Counterplay Read online

  Published by Nightstand Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Richard Aaron

  First Edition

  Nightstand Press

  P.O. Box 178122

  San Diego, CA 92177

  www.richardaaron.com

  Cover & Interior Design: GKS Creative, www.gkscreative.com

  Counterplay is a work of fiction. Apart from well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information

  in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such

  errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

  Library of Congress Case Number TBD

  ISBN: 978-1-948792-24-0 (Ingram Spark paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-948792-20-2 (KDP paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-948792-16-5 (ebook)

  For media or booking inquiries, please contact:

  STRATEGIES Public Relations

  P.O. Box 178122

  San Diego, CA 92177

  858-467-1978

  [email protected]

  First printed in the United State of America.

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO…

  My Children

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  One acre-foot of water is equivalent to a volume of water spread out over one acre, to a depth of one foot. There are 27 million of these in Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States. Lake Powell sits at the northern end of the Grand Canyon. When the Glen Canyon Dam failed, this water, traveling at 100 miles per hour, traversed the 292-mile Grand Canyon in under three hours. Over this distance, the Colorado River drops approximately one-half mile.

  The water did not flow in a smooth manner. The canyon walls disintegrated in an uneven, discontinuous fashion. The surges of water would be temporarily blocked by a massive bank collapse. Then, with the accumulation of force and pressure from the upstream current, the barrier would blow apart, and the unstoppable, chaotic tsunamis would continue along their downhill course. This process repeated endlessly as Lake Powell emptied itself.

  Lake Mead sits at the southwestern end of the Grand Canyon. This lake is the largest reservoir in the United States. It contains almost twenty-nine million acre-feet of water. The pulses of water exiting the Grand Canyon, some 300 to 400 feet high, smashed into Lake Mead creating similar, massive tsunamis.

  At the southwest end of Lake Mead lies a small, enclosed canyon called Black Canyon. This canyon is approximately a mile long and a quarter mile wide. The Hoover Dam is situated at the southern tip of Black Canyon. The surges of water entering Black Canyon initially bounced back from the Hoover Dam, which is much more robust than the Glen Canyon Dam. The structure could hold back water up to its crest and remain intact. Such an assessment assumed, however, that the water flow would be even.

  This, however, was not the case. At the point where the breakers entered Black Canyon, they were 100 to 200 feet high. Some crashed over the dam, and some crashed into the dam. All four intake towers were destroyed by the first few whitecaps. The Hoover Dam itself withstood this punishment, at first. However, many of the tsunamis were reflected back from the upstream face of the Hoover Dam to the northern end of Black Canyon. There was destructive and constructive interference between the reflected waves and further waves entering the canyon. Destructive interference occurs when the crest of one wave hits the trough of another, reducing the amplitude, in a laboratory setting, to zero. However, when they are in phase, they superimpose on one another, doubling in height. This phenomenon occurred continuously within the walls of Black Canyon. For months. In fact, when such a process occurs for a sufficiently long period of time, there is a high statistical likelihood that two giant waves, created through constructive interference, would themselves superimpose, creating super tsunamis, increasing them to unimaginable heights. Within minutes of the first surges entering Black Canyon, it became a chaotic cauldron of forces; forces not even a dam as solidly constructed as the Hoover could withstand.

  Water flows in the Colorado River are completely controlled. The Davis, Parker, Headgate, Imperial, and Morelos dams are all located downstream from the Hoover Dam. Each of these dams created large reservoirs upstream. Large hydroelectric generation facilities were erected downstream. None of these dams were engineered to survive the catastrophic, pulsing water exiting from the two largest reservoirs in the country. In all, seven dams were destroyed, and seven reservoirs were emptied before the US Army Corps of Engineers was able to bring the catastrophe under control. Severe shortfalls in electricity and potable water resulted. Phoenix, Yuma, Las Vegas, and many other desert cities became ghost towns.

  2

  The Stealth Hawk was hovering, eerily silent, several feet above the roadway near the fortress of Inzar Ghar. While Pakistan claimed dominion over the region, the reality was somewhat different. Inzar Ghar lay in the ungovernable tribal lands that connected Pakistan and Afghanistan. The only real authority there was the Pashtun: a tribal presence amongst whom Yousseff Said al-Sabhan was king.

  Two heavily armed men, Richard Lawrence and Zak Goldberg, disembarked. “Don’t go far,” Richard told the pilots. “When we’re done, we’re likely to have a few dozen guys in heavy pursuit.”

  The purpose of the mission was straightforward. One of the executive planners of the Colorado River attack, Kumar Hanaman, wanted to talk. His conscience had apparently begun to trouble him. Yousseff had imprisoned Kumar in his private mountain fortress, Inzar Ghar. The American intelligence community wanted to have a chat with Kumar.

