The phalanx code, p.3
The Phalanx Code, page 3
“Coop?”
“Yes, sir,” Mahegan said.
I nodded and turned my eyes to the fractured ceiling at the sound of a helicopter chopping through the sky. It became louder before it faded away. Louder again before fading again. The whipping blades echoed along the Missouri River Valley, blunted off and on by a whistling north wind.
“Cloverleaf search pattern. Let’s put this fire out and get moving,” I said.
“We’ve got wheels a mile up the river,” Mahegan said. “It’s going to be tight.”
We stepped into the frigid air. The dry clothes were welcome. Movement was swift with Mahegan leading. I had never met a better navigator than Mahegan and he had us handrailing along the military crest, that area just below the backbone of the ridgeline that kept us from being silhouetted against the night sky. The moon was a dim sliver of pale light.
Up ahead and across the river, blue lights flashed. Police cars raced toward Fort Leavenworth, now several miles to our southwest. Mahegan slowed as we dipped into a small tributary creek running into the Missouri River.
Another helicopter raced low along the river, no doubt using thermal imaging to locate our warm bodies against the cold terrain.
“Croatan,” Mahegan whispered.
“Dare,” Joe Hobart’s unmistakable voice replied through the throat microphone and earpiece set Mahegan had provided in the cabin.
With bona fides exchanged we crested a small hillock dotted with some hardwoods. The underbrush was thick with thorny vines that clawed against my pant legs. Mahegan powered through, so I followed his path and we reappeared next to an idling black-and-white Chevrolet Suburban with a roof rack of lights switched off for the moment. Stenciled on the doors was: CLINTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE. Clinton County was part of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area about thirty miles south of Leavenworth. Beside the car I spotted Sergeant Major Randy Van Dreeves on one knee aiming a long rifle across the river.
“Boss,” he said when I passed him, as if we had just spoken a few hours ago when it had been more than a year since the FBI raid that had cornered my team. A lump caught in my throat when I thought about Van Dreeves’ one true love, Lieutenant Colonel Sally McCool, who had perished in my arms during the Eye of Africa fight.
Hobart was behind the wheel, and I knew from the sirens, the helicopter blades, and the flashing lights that we had no time to waste on nostalgia or emotions. These three men were the core of my team, and we were like a championship basketball team that hadn’t practiced in the last year. We were rusty, but we knew the plays and could execute.
As we were transitioning to the SUV, Van Dreeves shouted, “Halt!”
We turned and looked as he aimed his rifle at a figure that came crashing through the same thorny underbrush we had traversed. Dressed in a military uniform and larger than average, the pursuer stumbled onto the ground where Mahegan moved swiftly and put a knee in the person’s back.
“I’m Sergeant Calles! The insider! I helped!” she shouted far louder than any of us preferred.
Calles. My guard. She was soaking wet and shivering.
“Throw her in the back,” I said.
“Could be tracked,” Mahegan said.
“We’re all going to be tracked if we don’t hurry. She helped us, I think. Had to know something. She put me in that cell. Let’s go,” I said, remembering her instructions to stay on the bed for the “next thirty minutes.”
Mahegan and Van Dreeves disarmed her, tossed her baton into the brush, checked her for communications devices or transmitters the best they could, found my Ziploc bag containing my grandfather’s diary in her pocket, and then hog-tied her before raising the rear door of the SUV.
“How the hell did you get across the river, Sergeant?” Van Dreeves asked. Mahegan handed me the diary.
“Your boat got hung up in some debris,” she said, breathing hard and probably on the edge of hypothermia. I swam to it and took it across.”
Mahegan asked, “What was in the boat?”
“I found a phone in the bottom, yes. Tossed it in the river,” she said.
Her story seemed to track. As they were escorting her to the back hatch, Calles nodded at the bag in my hand.
“That’s for the general,” she said. “His grandfather’s diary and something his lawyer just sent.”
I looked at the bag. In the bottom was a silver triangular device.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Calles continued, “Smyth was trying to have his IT team decipher it, but it was encrypted, and it looks like it’s only half of something. They called it a ‘package.’ Looks like a flash drive.”
