by Peter Nealen
“All right,” he said. “You’ve got a point. From what you’ve showed me so far, there’s definitely something a little off. And we’ve got more of a vested interest in this than you might realize.” He wasn’t going to tell Price just how involved the Blackhearts had been in the Tourmaline-Delta incident or its aftermath. Not until he knew how far he could trust the man. “But I want a look at that drone.”
“You’ve got a few minutes,” Price said. “They’ll know we’re out here somewhere by now; they don’t lose drones randomly. I guarantee that there’s a Quick Reaction Force heading toward its last known location right now.”
Brannigan smiled faintly, the expression almost hidden behind his handlebar, especially since it didn’t reach his eyes. “We don’t have a camp to pack up,” he said. “We can go now.”
“You mind if I send Vernon with you?” Price asked.
Meaning do I mind if you send a minder, who will report back to you. Brannigan hesitated. But if Price was on the right side, he might just want to have one of his guys get eyes on the crashed drone; he hadn’t said if they’d had a chance to get a good look at one before. And it’s a gesture of trust. He knows that Vernon is a potential hostage. Interesting.
“Fine,” he said. He glanced over as Price waved the big black man over. “Mount up,” he said. “We’re moving.” He raised his voice so that the rest of the team could hear. Vernon just nodded and headed for the Land Rover, his SCAR 16 already in his hands. He had grabbed his gear as soon as they’d gotten to the camp, and was now kitted out in the same chest rig and rifle as the rest of Price’s men.
Brannigan was the last one to climb into the Land Rover’s passenger seat, glancing back at Price, who was directing the quick and efficient breakdown of the camp. At the rate they were going, he fully expected that Price’s stated goal of thirty minutes to be off the X was going to be met.
One of the elements of Price’s checkered reputation was just how professional the guys he hired were. There were good indicators that for some of his bigger contracts, he—or, perhaps to be fairer, his companies—weren’t too picky about who they brought on, handed a rifle, and sent to a combat zone. There were some credible accusations that low hiring standards had led to unnecessary deaths. And what he’d heard about the Anambas operation wasn’t all that promising, either.
But whatever he’d done before, this crew was clearly a bunch of pros. They were knocking down the camp and loading the vehicles with commendable speed, all without dropping security.
Who knows? He turned forward as Jenkins accelerated away toward the faint cloud of dust slowly dissipating above the crash site. Maybe he’s really what he says he is, and he’s learned from his mistakes.
He wasn’t sure. Men who played by their own rules rarely did learn from their mistakes. They just changed the rules again.
***
The drone was a crumpled mess at the end of a hundred-meter-long skid mark plowed through the red dirt, patchy grass, and scrub bushes. It had clearly hit hard, and was much the worse for wear because of it. But it was intact enough that they might be able to salvage some information from it.
“Vinnie, see if you can ID anything that might tell us something,” Brannigan said. “Everybody else, on security. If that QRF that Price was warning about is on its way, I want to know about it.”
The rest set up a perimeter, with Curtis and Wade climbing into the beds of the pickups and laying their rifles over the cabs. They weren’t machineguns, but the extra elevation should give them at least some better sightlines.
Brannigan looked around to make sure everything was set, then joined Bianco at the wreckage.
“Camera’s smashed,” Bianco was muttering as he gingerly poked around the mangled mass of metal and plastic. “Doesn’t look like it’s booby-trapped, so that’s good.”
Vernon had joined them. Brannigan considered telling him to get out on the perimeter, but realized that the other man could simply say that he didn’t work for him. Which was the truth. And he was sure that the whole reason that Vernon was with them was because Price wanted his eyes on the drone, too. So, he held his peace and let the man look.
“There it is,” Bianco said, crouched down and looking carefully inside a rent in the flimsy-looking fuselage. Clearly the drone had been more lightly constructed than it initially appeared. “That should be the hard drive. If I can pull it, we might get something, unless they had it wired to wipe itself as soon as it lost signal.” Bianco had brought some tech toys of his own; they weren’t anything that would get too much attention from the Chadians.
Which reminded him; he needed to use the satellite uplink to contact Hancock and find out when the rest of the team was due in Abeche.
“Price seemed pretty certain about the time frame for a QRF,” he commented to Vernon.
“We’ve seen it once before,” Vernon said. “We had to drop a drone a couple weeks ago, when it was getting too close. We got overflown a few days before that, and then got shot at after dark. So, we weren’t taking any chances. The one we shot came down on the far side of a river, and before we could find a crossing, there were already vehicles closing in on it.” He looked at Brannigan. “And yeah, they were the Humanity Front’s contractors.”
So, Vernon’s a believer, too. Why the hell didn’t Van Zandt have intel about this if the same terrorists we went into Transnistria to hunt were here? Is Chad that invisible to the rest of the world?
The truth is, as much as I’m hesitant to trust Mitchell Price of all people, he’s making a stronger and stronger case. Not that it makes things any easier, discovering that we might just be up against probably the best-funded and most deeply-rooted terrorist organization in history.
And if he put some of the Humanity Front’s rhetoric about their idea of a “better world” into the context of violent revolution…it got even worse.
