Jet 03: Vengeance

by Russell Blake

  “Lock it down, people. Lock it down. All stations report in. This is not a drill.”

  One of the two guards at the main gate squinted at the approaching truck and then swung his shotgun towards it as his partner fumbled inside for his. The ruse the leader had hoped would get him close enough to take them both out had just gone down the drain, and he gunned on the gas and then cranked the wheel hard left as he stomped on the brakes, driving the truck into a controlled skid as it drew closer to the gate. The shotgun’s baritone detonation sounded from the guard shack, and then the explosion of the windshield and passenger side window showered him with glass as the truck skidded to a stop and he jumped out, rolling onto the ground as he fought to keep the wheels between himself and the guard.

  Another deep boom and twelve-gauge buckshot tore into the gravel next to him, and both rear tires popped from stray pellets. The leader took a breath and then dodged to the side of the wheel and cut the first guard in half with two staccato bursts from his rifle, then paused, waiting for more shooting. He was rewarded by another explosion, and then rolled clear of the truck, firing as he did. The second guard flew backwards and slammed against the wall, dropping his weapon in the process. The leader let loose another burst for good measure, obliterating the man’s head. He heard another few pops from below, the pistol again, and then the mine fell silent as his ear bud came to life.

  “This is Neptune. I’m hit, but the charges are in place.”

  The leader tapped his bud. “How bad?”

  “Shoulder. Not terminal. I can still make it to the rendezvous. Took down two guards.” Neptune’s voice sounded strained, but calm.

  “Any more near you?”

  “Negative, but I see lights approaching, so we can expect pursuit.”

  “We can’t wait for you if you get stalled.” The leader’s voice was flat, emotionless.

  “Roger. I’ll be there.”

  Another glance at his watch told him they had three minutes until rendezvous. He reached into his backpack and removed a can of red spray paint and then approached the fallen guards, eyes scanning the periphery, his M4 at the ready. Once at the shack, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and then popped the cap off the paint, tossing it onto the floor, and carefully sprayed the message that would be found on the shack walls. Finished, he took a towel from the sack and wiped down the can and threw it outside onto the gravel, next to the first butchered security guard’s corpse. Stepping back to inspect his work, he nodded to himself, and then extracted a phone from his pocket and took several photos.

  If the company or the government tried to hush up the attack on the mine, the images would go live on the internet within twenty-four hours, leaving them with no option other than to acknowledge that the unrest in the area had grown to the point where the sustainability of the operation was in question. Two similar messages had been left in other strategic locations by his men, so there could be no doubt about the apparent motives of the attackers.

  The sound of powerful truck engines revved from within the grounds as the night security force rallied, and he spotted two heading his way. Quickly calculating that he had no more than thirty seconds, he trotted five yards from the gate and withdrew three grenades from his bag, waiting for them to get within range. When the headlights played across the truck he’d abandoned, he pulled the pin on the first orb and threw it as hard as he could, watching with satisfaction as it sailed beyond the truck and onto the road.

  The first explosion slowed the approaching guards, and when he lobbed the second and third grenades their vehicles had stopped. He didn’t wait to see the results of the next detonations, and instead ran to the blackened edge of the road that led down the mountain and made his way steadily into the darkness, the mine entrance receding behind him. His com line crackled into life again, and his second-in-command quietly informed him that all the men were now at the rendezvous point. He acknowledged, and then turned and withdrew a remote transmitter from his pocket as he faced the entrance. In a lightning motion he held it over his head as he flipped away a small plastic protective cover with his thumb and then depressed the button.

  A shuddering blast shattered the night as the explosives were triggered simultaneously from the locations around the mine. The sky over the mine became an inferno as fire sailed into the air from the eight carefully chosen areas. The pipeline that carried the precious ore was ruined in two different locations, the communications facility destroyed, and worst of all for the operation, the crushers were hopelessly mangled by the strategically placed detonations. Secondary explosions from fuel tanks and flammable liquid drums sounded from further down the ridge, but he had already turned and resumed his run.

  They needed to get clear of the mine. The hard part was done. In a few minutes three more of his men would detonate their charges nine miles down the mountain, further crippling the pipeline. He wasn’t worried short-term about pursuit from the mine’s remaining guards – his designated team members had placed spiked anti-tire countermeasures on the road to incapacitate any chase vehicles. When he reached the rendezvous spot two minutes later the men were all accounted for, Neptune with a field dressing on his shoulder, the engines of two dark-colored vans purring softly in the high-altitude atmosphere. All eyes followed him as he walked to the driver’s door of the lead van and shrugged off his backpack, then tossed it together with his rifle into the cargo area. He climbed behind the wheel and gestured to his men.

  “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Two more explosions echoed from far down the mountain. The pipeline had been ruptured, right on schedule. The men clambered into the vehicles, requiring no further encouragement, and within seconds they were rolling down the road, lights extinguished, navigating through the drizzle using night vision goggles until they were five miles away, near the closest company town. Once in Tembagapura they’d ditch the vans and switch to motorcycles, then disappear, their work on the island done.

