by Brent Towns
Thurston frowned. “What the …”
The five black SUVs stormed into the small town’s main street. They stopped just short of the battle zone in a V formation and disgorged fifteen men all dressed in black and wearing tactical gear. Except for one man. He wore a suit and dark glasses.
“Talk about men in fucking black,” Axe growled over the comms.
“Keep an eye on them, Axe,” Kane said in a low voice.
Thurston said, “How far out is that Black Hawk, Luis?”
“Five minutes.”
The man in the suit walked toward them, weaving through the dead on the ground. Beside him came a fair-haired man with broad shoulders and wearing polarized sunglasses. They stopped just short of where the team members stood.
“You people have been busy,” he said in a gravelly voice.
Thurston stared at his square-jawed, clean-shaven face. She put him in his early forties. The man beside him was possibly ten years younger. Looking back at the man in the suit, she asked, “Who are you?”
The man smiled. “Let’s just call me Smith, shall we? And you are?”
“General Mary Thurston,” Thurston said but figured that whoever he was, he already knew that.
“Well, well,” Smith said in a condescending tone. “You seem to be out of uniform, General.”
“What are you doing here?”
Smith glanced at the man beside him and nodded. He turned back and said, “We have a little business here, and then we’ll be gone.”
The man at his side waved back at the men still with the SUVs, and five of them broke off. They ran toward a rundown building and disappeared inside.
“What business would that be?” Thurston asked.
Smith gave her a weak smile and looked up at the sky. “Very hot today isn’t it. Personally, I dislike the heat. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would live in a godforsaken hole like this.”
“Gotcha,” Ferrero’s voice came over the comms. “We’ll see if we can put a name to the face for you.”
There was a scuffle at the building that the five armed men had entered and now reappeared – with two others. Kane saw immediately that one of them was Iona! The other he’d never seen before. But regardless of the man’s identity, he wasn’t about to go quietly.
He managed to break away from his captors and ran toward the team. The men in black began to chase him, but the bulk of their gear slowed them down.
“Help me!” he cried out. “You must help me!”
A look of disgust combined with a touch with inconvenience descended over Smith’s face. He reached inside his coat and took out a Sig Sauer P320. He pivoted at the waist and brought the weapon into line.
A flat crack sounded, and the running man’s head snapped back, blood spraying from the exit wound. The prisoner dropped to the ground and didn’t move.
“Shit!” Kane gasped and brought up his 416. The rest of the team did likewise, and soon there were weapons pointed in all directions. Except for Kane’s. His was pointed at Smith’s head.
“What the fuck was that?” he snarled.
“That was nothing to do with you, Mr. Kane.”
“You know who I am?” Kane was stunned.
Smith smiled. “Of course.”
Kane looked over the killer’s shoulder at Iona, and the dime dropped. “She’s one of yours.”
“Who?”
“Iona.”
Smith shrugged. “I think you need some medical attention. You look like you’ve been knocked around a bit.”
The arrogance of the man was plain to see, and that pissed Kane off more than the realization of what had happened. But not by much. “You bastard! You had her tip them off to who I was. We were involved in something that wasn’t to your liking, and you fucking had her tip them off!”
“What is the CIA doing operating an illegal op on U.S. soil, Mr. Smith?” Thurston asked.
“Who said we’re CIA? As you said, that would be illegal.”
“Asshole,” Kane hissed and started forward, his battered face a mask of pain. He dropped the 416 on his approach. Smith’s arrogance expected him to stop, but he didn’t. By the time the CIA man realized his mistake, it was too late.
Smith tried to bring his weapon into play, but Kane was too quick for him. The P320 never even made it halfway before Kane closed his hand over the man’s wrist and disarmed him. Then Kane used all of his unarmed combat experience, turning Smith around and wrapping his left arm around the man’s throat. In his right hand, the Sig was pointed at the CIA man’s nearest operator.
“Try it, and I’ll put a bullet in your head,” Kane warned him.
“Reaper!” Thurston cautioned him. “Let the nasty man go.”
“Sorry, ma'am, he tried to get me killed. I can’t let that slide.”
Suddenly Ferrero came back over the comms. “Bravo, Slick was able to get a name for our friend. He’s Mark Newcomb, CIA. Well known as a cleaner for the CIA Special Activities Division abroad.”
Thurston knew what cleaner meant. Somehow the CIA had an op running here which had gone wrong, and Newcomb was here to tidy up the mess. But their op had gotten in the way. Thurston stared at the body on the ground and wondered how much of it was to do with him. She raised her gaze. “Kane, let Mr. Newcomb go. That’s an order.”
Kane released Newcomb, and a glance passed between the CIA man and his operator. Reaper handed the Sig back to him and said, “You should be more careful.”
“So should you.”
“Cara,” Thurston said, “get a picture of our friend on the ground there.”
She started forward, and Smith said, “I don’t think so.”
Cara stopped when he blocked her path.
“I’d move if I was you, Newcomb,” Thurston snapped, running out of patience. “I have an outside shooter who can blow a tick off a dog’s ass at one-thousand meters. I give him the word, and you’re done.”
Suddenly, a Black Hawk screamed overhead causing everyone to look up. As it moved away, the sound of its rotor lowering, Thurston shouted, “That’s ours too.”
