo, and I can shoot,” Promise said.

  “Your call. I’d prefer you get eyes on your children and then come join me.”

  “As you wish,” Promise said. She darted through the door that connected the two classrooms. She closed the door behind her, most likely knowing that the door would add some modicum of protection. His main concern now was a follow-on attack. They had a suicide bomber, possibly two, unless the car had been remotely controlled, as he suspected it might have been.

  He walked into the hallway, where smoke wafted in all directions. By now the principal was on the intercom and was barking orders.

  “Move to the playground immediately. We need all teachers to move their children to the playground immediately. Standard protocols.”

  Mahegan saw a little girl, maybe eight to eleven years old, standing in the middle of the hallway. She was rocking backward and forward, her head bobbing, in what appeared to be self-soothing motions. Mahegan knelt in front of her, placed a hand on her shoulder, and asked, “Who’s your teacher?” She flinched. Not a complete recoil, but a shrug to toss his hand off her shoulder. He removed his hand.

  She glanced at him with blank eyes through awkward-looking glasses. They looked like designer glasses, with wide pewter temples leading to tips that connected to an athletic strap made yellow to blend with her blond locks. The strap ran beneath her hair. The bridge and rims were coincident; the lenses large and square. Her eyes averted downward, as if she did not like making eye contact.

  Mahegan said, “It’s okay.”

  She stepped away from him and then toward him, as if she was confused. Then she laid her head on his shoulder and said, “Hold me. Tight.”

  He pulled her closer, as he would have wanted if he were her age and under attack.

  “My name is Jake. What’s your name?”

  A minute went by, and she just rocked against him, most likely suffering shell shock. Then she said, “Misha.”

  Misha. But the word hadn’t come out cleanly, as if from the sweet voice of an innocent child. She had made a louder sound than he’d expected, as if she struggled to communicate and the louder she spoke, the clearer it might seem to her.

  Misha.

  The name the shooter had called, Mahegan remembered. Had she heard her name, and was that why she was standing in the hallway, disconnected from any of the streams of students flowing to safety? He was standing now and cradling her in his arms, which was when he felt the blood on his hand. Her back was soaked. A piece of shrapnel had clipped her somewhere.

  He rushed her back to the classroom, where children were being marshaled to move to the playground for accountability. Promise linked up with him as he walked Misha into the first classroom.

  “My kids are on the playground and accounted for. Where did she come from?”

  “Her name’s Misha, and she’s wounded. I need a first-aid kit,” he said.

  “I know. . . .” For whatever reason, Promise stopped and turned to her colleague and said, “Shea, can we borrow yours?”

  “Of course. It’s in my desk,” the teacher said. She was probably Promise’s age and was white, with porcelain skin. Her dark hair was cut just above her shoulders. She wore a red print dress and white sandals. She had dark eyes with brows furrowed deep in worry. With the last of her children lined up to leave the room, Shea shot across the room and swiftly retrieved a white first-aid kit from her metal desk drawer.

  By now, Promise had Misha’s dress off her shoulders and had turned the young girl’s back to Mahegan. He noticed again that Misha had a yellow strap that held her glasses against the back of her head, like an athlete might. As he looked up at Promise from behind Misha, something in the lens of her glasses caught his eye, but she turned her head, and whatever Mahegan thought he saw was gone. He thanked Shea for the medical supplies and said to her, “Take care of your kids.”

  “I know what to do,” she said, not in
a snarky way but in a reassuring one. She was a teammate, as all the teachers seemed to be. They were executing the drill with precision as he noticed lines of children moving quickly beyond the door.

  A piece of shrapnel from the bomb, metal, or glass had raked a quarter-inch-deep gash across Misha’s back, as if someone had used a straight-edged ruler and a box cutter. Opening the white first-aid kit, he found an assortment of Band-Aids, antibacterial ointment, square pads, butterfly clips, aspirin, a bottle of Betadine, and a single roll of gauze. He quickly opened the antiseptic and said to Promise, “Sing her a song or something.”

  Promise said, “Misha, can we play our game, honey?”

