Besieged

by A. J Tata

  He was surprised that the facility seemed minimally manned tonight, if indeed it was. With every step, he expected to see a fresh bevy of guards with weapons. Maybe the shipment was top secret, and these two were the only ones cleared for the mission. Or maybe it was lousy duty, and they were the new guys.

  After walking down the steps, he followed the narrow stairway to the south as it angled down. He got to where his eyes were even with the floor, and now he could see, instead of just hear, the man with the bolt cutters working on another lock on the same container. He was a large man in a black jumpsuit that zipped up from the front, like a mechanic’s overalls. Mahegan heard the garage door closing and saw the second guard approach the first.

  “There’s another pair of cutters at the second container. Don’t touch the fifth container,” the first guard said.

  Guard number two turned and walked to the next farthest container, lifted the bolt cutters, then snipped the lock like a pro.

  They finished the other two containers and had all four locks off, along with the wire seals that indicated whether anyone had tampered with the load. Mahegan spotted the fifth container across the warehouse, in the corner, and wondered why it was separate from the rest. As each man stood in front of a container, they nodded at each other and turned the door-locking bars on each container. They left those two containers unlocked, but with the doors still closed, and then went to the last two and opened them in the same manner.

  Mahegan noticed that the container with two locks was closest to him, and it had a wire running along the exterior. On the top panel there seemed to be an antenna of some type.

  The four doors opened pretty much at the same time as commandos came spilling out of the containers, with MP5 submachine guns firing. The two Cefiro guards each caught at least ten rounds apiece in their lower extremities.

  Mahegan had seen everything he thought he needed to see for the moment and quietly moved toward the door at the base of the underground stairwell, which, thankfully, did not require a key card. He opened it with as much stealth as he could muster, but the door still scraped against the concrete.

  He wasn’t certain how many commandos were in those containers. Maybe ten to fifteen per. Someone had probably cued on the noise he had just made opening the door.

  He heard footsteps coming toward him into the stairwell. Beyond the door were ropes, chains, and other supplies. Had he stepped into a closet?

  He pushed the heavy pile of chains against the door behind him. It wouldn’t hold for long, but it would buy him five seconds. Sometimes that was all he needed.

  He picked his way into the darkness and realized this was another tunnel. He reached a wall, but there was a narrow bypass, which he could barely squeeze around. Midway through his attempt to get past the cinder-block wall, machine-gun rounds obliterated the doorknob. A hand reached in and opened the door. What followed was a two-man team with MP5s and flashlights beneath their weapons, the beams crisscrossing like light sabers. By now Mahegan had slipped beyond the stack of cinder blocks and was hustling into the abyss. Brief flashes of light helped guide him. After arriving at another stack of cinder blocks, Mahegan squeezed past again. The floor was still concrete, and he doubted he was leaving much in the way of footprints. Using his Native American stalking technique, he rolled from his heels to his outer feet to the balls of his feet as he jogged quietly away from the commandos. After ten minutes he was in utter blackness and the lights had quit searching.

  Mahegan walked for another twenty minutes, until he saw a ladder. He knew intuitively that he was not in the same tunnel through which he had approached the facility earlier that night. This tunnel was perpendicular to that one. He was heading due south, parallel to the river.

  He climbed the ladder and found the cover locked with a relatively new Master Lock. Not terribly hard to pick, it took him ten minutes using two pins he carried in his knife sheath. He pushed out of the tunnel and found himself staring at large, semicircular mounds with doors on the front.

  They were ammunition bunkers.

  He was standing in the middle of Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, the largest ammunition storage facility on the East Coast.

  And it was connected to the Cefiro R & D facility.

  Straight shot.

  CHAPTER 11

  CATCHING HIS BREATH, MAHEGAN RESTED WITH HIS BACK AGAINST a grass-covered bunker, which probably housed Hellfire missiles or some other lethal munitions. There were hundreds of bunkers in rows, like soldiers in formation. He had moved a couple of bunkers over from where the manhole cover led to the tunnel. As far as he could see, in both directions were bunkers that were the exact same size: about fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and fifty feet deep, like mini Quonset huts.

  The connection between the Cefiro R & D facility and the ammunition depot surprised him. He was even more surprised by the commandos spilling out of the containers and executing a perfect Trojan horse raid on the Cefiro R & D compound. Or, ultimately, on the United States of America.

  The attackers were dark-skinned and appeared to be Middle Eastern, but not Arabic. Maybe they were Persian or Pashtun, perhaps Armenian. He didn’t hear anyone speak, so their language was still unknown.

  His mind scaled from the broader attacks on the Savannah, Charleston, and Hampton Roads ports to this seemingly unconnected covert operation to get inside the Cefiro compound.

  The attacks had to be related. The “birds” flying into the ships had to be autonomous nanotechnology swarms using the code written by Misha Constance but proffered by her father, as if he had written it. Was that why he had been killed? He had produced and known too much? Or was it that he couldn’t tweak the formula on-site, so suddenly the R & D team knew that he had not developed the code and that Misha had, prompting their hunt for her?

