Cliff Ryder - Aim And Fire

A deceased man placing an order from beyond the grave? Someone wanted to make a bomb, but what if they got the chance to pick one up that was assembled and ready to blow? All they’d need to do was get it across the border, which, while difficult, wasn’t impossible, accord-ing to the most recent border security review, Kate thought.

She used one of the installed back-door programs that enabled her to access any government network without being detected. Bringing up the network for the U.S.

Customs and Border Protection department of the DHS, she entered the keywords Mexico, nuclear, border, kill terrorist, and directed the system to scan all files accessed within the previous forty-eight hours.

Hundreds of messages back and forth between station offices and Washington filled her screen. Kate sat back and used a trick she had learned during grad school. She let her eyes wander over the long list, relying on her subcon-scious to home in on the message that would be most useful. Her gaze alighted on one subject line. Two Border Patrol Agents And Multiple Illegals Killed North Of Border Outside El Paso. Opening the message, Kate read a concise summary of an incident involving a pair of Border Patrol agents and twenty-three illegal immigrants, all shot at what should have been a routine stop. What was strange was that the coyotes had been killed, as well, and everyone had been shot multiple times, many in the back of the head at close range. The Border Patrol SUV had been found several miles away, a burned wreck, but the truck that had been carrying the human cargo had disappeared. It wasn’t just a random murder; it had been a massacre.

Who would go to such lengths to kill everyone at the scene? she wondered. The answer came to her immediately. Someone who had something to hide, and when their cover was compromised, they didn’t hesitate to kill everyone to insure that they wouldn’t be seen. What could be that important? A suitcase nuke?

Kate leaned forward again and brought up the e-mail from the Border Patrol agent, putting the two side by side.

She felt a familiar strange fluttering in her stomach that heralded a leap in her intuitive logic. She knew the two incidents were connected, although she couldn’t explain why. It just felt right; that was all. But that was enough to start on, anyway. The proof would have to come later.

She looked at where the agent’s e-mail had ended up— the in-box of an analyst named Tracy Wentworth. My dear, I think you may be doing a lot more than you expected tomorrow, Kate thought, letting the rest of her dinner grow cold as she made preparations to travel to Washington the next day. Hope you’re up for the challenge.

The man known as Narid al-Gaffari had driven more than twenty-five hundred miles over the past three days, but instead of exhausted, he felt more and more invigorated as he neared his final destination.

Traveling down the highway at a steady seventy miles per hour in his nondescript Honda Accord, Narid took a moment to marvel at the diversity of the land he had spent every waking hour driving through so far. This was a far cry from his first visit to America, more than a decade earlier. Then he had been much more cautious, seeing enemies around every corner, the specter of police surveillance on every block. Now he looked back on those days as the easy times. After 9/11, there were still plenty of opportunities to sow the seeds of fear throughout the bloated American infrastructure—seeds that were still bearing fruit. But the paranoia, even if justified, had increased, and then the U.S. agencies had also started getting things right, so much so that al-Gaffari had resorted to what some might have considered desperate measures to rid himself of the surveillance. Desperate but effective—after all, few people spent time looking for a dead man.

This time, he had landed on the rugged coast of British Columbia in the dead of night, transferring from a freighter to a fishing boat that had dropped him off on shore. From there he had driven east, through the thick forests and the Cascade Mountain range and over the Rockies into the Great Plains, where the elevated beauty of the mountains that reminded him of home was replaced by the endless, flat grasslands that reminded him of the arid plains of Af-ghanistan that bloomed briefly in spring.

His map had been clearly marked, and when he’d reached the correct point, he turned south and followed a small maze of back roads to find what his contacts had said was an unwatched route into the United States of America.

Although he had initially expressed doubt about this plan, he had been delighted to discover that it was exactly as promised—unrestricted access to the U.S. Although the passport and identification papers for his alias would stand up to determined scrutiny, he had decided to enter the country this way, not willing to risk being matched to a watch list and compromising the entire reason he had taken this trip in the first place.

As it turned out, he hadn’t had much reason to fear.

After the crossing, his trip through the former breadbas-ket of America had been uneventful, even dull. The next few days had followed the same pattern—driving inter-spersed with sparse meals—halal food was hard to come by out here—brief breaks for his daily prayers until stopping at small, privately owned motels off the highway that were just glad enough to have a customer prepay in cash that they would overlook the securing of the room with a credit card. The fact that Narid spoke impeccable English, with a genteel British accent, did much to put the propri-etors’ minds at ease.

For his part, he was a model tourist—quiet, neat, polite and minding his own business. Even when three drunken good ol’ boys had tried to play “rag the raghead,” as they had jeeringly called it before being stopped by a sheriff’s deputy—which gave Narid his only real fear of discovery during the entire trip—he had thanked the khaki-clad officer and declined to press charges. He had, however, gotten out of town immediately, and hadn’t stopped driving until he was three hundred miles away. Allah would certainly not have looked favorably upon him had he let the entire operation be jeopardized by a chance encounter with those uncultured thugs.

Winding his way through the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, Narid had passed plenty of empty land, and the peace and quiet he experienced while driving through those areas reaffirmed his determination to carry out the mission. He knew that the dividing line of the Mississippi River bisected this country to the east, and on the other side were tens of millions of people, crammed into their sprawling cities, half-clad in their revealing clothes, eating their artificial food, watching their mindless enter-tainment, listening to their banal music, smug in their com-placency because they lived in what they thought was the most powerful nation on earth. It was a notion Narid would be only too happy to disabuse them of soon. But in a way, he was glad to see that this heartland wouldn’t be as affected by what he was about to set into motion. The people out here had been unassuming and friendly, men who worked the land and the women who stood by them. For the most part, they had let him go about his business with hardly a raised eyebrow, even given his obvious heritage.

Crossing the border into Texas had lifted his spirits im-mensely, and now, only a few dozen miles from his goal, Narid’s pulse quickened as the city of El Paso appeared in the distance. He resisted the urge to press the accelerator down, but left the highway and headed east instead, traveling on a series of progressively smaller roads until he turned down a narrow dirt road surrounded by featureless brown plains, broken only by an occasional small rise or hill. He followed it for another five miles, pulling up to a small complex of buildings on ten acres, ringed by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Large signs in English and Spanish warned that the fence was electrified. But what truly made the business unique was the white, three-story rocket that rose like a narrow finger on a launch pad in the middle of the buildings, pointing toward the heavens. A sign on the hill outside the perimeter proclaimed the company’s name—Spaceworks, Inc.