CHAPTER 16

JAKE MAHEGAN

MAHEGAN HELD MISHA BY TUCKING HER UNDER ONE ARM. THEY stood waiting at the ferry dock. Seagulls flapped overhead. Fog rolled in from the ocean, providing a cool misty spray to their faces. The sun was burning through the fog as they stood atop the wooden pier. Mahegan noticed it was in need of a good stain job.

As the sun had risen, he and Misha had hurried into the small coastal town of Southport. He had considered calling Casey and asking her to meet them, but had changed his mind when he considered the capabilities of this invading force. His guess was that they were Iranian, based upon the Farsi he’d overheard and their appearance. These men were hurting people and had much more danger in store. After fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last decade, he felt angry that he was now fighting on the American five-yard line, not theirs. It was a tough reversal of fortune for him to accept.

The enemy commander would be looking for Misha, and perhaps for him, but he wasn’t sure if they had a good fix on who he was or what he looked like. What he did know was if they were capable of jamming cell phone towers and launching remote vehicles, they had to have a considerable cybersecurity contingent. With that, they could monitor everything, including ferry stations. He didn’t want Casey to be the only SUV between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. to traverse the bridge from Wilmington to Southport and back. Surely they would be monitoring the choke points at the bridge.

From his burner cell phone, he texted her. Meet at Civil War Park.

After a couple of minutes, she replied, Roger.

It was Saturday morning, and the first ferry was at 7:00 a.m. They had fifteen minutes to wait. His guess was that it was a thirty-minute ride, give or take a few minutes. There was a line forming. Lines weren’t his friend, so they stayed offset, near a small equipment shed about fifty yards from the ferry pier.

“Looking for something?” a man dressed in khakis asked Mahegan.

Misha tightened her grip on his leg. He got the impression that she didn’t speak much, but that her mind processed some types of information as well or better than any adult.

“Captain Gorham. I’m the skipper,” the man said, introducing himself.

“Jake,” he said. “This is my daughter, and we’re just trying to get over to Fort Fisher.”

The captain eyed him warily, like the wizened salty dog that he seemed to be. He had a baseball hat layered with salt stains that nearly blotted out the words NC Ferry System.

“We’ll get you there. Push off sharp at seven. Boarding now.”

“Have you always had this route?” Mahegan asked.

“Used to do Hatteras to Ocracoke, but they needed some help down here, and I volunteered for a change of scenery.”

“From Frisco myself,” Mahegan offered.

“No kidding? Marine?” The skipper eyed his fresh haircut from Casey.

“Former Army.”

The skipper paused. “The way that little lady is clinging to your leg, I’d say she’s scared and you’re scared for her, though you don’t look like you get scared of much.”

“We’ve had a rough night, skipper. Any way to slide onto this thing and avoid the cameras?”

Mahegan could tell the man was gauging what to say. His weathered hand was rubbing what looked like three-day-old gray stubble.

“Ain’t running from the law, are you?”

“Just the opposite,” he said. “I need to get this young lady back to her mother, and our ride is waiting at Fort Fisher. We think someone has breached the cameras and is watching every portal.”

“Anything to do with what’s happening at these ports?”

“Might be everything to do with that.”

“Looks like y’all have had a long night. Give me a few minutes and I’ll send someone to come get y’all.”

They had waited about ten minutes when a jean-clad young man approached from the back of the ferry vessel and said, “Follow me.”

They walked right up the back of the ferry, boarded with the rest of the passengers, and pushed off directly at 7:00 a.m. About halfway across the Cape Fear River, the skipper came off the bridge and whispered, “Sometimes these damn cameras don’t work at all. State government. Go figure.”

When they docked, he saw Casey’s SUV and could feel the skipper watching him, confirming his story. Misha stayed close to him, and he placed her in the backseat of the SUV. He slipped in next to her, and she lay down, placed her head on his thigh as she stared between the seats at Casey.

“Thanks,” he said to Casey, who was dressed in her scrubs.

“You can fill me in later,” she said.

As they pulled out of the Fort Fisher Ferry parking area, he noticed the old Civil War redoubt and welcome center. Here at the mouth of the Cape Fear River during the Civil War, the Confederates defended against a Union Army pincer attack upriver to Wilmington. He had the curious notion that the area was more protected then than it was today. Other than a Coast Guard check at the offshore buoy, inbound ships had few deterrents to keep them from penetrating the nation’s heartland.

