Autumn Assassins: [#3] A Special Operations Group Thriller

by Stephen Templin

  A lean black dog with tan patches of fur above its eyes—a Doberman pinscher—passed through the door and stood on its toes and stared at him. The intel brief had mentioned a pair of dogs outside the residence. The dogs had once ripped apart a would-be thief before he succeeded in entering the house. Although the man survived, he was paralyzed from the waist down. The intel brief said nothing about a dog inside.

  He was in trouble, but he couldn’t allow the canine to sense it. For a moment, he and the dog remained still, staring at each other. Then the Doberman stepped one paw into the room and growled. Hank took a baby step toward the exit, and the canine grunted. Hank stopped and remained still, hoping not to excite the animal any more, but it growled, longer this time. The situation was degrading rapidly. He would have to make a break for the exit. It’s now or never.

  Hank leaped forward, grasped the doorknob, and unlocked it. With a growl and a bark, the Doberman sprang at him. He flung open the door and lunged forward. The dog’s jaws snapped at the back of his leg. Its teeth bit into his trousers and scratched his leg. He slammed the door behind him, blocking the animal from taking another bite.

  “Cowboy, I need an extract ASAP,” he said, limiting the movement of his lips like a ventriloquist so if anyone saw him they wouldn’t notice him talking to himself. He walked briskly toward the stairs. There was no answer, or the answer didn’t come fast enough, so he repeated.

  “I’ll be right there,” Cowboy replied. He was cool, but there was a hint of anxiety in his voice.

  When Hank came into view of the guests below, he slowed and descended the stairs at a casual pace. Some of the guests on the main floor looked up in the direction of Seven Ball’s office. One man seemed to look at Hank’s legs. Hank thought the dog had ripped his pant leg and he was bleeding, but if he looked down at the wound, he would draw more guests’ attention to it, so he kept his eyes forward and pretended everything was fine. The Doberman’s bark could be heard over the sound of the string quartet and the crowd. As more eyes turned to the barking upstairs, he looked in that direction, too, so as not to stand out.

  From the other end of the hall, opposite the foyer, the hard man who shadowed Seven Ball looked at Hank. The shadow spoke to Seven Ball, and they hastened in Hank’s direction, dodging people in their path. It wasn’t clear whether Seven Ball and his bodyguard were heading toward Hank or the stairs. Hank reached the main floor and exited the hall, trying to appear at ease. Once out of the two men’s sight, he hurried through the foyer.

  Then he hustled outside, but Cowboy wasn’t there with the car. The butler at the front entrance said something, but Hank was so focused on other things, he couldn’t connect with what was said or comprehend if the butler was even speaking English. Hank looked for a communications piece in the butler’s ear but couldn’t see one. If he had one, Hank hoped that security and the servants’ comms were on different channels.

  A vehicle stopped at the gate, and Hank recognized Cowboy behind the wheel. The guard talked to him. Cowboy seems to be staying there too long. Maybe there’s a problem.

  The butler blabbered at Hank again, pointing to the back of his leg. Hank’s pant leg was ripped and a trail of blood droplets had followed him from inside. He swooped down the steps. Cowboy rolled forward past the guard and onto the estate, then braked in front of him. Hank threw open the door and hopped in the front passenger seat.

  “Guard’s closing the gate,” Cowboy said.

  Hank’s eyes darted to the gate where the guard was shutting it. “Bust through,” he said.

  “You read my mind.”

  Shouting came from the direction of the mansion. Seven Ball and his bodyguard were now at the top of the steps yelling and pointing at Cowboy and him. Seven Ball didn’t have to speak English to get his meaning across.

  Cowboy stomped on the accelerator and the wheels squealed as the Mercedes picked up speed around the circle. The gate guard hollered and aimed a pistol at them. Cowboy let up on the accelerator momentarily, then stomped it again. The car leaped forward, and they burst through the gates, taking off one of its hinges.

  Gunfire sounded behind them, smashing through the car’s rear window. Cowboy drove in front of an oncoming car, narrowly missing it.

  “Cowboy?” Hank asked.

