Threat Zero Page 24

  Saving the world from the burgeoning Iranian nuclear threat would be her legacy.

  But she had to defeat Smart first before he got any more traction.

  Ravenswood walked up from the basement into the backyard.

  “Good to go,” he said. He was wearing dark brown cargo pants and an outer tactical vest with full ammunition pouches over a black stretch shirt that hugged his body. He flipped his shades down over his eyes and adjusted the M4 carbine that hung from a three-point sling looped into a snap hook on his vest.

  “She still alive?”

  Ravenswood nodded, obviously feeling the rush of wearing his equipment and torturing a captive.

  “That was a good intercept you provided me,” Ravenswood said. “Curious where you’re getting your info.”

  “Like I said, everything’s compartmentalized. You of all people should know that. Need-to-know basis,” she said.

  “I jump through my ass to get on your helicopter and rig a SPIE system while someone hacked into the FBI air operations and gave a stand down to their helicopter. As always, I’m half impressed and half pissed off.”

  “That’s my definition of winning,” Brookes said.

  “Ugh, did you really have to say that?”

  “It’s about time we started winning, Chip. So let’s finish this up. She give you anything useful?”

  “Said MS-13 banger jumped on the rope and they cut away into the Potomac somewhere near Quantico. The Reaper is pissed about Samuelson and she is, of course, upset about her brother.”

  “Stone and Weathers?”

  “They’re tracking him by following Bronson.”

  “Maximus Anon.”

  “Bronson?”

  “Yes. He’s Maximus Anon. Been leaking like a garden hose through Twitter.”

  “Mostly an echo chamber. No one is taking him seriously.”

  “He’s not naming you in a conspiracy, Chip.”

  “Might as well be. Your fortunes are my fortunes. I want the power trip as much as you do,” he said.

  She nodded then changed the topic. “I’d like to see her. Is she blindfolded?”

  “Yes. She has no idea where she is.”

  Ravenswood led them into her expansive basement. The estate was built upon a foundation that had once been a plantation home. Accordingly, it had the necessary shackles and chains to bind slaves.

  Valerie Hinojosa was hanging almost Christlike in the dungeon. Her hands were hanging limply from black iron wrist cuffs. Her ankles were bound in a similar, but wider, cuff. Her head was drooped with her chin nearly on her chest. Ravenswood had stripped her down to her bra and panties. Red welts had formed along her side where he had whipped her. A black kerchief was tight across her eyes and Bose noise-canceling headphones covered her ears.

  “Did you … do anything?” Brookes asked in a whisper.

  Ravenswood smirked. “I’d like to, but not in the mood to leave behind any DNA.”

  “You think she’s sufficient bait for this Reaper guy?”

  “Could be. We’ll see.”

  “We need to do better than see. He’s the only thing keeping her alive. Once we’ve got her, Bronson, and the Reaper, we’ll be in the clear. Jessup can handle the rest.”

  Ravenswood shot her a sharp glance.

  “Who’s Jessup?”

  “My hole card. Let’s get out of here. Gives me the creeps.”

  They ascended the steps and instead of heading onto the deck, took the entryway to the kitchen, the path the slaves used to take. Sitting at the dining room table, Brookes said, “Have a seat.”

  Above them was a crystal chandelier and layered trey ceiling with ornate dentil molding reminiscent of the castle-like façade of the compound.

  “Let’s go over the plan,” she said. “I want no mistakes.”

  Ravenswood nodded and began talking.

  CHAPTER 20

  Harwood nudged Bronson’s boat into the sand seventy miles north of the Brookes compound. He had decided to head south, toward Reedville and the compound, as opposed to north toward the Wharf and Ravenswood, as Bronson had suggested. Harwood’s guess was that if Brookes was having a face-to-face meeting at her remote estate, Ravenswood would be there and most likely running security with Team Valid: Stone and Weathers.

  He secured his rucksack, which he had inspected and repacked, and tied off the bowline to a weathered tree trunk. The Potomac River was murky with silt as it gathered near the Chesapeake Bay.