  Could the blue flash have been her dress? His memory was eidetic, meaning he could recall images after just a brief exposure. He kept seeing the flash of blue and overlaid it in his mind with the blue dress that Misha had been wearing yesterday morning, before the school bombing. He had knelt behind her and had tended to her cut. Had she somehow escaped captivity?

  The commandos were executing a plan, and there was a possibility Misha was on location. He had to go back. There was no question about that. The only issue was which route to take. He could move along the river and reenter through the original tunnel by the pier, the way he had entered earlier, which would provide him access to the grounds again. Or he could come through the escape tunnel he had just followed. A third option was to work his way through the forest to the west of the R & D compound.

  He pulled out his phone and punched up the Zebra app. He texted Patch for an update from General Savage. Mahegan had a complicated history with Savage, and they mostly tolerated one another, though they respected each other. Before he gave Savage any information, though, he needed to know what the general knew. Savage was scarce with resources, but Mahegan understood his need to make his footprint invisible. He was, after all, a general and had rules by which he had to play.

  Mahegan was just an ex-soldier doing his duty. Regardless, their goals were the same, usually, which was to preserve the security of the country.

  Patch sent him a secure text back, which disappeared immediately after he read it.

  Savage says that FBI guy Price and Detective Patterson are looking for you.

  He typed back, Didn’t have time to waste.

  Mahegan knew that he was pushing the envelope and that Savage was worried about the Posse Comitatus law, which prevented U.S. military combat action on U.S. soil, unless authorized by the president. Mahegan was off the radar, yet he had laws potentially constraining him.

  One of the reasons General Savage kept him on clandestine retainer was to walk the fine line between those two worlds. To Mahegan, it was nonsense to think that the United States would not need active military forces to defend the homeland, especially in this era of global Islamic extremism. Likewise, as good as t
he National Guard was in each of the states, they worked for the governors, not the “big Army,” unless the Pentagon mobilized them. Coordinating the response of fifty National Guards across America would be problematic in the event of a full-scale assault on the homeland. The bureaucrats in the Department of Homeland Security would most likely fumble around with it for a while, until it was too late.

  He, Patch, and O’Malley had evolved into this loose-knit, one-off group that stayed plugged in to their former unit, receiving information in trade for their own useful intelligence contributions. Mahegan and his two comrades had set up a protective over-watch system on the children of their unit members killed in combat. They saw it as their solemn duty to guard the families of those who had died by their sides in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were Promise and six other families, four of which lived in North Carolina, and then two teenagers who had just started college in Virginia.

  General Savage had given them the tools to provide minimal protection to the families, such as monitoring the cell phone towers where Promise worked. When they were blocked, Patch got an alert and immediately sent him the message.

  No broken promise.

  That phrase had also been Judge White’s mantra to them. Not because he had named his daughter Promise, but because a promise meant something to him and, by extension, to Mahegan and his men.

  Even General Savage abided by Judge’s creed in his dealings with Patch, O’Malley, and him. They didn’t have signed contracts. They received payments periodically by courier. Always cash. The money wasn’t so much a salary as it was a means for them to continue to search for threats and to watch over the family members without being intrusive. Patch and O’Malley had other jobs. Patch worked in the financial sector in Charlotte, and O’Malley did information technology work in Research Triangle Park.

  Mahegan’s love of the ocean had led him to Wrightsville Beach again. He had been there as a deckhand on a fishing boat when he first left the service a couple of years ago. He had saved enough money from his combat tours to find decent accommodations and to be able to feel a sense of duty and satisfaction that came with living out Judge White’s creed: no broken promise.

  Now here he was in the middle of an ammunition depot with a tunnel that led to an auto-manufacturing plant that had just been raided by four containers full of well-trained men with olive skin and digitized black and blue uniforms.

  He remembered the two partially constructed walls in the tunnel and decided that perhaps they would give him an opportunity to get back into the facility. He needed to get eyes on the activities.

  Using his burner cell, he called Casey, who answered, “Where are you?”

  “I can’t say right now, but I’m going to miss dinner tonight.”

  After a pause, she said, “I understand.”

  He hung up, knowing that she had probably received that call from her marine many times over. She knew what it meant.

  Then he texted on his government phone, using the Zebra app again, to ask Patch for information on any ships that had moored today and had been off-loaded at the Port of Wilmington. It made sense that the two were connected, the attacks at the ports and the raid in Cefiro’s compound.

  It occurred to him that the reason the attacks on the ports had gone from Savannah to Charleston to Norfolk and had skipped Wilmington was so that the enemy could use the Port of Wilmington to off-load their containers and truck them to the R & D facility.

  He remembered the mounds he had seen on the back side of the compound. They looked the same as the ammunition mounds surrounding him right now, only smaller.

  He called Patch. “Can you pull up satellite imagery from before Cefiro purchased the mega-site and after? I’m looking to see if they bought a chunk of the Army ammunition depot.”

