THE JACK REACHER FILES: CHOKE (Episode 1 in the CHOKE Series)

by Jude Hardin

  Jack Reacher…

  Former army major, military police, the 110th Special Investigations Unit. Now a drifter and a trouble magnet. Could he be involved in a plot to overthrow the United States government?

  Diana Dawkins…

  Lead operative with the super-secret federal agency called The Circle. Smart, beautiful, deadly.

  The assignment…

  Reconnaissance only. Confirm Reacher’s location so that the capture team can move in.

  Unfortunately, things don’t go as planned, and Diana is forced to improvise. With national security at stake, and facing what appear to be insurmountable odds, she must singlehandedly penetrate a heavily-armed militia camp and bring Reacher in for interrogation.

  And possible execution.

  CHOKE

  THE JACK REACHER FILES

  JUDE HARDIN

  CHOKE

  It was almost midnight by the time Diana Dawkins made it to the camp. Kobe Dreisler was dangling by his wrists from a tree branch, naked except for his boxer shorts and the sweat-soaked bandana tied around his head and the set of jumper cables attached to his feet. There was a car battery on the ground, positioned to deliver a healthy dose of electrical current through Kobe’s body every time one of the CHOKE soldiers clamped the loose ends of the cable to the terminals.

  CHOKE.

  Citizens Helping to Kill Expansion.

  Unlike some of the other militant organizations that had sprung up over the past decade, this particular group had started out with what many might consider to be a reasonable political viewpoint. But over time that viewpoint had evolved into something else altogether. Something extreme. Something deadly. Something that threatened the stability of the country.

  CHOKE had a history of stockpiling illegal firearms and explosives, and several members in other locations had already been arrested for acts of violence. They had an agenda. They didn’t want to change the government. They wanted to eliminate it.

  Diana recognized the two militiamen working on Kobe from their profiles. She knew them by name, and she knew their backgrounds. Unfortunately, neither of them was the primary reconnaissance target, a former army major named Jack Reacher, a drifter and a trouble magnet suspected of recent involvement with the CHOKE organization. Suspected of recent involvement with them and, more specifically, of helping to organize an assassination attempt on the president of the United States.

  Diana watched from the woods as the men who weren’t Reacher performed the interrogation by firelight. They were torturing Kobe Dreisler. There was blood on his face and his ribs were bruised and his feet were red and blistered from the electrical shocks, but Diana doubted that he would give them any information. She’d been with the ultra-clandestine anti-terrorist agency called The Circle for a little over seven years, and in that time she’d only known of one operative who’d betrayed the organization. It was a crime punishable by death, regardless of the circumstances, and The Circle’s code of justice was a lot different than the civilian world’s, or even the military’s. In cases of betrayal, there was no due process to speak of. The Director made a decision, and then your chair was vacant at the next briefing session. It was a severe and savage way to do business, but it worked. It was one of the reasons that only a handful of people on the planet knew that The Circle existed.

  Diana had been working with Kobe for a while. He was capable, and he was loyal to the cause, and she didn’t think that he would break under pressure. Still, the fact that he had been captured had irreparably altered the course of the investigation. It had put Diana in a position where she would be forced to improvise.

  She crouched in the brush as the CHOKE militiamen prepared to take their crude little interrogation session to the next level.

  There was a Ford F100 parked about twenty feet from the tree. Mud tires, faded red paint, yellow strobe bolted to the roof. CHOKE’s version of a roving security vehicle, Diana thought. Aaron Gerard Butler stood by the truck sharpening a machete with an oilstone while Leonard Theodore Hauser tended to the jumper cables. Both of the men wore camouflaged fatigue pants and combat boots, and both of them were shirtless. It was a warm night and the fire was hot and they were shiny with sweat. Kobe appeared to be in and out of consciousness. Di figured he’d already been shocked numerous times.

  “I’m going to give you one more chance to answer the question,” Hauser said. “If you don’t tell me the truth this time, my friend with the big knife here is going to amputate your left foot. Okay? Now, one more time. Who sent you here?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kobe said. “Please. I swear, I was just hiking through the woods, and I lost my way. Just give me a ride out to the road, and you’ll never see me again.”

  “Do you know what the words no trespassing mean? Surely you saw the signs. Surely you can read plain English. If you were lost, there were a hundred other directions you could have gone. But, instead of turning around and trying a different route, you chose to climb our fence and invade our private property. It just doesn’t make any sense. Unless, of course, you’re some kind of spy. You some kind of spy, boy?”

  “I told you, I’m a postal worker. I have numbers you can call to verify that. I’m just a normal guy. Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

  “A normal guy,” Hauser said. “Right. So why did you climb the fence?”

  “I figured there were people on the other side of it. Someone who could help me get back to civilization.”

  “Oh, we’re going to help you get back to civilization all right. One piece at a time. Do it, Aaron. Take the foot off.”

