Northern Sun: Book Four in The Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  The driver hopped into his seat and cranked the engine. Conor and Shani climbed into the back and scooted forward, closest to the back of the cab. Bill and the two AK-wielding guards joined them.

  Bill spoke into a radio, letting the driver know they were all aboard. The driver threw it in reverse and backed out the doors. They headed back toward the same landing pad they’d used earlier, finding the same chopper that had delivered them from Ricardo’s compound waiting on them.

  The refueling team hadn’t finished yet so they hung back until they were done. When the fuel truck was clear, they backed up to the pad. Bill and his men jumped to the ground, helping Conor and Shani with their gear. While they hauled their packs to the chopper, the two armed men brought up the rear with Omar’s stretcher. Shani had given him some water and kept a check on his vitals but he hadn’t spoken since arriving at the airbase.

  The chopper door rolled open and the crew chief hauled their packs inside. There was another man in cargo pants and a parka whom Conor didn’t recognize, but he wasn’t dressed like part of the flight crew. Conor hopped onto the chopper deck and stowed his rifle in a seat. He crouched by the door to take the end of the stretcher being extended toward him.

  “Can I give you a hand with that?” the new guy asked.

  “Definitely,” Conor said. “But who the fuck are you?”

  “Ricardo sent me to make sure the detainee reaches him in good health.”

  They each took a handle, hauling the stretcher into the chopper. When they were done, Shani climbed aboard. As the crew chief tugged the door shut, Bill gave them a parting wave.

  The new guy crouched by the prisoner and tugged a medical kit from beneath a seat.

  “Who the hell are you?” Shani asked.

  “You can call me Ransom. I’m an 18 Delta,” he said. “Do you mind if I remove the hood to assess him?”

  “What’s an 18 Delta?” Shani asked Conor.

  Conor had sagged into a seat and was strapping in for the ride. “Oh, it’s one of those Special Forces combat medics. He said Ricardo sent him to monitor the prisoner’s condition until we got him home.”

  “Go ahead,” Shani said.

  Ransom turned on his headlamp, then tugged the hood upward and revealed Omar’s face. The prisoner was awake but had no response to the hood being removed.

  “Any injuries I need to know about?” Ransom asked.

  Shani took a seat close to the prisoner where she could keep an eye on things. “He dropped a goolie.”

  Ransom looked at her curiously, uncertain of what that meant.

  “There was a struggle,” Shani replied. “I blew out his nutsack with a knee strike. It sounded like when you run over a frog with a car. You’ll find that one of his birdies fell out of the nest. It’s still attached but hanging down his leg.”

  “Roger that,” Ransom said. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  The medic extracted a pair of shears from a pouch on his chest rig and sliced Omar’s pants down both legs. When the cuts were complete, Ransom turned down the flap. He glanced at the damage, then moved on to take Omar’s vitals.

  When he was done, Ransom gestured at Conor. “Can you toss me two of those blankets beneath your seat?”

  Conor leaned forward, took two blankets from a stack by the medic’s gear, and handed them over.

  “We need to warm him up a little,” Ransom said. “His extremities are pretty cold. I also need to stabilize his injury. Any issue with me giving him a dose of ketamine and a local?”

  “That’s fine,” Shani said. “I don’t want him too comfortable, though.”

  “Roger that,” Ransom said. He dug around in his kit, removed a vial of ketamine, and drew the minimum therapeutic dosage into a syringe. He used an alcohol wipe to scrub the injection site and shot the drug into Omar’s muscle.

  Omar winced as the needle broke the skin.

  “Do you mind if I address the detainee?” Ransom asked. “I might need to explain the next step to him so he doesn’t resist and further injure himself.”

  “Go for it,” Shani said. She looked to Conor to see if he had any comment but found him dozing off. She rolled her eyes.

  Ransom was aware he was not here to provide comfort or companionship to the detainee. His job was to medically stabilize him so that he could be questioned on arrival at Ricardo’s compound. He had been in similar situations before where he exchanged no words with the people he treated. This time he felt he needed to. He didn’t want Omar to fight him because this next step was delicate.

