by Sean Wilson
Sean Wilson
Shadow Force Series
RUSSIAN ROULETTE
A Mike Ducane Adventure
Copyright 2016 Sean Wilson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are derived from either the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental
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OPERATION DOOMSDAY
Book 3 in the Shadow Force Series
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
About The Author
By the Same Author
Chapter 1
Seventeen hours into the mission and something was clearly very wrong. The Defence Intelligence Agency Operational Headquarters in Cyprus had flagged the situation as urgent as soon as they picked up the scrambled satellite signal from Syria that the snatch and grab team had failed to make the rendezvous point. Even though it was a deniable black ops mission using independent mercenary contractors, if the team had been compromised or captured, there would be Hell to pay back in Washington. And that could mean serious repercussions that the DIA would prefer to avoid. As the minutes ticked by without any clues about the team’s whereabouts, the DIA operational directors met in the spacious head quarters’ conference room to discuss their options.
The DIA extraction helicopter had scanned the desolate Syrian desert using sophisticated thermal imaging equipment but nothing had shown up. The chopper had been sent to collect the team, all former special forces personnel, highly-trained men who’d been tasked with snatching a key ISIS commander from under the noses of his personal bodyguards. But the clandestine raid had ended in a vicious fire fight with half the team being lost and the survivors pounding the hard desert floor in a gruelling run that should have brought them safely to their extraction point. But, somewhere along the way, something had gone seriously wrong. The mission had been completely and disastrously compromised. The DIA execs didn’t even know if any of their operatives had survived. One of the DIA brass scribbled across the top of his briefing notes ‘Clusterfuck’ and the word pretty much summed up the situation from all angles.
Skimming low and fast above the rocky desert plateau, Mike Ducane tried to ease the numbing bite of the plasti-cuffs that secured his wrists behind his back and he looked again at his captors, seated on the other side of the dimly-lit floor of the Russian military transport helicopter. He took a deep breath. The mission had turned into a living nightmare and his prospects of collecting his pension suddenly looked distinctly improbable. Despite the shock and confusion and the obvious fact that he’d been betrayed, his mind was working in over-drive to find a way out. He stared at the beautiful, uniformed woman sitting opposite him and tried to read her coal-black eyes. Fatima Trigo. His lover. Or so he’d thought. The woman he’d held in his arms. The woman who’d brought him more pleasure than he’d ever experienced in a lifetime of casual encounters. The woman he’d happily confessed to loving. He shook his head in disbelief. How could he have been so stupid? The woman who’d turned out to be a major in the Russian State Security Bureau. The woman who’d betrayed him. He decided to put those thoughts to one side for the moment and try to make sense of the disaster that had completely overtaken him and his team.
It had been his mission. He’d been selected as the obvious man to head up the team. Good guys every one. They were all highly experienced soldiers and they’d been bushwhacked, ambushed, taken by surprise and taken down in the cold night of the Syrian desert by a highly trained bunch of killers in Russian Special Forces uniforms. That could only mean Spetsnaz. These were the guys who were supposed to be fighting ISIS but it was abundantly clear to Mike that other agendas were now in play. The mission had gone seriously tits up. In some ways, they’d been lucky to escape the ISIS ambush in the enemy-held village. The sweating team of surviving DIA mercenaries had been closely tracked as they made their escape from the fire fight. They’d been closely monitored and intercepted. And that could only mean that the Russians must’ve been following them every step of the way after they’d made their hasty withdrawal from the compromised mission. That was a very disturbing thought to consider as the helicopter slowed to a hover in the cool darkness of the pre-dawn night and dropped onto its landing slot at the Russian naval base at Tartus. He might’ve been in Syria but Tartus was as good as Russian soil. Mike was only too aware that he’d been identified by his captors and separated from his men. He would never forget the cold-eyed stare of the Russian officer who’d nodded the silent command to his men to open fire. He would never forget the burly Russian NCO who’d raised his assault rifle and shot each of the dying men twice in the head to make sure there would be no survivors. No witnesses. Yet Mike had been singled out and spared and it soon became obvious that he must’ve been the ambush’s main target. Capturing Mike had also been the trigger for the brutal assassination of his team. They were judged as superfluous to the Russians’ mission so they were brutally cut down. He was slowly putting the pieces together in his head, looking for patterns, trying to build a coherent picture from the available data, assessing his cold-eyed captors, calculating probabilities. They obviously needed him for something, otherwise he wouldn’t be alive. They’d likely kept him alive to find out what he knew. It was equally obvious that he wouldn’t survive for long once the interrogation was complete. At the back of his mind though he knew with a dreadful certainty that, if he ever managed to get out of this crazy predicament, he’d take a great deal of satisfaction from slotting each and every one of the Russki sons of bitches. Slowly and deliberately. Yes, he had to concentrate on the situation in front of him but, in the depths of his heart, there was a cold dark call for bloody murder and mayhem. And one day, if he could manage to survive this disaster, he would surely want to answer it.
