by JT Sawyer
Dev saw the lean figure step out of his jeep and briefly pause to look at the ground. Shit, I don’t think I left any of my tracks down below. They should just blend in with the rest of the cowboys’ prints anyway. She heard the man go inside the house and close the door. Dev kneeled down and peered around the side of the pumphouse to listen for movement, then she crept down the hill towards the back door.
She had never been on a ranch before though she had spent her share of time on desert operations. Those had been in Africa and the Middle East, where she was assisting with her organization’s K & R missions. She hated the scarcity of resources for surviving in third-world desert nations and always relished returning home to Israel to enjoy the civilized comforts. The past few days of surviving on the move had worn her out and she felt stiff from inadequate sleep in her vehicle. All she wanted was for this nightmare of undercover work to end so she could resume a relatively normal life apart from the fictional persona that she’d had to endure at Aeneid.
Moving along the wooden porch, she reached for the handle on the door and turned it but then heard a faint sound behind her. Dev spun around and pointed her pistol at a man who had just emerged from the arroyo.
“Drop your weapon,” he yelled as he shuffled forward in a smooth gait while aiming his AR at her head. She saw his tactical vest, which indicated he was with the FBI. She kept her pistol grip firm and focused the front sight upon him. Then she let out a sigh and turned her weapon aside, raising both hands. The man kept his attention upon her while darting a quick sideways glance around either corner of the building.
“Easy, I’m not here to cause any trouble. Just looking for someone.” The words felt sticky in her mouth as she tried to calm her breathing.
“Yeah, who’s that? You don’t look like you’re here for horseback riding lessons.”
“Sergeant Major Mitchell Kearns.”
Mitch clenched the grip on his rifle, squinting as he looked her over.
“Who the hell are you? You better start talking fast. I may be with the FBI but I’m also Old West at heart and don’t have any qualms about dropping your ass right here and running your prints later.”
“My name is Devorah Leitner. I’m the daughter of Anatoly Leitner, who sent me here.”
Mitch sucked in a deep breath and tilted his head slightly before lowering his rifle. His eyes widened and he stared at the mysterious woman as a breeze ruffled the dry leaves on the ground behind him.
Chapter 6
FBI Bureau Chief Evan Ryker was a wiry man with blond brush-cut hair that resembled the bristles on a new toothbrush and belied his investment in hair gel. He was sitting at his desk in the downtown federal headquarters in Phoenix when a high-priority email popped up on his laptop. Clicking it open, he saw two facial shots of a raven-haired woman by the name of Mira Sanchez with the title below indicating: Upgraded to Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List.
The bulletin revealed that she was a domestic terrorist and was responsible for a recent security breach at a private contracting firm along with charges of sabotage, violent crime, and weapons violations.
“Subject should be considered armed and extremely dangerous…yada, yada…” Ryker muttered, reading over the last line which he’d seen dozens of times on such warnings each month. He hit the approve button to circulate it to his staff and then printed off copies to post on the main bulletin board in the briefing room. Before getting up to grab the flyers, he picked up the hardline on his desk and called the software analysis technician one floor below.
“This is Ryker. I’m forwarding an email to you about a subject and I want you to run her photo through facial recognition software in and around the city here for any recent hits as soon as approval from D.C. comes in.” After he hung up, he stared at the lovely features of Mira. She wasn’t the usual pasty-faced criminal with unkempt hair and poor teeth that graced the FBI billboards. “Ooh, too bad such a beauty is so tarnished,” he muttered to himself. “Whoever crosses your path is going to be disarmed in more ways than one, I think.”
He retrieved the copies from his printer and headed out the door, sliding his reading glasses down on the bridge of his beaky nose, hardly noticing his busy staff as he walked by their desks.
Ryker had been assigned as interim director for the Southwest Division as a stepping stone to a coveted job in Seattle. During the past three months he had slowly come to appreciate the climate and culture of Arizona which contrasted sharply with his former posting at the D.C. office.
With a nice home in the upscale neighborhood of Scottsdale and the pleasant lack of humidity, he was reconsidering his assignment to the dreary Pacific Northwest and thinking about requesting a permanent position in Phoenix.
He walked by his field operators, who were milling around a table discussing an upcoming training event. Ryker nodded at them as he strode over, sliding a copy of the Most Wanted flyer towards them. “Bet you were wishing they all looked like her.” He grinned. He patted the man to his right on the shoulder, one of those men whose name he always got mixed up—Dave or Dan—knowing him by his aptitude and qualification scores instead.
When he was finished, he headed downstairs to introduce himself to a group of new recruits fresh from FLETC (federal law enforcement training center). He spent an hour briefing the agents on his expectations, the particulars of the Southwest division, and their work rotations. Near the end of his lecture, he was interrupted by a woman who came down to inform him of the facial recognition trace he had requested. She insisted that the memo was urgent.
He picked up the phone on the wall and spoke with the agent in charge at the D.C. office, a man by the name of Perkins.
“If this is about the woman Sanchez then you should know she’s a high-priority fugitive,” said Ryker.
