by Chase Austin
“Get Josh to the army medical facility in Helmand. Get Basit here. We need to drill him further. A plane will be waiting for you at the air base. I am going to talk to the President,” Helms said.
“I hope he doesn’t do something stupid,” Eddie muttered just before the line was disconnected.
Chapter 39
Helms picked up the phone and called the White House Chief of Staff.
“I need to talk to the President.”
“Who’s this?”
Helms clenched his fists. This was outrageous. Time was running out and the White House Chief of Staff apparently didn’t even have his number.
“William Helms—Director of the NSA. Get me the President, this is an emergency.”
“The president is on his way for a game of golf with the President of North Korea. You will have to wait for it to finish.”
“Listen, you piece of shit, either you get me the President right now or I will make sure that your career is over before today ends.” Helms thundered.
The White House Chief of Staff sniggered at the attempt at bullying him. “The President has specifically asked me to keep morons like you away from him, so you can try, but I think it will be you who will be facing the ax.”
This was unprecedented in all of Helms’ career. The President had asked his minions to block calls from the NSA director! He saw no point in arguing with the gatekeeper. He needed someone with a sound mind and the authority to act. He disconnected the call.
His next call was to the United States Secretary of Homeland Security. His personal assistant took the call and promised her boss would get back to Helms soon.
Helms then tried Raborn twice, only to have his call disconnected twice. Helms was getting the feeling he was fighting a lonely battle, but he had to keep trying. His next call was to the United States Secretary of Defense, Patrick Mattis, who answered on the third ring.
“Hello Bill, how are you?” Mattis sounded chirpy.
“We have a situation. My sources in Afghanistan have intel about an attack on American soil today. The president is incommunicado. You need to take this to him and request an urgent meeting. I am flying to DC in thirty minutes.”
“Bill, hang on a second. I’m sure this is just another hoax. America today is not like the America of 2001. There is no 9/11 happening on our soil, ever again. I heard you were on leave so just relax for a day. I’m heading out to my office. I’ll see if I can reach out to the President. You know he is busy with the North Korean President.”
“Hoax or not, we need to take every threat very seriously. I’ll worry about my vacation. At a bare minimum, we should begin checking all pickup trucks, box vans, and semi-trucks headed into the major cities. We should also consider shutting down the Metro.”
“Which cities?”
“All the heavily populated cities, starting with New York, Washington—”
“Don’t be stupid, Helms,” Mattis interrupted him. “We can’t just shut our cities without any credible intel.”
“This is credible intel and an emergency. You need to tell the President that this is happening today, whether he likes it or not. If you want me in DC, I can arrive in an hour.”
“No need Helms. I hear you, let me talk to the President. I’ll call you back.” Mattis didn’t wait for Helms’s response. It took Helms a few seconds to realize that Mattis had hung up on him. Was he really going to talk to the President? He decided it was better to deliver a summary report to Mattis just in case.
His phone rang. It was the FBI director. “Bill, I checked with my sources, there is no intel on any attack. Are you sure that your source is credible?”
“Yes, we need to dig harder.”
Suddenly Helms’s office door opened. It was Andrew. “Sir, you need to see this.” He switched on the television.
The newscaster was hysterical. “A minute ago, two near-simultaneous explosions have been reported at Manhattan and Houston.”
This was much worse than what Helms had estimated. The attacks had begun, and the world’s most powerful nation wasn’t the least bit prepared for it.
THE END
Wicked Blood
A Nation Under Attack
About Wicked Blood
America is under attack and the world’s most powerful nation isn’t the least bit ready for it. Can Sam Wick save his motherland?
Sam Wick is Task Force 77's best. Master Extractor. Perfect Assassin. Where the government cannot and will not go, he will.
Task Force-77 (TF-77) is a black ops team of NSA and the US Military. This is the team the U.S. government calls when it needs to get people out of the most dangerous places on earth.
A juggernaut of espionage & action.
What Readers are saying about Sam Wick's Adventures;
★★★★★ "One heck of an entertaining and intense ride... Fast, entertaining, suspenseful and action-packed… you will find yourself flying through and it will be hard to let it go!" - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Fast paced read with a Kick-Ass hero you can’t help rooting for." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Full of awesome action. I can't wait to read the next book" - Amazon Review
★★★★★ " I did not put this book down for any reason other than to eat." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "Fast paced, lots of thrills. Highly entertaining." - Amazon Review
★★★★★ "I'm ready for Sam’s next assignment." - Amazon Review
Part 1
Chapter 1
Zangabad, Afghanistan
The unnamed shooter, code named ‘Z’, was glued to his glass, scrutinizing the vast terrain that lay in front of him. His target was a sniper named Eddie, a short and wiry El Paso stock with a boyish grin, black hair, and vital green eyes, lying on his belly and covered with foliage, some hundred yards away.