‘Out.’ The command was simple, curt and in English. Mike’s language skills had made him fluent in Russian yet he was addressed in his mother tongue. He struggled to his feet, his hands and arms numb behind his back, and staggered to the helicopter’s open door. No one helped him down but as soon as his feet touched the rough concrete, two Spetsnaz troopers grabbed him by the arms and half marched, half dragged him towards a hangar. All special forces soldiers were trained in escape and evasion but they were also exposed to the pressures and abuses they could expect to receive if captured. With his extensive spec ops experience, Mike had been contracted as a highly-paid mercenary, a deniable operative who could undertake difficult and sensitive missions behind enemy lines but someone who was ultimately considered as an expendable asset. The State Department had no intention of exposing Delta Force or the Seal Teams to the risk of capture. They would never countenance the prospect of seeing their specialist, elite troops tortured on camera and publicly beheaded for the benefit of the psychos and fanatics who were waging jihad on every continent. That’s where the DIA filled a very important role in US government foreign policy, operating behind enemy lines, targeting enemy commanders, capturing or killing their targets and escaping into the night like shadows. Most of the DIA field operatives would never allow themselves to be taken alive by the psychopathic torturers that were found in the rank and file of the ISIS fundamentalists. Despite their training and experience, Mike’s team had been surprised by an ambush t
eam of Russian special forces, by guys who were supposed to be on the same side. At least that was the theory.
The two soldiers dropped their captive on the floor of the hangar and Mike decided to stay down on his knees, getting his breath back and waiting for the next move in the drama to unfold. He looked up and saw Fatima talking to the Spetsnaz officer who’d captured him, to the man who’d so casually ordered the killing of his men. She nodded to the Russian and turned towards Mike, an odd smile on her face as if she was enjoying every moment of his discomfort, savouring his predicament. She was still dressed in her Syrian Army liaison officer’s uniform, her polished boots echoing in the cool air of the hangar as she walked briskly towards him. He was about to speak when she swung her leg and kicked him squarely under the chin, landing a blow that sent him sprawling to the floor. He most certainly hadn’t expected such a violent kiss to the chin from his former lover. He was dazed, he was in pain, trying to focus his eyes as he tasted blood in his mouth and wondered if the kick had loosened any of his teeth. She stepped closer and aimed a kick at his ribs, knocking the wind out of him and causing him to cough and wheeze as he tried to get his breath. This was not a welcome development but, at the back of his mind as he writhed in pain, he silently added Fatima’s beautiful portrait to his personal rogues’ gallery of people he fully intended to exterminate at the first available opportunity. Things like that could give a guy a great deal of motivation to stay alive.
‘Oh, Mike!’ she crooned. ‘Did that hurt?’ He clenched his jaw. No point in wasting any energy on replying. Her presence looked like a calculated master stroke, the perfect betrayal that might have broken his resolve and left him vulnerable to a fatal weakening of his will. He coolly judged that they should’ve saved her for later, for the moment when he was weakening, a final straw to break the camel’s back rather than an early move in the game. Now that he knew he’d been set up and betrayed by a highly-trained intelligence operative, that he’d been up to his balls in a very sweet honey trap, he could shift his perspective around and transfer the cold-blooded bitch to a place in his mind where she could do no more harm. His silence annoyed her. ‘Not talking? Pussy got your tongue, Mikey?’ She tried taunting him as he regained his breath, moving the pain to another part of his mind, but he ignored her. They weren’t going to brutalise him too quickly. He knew that. They were professionals. They’d coldly appreciate that too much pain was completely counter-productive, that his nervous system could be overwhelmed and switched off long before they’d extracted the information they wanted. He needed more time to assess his chances and look for an opportunity to make a break. He knew that time had suddenly become a precious and diminishing commodity. He wanted to push a razor sharp blade up through Major Trigo’s beautiful throat and tongue and wipe that grin off her face forever. The image that was crossing his mind at that instant must’ve shown on his face.
Fatima stepped back with that weird smile on her face. The thoughts were still racing through Mike’s dazed head. He closed his eyes. Russian State Security. He’d been so perfectly goddamn set up. Dammit! Pussy-whipped and sucked in by a real professional and he’d fallen for it one hundred and ninety-two percent. They say that men are like bathroom floor tiles: lay them right the first time and you can walk all over them for the rest of their lives. He tried to smile at the crazy thought but his jaw muscles were just too painful.
