Chasing the lion, p.11
Chasing the Lion, page 11
“Kill the president. Kill me. Order your team to attack friendly military bases. The list is limitless if it can truly be done. Like The Manchurian Candidate, only more sophisticated.”
“My team?”
“The whole idea of mind control is that there’s no way to tell who has been infected, so to speak.”
“What evidence do you have that you’re not sharing?” I asked. I was thinking about the dead bodies in the cave and tunnel that had all been searching for the same thing and likewise the people in the basement all doing the same.
“I’ve shared everything. Rogerson from the FBI ran some samples. We believe that the compound is most effective when injected directly into someone, but it can be aerosolized, also, and keep its properties.”
“Any update on Ben David?”
Owens looked away briefly and then returned her gaze to the camera. “Nothing concrete. He’s a slippery bastard.”
I processed for a moment that the CIA and FBI had lost control of a Mossad agent in Afghanistan. If Ben David had escaped, that was David Copperfield–level stuff, but something was scratching at the back of my mind. David was the best spy I knew. I tucked away the notion and focused on the task at hand.
“What are the indicators that Parizad is going to attack the United States?” I asked.
She looked away again briefly. Maybe someone else was in her office.
“The Quds Force has hunkered down in Iraq and Syria. No activity. Our station chiefs in the region report that the ranks have thinned. Parizad has been shuttling between Japan and Germany, evidently working on this poison. Iranian subs are aggressively patrolling in the northern parts of the Persian Gulf, chasing oil tankers. Being a general pain in the ass. Add in the mix that we’ve an inauguration coming up. It’s that time of year.”
“Has Parizad been in the United States?” I asked. Without sufficient time to process what I had seen, I wasn’t prepared to confront Owens about Melissa just yet.
“I certainly hope not!” Owens snapped. If she was an actress, she was a good one, because her reaction seemed authentic to me. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Germany and Japan were the two focus areas of the Marshall Plan,” I said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”
She wrinkled her brow and said, “And here I thought you were just a jock at the academy.”
As if that explained everything. I may have been an athlete, but I did know what the Marshall Plan was.
“I was, Director. I also have been boots on the ground for the last twenty years while you’ve been printing money.”
Before becoming CIA director, Owens had ascended to the presidency of a large midwestern bank after serving her five-year commitment in the army. She had graduated from West Point as a Finance Corps officer, a controversial pick seeing how most top-tier grads chose combat positions, not support. Worse, she had spent her entire career at the burgeoning base in Northern Virginia named Fort Belvoir, formerly the home of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and now the home to several agencies, including finance, that had consolidated into one location. From there, she doled out the cash.
Don’t get me wrong; we all enjoyed receiving our meager paychecks and were glad that a sharp mind like Samantha’s was at the helm cutting paychecks, but it seemed like such a waste of talent.
“Garrett, there’s no doubt you’re the right man for this job. Get to Japan. See if you can find Parizad. I’ll have one of my teams link up with you.”
“Roger,” I replied. “Meanwhile, Director, please get boots on the ground in that German compound. By now, there are probably dozens of dead people in there, most likely exposed to whatever this Demon Rain thing is you’re talking about.”
“We’ve got a team in there now with the German BND. Everyone you saw down there was likely injected with Demon Rain. Like I said, there’s some kind of virtual reality aspect to this we don’t quite understand yet. When you get to Japan, spend more time on the objective. See what’s happening with these groups of people.” The German BND was the equivalent of the American CIA.
“How long have you been tracking Parizad?”
“Forever and a day. Why?”
“I mean recently,” I said.
“Intensely for about eighteen months,” she said.
It was quite possible that she knew about Parizad interrogating Melissa, or maybe, to be generous, she knew he interrogated a woman. I kept my cards close to my chest for the moment.
“What other sites are there?”
“Parizad’s been operating in Yazd, Heidelberg, and Yokkaichi. That’s what we know about,” she said.
But she knew more. Had to. Melissa hadn’t been within five thousand miles of any of those places. Parizad must have been in America unless the video was a deepfake, which I hadn’t fully discounted.