While he wasn’t certain if the containers he had seen in the Cefiro R & D compound had arrived by ship through the Port of Wilmington or by truck from some other area, his instincts told him that the ship they had flown over in the Cefiro helicopter yesterday might have delivered the assault team to American shores.

As Casey drove past the Fort Fisher Museum, he noticed the security cameras on top of the gateposts. Mostly a cultural site preserving the history of the fort, the beachfront location also featured the North Carolina Aquarium. With so much state property came the surveillance monitored by state building managers and county emergency responders.

And possibly the terrorists in the R & D facility.

Misha lay on the backseat, her glasses still strapped to her head, despite all the activity. For the first time he noticed that Misha’s hands were shaking. Not constantly, but enough for him to think that perhaps the blast at the school had given her a concussion, perhaps a traumatic brain injury. The military had learned volumes about brain injuries from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and still knew very little about their impact on human behavior. He couldn’t comprehend the impact of a concussion on an eleven-year-old autistic girl. Once they got to a stable, secure area, he would ask Casey to examine her.

He watched Misha stare at Casey, who was driving intently on Route 421 toward Kure Beach and Wilmington. Weekend tourists were stacked up as they came to the aquarium and Fort Fisher. He looked up and saw vehicles filled with families or couples as far as he could see. Each one was similar. Two parents in the front seats and two or three children in the backseats, or young couples taking in the sights all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum with older couples who were probably there to walk the grounds of the fort.

Two things registered with him as he was studying the inbound faces. First, there was an SUV parked to their right up ahead, with two military-aged males in the front seat. The skipper’s blackout on the cameras had probably triggered the commandos at the R & D facility, giving them thirty minutes to move a team into position.

The second thing was that he could partially see through Misha’s eyeglasses, given the angle at which she was leaning against him from her spot on the floor. He saw a hologram that looked like a car’s head-up display.

Before he could consider this further, he said to Casey, “Two men, two o’clock. Black SUV parked. I’m ducking.”

He lay down on the backseat parallel to Misha, who asked, “What’s happening?”

“Just resting,” he said.

“No. You said, ‘Two men.’”

“You’re right,” he said. “We just need to get you back to your mother safely.”

“Stay with you,” Misha said quickly. Her voice had a high pitch to it, and she began rocking severely.

He tightened his grip on her as Casey said, “They’re looking at me hard.”

“Don’t say anything,” he said.

Mahegan couldn’t see her face, because his was below the window and pressed into her seat-back cover. About a minute went by, and she said, “I think we’re good.”

He stayed down to be on the safe side. Misha gasped when Casey said, “I spoke too soon. They’ve pulled out and are closing in fast behind us.”

“Misha, get on the floor,” he said. She complied and tucked herself into a tight cannonball position behind the passenger front seat.

“Can you lower the rear window to this thing if I ask you to?” he asked Casey.

“Yes.”

“How far away are they?”

“About fifty yards, but speeding. Five seconds maybe.”

“Either they saw us get in the car at the ferry dock or the cameras picked us up.”

“They’re right on us now.”

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a black Suburban tailgating them. The passenger was leaning forward over the dashboard, trying to get an angle into the rear of the car to see if he could spot Mahegan or Misha. Mahegan saw that the man had an MP5 strapped across his chest, and he knew that these men were from the R & D facility.

“When I say, ‘Now,’ I want you to push the button to lower the back window, then slow down rapidly. Don’t slam on the brakes, but go from sixty to, say, forty in a few seconds.”

“Don’t do any crazy stuff, Jake. We’ve got a little girl with us.”

“That’s exactly why I’ve got to do something drastic.”

He studied the rearview mirror again and saw that the SUV was riding their tail like Dale Earnhardt Jr. did at Charlotte Motor Speedway before bumping and passing. Neither of the men had their hands on their weapons, but one was talking into a radio, most likely passing along the vehicle make and license plate. Not good.

“Now!” Mahegan said through gritted teeth.

He waited five seconds for the window to go completely down, grabbed his Sig Sauer pistol from its pouch, and rolled over the backseat into the rear hatch. He felt the braking, planted his feet against the back of the rear seats, and dove through the open back window like an Olympic swimmer at the starting blocks.

The chase vehicle slammed into the rear of Casey’s SUV, and Mahegan landed on the hood. He shot the passenger, then shot the driver before they could react.

