Target Deck - 02

by Jack Murphy

  “What is it?” Deckard asked.

  Korgan paused.

  “Aghassi found something.”

  Thirty minutes later the Samruk patrol rolled up to a white building with a cross hanging over the door.

  Aghassi and Nikita stood outside the front gate. Aghassi held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. The Kazakh sniper looked up at the sky absently. Carrion eaters were circling overheard, riding the warm thermals and orbiting around the Christian mission.

  Deckard jumped down from his vehicle and walked towards his two reconnaissance specialists. Aghassi had sounded breathless over the radio. He told Deckard where he was and said that there was something he needed to see for himself.

  “What's up?” Deckard asked.

  “Around back,” Aghassi replied, dropping the handkerchief for a moment. “One of the locals told me this is a hospital for recovering addicts and the mentally disabled.”

  The front gate looked undamaged but the front door had clearly been caved it with a battering ram or something similar. Turning around the corner of the building, he spotted an old chicken coop. His nose crinkled at an old familiar smell. It was the stench of death.

  He was already numb by the time be turned the corner to the rear side of the building, he knew what to expect. He heard the steady buzz of the flies before he ever saw the corpses.

  Bodies lay on top of bodies, maybe twenty of them murdered in cold blood.

  At his feet was the body of a young woman, her face turned black with a layer of flies. She had been stripped naked, both arms hacked off at the elbows with a machete.

  On top of the splatter of gore created by the execution were words written in blood on the concrete wall with the woman's severed arms.

  Go home, Gringo.

  Half an hour later the convoy rolled into the Samruk compound. It was a mess, several of the roofs were caved in, rubble was strewn everywhere. Plastic film and white wrapping from medical bandages and gauze blew across the courtyard.

  The assault trucks turned around and shotgun parked, preparing for the next mission. The drivers got out and attached the hand pump to a 55 gallon drum of gasoline and began cranking it to refuel the vehicles. It was still early morning and the heat of the day had not yet arrived. Deckard felt sore in his joints as he walked towards the OPCEN.

  Inside, he grounded his gear and weapon before taking a seat.

  “You okay?”

  Deckard blinked as he looked up at Pat. He hadn't realized that he had been staring into space.

  “Yeah, I'm just weighing our options.”

  “You did the right thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could see that old familiar look in your eyes when we left the Christian mission. I thought for sure that you would order us back into the city to start hitting whatever targets we could scrounge up, the kind of scorched earth policy that you usually opt for.”

  “It wasn't because I didn't want to. If we get baited into a second ambush we won't have enough soldiers to fight with and win against Jimenez. One more night like the last one and Samruk International will no longer be combat effective. We're running out of bodies.”

  “Jimenez must have ordered the execution of those hospital patients. The message was clearly directed towards us. He wanted to provoke a response. He wanted to bait you into another ambush that would finish us off. But we are also running out of time,” Pat remarked. “Before long, the Mexican Army will reorient their forces to Oaxaca. Not every General and politician is involved in your sex, lies, and videotape scandal.”

  “If we go charging back into that city we'll get put through the meat grinder again. This isn't like Iraq, we don't have AC-130 gunships providing air support.”

  “And Jimenez is dug into his compound up in the mountains. It would take over a month to flush them out of there.”

  “Aghassi and Nikita could try to get in the same way as before, maybe they'd even get to take a shot at Jimenez but it wouldn't change anything. Another lesson from Iraq. We kill HVT number one and HVT number two takes over. The organization survives. If we kill Jimenez then Ignacio takes over the cartel. If we kill Ignacio then number three takes over and so on.”

  “We need to dismantle the entire network, the cartel has to be systematically taken apart.”

  “But we need strong intelligence information to do that,” Deckard said while rubbing his eyes. “And all of our sources except one are dead and even he is out of circulation for his own protection.”

  “We are inside his communication network,” Cody said, interrupting for the first time, having been mesmerized by his computer screen. “But we don't have the resources to do a comprehensive traffic analysis and connect every phone number belonging to a bad guy and then figure out where he is. There are too many.”

  “Yeah,” Pat said. “Jimenez had it easy, our sources were not hard to track because the way they used their phones was so unique.”

  “So what are our options?” Deckard asked.

  “We have almost twenty prisoners chained up in the other building that we can squeeze for additional information. Who knows if it will be actionable or not,” Pat added as an afterthought. “We also took a prisoner last night, one of the guys who attacked the compound. He's a babbling mess though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don't know if he is in shock or just schizophrenic. He keeps mumbling to himself about the beast or something like that.”

  “Okay, line up interrogations with each of the prisoners. I'm going to sit down with the source we brought in last night and have a talk with him.”

  “This is the deal,” Deckard told the source that they had rescued the previous night. His name was Cezar. They sat on one of Ortega's imported leather couches in what had been his bedroom. The large man-sized holes in the walls marked the entry points that Deckard and his crew had blasted just days ago.