  Patch said, “Roger that. Hang tight.” Mahegan heard some clicking in the background, waited a few seconds, and then Patch came back on the phone. “Your instincts are good. The main piece of land sold in twenty-fifteen for thirty million dollars, but they needed another hundred acres, and the Army sold them a chunk as a part of base realignment and closure.”

  “There’s a tunnel on the northeast side of the depot that connects to Cefiro. It looks semi new to me. There are some mounds on the west side. Can you find anything that might indicate a tunnel along that side of the property?”

  As Mahegan waited, he heard a tug in the river belch as it navigated the channel. He could hear owls communicating their nocturnal call to hunt. He envisioned them triangulating prey from their respective perches, hooting their plans to one another. He heard wings flap in the distance, followed a few seconds later by a swift tussle in the pine straw. Then the sound of wings fluttering again, this time more labored, as if the owls were working harder, carrying prey.

  “You’re in luck, I think. The ammunition depot and the Cefiro land were a plantation in Revolutionary War days and then a battery during the Civil War. There were all kinds of rail lines and tunnels around there to move ammunition. The Army took about eight thousand acres in nineteen-fifty-one and built that place using some of the existing tunnels. Looks like one in the general vicinity you’re talking about. I’ve superimposed the blueprint from nineteen-fifty-one onto our satellite shot today, and I see the mounds you’re talking about. Thermal shows heat signatures in each of them, with the most pronounced being the farthest away from you, the last mound. There is a tunnel near you that will get you to the first mound. Looks like about a mile long. Once you’re out, you’ve got about fifty yards between the first and last mounds. I sent the imagery via Zebra.”

  “Thanks. Where do I find the opening to the tunnel?”

  “It should branch off the one you were just in. I’m seeing a T intersection near the opening.”

  “Got it. Where are we on Mirza?”

  “Still no leads.”

  “Well, I think I found him.”

  “Say again?”

  “You said he was last seen in Fujairah, right?” Mahegan asked.

  “Was an unconfirmed report, but yes.”

  “Check the name of whatever ships are in Wilmington and see if they made a port call in Fujairah. I’m guessing they did.”

  “What the hell just happened?”

  “There are five containers inside the research and development facility. My guess is the Iranian Quds Force came out of at least three of them. One looked like a command and control container. It had a satellite and an antenna on it.”

  “Damn.” Then, after a pause, Patch said, “You found him. I’ll confirm, but that’s got to be him.”

  “Let me know,” Mahegan said, then clicked off.

  He opened the Zebra app and studied the images. He could see where the Army had sold the property to Cefiro and then had probably rebuilt their fence line or let the new Cefiro fence serve two purposes.

  He shut the phone off, rewrapped it in his wet-suit pouch, and found the tunnel entrance. The Army had used these tunnels to move heavy munitions from the pier to the labyrinth of bunkers scattered over the eight-thousand-acre facility. It would be a good piece of luck to be able to get inside the R & D compound from the west side, near the mounds.

  After climbing back into the tunnel, he studied the area with his Maglite. When he had been running previously, his plan had been to get to an area of safety, where he could regroup, pass on what he had seen, and get more intelligence. So he had missed the sheet metal welded to one side of the tunnel that he presently stood before. He knew that this could be the opening to the rail line that would move to the west and get him on the parallel track toward the mounds.

  Thinking of Misha and how scared she must be, he removed his knife and began to pop the welds. The welder had done a lazy job. The sheet metal came off easily. Shining the light into the opening, he gathered hope. There was a rail line and a tunnel.

  Stepping into the darkness, following the yellow light punching into the black void, he counted his paces as he thought about Misha. The invaders ha
d proven themselves ruthless and would not spend a second considering the life of a child.

  He quickened his pace.

  CHAPTER 12

  MISHA CONSTANCE

  TWO MEN HAD STARED AT HER POD FOR A LONG WHILE. MISHA HAD barely made it back in time, and the sharp screwdriver in her hand gave her little comfort. She had gotten control of herself. Her breathing had settled, and so she had calmed down.

  Her hands were still shaking, and her head still hurt. Her heart was racing, beating against her chest, but she did her best to act like she was asleep. Misha kept her eyes shut tight, but not too tight. When she needed to fight the flailing, she opened her eyes and looked through her glasses. That was what her father had always said. “Fight the flailing, Misha. Fight the flailing.” She didn’t think he had ever understood how hard she had tried until he invented the glasses and they helped so much. She held tight to the blanket they had given her.

  After about ten minutes she heard them leave. Then she heard some big trucks coming, so she did the best she could to look over the lip of the pod where the canopy was. She barely saw what looked like those giant metal boxes that the ships had brought into the port. She counted five of them, but she might have missed one. She wasn’t sure.

  After about twenty minutes the trucks left. Shortly after that, she heard what sounded like a really big sewing machine. Stitch, stitch, stitch. She had no idea what those noises really were, but she knew it wasn’t a big sewing machine. They sounded very mechanical, like pistons. And they were over very quickly.

  Now she heard the sounds of footsteps outside, walking in all directions. She could feel the vibrations through the pod. She pretended to be asleep again, sensing their shadows darken the lids of her eyes.