by Jack Murphy
“Shabeeha. Ghosts. I'm glad you caught up with them. Liquid Sky just missed them.”
“We killed a couple and the others immediately surrendered. They're not soldiers, just thugs who were in over their heads the second they were up against anyone who wasn't a four year old kid.”
“Good. Stick them down in the hole with the mustard gas bomb when we blow it.”
“Serious?”
“Better fucking believe it.”
Just then, a thud sounded in the back of Deckard's car. Something banging around inside the trunk.
“What the hell is that?” Pat asked curiously.
“Another addition to go into the pit with our Shabeeha pals.”
The cave was located in the outskirts of Homs, its existence only evident by a small gap in the side of a cliff. Inside, the rock floor was worn smooth as if it had been polished. The cave had served as a hideout, redoubt, and clandestine meeting place for soldiers, thieves, and bandits since before the time of the Romans.
The latest occupants were four sullen-faced young men in their twenties. They had been restrained with flexcuffs around their hands and ankles. A dozen green glow sticks illuminated the interior of the cave as the Kazakh mercenaries lifted and carried the chemical weapon they had captured inside.
Once the bomb was set down, the four Syrians looked at it and then at each other nervously knowing that nothing good could come from this. Then there was a shuffling at the mouth of the cave as someone was dragged inside by the mercenaries. He was a human giant but walked all hunched over. He was set down in front of the bomb.
Another silhouette was crouched in the opening to the cave, looking inside. He said something in Russian and the foreign mercenaries turned and exited the cave.
Deckard moved aside to let the Kazakhs leave and then stepped inside. He walked into the center of the circle of green chem sticks surrounding the weapon and his five prisoners. Bill didn't even make eye contact with him. Samruk International medics had patched him up, got his blood pressure back up with an IV bag of HexTend solution, and injected him with some stimulants to keep him conscious. Deckard's karambit had sliced one of his biceps in half, slashed the veins in his wrist, and disemboweled him. His guts had been balled up on his stomach and stuck in place with gauze and medical tape.
Deckard drew the karambit and knelt down next to him. The Syrian death squad members looked on in dreadful anticipation.
“End of the line.”
Bill continued to look straight down at the ground.
“Get it over with,” he mumbled. “It's what I would have done to you.”
“It isn't that simple. I need names. I need to know who you talk to on that encryption system in Mauritius. Who is your client?”
“We've changed hands a few times. Multiple Liquid Sky teams, multiple employers.”
“When was the last time you changed hands?”
“A couple months ago when there was a major compromise in Nevada. We were working for Ted Snyder at G3 Communications, but after the compromise everything they were doing came under scrutiny. They moved Liquid Sky off to another handler for security reasons, but since you were the guy in Nevada who made that mess, I guess you already put most of that together.”
“What makes you think I was the guy in Nevada?”
“Got a phone call from the new client. They're starting to put it all together. They knew you were in Syria but not that you were with us. They asked me to find you and take you out while we were here.”
“Who is the new client?”
Bill looked up at him.
“McCoy.”
Deckard was silent for a moment.
“A bold claim.”
Bill shrugged.
“It is what it is. This fight is over and I have no loyalty to him.”
“I'm going to need some details.”
“I only know my part of the operation. If you want to know about colored pins stuck in a map of the world then you'll have to ask McCoy yourself.”
Deckard spent the next hour debriefing Bill, writing things down on a notepad as needed. Bill went over how they communicated with the client, what their arrangements were, how payments were handled, where targeting and intelligence information came from, and the personalities involved in handling Liquid Sky, at least the ones he knew of.
Finally, Deckard stood up and walked over to the bomb.
“That was you in Pakistan, wasn't it?” Bill asked Deckard as he punched the activation code into the keypad on the bomb.
“Yeah. We did compromise Liquid Sky. Found periphery information in documents in Nevada and traced it to your operations. I would have taken out your whole team right there if possible, but after you slipped through our hands, I had to try something different.”
“I guess we really are two sides of the same coin, then. Letting clients tell us where to go and who to kill.”
“You don't get it Bill. I don't have a client. This was a mission that I chose.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Deckard told him as he activated the bomb and set thirty minutes on the timer. “It isn't enough to just throw on a scroll, a tab, or a trident. We have to earn it. Every day.”
“What a boy scout.”
“I don't know what happened to you Bill, not sure I want to know, but defaulting to the level of the enemy is unacceptable. You had to have known that what you were doing was sick, even by the standards of war. It couldn't go on forever. It was vain and self-indulgent. Nothing more.”
Bill leaned forward to try to relieve some of the pain in his abdomen.
“What the fuck ever,” he grunted. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”
Deckard turned and walked away, leaving Bill with the confused death squad members. Unable to understand English, they had no idea what was going on. As Deckard climbed up out of the hole in the ground, he didn't even think of looking back.
