A Learning Experience

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Shadow Warrior, Earth Orbit

“You should have been fucking keeping an eye on her!”

Steve glared at Mongo, feeling his hands clenching into fists. “Why the hell was she left so exposed?”

Mongo somehow managed to keep his voice very calm. “She didn’t want an army surrounding her,” he reminded Steve. “And she didn’t want any form of additional protection.”

Steve stared down at the deck, feeling an odd helplessness he hadn’t felt since 9/11. Mariko was his lover, his partner, his wife in every way that mattered… and she was missing, presumed kidnapped. Stave had no illusions about just how many enemies he’d made since he’d stepped up to the UN and rubbed their collective faces in their helplessness. One or more nations might well have decided to kidnap Mariko to avenge their humiliation, or to try to gain leverage over him, or… merely to show that he could still be hurt. If the latter, he knew, it was unlikely that Mariko would survive much longer.

“They took her, right,” he said. “They didn’t kill her?”

“Yes,” Mongo said. “We have footage of her being yanked out of the clinic, before the grenades started to detonate. She’s a prisoner, Steve, but she isn’t dead.”

Steve hastily reviewed the footage through the interface. The whole attack was breathtakingly simple, which was probably why it had succeeded. No attempt to sneak into the clinic, no attempt to pose as someone terminally ill, just a simple smash and grab. It was very professional, with all the variables cut down as much as possible. That, he decided, suggested that whoever was being the attack represented a country, rather than a terrorist group.

“Bastard disarmed city-slickers,” he growled. “Not one of them did anything.”

He cursed them under his breath. In the country, there would be someone with a gun, someone who would offer armed resistance to terrorist attack. But in New York, famed for restrictive gun laws, the entire population had been unmanned. It was unfair — and he knew it was unfair — but he found it hard to care. His partner was missing — and helpless. Her captors could do anything to her… and Steve’s imagination filled in too many possibilities.

“Find her,” he growled. If only she’d agreed to have a tracking implant inserted in her body. But she’d declined. Steve would have declined too, if he’d had the option, but still… he wanted to scream at her for refusing and at himself for not forcing the issue. She could have been found by now if she’d had an implant. “Whatever it takes, find her.”

He wished, desperately, that Mongo had gone to Ying and Kevin had stayed behind. His younger brother might not be a Marine or any other form of infantryman, but he was one of the smartest people Steve had met. Kevin could have deployed all the bugs and drones and taken out all the stops to find Mariko, then acted to recover her while everyone else was still dithering.

“And call on the NYPD,” he added. “Tell them we want them to put every effort into finding her.”

“They can’t,” Mongo said. There was a bitter tone to his voice. “The explosions in New York saw to that, Steve.”

Steve gritted his teeth, feeling another wave of helpless fury. The terrorists had bombed New York, forcing the NYPD to divert resources to deal with the aftermath. Even if the dispatchers realised that the bombings were just diversions, they might still be unable to redirect their people. There were dead and dying on the streets of New York, once again. He wanted to call the Mayor personally and scream at him, but what good would it go? The Mayor could hardly refuse to tend to his own citizens.

“Then we take care of it ourselves,” he said, accessing the interface and staring down at New York from high overhead. The terrorists might have accidentally outsmarted themselves, he realised. Their divisionary bombings would have snarled traffic pretty thoroughly, which meant they would either go to ground somewhere within the city or be delayed as they tried to smuggle Mariko out. “Use everything we have and find her.”

He scowled, remembering kidnapped soldiers and the desperate manhunts American forces had launched when they realised the soldiers were missing. It was a race between terrorist and soldiers, he knew; the terrorists had to get their captives out of the zone before the soldiers had blockades and barriers in place to prevent them from escaping. Holing up somewhere within the zone was risky, even in a shithole like Iraq or Afghanistan. The searchers might not stumble across the hiding place, but the locals might well betray the terrorists, either out of hatred or simple irritation with American troops stamping around and disturbing everyone. New York would be even worse, from their point of view. Someone was bound to see something and call the NYPD.

They’ll want to get her out of the city, he thought, morbidly. But where will they take her?

Jürgen Affenzeller was no stranger to sudden, intensive demands for action, but this was something else. The nightmare scenario — a terrorist attack on representatives of a foreign power — combined with a sudden awareness that the foreign power might well blame the United States for the lapse in security. It would be unfair, Jürgen knew, but he also knew the world wasn’t particularly fair. By any standards, Steve Stuart’s partner should have been given the same level of protection as the First Lady.

But the First Lady is about as useful as tits on a bull, he thought, as he hastily deployed the covert sensor apparatus to New York. The President had authorised it personally, even though there would probably be lawsuits and threats of impeachment afterwards. Steve Stuart’s partner is a doctor. She couldn’t work with a small army surrounding her.