  Cowboy’s eyes were open and his hands were still on the wheel, but he didn’t reply. His body tilted slowly as their vehicle drifted into oncoming traffic. Hank grabbed the steering wheel and saved them from a head-on collision, but he struck a parked car with a horrific thunk.

  1

  Max and Tom Wayne ran across the tarmac of a private airport in Washington, DC. “Willy says he can’t start the brief until both of us are aboard the plane,” Max said. “All he would say was that Dad has been missing for more than twenty-four hours.”

  They bounded up the air stairs to a Gulfstream G650ER business jet, distinguished by its long, unfettered wings and nearly seventy-million-dollar price tag. Customized for covert CIA ops with radar spoofing, antimissile countermeasure system, and other capabilities, the plane was valued at considerably more. The brothers stepped on board.

  Willy Madison greeted them with warm hugs. “Comment ça va?” he asked with a Louisiana French accent. How are you? Willy was a friend of the family who’d served with their dad in Force Recon of the Marine Corps, and later served with him in CIA. Willy was like an uncle to Max and Tom. With his red bandana, longish hair, and beard, he looked like a forty-six-year-old version of the country singer Willie Nelson.

  “Bien,” Max said. Good.

  “Ça va bien,” Tom said.

  Max and Tom’s mother was French. Before she was born, her parents immigrated to Mobile, Alabama, and opened a French restaurant there—not a fancy establishment for the rich, but a middle-class family place that served real French food and Louisiana Creole cuisine. After the boys’ mom died, their grandparents insisted on sending them to a private French immersion school where every subject was taught in French except for English class. Their French was fluent.

  Willy closed the hatch, and the growl of the dual Rolls-Royce BR725 engines quieted to the whisper of a pair of lawn mowers outside. He sat in one of the four handcrafted leather chairs facing each other. He gestured for Max and Tom to join him.

  The brothers moved to sit in the nearest chair, and Max gave Tom a brotherly shove, knocking him out of the way. At five foot ten inches tall, Max was two inches shorter than his younger brother, but Max boasted himself the stronger and more handsome of the two. Tom returned the push and said, “Control freak.” But Max managed to sit in the chair first, and Tom took the other seat.

  Willy ignored the grab-assing. “You already know that I’ve been working with your dad in the Company.” Then Willy handed Tom some paperwork. “Because of who we work for, I’ll need you to sign these before we proceed.”

  Max said, “I already signed mine.”

  Tom examined the paperwork—a standard nondisclosure agreement. He skimmed and scanned through the pages before he signed the document and gave it back to Willy.

  The Gulfstream taxied smoothly down the runway. Max, Tom, and Willy fastened their seat belts. “Two weeks ago, we obtained information that one hundred grams of aerosol anthrax was stolen from a Chinese military bioweapons facility,” Willy said.

  “I’m no bioweapons expert,” Max said, “but that doesn’t sound like a whole hell of a lot.”

  “You’re right, you’re no bioweapons expert,” Willy said with the hickory-hard side of his tough love for Max. “One hundred grams is enough to infect as many as five thousand people.”

  “Oh,” Max said.

  Tom smiled at his brother as if ridiculing him for making a dumbass comment.

  Max frowned.

  The jet lifted off the runway like a rocket, pulling Max back in his seat, but the ride was as comfortable as a Mercedes-Benz S-class. Willy continued. “Naturally we’re concerned that the anthrax could be used for a bioterror attack against the
US or our allies, but China denies even possessing it. In Hanoi, there is a Chinese spy named Seven Ball who we believe might have knowledge about the missing anthrax, so your dad was sent to investigate. Two days ago, he posed as an invited guest to one of Seven Ball’s parties and succeeded in giving us access to his personal computer. But your dad’s car was found crashed and his driver shot dead.” Willy leaned against the chair as if for support, and the love part of his tough love seemed to show through his eyes. “That’s the last we heard of him. He’s still out there somewhere.”

  “Was he shot?” Max asked impatiently.

  Willy took a breath. “We can’t say for sure. A trace of his blood was found in the vehicle, but the splatter pattern is more consistent with the impact of the crash than a gunshot. The incident was in the news, and the Hanoi police are investigating. Seven Ball’s employees are now reporting that their boss is out of the country on a business trip.”

