The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  It broke her heart to watch the news here in the US. The average American couldn’t even find the country of Yemen on a map, much less understand that Iran and Saudi Arabia were fighting a proxy war on the backs of the Yemeni people.

  She sighed as she highlighted an audio file on her secure terminal. Nadia adjusted her headset and clicked the little arrow to play the recording.

  The file was a poor-quality audio recording of a woman’s voice on a mobile phone, strained across distance and partially unintelligible in places. It sounded like she was weeping.

  “Hamdi!” the voice sobbed. There was a long pause. “Hamdi, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Zahra. I can hear you.” The man was shouting. “Go ahead. The connection is very bad.”

  “They’re all dead! Everyone in the village is dead.” The digital signal faded and Nadia lost Hamdi’s response.

  “… Mira is dead. The children are dead. Everyone in Yousap.” The woman was ranting, repeating herself. The man tried to stop her, but she just kept going, babbling about dead people and blood and bodies melting. It made no sense.

  Nadia paused the recording and listened to it again. After tracing the call to the cell tower near the town of Haydan and studying detailed maps from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, she finally found a place called Yousap. It was a flyspeck on the screen, not even dignified with a population estimate.

  One eye on the clock, Nadia studied the latest intel. These places were far from the front lines of the fighting. An attack in this remote village made no sense. Nothing added up.

  Nadia flagged her supervisor. Mark Gallarita was a heavyset NSA analyst with a perpetual frown and dark hair that flopped into his eyes whenever he moved his head. The Yemen desk was not where Mark wanted to be in his career, and he made that point perfectly clear every day.

  “What is it, Nadia?”

  She colored slightly, embarrassed. Mark’s demeanor was brusque, but she told herself he was just a guy trying to do his best on an assignment that he hated.

  “I got a fragment of a cell-phone call,” Nadia said. “It sounds like a bunch of civilians are dead.”

  Mark leaned over her terminal, where she had the maps pulled up.

  “The caller made a reference to this village.” Nadia pointed to a tiny dot fifteen kilometers past Haydan. “It looks like it’s only accessible by footpath, not even a place to drive a car up there. Subsistence farmers, goat herders. Maybe fifty people at the most.”

  Mark stared at the screen, still silent.

  “She was panicked.” Nadia realized she was talking faster, trying to convince her supervisor she was right. She tried to calm her voice and slow down. “Said everyone was dead. She mentioned the bodies looked like they were melting.”

  That piqued Mark’s interest. “Melting? Chemical weapons, maybe? But why in the middle of nowhere?”

  Nadia tried to backpedal. “Well, I think she said melted. It’s a terrible connection and the dialect was tough for me.” There were dozens of Arabic dialects in the country of Yemen alone, especially when you went into the deep countryside. Her parents had insisted she learn Arabic when she was growing up, but her parents had both been raised in Sanaa, the capital city of Yemen, and were born to wealth. She could understand the gist of any conversation well enough, but the subtleties might be lost in translation. On reflection, Nadia was increasingly concerned that maybe she was misinterpreting some of the words from the intercepted phone call.

  Mark straightened up. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Send this intel on to the theater commander as unverified. Then get on the horn with Creech and see if we can get a Reaper to make a surveillance pass for us. Maybe they can pick something up from the air.”

  Nadia nodded, looking at the clock. If she hurried, she might just have enough time to do this before she got off shift. Overtime on Friday night was not in her plans.

  She routed a secure call to Creech Air Force Base in Nevada into her headset and spoke to the duty officer. “This is Nadia from the NSA Yemen desk. Requesting a flyby on these coordinates.” She read out the location of the tiny village in the mountains of Yemen.

  A tired voice repeated the coordinates back. “Stand by, ma’am.”

  Nadia listened to the Muzak in her headphones until the duty officer came back on the line. “We have an MQ-9 UAV in the area, ma’am,” he said, using the official designation of the Air Force Reaper drone. “I’ve emailed you a secure link to the drone feed and I’m patching you through to the operator now.”