The officer approached with two heavily set soldiers and they quickly reached down and cut him loose from the plasti-cuffs. Mike gasped. The pain was excruciating as the blood flowed back to his hands and fingers. They grabbed him up from the floor and dragged his bruised and bleeding frame towards a doorway, his boot caps scraping along the coarse concrete, searing bolts of pain shooting all the way up his arms and shoulders. They dropped him onto a chair in a small, sparsely-decorated office and he doubled forwards to rub his arms and shoulders and cover up his abdomen. Unobserved by his captors, he managed to slip a numb and aching finger onto the back of his small, carbon fiber belt buckle and pushed a small sliding switch across and down to activate a tiny, discrete homing bug, a low power signal that might possibly be picked up by a DIA satellite or drone It was nothing more than a faint light in the darkness of his captivity but it could reveal his position. Sure, he probably wouldn’t survive for too much longer but at least the Agency would know who’d taken him and where he’d been killed. Even if his death would eventually be reported as just another regrettable training accident. It was his first opportunity to activate the emergency beacon though he understood only too well that no one was coming to rescue him. He also recognised that they wouldn’t be tasking a drone strike to put him out of his misery. Not in the middle of the Russian naval base at Tartus. That could spark a real war. And even though he was a popular guy amongst the other operatives, Mike understood that no amount of popularity would ever add up to a rescue mission or a merciful pop to the head before things got seriously unpleasant. He was on his own. That was always part of the deal and the countdown had already begun. In the cloak and dagger ranks of the DIA, he was expendable.
Chapter 2
Just a few short weeks before, Mike Ducane had been sitting in a discretely plain DIA office in Washington, attending a full de-briefing interview about his last mission and wondering why the office coffee always tasted so foul. The DIA Intel guys had wanted to know how one of the snatch team’s highly-trained operatives had been killed but their real focus was targeted on Mike’s completely unexpected discovery of a very impressive quantity of pure, high-grade heroin. Right in the middle of an ISIS-controlled village. Two hundred and fifty kilos of high-octane smack, securely packaged and crated, stacked in a concrete building and destined to be turned into an eye-watering amount of hard cash. The kind of cash that could keep presidents, dictators, religious despots and an entire war comfortably funded without anyone knowing where the money was coming from. Nothing like a war-torn embryonic medieval caliphate for hiding a sophisticated drugs operation. And Mike had uncovered a surprising, disturbing and undeniable Russian connection.
Perhaps trouble really came in threes but it was way beyond the realms of coincidence that a few days later a local Russian crime boss tried to have Mike kidnapped. Big mistake, of course. Very big mistake.
Heroin in Syria? Russians trying to grab him on US soil and work him over with a collection of cordless power tools? Mike had quickly begun to join the dots and the pattern intrigued him. He’d inadvertently stumbled onto something that had obviously scared the crap out of the Russians and panicked them into a bungled abduction attempt. The plan had been to subdue him – which meant beating him to a bloody pulp – and then bring him to an old, abandoned warehouse complex to be brutally interrogated before dumping what was left of him off the end of a pier. Nice guys. But things hadn’t worked out quite so well for the would-be kidnappers. Or for the would-be interrogators. After shooting and disabling the interrogation crew and applying a cordless power drill to the boss’s son, Mike had quickly discovered all the information he’d needed to confirm his suspicions. He knew the Russians were working with ISIS to move heroin from the lovingly cultivated poppy fields of Afghanistan all the way down to the sun-kissed Mediterranean coast. It was clever. It was sophisticated. It was an industrial-scale operation. In a cynical exploitation of their expanding military presence, the Russians understood that naval ships were just as capable of moving heroin as the rusty old cargo freighters that plied the Mediterranean trade routes. And much less likely to be stopped and searched. And the Russian Navy had its crucially important Mediterranean base at Tartus in Syria. Wow. What a coincidence. But that meant the Russian government had to be involved as well, from their hand-tooled, highly-polished toe caps all the way up to their cold, beady and calculating eyes. Everybody and his uncle was taking a slice of a very large, deep-pan cash pie. It sure looked as if crime and corruption really did pay after all. On the surface, it looked crazy. The Russian government was propping up the Ba’athist Syrian
regime in Damascus and that meant that they were also supposed to be fighting ISIS. But the chaos of Syria and the hordes of conflicting and heavily-armed parties meant that things were never as clear as they pretended to be. If the Russians were carpet bombing villages and sending in attack helicopters and cruise missiles, blowing up aid columns, who were they really targeting? The answer was always going to be found by ignoring the political rhetoric and the cynical bullshit. The answer would be found by following the money. Because hard cash always spoke with the loudest, truest and most reliable voice of all. Hard cash never lied.
Chapter 3
‘Michael,’ the voice was perfectly cultured, nuanced with British vowels and suggesting time spent in England. ‘I need to ask you some questions and you know that the sooner you tell me what I need to know, the easier things will be for you.’
Mike was always impressed with Russian military intelligence language skills. GRU. Hard line. Somewhere on the far side of brutal. Closely linked to Spetsnaz. The officer sitting on the table in front of him was dressed in freshly-laundered Spetsnaz combat fatigues, a pistol at his belt and a smile on his lips. ‘Once we’re finished here, we have no further interest in you and we can arrange for you to be returned to your colleagues at your DIA forward operating base in southern Syria.’
Both men knew it was a lie. Mike looked up, his jaw still sore and a trickle of blood drying on his chin. He said nothing.