Counterplay

prosthetic arm and hobbled a bit, the cadence of his step hampered 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