Chapter 3
Futile Attempts
Year 2024
Friday
March 31
05:09 Hours
Southern Cairo
Cairo, Egypt
Alpha Team Remnants and CIA Operatives
Air Force Special Forces
Dragon Skin Attack Group
Benny Hayes thought if he consumed one more energy drink, he might have a heart attack; going three days without any sleep, then attempting to wirelessly hack into military satellite records was a dumb choice. His hands were very tired from five hours of straight typing. Never again am I going to try this.
Brandon Jenkins woke with a start, instinctively he grabbed his combat knife that was under his pillow and threw it at the door. The twenty inch blade sunk deep into the thin wooden door. The door opened and a wide eyed Lieutenant stood at the door. Segraves looked at the knife sticking out the other side of the door and back at Jenkins. "Jesus Christ! I was just waking you up!"
"Sorry, man. I didn't mean to." Jenkins looked at his clock and noticed that it was early. "Why did you wake me up so early?"
"All your servers just crashed, and Benny is about to have a heart attack."
Jenkins jumped out of bed, and ran to the server room. He found Benny staring at a static covered screen shouting obsenities at the display.
Jenkins glanced at the screen, the servers, and Benny. He turned around to see Segraves walk out of the room. "Where are you going?" he asked.
The pilot turned glanced over his shoulder, and said (just barely audible over Benny's yelling), "I'm going to wake Cortez up." The man walked out of the room.
Cortez was not sleeping well. He was having dreams of his team, gutted, dead, and mutilated. He heard screaming.
He woke up. The screams continued then suddenly stopped. He brought his hand behind his ear and pressed down on the little metal piece just underneath his skin. In his left eye, a miniscule projector behind his eye shot up a small display in his vision. In this projection were all the heart rates of the soldiers once under his command. He went down the list. The projector, connected directly to the thinking part of his brain, heard him and brought up the information that he wanted. Nicholas James, dead. All of Zulu Team, deceased. Shawn O'Reily, No heart monitor left. Benny Hayes, fast, but still in the norm. Brandy Halverson, rapid, strained heart rate. Wait! What was that? He mentally scrolled up the "page." Brandy Halverson, rapid, strained heart rate. Antolin Rivera, just above normal. Tyler Travis, just above normal. They're Still Alive!
Cortez leapt out of the bunk, quickly pulled on some pants, thrust open the door, knocking over Lieutenant Segraves. Cortez apologized and helped him up off the floor. "Eric, they're alive! They're still alive!"
Segraves stood still for a moment pondering the possibilities that this could be true. "Wait what?"
"The others, they are still alive." said Cortez. He started to run down the hall toward the server room. He figured if anyone would be there it would at least be Benny.
CIA Operatives Jacob Lee and Sara DeMott were hanging on the beam just outside the window where two men were smoking. The men had left the window wide open, as if no one could get through it. The two operatives silently swung themselves in and landed on the floor behind them, making no sound at all. The field operatives crept up on the two men. The ends of their cigarettes lit up the room like the dull coals of a bonfire. The men had no idea that smoking those cigarettes would be the last activity in their life.
Hands crept toward the men's heads like ghosts. The hands grasped the men's heads, and jerked sharply to the side with a "crunch" as the bones in their spine popped and snapped. Slowly the hands lowered the bodies to the floor and retreated. Both the operatives silently crept to the other side of the room, drew their silenced pistols and opened the door.
Hussein was watching the brunette woman be tortured. He believed that the background check that his men were performing had at least turned up with the name Brandy Halverson. He simply stared at the female having her face shoved in water almost to the point of drowning repeatedly, yet she still wouldn't talk. She was a beautiful woman, but she still was American, therefore she was vile in his sight. He waved a hand, and the man who was dunking her stopped. The American kneeled there, bound, wet in the harsh, fluorescent light. Hussein stood up, walked over to her, and crouched down until he was at eye level with her. "Where are your rescuers? Who is going to save you?" he asked her. No answer. "I wonder how long it is going to take to break you." He ran a finger slowly through her brown hair. She attempted to lash out at him, but the man restraining her pulled her by the shoulder to the floor, and brought a massive closed fist striking down on her face.
"What do you want?" she asked as she got back up. Her cheek was bleeding from the punishing blow that was dealt to her. He crouched down again and looked her in the eye and said, "I want the death of you and the rest of your kind."
When Cortez arrived at the server room, he didn't just find Benny, he found Brandon Jenkins at the Main server computer typing at lightning speed. He did not know what to make of it. Benny was facing away from the static-distorted screen cursing under his breath. The screen returned to its normal format after another minute or two of typing by Jenkins. Benny walked back over to the desk on which the computer rested, connected to the servers, and asked, "What went wrong." Jenkins looked over his shoulder at him and replied, "It looks like most of the information on server you want has been moved, or destroyed. I found a little bit of video on it, but nothing else."
