Hidden Threat (55 page)

The camera panned to two firemen holding a stiff hose that was spewing a solid stream of water into the right front of the house. Amanda could see that a charred, black hole was located where the dining room used to be. Suddenly, she saw her mother pushing the firemen and screaming, waving her arms toward the house. The camera panned onto her face, the same contorted mask she’d seen as her mother had knocked the lighter out of her hand and onto the Persian rug.

“
. . . bastards, get more trucks here! Save this house! Damnit, I’ve got no insurance! Damn you, save this house!”

Amanda dropped her eyes. No matter how despicable her mother had been, it was difficult to watch someone acting with such a lack of human dignity. And while Amanda had suspected that something of this nature might happen if the plan worked, actually watching it was challenging.

Then she thought that it was no more challenging than how she had watched her mother and grandmother emasculate her father on a daily basis until it became routine, commonplace. The notion that he was a deadbeat bastard had eased its way into their lexicon and become a staple of their lives. It was a notion that was so opposed to reality that in hindsight it seemed absolutely absurd to her that she had ever taken the bait.

“
Looks like you got her good, hon.”

Charlotte had returned her car to the driveway to help hide Amanda’s Mercedes and to provide a plausible explanation should any police arrive.

“
What do you mean? I’ve been here with you and Brianna all night.”

“
You got that right.”

CHAPTER 77

Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan

Monday Morning

In the tunnel there was very little space for the three of them. One hand grenade would possibly kill them all. The scraping of the floorboard and the partial opening of the trap door into what they believed to be house number three made the next few seconds seem like an eternity.

Matt grabbed Van Dreeves, who was cutting wires on the bomb protecting the computers that potentially contained the database. It had to be somewhere and what the technicians from Langley had forwarded to Matt was a message that the flash drive’s Trojan had piped back to them a partial file that looked like a list of names, phone numbers and addresses of fighters, financiers, logisticians, businessmen, all of whom were a part of the loose network of Al Qaeda.

In the modern era, such a list would be akin to finding the personnel roster of a nation’s standing army. Matt knew that the Rosetta stone was not killing bin Laden, though he hoped to do that soon, but to get the list, the database, the Al Qaeda, and then systematically move down that list and kill or capture those on it. Only then could America tip the balance of fear away from its own shores and back towards those who wished to do her harm. Constantly updated, the list was rumored to be kept on two hard drives. Initially on the server in Jeddah, bin Laden determined to keep that list up and running as a decoy. Intelligence agencies spent years chasing the Jeddah server list, which was mostly made up of Muslims who wanted to travel to the conference on Islamic Affairs. True, there were some who ultimately joined bin Laden’s organization and cause, but he transferred them to a different list.

Getting Van Dreeves to safety and protecting the computer and their hard drives was job one.

Surviving was job two.

“
It’s a fake,” Van Dreeves said about the time Matt pushed him.

Matt’s credo had always been that a good offense would eventually wear down a good defense. If you hit enough baseballs over the fence, you win. When in doubt, attack. In the nanosecond that flashed through Matt’s mind as he grabbed Van Dreeves and shoved him past himself and Hobart, he turned to Hobart and said, “We’re going up.”

He stepped on the wooden ladder that led up to the trap door that was by now two-thirds of the way open and raised his rifle. He flipped on his flashlight and shined it right into the face of a startled man who was brandishing a weapon of some sort.

Matt shot him in the face, the bullets kicking the man backward. The trap door did not fall, which to Matt meant that there was someone on the backside of it holding it open. In the next nanosecond he put two rounds into the flooring that served as the trap door. In the yellow beam of his MagLite he saw the wood splinter and a penetration hole appear through the panel, which began to fall. He pushed his shoulder into the door and lunged upward from the top rail of the ladder in the direction of the hinge on the trapdoor.

The door snapped off its hinges and Matt tumbled onto the soft body of a moaning man. He scanned the body for weapons and saw an AK-74 about five feet away. He put his flashlight on the man’s bearded face and saw that he was grimacing in pain. Thinking that he may want a prisoner, he decided to check fire.

“
I’m up. One KIA, one WIA. Let’s move,” Matt said.

Soon Hobart was up and pushing across the dead man that Matt had shot first.

They were breathing heavily in the dark, letting the silence settle over them, making millisecond calculations as to what they should do next.

“
VD, stay below until we’ve got this thing sorted out.”

“
Roger.”

“
And protect that precious cargo.”

“
Roger.”

“
I’m thinking if the other house was rigged, maybe this one is also,” Matt said.

“
Roger that.”

They both heard a noise opposite of their location, what Matt presumed was the front of the house, though he had no way to determine precisely where he was in relation to the home’s blueprint. Their preparation had not detected any tunnels and so he tried to calibrate what he did know about the home. Two back bedrooms, two other rooms and a front door that led to a walled compound. Pretty basic. Four squares within a larger square. Each room led to another room. They were against a wall and Matt slid his back along it until he reached a corner. Hobart had done the same thing, so that now they were in opposite corners aiming at the doorway.

“
I’ll take the door and then next room. You follow,” Matt whispered into his voice activated communications device. “VD, act as rear guard against anyone coming from the tunnel.”

“
You got it.”

“
Shoot to wound. This is Rahman’s place.”

Matt moved silently to the door, which opened inward, so he took the opposite side and kicked it open, inviting a fusillade of automatic weapons fire in the general direction of Hobart.

“
You ok?”

“
Yeah, coming up your back,” Hobart said.

