The Pandora Deception--A Novel

by David Bruns

  Rocky could feel his nervous energy building in anticipation of the raid. He could hear the two guys in the backseat checking their weapons again. The Uzi submachine guns harnessed to their chests, the handguns. There was a zwick sound as one of the guys slipped out his blade and then reseated it into the sheath.

  This raid was different. For months, Kasim had emphasized covert action. Nasri and Rocky had bribed the food truck guy to take a bomb into the Ethiopian dam work site. Another time, they impersonated a road crew and set IEDs on the highway at Ad-Damazin.

  But tonight was different. They were there to make a show.

  Those were Kasim’s words: Make a great show. He finished off with that deep rolling belly laugh of his.

  Nasri took a curve in the road at high speed and nodded to the windshield. “That’s it,” he said.

  Rocky craned his neck to get a look. The destination was a concrete block structure set in the middle of the lake, like an island. A bridge connected the island and the mainland.

  According to Nasri, the building pumped water from Lake Nasser into a canal where it flowed a hundred miles into the desert. The Egyptians were trying to build a new Nile River Valley. Sounded like bullshit to Rocky.

  There was a guardhouse with a steel bar that blocked the road. Two guards, according to the mission brief.

  It was nearly three in the morning, the perfect time for a raid. A man in a blue uniform appeared in the glass door of the guardhouse. He rubbed his face like they’d woken him up.

  Nasri started to slow down, then hit the accelerator and the SUV surged forward. The steel bar twanged back like a paper clip.

  Rocky twisted in his seat. The second SUV had stopped at the guardhouse to finish the job. He counted two sparks of handgun fire, then two more.

  The pumping station building was huge, at least thirty meters high, and washed in harsh floodlights that showed the imperfections in the concrete as rough shadows.

  Nasri took the quarter-mile-long bridge at speed, grinning. Rocky gripped the armrest. Dark water flashed beneath them.

  The bridge opened onto a wide courtyard in front of the pumping station. Nasri spun the wheel and skidded the SUV to a halt twenty meters from a pair of massive steel loading doors.

  All four of the vehicle occupants bailed out. Nasri and the two guys in the backseat moved to the lift gate. Rocky walked to the front of the SUV, flipping off the plastic end covers on an RPG-22 antitank rocket launcher as he moved. He extended the weapon with a snap and manually cocked it by raising the rear sight. He checked to make sure the backblast area was clear and shouldered the weapon. He sighted on the center of the doors that led into the pumping station.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  A tremendous whoosh, a gout of flame erupted behind him, and the rocket corkscrewed into the doors. The resulting explosion nearly knocked Rocky off his feet.

  When the smoke cleared, one of the blasted doors was on the ground, the other hung at a crazy angle.

  Nasri whooped as the second SUV roared past Rocky, driving straight into the blown-open doorway.

  Rocky dropped the spent RPG-22 and moved to the open lift gate of the SUV. He hoisted a rucksack loaded with explosives onto his shoulder and hustled after his team into the pumping station.

  The inside of the concrete building was open, like a stadium. A deafening whining noise filled the space. Enormous mechanical structures, each the size of a small house, were linked by a series of meter-wide pipes. The scale was such that it took Rocky a second to realize they were pumps.

  Over the din, Rocky could make out the pop-pop of small arms fire. That would be the second car taking out anyone in the control room.

  Nasri slapped him on the shoulder. “Stop gawking! This way.” He pointed to a set of double doors labeled POWER DISTRIBUTION and a red HIGH VOLTAGE sign.

  The four of them crashed through the door together. After the deafening hum of the pump room, the power distribution room was almost silent. The room was full of gray-painted steel cabinets, each as tall as a man, arranged in four rows.

  The team raced to their assigned places in the room. Two in the far corners, one in the center, and one by the door. Rocky dropped his rucksack and ripped open the zipper.