Deckard finished reviewing his notes and put them in his pocket.
“Did you get what you were looking for?” Pat asked him.
“Enough to finish this.”
“Satisfied with the answers?”
Deckard frowned.
“No, never.”
The mercenaries looked on as the bomb exploded and a wisp of mustard gas slowly plumed out of the opening of the cave. They had made sure they were upwind before detonation.
“How are we getting out of here?” Deckard asked without taking his eyes off the cloud of mustard gas.
“Unimproved airstrip an hour or so from here. You'll like what you see.”
Samruk International piled onto a flatbed truck and a van they had procured on the battlefield and drove across a series of back roads to an unmaintained airstrip in the middle of nowhere. From there, they set up a security perimeter and waited. It was too risky to extract during the day with so many surface-to-air missiles floating around.
After having the medics look at his wounds again, Deckard slept like a stone. With the sun going down, the mercenaries measured out some distances and set out infrared strobe lights to mark the landing zone. The pilots would be flying blacked out and under night vision. Pat got on his satellite phone and made contact with the pilots. Encrypted cellular and satellite phones like he and Deckard had been using were really the future of military communications, not just tactical comms but for covert and clandestine operations as well.
Tactics, techniques, and procedures changed fast, and they were all just struggling to keep up.
Deckard woke as the first airplane screamed into the desert airstrip. He hugged himself, trying to get warm. The night air was cold against his skin. He stood and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, but still felt like he was moving in molasses as his body was no where near recovered.
“Take a look,” Pat said, handing him a PVS-14 night vision monocle.
Deckard looked through the night vision device at the plane turning itself around at the end of the landing zone. He whistled.
“
C-27J. Samruk International now owns two of them. I figured that if we are going to be a smaller force then we need a tactical air capability. Those Antonovs are great, but these C-27s can conduct short take off and landing on unimproved airfields.”
“Did you bankrupt the company while I was gone?”
“Nah, I got these babies at bargain basement rates. The U.S. government mothballed them the second they came off the assembly line. Budget cuts.”
“Their loss is our gain,” Deckard said as he continued to watch the aircraft.
He watched as the second C-27J landed and dropped its ramp to begin loading the mercenaries onboard.
“Pat?”
“Yeah?”
“I don't think I can do this job anymore.”
Pat was silent for a moment before replying.
“Deckard, I think this is the only job that you can do.”
42
Nadeesha smiled and the young NGO worker responded in kind.
He was a young kid with one of the save-the-children type non-governmental organizations that scooted back and forth across the border everyday. She had told him that she was a freelance journalist who had gotten trapped behind enemy lines for several days. She had linked up with the western NGO and their two security contractors after coming across them doing a medical detail for children. She immediately struck up a rapport with the boy who was now sitting next to her in the car. Chet was one of their medics.
She was filthy as everyone else in the third world hell hole, but a little field improvisation and showing some cleavage went a long way. Chet wouldn't shut up now and talked to her constantly. She could put up with it if it got her a ride, a bottle of water, and helped her escape back into Turkey.
The overland route had been rough, but far better than staying in Homs. When everything went pear-shaped she knew when to cut her losses. Without a doubt, her team had been encircled and killed. When she left they were trapped between some foreign mercenaries and the Syrian Army. She knew the men would be executed, but as a woman her fate would be far worse.
Too bad about Deckard, she thought as she tried to ignore Chet's blabber mouth. He had been a nice ride, but now it was time to move on.
They drove into the village of Jarabulus near the border with Turkey. While Chet couldn't shut up about his graduate-school program, she had elicited some information from one of the NGO's security men, a middle aged Australian SAS veteran. The relatively moderate Free Syrian Army controlled the border checkpoints on the Syrian side. Whenever the Nusra jihadist fighters took over a border checkpoint the Turkish military would push into Syria and kill them or chase them off, then the military would withdraw back into their own territory. At least the Turks were not letting the crazies control the border, which made life easier for the NGOs to cross.
At the checkpoint, the former SASR soldier handled the FSA members standing guard. The NGO had a fairly good reputation and had built some strong rapport with the FSA. After a cursory inspection of the vehicle, which was really just a formality, they were then waved through the checkpoint. The procedure was repeated on the Turkish side of the border, and then they were ushered forward.
Nadeesha breathed a sigh of relief. They were in Karkam1_, Turkey. It was a small, quaint village where the NGO worked out of.
She stared out the window as houses passed by.
There was one thing that Nadeesha knew about herself if nothing else.
She was a survivor.
43
New Haven, Connecticut
Two weeks later:
McCoy turned over in bed as his wife grumbled next to him. The phone on the nightstand was ringing. The red numbers on the clock said that it was three in the morning. Rubbing his eyes, the retired General knew that only a handful of people had the number to the landline in his home. If he was being called at this time of night, it was for a good reason. Probably someone needing him to fix a problem in another time zone.
