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

by JC Ryan

  So, when Brandt received the call just before turning in for the night, his headaches with his best agent chafing at the assignment suddenly went away.

  “Brandt, what kind of support does your man in Kabul have? We have an urgent mission, and it’s too late for us to mobilize a conventional Spec Ops mission. Can he handle it?”

  The CIA director sounded completely alert, so Brandt didn’t question the hour of the call. At this time of year, Washington would have been three hours ahead of Arizona, but the fact that it was the wee hours of the morning in DC didn’t cross his mind. Even if it had, the word ‘urgent’ was enough explanation for the lateness of the call.

  “The short answer is ‘probably’. Give me more details, and I’ll be able to answer more confidently.”

  “We have SIGINT that there’s to be a meeting of the top drug lords and a couple of Taliban leaders at the suspected HQ site your agent reported about. The one at Koh… shit I don’t know how the hell anyone can even pronounce this name. The Director tried again, slower this time, but gave up and spelled it out.

  Brandt wrote it down, Koh-e Shir Darwaza. He looked at the map of Afghanistan on the wall and saw the red pin he’d placed there after reading Rex’s report, months ago.

  “Does your man have resources he can call on to assist him?”

  “Yes, he has.”

  “How will he do it?”

  “We’ve talked about this before, Carson. My teams’ methods and support resources are secret, and their safety depends on them remaining so. Just trust me. He has support. That’s all you need to know.”

  Carson was silent for a minute. Brandt reminded him that he hadn’t given a location or time for the meeting.

  “Oh, of course. How silly of me. The meeting is called for 11:00 p.m. Juliet.”

  Brandt just grinned at Carson’s self-conscious attempt to sound military-like. The man had never been in military service, so the affectation was ridiculous. He was all business when he replied, “He’ll be in place no later than ten Juliet.”

  “Make it nine-thirty,” Carson said. “Just to be sure he’s there before the tangos.”

  “Tangos, right. You’ve got it.” Brandt hung up thinking Carson was an idiot, but he didn’t have time to indulge in that for long. His first thought was, what’s got up Carson’s ass? For months he’s been ignoring Dalton’s heartfelt pleas to attack and destroy the warehouses and labs, and now all of a sudden, he can’t get the leaders killed quickly enough. Brandt looked at the array of clocks on the wall, the Afghanistan one showed it was 1:25 p.m. in Kabul. Less than eight hours to plan and execute an operation was cutting it close, even for Dalton.

  Chapter Ten

  Phoenix Headquarters, Kabul, Afghanistan, 1:30 p.m.

  BRANDT HAD NO idea that Rex Dalton was catching up on some much-needed sleep after his most recent predation on the Afghan drug trade had done its damage.

  Fortunately for Rex, he always woke fully alert, no matter how little sleep he’d had. Aside from the brief interruption when the truck blew up, he’d had an almost-luxurious five hours’ rest, so when he answered his cell phone and realized he was getting an encrypted call, he assumed his work had paid off. Now his intelligence reports would get some response, the CIA or the military would take over, and he was being recalled.

  Instead, Brandt was rapidly telling him about a change in his mission parameters. It took him a few seconds to catch up.

  “Wait, back up. I’m supposed to gatecrash and break up this meeting you’re telling me about?”

  “Where’s your head, Dalton? I’m telling you the Director of the CIA himself has authorized you to take out the people involved in this meeting. Not just break it up. He wants the drug lords, the Taliban leaders, and any heroin you find onsite blown to Kingdom Come, not just disrupted.”

  Rex took the phone from his ear and stared at it. It didn’t tell him anything new. He put it back and said, “Why this sudden change of heart?”

  “Ours is not…” Brandt began.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah – not to reason why. Okay, boss, you’ve got it. But I’ve got to say, this is a strange turn of events.” Rex deliberately left the rest of the quote out. Maybe it was superstition not to recite the inaccurate words everyone thought the poem said – ‘Ours is but to do or die’. Rex knew the correct words from the poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade. It said; Theirs not to make reply/ Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do and die. His emphasis on ‘and’.

  “You think you can’t handle it…” Brandt left the end of the sentence hanging. It was his way of challenging Rex to stop questioning the order and get to work.

  Rex didn’t bother to respond to the challenge, he just said, “I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

  “Break a leg,” Brandt said. Like actors, soldiers never wished each other good luck. They believed it was a sure-fire way to invite the opposite.

  ***

  REX WASTED NO more time in sleep. He had a lot to do, and not much time to do it. First order of business was to scout the location. He wished he had access to spy drones. That would have made it so much easier and less risky than entering what was practically the warfront. As it was, all he had was his looks, his fluency in the language, and his skills.

  Because it was broad daylight, Digger would be a liability. So, Rex had to leave Trevor and Digger to get as much sleep as they needed, and instead approached Frank to talk about the mission first.

  By noon, Frank had agreed to put himself, Trevor and Digger, plus five more of his best men at Rex’s disposal. Rex had all intentions to arrive unannounced at this party, but while he was going to be in the neighborhood he would use the opportunity to ask the partygoers a few questions before dispatching them all to a happier place.