  Ransom positioned himself where he could look Omar in the face. “I need to put your testicle back where it belongs. The longer the wound is open, the greater the risk of infection or further injury. Do you understand?”

  Omar nodded but concern clouded his face.

  Ransom dug into his medical bag, filling another syringe from a different vial. “I need to give you an injection at the site of the injury. This is a local anesthetic that will numb the pain while I’m working.” When he was done speaking, Ransom held the syringe in his teeth while he used an alcohol wipe to clean the injection site.

  Omar winced at the touch of Ransom’s gloved hands, torn between watching and pinching his eyes shut. It took several wipes to clean the site due to the blood and encrusted fluids. When he was done, he took the syringe and poked it through the tissue of Omar’s scrotum. The fact that he didn’t react was an indication that the “little pinch” of the injection was lost in the greater pain of his injury.

  Ransom backed off, recapped his used syringes, and removed his gloves. He cut the tip off a pack of sterile saline and used it to irrigate the injury and the loose testicle. He followed that with a generous dousing of betadine, then gloved back up.

  “That local should be working now,” Ransom said. “If it’s not, we’ll know in a second.”

  Shani raised an eyebrow at that, aware that a shriek from Omar would be the indication they hadn’t given it enough time.

  Ransom leaned forward and inserted three fingers into Omar’s torn scrotum, re-opening the point from which the loose testicle had been jettisoned. Finding the opening sufficient, he deftly plucked up the stray and reinserted it through the wound.

  While Ransom was working, Omar raised his head to look.

  “Don’t look!” Ransom warned.

  It was too late. Seeing Ransom working on him was too much. Omar turned his head to the side and vomited.

  “Shit,” Ransom mumbled. “I knew that was going to happen.”

  “Should have put the hood back on him,” Shani offered.

  “Guess so.”

  When Omar’s body finished heaving, Ransom used a finger to push the testicle deeper, then packed the wound. “They’ll close him up at the base.”

  “If he lives that long,” Shani said. “Depends on his level of cooperation.”

  “Acknowledged.” Ransom taped the thick trauma pads into place. “I’m going to go ahead and catheterize him because this swelling is only going to get worse.”

  Shani wanted to turn away, uninterested in seeing the procedure, but she didn’t. She continued to watch solely for the psychological impact on Omar. She knew that her watching this further humiliated him and that was what she wanted. She needed him to be broken. It was the essence of interrogation.

  When the catheter was in place, Ransom stretched two blankets over his patient. He removed two chemical warming packs from his gear and activated them. He placed one under Omar’s feet and tucked the other into an armpit. “Do you mind if I leave the hood off? It will make it easier to monitor him.”

  “That’s fine,” Shani said.

  With the prisoner sedated, Shani dug into her gear and removed the sPad from its pouch. She used her thumbs to tap out a quick message in their secure communication app: “We’re in the air and headed your way. Cargo stabilized.”

  31

  “I must have dozed off.” Conor yawned. “Sorry about that.”

 
Shani patted him on the leg. “I understand. At your age, naps become a way of life, don’t they? One minute you’re eating your oatmeal, the next you’re face down in it.”

  “I take sleep where I can find it. Keeps me fresh for those moments when I need to be at maximum operating efficiency.”

  Shani raised an eyebrow at him. “Not sure I’ve seen you in that state. How much sleep does it require?”

  “Probably about as much as I just had. I’m in top form at the moment.”

  Shani looked doubtful. “You should be. We’re on approach. You’ve been asleep since we left Duluth.”

  Conor shrugged. “That long? Must have been tired.”

  “Must have,” Shani agreed.

  The chopper banked and the pitch of the engines changed as their airspeed slowed. Conor glanced out the window and it was nothing but bare hardwood forest for as far as he could see. The West Virginia forest looked exactly like that surrounding his compound at Jewell Ridge.