"Pull it up," said Cortez, "come on, let's see that video." Both of the other men in the room jumped up, surprised that he was in the room. Cortez walked over to the computer's screen. Segraves entered the room and joined them by the computer. Jenkins pulled up the video. It was an aerial view of the mosque and the surrounding area that the team had been tasked with raiding. It showed the men in the mosque preparing for the attack. Off to the upper right-hand corner of the screen it showed Cortez his teams meet up with each other. On the roof of the building next to them was a man with a radio in hand, staring at his team, then back to the mosque. They had been tipped off, they knew we were coming before we even got there! Cortez thought. The video contained the rest of the firefight between the Americans and the terrorists. After the battle the monitor displayed the enemies taking the prisoners offscreen, but it showed the informant getting in a nearby car and driving away. Jenkins paused the video. He zoomed in on the informant's face. The man was of middle-eastern ancestry. Benny shoved Brandon out of the way, zoomed in on the man's right eye, pulled up another program, and started to scan the man's eye. "What are you basing the biometric eye scan against?" asked Segraves.
"I am basing the scan off of the CIA database for known terrorists. If you had bothered to stay up later last night, you would have seen me hack into the CIA's mainframe computer wirelessly." retorted Benny. On one side of the screen was the man's eye and on the other side were thousand's of eyes going by each second. The revolution of eyes suddenly stopped on an eye that looked just like the man's eye. The two eyes joined into one eye; next to it appeared a picture of the man, his name, known affiliates, and possible safe houses. Benny watched this information appear and said, in a fake British accent, "Why, hello there."
Jenkins looked at the screen and said, "Nice job, man. Hey, maybe this guy knows where your team is Cortez." Benny suddenly pushed himself away from the computer desk and yelled, "There is no way that they are even alive now; it's been seven days since they were captured! There is no point to even doing this."
"Actually there you are wrong," said Cortez, putting his hand on Benny's shoulder, "Check your implant, their hearts are still beating." He pointed to the man on the computer screen and said, "We need to find them, and I think this man might know where to look."
CIA Head Superintendent Nicholas Patides walked down the hallways of the Langley headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, located in Virginia. The tall stocky man of Greek descent was head of everything in the agency, except for certain things that only the director of the CIA could control. The geeks down in the computer lab had told him that someone had hacked flawlessly into the mainframe computer. Now, not only was the integrity of the agency in trouble, but now Director Walters wanted his neck. This was a dangerous situation for him.
He walked past several doors, stopped at one, took out his key-card, swiped it, and stepped inside the door. He passed an attractive woman walking the other way, turned around and stared at her backside. God, I love this place! He continued his approach to the door at the end of this corridor. The unlocked it and stepped into his secretary's office. She handed him some files, which he grabbed and quickly headed into his personal office.
Inside his office he sat down in his leather, highback chair. He logged onto his PC and checked his e-mail. He had only one in his inbox. It was from the director; he was requesting for him to come to a meeting in fifteen minutes. His phone rang and he picked it up, "Yes Sheryl?"
"It's a person from Frank's Pizzeria asking about your delivery."
"Thank you, I'll take care of it."
He closed the line on which he was just talking on. He pushed the button on his phone that opened the second line. He put the earpiece to his head, "Hello."
"Yes, did you order a large pizza with pepperoni, anchovies, and bacon?"
Nicholas thought about it for a second, deciphering the message mentally. "Why, yes I did."
"Well I didn't know if you wanted to explain to our friends in Greece that our Middle-Eastern partners have made no headway with the prisoners. Or if you wanted to tell them about the fact that those dumb towel-heads were raided by several of your CIA agents!"
"I was just about to talk to those 'towel-heads' if you hadn't called." replied Superintendent Patides. "If you excuse me, Dean, I have to go to a meeting now."
"Just remember, you are still replaceable." Suddenly the line went dead.
Almost immediately after he had put down the phone, his personal cell phone rang. He opened it, put it to his ear and said, "Yes Baleesh, have you had any progress?"
A heavy Middle-Eastern accent replied, "No, but we are starting to break the Hispanic one. Probably by tomorrow he will have talked. Oh, by the way, did you send us some visitors?"
Nicholas lied to the man and said that he had no knowledge of this happening. In actuality, he had sent those three agents over there. He knew they would be found, and hopefully killed by Hussein's men. Those three knew too much, they had reason to suspect his involvement with the Greek terrorist group, the November Seventeenths. He had needed that fact to be kept silent.
"Anyways," Hussein Baleesh continued, "the woman is going to need more force; she is the tough one out of the group. Oh, in case you were wondering, if your agency sends any more agents, not only will they be killed, but the one agent I have as a prisoner will be killed on live TV. I think his name is Brandon Ball."