  Her phone clicked and a new voice came on the line. “NSA, this is your pilot, Charlie,” the voice drawled. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking on this fine day?”

  “Hello, Charlie, this is Nadia from the Yemen desk in DC.”

  “Well, welcome aboard, Nadia. Please place your tray tables in an upright and locked position and fasten your seat belt. You will be seeing a live feed from my drone in three … two … one … mark.”

  Nadia’s screen popped to life, showing an image of the mountainous Yemen countryside at night using a high-definition, low-light camera. A three-quarter moon cast the scene in silver.

  “Looks like it’s about one in the morning in lovely Yemen, Nadia. Our low-light cameras are pretty good, so I’ll do a visual pass first, okay?”

  “Acknowledged.” She raised her hand to beckon Mark to her desk and handed him a spare set of headphones.

  The mountain hamlet of Yousap came into view on her screen. To call it a village was an insult to villages. It consisted of ten structures bisected by a footpath barely large enough to accommodate a donkey cart. A few crude corrals surrounded the buildings and some gardens.

  “I believe that is our target, Nadia. Looks like a lovely rustic—make that very rustic—hideaway. What are we looking for?”

  Nadia quickly filled him in on the basic situation.

  “Roger that. The fastest way to tell if we have any warm bodies is to use infrared. Stand by.”

  The screen updated to show a ghostly image of heat gradients. Nadia could make out at least a dozen person-shaped images with barely perceptible heat signatures. Inside one of the houses, she made out a warm body—probably the woman who made the phone call.

  Charlie’s voice was subdued when he spoke again. “Based on what I am seeing here, Nadia, I would say we have a whole lot of recently dead or dying people in this little burg.”

  Nadia leaned closer to the screen. “Concur, Charlie. I’d like to see if we can ascertain a cause of death. The eyewitness described the dead as looking like they had melted.”

  “Roger that. Let me see how much detail I can get for you. Stand by.”

  Nadia and Mark watched as the remote pilot increased magnification. Charlie’s voice sharpened. “Nadia, we have a high-speed incoming bogey on an intercept vector.”

  “I don’t understand, Charlie. What is—”

  An aircraft entered the field of view. Charlie froze the image and Nadia was able to make out the desert camouflage painted on the top of the fuselage and the seal of the Royal Saudi Air Force.

  “Jesus,” Mark said, “that’s an F-15E.”

  “Nadia,” Charlie said, “we have been ordered by in-theater commander to vacate. Breaking off now.”

  “Charlie, wait!” Nadia said. “Give us a visual of the target for as long as you can.”

  There was no reply from the pilot, but the image stayed on her screen.

  The F-15E released a weapon from under its wing. It streaked down toward the tiny hamlet of Yousap. Seconds later, the mountaintop erupted in a ball of flame.

  “Laser-guided bomb,” Mark whispered. “Two-thousand-pounder. Enough to vaporize a city block. What the fuck is going on over there?”

  “Nadia, this is Charlie. It’s been a pleasure, but I’m outta here.”

  Nadia’s screen went dead.

  “That woman was alive,” Nadia said. “We saw her heat signature. She was the one who made the call.”
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  Mark blew out a long breath and pushed his glasses up his nose. “We don’t know that for sure, Nadia.” He stripped off his headphones and handed them to her. “We don’t know what happened. It’s a war zone over there, and for all we know that heat signature might have been the next Osama bin Laden.”

  Nadia stared at him until Mark looked away.

  “All right, I’ll tell you what. There’s a new group over at CIA called Emerging Threats. My new standing orders are if it smells funny and doesn’t fit in our mission, we’re supposed to send it over to the ET group.”

  “The ET group. Really?” Nadia looked askance at her supervisor.

  “Hey, if this was chemical warfare, it certainly falls outside our normal mission.”

  Nadia looked at the clock on her screen. Quarter past five.