  Gravel crunched under the oversized tires as they headed away from the chaos they had caused, the glow of Tembagapura below them beckoning through the haze of light rain. Three other attacks had been launched against the Indonesian military’s nearby outposts, concurrent with their assault on the mine, ensuring confusion and mayhem to cover their escape. By the time the full extent of the damage was understood, they would be aboard the helicopters that awaited them in a secluded field and on their way to Mopah airport, where two prop planes would whisk them to the New Guinea side of the island, and from there to Australia, where they’d lie low in Sydney and await further orders, the group’s specialists richer by five million dollars for a single night’s bloody work.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Silver Justice

  Chapter 1

  “We found it.”

  Assistant Special Agent in Charge Silver Cassidy grabbed the radio hooked on her belt, thumbed the transmit button, and raised it to her mouth.

  “Where?”

  “The sick bastard threw it down the garbage chute.” Special Agent Seth Thompson’s ironic tone was unmistakable even over the radio. “Seven floors. It’s hard to recognize it as a head now. Bumpety bump bump.”

  “Nice. Forensics will go crazy for this one,” she said, glancing at the group of agents standing near the bedroom door.

  She caught a flash of her reflection in the hallway mirror and paused to plump her dark brown hair. The morning had been a whirlwind, between the early call on the latest murder and trying to get her daughter to school before heading to the crime scene. She knew she looked tired and harried, having had no time for makeup or hair gel in the rush.

  That was fine. As the head of the FBI task force hunting this serial killer, Silver didn’t need a glamorous look or a ready-for-the-cameras presentation in order to be taken seriously. She was the no-nonsense presence representing the Bureau leadership on the investigation, so everyone at the crime scene gave her a respectfully wide berth.

  A generally good idea bef
ore she’d imbibed her second cup of coffee.

  Static burped at her from the two-way again.

  “You got anything more up there?” Seth asked.

  Silver paused, considering possible responses as she turned towards the floor-to-ceiling glass of the living room, taking in the West Side apartment’s magnificent view of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Some people knew how to live.

  Or in this case, where to die.

  “Just more of the same. Body in the bedroom tied to the bed. Evidence of loss of bodily functions and a whole lot of blood…he didn’t go easily. Over.”

  Silver shook her head and pursed her lips. This was victim number four for their killer, who had been kind enough to leave a laser-printed calling card that she knew could have been made on any of tens of thousands of HP laser printers that used the same toner.

  One of the forensics techs had bagged it after dusting it carefully. She caught Silver’s eye, then shook her head. Nothing. Clean as everything else had been on this frustrating hunt. Still, patience would pay off. They would find something. They just needed to look a little harder…

  This was a murderer who reveled in the limelight. He clearly wanted to be known, so much so that he’d been willing to help the process along by contacting the press with photos following the first killing. The papers had gone berserk after that. One of the Florida rags had made the shots of the victim and the calling card the central feature of their front page treatment after the ruthless and sensational slaying. As a publicity grabber the little rectangle was elegant and brief, offering two words on one side.

  The Regulator.

  The media had immediately picked up on the moniker, and now that was the case name.

  The FBI had kept the messages neatly printed on the opposite side to itself – standard operating procedure to ensure there were elements only the real killer could know about. This one said: ‘Cooler heads prevail.’ She knew from lab reports on the earlier slayings that the message had been printed at the same time the card had been created. Premeditation wasn’t even in question.

  Silver adjusted her belt, shifting the Glock 23 in the hip holster over, already sweating in the navy blue FBI windbreaker she wore over her blouse and slacks. They had taken over the crime scene from the NYPD detectives, who had reluctantly acceded federal jurisdiction given that this was an interstate killer. A few uniformed patrolmen waited in the hall, securing the area, and the two homicide detectives who’d initially been assigned to the case were keeping them company, unwilling to completely remove themselves from the action but finding themselves with nothing to add.

  “What do we know, people?” she called out to the remaining group, all FBI, mostly male, white, and older than her. At thirty-six she was considered young to be running such a high-profile investigation, especially in the boys’ club that the Bureau continued to be – all the FBI’s marketing photos and insistence on politically-correct diversity notwithstanding. But Silver had earned her position and didn’t make any excuses; she was used to swimming upstream in a man’s world – had been doing so for as long as she could remember. She’d been proving herself since her training days, when she’d graduated second in her class at Quantico – she would have been first had she not annoyed one too many instructors with her independent attitude and been marked down accordingly.

  That still stuck in her craw. By rights, she should have been first.

  Supervisory Special Agent Sam Aravian, a tall, gangly man with olive skin and an unruly head of black curly hair, emerged from the bedroom and shot her a worried glance.

  “This one is grislier than the last. It looks like he was tortured, judging by the lacerations,” he reported, shaking his head. “I’m thinking the killer was trying to get information out of him.”

  “Little soon to speculate, don’t you think?” Silver cautioned.