  Aaron Gerard Butler set the sharpening stone on the tailgate, walked over and cocked the machete back like a baseball bat. He took a couple of practice swings, and then stepped over to where Kobe was dangling from the tree. He pressed the sharp edge of the blade against Kobe’s left ankle to measure the distance. He reared back, his powerful shoulder muscles glistening in the firelight, but a split second before he swung, Diana drilled a sound-suppressed 9mm slug into the back of his head from about thirty yards away. As Butler dropped to the ground, Diana fired again, the second projectile finding a home where Hauser’s left eye used to be.

  Diana sprinted over to the interrogation site and used the machete Butler had been holding to cut Kobe down from the tree.

  Kobe landed on his feet, tried to take a step forward, staggered and collapsed on the ground a few feet from the fallen militiamen. Panting, sweating, barely able to speak.

  “What took you so long?” he said.

  Diana started untying the rope from his wrists.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you might be able to extract some information before they started cutting you into pieces.”

  “I wasn’t exactly in a position to be asking questions, Di.”

  “At least you didn’t answer any. What about Reacher? Is he here or not?”

  “I don’t know. They captured me before I made it into the main compound. I got nothing.”

  “Which means I’m going to have to go in there myself.”

  “I’ll go with you. We’ll do it together.”

  “No. You would only slow me down.”

  Neither of them bothered to mention the possibility of taking the noisy old pickup. It would have been like a rolling advertisement, announcing their arrival in advance, a quarter mile in every direction. When stealth was an issue, and as long as the intended target was less than five miles away, it was always best to travel by foot.

  And Kobe’s feet were in no shape for traveling.

  “Sorry,”
he said. “I tried.”

  “I’m going to take care of it. Put a call in for evac and cleanup. Give me an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  Butler and Hauser were both carrying Colt Anaconda revolvers with eight-inch barrels, enormous .44 magnum hand cannons that weighed over three and a half pounds each. Diana pulled the guns out of their holsters and carried them over to Kobe, along with his government-issue Glock 9mm, which had been stuffed into Hauser’s waistband.

  “Keep an eye on these,” she said.

  Kobe slid the Glock into his shoulder holster.

  “Don’t you want to take one with you?” he said, referring to the monstrous Colt revolvers.

  “Too heavy. Anyway, I have an extra magazine in my backpack. I’ll be all right.”

  Diana checked the GPS on her phone, donned a black hood and a pair of night vision goggles, started running west toward the group’s main compound, which was a little over a mile away. In training exercises, she’d covered the same distance over similar terrain in less than seven minutes. But this wasn’t a training exercise. This was the real thing, and there were always a million contingencies that could potentially slow you down.

  Still, Diana figured she could get back to Kobe in an hour, no problem.

  Explaining the two dead CHOKE members to The Director was a different matter.

  Complacency kills, The Director always said, and while no assignment was ever taken lightly or considered routine, this one should have been about as close to a cakewalk as they came. The orders had been to avoid engagement. Recon only. Confirm Reacher’s location, turn around and head back. The fact that they had failed so miserably on such a simple mission would be grounds for disciplinary action, and since Di was the senior operative and designated team leader, her head would be on the chopping block right alongside Kobe’s. But there was no way to fix that now. At this point, all Diana could do was keep moving forward and hope to obtain the intelligence they’d come for, hope that their next assignment wouldn’t be somewhere deep in the Alaskan wilderness.

  A cleanup crew would take care of Aaron Gerard Butler and Leonard Theodore Hauser before sunrise. People disappear. It happens all the time. There would be an investigation, local authorities and maybe even the FBI, but nothing would ever come of it. Perhaps Butler and Hauser deserted their posts and headed for Canada. Or Mexico. Or somewhere else. Their families would always wonder.

  Along with the hood, Diana was wearing a small backpack and a pair of cargo pants with big button-flap pockets stitched to the sides. Long-sleeve pullover, high-top sneakers, everything black. She was practically invisible. When she made it to the inner fence that guarded the perimeter of the compound—chain link topped with barbed wire and razor ribbon—she pulled a set of bolt cutters out of her backpack and cut a hole big enough to crawl through. She’d been studying the layout for several days, so she knew exactly where she needed to go and what she needed to do.

  As she made her way toward the third tent on the left, where all the personnel records were kept, her phone vibrated against her left thigh. She pulled the device out of her pocket, turned back toward the fence so that her body shielded the light emanating from the display, tapped the screen and read the new text.

  It was from Kobe. The message was brief, and to the point.

  Call The Director.

  Not good. The Director hardly ever interrupted a mission, and when he did it was usually to issue an order to abort. If that was the case, Diana figured she might as well start thinking about places to purchase a nice parka and some thermal underwear.

  She punched in the number, and The Director answered on the first ring.

  “Change of plans,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Since you botched the recon, we’re going to have to approach this Jack Reacher situation another way.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I think we can still accomplish what we came to do.”

