Rex Dalton Thrillers: Books 1-3 (The Rex Dalton Series Boxset Book 1)

by JC Ryan

  Taking him out posed a problem of a different sort. Mudawar’s disappearance could be explained by rivalries among the second rank drug lords of his stature. Asad’s would cause waves among the first rank, and then, now as before, they’d go to ground and Rex would lose the trail. To wring the information about the warehouse from him physically and then eliminate him would be counterproductive to the bigger picture. But it was a waste of time thinking about any of that until he could find him.

  At first, Rex wondered if another operator who didn’t have the same goals and constraints he did might have effected Asad’s disappearance. But discreet inquiries designed to mislead about his real question convinced him that the known CIA agents in the area were not to blame. They were clueless about what he was doing, and the drug trade was out of scope for any of their missions. Other countries’ operatives, specifically Russia’s, would have no reason to interfere with him. Therefore, Rex concluded that the man had disappeared on his own, but for what reason, Rex had no clue.

  He went fishing for it in the murky waters of the Deep Web. There he found a financial trail that few could have followed, but he followed it to an operational plan that led in turn to the warehouse Rex wanted to locate. It was a fortunate turn of events, because it meant he wouldn’t have to question Asad personally and attract the notice of the kingpins.

  The location of the warehouse was about thirty miles northwest of Laghman, on a road that the map showed ending nowhere. It was a strange location, requiring anyone wanting to move product anywhere else to backtrack to Laghman and further southeast another hundred miles or so through Torkham, a major border crossing to Pakistan. This was the only warehouse Rex had found that apparently used the Golden Triangle route out of Afghanistan. And it was huge. Much larger than the ill-fated Mudawar had known.

  It was a worthy target and taking it out would announce that someone with a lot of backing was taking the ‘war against drugs’ to mean just that, a war with bullets, explosives, dead bodies, and all.

  Only Rex would know that it was a two-man-and-a-dog operation.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Laghman Province, Afghanistan April 2014

  TO PULL OFF the destruction of the major warehouse, Rex required much more planning and observation than he’d needed for the little raids he’d carried out the previous summer and fall. Frank didn’t have enough C4, so Rex and Trevor made some daring raids on al Qaeda compounds to replenish his supply. A late snowstorm in the mountains between Laghman and the warehouse delayed one of his reconnaissance missions by more than a week.

  Rex felt the pressure of the upcoming poppy harvest, knowing he was about to interrupt a major part of the supply chain. To make the loss felt in New York and Washington, DC, where he strongly suspected he’d find the end of the thread, he needed to destroy the largest remainder of last year’s stored product before this year’s crop was ready. That, he was sure, would create enough noise among the controllers in the US to hear all the way to Kabul. And he’d be listening.

  His plan was elegant and simple. With the help once more of Trevor and Digger, he’d scout the most vulnerable areas of the building, rig it with enough C4 to bring down the million square feet of the Hart Senate Office Building, and blow the heroin all over the mountain range in a fine enough mist to make it impossible to collect it again. A few mountain goats and their herders might get a temporary high, but the stuff would never make it out of Afghanistan, much less into the veins of Rex’s stupid countrymen.

  By the time the explosion happened, he, Trevor, and Digger, would be halfway back to Laghman, and when he got back to Kabul, he’d contact the Old Man and demand to be recalled. He wanted to be in Washington DC when the shit hit the fan.

  In the second week of April, he was ready. This time, he took Frank into his confidence. He needed Trevor and Digger, and he needed them for longer than Trevor’s R&R days would accommodate. When he talked to Frank, he confessed what they’d been doing, and asked Frank not to discipline Trevor.

  “He was doing it for a lark and to help me. But if you need me to pay for his time, I’ll be happy to. I’ll just need a little time to appropriate some funds,” he said.

  Frank laughed. “You think I didn’t know what you two were up to?”

  “Three,” said Rex, automatically echoing Trevor, who insisted the dog be included any time their team was referenced. “How’d you find out? Did Trevor talk?”

  “Digger told me,” Frank said, with a perfectly straight face.

  “Okay, so you don’t want to tell me your secrets. In any case, let me know what, if anything, I owe you, and I’ll see to it,” Rex said.

  “Just let me in on the big one. Sooner or later, your outfit, whoever that is, because I know you aren’t Delta Force anymore, will tell you to take out a major target, and they’ll have you hire someone to help. I’m applying for the job.”

  Rex smiled. “You’ve got it. So, I can borrow Trevor and Digger?”

  “Go for it.”

  The next morning, Rex’s old pickup, burdened with a couple hundred pounds of C4 hidden by a dozen crates of live chickens with straw in between, left the compound for the two-hour drive to Laghman. Trevor claimed it was way too much, and he should have known, because in addition to being an excellent dog handler, he was also a demolitions expert. But Rex wanted extra insurance. Not only was that building coming down, but everything in it was going to be blown to individual molecules, or he’d want to know the reason why not. Trevor succumbed to reason and climbed into the pickup.

