SAFE HAVENS: Shadow Masters (A Sean Havens Black Ops Novel Book 1)

by J. T. Patten

  “Sir, I am more than willing to cooperate with you to come to some sort of resolution. I fully respect your position and authority but do not believe I have stolen anything, so if there is anything more that you can share with me so I can resolve this matter, I would be indebted to you.”

  The guard continued sifting through Havens’ personal items as if he didn’t hear him.

  No, this is not how a government employee would be acting if they needed to get home. This is not how an audacious American would behave if they were not guilty of something. This subservient attitude is not going to gain respect.

  “Listen you pieces of shit!” Havens switched to Yemeni Arabic and quickly got the attention of all in the room. “Get me your superior or kill me now, because when I get out of here, I am directly contacting Abu Rashad Al-Aghbari who is a personal friend and he will completely goat fuck you all! And I will not miss my plane!”

  Upon hearing the name of the renowned Vice-Prime Minister for the Affairs of Defense and Security, two of the guards’ eyes widened and jaws dropped.

  The first security officer sensed a bluff, but the fact that this individual spoke local dialect, was clearly now explosive, and was knowledgeable of an individual who should cast extreme fear into the hearts and minds of security personnel, he was certainly going to proceed with caution.

  The guard had been informed by his superior to detain this man upon entry but despite informing the other guards, this man had somehow cleared processing.

  “I will be right back. You will wait here.”

  Havens started to dress.

  “You must not…”

  Havens did the interrupting now, “FUCK YOU! I am getting dressed, walking out that door, and getting on my plane. I have violated none of your laws which makes this an international incident if you do not release me or get someone from my embassy here. Shit, call the embassy RSO Kent Williams!”

  The guards were still looking at each other hoping for some guidance from their superior.

  “I will be quickly. You will wait for the moment and I will return quickly. Please. You must wait.”

  The guards exited the room closing the door behind them. Havens could hear rapid chatter among the guards, questioning the situation to which the head guard had no answers. But he was certainly going to get some.

  As the guards were exiting, Havens followed them with impertinence until they slammed the door behind them. They failed to notice, however, as he looked to be naturally reaching for the door knob in an effort to come along, that he had retrieved and palmed the black ceramic razor blade from his belt. He was just able to insert it in the jamb between the frame and door lock when he slammed his fist on the door with all his might causing the guard to instinctively wince and release the door handle. When they saw that no crazy American was coming out the door, the guards continued on.

  Havens waited until the conversational noise left the area and slowly opened the door, putting the blade back in his belt pocket.

  He has seen upon his guided walk to the room that there were no security cameras in this area nor were there any other offices that may prove risky with increased foot traffic. Knowing what was to his left, he walked to his right not quite knowing what he was going to do. His plane would be boarding in the next thirty minutes, which would still give them time to detain him again if caught. Havens stopped and went back to the room’s door which unlocked from the outside with a key. He pulled two toothpicks from a zippered pouch and jammed them into the lock before breaking them off. It would at least buy him some time knowing they would expect him to still be in the room.

  Havens slowly retraced his steps through the hallway back to the terminal area. Still no sign of the security guards.

  Havens saw a male backpacker with a Chelsea Football Club warm-up jacket enter the bathroom after stepping away from his boarding gate in an apparent last minute decision to use the toilet. Havens quickly followed from behind, careful to check that no eyes were tracking him.

  If I kill him and take his ticket his body could be discovered and they will shut down the airport. Would they shut down the airport? I should know those procedures.

  I could knock him out and make it look like a robbery. With more planning I could make it look like an overdose. Looks like a good kid out exploring the world getting high and sowing his oats.

  Think.

  “Shite!” the backpacker said as the sight and odor hit him. He was waving the air when he noticed Havens close behind him.

  “Excuse me,” Havens said. “Wondering if I could make you an offer?”

  “Uhhh, no, I don’t think so, mate. Plane to catch.”