A stunned superintendent said his goodbyes to the terrorist and turned off his cell phone. He looked up saw that it was nearly time for him to go to this meeting. He got up, put his overcoat back on and headed out.
Field Operative DeMott couldn't believe that she was in this situation. She was doing a split between two walls right above a bald Iraqi. If the man were to look up, well, he would get an interesting view. A few feet in front of was a door, the door she had to get through. Her and Operative Lee had split up, to find Agent Ball easier. The position her body was in was a very difficult one to hold for several minutes, much less an hour. Her legs were about to give way, and she if that would happen, she would land very hard on "Baldy's" head. She scooted forward, inch by inch, and dropped down behind the man. Quietly she moved her hand to her right thigh, unclipped her silenced pistol, aimed it straight at the tan dome, looked away, and pulled the trigger. The dark room lit up a tiny bit and then went dark in an instant. She felt a little bit of blood splatter against her face. She put her pistol away, and wiped the blood off her Caucasian skin, leaving a crimson streak down her left cheek. She turned around and headed out of the room.
CIA Director Mark Walters sat at a long thin table surrounded by his senior staff. On his right was Head Superintendent Nicholas Patides. On his lefthand side was the Head of Applied Technologies, Antoinette Kolbe. Next to her was the Head of Computer Sciences, Karl Cramer. Right in front of him was the Head of Agent Affairs, Jon Spranger.
Mark Walters had joined the CIA young, but quickly climbed up the ladder to where he was today; he was the youngest man ever to run the CIA. At the age of thirty-two, he was under a lot of stress lately. To add onto the normal stress, someone had hacked into the mainframe computer (a feat that was not supposed to be possible) and three field operatives were in trouble. All of his staff were fairly young, but they were all more experienced in politics and espionage than him.
He turned to face Mr. Cramer. "I know they got something," he said, "but I want to know what they took." The small, balding man looked scared. He stammered and told him that the intruder took only the list of known terrorists, their information, their fingerprint, eyescans, and known affiliates. This was not as bad as he thought it would be, but still it was a wake up call. "I want you and your people to strengthen and enforce all spyware, firewalls, and anti-hacker crap by 300%. Now!" He said to the short man. Cramer nodded and headed out of the room.
Then he turned to face his second in command and the man in charge of all his agents. "Who are these agents and what the hell were they doing over there?"
Spranger replied saying, "The three operatives were Field Agent Brandon Ball, Field Operative Sara DeMott, and Field Operative Jacob Lee."
"Thank you. That still does not tell me what they were there for."
"They were there, because I sent them over there," piped up Superintendent Patides, "I had reasons to suspect that several known terrorists were at that warehouse, and it looks like my assumptions were correct. It also looks like they obviously were not fit for the job."
"Thank you, Nick." He backed up to face the three remaining people at the table and said, "Now, how do we get them back?"
"We could always make our lives easier and disavow the three of them." Walters had never liked how heartless his superintendent could be. If they disavowed the agents, the US government would deny the very existence of them.
"We could send a rescue team." Said Antoinette Kolbe
"How would we even know if they were still there, maybe they were taken to a different place."
"People, I don't care if we have to hire mercenaries to find them, just find a way to find them." said Walters. "Whatever happened to those soldiers that escaped that base over in Baghdad?"
"They disappeared from the grid, once they went past Saudi Arabia."
"Maybe if we find them, they can help us."
Sara DeMott was walking down the corridors, when she saw a dull flash down the hallway ahead. She drew her pistol and aimed at the door that had just opened. Out of the door walked Jacob Lee. He stared over his shoulder at Sara and pointed at an adjoining hallway. She joined up with him and they headed down the hallway.
The two operatives walked into a long room that resembled a prison. They walked past several cells, when they found one with several people in it. When they stepped near the cell, one of the occupants turned around. The woman put her finger to her lip to signal for them to be quiet. She crept toward the gate of the cell as if to talk to them. Instinctively Jacob asked her in a hushed tone if Field Agent Ball was in the cell. The woman looked to her right and nodded. Sara took out her lock picks, and started to pick the lock.
Suddenly there was a loud crack, and a sharp pain in her side. She slumped to her side, ripped her pistol out and unloaded it on the man who had shot her. Beside her, Jacob drew his weapon and aimed it at the door. He looked down at his fellow operative who was on the floor, clutching her side. As he looked down, a bullet entered his right shoulder. He was knocked back, dropping his gun. He fell to the floor. He attempted to stand up, but twin cables shot toward him, connected with his chest, and the slumped heavily to the ground. Sara looked down at her side and saw that blood was oozing out of a small, deep wound. She bought her gaze up in time to see the wooden butt of an AK-47 coming down toward her head.