“Roger that,” I said. I stowed the diary in my cargo pocket and the small triangular “package” in an interior zipper in my tactical boot.
“The warden did say they had something for me,” I said.
“Could be a tracking device,” Mahegan said.
“I’ll risk it,” I said.
They lifted Calles into the cargo hatch of the SUV. I slipped into the back seat on the passenger’s side as Mahegan racked his left rear seat behind Hobart all the way back. Van Dreeves slid into the front passenger seat, and we were a whole unit again, almost. Sally’s noticeable absence, I imagined, and hoped, would be with us forever. I looked over my shoulder at the Sergeant Calles, roles reversed, then leaned forward.
“Patch? Zion?” I asked.
“They’re at Drewson’s compound,” Van Dreeves said.
“What’s Drewson’s angle here?”
“The two tech giants Mitch Drewson and Aurelius Blanc are going at it like the old US and Soviet Union days,” Van Dreeves said.
“Blanc as in founder of LanxPro? Why do we care about two billionaires going at each other?”
“All I can say is that we got in last night, and before launching us to get you, Drewson gave us a briefing about his Project Optimus. Something about how Blanc’s Phalanx Corporation is imposing technofascism on our country and the world and he, Drewson, is trying to stop that.”
Hobart was racing the SUV to nearly a hundred miles per hour. We hit a large pothole that threw Mahegan’s head into the ceiling of the SUV.
“Sorry, Jake,” Hobart said.
Next to me, Mahegan said nothing. He just kept scanning the rolling hills and split rail fences looking for threats to us and our mission.
The forever chatty Van Dreeves said from the front seat, “What I read is that Blanc has programmed Phalanx’s algorithms to constantly update random facial image captures, which lead to a scan of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Shoutter, Truth Social, Gettr, or LanxPro,” Van Dreeves said. “Like worldwide surveillance.”
“I don’t follow that bullshit,” I said.
“Elon Musk has Twitter. Drewson has his Shoutter app. And Blanc has LanxPro where Phalanx coders connect it all. One app to access your business profile, microblog, family pictures, political discourse, et cetera. Their software accesses the public images and words from all the user content, combines it with what is on the internet, and instantly creates a profile of everything ever posted by or about a person. Drewson says Blanc is using all that to create a global security state.”
Mahegan and I said nothing. As we rounded the bend in the road to gain access to the interstate heading north, a police barricade was blocking the entrance ramps.
“Randy did a lot of reading in the Navy brig,” Hobart said.
“True that,” Van Dreeves said.
Hobart flipped on the lights on the roof rack briefly to show he was “friendly.” He slowed enough to wave his arms outside the window, as if we were just another cop car racing to find the escapee. The police officers looked at each other, shrugged and nodded at the one in the wrecker, who backed up enough for Hobart to thread through the extensive blockade. Hobart stopped to chat with the heavyset cop who was carrying an AR-15 at a lazy port arms.
“Y’all looking for the jailbreak?” Hobart asked.
“Army general. Traitor. Good as dead if I see him,” one of the cops said.
“Where’d you hear he was a traitor?”
“Right here on my OptiPhone.” He held up an OptiPhone, Drewson’s competitor to the iPhone, Droid, and LanxPro smartphones. The picture was of me in a gray prison uniform. My face still looked pretty much the same, a year later. Mahegan was directing an infrared laser pointer at the cop, who squinted without realizing his vision was being disrupted by the invisible beam. I turned slightly so that the officer would not have a full profile view of my face, but I didn’t want to bring any attention to Calles in the back. It was a major test of her true loyalties to see if she remained quiet.
“I’m betting I get him first,” Hobart said.
“You guys don’t look like normal cops,” he said.
“Sheriff’s department down in KC,” Hobart said. “When the break happened, we scrambled from our homes. Moving into position.”
“Wasting time,” Van Dreeves said, impatiently.
“Yeah, yeah, sorry. You guys must be SWAT,” the cop said. “We’ve been waiting for you. Wait a minute.”
I held my breath as the cop stared at his phone and said, “Hold on, guys.”
