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  Mahegan felt a comfort here, removed from even the sparsely populated Roanoke Island. Drifting up the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a year, he had worked the odd job for a couple of weeks before moving on. He was a deckhand on a fishing boat out of Wilmington, a bouncer at a bar in Beaufort, and part of a landscaping crew in Hatteras. Remaining obscure was paramount.

  But a year was enough. The one-year anniversary of his failed mission in Nuristan Province was tomorrow, and he was at the end of this particular trail.

  Plus, they had found him. He needed solitude to finalize his plans. Today.

  The first part of his plan, if he could call it that, was to borrow his new landlord’s pickup truck, drive up to Arlington National Cemetery, and visit the gravesites of Colgate and the rest of his men who had been killed in action.

  The second part was, well, complicated.

  He stood and turned slowly, facing west. He counted the faces poking through the reeds and tall grass. Eight. Just like the remaining members of his team.

  They seemed to be staring at his arm, where the scar that looked like a lightning-bolt welt ran from his left shoulder to his elbow. Mahegan suspected that somewhere deep down in the psyches of these animals, they knew the threat to their species. Sixteen left. Just as families passed stories from generation to generation, these red wolves, Mahegan was certain, were passing the story of their near extinction to their offspring.

  One of the wolves circled past him. He didn’t know, but perhaps his kinship with these animals had something to do with being backed into a corner, the very essence of their being whittled to the core. Would they survive or evaporate into thin air? He closed his eyes, becoming certain of his connection with these predators. He relaxed and let his mind drift outward to them, and then opened his eyes. They had slipped silently into the bush, Mahegan catching the flipping tail of the pup.

  He turned, waded into the sound, and began swimming.

  As he glided into the water that was now showing some chop from a southerly wind, a distant, but enormous explosion shook the water around his body.

  He stopped, stood in the chest-deep sound only twenty meters offshore, and turned toward the mushroom cloud fueled by a large plume of smoke billowing upward like a miniature nuclear blast. He gauged the distance to be about ten miles away at a two-hundred-degree azimuth, southwest, in the center of Dare County Bombing Range.

  Picturing the source of the burst cloud, Mahegan thought, That’s about right. More than a year ago the Department of Defense had closed Dare County Bombing Range, which oddly enough sat in the middle of the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge. In an attempt to appease a shunned contractor, the DoD had given the dirty job of clearing the bomb detritus to the private military contractor Copperhead, Inc.

  As he began swimming back to Roanoke Island, Mahegan suddenly felt better about his decision regarding Savage’s offer.

  Chapter 3

  Fort Brackett, South Carolina

  While Mahegan was stepping into Croatan Sound for his early morning swim, about 350 miles from Roanoke Island, a man named Chikatilo watched his two-man construction crew outside the front gate of Fort Brackett, South Carolina. They had been working for several hours under the glare of high-intensity spotlights. The workmen wore orange-and-yellow striped vests and had placed diamond-shaped signs along the road that read FINES DOUBLED FOR SPEEDING. One of them even held the reversible STOP and SLOW sign, though it wasn’t really needed.

  Chikatilo looked at his smartphone and saw the Twitter direct message:

  @TuffChik . . . Road construction looks good!

  Chikatilo and his crew were ghosts. Though he didn’t look to be of Afghan descent, he was. He had blond hair and blue eyes, a by-product of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Born in Bamian, Afghanistan, he attended the University of Colorado in a preparatory step to eventually ascend into Afghan politics, like his father, who was the governor of Bamian Province. The success of the 9/11 attacks had stoked his militant fervor and his father, a moderate, had cast him out of peaceful Bamian like spoiled seed.

  Like any good jihadist, he had found a way to infiltrate the enemy and had secured a job as an interpreter based upon the bona fides of his father, whom the American Army had never questioned about his son. His tour with the Americans had led him to Mullah Adham, who had anointed him “Prizrak Chikatilo”—prizrak meaning ghost in Russian. Then The American Taliban had made Chikatilo a ghost and named him the leader of all of the ghost prisoners.