  Inside each rucksack was a demolition charge of ten C-4 blocks wired together and attached to a timer. A bright red lanyard was attached to a silver pin—the arming mechanism.

  “Everybody ready?” Nasri yelled. Even without the radio, Rocky could hear him in the quiet room.

  Three positive responses.

  “Arm your charges on my mark. Three, two, one, mark!”

  Rocky pulled the pin.

  They had ten minutes to get clear.

  Back in the noisy pump room, Nasri paused to gawk at the pumps.

  “Damn,” he said. “Those are big fuckers.”

  Rocky tugged on his arm. “C’mon, man, we’re on the clock.”

  Nasri did not budge. “Gimme the RPG.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give it to me—and get back.”

  Rocky handed him the spare weapon and jogged with him to the blasted exit doors. “What are you gonna do?”

  Nasri grinned. “Boss said put on a show.”

  He extended the RPG casing, cocked it, and aimed at the nearest pump.

  “Fire in the fucking hole.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, Africa

  The worst part was the waiting, Dre thought.

  After they hatched the plan to trace the Mahdi after his next attack, Don divided the team into six-hour rotating watch sections.

  For Dre, a day defined into six-hour segments felt strangely comforting, like she was back in a watch rotation on the Murphy. She and Janet took the evening watch and the morning watch, while Shira and Michael took the graveyard shift and the afternoon shift.

  On the evening watch of the sixth day, Don Riley burst through the door of their SCIF. “It’s happening,” he said. “Turn on Al Jazeera. There’s been another attack.”

  The news anchor on Al Jazeera was a trim, middle-aged man in a dove-gray jacket, matching tie, and carefully coiffed hair. He stared at the camera and said in a modulated English accent, “There has been an attack near Toshka in southern Egypt, on the border with Sudan. Initial reports are that upwards of two dozen people have been killed, and the Sheikh Zayed Canal system required to irrigate the new desert city has been heavily damaged.”

  Janet was already checking out unclassified internet news sites as well as the classified networks. Already mobile-phone video clips were showing up of smoke pouring out of a large concrete building set in the middle of a body of water.

  They switched back to Al Jazeera, which now had a guest on to discuss the economics of the new desert city and the impact of the bombing on the region.

  The expert was a professor from Cairo University who spoke in very precise English. “The Sheikh Zayed Canal complex is a system of pumping stations, locks, and canals that deliver water from Lake Nasser to an ever-expanding Egyptian domestic agricultural sector,” he said. The screen changed to show a close-up of the region. “The Toshka Lakes shown on this map represent what the Egyptian government likes to call a ‘new desert city.’ Using water from the Nile, we have transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of desert into productive farmland. Literally millions of people rely on the Toshka project for their daily sustenance. This is not an attack on infrastructure. This is an attack on the people of Egypt.”

  “But what about the possibility that this act was done in retaliation for some of the attacks on upstream dam projects in the Nile River basin?” the announcer asked.

  “This attack is the work of those who want to control the Nile River,” the professor said emphatically. “Our neighbors to the south. Sudan and Ethiopia, to be exact.”

  “And what about the terrorist known as the Mahdi?” the news anchor pressed. “How does he fit into all this?”

  The professor’s care
ful accent began to break down as he became more agitated. “He is a fraud. This so-called messiah who claims to want to unite Islam does nothing but tear us apart. The real perpetrators of this attack are those who seek to take the lifeblood of the Nile away from Egypt.”

  Don muted the television. “Any activity from the Mahdi website?” he asked.

  Dre shook her head. “Not yet. In prior attacks, it took hours before there was a claim.”

  Finally, Michael and Shira arrived together. Shira’s eyes flitted from Dre to Janet, and two spots of color formed high on her cheeks. Michael took his place at his workstation.

  “All right, people, let’s be ready,” Don said. “When this goes down, we’ll only have a few minutes and we need to make them count.”

  Time dragged on with no sign of activity from the Mahdi website. Don switched back on the TV sound.

