Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets)

by Michael Anderle

  She sat down at her desk, pulled open her laptop and started writing emails.

  Thousands of miles away, in a house in Key Biscayne, Florida an old man smiled as his GPS signal suddenly stopped sending its signal.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  13

  Key Biscayne, FL - USA

  Bethany Anne was sitting on her outside balcony, enjoying the evening. She was watching a boat travel down the watercourse between her house and the one across the way. There was a bridge it could go under, or around behind her other house and then through the larger waterway out to the Keys.

  Nathan had finally capitulated on the price of his businesses. Bethany Anne had told Ecaterina to get everything she could, then go back up one to two million. Men needed to feel some sense of success. She knew that for the two of them the negotiations were business and wouldn’t affect their personal relationship.

  Not that she could act that way. If her partner was breaking her over the negotiations table, she would harbor a huge resentment in the future. That it didn’t work that way for them was fortuitous for her and she used it, but she didn’t understand how it worked.

  Now she could get Nathan focused on the future. She would get her father and Nathan working together on the businesses Michael had given her. She didn’t doubt that there were some problems in the companies she now owned. So their first task was to get a handle on what was obvious and in need of attention, her dad, and what wasn’t obvious and in need of attention, Nathan.

  Pete was doing well. He had been doing extra work and seeking out suggestions from John from time to time. Bethany Anne had made a call to Jonathan and had asked if he wanted to see his son, that she felt he could handle a parental visit without backsliding. They talked for a while and agreed that the changes were just short of amazing, but the risk was still too much.

  It was as much Jonathan’s problem as Pete’s. Jonathan had just about broken down in the car when he left Pete in New York. He was afraid he would act like a too-caring father again when his son needed the structure and challenge of living on his own in a potentially hostile environment.

  The respect Pete would have for himself would be better than the easy life his father would provide him.

  John had agreed that everything was going well and frankly liked the kid. Pete had helped on the operation and John thought he had a shot at joining a future team. Dan agreed and said he would start having Pete shadow him as he continued to set up the organizational structure Bethany Anne was building.

  Bethany Anne had surprised Pete one evening. She tracked him down over at the team’s house and asked him how strong he was in Spanish. He just looked at her and said, “Tacos? Burrito? Muy loco laca en cabeza?”

  She told him to sign up for Spanish speaking classes. Since the team all had some knowledge, they hired a tutor to come over three times a week. The first hour was directly working with Pete and then the whole team would come in and jointly they would work for the next hour.

  Bethany Anne had some ability, but with her enhanced memory, she only needed to really go through a lesson one time to pick most of it up. She still dropped in on the team a couple of times during the week to get the flow of the language and any nuances the teacher provided. Their teacher, Adriana Garcia, was very good, very pretty and very single.

  Adriana obviously enjoyed the attention of six males who were competitive in everything, including trying to see who could flirt with her the most. But she got rather meek when Bethany Anne joined the teaching sessions. Almost like she recognized an alpha woman in beauty and shrunk in on herself.

  Adriana should have noticed that none of the guys gave Bethany Anne any second glances. If that didn’t tip her off that something was strange when a woman so beautiful came around and the guys didn’t flirt?

  None of the guys were disrespectful of the teacher. Killian was the mildest with his compliments in either language. He was a changed man and it showed in his speech.

  Dan had both homes completely wired for security and wired the neighbors’ houses as well. He talked with Bethany Anne about it and she told him to talk with Nathan.

  Nathan told Dan to form a Home Security company and offer to set up the neighbors for free. They used the team’s home as the example and they all agreed to a complimentary one year trial, which included hardwiring.

  Dan was very surprised at how easy it was to get his cameras and security equipment into the homes legally. His brain almost rebooted from trying to understand he wasn’t going to have to sneak onto the properties. Nathan just smiled and told him there was always a way to accomplish something if you considered how it might benefit the other person.

  Bobcat and William flew in with Shelly, the team’s Black Hawk.

  Bethany Anne, John and Pete had been waiting for them to touch down across the waterway. They had used one of the SUVs and driven around to the park entrance then used one of the roads to get to where Bobcat had originally landed before Bethany Anne bought the first home. Once the guys had checked out the landing location, she got out and stretched her legs. She still thought the whole process of letting them go first was silly, but Dan and her father had finally convinced her it was completely necessary.

  John was talking with Pete by the SUV and from their faces, it looked like a serious discussion. Pete was listening intently. When Pete looked John in his eyes and nodded his head once, John walked around the back of the SUV and hit the button to pull the back doors open. He reached in the back and pulled out a ceramic protection vest in Pete’s size that had the team emblem on it. He gave Pete a small bag Bethany Anne knew to be the false teeth and red contact lenses her team carried on ops.

  If anything went bad and Bethany Anne was going to be seen or had been seen, the guys would pop the teeth in and wear the contacts. He handed Pete a shoulder holster and the 9mm Glock the team used as one of their core choices. Pete took each with a little reverence and suited up. Finally, John pulled on a black team t-shirt that went over the vest and a linen suit jacket to help hide the pistol. Not that the suit jacket hid it perfectly, but it was better than nothing. All of them had carry licenses.