  Chikatilo had just two ghosts with him. He watched a big, muscled guy he’d named Bundy lean his hardened abs into a jackhammer that was spitting chunks of curb concrete in all directions. Bundy was wearing safety glasses and a work belt with tools. Chikatilo looked professional in his construction hat with the big letters BOSS stenciled across the top. He stared at his team for a minute and then let his eyes drift toward the military police gate at Fort Brackett, South Carolina, home of the US Army’s largest training base.

  It was near five a.m. As the jackhammer cleared away the curved six-foot chunk of curb, the crew began emplacing prefabricated, Styrofoam, shaped replicas of the curb. Manson, the second man in Chikatilo’s crew, wore an orange vest and white construction hat. He handled his two three-foot sections of curb gingerly and placed them side by side. They fit nearly perfectly, though he brushed some curb dust away from the crevices to achieve a snug fit.

  Their construction truck was parked along the lane where, when vehicles slowed to have their identification checked at the military police checkpoint, they would be stopped directly in front of the construction site. Chikatilo tugged down on his hard hat and hitched up his pants as a military police vehicle cruised slowly toward them. They were on the civilian side of the gate about one hundred meters away from the guards.

  Chikatilo had picked this location because it was off the military installation, yet also that magic spot where traffic in the mornings backed up as the guards fell victim to math issues. Too many cars were trying to pass through too few gates in too short of a time. Accordingly, the lines were sometimes a quarter mile long across the four entry lanes. Worse than the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan, Chikatilo thought.

  A military police officer pulled up next to him and smiled.

  “Y’all going to be finished before long? In about an hour the entire city is going to be waiting to pass through right there,” he said, pointing at the four stalls where security guards checked identification. Chikatilo noticed the dashboard lights gave the man’s face an eerie glow, so he wasn’t too worried about the MP remembering much about his own face.

  “We’re about done, officer,” Chikatilo said. He knew the man in the car wasn’t a commissioned officer, but he wasn’t about to cause trouble or draw attention to himself. As a ghost, he’d been careful to look the part of an American construction worker, wearing a long ponytail clip-on hanging out of the back of his BOSS helmet, a gold veneer cap covering his right incisor, and a large “Mom” tattoo on his forearm. His safety glasses distorted his eyes and the brown contacts disguised his blue eyes.

  “Good. Don’t want no unnecessary backups,” the military policeman said.

  “No worries, officer,” Chikatilo said, reaching his hand out for a shake so he could show the full breadth of the tattoo. He saw the man glance at his arm and then reach his hand out of the window to give him a shake. As he clasped the man’s hand, Chikatilo looked into the cruiser and saw the radio in the passenger seat. He recognized the state-of-the-art Harris RF-7700V series handheld radio that was pressed to talk, chat-enabled, and able to transmit photos.

  “Hey, is that a Harris radio?”

  “Sure is. Best we got. Can even text on this puppy.” The MP held up the dark green device not much bigger than a remote control.

  All Chikatilo cared about was that the Harris radio operated in the 30–108 MHz range, confirming his intelligence that the range he needed was what the installation military police used. The Army
would be blocking all other radio signals to protect against remote detonated explosives at the gate, just as in combat. Which meant that the only signals that could be sent and received here would be within that spectrum and most likely attributed to one of the military police-operated Harris radios.

  “Have a nice morning, now, y’hear,” the man called out to him as he nudged the gas pedal and slowly turned back toward the gate.

  “Same to you, officer.”

  Chikatilo turned and saw that Bundy and Manson were staring at him, apparently done with their work.

  Once the police cruiser was out of earshot, Chikatilo said, “Rig the bitch.”

