Asteroid Destruction

by Bobby Akart

  Then a large black leather cowboy boot stomped on his left hand, causing him to recoil his arm.

  “You are ready to die, DEA gringo, yes? You play with Juan like two lovers. You will not play with me!”

  The well-dressed man seemed unfazed by the closeness of the meteorite that had just sailed by them. He ordered the guard, Juan, to get off the floor, and the man quickly scurried out. Then he turned to Gunner and spat on him. As he laughed, Gunner could see a single gold tooth glistening in his mouth.

  The man abruptly turned and shouted at the women as he walked down the hallway. The clanking sound of metallic locks indicated they were left alone again.

  He leaned back against the wall and rubbed the wounds created by the cattle prods. He tried to analyze everything that was happening to him, but the one thing that puzzled him most was the young boy.

  Then a young-sounding woman spoke to Gunner. “El niño es sordo y mudo.”

  “Wait, what? What does that mean?”

  Several of the women shushed the young girl who spoke to Gunner.

  “Por favor, tell me.”

  Then like a chorus of cicadas in the forest, they all joined in.

  “Shush! Tranquilo.”

  Chapter 18

  Defense Threat Reduction Agency

  Fort Belvoir, Virginia

  Special Agent Theodora Cuccinelli possessed an extraordinary analytical mind that was coupled with an innate empathy for those in peril. Had she obtained a psychology degree, she could’ve easily become one of the FBI’s top profilers. However, that was not her passion. She grew up in a time when every aspect of life revolved around the use of computers.

  She was recruited by the bureau during her junior year at Cornell University in upstate New York. The Ivy League school might not have the notoriety of its counterparts—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—but it was considered one of the top ten universities in the nation for its computer sciences program.

  While in college, she’d created a paper banner that hung in her dorm room. It read Data is My Friend. Early on, she thought she might be destined for any number of computer-related careers, from multimedia programming to managing information systems to the field in the highest demand—cyber-security consulting.

  The nature of war had shifted in the world from bombs and bullets to keystrokes and pen testing, the practice of looking for security vulnerabilities in a software or computer network in order to exploit them.

  For a while, much to Cuccinelli’s regret, she participated in challenges with her fellow students. Rumors were rampant that a professor at MIT had recruited some of his top graduate students to profit off their capabilities. Known around the dark web as the Zero Day Gamers, this group would routinely perform ransomware attacks on businesses and small municipal governments.

  These hackers spent their free time conducting penetration tests of the servers of their targets until they were able to breach the system. Once in, they’d insert malware that could only be removed by them, but for a fee, of course. If the owners of the network refused to pay, their data would be lost and the hardware would be ruined. It was less expensive to pay the data kidnappers, so most did.

  As the news of the Zero Day Gamers’ exploits spread around college campuses, many students with advanced computer skills tried their hand at hacking for fun. It became a game, one where the goals and challenges were continuously made more difficult.

  Teddy Cuccinelli had been drawn into the game. She meant no harm and certainly had no intention of inserting ransomware for profit. She, like so many brilliant young minds, was bored with her studies and had very little social life except with her fellow computer nerds.

  So she joined in the fun and was good at it. There wasn’t a private enterprise system that she couldn’t breach. As her talents grew and her exploits became known, she began to draw the attention of the FBI Cyber Division.

  She’d single-handedly breached the server network of Connecticut Electric, the state’s largest utility. As was always the case, she spent a few hours one evening, solely out of curiosity, navigating through the company servers, viewing their personnel files and financial data.

  To her, it was no big deal and just another opportunity to mark a notch on the wall of successful hacks.

  To Connecticut Electric, and the FBI Cyber Division, who’d been closely monitoring their computer network due to a series of intrusion attempts in recent months, it was a big deal.

  The next day, Cuccinelli had walked out of Collegetown Bagels with breakfast and began the short stroll down College Avenue to class when several black sedans with darkened windows descended upon her. Within seconds, she was thrown against the trunk of the car, handcuffed, and her bagels rolled down the sidewalk while she was whisked away.

  A moment of transgression that might’ve easily ruined her life turned out to be an opportunity of a lifetime. Over the next several days, the FBI interrogation gradually turned into an interview. The lead investigators with the Cyber Division were so impressed with Cuccinelli, that they reached out to their recruiters to travel to the Albany office to talk with her.

  Her career path took a drastic turn from playful hacker to FBI special agent dealing with cyber warfare. She was no longer Teddy Cuccinelli, computer nerd. She’d become—the Jackal.

  While the FBI utilized the Jackal for her computer talents, they overlooked her empathetic side. A side that could’ve assisted the profilers who searched out the nation’s serial killers and internet predators who used social media to attract their victims. It was the Jackal’s empathy that kept her sitting at her desk day and night in search of Gunner Fox.

  She’d developed feelings for Gunner, but not in a romantic way. She’d studied his psychological profile and background. What she saw was a unique love story between an American warrior and his idealistic wife, one that ended tragically as she pursued her dream of space travel.

  She understood Gunner’s angst, and after meeting him in person, she made a promise that he knew nothing about. Heather might be watching over him from Heaven. And Cam might be by his side on their missions together. But she would watch his back from the omnipresent cyber world, lending an assist whenever she could.