  John looked over at Bethany Anne and nodded once. Bethany Anne winked with the eye that Pete couldn’t see and watched John get in the car and drive off. She knew he would probably drive around the corner and watch through the brush. What Pete understood was that Bethany Anne’s security was now his responsibility.

  It wouldn’t be much of a trip. She wanted to talk with her air and ground team and she wanted to fly in Shelly. The fact that it would be hard for anyone to hear them was a huge plus. She called and told Bobcat to grab William, Shelly, and to plan on flying out over the water for up to a couple of hours. She barely had the request out of her mouth before Bobcat was issuing orders and telling her that they would be there ‘very shortly if not faster.’

  He really loved flying that chopper.

  Sure enough, she could hear the Black Hawk coming in before she saw anything. Pete caught it a few seconds later. His Were hearing was pretty damn good. They waited until the Black Hawk was down before William leaned out to give her a hand in. Pete was the last on board.

  Pete, she thought, was coming along all right.

  Bobcat didn’t wait around, he took off and headed over the park before heading out over the water. No need to get Bethany Anne’s neighbors upset enough to fabricate more stories about her eccentricity.

  She wasn’t bothered with rumors. Whatever they made up couldn’t possibly be a better story than the truth.

  She loved flying. If she had been granted one super power, it would have been flight.

  The four of them wore the flight headphones that allowed talk and reduced the craft’s noise. Shelly was purring even better than the last time. Bethany Anne had taken the second seat up front and looked over her shoulder at William, “She sounds great! How did the engine fit go?”

  William smiled behind her, “Shelly’s good with these new engines. Lik
es her engines like she likes her men…” William shut his mouth so quick Bethany Anne heard his teeth click. He got a little white in the face. He was used to being a crass mechanic, not the aeronautical engineer to a vampire business mogul. If she decided to fire him, he would probably just be pushed out of the helicopter and his body lost to the waves below.

  “I’m sorry William, did I miss the rest of that comment? Hard, beefy, lean and mean?” She smiled at William’s obvious discomfort. Not this again! She couldn’t get the best out of her team when they weren’t comfortable around her. She spoke up.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A vampire bat flies back into his cave after a big night...he has blood all over his face. Perches himself on the roof to try and get some rest. But before too long the other bats smell the blood, and start to gather around him. They ask feverishly where he got the blood from. Knowing that they will not let up till he tells them where, he says ‘OK, follow me!’ He flies out of the cave, across a valley, over a river into a dark forest. Deep in the forest he stops, all the other bats gather round in an excited frenzy. ‘OK’, says the bat, ‘see that big oak tree over there?’ ’Yeah, yeah’ reply the other bats, drooling in anticipation. ’Well I fucking didn’t!’”

  Bobcat busted out laughing and she heard Pete snickering behind her. William smiled and his face was a little less red now. Bobcat could see Bethany Anne’s concerned face looking behind him and guessed what was going on so he started the next joke. By the time Pete finished the next one the whole chopper was laughing and smiling.

  “OK, as much as I like jokes, we need to have a small meeting on the state of our equipment. How are the SUVs doing, William?”

  By now, he had forgotten his earlier slip and could almost deal with Bethany Anne as just another person so long as he didn’t look her in the face. Beauty did have a way of making his mouth want to stop working properly. He took out a notebook he kept with him and began to review it as he spoke. “We now have five and all of them have been checked out. Two are out for upgrades to the glass, engines and suspension. These will become your rides.”

  “Wait a minute, what are you guys doing for the other three?”

  Bobcat spoke up, “I’ll take that one. At the moment, the other three are getting the engines but only partial on the glass. If the team needs to roll down the windows for firing while driving, we can’t full up armor them. Well, that’s not true. The guys over at Texas Armoring can do it, but they’re so booked it’s at least three to six months in the queue right now.”

  Bethany Anne considered that. She had no problem throwing money after a problem to get it expedited, but she wasn’t aware of any reasons that they needed to have anything done beyond what Bobcat had planned right now. The whole point of the meeting was to start the process on how these decisions were going to get made. “OK, I’m good with that. But check with Texas Armoring. I really liked the ride we had up in New York. We might as well put three on order for the future. See if they can give us a couple of windows that allow the team to shoot out of. Well, don’t be so crass as that when you explain it. I don’t want to give them the idea we drive around in running gun battles all of the time.”

  “But you’re expecting it?”

  She nodded from the front seat, “Yeah, I’m expecting it. I’m not going to be able to not piss off some powerful people, so they’re going to attack. We need to have protection when we run into an ambush and superior firepower is our response. Which is the reason for this flight.” She turned back around to William.

  “William, what’s it going to take to upgrade Shelly to be able to slap some sense into a target before the team gets there?”

  He thought about that for a second, “Well, there are some conversion kits Sikorsky puts out for these Black Hawks. They tend to call them Battlehawks. Colombia has a version they call the S70 Arpia III that has rockets and forward firing gun pods. That’s the level I kits, they don’t require as much modification to the bird. There is a level II and Level III kit. I’ve printed the level II specifications from a website. Hold on.”

