by JT Sawyer
Unusual for the average person to cling to cover like that. Based upon the ‘dwell-time’ where there is greater track depth and tread detail present when a person stands in one place versus walking, he figured the person spent a few minutes near the corner of each building, scanning the field ahead. This wasn’t feeling like a lost hiker as he’d encountered before at the ranch.
He moved back to his jeep and retrieved his M4 out of the rear locker. Through experience in government-sponsored missions abroad in the military, he had learned that when the tracks don’t provide enough information, you have to rely on intuition. Trackers the world over recognized that your subconscious collects far more data from your surroundings than your conscious mind. His gut was telling him something was off and it was further confirmed when he saw the tracks skirt around his bunkhouse and head up a slope towards the water tower behind his dwelling.
He was without any kind of field support from his colleagues or the sheriff’s department. Even if he could get a call out, it’d be over an hour before they arrived. Maybe it was some thief hoping to break in and steal some of the vintage cowboy accoutrements lining the walls of the main house or worse yet, some anti-ranching enviro-nutjob who wanted to torch the place in hopes of putting a stop to cattle operations. He’d heard of that happening before on spreads up in Nevada and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let it occur to his friend’s land. Mitch crept to the edge of the house and peered up towards the water tower forty feet away. It was a bulbous, gray receptacle that stored twelve hundred gallons of water, atop four massive iron uprights. The whole thing resembled a small moon resting upon angled rusty fingers. Directly beneath it was a ten-by-twelve pumphouse whose door was still locked.
Mitch backpedaled to the front of his place and went through the motions of closing and opening the door, loud enough for the sound to carry. Then he stepped off the porch and moved past two large cottonwood trees which had a blue hammock suspended between them. He slid down into a drainage twenty feet below the rim then crept through the thick foliage of raspberry bushes and wild grapevines. Rounding the bend in the wash, he pressed his face between a patch of overhanging leaves and studied the water tower. He had always taught his law-enforcement students that when a fugitive’s tracks proceed to high ground then the subject is probably waiting to snipe you from their perch. There had been two game wardens back east who had been killed by poachers using this same technique and Mitch himself had used it on more than one occasion in Afghanistan. Whoever you are, you picked the wrong ranch to fuck with. I may not even call this one in if you’re an anti-ranching whacko.
He peered through the scope of his rifle and saw a thirty-something woman with dark tussled hair squatting beside the rear of the pumphouse. She had an athletic build with lean arms. Her face bore a tired expression and he could discern a heavy coat of sweat hanging over her forehead. Despite this, she had the poise of someone who seemed comfortable working from concealment. Slung over her back was a leather shoulder bag. Scanning down her left side, he saw she was holding a pistol—a Beretta by the looks of it. Mitch took a deep breath and studied her features again. She definitely ain’t here for the enchiladas. And I sure as hell wouldn’t forget a face like that.
Chapter 4
Inside the headquarters of the Aeneid Corporation, CEO Nelson Ritter was studying a 3-D holographic image of their current operations around the globe with particular attention focused upon Turkmenistan.
Aeneid was recognized as the leader in body armor for police departments, the military, and the executive protection industry. Ritter had once been a soldier of fortune in Latin America during the ’80s and later started the company in the U.S. serving the law-enforcement community. He used any profits to slowly start funding his own mercenary operations in third-world countries where his fledgling investments were rooted. Over the ensuing decades his small army of private para-military contractors had been used for implementing little-known coups, staging riots, and swaying political outcomes in countries connected with Ritter’s holdings which were mostly in the form of natural gas or oil. Surinam, Guyana, and Eritrea were just a few of the countries where Ritter had oil operations that were kept in play through the use of his private soldiers and the backing of the totalitarian regimes to which he provided considerable compensation. He always opted for establishing his presence in smaller countries with oppressive leaders and away from the prying eyes of meddling human rights groups. These overseas business ventures were kept separate from the rest of Aeneid through shell corporations abroad and few people even within the Department of Defense knew about it thanks to a connection at the upper echelon of the Pentagon.
At a recent defense contractor’s expo in Virginia, Ritter had procured a large contract from international investors that would lead to further expansion of his reach. Corporate stocks had doubled recently after the initial unveiling of a new concealable soft body armor for civilians. Ritter’s goal was to use recent terrorist-related events to create a need in the psyche of homeowners and concerned parents that they too should be as protected as the police. The writing easel on the wall used at his daily meetings with his board of directors had numerous reasons highlighted in red ink as to who in America needed Aeneid Armor: postal workers, bank employees, courthouse staff, delivery drivers, single moms with crazed ex-husbands, and even teachers in cities with high violent crime rates. Ritter surmised, with the latter, that if he could convince every gun-toting dad in the country to buy body armor then school districts in Second Amendment-friendly states would also be within reach. His end game wasn’t protection—it was just making enough profit to further fund his operations abroad. The same body armor he retailed to U.S. law enforcement was peddled under a different label to Taliban factions and even Somali pirates. Ritter had learned long ago from analyzing his weak-kneed competitors that possessing moral turpitude only served to hamper market expansion.