  “Fine. Emerging Threats it is.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Guba, Ethiopia

  Over the course of his years working on the site of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Seifu had seen the project grow from an airstrip next to a river in the middle of the desert to a concrete-and-steel mountain that spanned that same river.

  For the first year it seemed that the number of workers on the site doubled every day. In the early days, the site crawled with earthmoving equipment. Bulldozers, dump trucks, backhoes. The ground shook with blasting all through the day and night as the workers scraped away the desert down to bare rock.

  They built a concrete plant and all day and night trucks carried wet concrete from the plant to the dam site, where even more workers had put together enormous spiderwebs of steel rebar. They poured the cement into molds, layer by layer replacing the earth they had scraped away.

  In its place, they left a stepped mountain of man-made stone across the river. At night, after he was done with his driving for the day, Seifu would go to the highest point above the dam and look out over the upstream valley. Below him, men worked in the glare of lights, building yet another layer of the dam.

  He tried to imagine what it would look like when the desert was covered with blue water as far as the eye could see. It was hard to picture, but the engineers said it would happen and he believed them.

  When he first started at the work site, Seifu’s plan was to earn enough money to go back to school. He wanted to be an engineer, or maybe an architect.

  But that was years ago and he was still just a driver. His job would last as long as there was a single worker on the site. It didn’t matter if his customers were engineers or truck drivers or janitors, they all had one thing in common.

  They all had to eat. Seifu drove a food truck.

  His menu was simple. In the mornings, he served kinche, a mix of boiled grains seasoned with a spiced butter. In the afternoons, he offered wat, a thick stew, and a side of injera flatbread.

  His portions were large, his prices reasonable. Everyone knew Seifu’s battered white Toyota pickup truck with the blue tarp canopy. Twice a day, he was waved through security checkpoints as he made his rounds.

  Occasionally, he made some extra money by carrying a package past the guards into the work site. He knew they were probably drugs, but the extra cash was always welcome and he didn’t see any harm in it.

  When a man approached him late one afternoon with a request to carry something into the lower dam build site, Seifu didn’t think anything of it. He quoted the man his normal rate.

  “My package is large,” the man said.

  Seifu didn’t recognize the man. He was tall, at least two meters, with broad shoulders and biceps that strained the elastic of his blue polo shirt. His hard hat was brand new, as was his yellow safety vest. He also had an accent, but that wasn’t unusual. There were thousands of workers from all over Ethiopia and Sudan, and they changed all the time.

  “How big?” Seifu asked.

  The man spread his arms about a meter apart. He indicated a half meter of height and width.

  Seifu shook his head. “Too big. Won’t fit in my truck.”

  “I can pay,” the man replied. “Name your price.”

  Seifu wasn’t about to fall for that trick. He shook his head and started to get up.

  “Wait.” The man clamped his hand on Seifu’s arm. With his free hand, he pulled a wad of cash—American dollars—from his pocket. “I told you I can pay.”

  The outer bill was a crisp one-hundred-dollar note.

  “Two hundred,” Seifu said. “And fifty.”

  The man released his arm and peeled the top one-hundred-dollar bill off. There was another one underneath.

  “I’ll meet you here in the morning,” the man said. “You’ll get the rest of the money after I load the crate.”

  All through the evening, Seifu’s conscience nagged at him. Smuggling in a small package was one thing, but an entire crate? Yet every time he shifted position, the crisp bill crinkled in his pocket.

  The next morning, a dusty black SUV was parked next to Seifu’s food truck. The man he had met the day before got out of the passenger side. He raised the rear hatch. Inside was a black plastic Pelican case, like the kind the surveyors used to store their sensitive equipment.

  It was also much bigger than Seifu had expected. Too big to fit into the back of his truck once all the food was loaded.

  “I can’t do this,” Seifu said. “It’s too big.”

  The driver’s-side door opened and a second man got out. He was even bigger than his partner, dressed in blue jeans and an untucked shirt. “Is there a problem, Rocky?”