  Misha muttered something and started rocking again, but he was focused. He poured the Betadine along the cut, and she immediately wailed and leapt toward Promise, who had known what was coming and opened her arms. Misha flapped her arms and kept rocking, giving him a hint that perhaps she was a special needs child.

  “That’s all there is, honey. Misha, that’s all there is,” she said in a soothing voice. He could instantly picture Promise with a classroom full of students, teaching and mentoring them. She was a natural.

  “Ants! Ants!” Misha shouted at Promise through her choked sobs.

  After hesitating, Promise said, “We don’t talk about the ants, remember, darling?”

  Mahegan wasted no time in opening the butterfly clips and began snapping shut the wound. In all, he used the entire lot of eight. Blood was seeping down her back, and the orange Betadine made everything look worse. He used the antibacterial ointment, generously spreading it from clip to clip. Next, he placed the gauze atop the wound, with Promise taking it across her front as she handed it to him. They wrapped her four times, until they had used the entire roll.

  “Take us to where everyone else is,” he said to Promise. His sense was that they were the only ones still in the building, as Shea, whose classroom was the last in line, had already marched her group to the rally point.

  He lifted Misha and carried her. She was still crying but had settled into a rhythm of soft sobs. She struggled against him like a two-year-old child bent on climbing down from her parent’s grasp.

  “Ants! Ants!” Misha shouted again. He had read somewhere that autistic children sometimes felt like their senses were on fire. Perhaps she had Asperger’s syndrome or a form of autism. He held her firmly as they moved swiftly along the hallway, and her mood seemed to shift without warning. She suddenly seemed to have an inward sense of peace, which seemed abnormal for the moment. The tighter he held her, the calmer she became.

  “Please. Don’t want to go,” Misha muttered. He figured she was more scared of the uncertainty that lay ahead than the familiar confines of her classroom. She smelled of baby shampoo and freshly washed laundry. Her blond hair fell across his face as he followed Promise, who led with her pistol. They jogged through hallways lined with artwork made by elementary school students. Construction paper of all colors with drawn images, some looking like animals, others looking like people, created a kaleidoscope effect as they barreled toward the double doors Promise was pushing against.

  Misha held tightly to his neck. While he was confident in the quick medical repair job he had performed, she would need real doctors soon. She had lost blood and was being remarkably still against his chest, which indicated she might be going into shock.

  As they raced toward the doors, he saw the assembled throng of hundreds of students and teachers on a soccer field, who all seemed to be staring and pointing in his direction, their mouths shouting words muffled by the metal doors.

  Then the world exploded in front of his face. The doors buckled inward as dirt and rocks kicked at the side of the building. The sound was deafening thunder in his ears, like the explosions he’d heard in Afghanistan or Iraq.

  Promise had been leaning her hip against the door and was now flying past him, as if in slow motion. The blast hit him as he instinctively turned Misha away from the detonation. The force was stronger than wiping out in a twenty-foot Hawaiian north shore wave. His back had taken the brunt of the force, and he had felt heat from the fire, as well. The scar in his left deltoid burned with injuries old and new as the blast slammed him against the concrete wall.

  He held on to Misha as tight as he could. His head hit against the wall as he turned to keep from crushing Misha.

  Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 2

  MAHEGAN REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS, CHOKING AND COUGHING from smoke that wafted through the hallways like the souls of lost children. Surely there could not be this kind of death and destruction in an elementary school in southeastern North Carolina, not far from where he was born on the Outer Banks.

  The first thing he noticed was that Misha was no longer in his grasp. Where had she gone? How long had he been unconscious? He rubbed the back of his head and found blood seeping from a deep cut at the same time he noticed paramedics huddled over an unmoving figure, which was too large to be Misha. Standing, he stepped over the rubble of concrete blocks and walked toward the group.

  A police officer drew on him immediately with a Glock, saying, “Hold it right there, buddy.”

  He raised his hands slightly and said, “I’m looking for Promise and Misha. I was with them when this happened. I’m the one who threw the suicide bomber out of the lobby.”

