Target Deck - 02

by Jack Murphy

  He began to fidget in his seat, rubbing his hands together. He never felt comfortable during long periods alone without a task or a distraction. Alone with his thoughts was alone with his nightmares. Times like this brought him back to another time and place.

  A knock sounded at the hotel room door before his assistant entered.

  “East Torreon has been shut down,” the assistant informed him. “The Marines are throwing up roadblocks to the south but we have a clear shot into the sector for the next few hours. Our contact says he will have OBI keep it open as long as we need.”

  “This will be over before then,” The Arab replied. “Did you get what I asked you for.”

  The assistant handed him a few packs of cigarettes from the local market. The Arab lit one up and took a drag.

  “Thank you Abdullah,” The Arab said, patting the back of his assistant's head. “Let us go and do what we do.”

  Grabbing his backpack for him, the assistant followed The Arab and locked the door behind them. The sun was just starting to peak and whores were beginning to stagger back to the hotel after working the streets all night. The Arab pushed several out of the way as they made their way down the stairs to the street.

  Geographically, Torreon was right smack in the middle of the war between the drug cartels as a major way station between northern and southern Mexico. The war had been raging for months now as evident by the rotting corpses in the streets that The Arab's assistant had to avoid as he negotiated his way to their target.

  The Arab lit another cigarette, took a puff and rubbed his eyes.

  He had seen these streets before, grown up on streets just like them in Iraq. He was barely old enough to walk when his father came home from work and kicked his mother out of the house. He wanted to take another wife so she had to leave and the child with her. Rejected by her family they slept in filthy streets flooded with stagnant black water. He hadn't understood it at the time, but she had sold her body to men passing by just to keep them both fed with one meal a day.

  Finally, with both of them starving, his mother rejected him as well and left him to die on the streets, hungry and alone. He had not yet reached maturity when he too was forced to turn to prostitution. In southern Iraq, it is easier to have a boyfriend than a girlfriend and there was never any shortage of clients.

  As a teenager he had grown big enough to find additional ways of surviving. He learned how to fight and fought anyone and everyone he could find, taking what he pleased. For a time he ran with a gang of youths who would steal and run scams but most of the time he worked alone. After Saddam was captured by the Americans things only got worse as Iraq slid into chaos.

  The next gang he worked with was mostly into kidnapping. There were no rules, they would drive into Baghdad and grab girls right out of the University campus. They would be raped for days on end until their family paid the ransom. If the family didn't pay up they would be killed or sold off to locals as sex slaves. There was no one to stop them and the Americans were busy going after foreign fighters and bomb makers.

  If they needed a place to stay or a new hide out they would simply knock on the door of some rich person in the nice part of town and tell them that if they were not allowed in that they would rape his wife. If they refused, the gang would force their way in, if they complied they raped the wife and cut the heads off babies they found inside anyway simply because that was what they did.

  Wandering the back alleys one night, stumbling over holes in the street big enough to swallow a tank, he finished a bottle of whiskey and decided he had had enough. Drunk and disoriented he flipped open the straight razor he always carried. The rusty knives were only used for the home invasions. Tearing off his shirt, he snarled, externalizing every moment of self hatred he had ever experienced.

  The car came to a halt alongside a black sedan that was idling alongside the road.

  The Arab was shaken back to reality, dropping his cigarette out of the window as he was about to burn his fingers. The driver's side window was lowered, revealing his Arab-to-Spanish translator.

  “The local we hired has the house under surveillance. They are home.”

  “The area will be clear of soldiers for several hours,” The Arab stated. “Plenty of time for us to get in there and do this.”

  Motioning to Abdullah, the assistant took the lead, driving into the target neighborhood. The men in both vehicles pulled ski masks over their heads. Arriving on the correct street in the area that had been operationally frozen for the Mexican military, they met with a local who had been keeping tabs on the family living in the house they told him to watch.

  A few words were exchanged before the money was handed over from the translator in the second sedan. The local informant walked off and both cars parked in front of the house they were interested in. The translator opened the trunk of his car and the other occupants of the vehicles retrieved their sledgehammers.

  The Arab thumbed the scars running down his forearms as the death squad went to work on the door. The residents were just waking up as the door gave way. The killers drew pistols, moved inside, and quickly secured everyone they found, flexcuffing their hands behind their backs. Grabbing his bag, The Arab followed them in, lighting up another cancer stick as he walked inside.

  It was a family of four, kicked down to their knees in the living room while Abdullah set up the digital video camera on its tripod. The biggest and baddest of the Sinaloa cartel assassination teams called themselves TT and their leader went by the name of Ghost Killer.

  The death squad now had Ghost Killer's family hostage. His mother, his sister, his niece, and his cousin. Tears were streaming down their cheeks but no one said a word to them. None of the killers were interested in gathering information or holding them for ransom. When one of the prisoners began to whine or speak out, one of the death squad members would take a plastic bag and hold it over their head. Letting them squirm for a moment, it would give them reason to keep their mouths shut the next time.

