24 Declassified: Storm Force 2d-7

by David S. Jacobs

  13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 P.M. AND 6 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME

  Playsquare Day Care Center, New Orleans

  An unusual gathering was massed at the Playsquare Day Care Center, located about an eighth of a mile from City Hall. It had been commandeered by Susan Keehan and her EXECPROTEK contingent.

  The modest neighborhood featured office buildings tenanted mostly by mid-sized legal firms and insurance agencies. The day care center was in a two-story building fronting the north side of a vest pocket-sized park. Ordinarily open on Saturdays, it was closed today because of the storm threat.

  Several SUVs and dark-colored, late model cars were parked in front of the building.

  The nonprofit day care center was owned and operated by the Keehan Humanistics Fund, one of many charitable facilities it maintained in the city. Susan's Free Raoul Action Squad was temporarily perched at the site, using it as a staging area. A place where they could wait for final word from the kidnappers as to where and how to deliver the ransom money in exchange for Garros.

  The abductor chief was impatient, eager to move fast. He'd told them during his most recent call that he'd be giving them their instructions within an hour or so, definitely no more than two hours.

  The day care center had been chosen by Mylon Sears. It was centrally located with easy access to all parts of the city. A business zone on a Saturday, it would have been quiet and depopulated even if not for the hurricane warning. There weren't a lot of civilian types around to gawk and wonder about the heavy security detail.

  The day care facility, a KHF asset, could be used without question. Today, now, it was deserted, save for a sole caretaker.

  He liked his job and was easily persuaded to sit tight and mind his own business; one of Sears's men kept him under watch anyway, to make sure he didn't make any outside calls to his wife or friends to report the exciting news that Susan Keehan herself was in the building, thus spreading the word and attracting attention.

  Susan, Sears, and the rest of the security squad sat and waited.

  * * *

  So, too, did Jack Bauer and Pete Malo sit and wait, in their SUV parked at the southeastern corner of the park opposite the day care center. Other CTU operatives were posted at key intersections in the area, maintaining the lowest of low profiles.

  Mylon Sears was no fool; he and his men were professionals, and would be quick to detect a too-heavy presence of watchers. For the same reason, no CTU helicopters had taken to the skies above the area; that would have been another tip-off alerting Sears that he was under observation.

  Yet Sears would also have been suspicious if no attempts had been made to follow him, in the aftermath of the abduction and triple murders.

  Earlier when the Keehan convoy had first left the Mega Mart building, it had been tailed by a couple of unmarked CTU vehicles. Their purpose was to be discovered in the act of shadowing the convoy.

  Sears, ready for the eventuality of tail cars, had roving chase cars of his own in the area. He put them to use, blocking intersections along the route, physically obstructing the shadowers with "stalled" vehicles and faked traffic jams to thwart pursuit.

  Satisfied that he had eluded the tail cars, Sears continued on his way in confidence.

  Jack and Pete had the Flea bugging device planted on Susan Keehan. Since Sears stayed right beside his client, they knew what he knew the moment he knew it, including the convoy's planned destinations. That enabled them to proceed to the locales in a roundabout way without being observed by EXECPROTEK spotters, first at the bank and later at the day care center.

  The Flea continued to remain operational and undetected, sending a steady stream of chatter to their transceiver set.

  Now, as the agents waited, a message came in from CTU Center. Since they were continually monitoring the Flea's output on the transceiver's speaker grid, they used secure, scrambled cells to maintain contact with the Center.

  Jack took the call, while Pete stayed on top of the Flea stream. The Center operator said, "We have a positive ID on the driver of the Paz hit team."

  The audio came in through the cell, while a corresponding video feed appeared on the SUV's dashboard monitor screen.

  A photograph appeared of the dead driver, a man with a potato face, meatball nose, and jug-handle ears. The monitor went to split-screen, one window depicting a full frontal face and another a profile view.

  Jack's eyes narrowed with interest; the feeling that he'd seen that face before but couldn't place had irked him, and he was intensely interested in the solution of the mystery.

