Gauntlet (48 page)

Koopman was scratching his head. “Red cellophane. Red cellophane. Why does that ring a bell?” He shook his head, then turned back to Indy. “How long ago did Catherine leave, Indy?”

Indy paused, and looked at his watch. “The last load was maybe 11 or 12 hours ago. It would have been early this morning.”

Suddenly Koopman slapped his hand to his forehead. “Indy, you’re right,” he gasped. “This is way bigger than drugs. Red cellophane, my God!” He turned to the other officers, and was faced with blank stares. “Jesus, don’t you guys watch the news or listen to your scanners? Mysterious loads transported in the middle of the night? Bricks wrapped in red cellophane? That Semtex that was stolen in Libya. It’s in bricks, wrapped in red cellophane. Rumored to be heading for an American target.”

With Koopman’s announcement, the atmosphere became electric, and the men turned on Dennis with renewed purpose.

“OK, Dennis, I think you probably know more than you’ve been telling us,” said Brink. “Who was it that came through here?”

Dennis only shrugged. Thinking again of Leon’s psychopathic rages, he said woefully, “I don’t know. I saw nothing. Not me. Nothing.”

“Can you describe what they were transporting?” pushed Koopman.

“Describe? Me? No sir. I didn’t see anything.”

Blackman interrupted. “Listen, you jackass, there’s a very good chance that what came through here was not drugs, but explosives. Semtex, headed toward the States, on the way to some massive terrorist attack. Haven’t you been listening to the news? The Emir promising the destruction of an entire city?”

“Oh, maybe. Yeah, I guess I heard something about that. But I didn’t think he would blow up Fernie.”

“Good, Dennis. Then you know that we may be dealing with international terrorism here. That means this is a real crime, not like getting caught with a joint. We’ve got you on the scene of that crime. You won’t be going to some nice, peaceful, happy Canadian jail. You’ll go to Guantanamo Bay and stay there until scorpions are crawling out of your asshole. If you talk now, we’ll take you back to the Canadian side of the border, where Canadian law governs. Otherwise we’ll leave you here until the FBI shows up, which, by the way, is not going to be very long. Do you want to talk now?”

Dennis reflected on that for a second or two. He knit his brow and fixed his gaze on the ground in front of him. Leon or Guantanamo? Shivs or scorpions?

“OK,” he said. “I’ll talk. But I go to the Canadian side.”

“Smart boy, this one,” said Koopman. “Sharp as a tack. So tell us, Dennis, what came through here, and when, and in what amounts?”

T
URBEE had been monitoring activity north of the border. He had been able to track the Semtex from Stewart, BC to Highway 1, east of Kamloops. With the assistance of the NSA, he was monitoring any satellite communications coming out of the southeast corner of BC. This yielded rich dividends when he picked up the Sat-phone license check by the Canadian cop.

As was his custom, Turbee raised his hand and waved it in the air, seeking someone’s attention.

“Now what?” snapped Dan.

“We just intercepted an RCMP Sat-phone transmission. It came from a location less than half a mile north of the Montana border. It was a vehicle plate check. The first three letters of the plate were DGO.”

When Dan didn’t respond, Rhodes decided to take over. He quickly glanced at the time the license plate check had taken place and did the math in his head.

“It’s arrived, people,” he said calmly. “There is now more than four tons of high explosive in the hands of terrorists, somewhere in the United States.”

“Assume that they’re going a steady 70 miles an hour on our freeways. Assume that they’ve been in the country for 12 hours. Here’s the area where they could be at the present time,” George added. He drew a large arc on the Atlas Screen, with Devil’s Anvil at the northernmost point. The arc included Kansas City, Cheyenne, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, most of California, all of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nebraska, and on and on. George looked at Dan expectantly. “So what do we do, captain?”

C
ORPORAL CATHERINE GRAY had been in the truck for several hours. The first hour had been almost unbearable, with a good amount of crashing and banging, as the truck navigated old skid trails and overgrown logging roads. But eventually the trip became smoother, and within two hours, she thought that they were riding on asphalt. There was a heavy stuffiness in the air, and the heat in the back of the truck increased as the day wore on. Then she remembered that there were a number of coolers sitting in the back of the truck with her. She flicked on her cigarette lighter and found them. She opened one and, to her delight, saw several cans of soda sitting in the bottom. She reached for one and had a long, pleasant swig of the pop. It was even cold.