  The tenor of the conversation had definitely shifted to a more aggressive tone. The Egyptian Defense Ministry released a statement saying that they would vigorously defend Egypt’s natural resources and issued mobilization orders to move troops south to the border with Sudan. There was an implicit rebuke of Sudan and Ethiopia in the statement, and both countries responded with angry denials of any wrongdoing.

  “He’s broadcasting,” Janet announced, her voice pitched with excitement.

  After the verbal fireworks on TV, the claim of responsibility by the Mahdi felt almost tame in comparison. The Mahdi began his broadcast with the same background music and the well-appointed sitting room.

  The atmosphere in the room went electric with anticipation. Dre called up the IP trace program.

  “Initiating the tracker program now,” she said, hitting the return key on her workstation.

  “Put it on the big board, please,” Don said.

  Dre threw her feed to the wall screen in the tactical operations center. A map of the world showed with a blinking dot on Iran. Their starting point was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s server.

  The blinking dot shifted to Geneva.

  “It’s taking too long,” Don said. “That was at least ten seconds.”

  “We don’t know how many hops he’ll make, Don,” Janet said, but her voice sounded worried. Normally, the Mahdi’s broadcasts only lasted about a minute and a half.

  Dre checked her screen. “The next hop is being resolved … looks like—”

  The blinking dot moved to Brazil.

  “We’ve burned more than forty-five seconds,” Don said.

  “The program is working as fast as it can, Don,” Janet said calmly.

  Vancouver, Canada.

  On the video, the blurred form of the Mahdi was wrapping up with his now-familiar “children of Islam” line.

  Tokyo, Japan.

  “Come on,” Don said under his breath. “Come on.”

  Cape Town, South Africa. The blinking light turned solid.

  “We’ve got him,” Dre said. “Shit, he’s gone to a satellite.”

  The background music on the video faded. The Mahdi’s broadcast ended on a black screen.

  “Well?” Don said.

  Dre pulled up the satellite data. It was a GEOStar-3, a common communications satellite that carried traffic for thousands of commercial customers.

  “Run down every bit of traffic on that satellite over the last hour,” Don said. “See if we can get any matches with anything we have in the database.”

  “Don, that’s not going to give us a location,” Janet said.

  Don cursed, a sharp biting sound that stilled the activity in the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Don said after a few minutes. “That’s that, I guess.”

  “I have an idea, Don,” Michael said. “I’ve been discussing it with Shira, and she thinks I should bring it up to the group.”

  Dre and Janet exchanged another glance. He was discussing it with Shira? Since when did Shira rate a discussion before the rest of his team?

  “Let’s hear it, Michael,” Don said.

  “What if all this is a smoke screen?” Michael said. “What if the Mahdi is just trying to control the news cycle by feeding us what we’re expecting to find?”

  “Are we really back to this fake terrorist theory again, Michael?” Don said. “If you’ve got something solid, then let’s hear it.”

  Michael shot a glance at Shira, who nodded. “Okay, we have the Ebola virus attack in Yemen. At virtually the same time, the Mahdi launches an attack on the Roseires Dam in Sudan. That’s only one instance, a coincidence, right?”

  Don nodded, but his expression was anything but neutral.

  Michael continued. “We had another incident in Yemen a few months ago.” He called up a file and threw it to the big screen. Dre scanned the document. A garbled mobile-phone call followed by a Saudi air strike.

  “The woman on the call described the bodies as ‘melting,’ and said the entire village was dead. What does that sound like to you?”

  Don’s features pinched into a frown. “Single-sourced intel. No backup. That’s weak stuff, Michael.”

  Michael touched his keyboard and split the screen. The first Mahdi attack had happened the same day.

  “The only difference between the first attack in Yemen and the second was the cease-fire that grounded all the Saudi warplanes. What if the plan had been to destroy the town of Melaba to hide the evidence?”

  “That means there would be a connection between the Saudis and the bioweapons test,” Janet said.