  Rig the bitch really meant connect the battery wires to the MVX-90, the programmer’s back door into US military communications. When armed by a call from Chikatilo’s cell phone, the MVX-90 would recognize the next radio transmission within the 30–108 MHz bandwidth as “friendly” and allow it to proceed to its intended target, the bomb. Once activated, a passive infrared device would pulse an invisible light across the road. When a vehicle crossed the beam, the passive infrared device would ignite the blasting caps in the twenty explosively formed penetrators they had just installed in the faux curbstone.

  The copper discs would turn to a nearly molten form, enough to transition from concave to convex and become a hardening fist of alchemy heading straight for twenty different targets at the speed of seven thousand feet per second. The blast was intended to maim and kill as many soldiers and family members as possible at the main gate.

  Bundy and Manson looked at him when they were done and nodded.

  “Camera set and ready?”

  Bundy, the Iraqi, nodded and said, “Inshallah.” God willing.

  Chikatilo had them secure a small wireless camera that could be monitored from the mobile command post inside the white work vehicle in which they traveled. When he was satisfied that the target area was sufficiently populated, he would call the small cell phone lying in the grass underneath some leaves. The cell phone was connected to the MVX-90 receiver inside the faux curbstone by a thin copper wire no bigger than a speaker wire for a stereo.

  “Let’s move.”

  The two men nodded. One was from Iraq and the other from Afghanistan. The Iraqi was an excellent electrician, while the Afghan made the best homemade explosives Chikatilo had ever seen.

  They understood most of what Chikatilo said to them and of course they understood “Rig the Bitch,” because they had rehearsed it a hundred times. Where necessary, Chikatilo easily rotated between his native Pashtun tongue or his passable Arabic.

  Chikatilo packed up his troops in their utility van and slowly pulled away into the early morning dawn that beckoned just over the horizon. He drove about a mile up the road and turned onto a side street. Slamming the van into park, he turned around and watched Manson, the one from Afghanistan, strip off his construction uniform and shave his body. The man held a Koran for a moment and spread his palms upward as he canted his supplications. Done, Manson strapped rows of C4 explosives packed with one-penny nails and wood screws around his midsection. He then donned khaki pants, running shoes, and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked like an average Middle Eastern American trying to fit into Western culture.

  He had begun to connect the detonator when Chikatilo reached out and said, “Whoa, buddy. Rig that bitch up when you get there.”

  Manson grinned, understanding.

  “You know the route, right? Don’t forget this.” Chikatilo held up a second cell phone, pressed dial, let it ring once, and then hung up. He then made a cradle with his arms, as if he were holding an infant. “Get close to children and women.”

  Manson, the Afghan, nodded. They had rehearsed this part, too. He grabbed the cell phone and pocketed it, then hugged Bundy, the Iraqi, before jumping out of the double back doors of the van. Chikatilo gave him a few minutes to get moving, confirmed he was heading in the right direction, and then pulled onto I-20 heading east before turning north on I-95.

  He parked the van at a rest stop on I-95 about forty miles away from the base and watched the remote camera’s image through the Wi-Fi/satellite uplink. He saw the traffic creep along through the panorama of the camera. He tilted the toggle and zoomed in, catching a few officer stickers on the passes. Those were blue, enlisted were red, and civilians were green. He slewed the camera to the left and saw the line of cars growing. He slewed to the right and saw the security guards taking identification tags, scanning them in bar code scanners, and handing them back. The line had slowed to a crawl, giving Chikatilo the opportunity to study the faces in the cars. He saw mostly men, but also several women and children. He was thankful that there were schools and day care centers on the base. Everything was moving according to plan. Now was the time.

  Chikatilo picked up one of many disposable cell phones, dialed the number, and listened as the receiving phone began to ring. He zoomed the camera onto the phone in the ditch beneath the leaves and saw the red light flashing in a gap in the detritus they had purposely left behind. He zoomed in to the tiny passive infrared switch and saw that it had properly activated as indicated by the dull green light on the back, which he could see through the tiny hole he had carved through the Styrofoam curb. There was a similar hole on the other side of the Styrofoam that would soon be pulsing an infrared beam.