As the black SUV began to slow down and veer into oncoming traffic, the windshield shattered. He reached around with his right arm and steered the vehicle back into the correct lane. He could hear honking behind the SUV as they slowed. He waved to Casey to keep going. He knew there were more where these guys had come from.

He steered the car to the shoulder as the SUV slowed to a stop. After sliding off the hood, he opened the driver’s door and pushed the dead driver into the middle opening between the two bucket seats. He checked that the passenger was dead, as well. He’d sent two double taps into the chest of each man. He normally would have gone for head shots, but he had been concerned about the angle of the glass and the penetrating capability of his hollow-point bullets.

But the hollow points had gotten the job done.

He looked at the dead guy in the passenger seat. The seat belt held his torso up, but his head hung low in death. He was dressed in a white cotton shirt, gray slacks, and a blue blazer. He had a thin black beard, an angular nose, and short, oily black hair. His lifeless eyes appeared black as they stared into the console.

He raced the SUV from the shoulder and maintained a fifty-foot distance from Casey’s vehicle. He was on the look-out for more of the SUVs, also aware that there could be some autonomous vehicles on the road. He was certain that this SUV had a GPS tracker and that some commander was monitoring his location from an operations center in the R & D location.

If a commander was moving his forces around to recapture Misha, he would concentrate his efforts at a choke point. Route 421 coming out of Fort Fisher was nothing but one big canalized piece of terrain, with beach and ocean to the right and beach houses to the left. He knew they were approaching Snow’s Cut, which was a part of the Intracoastal Waterway. They would have to traverse a bridge, which was a perfect ambush location, if the enemy had been able to reposition in time.

He sped ahead of Casey, motioning as he passed for her to ease off the speed, pointing at his eyes and then pointing up ahead, the universal sign for “I’m going to go check that out.”

About the time he could see the bridge, he noticed a sign for Carolina Beach State Park, which backed up to Snow’s Cut and the Cape Fear River. It had a single road through the middle and had been his starting point last night. His vehicle was presumably still there, if it had not been towed.

In the line of traffic coming at him, he saw a black SUV cross the bridge and then a red Cefiro sports car, just like De La Cruz’s car, pull onto the bridge and stop. He was about one hundred yards away and barreling toward the bridge when an explosion rocked the suspension of the Suburban and spit shrapnel into his face through the open gap that once held the windshield.

He slammed on the brakes in just enough time to turn into the access to Carolina Beach State Park. He could see Casey following him and saw Misha’s bespectacled head poking up between the seats. He wished Casey would tell her to stay on the floor.

Turning onto the road, he saw that the black Suburban had beat the red Cefiro car across the bridge. It made the turn to follow them, and he waved his arm for Casey to pass him. He wanted the vehicle he was driving in between Misha and the terrorists.

She passed him doing seventy miles an hour on the gravel road, dust kicking up behind her. In the sideview mirror, he could see the black SUV gaining, and he wondered briefly if they thought he was one of them or if they knew the vehicle had fallen into enemy hands. He used the dust to his advantage and yanked the earbud from the dead guy next to him. He heard men speaking Farsi, possibly trying to contact the dead men in his vehicle. He knew limited Farsi and barked a quick “Follow me” in his opponents’ native tongue. He saw the SUV speed up and then slow down, as if the driver was unsure what to do. Meanwhile, Casey was maybe doing eighty miles an hour, and he thought she was probably in sync with him.

He sped up to act as though he was chasing her, and when he was about ten yards from her SUV, he did a Rockford 180-degree turn so that he was facing the oncoming SUV. He leapt out of the SUV just before the oncoming Suburban slammed into his, went up on its front two wheels, and then shuddered back to the ground.

He saw that his air bag popped, but he wasn’t in the car to feel it, because he was running to the side of the SUV that had just slammed into the one he had been driving. He sent two bullets into the head of passenger, who was dazed and now dead.

The driver’s face was bloody from his impact with the air bag, but he was conscious and reaching for his MP5. The window had shattered when Mahegan shot the man’s partner, and he reached in and put two rounds into the man’s face.

He saw that Casey had turned the corner toward Snow’s Cut and was waiting for him. He spent about two minutes going through the pockets of the four men, two in each vehicle, and pulled the registrations from the cars.

Luckily, he found a duffel bag with their ammunition, so he dumped everything in that and then jogged to Casey’s SUV. It was awkward running in his wet suit and reef boots as he carried a bagful of weapons and smartphones.