“We gotta run,” Van Dreeves said.
The cop turned his phone and showed it to us. “Says they’ve got him. False alarm. Back in captivity. You boys can head back to Clinton County.”
After a pause, Van Dreeves said, “Well, that’s good news. Hear that team?”
“Roger that,” Hobart replied, and then gunned the Suburban through the slalom of dragon’s teeth obstacles and onto the interstate north.
As we got up to cruising speed, Van Dreeves said, “See that? Phalanx Alert. Instant information cross-checked across billions of images. Then hits every phone with your picture, boss, and then some bullshit about how you were back in jail. Everything was fine.”
“Thought you guys had erased all that,” I said.
“Blanc’s tech easily defeats our home-cooked eraser app. I can probably counter it, but, you know, boss, we’ve been in jail, too. It’s not like they let me program there.”
Van Dreeves had developed programming skills and had created an app that immediately found and erased any picture of any Dagger team member from the internet. Given Moore’s law of technology capabilities doubling every eighteen months, it was understandable that our web-crawling code had not kept pace with Blanc’s.
“But clearly, I’m back in,” I said. “What do you guys make of that?”
“My guess is that Blanc wants you all to himself. He’s erasing everything so he can come after you with his Phalanx teams. Only thing it can mean,” Van Dreeves said. “He wants the locals out of the picture.”
I nodded. “But why me?”
Hobart kept the lights on and rocketed north.
“Well, not sure how to say this, boss,” Van Dreeves said.
“Not like you,” I quipped.
“Something to do with your grandfather,” Van Dreeves mumbled.
“Coop? How so? What makes you say that?”
He looked over the rear seat at me and said, “Evelyn Champollion says so.”
“Evelyn?” I stuttered.
“Yes. She said she must warn you about a connection between your grandfather and Blanc.”
4
EVELYN CHAMPOLLION WAS AN archeologist and cryptologist, which was consistent with her family lineage. Her great-great-grandfather had interpreted the Rosetta Stone and was a famed Egyptologist. She might also be a French DGSE operative, but that was uncertain. I had come to like her for her wit and cunning during the Eye of Africa battle. I was curious about what she was doing in Drewson’s compound, what she knew about Coop, and what she wanted to discuss with me.
Hobart turned off the highway, onto a secondary road, and finally swerved into a tight, tree-lined dirt two-track path that led to a crop duster airfield where recently retired Air Force pilot Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy West waited with a CASA 212 cargo short-take-off-and-landing airplane, its propellers spinning.
Mahegan had Calles change out of her clothes on the apron and don an olive pilot’s jumpsuit.
“Smart dust,” he said. “Hurry.”
Once in the cargo bay, I put on a headset and strapped into the webbing that ran along the interior skin of the aircraft. Two pallets filled with weapons, ammunition, cases of water bottles, combat rations, and communications gear sat in the middle of the bay. Drewson was serious about whatever endeavor he was funding.
Hobart, Van Dreeves, and I poured into the aircraft. Mahegan had his vise grip wrapped around Calles’ biceps as he guided her into the seat next to him. He had not replaced the restraints around her ankles but had retied her hands after making her change.
“Good to see you, jailbird,” West said through the headset. He looked over his shoulder and grinned, then throttled forward and lifted the aircraft into the sky, banking low to the west barely above the treetops.
“Thought you’d be flying for JetBlue by now,” I shot back.
West had rescued us from the Eye of Africa using Sally McCool’s MH-60 Black Hawk. He was qualified and rated on every aircraft in the air force inventory and many that weren’t. He was of the Chuck Yeager “Right Stuff” gene pool, a natural stick-and-rudder pilot.
“Wouldn’t have me,” he joked. “Passengers didn’t appreciate a good barrel roll.”
Most likely he had retired and signed on with a private air freight carrier that performed clandestine missions for secret agencies. “By the way, got Matt Garrett up here in the co-pilot’s seat.”
“General,” Garrett said.
“Hey, Matt. Been a while,” I said.
“Where have you been hiding, General?” he quipped.
“No slack from you guys,” I said.