  The expert pilots set the helo down gently and killed the engine. As the rotors wound down, the crew chief slid open the side door. Through the portal, Conor could see they had a welcoming committee. There were two vehicles and a half-dozen men waiting on them.

  Ricardo leaned against the side of one of the vehicles. In his pullover sweater and khaki pants, he looked like a fiftyish family man watching his kids play soccer. Despite his line of work, you’d never find him in tactical clothing or black polos. His camouflage was that of the upper-middle-class professional found all over the beltway. He could have been a lobbyist, a broker, or a pharmaceutical executive.

  Shani dropped down beside Omar and slipped the hood back over his head. Hands reached through the door to grab the handles of the litter, and Shani and Ransom took the far end and guided it out of the chopper. At the doorway, they handed it off to men waiting on the ground. Ransom quickly gathered his medical gear and hustled off the aircraft without a word, following the team carrying Omar.

  Shani and Conor hauled their own gear to the edge of the deck and dropped to the ground. Ricardo waved for them to join him, so they tugged their gear onto their shoulders and headed toward his waiting vehicle. They tossed their packs in the back and unloaded their weapons before climbing into the back seat.

  “We’re going to head back to the conference room for a debriefing,” Ricardo said, twisting his body around to face them. “That was some damn fine work.”

  “What’s going to happen to Omar?” Shani asked.

  “I’ve got a doc waiting on him. He’s going to make sure Omar is stable and hydrated before we start the interrogation.”

  “Will we be performing the interrogation?”

  “He’ll be questioned here,” Ricardo confirmed. “We won’t have the honors, though. Our contracting agency is flying in a team for that. They don’t want word of Omar’s existence to leak out so they figure it’s better to keep him isolated here.”

  “If word reaches Washington that we have one of the terrorists, every department still functioning will want a piece of him,” Conor said.

  “Exactly, and they’ll be trying to pull all that due process bullshit,” Ricardo said. “We’re in the frontier here. We can get away with a lot more than they can within the beltway. Omar may remain here indefinitely.”

  The woodland camo HUMVEE rolled to a stop at the Quonset hut where Ricardo had met with them earlier. Leaving the engine running the driver assisted them with getting their gear to the door. When they had everything off the vehicle, he made a careful turn and accelerated down the narrow, tree-lined road.

  Ricardo removed his sunglasses and peered into a biometric reader that scanned his retinas. There was a faint whirring sound and a click then the door unlocked. Ricardo opened the door and held it while they pulled their gear inside.

  As soon as they were in the door, the smell of food hit Conor’s nose. “Chow!”

  “Don’t get in his way, Ricardo, or you’ll be trampled,” Shani warned.

  “I took the liberty of having the cook prepare a selection,” Ricardo said. “I hope there’ll be something to your liking. I thought we might talk while you eat.”

  Conor hadn’t waited on an invitation. He was already standing over the selection of chafing dishes, spooning food onto a plate. It wasn’t gourmet fare but it was a better selection than anything he had seen recently. There were pork chops smothered in gravy, macaroni and cheese, and mashed potatoes. There was meatloaf, green beans, and salad. There was even fresh fruit, which provided a little insight into the reach of Ricardo’s supply chain. It made sense in an odd sort of way, though. Certainly a man who could obtain rocket launchers and grenades could find a bloody cantaloupe.

  “Leave any for the rest of us?” Shani teased.

  “I did but eat light, I may want seconds.”

  Ricardo poured himself a cup of coffee and took a seat at a plastic table beneath a hanging light. Conor soon joined him, carrying two plates. Without sitting down, he went back for a cup of coffee and a glass of water.

  Shani joined him in a moment with a less crowded plate.

  Conor frowned at it. “That all you eating?”

  Shani nodded. “You said to go light.”

  “I was just teasing. My big toe requires more sustenance than you have on that plate.”

  Shani smiled, then leaned away from the table to look Conor up and down. “I don’t think all that’s going to your big toe.”

  “A machine,” Conor said through a mouthful of food. “I’m a finely-tuned machine.”