  The key now was to get the military police at the gate to make a radio call, which would begin the cycle.

  Chikatilo next dialed the military police station at Fort Brackett and said, “I can’t say who I am, but you’ve got something really bad about to happen at the main gate. I’m watching it now and people are going to die. Remember the sniper who shot at an entire brigade formation or the guy who shot all those people at Ziti’s restaurant? Well, this is bigger. You need to lock the main gate down now!”

  He heard some scrambling in the background and a new voice came on the line, asking, “Who is this?”

  “I’m telling you, man. Some serious shit is about to go down if you don’t get some dogs and military police and first-aid teams out to the main gate. You are not prepared for this.”

  “Stand by,” the voice said. Chikatilo heard the man pick up something, which thudded on the desk once, and then heard some more voices in the background. Then he heard a small beep indicating the man in the police station had pressed the transmit button of a secure radio, probably a Harris and most definitely in the 30–108 MHz range. Push to talk.

  “Guardian six, this is Guardian one six,” the voice said.

  Chikatilo turned his attention to the camera, which showed the passive infrared switch was now glowing a bright green. The MVX-90 had done its job. He hung up the cell phone and panned the camera out so that he could see more cars still stacking up.

  There was a bored young man with the high-and-tight haircut of a paratrooper driving a Ford Focus directly in line with the lethal curbstone. He looked ahead, mouthed something that Chikatilo thought looked like, “This sucks,” and then looked to the right. The soldier’s car was completely stopped and perhaps three feet from the now pulsating infrared switch. Nothing was moving. Then the young man stared hard at the curbstone. It occurred to Chikatilo that a lot of the men and women in the traffic jam at the front gate had been on three or four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and knew what these bombs looked like.

  The young man yanked up the parking brake on his car, eyes wide, and stepped out of his vehicle and started screaming. Chikatilo couldn’t tell what he was saying, but he guessed it was something like, “Nobody move!” He was holding his arms up and walking to the rear of the formation of cars, away from the curbstone. Chikatilo saw a female soldier in uniform with two children in child car seats, both in the back. The soldier turned her head and braked hard.

  For a moment he worried that the male soldier would stop the mission, but then someone in the other lane flipped him off and nudged forward. The car broke the invisible beam, and suddenly the camera picture was lost in an explosion that a few
seconds later he and Bundy actually heard at the rest stop forty miles away.

  Chikatilo continued to watch the bedlam as fuel tanks on cars exploded. Copper plates traveling seven thousand feet per second through thin-skinned vehicles, mangled bodies, and tore off limbs. Survivors began screaming for medics.

  Chikatilo resisted calling Manson, who should be waiting on the opposite side of the chaos from where the bomb had exploded. It took exactly fourteen minutes and thirty-two seconds for the first ambulance to get to the scene. Chikatilo timed the response. He had predicted fifteen to twenty minutes. All of this was important for the future missions.

  Manson’s instructions were to wait until he had a crowd of over thirty people gawking at the scene. Soon, another three ambulances arrived and the throng of do-gooders trying to yank the injured from their vehicles grew dramatically.

  Chikatilo watched as Manson, in his blue jeans and Hawaiian shirt, jogged to the largest mass of people near the main gate. He was running as if he wanted desperately to help. No one turned in his direction, as they were all fixated on the death and destruction to their front. Cars were smoldering, tires were smoking, and fires were burning. People were burning. Chikatilo watched on the display monitor as Manson became the single best guided missile ever.

  Manson waded into the middle of the crowd, pushing and shoving his way to the absolute center of the mass as if he were a doctor who could heal all that had been broken. He found a mother holding a baby, screaming with an outstretched arm, perhaps looking at the molten ruins of another child. Manson put his arm around the grief-stricken mother holding the wailing baby.

  Then he detonated himself.

  For a second time the screen went gray with smoke and debris flying in a fury of destruction.

  Chikatilo nodded, looked at Bundy, and said, “You’re up next, buddy.”