  C4 is a very stable explosive, requiring something other than travel over rough roads to make it go boom. The prescribed method is a detonator. The prescribed method for precise timing is attaching the detonator to an electrical detonator. There are three categories of the latter. The first, instantaneous electrical detonators, abbreviated IEDs but not to be confused with Improvised Explosive Devices, short period delay detonators (SPDs) and long period delay detonators (LPDs). LPDs are measured in seconds. Rex needed a couple of hours’ delay.

  For that, the commonest form of remote detonation was by cell phone, but that wouldn’t work in the remote mountain area of Afghanistan where the warehouse was located. Fortunately, Rex knew how to do it with an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock. It was his plan that linked the shaped charges in a sequential manner, so that the initial trigger would blow the first one, the first would blow the second, and so on. It would take both men to rig the charges in a reasonable time, and they’d need to eliminate armed guards beforehand. Depending on who else was in the building, rigging the charges could be routine or not.

  Digger’s part in the operation was locating the guards so Trevor and Rex could eliminate them. He performed his task with his usual efficiency, and they were in. Rex had anticipated there’d be workers or guards, perhaps both, inside. He hadn’t anticipated how many. Even though they’d timed their breach for Rex’s usual preferred time of three a.m., there were more than a dozen by his count. It made their task more difficult, as Rex had determined the large open space required charges in more than twenty locations. He’d shaped them ahead of time, but he still had to wire them in sequence once they were in place.

  Rex solved the problem by silencing the armed guards permanently, with Digger’s help in locating them. Then Trevor sent Digger to round up the rest. The sight of a large, angry, black dog sent many into paroxysms of fear, and those who withstood that were brought into line by a few snarls, growls, and the odd carefully controlled bite. One by one, Digger herded them to the center of the warehouse, where he held them while Rex and Trevor did their work. Neither the men nor the dog explained to them what was happening.

  When they were done, Rex told the assembled workers to go back to work. They accepted his directions without a word of dissent, and when he and his team left, the workers were all going about their business. Two hours later, Rex, Trevor, and Digger were far enough down the road that the explosion didn’t even shake the pickup or make
Digger prick up his ears.

  It wasn’t until they got to Kabul that news of the explosion hit the airwaves. Rex and Trevor were having dinner with Frank and the rest of the team, Digger hiding under the table to enjoy a few scraps that Trevor slipped him, when Frank told them what he’d heard.

  “It seems someone has put a major kink in the heroin trade by blowing up a big warehouse north of us. I’m told we may need to pull out of Kabul, along with other military contractors, to avoid reprisals.”

  Rex didn’t look up. One of the team members asked, “Why would there be reprisals against us? Wasn’t it some sort of war between the drug lords? We’ve been hearing that they’re arguing among themselves.”

  Frank shrugged. “I guess almost a dozen hajis were in the warehouse when it blew. At least, their families have reported them missing, and that’s where they worked. From what I was told, there wasn’t enough left to even determine DNA.”

  “Good riddance,” another teammate remarked.

  “No argument with that,” Frank said. “Rex, do you know how much longer we’ll be able to enjoy your company?” The innocuous-sounding question was really asking if his mission was done.

  Rex cleared his throat. “Hopefully, not long. I think my work here is just about done. From what I hear, there’s something brewing in DC that I may need to handle. But maybe I’ll be back. Who knows?”

  Under the table, Digger’s ears perked up. “Work” and “done” meant it was playtime.

  ~THE END~

  Rex Dalton’s Next Adventure

  The Power of Three

  Rex Dalton was sent on a mission to Afghanistan to gather information about the opium trade. His mission brief was to find out who were the key players, the trade routes, and to follow the money trail from the producers and distributors into the coffers of Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Before long he had opened a can of worms revealing spine chilling deceit and corruption that reached into the highest hallways of power in Afghanistan, America, and Europe.

  His submissions to his superiors to take actions to wipe out the drug stores, labs, and the drug lords, fell on deaf ears.

  Eventually, the deliberate inaction and ineptness of US politicians drove Dalton to take unsanctioned action and it stirred a hornet’s nest which even he, one of the world’s most lethal assassins, might not survive.

  The Power of Three

  A Rex Dalton Thriller

  Book 2

  By JC Ryan

  Chapter One

  The Phoenix Compound, Kabul, Afghanistan May 2014

  REX DALTON TOOK evasive measures, street craft, to make sure no one was following him before he stepped out of the shadows and presented himself at the gates of the Phoenix Unlimited compound just before shift change for the gate guards at 4:00 a.m. He was well-known to the guard, but he gave the password anyway. It was SOP – standard operating procedure – and he appreciated that the private military contractor outfit was diligent with their security.

  Rex was in the employment of CRC, Crisis Response Consultancy. One of those nondescript names that simultaneously said nothing and everything about the activities of the organization. You had to be one of them to know what crises they were consulted about and how they responded to it.

  They were not the kind of consultants one would find in the board rooms of corporate America, advising companies how to cut costs and increase their profit margins. In a word, CRC was Black Ops.

  Those who were not in the know about CRC’s business would probably refer to Rex as a consultant. Those who had an inkling of what was going on would have thought of him as a field agent or an operative. His enemies and some others would have the word assassin in mind when his name came up. And to a certain degree, all those job titles would be correct, but what Rex really was, was a chameleon.