  So she’d sat at her desk, staying vigilant. She studied camera footage from around North America, straining her eyes to differentiate meteorites from spaceships.

  When NASA, in particular Houston’s mission control, was less than cooperative in turning over their data on the mission, she hacked into their computers to have a look for herself. She studied the Starhopper’s last known coordinates. She calculated time, speed, and distance. She created a working hypothesis of the best-case scenario because the worst-case scenario was too painful to consider.

  She also took into account something of which she was certain. Despite Major Gunner Fox’s outward demeanor and tendency to take risks, he wasn’t suicidal. He didn’t want to die. He was a survivor and would consider it a failure to succumb to death because of his inner sadness. It was for that reason that she never left her desk.

  Based on her calculations, the Jackal focused her efforts on a thousand-mile radius from the heart of the Caribbean Sea. She studied the highly classified data obtained from NASA regarding the destruction of satellites in low-Earth orbit. America’s adversaries relished the opportunity to take advantage of its weaknesses, she surmised, and the loss of reconnaissance and military hardware in space would embolden them.

  She plugged in her findings on the damage to the satellites and studied it in relation to the intercept point of IM86. If her calculations were correct, and assuming the Starhopper was able to navigate through the debris field, she determined that the Caribbean Sea, or thereabouts, would be the safest possible place to return to Earth.

  To be sure, this conclusion took nearly twenty hours of nonstop research and calculations by the Jackal. It took Artie, the Starhopper’s onboard artificial intelligence, less than two seconds to reach the same recommendation. The Jackal w
as far from being considered a slow learner. It was just that her brain wasn’t as big as Artie’s.

  Nonetheless, she was on the right track, and with each passing hour, by process of elimination, she was able to focus her efforts on the most likely landing area for the Starhopper—somewhere between Nicaragua and the Amazon Jungle in Brazil.

  Her eyes were growing weary and she’d just popped open her last can of Red Bull when Ghost entered her office.

  “Have you slept?”

  “No, sir. There’ll be time for that later. I’ve got a general area stretching from Central America to the northern parts of South America. It took a while to make this determination, thanks to the stonewalling I got from NASA.”

  Ghost sat in the chair across from the Jackal and sipped his coffee. He leaned forward with a solemn look on his face.

  She immediately picked up on his demeanor. “Sir, what is it?”

  “I’ve just been told that Mark Foster, the Mission Control director, committed suicide sometime during the night. They said he’d been distraught over the whereabouts of the Starhopper and the state of affairs in general. He decided to opt out.”

  The Jackal furrowed her brow as a look of disbelief came over her face. “Sir, I had a phone conversation with him yesterday morning. Granted, it was somewhat frenzied, as everyone was searching for the spacecraft, but I wouldn’t describe his mental state as distraught. To me, based upon our phone conversation anyway, I’d say he was determined, if anything.”

  Ghost shrugged. “Well, either way, the man is dead, and now Houston is continuing their search without him.”

  The Jackal slumped back in her chair and looked to the wall where she’d outlined all the people involved in the death of Heather Fox. The dotted lines connected to one central figure, Colonel Maxwell Robinson, but some led to the photograph of Director Foster. Her focus on the wall caught Ghost’s attention, who began to study it as well.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I mean, I want to remain focused on finding the Starhopper and Major Fox. But, well, something about this suicide raises alarm bells for me. Foster was connected to Mrs. Fox’s death, and he was also connected to the Russian professor although he wasn’t implicated in any wrongdoing. Moreover, he had a direct relationship to Colonel Robinson.”

  “Are you wearing your FBI hat at the moment?” asked Ghost.

  “Sir, I never really take it off. I’m just saying that if my theory about Colonel Robinson’s involvement in the cover-up of Heather Fox’s death is correct, he’d stand to benefit by eliminating the only other American who was privy to what really happened—Mark Foster.”

  “But there’s still someone who needs answers …” Ghost said as his voice trailed off. A wave of sadness came over him as he considered Gunner’s likely demise.

  “He’s still alive, sir. I know it. And when he finds out what Maxwell Robinson has kept hidden from him for all these years, he’ll have a new sense of purpose, one that doesn’t bode well for the colonel.”

  Chapter 19

  Unknown Jungle Compound

  South America

  Gunner tried several times to converse with the women who were being held in the jail cells all around him, to no avail. Every attempt was greeted with a swift rebuke—shhhh. They were frightened, fearful of the same kind of treatment that he was receiving, and worse. He honored their wishes and left them alone. After a brief period of silence, except for the occasional sonic boom of a meteorite exploding in the region, Gunner drifted off to sleep.

  He was awakened, not by an explosion or his sadistic captors, but by a feeling. A presence.

  Gunner woke up with a jolt of sudden energy and retreated to the back corner of his cell, crashing his back into the metal bucket designated for his human waste. His eyes grew wide in an attempt to focus on the small figure who sat in front of the bars.

  As he gathered his wits, he realized that the young boy had returned, and he was sitting with his legs crossed in front of him on the dirt floor. Yet again, an unemotional blank stare was on his face as he studied Gunner.