  The Arab reached into his bag and grabbed his rusty knife, sticking it down his front between his belt and his pants.

  The cameraman signaled that they were rolling. The Arab stood behind the prisoners with his arms crossed in front of him, the knife clearly visible. The Spanish speaker came forward and began reading a prepared speech from a piece of paper, declaring themselves to be Los Zetas assassins who were retaliating against the Sinaloa cartel. Another member of the kill team hung cardboard signs around the necks of each captive, declaring them to be whores, traitors, and patsies.

  Once the speech had concluded, The Arab went back to his bag for the second piece of equipment he needed, a three foot length of 2x4 wooden plank. He had a lot of experience in his line of work and decapitating adults was much different that slicing the heads of children and infants. He had tried other measures like drugging the victims but it never seemed to work in a timely manner. It would take too long for them to go under, or worse, they would collapse while filming and not wake up.

  Walking up behind the Ghost Killer's cousin, he wound up and slammed the 2x4 into the back of his head, knocking him face first on the floor, unconscious. The niece received the same treatment, then the teenage sister, and finally the overweight mother. Knocking them out first was suitably violent on camera and kept them from kicking too much during the cutting.

  The camera man adjusted the angle to point down at the prostrate forms. The Arab drew his knife and went to the mother first. Exposing her soft neck by pulling back on her hair, he started the cutting.

  He kept his work fast and efficient. After all, they had a second job today. The death squad would have to call their control to have another zone frozen to keep the military out while they went and paid a visit to the family of a Zeta assassin in different neighborhood.

  45

  Flinging open the sliding door, Aghassi slowed down just enough for them to toss the Mexican military officer out of the van alongside the dusty highway before spe
eding off again. The mercenaries couldn't bring themselves to execute the guy in cold blood. He hadn't been part of the gun running ring but since he was an intelligence officer stationed at AMIZ, he had seen the comings and goings, listened to the encrypted radio traffic, and had eventually put two and two together. In short, he was a good intelligence officer.

  Aghassi looked in the rear view mirror and saw the young man standing on the shoulder of the road looking dejected as the mercenaries continued driving north. They had made it very clear to him that it would behoove all parties involved if he never mentioned his kidnapping and instead concocted a story to explain his absence to his superiors involving tequila and hookers.

  According to the S2 Officer, the guns were being flown to Military Base Number Three which was adjacent to the civilian airfield in Torreon. From there, the guns were being distributed to cartels across Mexico. It wasn't just one cartel being armed, but nearly all of them. To Deckard's ears, it had shades of the Iran-Iraq was in the 1980's where the United States had armed both sides of the conflict to weaken both parties.

  From Torreon, truckers would be contracted to haul the guns south to AMIZ under armed escort from Private Military Contractors, the military, or guns for hire. The north/south running corridor would be frozen during this time on orders coming by encrypted radio signals from the OBI office in Mexico City to allow the convoy free passage. Once the guns arrived in AMIZ, select military officers and intelligence agents would divide the weapons up and use the loading bay as a distribution point. One day the Zetas would pull their trucks in and load up the largess. The day after, the Sinaloa cartel would send their own trucks to pick up an equal number of weapons.

  Who was flying the weapons into Military Base Number Three and where were they coming from? The S2 Officer didn't know and was only familiar with the stages of the operation that passed through the hub at AMIZ where he worked. He did know that everyone at the military base in Torreon was corrupt. The base served as the major way station for the flow of weapons to the cartels and the soldiers and civilians working there facilitated the violence that had plagued Mexico.

  Aghassi watched again in the rear view mirror as Deckard downed two more Motrin pills along with a bottle of water before passing out on the floor of the van. They had a long seven hundred mile drive ahead of them, right up the spine of central Mexico.

  The mercenaries rotated drivers all day, only stopping for a couple piss breaks and to pick up some food along the way. When not driving, they took advantage of the free time to catch up on some sleep and perform weapons maintenance.

  Deckard opened Aghassi's notebook computer and checked his encrypted Samruk International e-mail account. He had one e-mail from Samantha to tell him that the military was already getting bored as they had not found any mercenaries, cartels, or communist rebels to fight. So far, so good. Frank shot him a quick note to inform him that they had arrived in Kazakhstan with minimal fanfare. Sergeant Major Korgan was getting the injured situated in the hospital in Astana.

  Then an e-mail from an address he didn't recognize appeared in his inbox. Clicking on it, he read its contents:

  -Begin PGP Encryption-

  Deckard, one of my sources tells me you were not on that airplane out of Mexico. You blatantly violated our agreement. There will be repercussions for that. In the meantime, I will not be reporting this indiscretion to my superiors. I have a good idea of what you are up to and I want you to know that the Clandestine Services support you in spirit but not in any tangible manner for reasons I'm sure you can understand. We know something stinks to high hell with this man called The Arab. Understandably, you don't have a high opinion of my employers but this isn't one of our operations. Good luck.