Eddie was part of an elite black ops team - Task Force 77 - jointly overseen by the NSA and the US military. It was created to execute the toughest missions, penetrate the most dangerous locations, often through means that no government could overtly authorize. Except for a handful of individuals, no one (not even the President of the US) knew the exact size of this team or how many assets it had.
Eddie was one of TF-77’s best snipers. Right then he had no idea that while he was finding his targets, he was in the crosshairs of someone else’s weapon. It would be the easiest of his predator’s kills, but the shooter wasn’t there to assassinate him. His orders were clear. His client wanted him to make sure that the sniper and his partner, Sam Wick, finished their mission successfully.
Eddie’s partner - Sam Wick, who at the moment was hiding in plain sight some sixteen hundred yards away and closer to Eddie’s targets - was widely considered to be the best among the current crop of TF-77 assets. With a hit rate of ninety-five percent for the last five years, he had rarely come back without results from his missions. He stood 5’11 and his weather-beaten face had a rugged attraction, not least because of his unreadable sea-blue eyes, bright with intelligence. With his slicked-back black hair and athletic build, he seemed like a man always on a mission. His looks, and his ability to speak seventeen languages with a neutral accent, including Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi, made him an excellent choice for deployment in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. He considered himself to be an orphan, that is, until seven months ago, when during a mission in Poland, he stumbled onto some key information about his parents and the possibility that they might still be alive. Someone called ‘Professor’ was the key to this puzzle, but so far, he had been unsuccessful in finding anything substantial about his parents, or about this faceless man.
For the last few months, Sam had been stationed in Afghanistan, tailing Abdul Basit, a Taliban commander.
Z knew everything he needed to know about Wick and Eddie because of the one page brief about given to him about his targets by his client. He knew that they were Americans, but why they were here, he had no idea. For Z it was an opp
ortunity where the task was simple and the payout, huge. Easiest money ever made.
He had tailed Eddie and Wick from the city using a tracking device glued to the belly of the Ford in which the duo were traveling. He watched them separate at the edge of Zangabad, with Eddie taking the Ford to the foot of a desolate hill with a better vantage point of his target. Z instinctively followed the Ford.
Lying on his belly, Z checked Eddie’s position and then the position of his target from the glass. The target was a single wooden door in the middle of a vast territory, roughly sixteen hundred yards away. It was too far even for Z’s own comfort.
Would Eddie be able to take the shot? Z didn’t know but he would soon.
Eddie repositioned himself. Facing North, bleeding sweat, he lowered his eye to the glass, aiming towards the door. Crosshairs tracked to a distant one-room set. Sixteen hundred yards out. Everything was fumes.
His crosshairs tracked back, measuring, calculating the distance. He was back on target.
Z, a hundred yards behind Eddie, watched with interest. It was an impossible shot, almost.
Eddie’s crosshairs wobbled on the first dark shape. He muttered to himself, ‘Aim small. Aim fucking small’.
He could not see the obscured face, only a black mass. A prayer susurrated from his dry lips. He fired.
The shooter followed the shot through his own glass. The shot echoed for eternity. Seconds later, a red mist painted the hut’s wall.
The shooter felt an unknown elation and a touch of jealousy. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath. He had just seen Eddie - one of the best in the sniping business - get a 10 on 10 shot, and move on to the next target without wasting time.
Z saw another man going down.
Z then saw Wick in the distance, sprinting. A Beretta in his hand. His shooting hand rose in the air and the bullets pierced the last surviving man. The three men didn’t even get a chance to properly lift their weapons.
Wick vanished inside the door and now both Eddie and the shooter could only wait. Some twenty minutes later, Wick emerged from the door carrying a wounded body.
Wick ambled towards the open Toyota and put the injured man on the front passenger seat. He then vanished behind the door, again. Z quickly fetched a expensive camera from his bag. He had to take some photos as proof.
Five minutes later, Wick reappeared at the door with another body. Running towards the open SUV, he put the body on the back seat and then ran back to the hut again. The third time when he reappeared, he took control of the SUV and the four-wheeler finally accelerated. Z soon realized the reason for his hurry. With the first blast that rocked the terrain, the one-room hut had started to crumple to the ground. The earth began shaking and the ground had started to vanish in an unending pit.
Z kept on taking pictures in rapid succession, documenting everything.
From the corner of his eye, Z saw Eddie gathering his things and he slowly crawled back to hide himself. Soon, the engine growled, and the SUV lurched forward. Z didn’t follow Eddie but remained at his place, watching the trail of dust left by the Ford. He just kept on clicking pictures.