“I know. She’s been bumped up the list and I’m actually calling to inform you that there’s been a hit on her northeast of Phoenix. She was spotted near a gas station in Cave Creek yesterday.”
“Very good. We’ll get someone on this.”
Ryker was pleased things were moving along so quickly. He dismissed the new agents and headed back upstairs. Looked like he would be putting in overtime on a weekend once more. He didn’t mind as long as it didn’t involve him being outside in the afternoon too much when the temps spiked to triple digits.
Chapter 7
The thirty-something woman’s black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, revealing her high cheekbones and olive skin. She had a tiny comma-shaped scar off the left side of her chin. Her almond-colored eyes stared intently at Mitch as if boring a hole through him.
“Anatoly Leitner—now that’s a name I’ve not heard in many years,” Mitch said, moving closer to her as she slowly reholstered her pistol while he kept his hands on his rifle.
He thought back to the days when he’d had the pleasure of working with Anatoly Leitner, one of the finest teachers of tradecraft in counter-terrorism that he had ever met. After Anatoly’s service with the Mossad, he was hired by several U.S. agencies to provide training to special operations units. The U.S. and Israeli militaries have a long history of sharing training methods and Anatoly was the first of many seasoned combat vets to go freelance after 9/11. After spending nearly a year training Mitch’s unit at Fort Lewis and abroad, Anatoly’s contract ended and he returned to Israel only to disappear into the shadows again. In addition to being a legendary figure in the world of clandestine ops, he had been like a father figure to Mitch, who had lost his parents at the age of twelve. Now, here was the man’s daughter, staring at him with that same look he remembered in Anatoly’s eyes—one of controlled fury, like a tempestuous storm at sea about to swallow a ship.
“He mentioned he had a daughter but never spoke much about his family. I only saw a few photos once during a rare barbecue dinner me and a bunch of my old SF buddies had for him before he left.”
“So you worked with him in special operations?”
Mitch lowered his rifle, shovin
g the sling off to the side of his shoulder. “You’re asking me what your old man did for a living? That sounds like the guy I knew—always keeping everyone in the dark about what he’s up to.”
He moved a few feet over towards the trunk of a large cottonwood, resting his back against the twisted bark while she stood with her feet shoulder-width apart as if ready to bolt.
“My father never spoke about his work overseas. My mother insisted that when he was home, we would have some semblance of a normal family life that didn’t revolve around chaos and warfare.”
“So, in other words, no one talked much at mealtimes,” Mitch said, giving a knowing look to what she was describing.
She grinned and shook her head. “Yes, it was all a veneer of pleasantries to mask the pain etched in his eyes.”
“Anatoly was the best teacher in special operations that I’ve ever met.”
Dev looked him over like a boxer would an opponent in the ring, then she glanced over the trees in the arroyo below. “I need a place to stay for the next few days. There’s a potential terrorist attack that is about to unfold somewhere in the southwestern U.S. and I need to piece together all the players.”
He thrust his chin forward, chuckling. “Oh, is that all. I thought you were going to say you and your pops needed my help quelling a revolution in Paraguay or some crazy shit.”
“Please, can you help me?”
“Did I mention I work for a federal agency? Let me take you downtown and you can present what you know to my bureau chief.”
“I can’t do that. There’s a reason I’ve been hiding out for the past five days. Someone in the government, in the FBI, is trying to get to me. That’s what brought me to Phoenix in the first place. There’s a man in your organization who’s in on this.”
“In on a premeditated attack on U.S. soil—somebody in my agency? Not likely.” He moved up to the porch and sat down on a frayed wicker chair beside her.
“Your bureau chief, his name is Ryker, is that right? How well do you know him?”
Mitch raised his eyebrows in surprise at her question. “Not well—he’s only been there a few months. Seems typical of government management—lots of Tony Robbins motivational speeches and little action to support it.”
Dev remained standing, her body seemingly relaxed on the surface, but Mitch sensed she was on high alert. “I can’t say for sure that he’s connected but I traced a call to the downtown division that came from my former employer at the Aeneid Corporation in Anaheim after they tried to kill me.”
“The defense contractor—the one that makes body armor?”
“That’s right. I’ve been on the inside there for months trying to track down a connection between them and some intel we picked up from a hostage my father and I rescued.”
“Whoa, your father’s running his own outfit of spooks? Wait a minute, back up here and pretend I don’t know what Anatoly’s been into since my days in SF. Your father literally dropped off the radar after he left. He sure as hell never returned any of my calls or emails.”
“He’s operating his own agency now doing freelance work, mostly involved with liberating hostages—you know, the kidnapping and ransom industry. We run missions all over the world but do a lot of work in Turkmenistan—a place my father is fond of.” She shifted her weight to one foot, leaning her shoulder against the wall. “I’ve been working with him—training, doing field ops and intel. This was my first assignment over here, though, and after this mess I’ve uncovered, it might be my last for many reasons.”
“Now, why would you want to go into that line of work? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Anatoly would be the guy to operate under if you’re serious about learning the trade but you seem…” He paused, glancing into her eyes and studying the contours of her face. “Well, let’s just say that there are other ways to save lives than traipsing around in the shadows of third-world shitholes.”