  “Don’t fret, Rich. We’re patched into the comm-link,” the pilot said. “We won’t be more than five minutes away.”

  Richard helped Zak out of the Stealth Hawk. Zak was not yet fully acclimatized to his prosthetic arm and hobbled a bit, the cadence of his step hampere
d by two missing toes, courtesy of Hamani, the ghoul of the Inzar Ghar dungeons. As the Stealth Hawk gained elevation, the pilot shook his head. “They’ve lost in it DC,” he said to his mate. “Zak isn’t ready for physical combat. Doubt that he will ever be.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the copilot. “And the word is that Richard is just out of rehab. I’ve heard that Inzar Ghar has more security than a supermax. Glad we’re just the bus drivers.”

  The technology that created the comm-link was as complex as it was ingenious. It was routed through a multitude of satellites and military bases. Its ultimate destination was the TTIC control room in Washington, DC.

  The most intriguing part of the comm-link was Zak Goldberg. He had a radio transponder embedded in the prosthesis that served as his left forearm. He had spent several weeks as Hamani’s prisoner, but managed to escape before Hamani’s medical procedures took too great a toll on him. When, five months after his escape, he stumbled into the gates at Bagram Airfield a few miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan, he was half mad with pain, fatigue, exhaustion, and infection. He had been deprived of a left forearm and two toes, compliments of the grim Hamani. Over the coming months, he would have been slowly carved, burned, gouged, hammered, sawn, or sliced into oblivion—a course of action Hamani attempted to make last as long as possible.

  Yousseff was furious when he discovered that first Richard and then Zak had escaped from the fortress. He ordered his engineers to install a cuttingedge security system in Inzar Ghar. Hard-wired and highly encrypted, it featured more than one hundred cameras and fully automated electronic locking systems managed from a sophisticated control hub. The system was not connected to the internet, and thus was unhackable.

  A local farm boy, Fazal Khan, had been placed in charge of the system, and there were no further security incidents. Fazal, however, was as kinked as he was bored, and spent the better part of his nights exploring the seamy underbelly of the internet on his cell phone. Inzar Ghar had a wi-fi network within it, a network that was separate and distinct from the high-tech security system. However, no security system is idiot-proof.

  In the long, boring night shifts that Fazal preferred, when he was the only person monitoring the control hub, he would surf through an infinite variety of porn sites on his phone, searching for ever more sadistic videos. Late one night, he realized he could Bluetooth his phone to the system and peruse various perversions on one of the sixty-inch display monitors in the control hub.

  “Come in, TTIC.” Zak spoke quickly but quietly over his collar microphone. “Come in.” Nine time zones to the west in the TTIC control room, Zak’s voice was piped through the perfectly duplexed ceiling speaker system.

  “Got you, Zak,” said Hamilton Turbee, the autistic mathematician who had written much of the code that formed the skeleton of the TTIC systems.

  “Do you have us GPS’d?” Zak asked.

  Turbee nodded. “We do.” He keyed a series of commands into the system and an aerial view of Inzar Ghar appeared on the atlas screen, a forty-fivefoot in diameter circular convex screen that rose up out of the TTIC control room floor. Richard and Zak were visible, although somewhat pixilated, just east of the fortress. A red dot was blinking immediately next to them.

  “How close are we to the first set of cameras?”

  “One minute,” said Turbee as he clicked his way through the program.

  Myriad blue lights appeared around the perimeter of the fortress.

  “We’ve got it,” Turbee said. He measured the distance between the red dot and the nearest blue dots. “A little less than one hundred yards. Hold up until I’m in the Inzar Ghar control hub.”

  Turbee had cracked into the system several days earlier using the Bluetooth bridge between the fortress’ wi-fi and the control hub servers. The massive IBM octa-core supercomputers that powered TTIC had no difficulty brute forcing through the high-level encryption and gaining control of the Inzar Ghar security servers. Every video feed from the fortress system was redirected to TTIC, and appeared on the 303-inch video screens attached to the inside peripheral wall of the control room. None of this was known to Fazal, the custodian of Inzar Ghar on duty at the moment.

  “Give me a second to take control of all the cameras and locks,” said Turbee. He turned to the woman sitting next to him. “Which button, Khasha?”

  Khasha, a twenty-nine-year-old linguistics expert seconded from the NSA, was sitting beside Turbee at his workstation. She was born in Iran, and knew many Middle Eastern languages well. The writing beneath the various buttons and menus on the screen in front of Turbee was Pashto, the language of the Pashtun people.

  “These two,” she said, pointing, scanning the video in front of them.

  Turbee clicked on the small icons and the images on all the cameras froze. Any alert operator would have no difficulty in seeing the abnormal behavior of the video screens. Fazal, however, was highly alert but intensely focused on only the Bluetoothed sixty-inch monitor.