He brought up the footage from the security sensors and hastily scanned through it. The terrorists had not only hidden their faces, they’d worn dark ill-fitting clothing, just to make it harder for them to be tracked. It hadn’t worked too badly, Jürgen had to admit, but it had its limitations. For one thing, their body language was still readable. And, for another, the van they’d brought could be tracked through the streets.

Few citizens really realised just how formidable a public monitoring system New York had built up in the years since 9/11. It was questionable just how much of it was actually useful for tracking terrorists and it did invade civil privacy to a truly disturbing degree, but when the time came to retrace the terrorist footsteps it allowed their movements to be backtracked across the city. The van itself didn’t seem to have been rented — its plates suggested it was a rental, but a quick check revealed that the plates had been stolen in Washington — which implied that it had actually been brought into the city at one point. Carefully, he started backtracking through the records.

It took nearly twenty minutes for the cross-referencing program to find a match. Three brothers, all from Iran, refuges according to their DHS file. They’d made it over the border into Pakistan, then applied for settlement in the United States. Their relatives in America had vouched for them, so few red flags had been raised beyond their origins in Iran. The DHS had conducted an interview, decided there was nothing to worry about and then just let them vanish into New York. In hindsight, Jürgen suspected, the DHS was going to be blamed for allowing the terrorists to enter the country.

He placed a call to the NYPD’s anti-terrorist division and asked them to check up on the brothers. If he was wrong, he would find out very quickly — and innocent people would not be swept up in a police dragnet. But if he were right, he was confident the brothers would not be at home and, indeed, their wives and children would be wondering what had happened to them. Terrorists these days were advised not to confide in their wives and families, not after quite a few had been betrayed by their relatives, who didn’t see death in the cause of jihad as a worthy aspiration.

While waiting, he uploaded the details of the van into the cameras and scanned through the thousands of eyes watching New York. Hundreds of matches came back at once, most of them wildly out of place; thankfully, the traffic snarl would have made it harder for the terrorists to make their escape. But which one was the terrorist van? Or had the terrorists already abandoned their vehicle? There was no way to know.

Not yet, he told himself.

The phone rang. “Yes?”

“This is Captain Aldridge,” a voice said. He sounded brisk, mercifully professional. “All three of the suspects are missing, sir.”

“I see,” Jürgen said. It wasn’t conclusive proof of anything — the DHS had tracked men it had believed to be terrorists before, only to discover that they’d been having affairs — but it was suspicious. “Take their families into custody, gently. Have them interrogated, then explain to them that their menfolk may be in serious trouble.”

He winced as he put down the phone. Maybe the families did know what was going on, maybe they were guilty as sin — at least of keeping their mouths shut — but it was quite possible that their lives were about to be upended through no fault of their own. They’d be held as suspects, then treated as pariahs, idiots too stupid to realise there was something wrong with their relatives. As always, the terrorists left a trail of broken lives and shattered souls behind them.

Pushing the thought aside, he looked back at his computers. There had to be a clue somewhere, buried within the records. All he had to do was find it.

“Maybe put out a full alert,” he muttered. “Let the public know what we’re looking for.”

He shook his head, a moment later. A simple white van… there were hundreds of thousands of the vehicles within the State of New York. They’d be utterly overwhelmed with false positives. The terrorists had played it smart, so far. But their flight would be frantic enough for them to make mistakes. And he’d be there to pick up on them.

“You will have my full support,” the President said. “We will do everything within our power to look for her.”

Steve nodded, bitterly. Mongo had told him, in no uncertain terms, to sit down, shut the hell up and wait. There was nothing else he could do, despite increasingly unpleasant suggestions concerning random bombing of terrorist-supporting countries. The NYPD investigation was proceeding slowly, far too slowly. They had too many other problems to deal with right now.

He wanted to take action, he wanted to do something, anything. But there was nothing to do.

“All traffic in and out of New York is being stopped by the National Guard,” the President continued. “The airports have been placed on alert. Everything will be searched, no exceptions. We’re working on inspecting shipping too, Steve. We will find her.”

Steve gritted his teeth. New York’s National Guard had been a military disaster until after 9/11, whereupon they’d managed to redeem themselves and perform excellent service in Iraq, but he had no illusions about the sheer difficulty of the task facing them. Searching every single vehicle that might want to enter or leave the city would be immensely complicated, while it would cause huge traffic jams and considerable bad feeling. Hell, he had a feeling the Mayor would find himself caught between the President’s orders and the very real risk of losing his job.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” he said. The cynical part of his mind wondered if the President was genuinely concerned or if he was worried about the looming diplomatic disaster. Or both. Meeting the President in person had convinced Steve he wasn’t quite the liberal idiot Steve had believed him to be, before the world had turned upside down. “Everything you can do will be welcome.”

