Dead Drop Series (Book 1): Dead Drop (Rise of the Elites) Read online

  Dead Drop

  Rise of the Elites

  K.S. Black

  Dead Drop

  Rise of the Elites

  by K.S. Black

  Copyright © 2016. All Rights Reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-1539382287

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, situations, and events, or any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any events, even those based on real occurrences, are fictional.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts.

  "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."

  Benjamin Franklin

  Dead Drop

  Rise of the Elites

  Table of Contents

  Operation Rapture

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  Operation Rapture

  The handoff was expected to go off without a hitch, but Allen McGrath took a deep breath to settle the nervous excitement fluttering in his stomach. Flanked by a pair of armed bodyguards, he entered a lavish conference room in the business district of Karachi, Pakistan carrying an aluminum attaché case in his right hand, a West Point class ring on his third finger. His custom tailored Italian suit cost more than three months’ worth of captain’s pay. It didn’t matter. His trust fund provided him with more money than he could ever spend.

  The opening act of Operation Rapture was his first official assignment for the World Federated Nations, the first of many for the betterment of mankind and the fulfillment of his destiny. Ambition was a fire that surged through his veins. His mother had always described it that way, and he had to agree.

  Two officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, under orders from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, waited inside the office next to a large window that faced the bustling harbor. Dressed in business casual, both men wiped the sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs.

  McGrath felt a twinge of sadistic pleasure in their discomfort. Speaking perfect Farsi, with only a hint of an American accent, he asked them to have a seat at the conference table in front of the locked case. Then he recited a sequence of numbers.

  The soldier closest to the case entered the combination. It opened with a click. Inside were three stacks of gold certificates from various countries, including the U.S.; a letter-size, manila file folder; and a vacuum-sealed metal canister.

  A faint smile teased the corners of McGrath’s mouth as he pulled a small container of hand sanitizer out of his jacket.

  One year later – April 23rd

  After arriving in the port city of Tampico, Mexico, thirty-two Iranians, twenty-two men and ten women, crossed the border into the US and arrived undetected in Houston with assistance from the Gulf Cartel. The World Federated Nations had paid a large sum of money for the cartel’s services and their silence.

  Each bio-martyr carried a small leather pouch that contained a metal vial and two cotton swabs. Five days later, the second phase of Operation Rapture would unfold in sixteen major airports across the country.

  The vials held a weaponized subtype of the A/H5N1virus not previously detected in animals or humans. The virus was developed as a catalyst for a worldwide influenza pandemic designed to reduce the world’s population by half. Symptoms would appear three to four days after contact—after the infected were already contagious. The vials also contained a weaponized H2H rabies virus, an unapproved addition that not only ensured virulence but would allow the Iranians to maintain a measure of control. They alone possessed the cure.

  CHAPTER 1

  May 4 – Tucson, AZ

  Cooper Reid stood naked in the middle of his living room. He worked to slow his breathing as he scanned the twelve flat panel televisions that lined the wall in front of him. His first thought was to call Shannon. Out of habit, he reached for a back pocket that wasn’t there.

  Breaking news from Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Chicago, and Green Bay flashed across the screens. A reporter said something about major 9-1-1 call centers getting hacked, but before he could finish, the images were gone and replaced with blue.

  He scrolled through the channels on the sixty-inch screen in the center position and found one major cable news channel still on the air.

  Over a hundred cities had been attacked so far. Limited information had started trickling out of the blackout areas that spanned the entire Atlantic coast region from Massachusetts to Florida and the more populated cities in the Midwest—Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. No reports of terrorist activities had come out of the western part of the country. Not yet.

  Within minutes, the other channels were back up. He clicked through them until he found a couple of local Tucson stations and a few from Phoenix. News 4 Tucson broadcasted images of downed power-line towers outside of Houston and Dallas and destroyed substations in San Antonio, Austin, and Ft. Worth. The cameras focused in on the base of several towers outside of Dallas. The reporter speculated that timed explosives had brought the towers down.

  For the past few years, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was coming. Various scenarios had played out in his head thousands of times. They even filled his dreams. But the images in front of him were beyond what he ever thought would happen. A strange excitement was building inside him. He imagined it was the same excitement soldiers experience when they are about to get their first taste of war after months or even years of combat training. It felt primal. The outcome would be tragic for the entire country. But he couldn’t stop the feel
ing from growing.