  Ricardo cleared his throat. “As amusing as it is to watch you two work, I need a briefing. Please fill me in on what happened from the moment you abandoned your inflatable.”

  “Perhaps I should begin,” Shani glanced at her companion, “since Conor is attacking that plate like a hyena on a gazelle.”

  Conor flashed a thumbs-up. He had no objection.

  Shani launched into a narrative of everything that had taken place from the moment they made landfall up until the chopper picked them up.

  “So Mumin’s wife and girlfriend are still alive, as well as his children?” Ricardo asked.

  “Yes,” Shani replied.

  “And the Native Americans you spoke to know that these men were part of the terror attacks?”

  “I needed to tell them something,” Shani said. “They came to assist me and brought armed men from their community. I felt I owed them an explanation. I also need to justify giving them the supplies. They wouldn’t have taken them if they thought they were stealing.”

  Ricardo made a note on a yellow legal pad. “That’s fine. I’m not questioning your actions but a follow-up may be appropriate. I might need to send someone in to verify the disposition of Mumin’s family and impress upon the locals that they must remain silent about what happened there.”

  “You’ll threaten them?” Shani asked.

  “No,” Ricardo said. “There’ll be an incentive. Conor, you have anything to add?”

  Conor used his fork to gesture at his plate. “This fecking meatloaf is amazing.”

  Ricardo frowned. “I was referring to the operation, but I’ll pass your sentiments on to the cook.”

  “Please do. The only thing I’d add is to re-affirm that there appeared to be an uneasy alliance between Mumin’s people and the terrorists. There was some tension there. Mumin’s family lived in fear of the men in that other house. Mumin didn’t trust them and I think the feeling was mutual. This relationship may have naturally imploded over time, had we not intervened.”

  “You agree?” Ricardo asked Shani.

  “I do. While they held me captive, I heard discussions between Mumin and Omar. They didn’t like each other. I got the impression Mumin liked the idea of supporting the cause but found it to be less glamorous than he expected. Conor’s right. Given time, I think the terrorists would have turned on Mumin’s family and taken over the compound.”

  Conor licked a ketchup-stained finger. “When do we start
on Omar?”

  Ricardo checked his watch. “The interrogation team should be here in two hours. You guys have time to shower and change. There’s a shower in the restrooms in this building.”

  “Then that’s where I’m headed,” Shani said. “Do you mind, Conor?”

  “Of course not. I still haven’t had seconds or my dessert course.”

  32

  The compound from which Ricardo was currently operating was not his and had not been built for this purpose. It was originally a private training facility were civilians and law enforcement could come to learn everything from basic gun handling to more advanced tactics such as precision rifle shooting, shooting into vehicles, and squad tactics. There was even a shoot house for teaching room-clearing techniques.

  The place was owned by a couple of men with a deep reach into government contracting. To obtain those lucrative contracts the owners of the facility would create any kind of course or environment the government was looking for. If someone wanted to duplicate a terrorist compound in Pakistan, they could do it there. If they wanted to train a sniper for a particularly challenging shot in a particular environment, they could do it there. If an agency wanted to practice the snatch-and-grab of a high-value target, the scene could be reconstructed at the compound and practiced until the operators nailed it.

  Obviously, those same activities could be conducted at any number of government and military facilities around the country but not in total secrecy. People talked. People saw things. Sometimes word traveled up the chain that a certain operation was being practiced and gossip could lead to the operation being compromised. It could lead to Congress learning what someone was up to and pulling the plug on it.

  When trainings were conducted at this particular facility, no one ever caught wind of them. The West Virginia facility and the few others like it were as private a base of operations as you could get on United States soil. Neither the gunfire nor the unusual vehicle and chopper traffic escaped the eyes of local law enforcement, however, the local sheriff didn’t ask questions. He turned a blind eye to the unusual activities that took place at the compound because the owner trained all the local law enforcement officers for free. As a result, this small force of deputies was one of the best-trained rural law enforcement outfits in the country.