  “A very senior connection,” Shira added. “Someone who had the ability to call in an air strike on a target.”

  Janet jumped in. “Which brings us back to the Saudi bank transfer, which is linked—”

  Don held up his hands. “The last time we went down this rabbit hole, Michael, we ended up spending weeks poring through financial transactions instead of doing our day jobs.”

  “That idea netted us a good lead, Don,” Janet said, her tone sharp.

  Don clenched his hands into fists. His face was red. “If you want me to believe there’s a connection between the Mahdi and bioweapons attacks in Yemen and the Saudis, then we need a whole lot more to support that argument.” He stabbed a finger at Michael.

  “Two points make a straight line. If this Mahdi attack is a third point, can you fit the curve? If Michael’s theory is correct, then there’s already been another bioweapons attack. Correct?”

  Michael shot a nervous glance at Dre and Janet. “If I’m right, then yes.”

  Don pointed at Michael’s workstation. “Then go find it.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Project Deliverance, undisclosed location in Sudan

  For Rachel Jaeger, the state of Israel had given—and taken away—the best things in her life.

  If it were not for Mossad, she would never have met Levi. If it were not for Mossad, she would not have lost her young husband.

  It was hard to remember the exact contours of Levi’s face after all these years, but she never forgot the way he looked at her. The eyes of an angel, she used to say.

  No, that was wrong, too. It wasn’t how he looked at her, it was the way he made her feel.

  And now, she was feeling it again. From Jean-Pierre Manzul.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” JP said. “Isn’t that the expression?”

  “It is, and they’re not for sale.” Rachel buckled her seat belt in the Learjet and looked out the window at the packed-earth runway of the secret research site.

  “You’re angry with me.” A statement, not a question.

  Rachel continued her study of the desert landscape. The door of the jet slammed shut and the engines began to spin. JP darkened the windows until they were opaque black, forcing her attention back to him.

  “When do I get my phone and my weapon back?” she asked. Rachel didn’t care a whit about the weapon, but she hoped to hell the phone had been left on and was trackable.

  “We have security protocols at this site,” he said. “Everyone follows them. Even me.�
��

  “So, I can have them back now?”

  The engines on the jet roared and she felt the craft turning.

  “Soon,” JP said.

  “I feel naked without my phone and gun.”

  JP didn’t take the bait. “I don’t need protecting here.”

  “Why did you bring me here? Obviously, physical security is not an issue.”

  “You intrigue me, Zula Bekele.”

  “Who was the woman back in the garage?” Rachel asked. “The one in the hijab.”

  JP stared at her evenly. “She’s my lover. Does it matter?” He said it like a challenge, but he smiled as he said the words.

  She met his gaze. “Not to me.”

  When they landed in Khartoum, Rachel got her belongings back and powered up her phone to check the time. Two in the afternoon. They’d been in the air between four and five hours.

  The Mercedes limo was waiting for them. She inspected the vehicle and held the door for JP before she slipped into the front passenger seat. Rachel assumed the role of professional hawk, her eyes roving over the crowds, looking for someone who was watching too carefully, whose hands stayed out of sight.

  Throughout the hour-long drive to his apartment, she could feel the heat of JP’s gaze on her.

  She ignored him, hearing Noam’s gruff voice in her head. A rushed operation is a botched operation.

  “You’re smiling,” JP said.

  Rachel snapped a glance over her shoulder and met his eyes for a second. “I love my work.”

  The driver pulled to the curb outside JP’s apartment building. She exited the car, her eyes scanning the street. Rachel pulled his door open, her hand on the top of the doorframe.

  When JP stood, he put his hand on hers. “Have dinner with me tonight.” It was not a question.

  “Yes,” she answered without thinking.

  When Rachel got back to her own apartment, she checked the calculator app on her mobile phone. The register on the calculator read “22,” the code from Noam to check in. She sent a text to JP that she was going shopping.