Jacked Up Part 9

I spent the next weeks training in the mornings, being taught in the afternoons and spending my evenings on the computer, getting the casualty lists of all of the ‘accidents’ and bombings that I could. I cut and pasted all of the likely targets onto another spreadsheet for later use.

Using the police and spook data bases I then researched the more likely targets and found an alarming pattern. In about half of the deaths, there was someone who had links to the administration or else the opposition. On the plane my parents died on there was a member of the entourage that accompanied the President to North Korea and had stayed there to work with the dictatorship. I pulled up all of the paperwork I could and found that he had sent an email to a newspaper man, telling him that he was coming home with a bombshell of a story. This came to me from a government overwatch branch and was certain to have been noted at the White House.

I trawled the spook sites in the days after his email and found one that asked him to investigate something for the administration and to return to the US on the flight he had been killed on. I could see that the timing gave a window of opportunity for something to be set up. I think it was because I was looking at this in a certain way that I could create a time-line. Anyone else would have seen unrelated messages. With that in mind I looked at the other bombings and found three where the target was told to take a certain flight. It was starting to look like a conspiracy now. The other thing that was odd was that the messages to the media claiming responsibility from Jihadi groups all contained the phrase ‘death to the unbelievers’ in all four cases and the ones that I considered to be genuine terrorist attacks did not have that particular phrasing.

This gave me another avenue of investigation; the origin of the four messages could, hopefully, be tracked, if only to an unknown IP. When I looked at the ‘accidents’ that I had noted, I found only two that had anyone remotely linked to politics among the casualties. Again, when I researched the claims of guilt I found that those two also had the key phrasing among the emails and social media sites. I sent a message to General Xaviour to request a meeting along with the list of six names and asked if he could give me anything on these victims that was out of the ordinary.

While waiting for the meeting I carried on with my endless days of training. On the gunnery range I was being given the best of training by General MacMurtrie himself. M, or Mac as I referred to him, was teaching me the finer arts of a sniper. I was learning about a number of different weapons and becoming proficient in all of them. We sometimes spent late evenings on the range with me using a night scope to fire at targets that were totally unseen without the equipment. He considered that I had the female attributes of a slight body, good breathing and a settled temperament that enabled me to be a good sniper.

The classroom was, however, a different kettle of fish. Because of the remit given, I was being taught about Jihadi groups, their links, their backers and their methods. I became good enough in Arabic to get some idea of what was said, without becoming fluent. I had already come to the conclusion that this was all a smoke screen to muddy the waters. I had identified at least three different groups that were likely to have carried out the bombings and my chances of finding out which individual actually placed the bombs so I could kill them was pretty much zero. Even an Arabic looking man would never get close enough for the result that had been requested.

When I did get to meet with X we spoke about that side of it first and he said “Yes, we came to much the same conclusions as you. I can tell you that we think the bomb maker was one person in most of the cases and I can give you some idea of where we think he may be in another meeting.” I then asked him about the six names I had given him. He looked at me very seriously for a few moments and then pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to me. “This is not something we should talk about unless we were in a safe room. You will see my findings on the paper. Linking these names has put a firecracker under my trusted staff as we had never looked at them together before. Take care Anita; if the wrong person sees where you are going with this your life could be measured in minutes. I really do not want to see you in a coffin, if there is enough left of you to be in it.” Before we parted I asked if he could locate the origin of the emails with the particular phrase.

Back in my room I looked at the paper. One of the victims had been becoming vocal in his criticism of his boss; another had been a Pentagon official who was resisting demands to bring troops home, citing the chances of a powder keg if they were not where they should be. Of the rest, three were simply thorns in the side of a megalomaniac while the last, the man who died with my parents, was thought to have become privy to a plan to set up a trade-free zone in North Korea with an airport, casino, hotel and golf course where the local bigwigs could enjoy themselves along with any visiting dignitary. There was a note to say that this was unsubstantiated but overflights had noted that excavation and building works had been seen at the remote site. I made mental notes and burned the paper in the sink, flushing away the remnants.

All of the four flights I was looking at had originated, or touched down in, Ngurah Rai airport in Denpasar, Indonesia and had also stopped over at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport in Mumbai, India, before exploding between there and the Mediterranean. I rather expected that the bombs had been placed in India as it would be a doddle to bribe airport security to look the other way and, as it was supposed to be a ‘friendly’ country, it would not be a problem operating there. A few nights on the spook sites gave me a list of known mercenaries in and around Mumbai as well as a list of the known activists in the same area. To muddy the waters I also researched links between the Jihadis and the same activists.

The list of known mercenaries was, thankfully, quite short and I wrote an algorithm that requested all contacts with them prior to the four bombings. I put that into the system and then turned it off to go to bed. Over the last few weeks I had been entertained by Major Quinn, mainly on a Saturday evening, and the following Saturday was no exception. That night, however, he asked me about my investigation and how it was progressing. I was sure that he was in the loop and was not surprised when he asked why I was looking at India, rather than Arab countries. I told him that I was just trying to find out who placed the bombs and their links to known terrorists. I told him which groups I suspected for some of the bombs but needed to work back from the actual events where possible to find the trail back through the person who placed the bomb and then to the bomb maker and the one who ordered the attack. I told him that only these four had a common thread. He agreed that my logic seemed impeccable.

On Sunday, when I logged on, I found my reply from the algorithm. Looking back through the messages that had been captured, there were four to one of the mercenaries that tallied with the bombings. Each one told him to expect a friend on a certain flight and to be ‘hospitable’. At no time was he given a name or a direct order so I expected that the arrangement was already in place. I copied the bulk of the email with the flight number X’d and rewrote my algorithm to find what other emails he had received with the same message. I sent it out and sat back to think about things. It looked as if I needed to find the true origin of those emails so copied all of the sender details and wrote a short algorithm to find the location of each one and put it in the system. That answer came back pretty quickly – they all originated in or near Washington DC.

Now I was worried that I may have got too close, too quickly. I deleted all of the answers from my system and did a disc clean-up to remove them completely. I was sure that my dealings with the spook systems were good as they were all encrypted but it did not stop anyone having a look at my system while I was not in the office, I was certain that even with a padlock, it wasn’t secure.

Tuesday, when I logged on, I had a reply to my last query. There were three other emails with the request to be ‘hospitable’ and the dates were some years in the past. I did a search on the web for bombings in the days following, using the flight numbers given, and, in one case, there had been an explosion while in the other two there had been a bomb threat phoned in before the plane had taken off. In both cases a bomb had been found but there were no other details available. I made a note of the dates and flight numbers and left a message for a meeting with X before purging the computer again.

The General wanted us to meet at a safe place as he was starting to worry about where this was heading. On the Thursday morning at the gunnery lesson, Mac told me that tomorrow I was to go for a long run, making sure that I stopped at the barn in the ‘playground’ for a rest. He gave me a sidearm with standard rounds to carry ‘as I needed to get used to it where I was likely to be going’. He then said to make sure I carried all of my paperwork as I may not be going back to my quarters.

Marianne G 2021