Her thirst quenched, she sat back and used the flickering flame of the lighter to inspect the red bricks more closely. The drugs were definitely wrapped in red cellophane. She wondered again what that was all about. Maybe marketing, she thought. Even the criminals were getting MBA’s now. She had a closer look and found that there were labels on the cellophane. Printed on the center of the each label, apparent in the light of the flickering lighter flame, was the word “SEMTEX.” Semtex, Semtex, she mused to herself. Where had she heard that? Sometime in the past week... Then the penny dropped. The Libya explosion. The Presidential embarrassments. There had been missing Semtex. Was this it? Had she found the Semtex, here in the state of Montana, and heading south? What could that mean? Where was it heading? And damn the fact that her cell phone was dead!

Suddenly she realized that she was holding a cigarette lighter, and its little loop of flame, an inch or two from the brick’s label. She dropped it, and was happy to make the rest of the journey in darkness. “Oh shit,” she kept repeating quietly to herself. “Oh shit.”

S
OMEWHERE IN PAKISTAN, Richard and Jennifer found themselves in a similarly dangerous situation. They were blindfolded, and then tossed unceremoniously into the back of a van. Richard was fading in and out of consciousness. He was alert enough to notice that the van turned and stopped many times as it made its way to the outskirts of Peshawar. They reached a highway, but he was unable to tell in which direction they were headed. The van appeared to be climbing, and that would mean either north or northwest. Not a good sign. They were probably entering the lawless tribal lands, where Pashtun warlords reigned. He reflected on what had happened to Zak. Would parts of their bodies also end up being autopsied in some forensic lab in Tel Aviv? He put that aside as unhelpful, and tried to think about things they could do to get out of the situation instead.

“The cavalry’s on its way, Jen,” said Richard. “They got enough of the phone call to know we’re in trouble.” He wasn’t sure if he was trying to offer comfort to her or to himself.

“Yes, of course. I forgot. The several million Marines that we have stationed in the Frontier Province are going to descend on us at any moment and take us back to the Embassy just in time for a late night snack,” said Jennifer sarcastically.

“Warm milk and cookies,” Richard tried to joke.

“Don’t joke, Richard. I think we’re headed into the mountains. Listen to the sound of the engine. He’s down shifting a lot, and we’re switching back and forth,” said Jennifer.

There were a few final steep switchbacks, and then the van came to a halt. The back doors were opened, and they were both dragged roughly out of the van and thrown to the ground. Richard, unable to brace himself, felt a blinding stab of pain to his right temple as his head hit the ground again. He saw lights, then nothing. Knocked out for the third time in less than three hours. It was 6:30PM, September 1, Pakistan time.

T
HE HOURS PASSED SLOWLY. Richard vaguely recalled lurching to a halt, and his body being thrown out of the truck and then dragged down a dark stairway into a subterranean prison cell. His left hand had been cuffed to a large, heavy iron ring that protruded from the side of a cold, dark cell wall. He could only assume that they were in the basement of the Inzar Ghar safe house, located, from what he could remember, on the Pakistan side of the Sefid Koh.

The pounding pain in his temples quickly became unbearable. Richard had experienced chronic and debilitating headaches ever since he’d suffered an upper back injury in basic training. The intensity of the headaches was multiplied tenfold by the back spasms that came along with them. This particular problem had led him from aspirin, to Tylenol, to ibuprofen, and ultimately, when his life started to fall apart, to narcotics. Vicodin was his current drug of choice, only because it was readily available over the Internet. Some part of his brain realized that the various opiates, real and synthetic, led to ever-greater dysfunction. Another part of his brain justified and enabled the addiction. After all, he was taking medicine, not street drugs. Medicine that had initially been prescribed by doctors. He suffered chronic pain and was entitled to relieve it. He wasn’t an addict, and he didn’t use needles. He had a condition, like diabetes, that required medication to alleviate the symptoms. He had a job that carried with it great responsibility. He was functional, and the USA had a crying need for his services. In fact, had he not been told by Baxter that he was the one, the
only
one, who had the qualifications to do this?