Matt Garrett was the former head of the CIA’s Special Operations Group. He retired not long after his niece, Amanda Garrett, and brother, Zach Garrett, saved a natural vaccine that cured several illnesses caused by a variety of sub-Saharan viruses. Amanda had developed the medical regimen in the Serengeti and saved it from the maniacal clutches of big pharmaceutical companies that employed assassins to prevent the drug from coming to market. During that mission, Hobart and Van Dreeves had been working with Zach Garrett, who was one of my unit commanders.
“Where we headed?” I asked.
Van Dreeves said, “Boss, we’ve got people chasing us. Misha says that there was smart dust on your prison uniform, so they tracked you until you changed at the cabin. We have to hop from airfield to airfield and get to Wyoming.”
“Misha Constance?” I asked.
“Yes,” Jake said. Mahegan had rescued Misha after she blocked the Iranians from deploying the swarming code she developed. Somewhere deep on the autism scale, Misha was a brilliant and humorous eleven-year-old girl who had a difficult time communicating. She had formed a connection with Mahegan, who had saved her life on an earlier mission. Afterward, operational necessity compelled me to redeploy Mahegan immediately. That day on Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, I pulled him away from everything he cared about to send him on the next mission. In hindsight, that might explain the tension between Jake and me that had followed. It may even have been why he left the Dagger team.
“She’s in a makeshift command center in Atlantic City,” Van Dreeves said. “Wyoming, this. It’s about forty miles southeast of Jackson. Some two hundred miles of gold and silver mines are there. Drewson claims Phalanx has penetrated all levels of the government, so Jake set us up underground in Drewson’s headquarters for the time being.”
“Why drag an eleven-year-old kid into this mess?” I asked.
“She’s eighteen,” Mahegan replied, as if that explained everything.
“Drewson and his Project Optimus are holed up there. Expecting a big showdown with Blanc and Phalanx,” Van Dreeves said.
“What’s that got to do with Misha?” I asked.
We banked hard and hit some turbulence. My stomach flew into my throat.
“Didn’t see that coming,” West said. He didn’t explain what he had avoided, but we were still alive, so I didn’t ask.
“Misha joined Drewson’s team about six months ago. She wrote most of the code for Drewson’s public square app, Shoutter. Was working remote in Wilmington, North Carolina until Drewson began picking up signal traffic that Phalanx was either going to try to steal her away or … something worse. So, her dad moved out to Jackson and took up an IT job there.”
“A lot to catch up on,” I said.
“Hopefully, Corporal ‘Sonny Jones’ kept you in the loop,” Van Dreeves said, using air quotes for Jones’ name.
“Not an inmate?”
“Not there for a crime,” Van Dreeves replied. “According to Drewson.”
We landed at a remote airfield in the darkness, rolled to a stop, and switched personnel and cargo to a UH-60 helicopter. The process took us twenty minutes, and we were powering forward to the Wyoming high plains south of the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole ski resort. After an hour, the helicopter slowed and began a hovering descent into a small valley. In the darkness I only saw my thin and haggard reflection in the door windows. The rotor wash kicked up blinding snow as West crept the aircraft into the landing zone. We had no running lights and no landing lights to aid in navigation of the approach. West was a pro and went by the call sign “Falcon Six.”
As the wheels touched lightly into the snowbank, someone came jogging from the side of a ridgeline toward the aircraft. Hobart and Van Dreeves jumped out, weapons at the ready. The suspected interloper was one of Drewson’s security guys.
“Follow me!” he shouted.
“Jeremy, where are you going?” I asked West.
“Just going to reposition the ride and I’ll join you guys,” he replied.
“Roger that. See you in a few,” I said.
“In a few.”
I followed Hobart and Van Dreeves beneath the whipping rotor blades into the side of the mountain. Mahegan followed me, watching to the rear and pulling Calles with him. We passed through two heavy metal doors, both with armed guards holding M4A1 long rifles with suppressors and scopes, including night optics. The sentries were wearing night vision goggles and Ops-Core Future Assault Shell Technology helmets. These FAST helmets were common among my Special Operations troops, and I wondered if any of my former soldiers were behind the equipment.