  The map showed a cell tower nearby. Knowing that he didn’t have much time, if any, to evade the ghosts in the wires that were looking for him, he used the Bronson-provided burner cell phone to call Monisha’s number by memory.

  “Who’s this?”

  Monisha. Always showing the love.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Reaper!”

  “Keep it down, Monisha. I don’t have much time and I don’t want anyone to know where I am.”

  After a pause, she said, “Okay.”

  “There’s something very important on that flash drive I need you to find for me,” Harwood said.

  “Reaper, I gave it to Sergeant Major like you told me. Besides, I’ve looked at everything on that. There’s nothing more than what I sent you,” Monisha said.

  “If I know you, you downloaded it onto your hard drive,” he said.

  The line went silent.

  “So that’s a yes. Before you delete that information, which you will do, tell me if you see anywhere in the text where Sammie says, ‘Send it’?”

  During the silence, he could visualize her reading. She was a bright child and he had high hopes for her. With every day she seemed to grow and mature. He was making it up as he went, never before having been a guardian or parent. But he knew the power of love or, conversely, the pain of its absence.

  “Yeah, right here. Doesn’t really make sense. He just finishes what he’s saying with ‘send it,’ then adds his name beneath it.”

  “Move the cursor over ‘send it.’”

  After a second, “Oh my God. It’s a hyperlink. Usually they’re blue or something.”

  “Click on it,” he directed. “Hurry.”

  She was silent for a long time, presumably as she read.

  “This is some wild shit,” Monisha said.

  He didn’t correct her profanity. No time to waste.

  “Is it financial transactions?”

  “More than that. It shows bank transfers to Perza in Iran and Sultan in Crimea, but also has something called HUMINT, SIGINT, and ELINT.” Each time she spelled the acronyms for human intelligence, signals intelligence, and electronic intelligence.

  “Okay, and who is doing the transactions? I need to confirm that what I’m about to do is the right thing.”

  Another moment of silence before she said, “There’s only names on the receiving end. There’s a company account it looks like. Something called Acme, Incorporated. Like the roadrunner.” She cackled a bit, but got serious again. “Looks like billions with a B going to Perza and Sultan and every time there’s a transaction a little bit goes to Acme.”

  “A little bit every time adds up to a lot when you’re talking billions,” Harwood said.

  “O.M.G.,” Monisha said. She had a flair for the dramatic, but still, Harwood perked up.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a basic step-by-step guide for how to build a nuclear bomb in here.”

  “Like a diagram?” Harwood asked.

  “Yes. A picture with instructions.”

  “So they have a plan and they have the money,” Harwood said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “You there?” he said.

  “Yeah. This is a lot of money, Reaper. People where I come from kill for a hundred dollars. There’s a lot of killing going on over this money.”

  “I know. And because of that, you need to delete all of that information, Monisha. Seriously. They have someone who can track that information and find you.”

/>   “There’s one more thing here. I didn’t tell you about it before, but it’s a photocopy of a letter,” Monisha said.

  “Read it to me quickly,” Harwood said.

  “‘Dear Melinda, I’m sorry that our marriage didn’t quite work out as planned. I don’t know what the best thing to do here is, but I can’t imagine life without Sammie and Valerie. The Solomon approach would be for each of us to raise one, but they are brother and sister, and that would be cruel to the children. As long as you don’t move and allow me unlimited visitation, I will agree for you to have custody with me as the joint custodian. I will forever love you, William.’”

  “But Sammie said he lived with his dad?” Harwood said.

  “Maybe he just left. Felt sorry for him. At least he had one,” Monisha quipped.

  “What am I? Chopped liver?”

  “Heck, I don’t know if you’re coming back tomorrow, Reaper,” she said.

  That was more like it. He smiled.

  “But the point is that it confirms Valerie Hinojosa is his sister,” Harwood said.

  “Says Valerie. Nothing about Hinojosa,” Monisha said. She was good at focusing on the simple facts before her.

  “Good point. See if you can find a Valerie Samuelson or Hinojosa that is connected to Sammie. Meanwhile, I’ve got some business to take care of.”

