The Power of Three

by J C Ryan

  No, he couldn’t believe that. Not without further evidence. Until he got that evidence, the Old Man would get the benefit of innocence until proven guilty.

  Rex comprehended he couldn’t go back to the US, not under his real identity, and maybe not under any identity for a long, long time.

  To stay alive, he must remain dead.

  Sick at heart and no longer having the will to harden himself to the carnage, he granted Usama’s last wish and put a bullet through his heart. To satisfy his own anger, he added two more between the man’s eyes. It was only a symbolic gesture. The man was dead before he raised the pistol for the second shot.

  REX AND DIGGER were now alone in Usama's compound, and it was past midnight. He still wanted to conduct a thorough search of the compound, feed himself and Digger, as well as supplying himself with whatever he would need to escape the country. He had no time to waste.

  There was also the risk that someone would come to the compound, find the carnage and raise an alarm. By his calculations, he had four hours or so to search the place, collect what he needed for the trip, and eat.

  The first order of business was to search the rest of the furniture in the office. When Rex had done that and located two more laptops, he knocked on walls, pressed knobs, and ran his hands under the desk and the lower shelves of the bookshelves for electric switches and levers. His thorough search was rewarded with a panel opening by a spring-operated latch. Behind the panel was a safe, and the safe’s combination was recorded in the journal.

  Inside, he found several stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills in US currency. He counted twenty of the bundles, which, if they had come directly from banks, would have one hundred bills in each. Two-hundred thousand dollars in old, used, apparently unmarked bills would come in very handy. He had no way of knowing for certain if they were counterfeit without a jeweler’s loupe and a strong light, but in his experience, counterfeit bills didn’t come in bundles of used currency. He reckoned they were legitimate, or at least passable as legitimate.

  The safe also contained a bag of cut diamonds, about four pounds’ worth, if he was estimating correctly. A quick calculation, about two-thousand-two-hundred and sixty-seven carats to a pound, yielded another estimate – maybe nine-thousand carats. If they weren’t fake, and weren’t blood diamonds, maybe worth another one-hundred and fifty to two-hundred-thousand US dollars, maybe much more, depending on the quality.

  If they were blood diamonds, he had a moral dilemma as well as four pounds’ worth of virtually useless baubles. They would have been mined under inhumane conditions and sold to support insurgency. The legitimate diamond trade had turned its back on them, and therefore they’d be difficult, if not impossible, to sell. Not only that, but he’d have to deal with some unsavory characters to sell them at all, and he had enough of bad people.

  After some reflection, he shrugged. It would be impossible to determine right there and then if they were blood diamonds or not. But he was headed in the right direction to find out. Once he’d escaped Afghanistan and crossed Pakistan, he’d be in the heart of a thriving legitimate diamond-cutting trade in India. He’d be able to find someone there who could tell him. If they were blood diamonds, he would dump them somewhere. If not, he had another source of money.

  This couldn’t represent all of Usama’s wealth. This would only be what he kept on hand for immediate needs. Rex believed he’d find information on the laptop about bank accounts, probably Swiss numbered accounts, and more in other tax havens around the world.

  He’d learn about them soon enough.

  Searching the rest of the house, he found a larger backpack, non-military, into which he put the hard drives from all but the original laptop, which went in intact. A weapons room yielded ammunition to replenish what he’d used. He transferred the money and diamonds to the backpack containing the computer equipment, and reloaded both pistols, then put boxes of spare ammunition in various places, including his ammo belt and several pockets of his own backpack.

  When he was satisfied he’d found everything he could use except food, he went back to the study, dragged Usama’s chair with his body in it back to the dining hall, where he’d seen an antique scimitar on the wall. He reached up and tested the blade with his thumb. He felt hardly a sting, but a trickle of blood told him what he wanted to know. The blade was as sharp as Damascus steel. He took it down. Heavy, too. It would make a nice souvenir, for those so inclined, but it would just be a burden to him. However, it could serve a purpose here and now. Poetic justice, one might say, and throw investigators off his track, making this look like tribal warfare.

  Digger looked on impassively as Rex swiftly parted each man’s head from his body in four mighty swings.

  Rex felt washed-out, mentally and physically, when he dropped the scimitar next to the last of them and turned to Digger. “Want some chow, boy?” he asked in a detached voice.

  Rex’s silent partner looked toward the food congealing on the table and let his tongue loll out. Rex shook his head. The unappealing mess on the table was probably contaminated with the blood of the dead men during his interrogation and from what had been slung from the blade when he beheaded them. This was no kind of place to eat anything.

  “Let’s check the kitchen.” Rex led the way, prompting Digger to come when he didn’t immediately follow. Hearing the dog’s nails click on the wood floors, he continued without looking back.

  In the kitchen, the stove still held a little heat, and Rex sampled the dishes that would have been served to Usama and his guests if he hadn’t turned up at their party. He offered those with large chunks of meat to Digger in apology for feeding him human food all those hours ago. When the dog turned up his nose and turned his head away at the last thing Rex offered him, Rex knew Digger had enough, so he sat down at the kitchen table and ate his fill.

