The Enemy Within

A sudden gust bounced the UH-60 Blackhawk up and down through the choppy air. The clattering rotor noise rose to a new pitch as the helicopter’s pilot fought to maintain his control over the machine. They were only five hundred feet above the wind-whipped surface of the Potomac. Between the wind, the rain, and the bitter cold, flying conditions were right on the margin between dangerous and suicidal.

Seated right behind the cockpit, Helen Gray gripped her MP5 submachine gun tighter, trusting that her safety harness would hold. As the Blackhawk nosed down into forward flight again, she leaned closer to the copilot’s helmeted head. “How much further?”

“Not far.” He turned his head toward her, eyes invisible behind a set of night vision goggles, and gestured through the windscreen. “Maybe another half mile or so.’?

Helen slipped her own goggles down and stared hard at the wooded slopes ahead. It was difficult to make out any details through the downpour.

“There. About five hundred yards ahead. Just out of the tree line.” The pilot’s voice crackled through her earphones. “Looks like a vehicle. It’s not moving.”

Helen saw the VEPCO trouble truck at almost the same moment. It was stewed across an access road just below a pile of debris that must be the transmission tower they’d briefed her on. The driver’s-side door hung open. “Take us in.”

“Roger.”

The Blackhawk swooped closer to the hillside, shuddering again as it flew through more turbulence. HRT troopers in full assault gear slid the hero’s side doors open, bracing themselves against the sudden onslaught of rain and wind.

Helen leaned out through the opening, focusing on the ground rushing upward toward them. They were at one hundred feet. Fifty. Twenty-five. Her fingers unsnapped the safety harness holding her inside. “Here we go, people! Get set!”

The Blackhawk flared out just above the ground and hovered there, rotor pounding.

“Move! Move!” Helen threw herself through the side door and dropped prone with her MPS out and ready. The rest of her section spilled out after her and took up firing positions, forming a defensive ring on both sides of the helicopter. The instant they were all out, the Blackhawk transitioned to forward flight and climbed away into the darkness.

She waited for the sound of its engines to fade, scanning the ground in front of her for signs of movement. Tree limbs swayed in the wind, but she saw no evidence of anyone still lurking in ambush. “Anyone see anything?”

No one did.

Helen nodded, unsurprised. As she had feared, they were undoubtedly too late. Unsure of what had happened to its men and suspecting only a simple communications failure in the bad weather, VEPCO had delayed reporting any problem for nearly an hour. When the call came in, Flynn had immediately dispatched her HRT section to the scene. He had also asked both the Virginia and Maryland state police agencies to set up roadblocks in a wide perimeter around the power line crossing. She frowned. By now the terrorists were snugly and securely hidden among the D.C. area’s several million inhabitants.

Helen’s lips pursed as she sighted through her goggles at the bullet-riddled VEPCO truck. Why should they linger on at risk, when they had so easily and swiftly accomplished their mission?

Knocking down the two intertie transmission towers merely created a onetime inconvenience for several hundred thousand people. By killing the men sent out to cope with the problem, though, the terrorists had multiplied the effectiveness of their attack a hundredfold. How many utility crews anywhere in the United States would venture out to repair a line break or downed power pole until they were sure that SWAT teams or military units had secured the area? So power outages and other problems that once would have lasted only minutes or a couple of hours were bound to drag on for several hours or days.

Helen rose cautiously to her feet with the bitter taste of yet another defeat in her mouth. Whoever these sons of bitches were, they’d succeeded in throwing another monkey wrench into the intricately meshed gears of modern American life.

WJLA late night news, Washington, D.C.

Rita Davis, one of the station’s star reporters, stood framed against the floodlit front steps of the Hoover Building. The petite, dark, curly-haired woman seemed dwarfed by the harriedlooking man next to her.

“This is Special Agent Michael Flynn, the man heading up the FBI’s special task force on terrorism. I’ve just filled him in on the phone call we received from the New Aryan Order, and he’s agreed to speak with us for a few minutes.”

The camera swung up and over to Flynn, who was clearly impatient and unhappy at being on TV. Davis couldn’t say so on camera, but she would certainly crow later to her colleagues about peeling Flynn away from the layers of public affairs people screening the FBI’s top investigator. Bartering hot information for interview time had worked.