On a more immediate and rational level, Richard knew that he’d never be able to perform those services, or take care of Jennifer, if his hands were tied by debilitating pain and the inevitable withdrawal that would come from a lack of medication. He knew how bad it would get, and how useless it would make him. The back spasms alone would have him paralyzed and completely helpless. He was able to reach, with his free hand, into his inside jacket pocket, where he’d hidden the bottle of Vicodin. He fumbled with it, sweating and cursing, trying to undo the tamperproof lid with one hand and his teeth. In his agitation, he dropped the open bottle on the ground, where it rolled, spilling about five of the pills. He was able to bring the bottle back toward him with his foot, and then started doing the same with the small white pills. Anchored to the wall by the handcuffs and the iron ring, he scraped the little pile of pills to within half an inch of his reach, less maybe. He pulled harder against the cuffs and ring, getting closer and closer, and was finally able to reach one, which he picked up and brought hungrily to his mouth. He was able to do the same with a second, and a third, and...

“Richard, what the hell are those?” asked Jennifer, who was similarly manacled on the opposite wall. “What are those little pills?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing really. Just some stuff for my head. I have an upper back injury, and–”

“Richard, I’m with the CIA, OK? I know the signs. I know a little bit about your history. What are they? Oxycontin? Percodan?”

“I have chronic pain, Jen. Maybe you can’t understand that. But I need those pills. I won’t be functional without them. They’re Vicodin.”

“Oh Jesus Christ,” she snorted. “Now Langley is sending drug addicts along to do high stakes missions. Why on earth did they send you, anyway?”

“Look, I’m not all that burned out. I’ve had some problems. Most people know that. I had a couple of marriages turn on me. My eyes went and I couldn’t fly the Tomcats anymore. I had a nasty injury in basic training. Fractured a couple of vertebrae in my back. Set me back six months. Then I had to redo basic with an injury like that. I basically had to ignore the pain all the way through, just to qualify.”

“So?” said Jennifer.

“What do you mean, ’so’?” he retorted. “Try walking that road for a mile or two. And I’m telling you, Jen, without those pills the pain will make me totally useless. We’ll be worse off than we already are.”

Jennifer bit her lip. “Sorry, Richard. This is the last place we should be arguing. The whole world knows what happened to Zak Goldberg. These are probably the guys who did that. We don’t want to go there. We should be working together, to figure out how to get out of this.”

“So nice of you to mention Zak,” responded a straining Richard. “When my parents died, Zak’s family took me in. I grew up with him. I heard the President read the coroner’s report. I saw his body at the airport when Trufit brought me in. Dismembered him, skinned him, while he was still alive...” His voice trailed away, but he continued to reach for the pills on the ground.

Jennifer didn’t respond, but watched him quietly. How extraordinary, she thought. He was actually expending more effort to get his drugs than he was to get out of this cell. Richard was pulling as hard against the handcuffs as he could, striving with all his might to reach the last three Vicodin, which were lying just outside his reach. He put one foot against the wall and pushed against it as hard as he could, reaching with his only free arm. The handcuffs dug brutally into the wrist of his manacled hand, and Jennifer worried that he might actually wrench a ligament or pull a joint from its socket. But the last pills remained just out of reach, no matter what he did.

Richard continued to reach, determined to either get the pills or dislocate a wrist, elbow, or shoulder in trying. He didn’t care about the pain from the handcuffs. That was temporary. The pain in his back would be much, much worse.

All of a sudden he lurched forward, smashing his head against the hard stone flooring of the cell. More blinding pain, more stars, more wretched borderline consciousness. Why the hell had he ever joined the military, let alone the CIA? Then he realized where he was. On the floor. With the Vicodin. He turned around, scooped up the last three pills, and popped them into his mouth, dry swallowing them.

“Um, Richard? I know you’re busy just now, but there’s something you should notice here,” Jennifer said, as politely as she could manage.

“What’s that?”

“You’re free. Well, more or less. At least, you’re no longer manacled to the wall. I think that’s more important right now than the drugs.”

Richard, in his desperate struggle to get to the Vicodin, had missed the fact that the iron ring had come clean out of the wall. It had been anchored into the concrete by a metal prong, some ten inches in length, for God knew how many decades. The moisture, and likely overuse of the cell, had caused the prong to rot, and the pressure Richard had put on it had worked it loose. Richard looked around in amazement, flexing his hands. His increasingly drug-addled mind was struggling to come to terms with this change in position when he noticed that when he’d fallen forward, he’d landed right on a chunk of bone. In his unbalanced state, his focus rapidly changed from his freedom to the bone.

“What the hell is this, Jen?” he asked, holding the bone up to the light.

“It’s a piece of bone. I think it’s a tibia. Look, it’s shattered on one end, but intact at the other. See, there are a few pieces of ligaments still hanging from it,” said Jennifer.