“Anywhere else?”
“What are you getting at, Garrett?”
I paused before answering. I knew when someone was working me, and Owens certainly fit that profile. Succinct answers. Deflection onto the target. Vague generalities.
“Nothing, Director. You’ve been very helpful,” I said.
“Brave and True,” she said, signing off with her class motto.
I looked down at my worn West Point ring, dulled by years of constant wear. I had never taken it off, primarily because the wedding ring Melissa had placed on my finger was welded on the inside, keeping Melissa and West Point both close to my heart.
Steadfast and Loyal.
I slid my thumb across the dulled class seal and rubbed the wedding band.
“Lissa,” I whispered. My voice caught. “What did they do to you?”
After taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the pod. McCool, Hobart, and Van Dreeves reentered.
“Did you ask her about Melissa?”
I looked at McCool and shrugged. “Not ready to give up that information just yet.”
Hobart leaned forward. McCool leaned back in her chair. Van Dreeves looked at the door to the pod.
“You think our government is in on this?” McCool asked.
“I’m not sure what to think. I’m sitting here trying to hold everything together and objectively develop a plan, after seeing a video of my wife being interrogated by an international terrorist. We are following direction from the National Command Authority to get eyes on the former CIA safe houses, because, as Owens just put it, with the inauguration coming up, it’s that time of year.”
“Tactically, we executed the Heidelberg house operation near flawlessly,” Van Dreeves said.
“It was almost too easy,” Hobart added.
“My thoughts exactly. We got in, found that laptop, and escaped,” I said.
“Think the laptop is a ruse? Could the video of Melissa and Parizad be like photoshop but in a video not a picture?” McCool asked.
“Deepfake?” Van Dreeves asked. “More and more hackers are using artificial neural networks to superimpose images and voices into videos.”
“I get that technologically it’s possible, but in this case, why?” McCool asked.
I had an idea but found that my understanding of any situation grew if I let the team hash out their different perspectives.
“You see it all the time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that bullshit. There’s a video of Campbell talking to a group at a town hall meeting. Is that really her? Did the meeting take place? Is it all bullshit?” Van Dreeves said.
“Are you sure it was Samantha Owens on the video call?” Hobart asked, serious.
“It’s a secure line, so I’m guessing we’re okay. What we do know is that we found my friend Ben David in a cave in Iran. We found Parizad’s coin in his pocket. And I had a live conversation with General Fillmore.”
“Everything else could be real or could be bullshit,” Hobart added.
“I think the crux of the matter is that we potentially have a dead Israeli spy and some kind of testing of mind-altering drugs. The promises, such as they were, of LSD never panned out. The intent was to tactically get a prisoner to tell the truth or influence a few people, and the holy grail was to control large numbers of people. The CIA, Nazis, and Japanese were able to develop sodium pentothal, scopolamine, and other drugs that loosen the brain and nudge the victim’s mind toward being open and frank.”
“Dirty bombs, chemical attacks, and nukes all create mass casualties. Psychoactive drugs are meant to control individual minds. Isn’t it more likely that Parizad’s intent is to control a single mind to execute an attack that has the impact of a WMD?” McCool asked.
I stared at her a moment, thankful for these three warriors around me. Not only their incisive calculations but also their camaraderie.
“You may have a semi-decent thought there, Cools,” I said.
She took the compliment as intended. If I praised too highly, they knew they were in trouble. If I jokingly minimized the action, it was high praise indeed.
“I’ll take semi,” she said.
“What about the gazers?” Van Dreeves asked.
That was a good term for the people we had seen dead in the cave and in the Heidelberg compound.
Hobart was leaning back in his chair, thinking. He looked at Van Dreeves and said, “I have a thought on that.”
It was almost as if he needed to explain that he would say more than a couple of words.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
“Two groups of dead people climbing on top of each other like they couldn’t breathe and needed oxygen. If Rogerson is right, they inhaled this Demon Rain drug. Maybe the drug makes your mind want one single thing so badly; like you need oxygen to stay alive, your brain craves x just as severely.”