Ritter had always reveled in his ability to manipulate others. He’d started out working on his father’s used car lot after high school and knew the mouth-watering pleasure that came with closing the deal. A year later, broke and bored, he joined the army, doing a stint in Honduras in the early eighties where he fell in love with the tropics and the political climate. After his discharge he stayed on in Latin America, acquiring work with former Columbian military personnel who were running their own mercenary outfits.
Everything was unfolding smoothly with his latest venture until the troubling alert he received two nights ago from building security who informed him of a breach in their computer firewall. A hacker, working from inside, had obtained files from Ritter’s own computer on a new para-military operation—information that could compromise a potential billion-dollar undertaking and which involved his colleague at the Department of Defense.
As Ritter rubbed his thumb under his lower lip, contemplating the holographic layout in front of him, the wooden double doors opened behind him. Jessica Carter, the company’s head of the cyber division, strode in, accompanied by the chief of security Drake Redlyn. The hulking brute was clad in a suit that barely fit his muscular frame and he looked oddly out of place beside the sleekly dressed woman who wore a blue dress with three-inch black high heels. Ritter normally performed his office tasks and Skype meetings from his mansion in northwest Anaheim two days a week and the woman gave a surprised look at seeing her boss.
“Ms. Carter, have you located the whereabouts of our employee Mira Sanchez yet?” Ritter said, walking within bad-breath distance of the two, causing her to take a step back. She saw the hulking figure of Drake, the bodyguard, casually move to her right.
“She was just spotted near Phoenix. Our men on the ground there will have her shortly,” said Drake, interrupting.
“Am I to assume that we have containment of this problem?” said Ritter, who ran his fingers through his silver hair.
Carter fidgeted with her fingers. “Yes, the cover story we provided with the feds will be lending a hand to her ca
pture.”
“The data file you spoke of is on her?”
“That’s not clear yet,” said Carter with a nervous exhale.
“Then all of the loose ends are not tied up. I can’t have that information floating around God knows where.” He walked around the holographic image and gazed at the blue orb. “You do realize this happened on your watch—you hired the woman and trusted her.
“She will be back here shortly so I’m not worried—she was just a mid-level software technician,” she said as Drake slowly inched towards her while she cleared her dry throat.
“Mid-level, you say. So her act of penetrating our firewall was a stroke of luck?” He emitted a deep sigh and flicked out a fake smile, the glow from his white-crowned teeth nearly blotting out his lips. “Well, well, if you say she’ll be here shortly then my faith in you is restored. Bravo, no harm done.” Ritter continued grinning, his lips slowly decreasing in width. He shifted his gaze to Drake, who shuffled forward with surprising grace and swiftly wrenched Carter’s head with his bear-like hands, snapping her vertebrae like a fistful of wet twigs. The delicate figure collapsed to the floor like an inanimate puppet.
Ritter moved over to the crumpled woman, shaking his head. “That is for your lack of foresight in preventing this problem in the first place.”
Ritter returned his gaze to the blue image, enhancing a region in Turkmenistan near the Sangar Valley and then tracing his bony finger over to the Caspian Sea. “It’s all coming together. We just need this woman back in our clutches. Soon this whole pipeline dispute will be resolved and the killing and drilling can commence. Then oil will flow freely to Europe without the involvement of Iran.”
Ritter’s thoughts floated back to the next step in his overseas venture. Aeneid was responsible for training a garrison of elite Turkmen troops modeled after Army Special Forces. This required him to send over a team of mercenaries, or as he referred to them, strategic partners, to begin their work training the soldiers. These Turkmen would ultimately be responsible for protecting the pipeline and U.S. corporate interests. The trainers were former spec-ops soldiers hailing from different countries which fell in line with having plausible deniability and avoided appearing like a backdoor U.S operation. If the plan was successful, few in the White House would balk at the end result of weakening Russia and Iran’s grip on the region and there would be no need for them to disavow actions that they were completely in the dark about.
If he was somehow connected to the operation, unlikely as that was, Ritter would say he was merely supplying advisors to a fragile geographic neighborhood and was aiding in the war on terror by laying the groundwork for a potential staging area for any future U.S. actions towards Iran. He was assured by his Pentagon connection that such inquiries would never materialize. The Turkmenistan parliament certainly wouldn’t disapprove as they were interested in receiving a massive infusion of foreign dollars for providing one of the longest pipelines in the world.
Ritter walked in a circle around the orb, stepping over Carter’s body like she was a stuffed animal. “For most of the past fifty years, the American sheeple think the U.S. has been fighting ground wars to protect them when it’s always been about protecting American business interests in foreign lands. Corporations not countries determine war and peace. Not that it matters; as long as the masses have their precious Facebook and their Hollywood celebrities telling them what to think, their world will go on.”
He turned and walked to the door, stopping at the entrance and glancing at Carter’s face. “I’d rather not know the cover story on this one,” he said to Drake. “Report back to me with the missing data files in Ms. Sanchez’s possession after you’ve returned from Arizona. I’ll be at home going over some operational plans on my computer. We only have a few days until things unfold and we cannot deviate from the timeline.” He gave Drake a piercing look. “I need you to find that bitch.”