“What a bunch of evil, vicious bastards these guys are,” said Richard in disgust. “Probably tortured some guy to death right here.”

Then it hit him. The moment of epiphany. The shocking horror of death. “Jen, it was Zak. This came out of Zak,” whispered Richard hoarsely.

“You don’t know that, Richard. It’s a stretch,” she said quietly, hoping he was wrong.

“Oh my God, it must have. Remember the President at that press conference? He said that one tibia had been torn from Zak’s body, and hadn’t been found. This is where they did it. Right here, in this cell. This is the torture chamber. Oh my God,” breathed Richard.

They were both silent for a good five minutes. Richard clung to the tibia, the last piece of his best friend, and felt his defenses begin to crumble. The weeks of tension and years of pain, the people trying to kill him, Zak’s terrible death, and now the responsibility of another mission, and Jennifer’s life, all added up to more than he could take. A tidal wave of grief reached up to overwhelm him, and his delicate psyche began to break down. He started sobbing quietly. Jennifer tried to kick him out of it.

“You need to keep it together, Richard. You have to reach inside yourself and focus with whatever strength you have left. You’re no longer chained, and that piece of bone probably belonged to a total stranger. Get over here and help me get loose.”

Richard tried to gather himself. “I’m okay, Jen. I’d have figured it out eventually. I’m not totally addled... not yet anyway,” he grunted, wiping a small trickle of blood from his forehead. “You know, if my ring came out, maybe yours will too. They were probably constructed at the same time. And this place hasn’t exactly seen any upkeep. Let’s see what we can do.”

Richard walked over to her side of the cell, and reached for the iron peg to which her handcuffs were chained. He tried to jiggle it back and forth, but it didn’t budge. He whacked it a couple of times with the iron ring assembly still handcuffed to his own wrist, but there was still no movement. He hit it a few more times before Jennifer asked him to stop.

“They’ll hear that clanging, Richard. Try and pry it loose with that metal rod attached to your ring. Maybe you can lever it out,” she said.

Richard, momentarily forgetting his own pain, stuck the short iron prong attached to his own ring through the ring that secured Jennifer’s handcuffs to the wall. He put one foot against the wall, high up next to the ring, and pulled on the free ring and prong with all his might. His grip slipped loose, and he was sent hurtling across the cell once again, smashing the back of his head against the wall on which he had been chained. He cried out at the impact. More blinding pain. More stars. Seemed to be a pattern today, he thought wryly. He felt like he’d gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson. The back and top of his head, and both temples, were cut open and bleeding extensively. He clutched his jacket and found the second bottle of Vicodin. He took two at once.

“Richard, don’t,” pleaded Jennifer. “If we get out of here — and that’s a big if — you’ll need to have your wits about you.”

“My wits are just fine,” said Richard. “My head hurts, for reasons that I trust are obvious. I’m holding a chunk of tibia that came out of my best friend’s body. I’m locked in some sort of torture chamber with no immediate chances of getting out, waiting for those bastards to come back for me. And I’ve been tasked with taking care of you and keeping those guys from destroying my country. Under the circumstances, I’d say I was doing pretty good. Now let me try again.”

He walked back to Jennifer, slid the rod through her metal ring, found a firm fulcrum point in the damp stone wall, and pulled again. Jennifer marveled at the sudden change in his mood. He was babbling, barely coherent, and pitiful one minute, and the next he was rational and focused, planning for the next move. In truth, it was pretty amazing that he was lucid, nevermind being able to think or communicate logically. She couldn’t even imagine the physical and emotional pain he was feeling. She was distracted from her thoughts by the movement of her ring.

“I think it’s coming loose, Richard. Try again.”

“Think so. Hold steady.”

Three more yanks, and Jennifer’s iron ring was definitely starting to come free. Richard pried it back and forth a few more times, and after one last gigantic effort, it sprang free from the wall. Richard fell backward yet again, but this time was able to break the fall with his shoulder.

He moaned loudly, then looked up at his partner. She was free. Now all they had to do was find a way out of the room.

Z
AK STOPPED HIS DIGGING. This time he was sure about it. He’d heard the racket when the guards brought new prisoners into the dungeon. They sounded like they were in a cell in the chamber that connected to his. Not long after they’d been brought in, Zak had heard them speaking to each other. One man, and one woman. There had been a lot of crashing in the cell, as though they were trying to get out. He’d heard the screech of metal, and what sounded like a body hitting the floor, or maybe the walls, repeatedly.