“Any thoughts on what x might be?” I asked.
“There’s all kind of research on dopamine. Drug addicts, booze, exercising, et cetera. Maybe this drug creates a need that is just as vital as oxygen, and if they don’t get it, they die.”
The plane hit turbulence, and we jostled around for a few seconds. I looked at the flight map and saw we were over Kazakhstan, most likely fighting the brutal low-pressure systems that created minus-forty-degree temperatures this time of year.
“Okay, but to what end? What’s Parizad’s purpose?” I asked.
“This is the time of year for crowds, right? The director mentioned inauguration. NFL playoffs. Any number of targets if you can aerosolize it,” Van Dreeves said.
“Yes, but why? Just to land another blow against the Great Satan? Parizad’s a bigger thinker than that. A garden-variety terrorist attack seems … beneath him, or at least he might view it as such. Besides, we’re so divided now that another attack will just get us pointing at one another,” I said.
“Especially if it’s made to look like one side did it to the other,” McCool added.
I leaned back, took in her steely eyes, the hard angles of her face, and nodded.
“We always talk about feeding into vulnerabilities. That’s our weakness right now. Divided loyalties. Two camps lobbing digital grenades at each other. This Demon Rain thing could do something there, maybe escalate it to a civil conflict,” I said.
“Like civil war?” Van Dreeves asked.
“Makes more sense than just another random attack that will be forgotten in a few weeks. Parizad’s in this for the long haul. He believes we have forever altered his life; he wants to do a generation of damage, if not more,” I said.
“So what is the catalyst? How do these piles of dead people factor in?” Van Dreeves asked.
“Demon Rain,” I said. “Control enough influencers’ minds and the rest will follow. Program them to fight each other.”
Everyone remained silent, soaking in the gravity of what I’d just said. The thought had not occurred to me previously, but listening to my team brainstorm had crystallized my thoughts.
“Makes sense, boss. Who are the targets? What’s the cue?”
“Maybe Japan will help us figure that one out,” I said.
“Speaking of which, I’ve got a diagram of the compound,” Van Dreeves said. He pressed a button, and the monitor showed a rectangular structure with a long sidewalk leading to it from the road frontage. Behind it was a stream that wound to the south. Across the stream, the terrain rose steeply and was thick with Nikko fir trees.
“Okay, walk us through it,” I said.
He used a pencil to point at the different features. “Here you’ve got the first gate with the traditional posts and overhang that looks like a Rakkasan symbol. Here is the approach—looks like sandstone. There’s a second gate surrounded by ceremonial guardian lion-dogs, all which lead to the sacred fence.”
“Sacred fence?”
“Yes, this place was some type of palace,” Van Dreeves said. “Evidently, it was the best place to conduct torture during and after World War II. Anyway, inside the fence is the compound, which has the curved, tiled roof you might be accustomed to seeing in the movies. Through the front door, you have a standard layout, and then there are two basement levels accessed by this stairwell or this elevator.” He pointed at the stairwell on the left side of the house and the elevator on the right side. “The suspicion, I’m guessing, is that the two bottom floors are where we might find the Demon Rain victims. It’s built into the side of a mountain.”
We spent another thirty minutes discussing our plan and then decided to retire to our sleeping bags for some rest. I wolfed down an MRE and lay down on the cool metal floor of the C-17 inside my sleeping bag. Using a rolled-up pair of pants as a pillow, I thought about Melissa, Brad, and Reagan.
Did my two children know anything of what Parizad may or may not have done to Melissa? I liked to think not, because I was almost certain that one or both of them would have told me something. Then again, Parizad was a crafty operator and might still maintain some type of leverage on them. I drifted to sleep thinking about how an Iranian madman had violated the most personal sanctuary of my life: my family.
Was he somehow blaming me for the failed mission in Tabas over forty years ago?