  Frank assigned one of his men to go with Rex to scout the location. On the way, Rex and his companion would swing by the market and have a quick word with the informant who told him about this place before. Maybe the man could draw a few sketches of the place. That’s if Rex could get hold of him. It turned out that the informant wasn’t at his usual place at the coffee shop. The owner told Rex that the man hadn’t come in yet and heard from a friend of the guy that he had gone to visit some relatives but had no idea where they lived.

  At 3:10 p.m., Rex and his assistant stealthily made their way to the address. On the way, he asked his passenger about his background. He had a Welsh accent, so Rex wasn’t surprised to hear the guy was ex-SAS.

  To Rex’s disappointment, the house they were looking for was located on a large open property, with no other buildings close by to conceal their movements. A partially-crumbling wall surrounded the property. It looked vacant. It would be a good place for a clandestine meeting. An hour and a half of observation convinced him that no one was there. Not yet. He shook his head. The fact that this was supposed to be the regional headquarters made the lack of human activity puzzling. It could be that the people who usually worked there were sent home to be out of the way when the big shots arrived. But, in that case he would have expected that some guards would be in place already to keep the place secured. However, Rex had learned long ago the meaning of the acronym TIA, ‘this is Afghanistan’, which meant in Afghanistan, as far as westerners were concerned, almost nothing was ever done in conventional ways.

  From their vantage point it was impossible to tell if there was indeed anyone inside the property sleeping. It was also impossible to get any closer without making their presence known. Rex didn’t like it that he couldn’t get more information, but he and the ex-SAS guy decided to make the best of a bad situation and gather as much information as they could. They made sketches, estimated distances, and took almost a hundred photos, many of them zoomed-in close-ups of the house from various positions in an attempt to figure out where the rooms were based on the windows.

  By the time the two of them were ready to leave, Rex had a rough outline of a plan of action in his head.

  “L
et’s get back to the compound. I want to draw up my plan, and then I’ll brief you all at the same time.”

  “Ace.”

  Rex’s taciturn companion left him to his thoughts, which Rex appreciated. Something was odd about the information he’d received, and so was the situation at the house, but he couldn’t pin it down.

  Chapter Eleven

  Market District, Kabul, Afghanistan, 5:00 p.m.

  AFTER DROPPING OFF Frank’s man at the compound, Rex had changed into his man-jammies and headed to his usual haunts in the market district to see what gossip he could pick up. He was listening for chatter about the truck explosion, and he heard plenty, but he couldn’t relate it to the meeting he was supposed to raid.

  The man who’d given him the tip about the truck was still absent. Rex gave only a momentary thought to whether he could have been one of the unidentified casualties he was hearing about. If the guy had been killed, it was because he was more deeply involved in the opium trade than he’d let on.

  He didn’t hear anything at all about the meeting set to take place that night. It puzzled him. If the meeting was in response to his raids, he’d have thought someone would have mentioned it. His veiled hints got no response, and that was odd, too.

  Secrecy in Kabul was an oxymoron. Someone who wasn’t supposed to know about any given secret, but did, could always be found. Over the past twelve months he’d developed more than a dozen sources of information who seemed to know everything that was happening in the city. But no one he talked to that afternoon gave any hint they knew about a top-level meeting to take place.

  He’d pushed the envelope of prudence with his inquiries. One or two of his sources looked askance at his questions, and he’d had to back off. If he was to remain here after all his efforts, he couldn’t afford to burn these contacts. Still, it was frustrating to have to plan with no more information than he had.

  Frustrating as it was, it would have to be enough. He had a time and a location. Either it would happen, or it wouldn’t. By 6:00 p.m., he’d given up on collecting more information and returned to the compound to brief Frank and his team before dinner. Immediately afterward, they’d deploy according to his plan.

  ***

  The Phoenix compound

  HE GOT BACK about an hour before dinner time and found Trevor working with Digger in the courtyard as usual. Before he went to change clothes, he stopped to greet his buddy.

  Digger growled softly as he approached. Rex still didn’t know whether Digger knew him by sight of his face, by smell, or something else. He was dressed as an Afghan man, so it made sense that Digger would view him as an enemy, but then again, if he identified people by smell rather than looks then it meant his growling was part of his twisted sense of dog humor, just making sure Rex remained scared of him.

  “Hey, Trevor, question for you.”

  “What’s that, mate?”

  “I could hear Digger growling, and then he stopped. How far away can he see or smell me?”

  “He could smell you from five miles off, mate,” Trevor joked.

  “No, seriously.”

  “Well, seriously, his sense of smell is a million times better than his sight. I told you he growls at you because you voted for the wrong party, and he won’t let you forget it. Or because he doesn’t like your sense of fashion. Just think about it. Every target I’ve given him since we got here was dressed pretty much like you are. But he’d have smelled you before he recognized your face. And if you’d spoken, he’d have recognized that before your face, too.”

  Rex smiled. The more he learned about the dog, the more he appreciated his talents. That didn’t mean they’d ever be best friends. The dog’s sense of humor, and his racism, and his political affiliations would prevent that.