  “Hey, kid,” whispered Gunner, recalling that the boy had been struck by the guard. “Are you okay?”

  The boy just stared at him. What’s with this kid?

  The young boy had changed into a lightweight hooded sweatshirt bearing a bright red soccer ball on the front with the insignia Federacion Colombiana de Futbol. Gunner leaned forward to get a better look.

  “Colombia? Soccer? Is this Colombia?”

  Still nothing.

  Gunner inched forward and sat cross-legged in an effort to mimic the boy’s posture, doing anything he could to make a connection with the kid.

  The boy remained stoic for a moment and then pulled one of his hands out of the sweatshirt pocket sewn underneath the soccer logo.

  He began to draw in the dirt with his index finger. He created a large circle and then added ears, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He stopped and sadly looked at Gunner’s face, then broke eye contact and stared down at the face.

  “A face? Is that your face?” asked Gunner, puzzled by what the boy was doing. And then, in an instant, he understood as the boy drew in the dirt again.

  He scrubbed the dirt to remove the ears and mouth from the face drawing. He looked up to Gunner as a few tears streamed down his dust-covered cheek, leaving streaks of moisture. He pointed his fingers to his ears and mouth and slowly shook his head side to side.

  Gunner closed his eyes and sighed. The boy was deaf and couldn’t speak.

  El niño es sordo y mudo.

  Now he understood what the woman had been saying earlier. The young boy couldn’t hear or speak, which explained why his interaction with Gunner was so strange.

  Gunner desperately wanted to reach out to hug the child. Let him know that it was okay. That he wasn’t defective. That he was simply unique.

  But the bars separated them, as did their relationship. Gunner was the prisoner of the boy’s family members, who treated him poorly from what Gunner had witnessed. In a way, the kid was a prisoner as well. He was imprisoned by silence and the inability to vocalize his feelings or thoughts. And he was imprisoned by being an outcast, a simple child who could be abused because he was different.

  Gunner took a deep breath, sat a little taller, and smiled. He didn’t know sign language other than how to ask someone if they signed.

  He formed both hands into the form of the number “1” using his index fingers. Then he drew a couple of large circles in the air with the tip of each finger. He moved them up, back, forward, and down, alternating the circular movement as if he were pedaling a bicycle with his fingers. He studied the boy for a reaction.

  The boy seemed to understand what Gunner was attempting to do, but his face became sullen and he shook his head side to side.

  “I guess your scumball parents didn’t bother to learn sign language, much less teach it to you. They are real pieces of work to let you wander around this jungle without the ability to hear or call out for help.”

  The boy tilted his head, trying to understand what Gunner was saying. It was possible he was learning to read lips, but the language barrier would hinder that process.

  Gunner got the boy’s attention and patted his chest. Then he began to draw in the dirt. He had to show the boy that he was friendly, so he drew his own face and put an oversized smile on it.

  The boy returned the smile and drew a smile on his face-drawing also.

  Gunner tapped his heart and then pointed to the boy, followed by a thumbs-up.

  The kid emulated the gesture.

  Yes! Progress!

  Gunner took a chance, hoping to gain the confidence of the boy. He patted his chest again, and next to his face, he drew a crude rendering of a rocket ship flying toward a crescent moon. He looked at the boy, hoping for a reaction.

  The boy’s eyes grew wide and he pointed toward the outside of the building. He pointed at Gunner and made a motion with his ha
nds clasped together as if they were flying toward the sky.

  “Yes! Yes! That’s me. That’s my rocket ship!”

  Gunner was a little too exuberant in his reaction, and a chorus of shushes emanated from the other cells.

  “Sorry!” he quickly apologized and turned his attention back to the boy.

  He erased his dirt-floor chalkboard with the palm of his hand and began to make another drawing. He created an image of his duffle bag with the handles on top. Then he wrote in oversized letters F-O-X.

  “Fox,” he said aloud. “My nombre is Fox.”

  The boy was puzzled, but one of the women overheard the conversation.

  “Zorro. Su nombre es Zorro.” Fox translates to zorro in Spanish.

  “Gracias,” said Gunner, although he wished she hadn’t overheard him say that. He immediately speculated the ransom that would be demanded by his captors just doubled. Not that a demand for ransom would be a bad thing.

  Go ahead, assholes, call Washington to demand money. You think the hellfire brought on your heads by the asteroid is bad, wait’ll you get a load of Cam and Bear.

  Gunner managed a smile and continued to communicate with the boy. He drew a picture of his satellite phone and pointed from the duffle bag to the phone to him. He touched the drawing of the phone again and then positioned his thumb and index finger to his mouth and ear. He smiled and nodded at the boy, feeling hopeful.

  The boy scowled and then looked to his left down the hallway that led to the last cell where Gunner was held. Apparently, the guard on duty had abandoned his post, leaving the two to have this extended conversation.

  He looked back to Gunner and slowly reached into his sweatshirt pocket. When he pulled out the satellite phone, Gunner’s heart leapt out of his chest. His eyes grew wide and he lurched forward to reach through the cell door bars.