  William grabbed a sheet that had been folded into quarters from his back pocket and opened it up. He had found the specs on the defense industry daily website.

  “Here we go: The Level II kit would add guided weapons, including optical and laser guided anti-armor missiles like TOW, Spike, and Hellfire, and emerging laser-guided rockets. The baseline under consideration would mount 12.7mm/.50 caliber Gatling guns on the inboard pylon pair, and either missiles or a 19-rocket launcher on the outboard pylons. This will include laser-guided missiles and rockets, and combat optics are upgraded accordingly; the baseline configuration’s AN/AAQ-22E BRITE Star II turret or L-3 WESCAM MX-15Di include laser targeting, as well as surveillance. The armed kit will be integrated with the helicopter’s flight and weapons management systems, which will link to a day/night capable helmet-mounted display. A helicopter with this kit retains its full cabin capacity for 11 soldiers, but its ability to carry that many on a specific mission will depend on the weight of the weapons it’s fitted with. Owners may also choose to devote some of its space and weight limits to mounted and/or in-cabin ammunition and weapons, extra fuel on board, 2 door gunners with 7.62mm Gatling miniguns, etc. As equipment is added, troop carrying capacity will decline.”

  He folded up the paper. “They go on to talk about a level III that was tested with the Israelis, but I’m not comfortable with that yet. I figure Level II is good enough and if we want better we need to look at an attack chopper, not a conversion.”

  Bethany Anne could see his point. But while she could get away with flying a Black Hawk around Miami, she sure as hell couldn’t get away with an attack helicopter. “Thank you, William. Bobcat you have authorization to pursue the Level II package for Shelly. Get back with me before any purchase for a final decision and rope Dan into the conversation to see if he has any operational needs. We might need this done for an Op in Central America.”

  “That’s going to be a hell of a trip for a helicopter. Not a good choice with us stopping for fuel everywhere. It’ll be obvious we’re up to something.”

  “No worries, I’m going to go look at an Amels SEA AXE. It’s a 220 foot support yacht. There’s one available, possibly, in Miami in two weeks. It’s coming over here from Europe right now. It will hold Shelly, all of our small equipment and a 40 foot speedboat, even a submarine. I have Nathan checking out the owner now, he’s a sheikh or something. Probably doesn’t need money, but we’ll see if he has anything we can use as leverage to pry that boat from him legally.”

  The “illegally” part was understood. They weren’t the guys in the white hats. They would do what they needed to do and Bethany Anne would compensate as best she could. The story of how she purchased the house next to them got around the team. The fact that she paid half a million over the going rate made the action more palatable to some on her team. They weren’t the government who could and would just take it under eminent domain. See how well the government paid if you had any complaints when that happened.

  “Ok, next.”

  Bobcat took it from there, “The Gulfstream is in good shape. Ecaterina brought in a representative for retrofitting it to your liking two days ago. I understand that the insides are getting redone?”

  Bethany Anne nodded, “Yeah, we need to consider branding here. All of the businesses are going to be officially pulled together. What we’re doing is going to get noticed, so we might as well play it up. The General and Nathan are going to go through our businesses and see what we need to fix and what we need to support. The G550 is going to be the corporate jet until you get us something better. I want you to keep looking. I know the G650 is horribly backordered. See if there is something we can do with a retrofit. We need something with a corporate feel but military capabilities.”

  “Not giving me a challenge there, are you?” Bobcat smiled. He knew William was listening in rapt attention. This was the shit he lived for.

&
nbsp; “Well, if it isn’t doable, I didn’t buy out the right guy and hire the right engineer. What do you two say?”

  William chimed in, “It’s going to be as sweet as sugar and as hot as spice. We’ll come up with a plan that will do you proud. That’s for damn sure.” William’s mind was already racing on ideas. If they took a 737 and found some…

  “Pipe down a second back there, Billy.” Bobcat reined in his engineer’s racing thoughts. Bethany Anne was curious.

  “Hey, that reminds me. I saw your info from Ecaterina. Is your name William or Billy? Isn’t Billy a nickname for William?”

  Bobcat laughed. “Actually, it’s all William’s fault. Back in the Army, he was always telling the other mechanics that ‘they were getting their shit backwards.’ So, someone finally had enough of Williams lip and told him his parents couldn’t even name him correctly. That Billy was a nickname for ‘William,’ you weren’t supposed to name your kid the nickname up front. I don’t remember what happened to the guy, but his comment struck a chord with all of the people William had made fun of and the name stuck.

  She smiled. How ironic that your nickname was a name for your first name that was a nickname? She gave Bobcat some coordinates. “Take us over to this area, there are a few Keys I want to check out.”

  He located the coordinates and locked them in. He pulled the zoom factor up a bit to see both Europe and the eastern coast of America. Seemed to him that if you were coming from Europe, you might just go right through that area on your way to Miami. Curious, that.

  He dialed the magnification back closer and just kept his thoughts to himself. Whatever would be, would be.

  14

  Constanta, Romania

  Stephen was acclimating to the new technology quickly. Although he had been asleep for most of the computer and Internet revolution, he had the centuries of knowledge to make the connections quickly. It felt as if he was born in the wrong time.