  “How convenient,” Max said sarcastically. His legs wanted to stand up and go searching, but he was strapped in his seat and confined to the plane.

  “How bad was the crash?” Tom asked.

  “Under the circumstances, the damage to the passenger side was minimal. Like I said, only a trace of blood was found. We believe your dad is alive, but we can’t say with certainty.” Willy paused, as if gaining composure. “We fear that Seven Ball captured him. Our people in Hanoi and others are working around the clock to find him. The Vietnamese government is secretly cooperating with us. The police in Hanoi have called Seven Ball in for questioning, but his people are giving them the runaround.”

  Raw aggression built up inside Max, but Willy wasn’t a fan of such drama, so Max tried to keep it inside. “We need to find him.”

  Willy tapped an app on his cell phone, and a video monitor descended from the overhead. He tapped again and the monitor came alive. “That’s why I called you two. You both were trained by your dad since you were young’uns, and when you were old enough, you honed those skills in military special ops and war. Hank is like a brother to me, and I have to find him. I know you both are as motivated as me to find him, and I trust you as if you were my sons.”

  “We’ll find him,” Max said confidently.

  “You won’t have to ask twice,” Tom said.

  On the overhead screen, Willy displayed a picture of Seven Ball. “Your mission is to snatch Seven Ball so we can interrogate him regarding the whereabouts of your father and the missing anthrax. We have reports that he’s hiding out in his vacation home in Hainan, China.” Willy continued to show photos as he spoke. “The home is located in the southern part of the island between a district of resort hotels and Yulin Naval Base, where China houses a secret nuclear submarine facility. Although Seven Ball’s estate is guarded by only a handful of men, if he contacts the base for help, there’ll be a shit storm for you to deal with. The walls around his estate are thick and built up like an old Chinese fort. Right now our plane is flying under cover of a corporate jet. It’ll be nighttime when we begin our descent to Sanya Phoenix International Airport. At seven hundred feet altitude, you two will jump out of this perfectly good plane.”

  “A lot can go wrong between seven hundred feet and bouncing off the dirt,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, but we performed similar jumps when I was in the Teams, and you were a Ranger,” Max countered.

  Willy continued. “You’ll land three klicks southwest of Seven Ball’s vacation home, in the Yalong Bay Tropical Paradise Forest. There you’ll rendezvous with one of our Chinese agents. His parents named him Bruce, after the famous martial artist. Bruce will escort you to snatch Seven Ball.”

  Max studied the agent’s photo on the screen. Although Bruce Lee had died in his thirties, this Bruce appeared to be in his forties, and his face was fuller.

  “Any other friendlies for support?” Tom asked.

  “Bruce will have someone helping him, but that’s it. After you bag Seven Ball, Bruce will transport the three of you into town, where his friend will take you the rest of the way in to Sanya Phoenix. I’ll be waiting on this plane until noon to extract you. After we get Seven Ball out of China and take him to a more permissive environment, we’ll interrogate him.”

  “What if we run into trouble and can’t make it to the plane by noon?” Max asked.

  “The secondary extraction is via yacht—out of Yalong Bay.”

  “And our covers?” Tom asked.

  Willy reached under his seat, pulled out two manila folders, and handed them to Max and Tom. “Your primary covers will be businessmen working for a Las Vegas resort,” he said. “Your deep covers are mercenaries working for a triad operating out of Vegas—coming to settle some debts with Seven Ball. Of course, if either of you is captured or killed, the US will deny any knowledge of this mission.”

  “If China captures us and finds out we’re CIA,” Max said, “they’ll torture us to death. I’d rather die fighting.”

  “Me, too,” Tom said.

  “I understand,” Willy said knowingly.

  Twenty-two minutes after takeoff, the Gulfstream reached cruising altitude. Max checked the altimeter on his watch—they’d climbed to forty-one thousand feet, above the busy commercial plane routes and poor weather. Though the plane had a top speed of just under Mach 1, they’d fly a bit slower than that to conserve fuel over the long distance they were traveling.

