Chapter 59

Chapter Fifty-Nine

T hey found the first body at 0940 in a dumpster behind the gym. The gym employee had been dead before Kira Hanson identified Ben Kinder as her childhood playmate.

The second body turned up an hour later. The Fleet and Family Readiness employee who worked directly with Kinder appeared to have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning in his girlfriend's garage. It was lucky the girlfriend found him before the poisoned gas seeped into the house and killed her too.

She was being questioned by investigators—both local police and the FBI—but was likely to be a dead end. An innocent bystander who'd been dating the man for less than two months. So far, the only item of note was that the guy had moved in with her last Tuesday, after a pipe burst in his apartment.

The guy had lived near and worked with Kinder, and he'd switched addresses the day Kinder opened fire on base. He'd shown up for work on Wednesday, before Kinder was identified, and had subsequently been interviewed along with Kinder's other coworkers after the identification came through. He hadn't shown up for work again after that.

Now he was dead.

And then there were three.

Teague was pumped. It didn't matter that he'd barely slept since Sunday. This was what they trained for. They were close and getting closer.

Especially now that the base housing agency finally gave NSWC a list of all the empty housing units on Little Creek and Dam Neck. Hours late, but better than never. They couldn't exactly search occupied homes on both bases. There were far too many.

Compiling the list had been delayed because the contractor was short-staffed over the holiday weekend—two employees hadn't been to work since Thursday.

Teague and everyone else knew exactly who the missing employees were.

There were four empty units in one of the on-base housing developments. Teague parked his truck in front of one of them. He and Burns would search two units. Kramer and Meyers were searching the other two units in this development. Twenty miles away, other SEALs were searching the three empty units at Dam Neck.

Burns punched in the code on the lockbox and retrieved the key. Then they were in. The two-bedroom house had just been painted, and the rooms were bare except for sheets of plastic and blue tape, along with other painting debris.

There was no sign anyone had been inside the unit since the painters left on Friday. They quickly moved on to the second unit, walking the short distance to a house Teague had been inside three months ago, when a friend who was transferring to Little Creek asked him to scout housing for his family.

At the time, the house had been slated for a kitchen remodel and wouldn't be ready for a month, which would have worked well for the friend, but then his orders changed, and the lucky bastard was sent to Pearl Harbor instead.

"Odd that this place is still on the remodel list," he said to Burns. "It was supposed to be done two months ago."

Burns frowned. "I don't like the sound of that. Could be just lazy, but, given what we're looking for…"

They went in as if they were expecting an ambush. It never hurt to practice, but also, better safe than sorry.

The place was a wreck—the same mess it had been when Teague walked through months ago. The kitchen was gutted of appliances, same as before. The one difference was now there were new appliances staged in the living room, waiting for installation. The dishwasher and range had been unwrapped. Debris on the floor indicated the unwrapping had been recent.

"I don't like this," Burns said.

"Me neither."

Their instinct proved accurate when they entered the hall bathroom. On the plus side, they'd found one of the guys they were looking for. The problem: he too was dead.

Very recently dead.

And then there were two.

They radioed NSWC and informed them of their find. A bomb-sniffing canine and handler were sent to the house. The Belgian Malinois and his handler—a SEAL from another team—had been busy searching every potential target they were called to today.

In the house, Rikki alerted for explosives when his handler opened the dishwasher in the middle of the living room. He alerted again when the oven door was opened.

The fridge was still sealed with plastic wrap. A team of bomb experts would be tasked with opening it, but it was unlikely explosives had been left behind.

Rikki then followed whatever scent he'd picked up—explosives or the person who retrieved them—and led his handler through the house to the garage, where the dog lost the scent.

One conspirator had taken the explosives and left behind a compatriot. Why were the conspirators being killed, one by one? Were the two remaining men working together, or did one of them know his hours—or minutes—were now numbered?

Max Byrd, the handyman, and Richard Wagner, the leasing agent, were all that remained of the original five—six if Benny Kinder was included.