  He checked the time, surprised that less than twenty minutes had gone by since he was startled awake by the alarm from his computer. When the message count hit five hundred within an eight-hour period, an alarm was programmed to alert him. The count had gotten close a few times in the past. But only after some controversial posts. He needed to get dressed and figure out what to do.

  When he had stumbled out of bed, he hadn’t bothered with clothes or a robe as he raced down the hallway to get to his office. The light from the monitor had illuminated the room. He rubbed his eyes to clear the sleep—five hundred and thirty-two! There were zero unchecked messages before he had gone to bed.

  The number had continued to tick upward as he scanned the first message. Terrorists had blown up the Lincoln Tunnel. He read another that was equally unbelievable. The Brooklyn Bridge had fallen into the East River. Traffic was at a standstill for miles. Several more emails from different areas of the country had revealed the same thing—America was under attack. Was this another 9/11? Or was this a full-blown war?

  * * *

  He put on the clothes from the chair next to his bed. His cell phone was on the nightstand where he always left it before going to sleep. He slipped it into his back pocket before heading to the kitchen to make some coffee. Maybe caffeine would help clear his head before he talked to Shannon.

  Sirens blared from the televisions in the living room. Rushing out of the kitchen with his World’s Best Dad mug, he spilled black coffee across the Saltillo tile. An aerial view of the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge appeared on the large screen. Several highway patrol cars had exited the bridge and blocked the road.

  He switched the view to the large screen and turned up the volume so he could hear the reporter through the background noise.

  “--jumping the median to get around the road block on Highway 101 that had been set up to divert traffic away from the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a semi tow-truck from what I’ve just been told. And it’s being followed by three gasoline tankers and two trucks carrying—I can’t tell exactly what they’re hauling because the trucks are covered with green tarps. They’ve broken through the road block in Sausalito, and they’re heading south on the northbound lanes of 101.” The reporter touched his earpiece. “I’m being told we have eye witness confirmation that the two vehicles are propane trucks.”

  The tarp from one of the trucks broke free from its tethers and fluttered through the air behind it.

  “My god, they’ve turned the truck into a bomb! They’re entering the Rainbow Tunnel on the north-bound side of the Waldo Grade with the Marin County police trailing them.” The reporter’s voice took on a shrill tone as the camera zoomed in on the incendiary devices duct taped to the tank. “Do they know the trucks are rigged to explode? Have the police been notified?” The questions were directed to someone off camera.

  Cooper kept his attention focused on the unsteady footage of the chase.

  Five of the six vehicles emerged from the tunnel. They must have been going at least seventy-five mph; thick black exhaust spewed from the chrome pipes. The police shot at the tow truck in the lead position. The driver lost control and smashed into the patrol cars stationed just outside the tunnel’s entrance. The impact knocked them aside like toy cars.

  The camera followed the four trucks as they sped through the wreckage of patrol cars and bodies. Seconds later, flames shot out of the tunnel behind them. The south half of the tunnel collapsed amidst fire and a shower of dust and debris. Shock waves from the explosion buffeted the newscopter, but the camera operator was able to pan back to the bridge.

  A gasoline tanker and a propane truck slowed to a stop under the north tower. The other vehicles continued south across the bridge past a police van; the driver’s attempt to block the road failed. The van spun across the bridge and over the side.

  Less than a minute after the first explosion, the tower disappeared inside another fiery flash. The two trucks fell into the bay below along with a large section of the deck.

  The remaining two trucks reached the south tower and stopped side by side. When they detonated, the south tower buckled and the support cables released one after the other, as if in slow motion, and sent a portion of its deck into the churning water.

  Cooper couldn’t stop watching. He closed his mouth when he realized it was hanging open.

  The reporter hyperventilated into his microphone; a shaky finger pointed to something in the distance. The camera panned from the reporter to the southeast where two fire balls rose above the Oakland Bay Bridge.

  The small screen on the right caught his attention. It showed another angle of the same scene. Billows of black smoke rose from both the east and west span of the bridge. The newer east span, heavily damaged and on fire, remained standing. The center tower fell away from the west span. The camera focused in on the white-hot debris from the metal structure as it splattered on the lower deck catching it on fire. Within minutes, melted asphalt poured into the bay like molten lava.