He paused. “Have you heard anything diplomatically?”

“Just a protest from Chad’s Ambassador to the UN,” the President said. “He wanted to fly out, but his plane was grounded in the wake of the bombings.”

An ass in ambassador, Steve thought. He’d met several diplomats on military service and most of them had been conceited assholes. Or was it something more sinister? Did the terrorists plan to sneak Mariko out on a diplomatic plane, relying on diplomatic immunity to keep her hidden?

“I want diplomatic planes searched,” he said, and explained his reasoning. “Feel free to blame us for the imposition.”

“It will be more than just an imposition,” the President said, after a moment. “It will be seen as an attack on diplomatic formality itself.”

Steve sighed. The President’s concern was understandable, but he wasn’t about to let someone sneak away under the cover of diplomatic immunity.

“Make it clear to them, Mr. President, that we consider this an act of war,” he said, firmly. He had no intention of showing weakness to anyone. “If a nation or a group of nations is implicated in this act, we will crush them like bugs.”

In Washington, the President rubbed his eyes as soon as the connection closed, feeling suddenly very tired.

Few people truly realised it, but the power of the Presidency was hedged around with a series of checks and balances. The President was powerful — the most powerful man in the world — yet he was far from all-powerful. He couldn’t bomb a country back to the Stone Age because he’d had a bad morning and wanted to take it out on someone. Nor could he grossly overreact to terrorist attack, no matter how vile. In the aftermath, he would have to deal with the mess.

But Mr. Stuart…

The President honestly wasn’t sure what to make of him. Power seemed to have matured the man, at least to some degree, as he tackled the problems in forming a government. But he still enjoyed a certain immunity from blowback, from repercussions from his actions. What would he do with the vast power at his disposal if he had definite proof that a foreign nation was behind the attack on his partner? The President knew what he’d be tempted to do — and he knew what the system would prevent him from doing.

But who would stop Mr. Stuart if he decided to take brutal revenge on the terrorists?

Abdul let out a sigh of relief as they finally made it down to the shipping company and pulled into the giant warehouse. He’d anticipated some delays, but he hadn’t realised just how many Americans would act like headless sheep and drive somewhere — anywhere — rather than remain at home. The radio talked of martial law, of blockades on the roads and endless delays at airports. It was far too likely, he knew, that they would be caught even after changing the van.

He climbed out of the vehicle and nodded to the four men waiting for them. Like Abdul and his brothers, they were long-term sleeper agents, among the handful in the Greece-registered shipping company who knew it’s true function. Most of the workers were East European, men and a handful of women who provided cover through their sheer ignorance. They knew nothing they could betray.

“She’s in the van,” he said. He looked up at the giant shipping container sitting at one end of the warehouse. Inside, there were food, drinks, blankets, a portable toilet and a handful of books. “Remember to keep her under cover at all times.”

He watched grimly as the men carried the girl — she looked almost childlike in her current state — out of the van and into the shipping container. She would wake up soon enough, Abdul judged, just in time to discover that she would be spending the next few weeks in the company of all three brothers. By the time they reached their final destination, she would probably be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Or perhaps she’ll hate all three of us, he thought, ruefully. His brothers and he had spent years together, but their captive wouldn’t know them at all. But her feelings hardly matter.

Bracing himself, he stepped into the shipping container, followed by Amir and a reluctant Abdullah. His brother had gloom and misery written all over his face; Abdul silently promised the ghost of their dead mother that he’d take care of his younger brother. The last thing she would have wanted was for her son to be sent to a re-education camp.

“Make sure she’s secure,” Amir said. “We don’t want her breaking loose.”

Abdul snorted, rudely. The American girl wasn’t a superhero. Even if they released her hands, even if she managed to kill all three of them, she still wouldn’t be able to get out of the container. Still, he cuffed her to the side of the container anyway, then braced himself as the hatch slammed closed. Inside, even illuminated by a powered light, it was still thoroughly unpleasant. They were going to be sick of each other by the time they reached their destination.

“You may as well get some sleep,” he said, as he inspected the girl. She would probably recover without problems, he told himself. If they’d inflicted permanent damage, there was no way to deal with it in the container. “We’ll be on our way, soon enough.”

Moments later, the container started to shake as it was transported towards the boat. Abdul shuddered, trying hard to keep his reaction under control. He’d had nightmares ever since he’d had his first trip in a container, nightmares where the crane broke and sent the container falling towards the ground… or into the ocean. Or nightmares where the ship sank and they all drowned, helplessly.

He knew, all too well, that they could easily come true.