With the door open, Matt and Hobart pushed back from the opening, both hearing the unmistakable click of a spoon popping from a hand grenade and seeing the equally unmistakable toss and whir and roll of the baseball sized object.

“
Grenade!” Matt screamed. But he realized that they were not the intended targets. It had been a careful toss to roll toward the sloping hole where the trapdoor was open. Matt had thought to leave the door open to make Van Dreeves’ route of egress from the tunnel easier. He had not calculated the enemy’s use of the open door. He thought about Van Dreeves and he thought about the hard drives and the database that was always there. He wondered if Al Qaeda kept a back up of the database and he suspected that they didn’t. Bin Laden had been anal retentive about using servers and anything the U.S. intelligence agencies could crack. Paper initially and then hard drives, which could be removed and stored and hidden, but were easier to manipulate and update than using paper and pencil.

He heard the crunching roll of the grenade as it slid across the gritty, dirt floor. Turning, he dove across the reignited wall of lead that the enemy had started pouring into the room again. Like the shortstop that he was he dove with an outstretched glove hand, his left hand, watching the grenade bounce along. This was nothing but a sharply hit ground ball into the hole. Backhand this baby and then rifle it to first base. His weapon slapped him in the face and he felt the weight of his body armor slow him down as his fingernails scraped against the grenade that was rolling slowly toward Van Dreeves and the database that would always be there.

His body was twisted and he was airborne as the grenade took a funny hop off the fuse straight up into the air, giving his body mass time to catch up and he clutched the round object with his left hand.

Matt had turned hundreds of double plays as a shortstop and fielded thousands of ground balls in little league, high school and college. The key was the quick transfer of the ball from glove hand to throwing hand. Sometimes he caught the ground ball or the second baseman’s flip of the ball with his throwing hand and seamlessly, less than a second, could rocket the ball to wherever it needed to go. From the time a baseball would leave the bat, enter Matt’s glove, and then be released, less than two seconds would have transpired.

The fuse on a standard M67 hand grenade lasted three to five seconds. If this was a three second fuse, Matt knew he was screwed. If five seconds, perhaps not. Matt calculated that already two seconds had transpired, as he wrapped his hand around the grenade and his body landed with a scraping thud on the dirt floor. He pictured the door directly behind him.

He had no alternative but to whip his left arm backward, releasing the grenade, as if he were glove tossing the ball to the second baseman, a trick he had mastered at the University of Virginia. While not left handed, he was nearly ambidextrous, and flicked his wrist toward the open door with the machinegun fire raining down upon them.

In those brief seconds, Matt heard the whirring of the hand grenade, the sound of machinegun fire, the screams of Hobart and Van Dreeves, and the chop of helicopter blades above the roof.

Then the world stopped for Matt Garrett when the hand grenade and its millions of metal splinters filled the house.

CHAPTER 78

Spartanburg, South Carolina

Sunday Evening

Amanda found Brianna lying on the twin bed in her small bedroom. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with the word “GODDESS” in sparkling letters printed across the front, and white sweatpants. Amanda could see that she had been crying, though Brianna’s face was turned away from her. A salty path stained her left cheek and was clearly visible. Amanda also noticed Brianna’s old tennis racket in the corner of the room next to a pile of clothes. Two large posters of Britney Spears wearing next to nothing were hung on either side of the lone window. One of the posters was drooping from the top left-hand corner as the tape had dried and lost its adhesive properties.

“
Hey,” Amanda said as she slowly walked into the room.

Brianna turned her head and looked at her. “I’m so sorry.”

“
About what?” She stopped when she saw the bruises on Brianna’s face and neck. She gasped. “He hit you?”

Brianna turned away and nodded.

Amanda placed her hand on Brianna’s shoulder. “I’m the one who should be sorry. You’re my best friend, and I never even cared enough about you to realize what was happening. I was just too wrapped up in me, you know?”

Amanda sat on the bed next to her and brushed back Brianna’s hair. She thought to herself about maturity and how in the last two weeks she had transformed herself from an immature, selfish brat to a caring, concerned friend. She made a mental note that if the transition was this fast, then perhaps this might be who she really wanted to become, or even had been all along.

“
You got a raw deal, bitch,” Brianna said, wiping a tear from her eyes as she sat up in her bed. She pulled her knees up to her chest and clasped her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees as she turned her eyes toward Amanda.

“
Not any worse than having to be with Dagus.”

Brianna shuddered and closed her eyes so tight that wrinkles formed around her young face. “Is he really dead?”

“
I watched him put a bullet in his head. Hard to get any deader than that.”

Brianna put her forehead on her knees, and Amanda could tell she was crying, so she put her hand on her friend’s back and made slow circling motions as she spoke. “It’s okay, Bree. I never knew.”

Brianna kept her forehead on her knees and shook it left to right as if to indicate “no.”

“
Come on, Bree. I know about almost everything. How much was she going to pay you?”

Brianna turned her head to look at Amanda and said weakly, “You don’t know everything.”

“
Then tell me.”

“
What difference does it make, Amanda? You’ll go on with your life. You’ve got your half million, and what have I got?”

“
I’m not taking all of the money, Bree. I’ve decided to do something else with it. I can’t say what, but just trust me on this, okay?”

Brianna seemed to consider Amanda’s comment. She was now resting her head sideways on her knees, not looking at Amanda, but staring at no particular spot on the far wall.

“
Nina made me do it. She promised me some of the insurance money. Ten thousand. Screw him five times. What’s the big deal, you know? My mother has been struggling lately, and I thought some quick money would help. Plus, you know, we’d all wanted to be with Dagus at one point in time.”