  “Maybe so, but when Butler and Hauser don’t show up for muster in the morning, security is suddenly going to be ten times tighter than it is right now. We’ve been watching CHOKE long enough to anticipate their next move. With two of their men gone, they’re obviously going to know something is up, and there’s a high probability that the officers and other key personnel will be relocated immediately. If Reacher’s there, we need to get him tonight.”

  “You talked to Dreisler, sir. He’s incapacitated. He’s suffering from dehydration and exhaustion. He’s having muscle spasms from being shocked with a car battery, and he has burns on his feet where they clamped the jumper cables. He’s not going to be of any help to me at this point.”

  “Are you saying you can’t handle it?”

  A capture unit usually consisted of a helicopter pilot and a copilot and four additional operatives armed with fully automatic weapons and detailed information from the reconnaissance team that preceded them. Diana had none of that. She was traveling by foot, and her only weapon was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with eighteen more cartridges, including the ten in her spare magazine.

  There were dozens of militiamen sleeping a hundred yards away, sixty-two according to the most recent intelligence. Sixty-two hardcore brainwashed conspiracy-minded enemies of the state who enjoyed playing with machineguns and hand grenades.

  And Diana Dawkins was alone.

  Sixty-two against one.

  “I can handle it,” she said. “Not a problem.”

  She clicked off, slid the phone back into her pocket, turned around and started creeping toward the CHOKE compound.

  Reconnaissance was still the first order of business. Diana needed to know for sure that Reacher was actually here, and she needed to know his tent number and bunk number.

  Jack Reacher was a big man. Six-five, two-twenty. He was highly proficient with a variety of weapons, and with his bare hands. The bulk of his time in the army had been with the military police, 110th Special Investigations Unit, where he’d eventually been assigned to the position of Commanding Officer. Once considered a hero, his decorations included two bronze stars, a silver star, and a purple heart. He was big and strong, and he was smart. Diana knew that he wasn’t going to willingly follow her back to The Circle’s headquarters, and that the only way for her to emerge victorious was to make sure she held the upper hand from the beginning. In other words, she needed to win the fight before it ever got started. Before the first punch was thrown, before the first shot was fired.

  Fortunately, there was a pre-loaded syringe in a concealed pouch on the side of her backpack that came in handy for such occasions. The medication could be administered into a muscle or a vein, and the effect was instantaneous. As long as Reacher was in bed asleep, it wouldn’t be a problem to make sure that he stayed asleep.

  Getting him out of the tent without alerting any of the other militiamen might prove to be a little more challenging, but Diana figured she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Sweat dripped down her back in streams as she made her way inside the graveled perimeter of the tent complex. There were no lights on, but it was a clear night and she could see well enough with the infrared goggles.

  All was quiet except for the distant growl of a diesel generator, positioned behind a wall of sandbags at the northwest corner of the compound. Diana thought about running back there and shutting it down, but she decided not to, concerned that it might be rigged with an alarm. And even if it wasn’t, the sudden silence might be enough to startle some of the militia soldiers awake. So she left it alone. It wasn’t much an issue, especially if everyone stayed asleep.

  The flaps over the door to the personnel tent had been secured with a lightweight chain and a small padlock. Diana could have used her bolt cutters to slice through the lock, but she didn’t want to leave any immediately obvious evidence of the intrusion. When Reacher and Hauser and Butler didn’t show up for muster in the morning, it would be best for the CHOKE officers to think that they’d run off together during the night, t
hat they’d deserted the militia. The officers would eventually realize the breach and then prepare to bug out, as The Director had said, but maybe not right away. Maybe The Circle could get enough information from Jack Reacher to pass on to the proper authorities before CHOKE disappeared to a new location, and then maybe some arrests could be made.

  Reacher would have to die, of course, if it was determined that he was involved in the assassination attempt, but The Circle would squeeze him for every pertinent scrap of information before the execution. It didn’t matter how strong he was. The Circle’s interrogation techniques for such serious matters made guys like Butler and Hauser look like amateurs.

  Diana left the lock alone. She walked around to the side of the tent, pulled a small folding knife with a locking blade out of her backpack, cut a long horizontal slit about four inches from the bottom of the canvas wall and climbed inside.

  The interior of the tent was as dark as a cave, and it was difficult to see anything, even with the goggles on. Like murky green water. Diana put the knife away, pulled out a penlight and started looking around. Someone had left a partially-eaten sandwich and an open bag of potato chips on a little folding table, the kind people use when they want to eat while watching television. It exhibited an astounding lack of discipline, something that would never happen in the real military world. To the right of the snack table there was a desk with a computer on it and a rolling library cart loaded with some training manuals and a steel file cabinet with four drawers that were marked alphabetically.

  The third drawer down said Q-U. Diana opened it, pulled out the R file and took it over to the desk. She sat down and opened the folder. The page on top was for a man named Derek Raffinger. Diana lifted the top left corner of the page with her thumb and forefinger and had started to flip it over when she heard boots crunching on gravel. More than one set. She switched off the penlight, pulled out her pistol, sat there and waited in the dark. A few seconds later, she heard voices at the front of the tent.