“Got something coming,” Wade called out. He was focused over his rifle’s sights, off to the east. Brannigan followed his gaze, and saw dust clouds on the horizon.
He checked his watch. Yeah, right about on time. Price was right again.
“Grab what you can and let’s go, Vinnie,” he said. “Time’s up.”
Bianco ripped the last of the connections out and clambered up from the drone’s wreckage. “It doesn’t look like it had a dead man switch,” he said. “But I won’t know until I can hook it up. With a lot of firewalls in place, just in case.”
Brannigan nodded. “Mount up. We can look into it later.” He didn’t want to clash with whoever was coming to investigate that drone.
Not yet.
***
High above, another drone was circling. It was holding a much higher altitude than the high-tech craft that the man named Max had downed, too high to be readily seen with the naked eye, or heard. The Yun Ying, or Cloud Shadow, was China’s first true stealth drone, and while it left much to be desired when compared to the West’s stealth tech, it was plenty for this part of the world.
Cameras zoomed in on the encampment in the desert as the operator spotted sunlight glinting off a windshield. The drone banked, circling around, still almost fifty kilometers away.
***
“Zoom in there,” Lung Kai instructed. Jun Huang dutifully tapped the keys on the laptop, and the drone’s camera zeroed in on the rapidly-dwindling camp.
Lung Kai squinted. Unfortunately, though many of the cameras in smartphones were produced in Chinese factories, they still didn’t have quite the optical fidelity in their surveillance cameras that some of the Western powers did. It was a source of continual frustration.
But he had studied images of the target for hours and hours, often far into the night. He knew Mitchell Price, even at a distance. The man had caused the Central Committee considerable embarrassment, and while they had been unable to economically ruin him, now that he was in Africa, he was fair game.
It wasn’t as if the Americans were going to mourn him when he was gone, after all. He wa
s hardly popular with the United States government, if intelligence was to be believed.
He straightened. “Fang Shanxi!” he called. “Get the men ready! We have a location.”
Chapter 13
Erekle “Herc” Javakhishvili was an angry man.
He didn’t show it. He had maintained a façade of wry disinterestedness for a long time, going back even to his stint in the Georgian Army. Much like the Soviet Army that had come before it, letting anything be seen that could be construed as a weakness was a recipe for getting the ever-loving shit beaten out of you. For a man of strong emotions like Javakhishvili, that meant that being a laid-back dullard was a self-defense mechanism.
But underneath, deep down, he was a passionate man. And he’d finally found his place with Brannigan’s Blackhearts, mainly as Sam Childress’ primary doc. He wasn’t officially, of course. He was no surgeon. But he’d been the one hovering, monitoring all the medical stuff that the rest didn’t necessarily understand. Childress was his patient, damn it. And as soon as he’d turned his back, some bastards had snatched him.
Even though he was an American citizen, Javakhishvili knew that he was still something of a foreigner to the rest of the team. Not only was he the new guy—well, there were Kirk and Burgess, but they hadn’t gone out yet—but he wasn’t US-born. That had made him an outsider since he’d joined the Navy to earn his citizenship.
But it had started to feel, down in New Mexico, like he was finally getting past that. The Blackhearts were a small team, and those kinds of barriers had to get broken down quickly. He wasn’t as close to the rest of them as, say, Flanagan and Curtis, who might have been brothers had they not had different skin colors. Now, though, even though he knew that it wasn’t really true, he was feeling that that bond was threatened. He had to find Childress.
But so far, he’d spent the last hour roaming one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Northern Virginia, without seeing or hearing anything out of the ordinary. It was the middle of the week, so there weren’t many people at home; this was Beltway Bandit territory, so most of them were probably in DC, making new regulations and new fees to make everyone’s lives miserable. The neighborhood was mostly deserted during this time of day; most of the government employees wouldn’t be back for hours.
So, as he came to the end of the lane, the sidewalk leading out onto the highway, he was fuming. He didn’t even want to check in by text. That would mean announcing failure, again.
As he stepped around the corner, however, he saw a van sitting on the curb, right where it had line of sight on the nearest palatial house just inside the subdivision.
His heart started to race, until he saw that it wasn’t the van in the BOLO report. This one was blue, and had windows on the side, as opposed to the bad guys’ white, windowless cargo van.
Even as he shoved his hands in his pockets and started past, he could feel the eyes inside watching him. He’d reacted when he’d seen the van sitting there, and he knew it. It was amateurish, but he’d been too pissed to maintain his calm.
Just walk. Got nothing to do with these guys. They’re not the targets.
But as he passed the back of the van, he heard the doors open and with a rush of adrenaline realized that while these weren’t the bad guys he was looking for, they would do for the moment.
“Hey, motherfucker,” a voice called from behind him. He kept walking, even as his hand closed around the Kahr CM9’s grip in his pocket.
“I’m talking to you, cocksucker,” the voice said, rising in volume. “Turn the fuck around.”
If I stretch this out too far, I’m just going to get shot in the back. Can’t have that. It’s self-defense, after all.