  “No problem, Kasim,” the first man replied. “We just need to make it fit.”

  The driver pointed to the cab of Seifu’s food truck. “Put it up front.”

  * * *

  “What’s in the crate, Seifu?” the guard at the lower dam site asked through the open window. “Dessert?”

  Seifu had fended off the question at every checkpoint on his route, so the answer was rote by now. “The engineers asked me to carry it for them.”

  “Your problem is that you’re too nice, Seifu,” the guard laughed. “Save some kinche for me, okay?”

  Seifu wanted to wave back, but the enormous crate hindered his movement. It had taken all three of them to fit the heavy case into the cab, and it jammed Seifu’s frame up against the driver’s-side door, but it was worth it. Three crisp hundred-dollar bills crinkled in his pocket.

  As soon as he parked his truck, he would finally get rid of the thing. All he had to do was call the mobile number the man had given him and someone would come to pick it up. The man had warned him—three times—not to call the number until he reached the lower dam site.

  He parked his pickup in the shade of a dump truck. Even at ten in the morning, the sun hammered down on the lower dam site, turning the shallow bowl into an oven.

  All over the work area, men were dropping tools and heading his way. Seifu smiled to himself. Today, he’d made a month’s salary before breakfast.

  He opened the truck door and slipped his mobile from his pocket. He dialed the number the man had given him.

  The phone on the other end rang once.

  Behind him, Seifu heard a ringing exactly matched with his mobile.

  He twisted around. His mobile rang again and he heard the response.

  Seifu placed his ear against the black Pelican case. The ringing was coming from inside the case.

  * * *

  On a hilltop overlooking the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam site, two men sat inside a black SUV. The man in the passenger seat watched the lower dam site through a pair of field glasses.

  Far below them, there was a bright flash, a mushroom of dirt and rock. A second later, the sound of the blast reached them, and their vehicle rocked gently.

  The driver fist-bumped his passenger, then thumbed his mobile down to a saved number.

  “Sir, it’s done.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Tysons Corner, Virginia

  It was still dark outside when Michael
Goodwin pulled into the parking lot of E-Tech Ltd., the new home of the Emerging Threats group.

  The TechWorld business park on the outskirts of Washington, DC, looked like any other suburban collection of nondescript, three-and four-story office buildings surrounded by generous parking lots. The concrete-and-glass structures were not unattractive, but also not eye-catching. The gaze of any passerby would glide over them as just another boring business park.

  But a close observer might notice government license plates sprinkled among the cars. Not that unusual for northern Virginia. Perhaps a defense contractor, one might guess.

  The truly astute would begin to notice the sheer number of cameras in the area. They were located on the corner of every building and atop every one of the overhead lights in the parking areas; it was impossible to approach the TechWorld business park without being monitored. And finally, there was the cluster of antennas and other communications gear on top of some of these buildings.

  Even at this early hour, there were a sizable number of vehicles parked around the E-Tech building. Michael parked his new BMW 330i well away from the other cars and stepped into the early-morning humidity.

  When Michael pulled open the front door of E-Tech, he entered a hundred-square-foot enclosed box of bulletproof glass. This was one of two entrances to this secure building: the front door and an underground loading dock. Both were guarded by independent teams of two security professionals, armed, willing, and able to use deadly force should the need arise.

  He faced the camera over the front door for a facial-recognition scan. ID cards were not used here. Your biometrics were your security card in this facility.

  He heard the snap of a magnetic lock and the doors parted.

  “Good morning,” Michael called to the young woman dressed in a dark blue business suit sitting behind a reception desk. Her eyes followed him to the heavy door leading to the offices. She buzzed him in as soon as his hand touched the door handle. In addition to the Glock nine-millimeter in her holster, the receptionist had the ability to lock down the entire building with the touch of a button. If the desk agent was incapacitated, her two compatriots located in the security office behind the wall mural of the foyer would take over.