  The operator said, "The subject was identified by Interpol." Interpol, the international police organization based in Brussels and covering the European beat.

  New images came on screen, police mug shots from the look of them, the tip-off being the row of numbers being held under the subject's face. He looked about ten years younger but still very much the same, except that the crew-cut hair was a bit thicker and darker and the lumpish face slightly less saggy and jowly.

  The operator said, "He's Hermann Ost. German by birth, although he hasn't been in his home country for years, due to a number of outstanding warrants out on him for murder, attempted murder, numerous counts of violent assault, rape, illegal possession of firearms and explosives, gunrunning, racketeering and drug dealing.

  "That's his criminal dossier in his homeland. He's also wanted in several other West European countries for similar offenses. But these crimes are only incidental to his main source of livelihood.

  "Ost is a mercenary, a professional soldier for hire. His history is too long to go into now, but here are some of the highlights — or lowlights, depending on your point of view.

  "He first enlisted in the German Army, serving for eight years and reaching the rank of top sergeant before being court-martialed and dishonorably discharged for striking an officer. Next he surfaced in Africa, serving in various mercenary legions in Rwanda and the Congo. He achieved a certain level of notoriety as part of an extermination unit working for Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. He followed that up with extensive action in the Blood Diamond conflicts in Sierra Leone.

  "He headed an outfit protecting foreign oil field workers in Nigeria, until he was implicated in a scheme to kidnap and hold for ransom the same executives he was supposed to be guarding.

  "Africa being too hot for him, he moved his theater of operations to the Balkans, where he worked for most of the nineties. Since then, he's plied his trade in Indonesia, Malaysia, and East Timor. Most recently, reported sightings have placed him in the Persian Gulf emirates and Lebanon."

  * * *

  Memory returned to Jack with a rush. Now he knew why the potato-faced killer had seemed so familiar.

  Before joining CTU, Jack had been a member of the U. S. Army's elite Delta Force. He'd participated in a number of actions carried out in the Balkans, where Christian Serbia and Croatia had warred with each other and made war on predominantly Muslim Bosnia. The conflict had produced mass atrocities, mass murder, and mass graves, leaving at least one hundred thousand dead.

  With the European Union and United Nations paralyzed into impotency, the United States was able to act. At the height of the madness, the Serbian leadership under Milosevic made ready to escalate its program of "ethnic cleansing" — that is, genocide — against thousands of Muslims in the borderlands. Not that the Serbs were any worse than their antagonists, just quicker off the mark to do to their foes what their foes planned to do to them.

  Someone had to cool down the conflict before it escalated into the neighboring states of Albania, Macedonia, and beyond. Washington used Delta Force to put out the hottest fires, sending in secret teams to assassinate key Serbian warlords, decimate their militias, and destroy their arsenals. These were the blackest of black ops, covert missions that were kept secret even from allied NATO forces operating in the region as peacekeepers.

  Bosnia, too, was not without its own clandestine backe
rs. Legions of foreign fighters flocked to the area, militant Muslims recruited from throughout the Middle East, armed and financed by wealthy Saudis. Their numbers were augmented by professional soldiers who served for pay. Top pay.

  Among them was Major Marc Vollard, a mercenary commander who organized and led a wickedly effective counterforce to the Serb militias.

  One can't be too picky in wartime. On several occasions, Jack's Delta Force team had found it expedient to work in conjunction with Vollard, using his troops as auxiliaries for backup and support.

  Once the Serbian fire had been damped down, however, Washington turned a hard eye on its erstwhile ally. Vollard was amoral, pragmatic, and ruthlessly efficient.

  When the Serbs massacred a Bosnian village, he massacred two Serbian villages. By the standards of international law, he was as much of a war criminal as any who'd ever been dragged before a court of justice in the Hague.

  One attribute of a successful mercenary is to know when to get out of town. His sixth sense for survival operating at full bore, Vollard abruptly ceased operations in the area and vanished, departing for parts unknown.

