by JC Ryan
Before he took a turn on the hot seat, he told a few of the others, men he’d observed and respected, what he suspected. They agreed. Soon, the troop Rex was assigned to silently did the extra work without complaint. The instructors soon picked up on their collaboration and rewarded them with more of the same.
But the physical training was only the beginning of each day. “Just to wake you up,” the instructors said. Everything Rex had been exposed to in Delta Force was taught more intensively here. Especially solo work. Some days, he rappelled out of a helicopter blindfolded to make his way back to base alone with nothing but a map, a compass, and his rucksack full of water and a few rations. Other days, he and a handful of others would be taken to the center of a city and given clues and a time limit to find their target. If they reached the place where the target should have been only to find no target, they’d endure an hour of verbal abuse, the instructor yelling that their target had ‘died’ because of their incompetence.
During the ten to twelve months of training, depending on which service the agent had been selected from, every competency of every Special Ops branch of the military was reinforced. Rex learned to fly anything with wings, along with advanced tradecraft. Those were the only missing pieces from his Delta Force training, but even what he’d learned before was honed to knife-edge perfection.
Onto this was added intensive spycraft training. They learned how to develop legends, their covers when they were on the move in other countries. They learned about infiltration, explosives, and sabotage. They were drilled in finding and using safe houses, transmitting secured messages, recruitment of informants, disguises, digital communications, signals and caches.
They took the trainees to the living classrooms on the streets of the big cities, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and others and taught them street craft. Surveillance and counter surveillance to detect enemies following them on the streets. To run a route to make sure no one was following, and to shake off followers.
Rex’s attention to detail and extraordinary accurate and vivid recall of visual images astounded his instructors. It was as if he could ‘read’ people’s minds and intentions on the streets. More than once he had the surveillance teams following him tangled around themselves. Trainees rotated in and out throughout the training. Rex learned when the abuse was justified and when it was just a tool of the instructors. Gradually, it began to mean nothing to him. When the instructor addressed his troop as ‘ladies’, he laughed, but only internally. The other troop was the ‘ballerinas’.
A chuckle might earn him and his troop an extra one hundred pushups, which he could easily do but he was already having trouble maintaining his weight. He ate thousands of calories’ worth of high-energy food every day, and still was hovering only one pound over the weight that the doctors told him would wash him out. When it got to the point where he didn’t know if he could stomach another filet mignon or baked potato with half a stick of butter and a pint of sour cream, he weighed one-hundred and eighty pounds, and not an ounce of it was fat.
Chapter Thirteen
San Diego, California. November 2007
AT THE END of November, his training was nearly complete, though he didn’t know it. No one ever knew how long their training would last. Sometimes, an entire troop would disappear, and the others would assume they’d ‘graduated’, but no one knew for sure. One night, an instructor came into the barracks around midnight, beating a piece of broomstick against an empty jerrycan, and turned on the lights. Groaning, every man got out of bed, assuming it was another surprise training exercise. It wasn’t.
“Listen up, ladies! This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not an exercise. We’re short-handed, and you’re on deck. Although, I don’t know how the hell anyone in his right mind could’ve thought you girls were ready for anything, but that’s how it is. You will be given the details of the mission en route.
“So, shake out the cobwebs, clip on the garter belts, put on your skirts and high heels, pack your purses and be at the airstrip in ten. Don’t bother with the lipstick and makeup – nothing can change your unsightliness. There’re real hostages, being held by real bad guys, counting on you sexy ladies actually rescuing them.
“What has the world come to?” He mumbled loud enough for all of them to hear.
“Move!”
The instructor’s choice of words made Rex suspect it was a training exercise. But he wasn’t about to question it, nor to slack even if it was just that. He was a pistol, cocked and ready.
Their destination, a private airfield on the outskirts of San Diego.
He listened to the briefing through his headset. The leader of a drug cartel from south of the border had taken refuge from a sting operation in the home of San Diego’s chief of police. At risk were the chief’s wife and his only daughter. The chief was distraught and had been relieved of duty while his men tried to negotiate release of the hostages, in return for safe passage for the jefe and his two lieutenants. It would mean political suicide for the chief, but he cared for nothing but the safe return of his loved ones.
The governor of California had requested help from the FBI, who’d contacted Delta Force. While the FBI was still sorting out legalities and Delta Force was waiting to get the go command, the CIA had made the decision that the cartel leader could not be allowed to escape, regardless of the consequences to the innocent bystanders. While the agencies fought among themselves, CRC had been tasked to step in.