  He’d been in Afghanistan for almost twelve months as of that morning, and out of pure exasperation, he’d gone off the reservation regarding his original mission brief and parameters. Months of collecting intel with no sign that what he reported had any effect on the people he sent this information to. No one was interested in ending the Afghanistan war. The solution was there, right in front of them, the elephant in the room. It was the opium production that fueled the terrorists. Irritated and infuriated by the yellow belly nincompoops in Washington, he’d taken matters into his own hands.

  For months, he’d been raiding and destroying refining labs run by farmers and small-time opium buyers. When the growing season ended, and he could find no more of those, he’d redoubled his efforts to find the bigger labs and bigger buyers, regional drug lords, and his major target – the ruling drug lords and their distribution networks. Finding those distribution networks had been part of his original mission briefing. He found them, and he’d sent weekly reports on his progress.

  He even gave them plans on how to destroy the drug trade. No response.

  Finally, he requested permission to do something himself. Permission denied.

  That’s when he’d decided enough was enough. He concluded that this mission wasn’t really meant to do anything, it was probably just to placate someone in DC or elsewhere asking uncomfortable questions, so they could say we’re working on it. To change the situation and stop the bad guys and their drugs in their tracks, it was up to him to make it happen.

  CRC didn’t know of his extracurricular activities yet, but Rex expected that to change fairly soon. Two nights before he’d destroyed a major stockpile of heroin waiting to be shipped to South East Asia.

  The raid would have hurt the owner of the drugs financially, but in the overall scheme of things, at a ratio of eight tons of opium to yield one ton of heroin, the fifty tons destroyed in the explosion presented only seven percent of the 2013 crop. An offensive fourteen times the size he had launched was needed to wipe it all out.

  The attack on the storage facility carried two messages; one, for the drug lord to find another business venture or face the consequences, two, for the dithering CIA to do what he did, blow up all the warehouses. His reports contained the precise GPS coordinates and photos of enough targets so that with a few drone-strikes and precision bombs, they could destroy more than ninety-eight percent of the stockpile in an hour. However, based on the unresponsiveness to his reports he didn’t expect any of that to happen.

  So, then I’ll have to approach the problem from the other side.

  That is why he expected that word of his excursion would trickle back through a grapevine he knew had roots in America and the US government. He would be called home and reprimanded, then reassigned, hopefully not shown the door. The latter would be a disaster for him because he had not completed his life’s mission yet. He didn’t really know what would happen, and he reckoned a lot would depend on whose carpet he’d crapped on when he blew that place up. The one in the US who made the biggest noise about this would be where he would start his investigation.

  He hoped and believed that his CO, John Brandt, aka the Old Man, wasn’t part of it. If the Old Man wasn’t part of it though, then he was being deceived, and that didn’t sit well with Rex, either.

  Either way, until he got the call, he had some research to do, and the internet access in the hovel he rented under his Afghani cover didn’t work for what he needed. In fact, it didn’t work at all, being non-existent. What would a poor Afghani need with the internet, and how could he even afford it?

  To do what he needed, he had to wait for cover of darkness and sneak into the Phoenix compound or be marked as a spy by either the Afghani government, or by the Taliban, who controlled much of Afghanistan’s business, despite having been deposed from the government eight years before. Spies didn’t fare well under either circumstance.

  Rex’s objective on this early morning was to troll the Deep Web for any indication that his raid on the warehouse in Laghman Province lit up any secretive communications threads he could follow back to the US. It wasn’t exactly part of his mission to do that, either. No one had a
dmitted to him that there were ties between the corrupt Afghani government, the terrorist organizations who benefited from the financial proceeds of the drug trade, and someone in America, but it stood to reason. And that discovery was one of the reasons for his current state of mind.

  We’re fighting the wrong people. The real bad guys are back home.

  What other reason could there have been for the long-standing opium trade not being eradicated? It had been going on for years, and it fueled the war in a never ending, evil cycle of violence and destruction. While condemning it and punishing anyone who used the stuff with horrific consequences, up to and including public beheadings, the Taliban had nevertheless participated in it by extracting bribes and heavy taxes on the product. The money they got in this manner went to the purchase of weapons to kill more Americans.

  The official government also extracted their pound of flesh in the form of taxes. They didn’t have many other ‘cows’ they could milk. So for them, the drug trade had to continue. Meanwhile the drugs that made it out of the country to America and Europe were making some crooked business people very rich and killing tens of thousands of young people every year. The real war was happening in America and Europe, but no one would admit it. It was so much more dramatic and glorious to be killed or wounded in a war with terrorists with guns and bombs than being killed by their drugs.

  While the ‘war on drugs’ was receiving media attention at home, there were only sporadic reports, some even called it unfounded rumors, of American troops patrolling and protecting the poppy fields – yet Rex had observed it every day he was in the field. Even his urgent reports fell on deaf ears, or so it seemed. The reason had to be that there was corruption at home as well, and he was determined to root it out. He had a good understanding now of what was meant by ‘domestic enemies’ mentioned in that part of the soldier’s oath which talked about all enemies foreign and domestic.