  That suited Washington, which preferred that its temporary alliance of convenience with the mercenary major be filed and forgotten, never to see the light of day.

  * * *

  Jack told the operator, "Let me talk to Cal Randolph."

  After a pause, Cal came on the line. "What is it, Jack?"

  Jack said, "Now I remember where I've seen Ost before. Fifteen years ago, in the Balkans, he was a top noncom with Major Marc Vollard's mercenary legion. He was part of Vollard's leadership cadre, the inner circle who follows Vollard from hot spot to hot spot, serving as his core support system."

  Cal said, "Interesting. I can see where Ost ties in with Dixie Lee, they're both gunrunners on the same political wavelength. But where do they fit in with a brainy Maoist shooter like Beatriz Ortiz? Or, for that matter, the Generalissimo, Beltran?"

  Jack said, "I don't know — yet — but I'll tell you this. If Ost is on the scene, Vollard can't be too far away."

  "We'll run a trace on Vollard and see what comes up," Cal said. "Oh, and Jack — one more thing."

  "Shoot."

  "Susan Keehan's compromised in this business — Topham's and Beauclerk's death ensured that. That doesn't mean that her uncle, Senator Keehan, can't do us a lot of damage if things go sour on this ransom deal."

  "We'll rig it so we don't make our move until the exchange is made, Cal. But it could go sour anyway, if Sears drops the ball or the kidnappers do something stupid."

  "Then CTU will be in the clear. Just so long as we have deniability."

  Jack said, "We'll be careful."

  Cal said, "Good. I'll get back to you as soon as we've got something on Vollard." Cal signed off; the Center operator did likewise.

  A sultry blast of wind blew up from the south, whipping up all kinds of dirt and chaff, sending old newspapers swirling and spinning in midair. A trash can was knocked over and blown into the street, where it rolled around on its side in several half circles before another booming gust came up, picked it up bodily, and tossed it ten feet farther down the road.

  Jack and Pete looked at each other. Jack said, "Storm's rising."

  14. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 P.M. AND 7 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME

  Supremo Hat Company, New Orleans

  Fear, real fear, is a physical thing, born not of the mind but of the body.

  At its most extreme, it can cause death. Death by fright is no myth, but a reality, as the victim's heart bursts under supreme shock. A few notches down, it can induce paralysis or the loss of intimate bodily functions. Slightly lower on the scale, it can induce waves of nausea, cotton-dry mouth, loss of feeling in the extremities, and a drop in body temperature that is popularly known by the expression, "blood runs cold."

  It was this last group of symptoms that now afflicted Felix Monatero as he sat at his desk in his showroom office, staring at the monitor screen of a laptop and not seeing it, his awareness limited to a sick-making body terror.

  He'd just received a Triple-AAA urgent communique from Havana, a missive that was at a level so far above top secret that it could only be classified as cosmic.

  His masters back on the home island were in a state of near-hysteria, one that could not be disguised by the officialese in which their urgent message was couched.

  Decrypted, it boiled down to one frantic query: What is going on in New Orleans?

  Elaborations on the theme included questions as to whether Monatero had lost his mind or merely turned traitor. Was he trying to start a war between Cuba and Venezuela by his attack on that friend of the revolution and trusted Chavez hatchet man, Colonel Paz? Or for that matter, with the United States? Trust the gringos to find a way to exploit the street violence into a casus belli, a cause for war, to unleash their long-held dream of stamping out by force the Fidelista revolution!

  The big picture had emerged from the fog of deception, and it wasn't pretty. Monatero had been played. Havana had never ordered the assassination attempt on Paz, was in fact totally in the dark about the motivation and meaning of the assault.

  They blamed Monatero for the debacle, unaware that it was their favorite, Beltran the Generalissimo, who deserved all the blame.

  Havana had yet to learn the worst of it, that Beltran had used a trio of Supremo cell action men to kidnap Raoul Garros. Monatero shuddered to think of the reaction that would follow when they discovered that bit of bad news.