  The backpacker guardedly stepped back, unsure of the kind of offer he was being solicited.

  “I need to trade an airline ticket quickly.”

  “Uh, no, no way, I don’t think so, mate. Look I have to be on now.”

  The backpacker, sensing something was awry, tried to get past Havens quickly.

  Havens outstretched his arm but not too threateningly. He didn’t need to raise any further scenes. “Look, if you don’t have to be anywhere in a hurry, they won’t check passports at this point. I will give you a thousand dollars for wherever you are going. My ticket is heading first class to Kuwait. You can likely get another flight from there and still have a few hundred dollars in your pocket. Looks like you didn’t check your pack, so I am guessing no luggage? And if you are interested in a really great place for a chew, the Yemeni community in Kuwait has some great spots off the beaten path for a chew despite the area’s drug control. They usually have some football matches on TV; they bring out great food while you are chewing. It’s like a combination of the Barcelona’s Ramblas and the Red Light District of Amsterdam.”

  C’mon kid bite, I know you are here for the qat chewing and some adventure. I can’t bluff like this all day. I see you thinking, what part are you contemplating? No time for low key elicitation.

  “Where are you going, kid?

  “Dubai.”

  “Fifteen hundred. And Manchester United can sod off.”

  The backpacker grinned. “You play footie or a fan?”

  “Fan. Used to play, now I coach kids, but really I prefer Arsenal best. I do like Chelsea. They play with such heart and speed. C’mon whaddya say?”

  “Cheers. Fifteen hundred…U.S.?”

  “U.S. I didn’t have time to exchange,” Havens smiled.

  “Right. Well, looks like you are in a bit of a spot, and by the way you are looking around and talkin’ all low-like, probably in some hot pursuit situation.”

  “Bit like a Jason Statham flick, but I have hair instead of the hot girls and smoking fast cars that Statham has.”

  “Right. Fifteen hundred. Best move on. Door may be a shutting ‘Mr. Hairy Jason.’”

  “Cheers, kid. How about another $500 for the backpack?”

  “You must really be in a tight predic. But anything to fook the man,” the backpacker said raising his hand and fingers like a gun in his best attempt at being a combo mafia, hood gangster, hipster-something that was so ridiculously awful it gave them both a quick chuckle and head shake before Havens emerged yet again from the bathrooms.

  The young man added in an attempt at a casual afterthought, “Oy. You may want to stay clear of the dogs.” The backpacker gestured with his eyebrows, hinting at the backpack.

  “Thanks, chief.” Great, go from stealing something at an embassy I wasn’t at to now drug trafficking. “Do me one last solid. If you see any security right when you walk out, give a whistle or something. I’ll be coming right behind you.”

  “Cheers. No problem.”

  When the coast appeared clear, Havens dropped his light jacket on the ground near some chairs kicking it to a corner and grabbed a thin long overshirt, put on some non-prescription glasses, and hefted the backpack over his shoulder. He spit in his hand and put a small dab of toothpaste in his palm and mussed it through his hair.

  He hurried
ly walked straight to the Dubai flight gate, handed over the ticket, and proceeded to board. With no intention of keeping the kid’s backpack and whatever contraband he had in it, Havens would wait a bit to see what else could be of use in case the kid was caught and they discovered that Havens was in Dubai. Whoever “they” were.

  John, I knew that passport was too good to be true. What did you do to me and why, you little shit?

  As other passengers boarded, Havens reached down between his legs as if untying his shoes for the flight.

  With his thumbnail under the sole of his shoe, he bent up a Vibram edge rotating it past the heel clockwise to the toe so he could retrieve another passport that was hidden within the package he had previously sent to the Turkish-owned hotel.

  Now stuffing it into his sock so he could get at it later from the bathroom, he started to process what all had happened and how the hell he was going to get out of Dubai with no more surprises.