As both Wick and Eddie raced away to get out of the sight, Z opened his bag and took out a satellite phone. The call was answered on the second ring, as if the man on the other side was waiting for him.
“They have saved two men and bombed the bunker,” Z reported.
“What about you?”
“They don’t know about me.”
“Send me pictures,” the man ordered.
Chapter 2
The Louvre Museum, Paris.
The man was among the many who stood gazing at the naked woman. His flight had landed at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport that morning. As an American visiting Paris for pleasure, the first thing he went to do was to see Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grand Odalisque at the Louvre. He liked the Mona Lisas and the Venus de Milos of the world, but nothing gave him the peace he always sought, as the Grand Odalisque did. It was a figure depicting a young woman supposedly living in the harem of an Eastern Sultan. The painting brimmed with exoticism, eroticism, and the sort of sexual availability that the women of Western Europe were thought not to possess. It was a striking study of female beauty and at the same time an illustration of male desire warping the image of women.
His heterochromatic eyes, the blue left eye and green right eye, were hidden behind a pair of Gucci blue-rimmed sunglasses. A gold earring pierced in his right earlobe. He looked sharp and alert in a bespoke three-piece suit, but that facade of sophistication hid a serpent that not even his closest confidante knew about. Standing in the thin crowd, he checked his Rolex, still set to US time zone. The culmination of years of hard work was finally coming to a closure today.
No one knew how he had looked when he was twenty, thirty or forty. His face had undergone multiple plastic surgeries over the years, so much so that he himself barely recollected how he may have looked in the beginning. He didn’t even think of it anymore.
Rumor had it that he was once an undercover agent and assassin for hire for one of the USA agencies. Prior to that he probably worked as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and then as a vital asset for the CIA and NSA, and at some point, he came in contact with either ISIS or Al Qaeda where he became their best soldier. But no one knew the truth or his real identity. From the time he came in this profession, he had always lived with aliases and cover. His current alias was ‘The Professor’ and he was fine with it as long as he got what he wanted. And right now, he only wanted one thing–annihilation of a nation that had betrayed him and his loyalty.
The Professor opened the image gallery on his cell phone and looked at a picture. Sam Wick was standing on the verge of the burned police station in Helmand, Afghanistan. The next image was of Wick driving an open Toyota while the blast rocked the terrain behind him.
‘Kid, you are doing exactly what I want you to.’ He smiled.
He swiped right with his thumb. The next image was a monochrome one – of William Helms, the director of NSA and the custodian of TF-77 - having dinner with his wife and daughter at his home.
‘Now let’s see what you can do.’ He smiled again.
The plan had been set in motion two years ago. He and his small team of assassins, hackers, strategists, and political pawns had spent the major part of their lives in several cities in the USA, studying them as no one ever had. No one knew that until just before the plot started to take shape, he had been called Masood Akram – half Iraqi and half American. It was another of his aliases helping ISIS to keep their flags high. That mission had been a job meant for a lone wolf, and he had completed it with perfection. But for this mission, he needed people who were not afraid to kill or be killed.
His first recruit was a cleric in Pakistan, Irfan-Ul-Haq, AKA The Cleric, whose job was to use every tactic in the book to route American aid to the ones who would not hesitate to kill and die.
His next hire was Ed McCarthy, AKA Yasin Malik, an American who had converted to Islam from Christianity. His job was to hire and train the recruits using the money arranged by The Cleric.
The third piece of the puzzle was to get the weapons and explosives deliver to the target locations, which his team had taken care of.
During all this, in one of his visits to Paris he had met Fleur – a breathtaking French beauty and an art curator by profession. For her, he was an independent filmmaker. Sparks flew between the two and before anyone could say what, they were married. The following month, he and Fleur arrived at Houston and stayed at the Onyx – a 7-Star hotel at the Marina – Houston’s biggest mall. For her it was an amazing honeymoon, for him it was a chance to recce the hotel which was one of the targets. He filmed elaborate videos of Fleur on the pretext of his love for her, but the aim was to capture the moving images of the hotel and its security.
The GPS waypoints and videos were the means to train people to navigate the buildings like pros despite the fact that they had
never ventured out of their small towns and cities into hotels like this one. He knew that the city police or the SWAT teams could not withstand a military-style assault. He and his team planned everything with a huge amount of research and deep site recces and now it had to be carried out with clockwork precision to be effective.
For the last two weeks, everything had been coming together at breakneck speed, but something was amiss. There was no fun! The intelligence agencies had no inkling about the attack, which wasn’t surprising, but the Professor wanted them to know and act and then fail in their attempts. That would be real entertainment. They would squirm and wiggle and yet submit to his will and planning. That would be the real victory.