  “Move ahead, guys,” said Turbee. “Everything is locked and frozen. We have full control.”

  “Roger that,” Zak replied.

  The two approached the fortress, rising above them like a massive medieval castle. “You up for this, Rich? From what I hear, you got uncorked on your last visit.”

  “Maybe, bro. So did you,” Richard replied.

  “Yeah. If Hamani’s in there, I’m going to feed him to the rats, little bits at a time.”

  “If we had time, Zak, if we only had the time I would stir-fry the little psychopath. But we’re here to spring Kumar.”

  One of the American drones flying lazy eights above Inzar Ghar was equipped with sensitive infrared detection equipment. That information had also been redirected to TTIC. Seconds later, a number of bright smudges appeared on the atlas screen.

  “We’ve got four outside guards,” said Turbee, his voice becoming raspy. “Two on each side of the gate. In the small gun towers.”

  “Roger,” said Richard. He looked at Zak. “Why don’t we fire RPGs into each tower? That will take all four out.”

  “It will, so long as we keep all the other guards frozen where they are,” Zak replied. “Can we do that?” he asked over the comm-link.

  “Their control system is completely frozen,” Turbee replied. “And all the doors are locked. No one is going to bother you for the next few minutes.”

  “Good,” said Zak. “You take the left, Rich. I’ll take the right.”

  Within seconds the top of each guard tower was lit up by two grenades, shattering the calm night air. Zak missed with one; he was not yet fully comfortable with his prosthetic forearm. The missed grenade zipped past the tower and entered one of the upper windows of the grim fortress. Lights came on and shouting pierced the echoing thunder of the five grenades. At the sound of the explosions, Fazal looked up and saw all the screens in front of him frozen. He desperately entered commands into the system, but was unable to unlock any door or unfreeze any camera. Everything was now controlled by Turbee, some 8,000 miles away.

  “Open the front doors, Turbee,” Richard said.

  “Be careful,” said Turbee. “There are four armed soldiers on the other side of that door. I am opening those doors now.”

  The two huge steel doors behind the arched stone entrance slowly swung open. The lights of the foyer were on and illuminated the area, providing a broadening rectangle of light that was impossible to miss. The doors were only two feet apart when Richard and Zak each shot two small grenades that exploded in the cavernous room behind.

  Death was instantaneous. There were no screams, just the crackling of flames licking walls. The foyer was full of smoke and body parts.

  Turbee was able to direct Zak and Richard through a maze of doors, hallways, and stairs until they reached the lowest level. Although it still resembled a dungeon in some respects, the area was nothing like the cells in which Zak was imprisoned for a fortnight. There were bright lights on the ceiling and the cell doors were equipped with el
ectronic locks, controlled by the unhackable servers. There were a total of ten cells, nine of which were occupied by prisoners in various stages of mutilation.

  Hamani was standing at the far end of the cellblock, attempting through streams of curses to open a door along the back wall. He heard the two descending the stairs. He lunged for a gun that was resting on a small metal desk, but Zak and Richard were on him before he could use it. Zak punched him hard, twice, knocking out several of his teeth.

  “That was for my toes, you bastard,” he snarled.

  With the tables turned, the butcher of Inzar Ghar displayed a different streak in his personality. “I was just following orders,” he wailed in Pashto. “I did what I did because Yousseff ordered it.”

  “Richard, why don’t you whack him a couple of times? Just for fun. Let’s see where Kumar is.”

  Richard delivered a savage uppercut, knocking out more teeth. “Wanna go square dancing, you creep? You know, allemande left and all that? Do you remember that from last time?”

  Hamani had held Richard in custody only for a few moments almost eight months earlier, but he recognized him.

  “You crazy fucking American,” he moaned.

  “Yeah, you bastard,” Richard replied. “I’m the crazy fucking American that you were going to torture to death.”

  Zak spotted Kumar in one of the cells. “Turbee, he’s in cell nine. Open it up.”

  Turbee remotely opened the cell door with a bewildered Kumar confronting his wounded tormentor and Zak Goldberg.

  “Shayam?” he asked, using the name Zak had used when he traveled undercover with Yousseff. “I thought you were dead. Is it you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Shayam was a cover name. My name is Zak Goldberg. I am an American agent. We’re going to take you out of here.”

  Richard and Zak were about to hustle Kumar out the door when Zak paused and raced back toward Hamani’s metal desk, rummaged through the drawers, and picked up a number of Hamani’s favorite tools—a corkscrew, a small hammer, and a rusty knife with a dull serrated blade. He tossed them on the dungeon floor and addressed the other prisoners in Pashtu: “Have at him,” he snarled, pointing at Hamani. “Entertain yourselves.”