  He wiped his forehead, hoping the plane would pull away faster. An Indian man in his fifties sitting next to Havens already started to unpack some homemade snacks. Havens wasn’t hungry, but did like what the man was eating and had eaten it numerous times before. They made brief eye contact and the man offered Havens some of his thin flat yellow tortilla with green flakes.

  “What is it?” Havens asked, reaching out for some with a curious smile. “My name is…” Havens casually looked from his left eye at the backpacker’s plane ticket still in his left hand, “Nigel.”

  Sheesh. What have you gotten yourself into Havens?

  “Very nice to make your acquaintance Nigel, I am Rajiv. What we are eating is…”

  The plane pulled away with no incident. Havens listened to Rajiv for the rest of the trip while he silently willed the plane faster to the West. To home. To his wife and daughter.

  I am so sorry, Maggie. Things are going to change. Maybe Christina and I can talk about adopting again. I think I could be better the second time around.

  The director of Sana’a International Airport security hung up the phone and ordered his men to keep looking. He had been informed to let this man from the embassy just sit for a while in a locked room. He was supposed to be detained long enough to miss his flight with no interaction from the guards.

  Apparently, from what little the director understood of the reason for detaining the American, there was some internal U.S. counterintelligence issue about whom the man may be meeting in Kuwait if he made his flight. After an hour or two they were to come in and apologize for the error and confusion.

  It was a good thing that one of the guards had decided to go by the room to listen to the caged American animal and heard nothing other than silence. When they had finally unjammed the lock and entered the room to check on him, he was gone. They quickly checked to see if he had boarded his flight and learned that he had not checked in.

  Where was he?

  No one else had any record of another ticket being purchased, and if the U.S. Embassy was telling the truth, there were very limited flights now going to Kuwait.

  The director was somewhat remorseful that his senior man did not keep a guard at the door, but after all they were just supposed to hold him. Why should airport security have to babysit a relatively non-threatening staffer? He suspected that perhaps his security team had gone for an hour chew. It occurred to him a chew would be good right about now. A few more hours.

  The real Nigel exited the airport and texted a friend. He was going to go to the market for some qat, upgrade his hotel, get some clothes and hang out with some friends new and old. Perhaps he would stay another week. He wanted to bang that pre-med girl from New Zealand who had arrived in town a couple days ago. She would be with everyone this afternoon. Perhaps he could play a sympathy card appealing to her proclivities towards helping her common man. That’s it, he thought. “I was robbed on my way to the airport and roughed up a bit.”

  Nigel saw a series of stone stairs. Without giving it a thought, he hurled himself down the steps pulling his arms and knees against some of the rough edges of rock as he fell. When he landed at the bottom he admired his abrasions and the prospects of the evening.

  Chapter 13

  The cleaner located his second stashed car a few blocks away. The quiet Chicago neighborhood was quickly coming alive. He had to get moving before Donald got home.

  From the trunk he grabbed a sawed off Mossberg shotgun which he had loaded earlier that day and double-checked for shells. The shotgun was placed in the rear passenger side foot well for easy retrieval. A thin blanket was tossed over it in the event of a fast visual police check.

  The cleaner’s record would be spotless as his alias had been seasoned now with only the occasional parking ticket or traffic ticket that was promptly paid in full to augment the fictitious cover as true life.

  He tied a blue bandana around his forehead and donned dark sunglasses before checking the GPS transmission reading from the device he had placed under the vehicle Donald was now driving.

  Right on target, Donald. Keep going. Don’t slow up, homie.

  It wasn’t the cleaner’s position to ask questions but this job was nagging him a bit. He thought the killing of the teenager was overkill for a judge’s assassination. On the inside of the house there hadn’t been any legal certificates or diplomas in the den area walls. That wasn’t typical for a judge. Why would he need to take the girl’s laptop and not the judge’s computer or thumb drives? There had been a few jobs now like this that were nagging at him a bit.