“Did you see that? That’s the only bridge. We can’t get out of here,” Casey said.

“See it? I felt it. Drive to the waterway, and we’ll swim and then take a cab.”

“Swim?” she asked, looking at Misha.

“I’ll carry her. It’s not a problem. Let’s go before the cops are on this place.”

“What about my car?”

“Just park it in the parking lot, and we’ll walk over to the bank and walk in. Mine’s over there somewhere. Let’s go.”

He was getting impatient. In his operational mind-set, timelines and response times were second nature to him. He knew they had about three minutes before the first responders would be at the bridge and then the accident site. He didn’t mind leaving the two terrorist SUVs behind. He had already gotten good intel off their bodies and cars.

They walked toward the channel, found a covered area, and ducked into the tree line that fronted the water.

“Just ride my back like a pony,” Mahegan said to Misha.

“Scared,” she said.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. She nodded at him. Her blond hair was greasy and hung in loose tendrils across her face. Her blue dress was so dirty, it looked gray now. And for the first time he noticed that she was barefoot but didn’t seem to mind. She was a tough kid and was handling everything, so far. He placed Casey’s smartphone in the tight waterproof pouch that now also held his government phone and the burner.

He walked knee deep into the water and knelt down so that she could climb on his back. He felt her staring at him from the bank when Casey lifted her and placed her on his back.

“Just like a piggyback ride, Misha,” Casey said. “Hold on to this.”

He saw her place his long wet-suit zipper in her hand, which provided her the perfect rein. Casey then waded in and propelled herself through the water in her scrubs. He was certain she was none too happy with him. She had a job, which made him think of Promise and where all of this had started. How big was the enemy’s plan that they would terrorize an entire school to capture an eleven-year-old girl? Of course, it had to be the code she had written on those boards, but what was the end-game? Their target?

Based on what he had seen and heard, he knew now that he was dealing with Quds Force operatives. Iranian Special Forces. Mirza. They had fallen off the radar in the Middle East and now had reappeared here in the southeastern United States, as if by a magician’s trick.

And piecing everything together, he believed they were the vanguard for the recent invasion of the country.

They arrived at the far side, crawled up the bank, and walked through a neighborhood. Mahegan handed Casey her cell phone, and after a few clicks of the phone, she said, “Uber has a car five minutes out.”

They were a scary-looking bunch but could also pass as a family whose car had broken down, each with places to be. Though he had to admit it appeared strange that they were all soaked and dressed very differently.

When the SUV pulled up, the Indian man behind the wheel hesitated, but then he rolled down the window and said, “Hi. I’m Pateesh, your driver. So, we’re going to Hampton Inn, Landfall?”

“That’s right,” Mahegan answered.

Pateesh got them there in forty minutes, fighting traffic the entire way. Upon arrival at the hotel, Misha and Mahegan waited in the parking lot as Casey reserved them a suite on the fourth floor.

Once in the room, he asked Casey, “Can you check on Promise?” Then he sat down, exhausted.

She called, asked a few questions, hung up, and said, “No change.”

He nodded, then used his government phone to contact Patch. They texted over secure messaging because he didn’t want to call and have Casey or Misha hear his report. He recapped the night and day for Patch, whose simple response was “Damn.”

Mahegan asked him to make sure General Savage knew about the containers and the presence of the Quds Force on American soil. Patch typed back that Savage was monitoring their texts. Then Mahegan got a text from Savage that said, Can’t attack Cefiro. POTUS not authorize. Iran and Cuba deals too important. Wants eyes on only.

Mahegan was furious but ate his anger. They had a known terrorist presence on U.S. soil, and Savage had basically told him to stand down and watch the building, which was what “eyes on” meant.

The good thing, though, was that he didn’t give two rats asses about what the president or Savage said. He respected the offices but wasn’t going to stand by and let terrorists get a stable foothold.

Mahegan thought about the number of men he had seen at the Cefiro compound; he imagined their force was between thirty and forty strong. Five containers, eight per container, plus equipment. Seemed reasonable.

If they had started with forty, they were down four from the car chases and another four or five from the shoot-out in the tunnel. He wasn’t sure what their mission was, but he knew that when forces like the Quds lost mission-essential men, they lost significant capability. Like U.S. Special Forces teams, they were one deep. One medic, one communications guy, and so on. He felt good about the damage he had inflicted and about getting Misha back.

He stared out of the window, then looked at Misha. “Misha, can I see those glasses?”