“Hello,” he said answering the phone.
“Come downstairs,” a voice whispered over the phone.
“What?”
“Don't bother trying to call the police. You won't be able too.”
“Who is this?”
The line went dead. McCoy fiddled with the phone but there was no dial tone.
“What is it?” His wife asked as she turned to him.
“Nothing, just some problem in another timezone that work needs me to fix,” the lie came off the tip of his tongue without even thinking about it. Occupational hazard.
Walking across the bedroom he retrieved his cell phone from its charger and turned it on. No bars. Was the signal jammed? WiFi was out too. The voice on the phone said to come downstairs. It had to be a prank call. No way was anyone getting through the layers of security around his house. Just in case, he grabbed his HK USP pistol from the safe in the closet before heading downstairs.
At the bottom of the steps, he saw that the kitchen light was on. Frowning, he moved forward, holding the pistol out in front of him. He never heard the sounds of the man coming up from behind him. He was driven down to his knees and the pistol wrenched from his hands.
“If you want to leave your wife out of this I suggest not screaming for help.”
McCoy looked up at his attacker.
“What do you want?”
“I want you. I want Ted Snyder. I want anyone else involved.”
“Deckard,” the old General hissed his name.
Deckard helped McCoy to his feet and shoved him into one of the dining room chairs.
“How did you even get in here?”
“I've got a guy who does breaking and entering. I'm not half bad myself. Your two security guards are tied up in the backyard.”
“Everyone thought you died in Syria.”
“Me too.”
“Bill?”
“Sorry for your loss.”
“Look, not in here. My wife designed the kitchen. I don't want her to find my brains plastered on the wall.”
“Have it your way. Outside,” Deckard motioned towards the door.
He followed McCoy out into the yard. Still wearing his pajamas, he was freezing cold and began to shiver.
“I know it isn't just you and Ted in this little cabal,” Deckard said. “You guys don't self task. Not without top cover. You don't make a move without protection from powerful people, everyone knows that about you.”
McCoy spilled three names.
Deckard snorted.
“What the fuck?”
“You want Ted too? I'm as sick of these fucking weasels as you are. The four of them are meeting in New York in a couple days. The Others Club. Their favorite place, for brunch. I'm supposed to be there as well.”
“Sorry you can't make it.”
“Feel free to tell those fucks that I sent you.”
“I will.”
Deckard flicked the USP's selector to safe and tucked it under his jacket.
“What are you doing?”
Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out a small cellophane packet and tossed it to McCoy. The retired General looked down at the package with a small white pill inside and then back up at Deckard. The mercenary tapped the face of his wristwatch.
“On you.”
44
New York City
Ted Snyder nervously tapped his foot against the floor.
“Relax,” the younger of the two Biermann brothers told him, seeing the worried expression on his face. “The medical examiner confirmed that it was a heart attack.”
“Maybe they weren't looking for the right thing in the tox screen.”
“Wait until the old man gets here and then we'll get this all sorted out,” the older Biermann brother said, dismissively waving his hand.
They were seated for brunch just a few minutes ago and the waitress was now bringing their drink orders. Ted was the CEO of a major defense company and knew his share of heavy drinkers in his industry, but the fact that the Biermann brothers routin
ely drank bourbon for breakfast was something that he could never quite figure out. The waitress set down the Bloody Mary he ordered in front of him.
They sat in the old man's favorite room, which had been reserved for their private meeting ahead of time. The walls were painted in pastels and long, tall windows let the morning light in, giving the Upper East Side club a very warm feeling inside. As one of Manhattan's most exclusive clubs, the décor was strongly in contrast to the other stuffy formal clubs, some of which dated back to the Revolutionary War.
The Biermann brothers clinked glasses and drank up, but Ted wasn't in the mood. He'd spent a week holed up in a safe room eating military rations after Area 14 in Nevada got hit and then lived under unbearable amounts of security while still trying to run G3 Communications. Only recently had he identified who was behind the strike in Nevada. They believed that he had been killed in Syria. Then General McCoy turned up dead in his backyard. The coroner said it was a heart attack, but Ted wasn't taking anything for granted at this point.
There was a knock at the door and then a body guard opened it for the old man.
George Szabo had arrived.
Having just celebrated his 90th birthday, he looked none the worse for wear. The three men stood to shake hands with Szabo, which was nothing if not appropriate considering that he was the owner of The Others Club, not to mention a self-made billionaire.
Together, the Biermann brothers and Szabo occupied an interesting political space. They were all billionaires with vast financial empires. The brothers and Szabo also pulled political puppet strings through foundations, think tanks, and lobby groups both domestically and internationally. Szabo was notionally on the left and the Biermann brothers notionally on the right, but as Ted watched them shake hands there was no doubt in his mind that they were all drinking bourbon together at the end of the day. No matter who won, Wall Street won. It was a fixed game if ever there was one.