He turned around. Three young men faced him, all with guns thrust into their waistbands. He couldn’t identify the gang by the way they were dressed, but that they were gangbangers was pretty obvious. And their reason for being in the neighborhood was equally obvious.
“What are you looking at, motherfucker?” the taller kid in the middle demanded. “I see you eyeballing me.”
“I just came around the corner and saw a van parked on the side of the street,” Javakhishvili said, already planning. He’d faced far worse than these punks. They didn’t have a chance. They were all dead, and didn’t even know it yet. Because the fury was building in him, needing an outlet, and while these weren’t Childress’ kidnappers, as he’d thought before, they’d do for the moment.
“Maybe you seen a lot more than you should, motherfucker,” the tall kid said. “Too bad for you.” He started to reach for the Hi Point in his waistband, and Javakhishvili drew.
The pocket holster was designed to catch on the inside of the pocket, releasing the pistol in the process. The subcompact came out smoothly, and was already mid-punchout as his finger tightened on the trigger, the sights already aligned right about at the kid’s nose, the Hi Point still barely out of the gangster’s pants.
The little 9mm barked harshly in the quiet, wooded neighborhood, the hollow point punching a hole right between two wide, shocked eyes. The kid was already falling as Javakhishvili pivoted ever so slightly to his right, driving the gun toward the second punk, who had a hand on his gun, but was staring at his fallen buddy in shock. Hand’s still on the gun. Close enough. That one took a round to the chest and staggered back against the van as he dragged the pistol to the left.
The third punk had yanked out his Beretta, but he was too slow. Javakhishvili Mozambiqued him, double-tapping a pair into his chest before slamming a third into the kill box just to the right of his nose a split-second later.
The one he’d shot in the chest was down on the street, starting to twitch. A glance told Javakhishvili all he needed to know; that one was done for, his heart torn to pieces by the passage of the bullet. He’d taken the shot fast, but it had been a good one.
Turning his back, he stuffed the Kahr back into his pocket and hurried away.
***
Sam Childress had never been so scared in his life.
Not even in that snowy farmyard in Transnistria, as the bullets that had crippled him had torn through his body had he been so scared. That had just been death to fear, and he’d faced death before.
He knew, deep down, that the men who had torn him out of the hospital were the same ones they’d fought in Mexico and Eastern Europe. Somehow, he was sure of it. Why else would they have kidnapped him? He also knew that he was going to be interrogated, and that was where the fear came in.
He had no idea what time it was, or even what day. He’d had a black sack over his head since being dragged out of the hospital and thrown into a van, but he could see enough through the musty fabric to know that he was probably in a basement. The light had not gone out since he’d been put there, tossed on the floor like a sack of dirt, his hands tied behind his back. They knew he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t crawl with his hands behind him, let alone walk.
It was part of SERE training that the first thing a captor would attempt to break down was the sense of the passage of time. It disoriented the prisoner, disconnected them. That helped weaken resistance. It’s hard to fight when you’re confused and tired. The light staying on, the sack over his head, the complete lack of interaction since they’d stuck him down in the basement…it was all part of the plan.
And that was what terrified him. Not the pain of the interrogation that he was sure was coming. He’d been in near-constant pain, no matter what kind of painkillers they pumped into him, ever since waking up in a Northern Virginia hospital. He’d gotten used to pain, even though he hadn’t had his pain meds in a while. At least, he told himself that. Not only was the pain getting worse, but he was pretty sure that there was a dosage problem, because the sweating and the shakes had to be because of some kind of minor withdrawal.
But none of that scared him so much as what was coming. Because he wasn’t sure how long he was really going to be able to hold out. He wasn’t the man he had been a year ago. He knew well enough tha
t anyone had a breaking point, and after months of surgeries, hospital rooms, adverse drug reactions, and fighting back the black despair of being a cripple, he knew he was a lot closer to his breaking point than most.
He’d still fight. He didn’t have it in him not to; his string of NJPs and letters of reprimand during his Active Duty days attested to that. But he didn’t know how long he could. And he was pretty sure that these guys had as much time as they needed.
All that aside, he was still one of Brannigan’s Blackhearts. He’d stormed an ancient Persian citadel with seven men. He’d jumped into the Golden Triangle and fought a horde of Communists from three different nations. He’d assaulted an oil platform held by terrorists who had already claimed the lives of two platoons of Mexican Marines. He kept that at the forefront of his mind as the door at the top of the steps opened, and the wooden stairs creaked under someone’s weight as they descended toward him.
A hand yanked the sack off his head and he blinked in the stark light of the single bare light bulb hanging from the rafters overhead. At first, all he could make out of the man was his silhouette, looming over him.
“Let’s talk about Transnistria, Sam,” the man said.
“Never heard of her,” Childress croaked.
The man, sandy-haired and fit, smiled. Then he kicked Childress savagely in the ribs. He thought he felt one crack.
“I don’t particularly feel like fucking around, so let’s clear the air right now,” the man said. “I really don’t feel any pity for the handicapped. My employers like to pretend they do; it makes it easier for their hangers-on to think they’re such good people, but they really don’t care about people like you any more than I do. Especially since I know how you got that way, Sam. I know you got shot in Transnistria, getting in my way.”