  “I have a contact back State-side. We will keep you and your family safe for the duration of our stay in Oaxaca but that isn't much longer. We need to get you set up with something more permanent, even if we take Jimenez out.”

  “I will never be safe in Mexico,” Cezar agreed. “I appreciate everything you've done for us.”

  “I want to get you set up with the witness protection program in America. It means starting over from scratch but it will be in the United States and it keeps you and your family alive. I think I know someone who can arrange this, they work for the CIA. In exchange, he is going to want to debrief you on everything you've been involved with for the cartel.”

  “Whatever they want, I will tell them.”

  “Good.”

  The source was one of the truck drivers that traveled in armored convoys loaded full of drugs, transporting them north along the drug corridors where they would then be turned over to other cartels for transport, or they would pay a tax in exchange for safe passage up to the border. From there, the drugs were smuggled into the United States by underground tunnels, concealed in vehicles, or even carried on the backs of drug mules who huffed it through the desert. He had traded information to Samantha's father for a quick buck here and there, then when the police chief had been killed, Samantha became his handler.

  “Right now I need whatever additional information you might have about the cartel. The cell leaders involved, shipment routes, whatever you might have been holding in your back pocket. Now is the time to cash it in.”

  The prisoner sat in the corner of the concrete cell hugging his knees while rocking back and forth. His lips moved silently, his eyes darting around the room yet oblivious to his two visitors.

  “He's been like this since we captured him,” Pat told Deckard. “We bring him food and water but he hardly touches it.”

  “You think he is traumatized or in shock?”

  “Probably both but it makes you wonder.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should have seen it last night,” Pat explained. “When t
he base got hit those fuckers charged us in waves. They got right up to the walls a few times. Our boys had to drop hand grenades over the side of the outer walls to repel the attack.”

  “Sounds like the NVA overrunning Lang Vei in 1968. My dad told me about it once when I was a kid.”

  “He was there?”

  “So the story goes.”

  The prisoner's head shot up as he looked around frantically.

  “Thebeastthebeastthebeastthebeast.”

  “What the hell is he saying?” Deckard asked.

  “Something about The Beast. Apparently that is the local legend about Jimenez, that he has some kind of pact with the devil or something. Useful for keeping people in fear.”

  “And keeping them in line,” Deckard added.

  “Talk to Aghassi about it. He saw all kinds of weird religious shit inside Jimenez' villa. It freaked the hell out of him. He told me that Jimenez is all into that satanic type shit.”

  The prisoner continued to mumble incoherently.

  “Looks like he made a believer out of those guys that assaulted our compound last night,” Pat said with a shrug.

  “We'll see.”

  Samantha reached down and picked up a monkey wrench she had found earlier in one of the garages. She held it in one hand and slapped the end of it against her palm, testing the weight of it.

  Perfect.

  Turning, she began heading back to the improvised jail cells where all of the cartel prisoners that the mercenaries had captured thus far were being held. Deckard had ordered that they be re-interrogated with a special emphasis on identifying key nodes in the enemy's organizational structure.

  Two Kalashnikov totting Kazakhs were stone faced next to the door, standing guard. As the former policewoman's hand moved to unlock the door she heard footsteps coming up behind her.

  “Hold on a second Samantha,” Deckard said. “Where are you going with that wrench.”

  “I'm going to get answers.”

  “I have an idea. Maybe something a little less invasive.”

  Aghassi was with him, wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and flip flops he looked just like one of the locals.

  “Which one of the prisoners is the hardest?” Aghassi asked. “I'll break him.”

  “That has got to be Ricky. He's been cursing and spitting at me and the guards since you guys brought him in. A real son of a bitch.”

  “Bring Ricky out here,” Deckard instructed the guards, switching back to Russian.

  Aghassi brought out two folding chairs and set them up facing each other in the garage. He sat down in one of the chairs and stared down at the ground. In the other room Samantha and Deckard could hear a scuffle and curses getting thrown around in both Russian and Spanish. Finally, the Kazakh mercenaries dragged Ricky out with his feet trailing behind him on the concrete floor.

  “Sit him down.”

  The Kazakhs dully complied and slammed him down in the chair, opposite Aghassi. Restrained with handcuffs, the guards each placed a hand on the prisoner's shoulders to keep him in place.

  “Ricky, you probably don't know who I am,” Deckard explained while mentally switching back over to Spanish. “I'm in charge here. I run this compound.”

  “Fuck you,” Ricky spat, glaring at him.

  “Yes, fuck me. Now, listen. This guy sitting across from you came to me with some grievances. He walked all the way up here from the town and told me that I was holding someone prisoner who he wanted to speak to. That prisoner was named Ricky and he was responsible for killing his family.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I don't know exactly which of your actions affected this man. Was it a random bullet you fired that punched through a wall and blasted his son's brains out? Was it one of your deliberate contract killings? Was one of the women you raped his wife?”

  “Hold on, hold on!”

  “I don't know, I didn't ask, but his family is dead by your hand.”

  “Who is this man, I've never seen him before?”