  It was all clear to him now — too late — that his suspicions had been right from the start. Beltran had gone into business for himself. Who knew? Maybe he'd gone even over to the arch-villains in Washington, selling out to them as part of a plot against Cuba.

  He might easily have burned the Supremo cell, exposing it to his new paymasters, whoever they were. Which meant that the site was no longer even partially secure, but subject at any moment to raids by Federal agents.

  The revelation of supreme treachery had temporarily caused Monatero to go into brain lock, the gears of his mind jamming and stalling.

  Now, as the initial shock wore off, his mind started to unfreeze, thoughts and schemes beginning to percolate through his stunned psyche.

  The end was not yet; it was not too late. All was not lost. There was still time for him to contact his three enforcers, Rubio, Torres, and Moreno, and alert them to Beltran's betrayal. They could free Raoul Garros, short-circuiting the plot and minimizing the worst of the damage.

  Havana would be informed that Beltran had gone rogue, using his extraordinary position in the spy hierarchy to bend and warp the Supremo cell to his own sinister purposes, and that Monatero and the rest of his people were blameless.

  Then the Supremo cell must shut down, destroying all potentially incriminating hardware, software, and documents, while the personnel scattered in all directions, each of them finding a hole to hide in to thwart the hunters that were sure to follow.

  All this must be done, and quickly — but first Rubio, the leader of the action trio, must be contacted immediately to abort the mission and free Garros.

  Monatero reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, clawing out the cell phone that would put him in touch with Rubio. His hands shook, causing him to fumble with the cell, nearly dropping it.

  Recovering, he got a good hold on it and lifted the lid to initiate communication…

  The world blew up in his face.

  * * *

  Colonel Paz divided his death squad into two groups. The first included him, Carrancha, Vasco, and Aguilar. The second was headed by his lieutenant, Fierro, sided by Septiembre, Sancho, and Ramon.

  Paz and his group rode in the Explorer he'd had stashed in the Jiffy Pump safe house; the machine was armored and fitted with bulletproof glass. Fierro's group was in a second SUV, one lacking such hardened extras. Rank has its privileges.

  The Explorer was driven by Vasco, a former taxi dr
iver in Caracas, whose mad whirl of heedless, anarchic traffic was good training for a getaway car driver.

  Paz wore a bulletproof vest and was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle complete with grenade launcher, plus a pair of pistols stuck in the hip pockets of his pants. He rode shotgun, sitting in the front passenger seat; Carrancha and Aguilar were in the backseat.

  The second SUV was driven by Septiembre, he of the sad eyes and mournful face.

  Fierro had declined the option of riding in the front passenger seat, relegating it to Ramon. With the vehicle unarmored, the backseat was perhaps marginally safer than the front. Fierro rode in the rear, along with Sancho.

  All death squad members were heavily armed with assault rifles, machine pistols, and shotguns, as well as a multiplicity of handguns. Paz and Fierro, the respective leaders of their squads, were also each equipped with several hand grenades.

  The vehicles stood idling on a side street, screened from the direct sightlines of the Supremo Hat Company building.

  Now Paz gave the go-ahead hand signal, the two SUVs rounding a corner and entering the square opposite the Supremo site. Engines roared; wheels spun, burning rubber, as the murder machines lurched forward, charging the building.

  Closing in on the site, the SUVs parted company, Paz's vehicle hurtling toward the front of the hat company building, the other whipping around toward the rear.

  A Supremo sentry was posted on the corner in front of the building, armed with a couple of handguns hidden under his jacket. Looking like any other ordinary idler, standing there loafing and smoking a cigarette, he looked up to see the Explorer coming at him. His mouth fell open, the cigarette clinging to his lower lip. He pulled a pair of handguns out of the waistband of his pants.

  Paz shouted, "Get him!"

  Vasco wrestled the steering wheel to one side, swerving the vehicle to put the sentry directly in its path. The sentry did some fancy high-stepping to try to get out of the way, but the Explorer clipped him with its right front fender.