  She chuckled. “You make it sound like you’re in a business suit getting ready to go into an office building when you’re probably in the woods somewhere looking down your rifle scope.”

  Not far off, he thought.

  “Okay, now delete that stuff, Monisha.”

  There was clicking over the airwaves, then Monisha said, “I trust you, Reaper. I just double deleted it. Into the trash bin and then emptied the trash bin.”

  “Okay, good. I know what I need to know, I think. Enough to go on. I’ll see you soon, Monisha.”

  “K, Reaper.” She paused. “I miss you,” she said. Harwood wasn’t expecting that. They dealt with those kinds of emotions with shallow jokes or gallows humor, cutting at one another. The crasser the joke, the deeper the love. He did miss her, though, and there was no harm in letting his adoptive daughter know that she was worthy of affection.

  “I miss you, too, Monisha. Think good thoughts,” he said. Hanging up the phone, he moved to a perch that overlooked the boat from about fifty yards away. It was a flat area with twenty- to thirty-foot-tall trees and some boulders, one of which was like a small table. He removed his rucksack and retrieved the paper map that Bronson had given him. Studying the terrain around Brookes’s compound, Harwood identified three obvious sniper locations that Stone and Weathers would most likely be lying in wait. The issue was that there were two of them and three locations. He numbered them one through three as he used to do in combat, with number one being the best hide site and three being the least desirable.

  Countersniper operations necessarily involved stalking, but he was actually countering the countersniper operation. He anticipated that Stone and Weathers would be in hide sites within one hundred meters of the top two sniper locations. The map showed some decent depressions and ridges they could hide behind to eventually ambush him.

  Those locations would be his targets. He numbered the potential ambush locations around each of the sniper hides. He assumed they would have all of the latest kit, including night-vision goggles, and briefly debated whether it was better to strike now when they would least be expecting him, but decided the cover of darkness was always an advantage to the attacker.

  He had no particular feeling toward Hinojosa. She was professional and did her job well. But what really counted to Harwood was what was on that flash drive. While Hinojosa was most likely Samuelson’s sister, the real motivation here was stopping the espionage that was enabling Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

  He waited until darkness, passing the time by eating combat rations and drinking two bottles of water Bronson had left for him in the boat. He stripped and cleaned his SR-25 and Sig Sauer pistol. He used a whetstone to sharpen his knife as he sat cross-legged leaning against the rocks. Under the last remnants of daylight, he reassembled and packed his rucksack. His magazines were full.

  He studied his map, memorized everything he needed, and then picked his way to the boat, which was sitting idle at the base of the vertical bluff he had last parked it. He boarded, programmed the GPS, cranked the engine, and navigated the Potomac River, finding a rhythm and a sense of anonymity in the middle of the widening waterway. At least a mile on either side, the land rose more abruptly on the west side than on the east. He watched the wheel adjust slightly every time the GPS hit a waypoint that he had programmed. By his calculation, he had nearly two and a half hours at thirty knots to travel nearly eighty miles from his position opposite Aquia Harbour to the jetties on the Northern Neck of Virginia. The area was famous for its fishing industry, especially the menhaden, which produced all of the omega proteins that Harwood gulped on a daily basis.

  The sun was hanging in the west, sinking slowly, painting a picture with orange and purple hues mixed with green forests and the muted brown river. Bronson’s boat purred with efficiency, propelling Harwood toward Brookes’s compound. He had clear vision and purpose. Enemies of the state were aiding and abetting foreign threats. More personally, they had killed his former spotter, as well as twenty-two innocent souls in the Camp David Ambush. How many had been killed, total? The body count was high when factoring in the Perza, Sultan, and even MS-13 goons.

  Harwood was square with his God, though. Deep down, he believed Hinojosa was on the side of good and was most likely held captive by Ravenswood. He would find out soon enough. As the sun dipped below the bluffs to the west, the moon nosed above the horizon in the east. Harwood took this as a sign that everything would soon be in balance, the way nature intended it to be. He was working hard to be a good father figure to Monisha and be a good Army Ranger. That was what counted in his life.