Investigators arrived to take over the crime scene investigation. Bomb control was called to tackle the fridge. Teague and Burns gave statements, then returned to HQ to share what they'd learned.

With their success at Little Creek, a SEAL with a bomb-sniffing dog was sent to check the empty houses at Dam Neck too. Other bases in the area were doing the same, but they all believed—hoped, really—only Little Creek and Dam Neck were targets.

Teague was driving to HQ when they received word that explosives had been detected in a refrigerator at Dam Neck.

Two bases. How many bombs?

Teague felt the clock ticking. It was four hours to sunset.

Max Byrd. Richard Wagner. Generic names. Wagner was one of the most popular surnames in the US in addition to being a name associated with the recent coup attempt in Russia.

The name Byrd tickled at his brain. It was an English name, not Russian or German like the others.

It was probably an alias, but why choose Byrd?

A fter the final safety check, in which everything was declared in order, the barge left the dock to get into position for the show. The pyrotechnician and six crew members rode on the tugboat for the hour-long journey.

Two SEALs were concealed in the tug—unknown to the seven men who would be on the barge. More would join them, swimming to board the barge in the final hour before the show.

Teague remained on base with the rest of his SEAL team. They had just over three hours to find where the explosives had been planted.

He studied the photos of the fireworks barge on the screen in the conference room.

Long wires connected tubes loaded with shells that contained a lift charge, burst charge, and stars that were marble-sized pellets that exploded in patterns and gave the fireworks their size, sparkle, and color.

The main fuse for each shell would ignite the lift charge and slow-burning fuse to allow the shell to reach a specific altitude before blowing apart.

This was familiar to all of them—the explosives they used on a regular basis lacked the pretty stars, but they exploded the same. Black powder had been used for centuries for both fireworks and killing, inspiring the lyrics in the "Star Spangled Banner" describing the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air.

Propellants the military used to launch their explosives ranged from those used in simple guns to what was employed in shoulder-fired rocket launchers and massive cannons mounted to ships.

The tubes that held the firework shells were simplistic cannons. Long wires connected those cannons to a control board with hundreds of electrical circuits, which the pyrotechnician would use to manually control the display.

He thought about the dishwasher and range and the wires and tubes that were spilled on the floor of the vacant house. Everything was in packaging. Brand-new.

Teague pulled out his phone and checked the photos he'd taken at the scene.

To the room at large, he said, "Do you have photos from the house on Little Creek yet? Of the appliances?"

The captain checked the computer and said, "Just the ones you uploaded. The crime investigation unit will take a while."

"Put my photos up. Burns's too."

It was easier to see on the big screen. The odd note. "Look at that wire. It's not coiled like the others. Different color. The range uses a massive 220 plug. The dishwasher needs only hoses. The electrical cord is attached."

Another SEAL sat forward, clearly seeing what Teague had. "That's an electrical wire. Like the kind they're using on the firework barge."

"The fireworks on the barge are set up to be fired manually, not remotely," Teague said. "But…with the proper setup of a shell without lift charge or stars—pure explosive power, wired to a control board that has remote access—could a person on the barge remotely set off explosives on the base timed to match the display?"

"Yes. Absolutely. The extra circuits would blend in. It would hardly be noticeable that they weren't wired like the others." This was stated by one of the explosive experts in the room. All SEALs knew explosives; some were more expert than others.

"Does the person on the barge have to be complicit," another sailor asked, "or could the remote controls be hidden among the manual circuits even from the pyrotechnician?"

"Not sure, but either way, both the bombs and the circuits on the control board would need to be set up already," the explosives expert answered.

Burns leaned forward, his gaze on the screen. "This is how we find the bombs. Once the barge is in place, it'll be easy. Run a safety test of the circuits. Signal intelligence can pick up any circuit that sends a signal to a charge on Little Creek or Dam Neck. It's as simple as grabbing the location from the air."