  Willy finished the brief and touched his cell phone again. The shades over the large oval windows lifted, and the cabin speakers hummed. Light and music poured into the cabin. The Highwaymen sang “Highwayman”—one of Willy’s favorite songs. The tune lightened the mood, and Max and Tom strolled aft to check their weapons and gear. Willy and CIA had packed their bags and marked them with tags color-coded for their mission. Now Max searched through his bags to confirm that he had everything he needed. If the parachute wasn’t packed perfectly, in spite of how much he wanted to rescue Dad, Max wouldn’t be jumping out of the plane. He expected the Agency to do their job properly, and after he verified the contents of his bags and examined his chute, he knew his expectations had been met. Again.

  Tom chuckled. “I used to be afraid of heights.”

  “Until you became an Airborne Ranger,” Max said.

  Tom zipped up a bag. “And you used to be afraid of the water.”

  “Until I became a frogman and realized that failing without trying was scarier than drowning,” Max said proudly, puffing out his chest. “No regrets.”

  Tom punched him in the chest as if to let some of the air out. “Dad was pissed that we didn’t join the Corps like him.”

  Max socked him in the shoulder. “He was more pissed at you for going Army than me for going Navy. At least the Navy and Marine Corps are both part of the Department of the Navy. Same military academy at Annapolis, too.”

  “Thought the Army would have more opportunities,” Tom said. “Dad seemed to forgive me after I earned my Ranger tab.”

  “But then you left the Army. If you’d stayed in, you could’ve tried out for the Unit.” The Unit, a.k.a. Delta Force, was an Army tier-one unit like the Navy’s SEAL Team Six that took down Osama bin Laden. Both the Unit and Team Six often worked with CIA and performed the nation’s most classified missions. Tom’s leaving the life had felt like a betrayal. And it still stung. “I made it to Team Six, but you just walked away from it all.”

  “I had to live my life,” Tom said matter-of-factly.

  Max spoke like their father, with rough edges and not much use for the sentimental. “What do you mean?”

  Tom shrugged.

  Max became irritated. “Dad trained us our whole lives to become masters of unconventional warfare, and you threw it all away.”

  Tom had a softer, kinder way of speaking. Their father had said that Tom was the more sensitive of the brothers, like their mother. “Like you say, Dad trained us our whole lives for that. I just wanted something different.”

  “I don’t understand you sometimes.”

>   “I’m not judging,” Tom said. “You followed in Dad’s footsteps, and that was fine for you, but I wanted more than being gone all the time on training and missions. I want the family life we never had.”

  “We are family,” Max said. “This is our life.”

  “I’m only doing this because Dad is in trouble. After we find him, I’m going back to Georgetown to finish my studies. Charlotte is waiting for me.”

  Max appreciated beautiful women, and Tom’s girlfriend more than qualified. “She’s bada-bing, bada-boom; I’ll give you that. But bros before hoes.”

  Tom’s voice became edgy and his face serious. “She’s not a hoe.”

  “You know what I mean.” Max stopped checking his bags. “Saving people is a real life.”

  “College is a real life, too. Dad wants this black ops life for us, but what life would Mom want for us?”

  “Well, Dad needs our help.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Both of them became silent as Tom finished checking his gear. No music was playing, so Max looked to the front of the plane and called out, “Willy, you got any AC/DC songs?”

  Willy turned around and faced him. “No, I ain’t got no AC/DC.”

  Tom piped in. “How about Coldplay?”

  Willy frowned. Max did, too. “Hell, no!” they both said.

  “If you boys promise to behave,” Willy said, “I might have some Johnny Cash,”

  Max and Tom nodded. Johnny Cash they could all agree to.

  Willy stood up and put on “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky.” While the music played, he prepared airline-style meals in a microwave. He burned the first one.

  The smoke of it reached Max’s nostrils. “I hope your team’s parachute packing is better than your cooking,” Max said.

  “You git what you git, and don’t pitch a fit,” Willy said sternly.

  Max realized he was pushing it with Willy and thought it wise to back off.

  Willy offered the brothers something sweet. “Banana moon pies,” he said.