  And doing those things well meant eliminating threats to his family and avenging the obvious murder of Samuelson. He didn’t care who pulled the trigger—Stone or Weathers—he knew it wasn’t Samuelson.

  Nobody fucked with an Army Ranger without paying the price. The creed to leave no soldier behind applied beyond the battlefield, as well.

  The boat slowed and turned in between two jetties. He passed a couple of shrimp boats with their nets hanging over the side like misshapen wings. The fishermen were returning to the docks as darkness enveloped them. Part of his strategy had been to hit the jetties at darkness, but he hadn’t accounted for the extra sets of eyes, figuring most of the fishermen would have already docked and processed their harvest.

  He motored past them and was swallowed into the darkness of a cove. The GPS, operating like autopilot on an aircraft, turned the wheel sharply into another cove, following tidal streams deep inland. He’d traveled about a mile from the jetties through several tunnellike coves that led deeper into the Virginia countryside when the boat slowed. He recognized the water tower that marked the point he was looking for.

  He took control of the wheel, floated the boat into the muddy bank, shut the engine, grabbed his ruck, and leapt onto the bank. He secured the bowline around a tree trunk, hefted his ruck onto his shoulders, snapped a modified helmet onto his head, and flipped down his night-vision sight.

  He patted his Sig Sauer P320 X-Five Full-Size with side rail mounted infrared laser and flashlight. With the flip of a thumb he could toggle between infrared aiming that was aligned and bore scoped to his pistol barrel and white light that would be visible to the naked eye. He screwed the SRD9 suppressor onto the bore of the pistol and felt it click into place. After ascending the bluff, he oriented himself and began the roughly two-and-a-half-mile walk to the first sniper hide ambush location.

  Countering the countersniper.

  He kept his SR-25 disassembled and secure in his rucksack. If done correctly, his operation involved knife fighting, then using his silenced pistol. He h
ad searched for sniper hides that might have line of sight on the ambush locations, but those sites were all low ground, not easily targetable from any distance. And a miss might tip off the entire security detail that he was on location. Surprise was his friend, at the moment.

  When he got to within one hundred meters of the first sniper hide he knelt next to a field of tall grass along the edge of the forest. Water tumbled along a small, rocky stream no more than three feet wide between the woods and the field. There was a deer stand about thirty meters to his front, which meant there were probably others. The grass and proximity to water would make this prime hunting grounds. The rise to the elevated sniper hide was prominent across the field. If he were to ambush the sniper hide, it would be from one of the deer stands.

  He stepped back into the darkness of the woods and took cover behind a tree. Listening intently, he heard the usual rhythmic sounds of night in the country. The gurgling stream, the rustle of squirrels in the trees, and the occasional rut of a deer.

  But the scrape of metal against wood was an unnatural sound among nature’s symphony. The noise came from his two o’clock, across the fifty-meter-wide field. It occurred to him that the sliding sound might have been a long gun scraping in his direction along a wooden support. He carefully moved to the opposite side of the tree he was using as cover and snuck a quick glance across the field. A figure was moving in the deer stand, which was about twenty feet up a tall hardwood tree of some type. Harwood lowered onto all fours and then onto his stomach, low crawled to the base of the tree holding the deer stand nearest him. He carefully opened his rucksack, using the sound of the stream as audible concealment as well. Assembling his SR-25 to include his Knight’s Armament suppressor and ATN THoR HD thermal scope, he quietly slid a magazine into the well, depressing the release as he seated it to avoid the loud click.

  Leaving his rucksack at the base of the tree, he ascended the angled two-by-fours that served as steps to the deer stand, each time running his hand along the step above, checking for traps, IEDs, or trip wires. He quietly placed his rifle on the weathered floor of the stand. The entire process took him fifteen minutes to get fully into a shooter’s position. He laid a T-shirt in the corner where he expected the brass to kick in anticipation of deadening the noise and preventing it from rattling around the stand. When he powered up the THoR scope, he slowly charged the weapon, sliding one round into the chamber.