  Mahegan stared the officer down, which was not difficult. He was a good ten inches taller than the deputy. He could guess the deputy’s thoughts, as he had done many times before, as the man gauged his dark skin, fading brown-blond hair, and blue eyes. As a descendant of the Croatan Indians, Mahegan had inherited a lineage derived from one of Governor John White’s settlers of the Lost Colony and the Native Americans who had been on Roanoke Island when the settlers arrived.

  The deputy lowered the pistol and said, “Damn. It’s true. We got a report of a big guy giving the kids and teachers time to get out. You’re that guy?”

  “I’m that guy.” He pointed at the heap on the floor with the paramedics and said, “Now, is that Promise?” he asked, certain that it was.

  “Promise White is what her school badge says,” the police officer said. He wore the badge of a Brunswick County sheriff’s deputy on his khaki uniform. The name Register was cut in white letters onto a black background, not unlike some of the name tags Mahegan had had to wear as a conventional military officer before his transition to special operations.

  He stepped past the sheriff’s deputy and knelt between two emergency medical technicians who were feverishly working around her still body. Promise’s face was covered with an oxygen mask, and a white padded brace stabilized her neck. They had carefully moved her onto a backboard in case she had any damage to her spine. A woman held an IV bag of saline water and probably antibiotics above her. He followed the tube and saw where it poked into her dark skin at the crook of her elbow. The good news was that she was breathing. The oxygen mask fogged with every automatic push of the ventilator under the watchful eyes of the kneeling technicians.

  Knowing better than to get in the way of medical personnel focused on saving a life, Mahegan watched. The technicians lifted the board to which Promise was securely buckled and moved her toward the ambulance.

  He asked the deputy, “Concussion?”

  “They think maybe a coma. But you know they usually worst case these things. Friend of yours?”

  “Yes. Daughter of one of my Army buddies.”

  “Army? What unit?” he replied with a tone that suggested he had served, as well.

  “I was in the Eighty-Second Airborne, then went on the other side of the fence,” Mahegan replied, referring to his time with Delta Force before he was dismissed from the Army for killing an enemy prisoner of war. Thankfully, the Army bureaucrats had chosen to shelve the dishonorable discharge and give him an honorable one. His mentor, Major General Bob Savage, had had something to do with that, but Mahegan tried not to give him too much credit. Savage always took enough for both of them
.

  “Paratrooper and Delta? Shit hot, man. I was just a leg down in the Third Infantry, but I did my time in Iraq,” Deputy Register said.

  “It all counts. We always appreciated when the tanks showed up,” Mahegan said. It was true. Serving was serving. Every soldier, sailor, airman, and marine who had signed up in the past sixteen years had known he or she was going to war, and that counted.

  “Some rough days over there,” he said.

  “Today was rough,” Mahegan said, refocusing the deputy’s attention. “Have you seen a young blond-haired girl named Misha? She was wearing a blue dress. I was holding her when the blast hit that door.” He pointed at the crumpled back entrance.

  “One ambulance had already left as I was coming up, which sort of surprised me, because I was on this thing in fifteen minutes or less.”

  Mahegan thought back to the initial shooter/suicide bomber, the explosion, and the sleek car bomb. Then to patching up Misha’s back and racing toward the back door. All of that had probably been less than ten minutes of activity. Given the school’s rural location, he could understand a fifteen-minute response, especially if the attackers had jammed communications. But Mahegan wondered about the first ambulance. Was it legitimate, and had they taken Misha to the hospital? Or could this operation be so sophisticated that there was an autonomous or ersatz ambulance in play, as well?

  “We need to get you to the hospital,” Deputy Register said.

  Mahegan was still thinking about the sophistication of the attack: a school shooter doubling as a suicide bomber who was remotely controlled; probable lockdown on wireless and cellular communications in the school vicinity; two car bombs, at least one of which he believed was autonomous or remote controlled. And possibly a rogue ambulance?

  “I’ll just ride with Promise, and that’ll get me there,” Mahegan said.

  He sat in the back of the ambulance and stared at Promise’s limp form beneath the blanket they had pulled over her. He thought back to her father, Thurgood “Judge” White, who had mentored his entire team. Judge had been a veteran of every clandestine operation the nation had performed in the past thirty years, and he had created his unit’s solemn bond to take care of one another.