  “Briefing in half an hour. Bring Digger along, I get the impression he might understand the briefings better than you do.”

  Trevor flipped him a middle finger.

  Rex gave a casual wave and went to change into something more appropriate for his next task. Wearing desert camo fatigue pants and a tight khaki t-shirt, he sauntered to the office building. The briefing would take an hour. They’d have dinner after that and then at 9:00 p.m. the eight of them, nine if one counted Digger as a soldier, which he probably was, would head out in various nondescript vehicles for the house.

  Rex’s briefing was as detailed as he could make it with the information available. Everyone understood that they had to remain flexible and that things could change as soon as they arrived onsite. He quickly sketched the floor plan of the house, as much as he was able to figure out from looking at it from the outside through a monocular. He pointed out and showed pictures of the crumbling wall and the surrounding area on the whiteboard, pointing at each man as he placed an X where he’d want each to conceal themselves before they approached.

  “Trevor, you and Digger will have to pinpoint the guards and tell us where they are, so we can take them out before going in. We’ll need everyone to get inside from all directions at the same time for the element of surprise.”

  Rex fielded some questions and clarified that they’d be leaving no witnesses behind. However, he did want the people they found captured, controlled, and kept alive until he’d questioned them.

  His inclination was to blow up the house with the drugs and people inside after he interrogated them, but he also had to think about doing it in such a way that it didn’t lead any investigators back to Phoenix. That of course depended on how thorough the investigation would be, and whether it would send a more pointed message if the people were found with their throats cut instead. That would be more in line with how things were done in Afghanistan – TIA. Another factor was how many of them would be there. The intel had been vague. Actually, there was none about that, one more thing he found weird. But since it came from the CIA, he chalked it up to their usual incompetency.

  ***

  BY DINNERTIME, EVERYONE was clear on the mission. They ate lightly to avoid sluggishness. They needed the blood in their brains, not in their stomachs processing food. Rex’s old pickup and two equally disreputable vehicles that Frank used when he wanted his outfit to keep a low profile set out as twilight was falling. The vehicles left a few minutes apart and turned in different directions, using different routes to get to the destination. The last thing they wanted was to look like a motorcade of former Special Forces operators on their way to go and break up a drug lord-slash-Taliban meeting and kill all the attendees.

  Trevor and Digger rode with Rex. Digger sat between them, staring straight ahead. Trevor opened his mouth as if to say something, and then closed it again, apparently changing his mind. Rex glanced at him, leaning forward a little to see past the dog.

  “What is it?”

  Trevor shrugged. “Nothing, really. It’s just that you seem more comfortable with Digger lately.”

  The dog opened his mouth in that goofy smile of his. He did it every time he heard his name, if they weren’t working. He definitely knew the difference between a command, and when the humans were talking about him. And his facial expressions seemed to indicate that whenever the humans were talking about him, it was a good thing.

  Rex shrugged. “I appreciate his talent, and that he’s stopped trying to kill me. Also, that he’s learned to be not so rude and only growls softly at me. That’s all.”

  Trevor grinned. “Admit it, you wish he was yours.”

  Rex couldn’t hide his horror at the idea. “Hell, no!” Then he remembered Digger could understand him and hurried to pacify him. I mean, he’s a good dog and all. But I don’t need a pet.”

  Digger closed his mouth and looked at Rex as if he’d been insulted. Trevor was definitely insulted. “He’s not a pet! He’s my brother-in-arms – my best mate.”

  “Okay, sorry,” Rex said. “Can we save this for another time? We need to focus.”

  Trevor smiled again. “Fair enough. Just passing the time.”

  Digger’s expression changed back
to what Rex thought of as a smile.

  “Well, we’re here,” Rex said. They were actually a mile or more from the house. Rex didn’t want to just drive up and alert the bad guys if they or their guards were there already, nor did he want strange vehicles in the vicinity if the bad guys arrived after them. He’d planned to have all three of their vehicles parked quite a distance from their target. When the others got to their assigned spots, they’d have between half a mile and a mile to get to the house. Rex, Trevor, and Digger would be the first to get there, though.

  Now that the time had come, Rex was grateful for the isolation. It was still light enough for Digger to spook anyone who saw them and raise an alarm. Fortunately, they met no one on the way.

  From a distance, far enough away to avoid detection if guards had been placed, they reconnoitered the area. There was still no one at the house. The drug lords must have felt secure in the belief that no one would know, or no one would dare to get close to that house if they knew what was good for them. Drug lords had a fearsome reputation all over the world and Afghanistan’s were no exception. Either that or they were complete idiots. The verdict on the latter was not in, yet. Rex’s opinion was that anyone who would get involved in the trade had to be some kind of an idiot. On the other hand, these men were among the richest in the country, definitely in the region. Some men would never have enough and would take the risk for more wealth. He shrugged. TIA.

  Trevor sent Digger ahead to scout further out, while he and Rex waited for the others to arrive at their designated spots. No guards were detected and nothing unusual showed up on Trevor’s iPad, which was wirelessly connected to Digger’s harness fitted with a small but powerful night-vision video camera.