If so, I saw no way for this to end well, and maybe that was his point. Both Parizad and I had lost the most important people in our lives and had only revenge to live for. For me, it wasn’t a bitter, hateful emotion. Rather, Melissa’s death, and Parizad’s potential involvement in it, had removed all uncertainty from my life.
I intended to kill everyone who had anything to do with involving Melissa in the Demon Rain project. Little did I know how difficult it would be to kill so many, so close to home.
12
WE LANDED AT YOKOTA Air Base north of Yokkaichi and off-loaded the Beast in a U.S. Air Force hangar on the south end of the runway. We taxied into the hangar, two plainclothes airmen lowering the door behind us as soon as the tail cleared the entrance.
I had Admiral Rountree from CENTCOM to thank for this support. During the flight, I had given him the mission of finding a safe haven for us. There was always a shit storm of activity at Yokota, so a random C-17 wouldn’t raise any suspicions.
As McCool and team readied the Beast for action, we made final plans. There was one road leading into the compound, which was carved into the side of the Miyazuma Gorge overlooking the Utsube River. Van Dreeves’s map recon showed that the only way to get in and out with any element of surprise was vertical envelopment. We decided that we would fast rope onto the back side of the hilltop and then infiltrate into the rear of the compound that backed up to the terrain. We packed 120-foot ropes because the slope appeared to be severe.
We waited until midnight, passing the time by cleaning weapons, sleeping, and eating. Hobart sharpened his knife. Van Dreeves flipped a pen through his fingers as he stared at the map, divining routes in and out, perhaps. McCool and her crew turned wrenches on the Beast. Eventually, we conducted a walk-through rehearsal of the plan, again, with Hobart, Van Dreeves, and me reviewing in detail executing on the objective. We made sure we had ropes, rappelling equipment, protective masks, oxygen tanks, and flex-cuffs.
As midnight fell, McCool had the rotors spinning. The wind was up, and a cold front was moving through, sweeping down from the mountains in the west and lowering the ceiling, which created suboptimal conditions. We knew there was a chance of weather, but McCool had the latest avionics in the cockpit. She always told me that she would never fly faster than she could see, but she was on the margins tonight. Rain lashed at the windscreen. Winds buffeted the aircraft with sudden invisible punches.
As she hovered over the target landing zone, the Rolex Melissa had given me read 0034 hours. The flight from Yokota to our landing zone had taken thirty-four minutes. Jackson dropped the thick rope, and we slid down onto the hilltop a half mile behind the compound. We were over the landing zone maybe for fifteen seconds, and McCool made a series of false insertions on the way into and out of the objective to mask our actual insertion point, in case anyone was watching.
We rallied in the trees as the sound of chopping rotors and whining engines was replaced by stillness and quiet, save the wind rustling the treetops. The rain had moved north. We donned our IVAS night vision sets as we performed our customary five-minute listen-and-learn waiting session to get acclimated to our new environment. Animals grunted in the forest, probably smelling us.
“Bear or boar?” Van Dreeves whispered.
Hobart finally stood, put a hand on Van Dreeves’s shoulder, and nudged him toward the objective. We broke brush until Van Dreeves found a narrow trail through the thick forest. Tall pines towered above us. Low ground cover grabbed our legs and ankles. Spiderwebs hung between trees in perfect symmetry. One of the benefits of the IVAS was the high-definition picture and thermals, but the heads-up display, built-in compass, and Terminator-like optics were truly next generation. We were walking on a 208-degree azimuth toward the objective when Van Dreeves found a set of power lines angling toward the back of the compound. We walked along the edge of the forest, keeping parallel to the relative open terrain to our left. There was a grove of small trees beneath the power lines, and every hundred meters or so, large metal towers climbed into the sky, supporting the drooping cables that hung above the trees. A creek meandered through the right-of-way. Two wild boars bounced along a trail and stopped, most likely noticing our scent. They grunted and ambled to the northwest, upstream. A bear growled in the distance like a muted foghorn carried by the wind. The treetops rustled and swayed, scratching at the sky.