  In the pantry, he found non-perishable food, tins of tuna and sardines, lamb jerky and more, along with bread, fruit, and more goat cheese, the latter in the cooler. These went into empty plastic containers he found in the pantry.

  The last task was to get a change of clothes and take a well-earned and urgent bath. When he peeled off the battle fatigues he’d been wearing for the past two days, they were crusty with the blood of his victims. Reluctantly, he wrapped them in a towel to take with him to get rid of later. He’d take a supply of the ubiquitous man-jammies to wear until he was in a place where he could buy other, preferably Western, clothes.

  Rex spent an almost luxurious twenty minutes in the shower, washing and scrubbing and doing it all over again until he felt refreshed and relaxed from the hot water massaging his body.

  When he got out of the shower, he offered Digger a shower, but the dog declined by getting up and walking back to the front of the house. One more command he’d have to learn, how to make the dog take a bath when he told him to. He let Digger win this one.

  By the time it was all done, it was an hour before sunup. Rex had to leave before the sun came up and be far away when anyone discovered what had happened there.

  He and Digger could drive to Ghazni in a few hours. Rex had been to the city of about hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants in the central east part of the country on a few previous occasions. It was about ninety miles from Kabul. They’d find an out-of-the-way hotel there, rest a few hours, and then head for Pakistan. Anyone suspecting that the perpetrators of the carnage at Usama’s home were fleeing the country would probably assume they’d be heading straight for the Pakistan border to get to Islamabad, rather than making the much longer trip southwest.

  He found the keys to an SUV hanging conveniently on the wall next to the door that led to the garage. He loaded his two backpacks and the containers with food into the SUV, told Digger to get in, and drove it outside. When he’d cleared the house by several yards, he told Digger to stay, and he went back into the house. He went into several rooms, setting each on fire as he went. There were enough hangings and other flammable materials to start a fire.
He didn’t want the house to break out in flames too quickly, he needed time to get away. Therefore, he didn’t use any accelerant.

  He went out the front door, got into the SUV, and drove through the nearest gate.

  25

  Outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, 6:30 a.m., June 25

  THE SMOKE FROM the slowly-smoldering fire in Usama’s home had joined the general haze over the city when the first visitor arrived in a dilapidated truck at the gate. The first alarm was that the gate was wide open and unguarded. The visitor, a deliveryman from an upscale market closer to the center of the city, nervously drove through the gateway. It was the first time in the two years he had been delivering to the rich man’s compound that he found the gates open and unguarded. He had announced himself at the speaker fifty feet from the gate but had received no reply.

  He was on a schedule, but he also knew this customer was the most important customer his employer had and would take great care not to upset him or his employees. He decided to investigate. There was no one there when he arrived at the gateway, but the gate stood open, swung outward from the compound wall. After driving through, he took the drive around the side of the house to the back, to make his delivery at the kitchen entrance as he usually did.

  The stone house gave little indication of the burned-out interior. By some twist of fate, the back door had survived along with most of the corridor that led to the kitchen and other parts of the house.

  No one answered that door, either. There was a strange smell in the air — like someone was barbecuing meat on an open fire. He cautiously pushed it open and was engulfed by smoke billowing from the passage in front of him. The strange barbecue smell was now pungent, nauseating. Like someone had roasted a goat or some animal without gutting it.

  Sensing something was dreadfully wrong, he closed the door, backed away, got into his dilapidated truck as quickly as he could, and reversed away. The truck’s gearbox sounded like an electric meat grinder when he shifted from reverse to a forward drive and sped away.

  The deliveryman was in a daze. He knew he had just discovered something horrible, and he had no idea what to do about it, except that he didn’t want anything to do with it. He didn’t even think to report it to his employer.

  Maybe it’s best to complete the rest of my deliveries. Let someone else discover it.

  A couple of hours after he’d sped away from the deserted compound, he allowed his subconscious to tell his conscious what the pungent smell was. He managed to bring his truck to a stop in time to get out of it and vomited into the street. He was still wiping his mouth when a policeman pulled up behind his truck, got out of his vehicle, approached him, and asked him what was wrong.

  The deliveryman whispered his fears about Usama’s household to the policeman. He offered the policeman all of Usama’s gourmet provisions still in the truck just as long as he kept his name out of the investigation.

  The policeman liked gourmet food as much as the next man, so instead of reporting the deliveryman’s suspicions to his superiors, he went to Usama’s compound himself. Verify first, then report. There, he called out his credentials. Hearing no answers or challenges, he strode boldly into the compound to investigate.

  The policeman quickly discovered what the deliveryman had missed when he fled the scene. Several corpses in the classic pugilistic pose in partially-burned utilitarian rooms and hallways. An office room with the scorched furniture tossed about and an open safe. A security room with another corpse and ten exploded monitors. The opulent rooms in the front of the house almost completely destroyed, with their exotic hangings and rare woods now in ashes. And four headless bodies with plastic melted to bone, still ‘seated’ in chairs that had collapsed as they burned. Then a stroll around the house revealed six more bodies, thirteen in total. The bodies of the guards outside the compound would only be discovered much later and push the count to fifteen.