The mission was hastily designed, and the trainees had been given no opportunity to rehearse it. They had a hand drawn plan of the house, provided by the chief of police. The satellite view of Google Maps gave them more information about the house and the surroundings. They had a few questions, which were relayed to the ops support team back at CRC HQ who got the answers for them. None of the team said they would’ve liked to have more time. They’d trained for it and were ready for it. It had been hammered into them for twelve months; find the enemy and destroy them, anywhere, any time, and with anything. Do it with surprise, speed, and overwhelming force.
Their orders were simple. The chief’s wife and daughter were more important than the trainees’ own lives. Get them out, unharmed. Capture the drug cartel’s leader and his lieutenants, or better yet, save the taxpayers some money and kill the bastards if they so much as twitched an eye. Anyone who came back alive graduated by default.
When the mission was over, Rex could never remember the sequence of events. He and four other CRC operatives went into the home that night. He remembered a kaleidoscope of eerie green slices of vision. He remembered shooting one man and sweeping the chief’s daughter under his right arm, thrusting her behind him and taking a bullet in the tactical vest that momentarily robbed him of breath. And then he remembered nothing afterward, though he overheard his buddies reliving it all on the flight back. According to them he had switched his weapon to his left hand, flicked it to automatic, and opened fire – killing the remaining two. Apparently, he’d carried the girl out on his shoulder, calling her Quinn for some reason and telling her over and over that he was sorry, but that she’d be all right.
He had only their recount of the events to go by, so he had to believe it was as they said. Their version was confirmed, on the way back, when one of his team mates said, “Great work, Rex. It was very educational watching you do it all. Do you think next time you would be able to allow us to get a few shots in?”
The mission was a success. Rex was a bit rattled that he’d done it all without being able to remember much. Nevertheless, it seemed to him he did everything he was trained to do. His – their – contribution to truth, justice, and the American way, just like many other men and women in the undercover services of the US, would remain shrouded in secrecy.
Rex was okay with that.
***
THE FOLLOWING DAY, the commander of the training facility, a crusty older man, whose name was John Brandt, and whom everyone referred to as the “the Old Man”, emerged to addr
ess them. Rex had heard of him but had never seen him in person. He’d been told, though, the Old Man knew every one of them better than they knew themselves and was following the progress or lack thereof of every one of them every day.
He had a simple speech for their graduation.
"In this new job of yours, there is only one rule, and that is there are no rules. We are leveling the playing field.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. George Orwell said that, and it is true of this outfit.
“Go and do it to them before they do it to us. Make sure to get your retaliation in first." The commander turned and left the room.
There were to be no congratulations. No medals. No certificates. No celebratory cake and tea, nor a beer. Not even the gratitude of the nation whom they served, because they did not exist.
And Rex was okay with that, too.
That was it. They were now ready to take the fight to the bad guys.
Rex was now twenty-six-years old and as ready as he ever could be.
Chapter Fourteen
Arizona Headquarters of CRC, December 2007
REX REMEMBERED THE lesson ‘Ed’ and ‘Butch’ had given him about the origins of CRC. How the CIA and, for that matter, most of the US intelligence community had become so bogged down in red tape and risk-averse bureaucracy, their hands tied with political correctness and cultural sensitivity, that they could not function.
“No racial profiling” had become the will of the people, although most of the people didn’t understand what that meant. How was it possible to detect terrorism, if no one could cast an eye at a person whose origins were in regions rife with terrorists?
America’s divided and increasingly dysfunctional politics was crippling all efforts by the intelligence community to take the necessary steps to protect the homeland. Hell, they couldn’t even agree what to call the damn terrorists for what they were – radical Islamic terrorists.
They couldn’t agree about what to call illegal immigrants – calling them undocumented immigrants was the same as calling a burglar who broke into your house an undocumented visitor. Words like Islamophobia were created and given the same stigma as being a racist, misogynist, Nazi, or worse.
The high-and-mighty US was overextended in wars, which they were only halfheartedly fighting. The country was in economic dire straits. The supposed land of the free and the home of the brave, the birthplace of equality, was now divided by class warfare and the poisonous politics of conflicting ideologies.
So, deprived of the ability to make a real difference, the top tier became more concerned about being politically correct always, securing their own positions, and moving up the food chain, than about supporting their field operatives. The latter were understaffed, ill-equipped, unsupported, and poorly managed. Not to mention hobbled by timid handlers too afraid to put a foot wrong to be efficient.
The problem was that very few in the US, especially not the apathetic population, had any clue what was going on. As far as 99.999% were concerned, there was a whole brigade of Rambos, 007s, Chuck Norrises, and the like – out there looking out for them, protecting them from evil, and allowing them to sleep well at night. Most just wanted to live their lives of instant gratification filled with fast-food drive-throughs, smartphones, tablet-pcs, three hundred TV channels, unreal reality shows, and American Idol without thinking about imminent danger, unless it came in the form of a Tom Clancy novel that reinforced their naïve belief that ‘it can’t happen here’.