  He remembered being a soldier. He had liked that so much more. He even missed the work and his team in Kabul. He had to keep reminding himself that his new employer was the boss, and his boss made the Clean the Streets missions of the Silver Star program a success. They were all apparently taking out crime at levels that were typically not touched, or they were unconventionally executed to draw pressure onto other criminal elements. That part he did not like, but life was not fair.

  The cleaner pulled from his wallet the one piece of cover contraband that he allowed himself. A picture of his wife and children.

  How he missed them so.

  It still boggled his mind how his wife, sister-in-law, and still missing brother-in-law could get involved with the drug trade and Mexican cartels while he was away in Afghanistan. He didn’t even have family in Mexico and certainly no family involved in criminal activity, to the best of his knowledge. They hardly had any Mexican friends where they had lived. Even the Mexican restaurants they frequented were national chains and not Mexican-owned. Nothing made sense about their slaughter.

  The police had said his brother-in-law had “allegedly” been involved through Air Force connections overseas that transported drugs back to the states through military channels. The hit that left his family dead and sister-in-law decapitated in the basement was part of some turf battle and his brother-in-law was likely either part of it or in hiding.

  Maybe his wife had just been helping her sister. He wondered how she could have let this come into his home. For God’s sake he had been hunting Taliban funded heroin traffickers in Afghanistan risking his life to fight this drug’s illicit economic expansion when he was called home. A couple years had passed, but the pain felt like it happened this morning.

  He had made people pay.

  His new employer had recognized him from the headlines, taken him in, got him some emotional help, and came up with a job he could hold down exacting revenge against the monsters who had butchered his family and that had let criminals out of prison to kill again. The judge was supposedly another one in the kill chain that needed to be terminated.

  Once the cleaner could emotionally get through a day without breaking down, his employer had provided him with intensive, unconventional urban tactical training. He took to the training well and it complemented his previous military experience.

  Upon its completion, he was handed a file identifying the murderers of his family. He was provided a small team to exact his reveng
e. They entered nearly ten different homes, apartments, motel rooms, and a restaurant, all the way from Chicago to St. Louis to Texas and Arizona, and just over the border in Mexico. They would burst in to each location as a killer assault team, wreaking havoc on those he was told were responsible for his own personal losses.

  They had torn apart the murderers and drug traffickers with automatic weapon fire. In its final zenith, his employer had recommended beheading the dead to throw off authorities, send a message, and above all, pay back his children’s likely last wishes for their father to come to their aid. It had brought the cleaner to his knees initially, but he knew he had to do it for his family honor and final vengeance.

  From that point his heart turned cold. Yet underneath that compassionless void, he would on occasion hold the photo of his beloved family, looking wantonly at their lives that once were. It had been a good day when the picture was taken.

  The cleaner decided as he drove to Donald’s location that he would address these recent missions with his employer again. On one such mission, they had happened upon some Somali whores locked in a storage room strung out on heroin with only a couple soiled mattresses and a sink. No doubt they had been trafficked and held as sex slaves. Their orders were to kill them as well to paint a deceptive story of criminal rivalry. The first time the cleaner addressed his opinion on this he gained little more than a quizzical look from his handler who asked him if he was going soft. The handler had scolded him telling him to act like a soldier. To act in accordance of a man who had been given a new family and a new chance at avenging his family’s murder without fear of reprisals. Who else would be given such an opportunity in a similar situation? How could he think there could be no innocent lives taken for the greater good to get after the heads of the snake? Who else could still be doing all this good for the public and still be working for the United States government?

  It shut the cleaner up for a time, but as a lifelong Marine who had done some covert ops work in the past, he knew this was not the work of the United States government. Policy would never allow it. He knew, despite not yet fully coming to terms with reality, that he was being exploited by someone in the military or intelligence apparatus who had some temporary relief from oversight and accountability. He would have to find out who that was. His boss knew he wasn’t happy. And that didn’t make the boss happy.