  Five minutes later, he radioed the police station and immediately after that an informant he used on occasion, to report a mass murder.

  While the police were dropping whatever it is they were doing or not doing at the time and rushing to get in their vehicles and to the scene, the informant, an employee of one of the slain drug lords, sent word through his network, which included not only his close co-workers, but employees of the other major drug lords. For an hour, telephone lines sang with rumor and questions. Who was safe? Who was missing? Before the morning turned to noon, the informant knew he was now at the top of his boss’s… make that his former boss’s… totem pole.

  His counterparts in the organizations of the other three dead drug lords met with him to assess the situation. They’d all checked on their downlines in their respective organizations and discovered three of Usama’s men missing. Two of whom were thought to be the lumps of carbonized flesh that had been discovered that morning in a farmhouse near an outlying heroin lab up in the mountains about twenty miles away from Usama’s compound. They didn’t know whether it was related to their bosses’ untimely deaths or not, but the coincidence was suspicious. There was no body to account for the third missing man, so he could still turn up alive.

  Now they had to decide whether to seek other employment or take over their respective organizations themselves. The upside of the latter was unimaginable wealth. The downside was unambiguously demonstrated by the condition of their former bosses’ bodies. According to the policeman who’d discovered them, the demon or demons who’d murdered them had trussed them like chickens on the way to slaughter, shot them, cut them, and in a final display of disrespect, beheaded their lifeless bodies.

  Who would do such a thing? Were those monsters still in the country? Would they be next if they stepped into their masters’ shoes? What was the right move? Should they run for their lives, or report what they knew to the authorities?

  The policeman who’d informed them of the disaster was waiting for their decision.

  After much debate and several more hours, during which the fire destroyed more evidence, they decided better the devil they knew than the devil they didn’t. The authorities wanted the drug trade to continue, ergo, let them deal with the crime, and the survivors could get on with business. So, that was what they did - they left it to the government and went looking for new jobs.

  From there, the news worked its way through official channels and gossip channels, to the highest levels of Afghan government and thence to embassy officials throughout the city. The American ambassador reported to his immediate supervisor, the Secretary of State. He informed the President.

  Before it reached the President’s ears, it also went through lower-level channels of informants on Hathaway’s payroll, until it finally reached Hathaway’s ears. Though the disaster had taken place early on the morning of the same day Hathaway heard of it, the eight and a half-hour time difference between Kabul and New York meant the perpetrator had nearly a full day’s head start on his escape before the news reached him. Hathaway looked at his watch.

  Hathaway spent half an hour in a temper tantrum that destroyed one carefully-decorated room in his penthouse. Then he called the Senator.

  “Our bird has flown,” he said.

  “What? What’s that?” the Senator stammered.

  “Oh, for hell’s sake,” Hathaway sputtered. His elaborate verbal misdirection always confused the Senator. “The supplier, and I guess a few of his suppliers, have become the dearly departed.”

  It took several more minutes to give the Senator enough broad hints to get his half-demented brain to understand what Hathaway was saying. Hathaway made a mental note that he was going to have to cultivate another wholly-owned Senator soon. This one literally had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. Finally, he got the message across. They made arrangements to meet in Philadelphia the next day to decide what precautions they should take in case this headache decided to grow wings and visit them in person. Meanwhile, the Senator was to inform his puppet, the Director of the CIA.

&nb
sp; Ten minutes after Hathaway had ended his call to his pet Senator, and the Senator had taken a stiff snort of cocaine, he was on the phone to the DCIA.

  Carson felt the blood drain from his face as he listened to the news. What the hell had happened? He’d been informed by the station chief two days ago that the Afghan police had found eight bodies in the house where he’d arranged the ambush.

  Brandt had confirmed that was the number of the team sent on the mission. So, who was now murdering the same drug lords who were supposed to have been at that false flag meeting? Or was it unrelated? Maybe a war among the Afghan drug lords? Could it be just a coincidence after all?

  Carson fervently hoped this was one. He examined the scenarios mentally.

  One. How likely was it that one or more of Brandt’s team could have survived? But then the mission team must have been more than eight. Would Brandt have lied about it? Or would his man in Kabul have lied about it? If one or more had survived, by some unlikely chance, how many would it take to go on a rampage and cause all this death and destruction? Fifteen dead, maybe eighteen. One man? Not at all likely. Impossible, in fact. No one was capable of doing all this on his own. Rambo, Chuck Norris, or some improbable fictional character from Hollywood’s imagination might have done such a thing, but they operated in movie theaters, not in Afghanistan.

  What else? The second scenario, the one he hoped was the real one, was the one with which he'd tried to placate the Senator. A new faction of drug lords vying for the top position, probably. Tribal warfare had been a way of life in Afghanistan for millennia. It had to be that.

  However, somehow, he didn’t believe his own reasoning. He had an uneasy feeling that he knew who the CRC man in Afghanistan was. He’d read the CRC reports more diligently since he’d had that conversation with Brandt about his best man – the Ghost. CRC’s success ratio was near perfect, ninety-nine-point-nine percent. The other tenth of a percent was the few agents they’d lost. They’d never had the failure of an entire mission.