  Ricky was getting frantic. Just where Deckard wanted him. Walking over to Samantha he relieved her of the monkey wrench she had wanted to use on Ricky and handed it over to Aghassi. The Samruk intelligence agent's face was a blank screen. He looked like a ghost as he stared straight ahead at Ricky.

  Deckard extended the monkey wrench to Aghassi and he slowly reached over to take it from him.

  “I have some questions to ask you Ricky. Questions that you've been giving us a hard time with. Now we are going to try something different.”

  “What do you mean? You can't do this!”

  “I'm going to ask you some questions. The first time you lie to me, the first time you break my balls, I leave the room. My guards leave the room. You remain in handcuffs and this man in front of you gets to keep the wrench.”

  Ricky swallowed.

  “Now Ricky, tell me, who knows the most about cartel operations after Jimenez and Ignacio?”

  Taking a deep breath, Ricky began to sing.

  32

  “Get me Kurt Jager on the Iridium phone,” Deckard said storming into the Operations Center. “Get in touch with our Agency contact Grant as well and tell him we need to talk. Bring up our target deck on screen, it's time to start filling in the blank spots.”

  Cody's fingers danced across the keyboard.

  “Frank, go get me the source we brought in last night. The truck driver. I need to have a word with him so have him wait outside.”

  Frank got up and walked out. Leaving the crutches behind, he still had a slight limp.

  “Pat, go wake up Fedorchenko and tell him that I want the men on standby and ready to go on a moment's notice.”

  “You got it,” Pat said as he followed Frank out the door.

  “Kurt is on the line for you,” Cody announced.

  “Put him on speaker.”

  “Kurt?”

  “I'm here Six, what can we do for you?”

  “I need you to mobilize the Zapatista militia. We are getting to the end game and it's time to put the pressure on Jimenez. Is Commadante Zero ready to go?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Kurt laughed. “We've been trying to hold him back since you gave him all these new weapons.”

  “Good. Samruk will handle urban targets inside Oaxaca City. I want the Zapatista soldiers to action targets in the rural areas that they are more familiar with.”

  “That's my opinion as well and it is shared with Commadante Zero. We've been prepping that mini-submarine you captured and have identified a landing zone on the western shore where the drugs are coming in.”

  “Get that mission rolling as soon as you can. Any other targets that Zero is looking at?”

  “These people have lived here their whole life. They know where the cartel is out here in the hills and what they are up to. Their intel is pretty solid.”

  “Grant is holding for you,” Cody interrupted.

  “Okay, Kurt. You know the deal. Make it happen.”

  “Will do,” the German said, signing off.

  “Grant?”

  “I'm here Deckard,” the CIA officer's voice came over the speaker phone.

  “I have an informant who's been outed. I need safe passage for him. He's willing to do a debrief.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A drug courier. It's him, his wife, and his kid.”

  “What are you asking me for?”

  “Witness protection.”

  “Give me his information, if he is who you say he is I will make it happen.”

  “Any progress on tracking down the Arab?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. This guy is a ghost. Nobody knows who he is or where he is. I've got people working this around the clock, people are starting to get freaked out about it. There is nothing on this guy but myths and rumors. People have heard of him, are scared of him, but he's like some kind of boogeyman that no one can actually pin down.”

  “I'll keep an eye and an ear open for him.”


  “Pass on whatever you have and I will let you know if we locate him. Our databases are empty on this guy. If we find him and then you do what you do once I give you his whereabouts, I'll put as many people into witness protection as you want.”

  “Good to know. I will have something for you soon.”

  “I hope so Deckard. I will uphold my end of the bargain but we can't keep the heat off you forever. You are starting a war in America's backyard after all.”

  “We're not starting one Grant, we're finishing one.”

  Deckard walked over and hung up the phone.

  “Let's take a look inside this communications network Cody.”

  The computer expert brought up a window on the projection screen showing thousands of telephones connecting to each other as well as showing the links between them. The infographic looked like a giant spider web.

  “Once we identify who the leaders are in the cartel network, we can begin taking them apart faster than the cartel can react. When we get inside their decision making process then we've got them by the balls.”

  “But we have no way of knowing who is who,” Cody explained. “This is just raw data. It means nothing by itself.”

  “Until now. We had a little talk with our prisoner, Ricky, and hit the jack pot. There is a paymaster for the Jimenez cartel. He's got so much money that it is just stacking up in safe houses and in the villa, he literally doesn't know what to do with it. When he has to pay his men, pay off officials, or hire freelancers he sends the paymaster to deliver the cash. This guy knows everyone and is the closest thing to the drug lord's secretary. He probably knows more about the interconnections between the cartel and Mexican society than even Jimenez does.”

  “Do we have his phone number?”

  “No.”

  “Then how am I supposed to find him in all this mess,” Cody said waving at the projection that displayed thousands upon thousands of numbers.

  Someone knocked on the door to the OPCEN, interrupting the conversation.

  Deckard opened the door and saw Samantha standing there with the source. Frank was lumbering down the hall behind them.