After Ritter left, Drake flung the woman over his immense shoulder like a wet beach towel and carried her to the stairwell six floors down where he placed her on the landing. As he arranged her limbs in a contorted fashion, her lifeless eyes stared upward, resembling the bottoms of two mini whiskey bottles. He removed one of her black high heels and broke off the spiked end, tossing the piece on the stairs above. Then he unscrewed the light bulb in the ceiling and rattled it until the filaments inside broke, twisting it back into place.
In the past six years of working as head of security for Aeneid, Drake had grown fond of the increasing power that Ritter had provided him. He frowned upon the title ‘bodyguard,’ preferring the term ‘problem-solver’ instead. Drake slunk off into the darkness, ascending the stairwell to the roof where the company’s private helicopter was awaiting his arrival.
***
Twenty minutes after Carter’s demise, the phone of Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Monroe rang as he sat at home in his mahogany-lined library in Arlington, Virginia.
He slid his glass of brandy onto the table and grabbed his phone, which was resting next to a pewter-framed photo of his wife and four children.
“Whenever I see your number on my screen, Nelson, it makes me wonder if I’ll be getting any sleep.”
“There’s a slight problem. We had a corporate spy who obtained a file—a file that contains information on our upcoming venture.”
Monroe sat erect and his shoulders tensed. “Tell me this is contained.”
“It will be. I need you to grant approval for facial recognition software to be employed by one of our agents on the inside so we can pinpoint the culprit’s location.”
“Listen, you better…”
“Spare me the finger-pointing. If you had provided me with the clearances and funding when I asked months ago, this whole operation would have been underway already so grant the approval with the lackeys on your end and let me do my job.”
Monroe took a long pause, trying to calm his nerves. “Very well but keep me informed when you have this under control. I have a budget meeting tomorrow with the sec-def and we don’t need any ripples in the media about Iran just yet.”
“I wish you a good night’s sleep then, Thomas.”
Monroe placed the phone down and poured himself another glass of brandy from the bottle beside him, spilling some on the table as he tried to steady his hand. He’d never had reason to doubt Ritter before in all of their business dealings but those seemed small-scale compared to what was at stake this time.
Monroe saw to it that allegations of war profiteering or misappropriation of funds for private contracting never reared their heads in his meetings with the Senate Oversight Committee. His office, which had a $125 million budget, was responsible for overseeing the lucrative defense contracts of which Aeneid held a considerable slice. It was largely through Monroe’s efforts that Aeneid went from being a small provider of body armor for law enforcement to a major player in the mercenary trade with millions of dollars in U.S. government sponsored contracts. Prior to his ascension to assistant sec-def, Monroe had been an attorney in international trade in Washington D.C. and on the payroll of many of the defense companies whose budgets he now had the means of manipulating.
This new venture though was unlike anything he’d undertaken before. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, obtaining oil from the Caspian Sea region had been nearly impossible given the terrain challenges and the divisive politics of the many post-Soviet states. A consortium of American oil companies were interested in ways to obtain a stranglehold on the considerable oil reserves. Ritter was one such puppet-master they sought out through backwater channels. His previous connection with Monroe, through their mutual history of involvement with the DOD, proved beneficial to moving the wheels of geographic dominance forward.
Monroe needed Ritter as much as the old curmudgeon required his services and he was confident that Aeneid’s operation would proceed without any bumps—at least until this latest phone call.
He rubbed the back of his neck and then swi
gged down the rest of his drink, the concern in his eyes slowly melting away with the infusion of liquid courage while he tried to refocus on the forthcoming fiscal tsunami that was about to swell his pockets.
Chapter 5
Since her arrival in Phoenix, Dev had spent her time tracking the movement of one man within the FBI and was still unsure of who he was. Somehow he was connected with the Aeneid Corporation back in Anaheim. The phone number she found on the dead man’s cellphone had given her enough of a trail to use her own surveillance software to locate the Phoenix caller. Now she just had to provide more solid evidence to prove that he was connected with her boss’s nefarious undertakings at Aeneid and to prevent the potential attack from occurring. What she didn’t know was the big picture—why launch a bunch of lone-wolf attacks around the western United States? What purpose did it serve other than the obvious body count and short-term media frenzy? Something this orchestrated required considerable planning and funding so there had to be more to it than just shock and awe. And what was the timeline—this week or next month?
The coordinates her handler had provided to direct her to a trustworthy former colleague from the spec-ops community had led to this isolated ranch in the Sonoran Desert. Dev wondered how he was connected with her organization back in Israel but had little choice in asking for assistance after being on the run. She had driven by the day before and scouted the location with her binoculars from a distant hilltop. It had appeared that the cowboys were preparing to leave so she decided to wait until the next day and make her entrance then. All she needed was a safe place to lay low for a few more nights and she didn’t want to risk staying in Phoenix any longer. She had picked the lock on the first house near the stock pond and obtained some canned goods and replenished her water supply.