The double standards applied to politicians and celebrities versus the general populace was nauseating, to say the least. When a member of the public lied that’s what it was called. When the elite lied they ‘misspoke’ or ‘misremembered’. Getting an apology out of one of them would be more difficult than getting the Pope to confess that he’d always had it all wrong and that Buddhism was the only true religion.
“Panis et circenses, bread and circuses. Two things only the people anxiously desire - bread and circuses, wrote Juvenal, a Roman satirist about 2,000 years ago.” Rex remarked, “I guess the American version would be McDonald’s and smartphones.”
It was in this political environment that some of those who really understood the threat against not only the US, but the entire free world, realized they could no longer sit by and watch how their countries with their cultural sensitive and PC approaches were committing suicide without even knowing it. They came to believe they must take steps to do an end run around the politicians and bureaucracy - in the interest of national security. Therefore, within the security community various top-secret initiatives were launched, some of which established small, highly efficient, highly secret hands-on intelligence units consisting of highly trained professionals to take the fight to the enemies of the United States.
The politicians didn’t want to know about it – they needed plausible deniability – a politician’s creed. Their model was the three wise monkeys. I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything, and I didn’t say anything.
CRC was one of those secret units. As Rex now learned the full story, CRC consisted of a small group of former spies and spy masters, a psychologist or two, and an undisclosed number of field agents. A few of the top people at the CIA at the directorate level knew about their existence, because they used them to get jobs done that the rest would or could not do. It was Delta Force on steroids, but without the constraints of the rules Delta had to follow. Since they didn’t exist, CRC had no such silly rules.
Rex only knew the CRC names and faces of the field agents with whom he graduated from CRC’s intensive training program. Now he met his handler and the team he’d be working with for the next two years. He’d graduated from their ‘boot camp’, it was true. But he was still considered an underclassman by those who’d been in the field. And in their opinion, he was greener than most new graduates, because aside from the hasty mission at the end of his training, he’d never seen combat. He’d otherwise never been under fire in any but a training situation. It was unprecedented, and more than a few had outright refused to work with him.
The team who finally accepted him did so reluctantly, because they’d lost one of their members on their previous mission. He had been their most fluent Spanish-speaker, though all had a rudimentary knowledge of the language. They gave away their origins with their accents, though. Told that Rex had none, they weighed the advantages of having him against the disadvantages and said yes.
Naturally, they gave him as much grief as they could while waiting for their next assignment. Rex not only took it in stride, he gave back as good as he got, winning two of the team members’ respect when he kicked both their asses in routine mission-readiness training and then helped them each up with a smile and some good-natured ribbing.
“Dude, I’m going to rip your arm off and beat you with the soggy end next time,” the first one said, still doubled over, struggling to breathe after the vicious punch Rex landed on his short rib, which ended the session.
“You’re welcome to try, anytime, anywhere, Boot,” Rex replied.
Being called a boot by the new guy on the team struck the man so funny that he choked on his own laughter. They didn’t have ranks. For each mission, a leader was appointed based on the skills required for the mission and who had them.
Rex would not be entrusted with leading a mission, though, until he had some experience under his belt.
Chapter Fifteen
The US Southern Border, December 13, 2007
THE FIRST SUCH experience came when he’d been barracked with his new outfit for about a week. The cartel he’d deprived of its leadership in the San Diego mission was a much bigger problem than they had imagined. Not only were they now taking out their revenge on the Border Patrol agents, intercepted and decoded messages showed that they were about to form an alliance with a Middle Eastern terrorist group. The exact terms of the intended alliance were still sketchy, but it w
as clear that the cartel would be expected to help these undocumented jihadi visitors cross into the US over the southern border.
Fortunately, at the time of discovery of the proposed unholy alliance, the cartel members were murdering each other in a bloody scramble to replace their dead leaders. There was still a small window of opportunity to prevent the alliance from coming to fruition.
However, the southern border was the football of partisan party-politics. It had been a front and center election issue in each election for decades. Were the people crossing the border illegal aliens or undocumented visitors? Were all of them in search of a better life or not? Is it not our Christian duty to help the poor and deprived? After all is that not what the words, Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free from Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, New Colossus, on a plaque mounted on the Statue of Liberty, meant?”
The answers were obvious, but politicians would not admit it and milked both sides of the argument for the votes they could get out of it. For some of them, it was an insurance policy to throw the borders open and allow their future constituents unfettered access to the country.
Many in the US security community, those who took the protection of the homeland seriously, were horrified about the politicization of the border control issue.