  - G

  -End PGP Encryption-

  Deckard snorted. Agent Grant of the CIA had just given them an underhanded endorsement. Who would have thought? Additionally, Grant had added a web link at the bottom of the e-mail. Clicking on it, Deckard was taken to a publicly available youtube.com video. As he watched three women and one man kneeling on the ground, he knew what was coming next.

  Someone was reading some kind of diatribe off camera about how they were Zeta hit men striking back against the Sinaloa cartel. The executioner whacked each victim on the back of the head with a board before he began slicing their heads off. Deckard noted long horizontal scars running up the executioner's forearms as he worked the rusty blade through the older woman's throat. He closed the laptop and put it away.

  The website indicated that the video had been uploaded just an hour ago. The narration given in the video indicated that the quadruple murder had taken place in Torreon.

  It was nine o' clock at night when the mercenaries rolled into town.

  “This is about as far as we are getting,” Pat said as he coasted the van off to the side of the road.

  “Grab your kit and we'll move out on foot,” Deckard ordered.

  They had been driving around the edges of Torreon for nearly an hour, running into one roadblock after the next. Some were cordons set up by Mexican Marines but most were being run by cartel members. According to the map, Militar No. 3 was in the center of the city along with the airport. Kitting up, the mercenaries locked up the van with their go-bags full of emergency supplies and proceeded deeper into the city.

  Deckard carried explosive charges, Nikita a small aid bag filled with medical supplies, Pat a pair of large bolt cutters, and Kurt a Hooligan tool. Aghassi has his usual breaking and entering kit.

  The Zetas and the Sinaloa cartels were engaged in an all out battle for control of the city. Automatic gunfire thudded throughout different sectors of Torreon with red and green tracer fire streaking through the night sky. The occasional grenade or RPG explosion lit up the night and the crump-crump-crump of mortar fire walked across one of the derelict neighborhoods.

  The cartels were going bone to bone to see who was bigger and whoever had the largest body count would win the day. Whoever uploaded the most violent videos onto the internet would achieve victory in the propaganda war.

  And it was all on someone else's dime.

  Squeezing through a filthy alleyway filled with trash, the mercenaries circumvented a Sinaloa cartel roadblock. One at a time, they sprinted across a four lane highway and passed a hollowed out gas station with shattered windows. Just as Nikita cleared the road, he hit the dirt as headlights flashed above him and a five vehicle convoy of blacked out Suburban Sport Utility Vehicles blasted down the street.

  Paralleling the road, the five men shook out into a single file, maintaining a separation between each man. Lowering their night vision goggles, they were able to see their surroundings and stay well away from any other human presence as they were in an approach into the city that was not built up, consisting of knee high brush. Under the green tint of the night vision goggles, light sources were amplified and the gunfire shooting into the sky looked like lasers from some kind of science fiction movie.

  Deckard led the patrol through an empty construction site where they passed between stacks of cinder blocks and rebar before climbing a dusty hill and dropping down into what had been some kind of resort with a golf course and artificial ponds. Moving through the abandoned resort, the mercenaries stuck to the low ground where they would not be silhouetted and pushed deeper into the city.

  With years of experience conducting Direct Action raids and Unconventional Warfare, in and out of the military, Deckard made a careful route selection based on his map reconnaissance. The haphazard and confusing nature of urban war zones and the danger they posed was worth avoiding as much as possible so to that end, he kept them away from the built up areas where the gunfire was coming from. This wasn't their war and their goal was to cut the conflict off at the source, not get embroiled in every bushfire gun battle.

  On the other side of the resort, Deckard found a high wall and a gate that would take too long to go around. A smaller gate for foot traffic was secured with a chain and padlock. Motioning
Pat forward, the former Delta operator used a pair of wide grip bolt cutters to shear through the lock. With a snap, the metal gave way and the padlock fell to the ground.

  Both men quickly ducked back into the alcove as another convoy passed on the street outside. This time it was pickup trucks full of Marines. One thing was clear, this area had not been operationally frozen by OBI in Mexico City. This was a free for all and everybody was invited.

  Waiting to make sure the coast was clear, the mercenaries dashed across the road, avoiding a corpse sprawled in the street as they reached the opposite side. Hopping a small fence, Deckard looked down at the small Garmin GPS Foretrex strapped to his wrist. The industrial park in Torreon was warehouse after warehouse with a barren strip running down the middle where a set of railroad tracks had been laid. Following the tracks, the patrol continued heading north.

  From the single shots ringing out across the industrial area, it sounded like someone had posted snipers up on the overpass on the other side of the warehouses. More mortar fire was raining down on a position somewhere on their left flank. Ignoring the distractions, they moved through the war zone until Deckard took a tactical pause at an intersection.

  Two burnt out car hulks sat in the middle of the road, one of them with flames still flickering inside. Charred corpses were twisted around inside until they became unidentifiable from the rest of the wreckage, but the mercenaries did recognize the smell of burning flesh from previous battles. With no signs of immediate enemy presence, they made another road crossing, one man at a time while the others faced out and pulled security.