  He shook his head. Something was off. Only thermite could have caused that kind of damage. Propane and gasoline don’t burn that hot.

  He dialed Shannon’s land line. “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”

  He tried her cell and his daughter’s and got the same message each time.

  “Damn it!”

  He lowered his head and massaged his temples. Shannon and their daughter, Hayley, lived fifty miles from San Francisco. After what he had just seen, he had to get them out of there. Tucson was safer. He’d get Shannon to come back with him even if he had to drag her here. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that.

  A thousand miles separated his home in southern Arizona from theirs in northern California. He would’ve been ready to go within a couple of hours, but his pickup was in the shop for repairs. The Jeep was fine for off-roading and running errands around town. But for a road trip in this chaos? He wasn’t going to chance it.

  He should’ve pressed harder about the delivery deadline on the Humvee. The project was supposed to be finished two months earlier. Overseeing the construction of his new house and underground bunker nestled in the Tucson foothills had kept him busier than usual so the missed deadline didn’t bother him as much as it normally would. Why didn’t he pick the damn thing up two days ago after he got the call that it was ready?

  Cooper made his living being prepared. He prepared for drought, EMPs, pandemics, terrorist attacks—everything from the apocalypse to zombies. Business was good. Better than good. He wasn’t the only one who believed in the mantra that two is one, one is none. Worries about food, water, defense, or shelter were minimal. He had it covered. But it would always be a work in progress.

  Five years prior, he had started a conspiracy theory blog, Muninn & Huginn, named after the pair of ravens from Norse mythology. Odin would send the pair out at sunrise to fly across the world. They would return in the evening to tell him everything they saw and heard. The website became known as Eyes on the World or EOW and had grown from a blog with a small group of avid followers into a urban preparedness website with over two-hundred thousand members who dubbed themselves The Ravens.

  The Ravens were willing to shell out fifty bucks a head for a life-time membership that included access to his interactive online classes and seminars ranging from food storage to self-defense. Cooper surprised himself with his marketing savvy and took pride in the fact that he knew his shit. If he didn’t, he found someone who did.

  He tried Shannon and Hayley’s cells again and reached the all circuits busy message again. Panic sent a flash of heat through his head that quickly spread through his chest. He tried texting but wasn’t sure if they were getting his messages.

  He took a deep breath and went back to his office. Reports from The Ravens continued to come in from numerous locations across the country. He waited a while longer and let his program sort the messages into the folders he had set up earlier. While he waited, he tried the ham
radio. He had trouble getting anything but static. Were the frequencies being jammed on purpose?

  For the time being, Tucson, like many other places in the southwest and west, except for California, had been spared from any acts of terrorism that he knew of. Electricity and other utilities were up and running, local television and radio stations still broadcasting. The internet worked, and he could make local calls. He wondered how much longer that would last.

  * * *

  After a quick call about the Humvee, Cooper retrieved a few items from the spare bedroom that served as his supply room. He punched a code into the keypad next to a solid core, commercial steel door. The door wouldn’t stop anyone who really wanted to get in, but he wanted to make it as difficult as possible.

  Inside, he took a mental inventory of his house preps: six months’ worth of freeze dried and dehydrated meals and water in different sized containers for three people, water filters, basic medical supplies, several ways to make fire, personal hygiene products, vitamins, disinfectants and cleansers, camping equipment, tools and knives, thirty giant rolls of duct tape, one thousand heavy-duty garbage bags, respiration masks, disposable contamination suits, three gas masks, batteries, portable lighting, solar chargers, a portable ham radio, several sizes of sturdy bags and pouches, and various odds and ends that would be useful in any kind of emergency situation. He had similar but smaller caches of preps in a couple of storage units nearby.

  He opened a set of accordion doors, stepped inside the closet to unlock two large gun vaults, and scrutinized the contents. His arsenal consisted of a combination of handguns and rifles, sixty in all, and various types of ammo.

  He grabbed his Tavor from the larger of the two vaults. The Tavor was the newest addition to his rifle collection and was purchased after an acquaintance who had served in the Israel Defense Forces recommended it to him.

  He had trained with it at the last tactical shooting course he attended and appreciated the rifle’s maneuverability in urban situations. It was a semi-automatic bullpup configured so that the bolt carrier group was behind the pistol grip. The shortened length didn’t sacrifice accuracy, and the integrated suppressor was a big bonus.