  Sam turned his head towards the dining room’s picture window and rolled his eyes, thinking Silver wouldn’t catch his expression in the dim reflection. She let it go.

  “Have we got anything from the doorman? Any witnesses? What about security cams? Tell me this isn’t four in a row where the perp’s a ghost…”

  “Nothing so far. The maid found him. NYPD is interviewing her with two of our agents, but she doesn’t know much, and she’s still in shock. It isn’t every day you find your employer of six years doing the headless horseman thing,” Sam offered, biting short the rest of his remark when he caught the look in Silver’s eye.

  Silver keyed the radio again.

  “Seth. What are you going to need to process the downstairs?”

  “We have the garbage room sealed off, and two techs are on it. They called upstairs and have someone going over the chute room, too. I’ll be up in a few minutes. But I don’t need to tell you this is going in an ugly direction.”

  Silver looked out at the park again and wondered when they would catch a break. It had been six weeks since the first killing, three weeks since the last, and they were no closer to closing in on the killer than when the first victim had been discovered in his car with the calling card stuck in his mouth, stabbed to death and left to drown on his own blood. That modus operandi, coupled with the killer’s contacting the press and promising more killings, had galvanized the Bureau into creating a serial killer task force even before he’d slain his second victim.

  Besides the lack of any breaks in his having been seen or caught on camera, she was concerned with how clean the crime scenes were. That implied at least a passing familiarity with forensics, which didn’t bode well for their hunt. This was an organized, patient planner who hadn’t slipped up.

  Yet.

  But they always did.

  That wasn’t completely true, though, was it? an internal voice chided her, reminding her of the ones that had gotten away.

  The Capital City murderer.

  The Grim Sleeper.

  The Zodiac Killer.

  The Original Night Stalker.

  Every time she was on one of these cases her worst nightmare was that her quarry would turn out to be the next Jack the Ripper or Zodiac and simply disappear into the fog one day after a run of devastating brutality – on her watch. That fear kept her driving hard and had molded a herculean work ethic which had served her well.

  “Okay, Sam. Let’s make sure we get statements from everyone who could have potentially seen anything,” Silver said, turning to survey the scene. “We should probably go to the surrounding buildings and talk to anyone who had a sightline on this place. Although that’s a long shot, given the timing.”

  “I’m on it,” he agreed and moved back into the bedroom.

  Silver had been with the Bureau for thirteen years and had risen through the ranks, starting in Organized Crime before switching to Violent Crime, and since making the move, this was the second task force where she’d been the assistant special agent in charge. The last one, disbanded two years earlier, had stopped a particularly ugly serial killer who’d been targeting prostitutes in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York areas. It had taken nine months to capture Tom Rinkley, but they had ultimately arrested him in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he drove a cab for a living. DNA had proved his undoing – they had managed to get just enough samples from four of the victims to put him away with a clean, unassailable case – so much so that once he’d been told what he was facing, the killer had confessed to a total of a dozen slayings spanning two years, reciting them with clinical precision.

  Rinkley hadn’t been a particularly bright man, but he was methodical, at least at first. They had gotten him after he’d increased his frequency and gotten sloppy, which they later discovered was because he was having breaks from reality – vivid drug-induced hallucinatory episodes where he believed he was receiving messages from God to kill unclean women.

  Silver had participated in the interrogation. Her skin still crawled as she recalled his gleeful account of how he’d reduced the incidence of AIDS and deterred any women consid
ering the vocation. The interaction had made her want to put a bullet between his eyes right at the questioning table.

  “Well, Agent, they were whores. Unclean, polluted vessels for disease, sent to tempt good men and contaminate them with their foulness.”

  “Good men? You mean the kind of good men that leave their wives and families at home and go seek out prostitutes in truck stops or near bus stations, like those you targeted? Those kinds of good men?” Silver had inquired in a neutral tone.

  “Men are like dogs. They don’t know any better. It’s women who lead them astray and spread the corruption of their bodies and their spirits. Exterminate the vermin and the neighborhood becomes clean over time.” Rinkley had fixed her with cold, dead eyes, smirking as he winked at her. “You should know how filthy women can be, Agent Cassidy.”

  Silver had outwardly been unmoved, but that night after crawling into bed, she’d cried for an hour – for her soul, for her daughter, and because the universe produced sick animals that viewed her gender as inferior, and therefore something less than human. She knew Rinkley was atypical, but being in the same room with a man who was so palpably evil strained her composure and tested her inner fortitude.

  If she’d had a gun in her hand when he’d winked at her…

  Silver snapped back into the present and took a few deep breaths, trying to purge her psyche of the ugly stain the predator had left.

  This was her job. This was what she’d chosen, no, fought to do with her life. And sometimes you had to get your hands dirty.

  But when she thought of her ten-year-old daughter, Kennedy, growing up in a world where evil like Rinkley’s prowled the streets, a small part of her wondered if they wouldn’t be better off taking these psychos behind the jail and shooting them.

  Only that wasn’t the gig. Vigilante justice wasn’t a big part of the FBI curriculum.