Dev’s eyes lit up. “You don’t think a woman has a place in…”
Mitch held his hand up, palm facing outward. “Stop right there. That’s not what I was saying at all. I’ve just seen what that work can do to people. How you enter the ranks wanting to do good and help others only to end up needing to mend your own soul years later after dealing with all the horror.”
Dev looked out at the canopy of trees where two canyon wrens were competing for a coffee-colored bark beetle. “You spent a lot of time with my father?”
Mitch shrugged his shoulders. “Around eleven months, nearly 24/7 here in the U.S. or on various overseas operations.”
“What I wouldn’t have given when I was younger to have such an uninterrupted stretch with him.” She ran her hand through her hair while sighing. “But then the wistful prayers of a child sometimes go unanswered, don’t they?”
“Let’s go inside where it’s cooler and you can lay out what you’ve uncovered.” Mitch’s trust didn’t extend very far with an intruder showing up on his doorstep with a story like she’d just delivered but his instincts told him to hear her out. And no one except a handful of his old SF unit buddies knew about Anatoly so he was pretty certain of her connection, not to mention her subtle resemblance to the man.
“You may not like everything I’ve got to say. It involves corruption at the highest...” She paused as Mitch raised his hand and then craned his head towards the front of the house.
Something was off. The purple finches that normally nested in the sycamores near the rim were silent and the wind held a musky locker-room scent, the odor Mitch knew was associated with human perspiration. He lowered his body near the edge of the back porch and peered around the side. Moving down the rocky slopes near the main entrance of the ranch were close to fifteen heavily armed men in body armor. The men flowed along the terrain like one organism—a well-trained group who were no strangers to small-unit tactics. They poured over the slope like ravenous fire ants, sweeping their weapons along the upper houses two hundred yards from Mitch’s location.
Chapter 8
“What the fuck is going on?” he whispered, wondering what kind of trouble she had brought down upon his friend’s ranch and his own life which only an hour earlier had held the promise of a respite from the chaos of his job.
Dev squatted beside him and gasped as she looked out over the main grounds of the ranch. There were three teams of five men moving in on the upper houses, kicking in the doors and performing sweeps around the structures.
“Aeneid—this has to be Nelson’s goons but how the hell did they track me here? I’ve only used burner phones, moved each night, and…” She paused, biting her lip. “The mole inside the feds must be using facial recognition software. They must have pinged me when I was downtown the other day or in Cave Creek.”
“We don’t use facial recog on subjects unless they are a high-value target on the top-ten list and even then it takes weeks of red tape and approval with Homeland Security to initiate that.”
“Who could circumvent that?”
Mitch smirked. “The bureau chief could but he’d still need approval from HQ in Washington.” He studied the way the men moved, interacted, and their accoutrements, noting their fluid footwork and unison. “These boys seem like heavy hitters—some kind of para-military group by the looks of it.”
He clutched his rifle close, remembering Miguel was still asleep on the porch of the uppermost house and realizing that the infirm man was probably unaware of all the commotion. Mitch peered around the side again, looking for a way to reach him when he saw two men ascend the steps to Miguel’s house and riddle his chest with gunfire. Mitch’s mouth hung open and his throat went dry as he watched the elderly figure slump back into his chair. Mitch slammed his balled fist against the wall. He started to raise his M4 up and then felt Dev’s hand on his shoulder.
“You can’t engage them. There are too many.”
He lowered his rifle, realizing it would be suicidal to attack such a large group. He looked at her with fury in his eyes, wondering what maelstro
m she had just rained down upon him.
“Is there another road out of here?” she said, frantically studying her surroundings.
“Nope, one way in, which I used to like until now.” He went to the back door and quietly unlocked it, making sure to keep her in his sight. “Help me grab some things from inside then we’ll have to make our way out the back along the arroyo.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll get out of here on foot, but not before I take out as many of those bastards as possible. I’d like our odds better if there were only half as many guys on our trail.”
Mitch went into his bedroom and retrieved a backpack jammed with survival gear and spare magazines for his pistol and rifle. On the front flap was a logo that indicated Zombie Bug-Out Bag.
Dev scrunched her eyebrows together. “What is it with you Americans and your infatuation with the undead?”
“Just another excuse to buy guns and cool tactical gear, and a man can’t have too much of either.”
Mitch handed her a scoped Remington 700 rifle and a small daypack with water, first-aid kit, and some MREs. He went into the rear closet and removed some of his reloading equipment, pulling out a canister of gunpowder. Then he ran into the small kitchen at the front and glanced through the tattered white curtains on the window. The men were on their way past the barn and would be headed towards his bunkhouse within minutes.
“Grab a bunch of those beer mugs from the dishrack,” he said to her as he pried the lid off the gunpowder. He began pouring the black particles into a half-dozen glasses. When he was done, he reached under the cabinet and pulled out a box of roofing nails and a bottle of bleach. He tossed a handful of nails into each mug while Dev filled a shot glass with the caustic liquid.