Knowing he was outgunned, Newcomb stepped aside, and Cara used her cell to take a picture. She tapped the keys and said, “Slick, on its way.”
Newcomb stared at Thurston and asked, “Are we done here?”
“I think so.”
Without another word, Newcomb and his man turned, starting back toward the SUVs. The CIA black ops operator said, “The boss ain’t going to like this. We were meant to get rid of Hafeez quietly.”
Without looking at the man, Newcomb said, “What does it matter now? Hafeez is gone. So are any of his CIA secrets.”
Kane watched Iona as she climbed into an SUV along with Newcomb. Then all five vehicles started and turned around, leaving Hell Town behind them.
After they’d gone, Thurston said, “All right, let’s start checking to see who’s still alive. Kane, did you know this guy was here?”
“No, ma’am. I had no idea.”
Chapter 2
Team Reaper HQ, El Paso Texas
Three days later
The phone on Thurston’s desk rang twice before she picked it up. Placing it to her ear, she said, “Thurston.”
“Mary, it’s Hank,” the voice of General Hank Jones came down the line. “There’s not much time so just listen.”
“Sir.”
“You’re about to get a visit from some very bad people. Just give them what they want, and they’ll leave. My hands are tied on this one. The orders have come from over my head.”
Concerned, Thurston asked, “Who are they, sir?”
“Newcomb and a handful of contractors that the CIA Special Activities Division use.”
“Shit. Is this about what happened the other day, General?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell did we stumble upon, sir?”
“I can’t say, but you can be sure that it is bad because they’re going to a lot of trouble to cover
it up. Be careful, Mary, these people make other people disappear.”
“We can handle them, General.”
“I’m sure you can, just give them what they want, and they’ll be gone.”
“How long do I have?”
“Maybe ten minutes.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Thurston hung up and rose from her chair. Walking out of her office, she went to find Ferrero. It was in the briefing room that she found both him and Kane.
Ferrero was ex-DEA. He’d worked with Kane back in the day when the Drug Enforcement Administration was running covert ops in Colombia. In his late forties, Ferrero’s hair was graying all over, and he was single and solidly built.
“We’ve got a problem. Where’s Slick?”
“In operations,” Ferrero said. “Why?”
“Follow me.”
They hurried out to the operations room and found Swift at his computer. The computer tech had red hair and was thin built. He often bragged that there was nothing with a computer he couldn’t do.
“Slick, bring up the external cameras,” Thurston snapped.
The big screen came alive and showed the approach to the Team Reaper HQ. The parking lot was empty. “That’s something,” Thurston breathed. “All right. Everything you have on the search you were doing into our friends, back it up and store it somewhere. Separately.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ve got about eight minutes.”
“What’s going on, Mary?” Ferrero asked.
“I just received a call from Hank Jones. It would seem that our friend Newcomb and some of his hired help are coming here to seize whatever we have from the other day. The general has ordered me to cooperate with them. The whole thing is coming from higher up the chain.”
“How high?” Kane asked.
“One would guess all the way to the top.”
“Which means that it’s something bad.”
“Yes.”
“You could say that,” Swift said.
All three stared at him.
“What do you know?” Thurston asked.
“I was just about to come and find you when you found me,” Swift explained. “Our friend, who was shot out in the desert, was a Pakistani journalist. Hafeez Jiskani.”
An image flashed up on the second big screen of the dead man from Hell Town. Swift continued. “He’s been making noise about a UAV strike last year in Pakistan. He claims that the strike against a Taliban training camp went wrong and a school was hit. Killed thirty school children. Both governments denied it, but I found this after some deep digging.”
A grainy video flashed up onto the screen. There was an audio file with it, and someone was speaking in the background while the camera was panning around. A small body came into view, then another, and another. All the while the voice in the background was talking.
“Is that our friend Jiskani talking in the background?” Kane asked.
“Yes. It would seem he was right about the air strike,” Swift said.
“Shit!” Thurston hissed. “Then what was he doing hanging out with The Devils?”
“They have contacts,” Kane pointed out. “They must have got him into the country. Somehow, the CIA got wind of it. They weren’t sure when, so they put Iona or whatever the fuck her name is, undercover in there to wait for Jiskani to show.”
“It still doesn’t explain why he was in the U.S.,” Thurston said.
“Could you imagine if this got out?” Swift said. “We’re in an election year. It sure would kill a candidate’s run for office.”
“I can’t imagine the president sanctioning this, though.”
“Someone wanted him dead,” Kane pointed out.
“Put it on a thumb drive and hide it,” Thurston ordered. “I’ll talk to the general about it later. For now, we sit on it. What do we know about Newcomb? Apart from him being a CIA cleaner.”
Swift said, “He takes his orders from the deputy director of the CIA who runs the Special Activities division personally.”
“Paul Horn?” Thurston asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Apparently, he was a warrior from deep within the CIA covert ops. Anyway, Newcomb always hires outside people for his teams. The other day when you saw him, he was working with a team from Black Shield.”
“The defense contractor?”
“Yes. They’re in the middle of some negotiations with Poland and the U.S. Government at the moment for a missile defense system worth billions. Who also just happens to be one of the biggest donors to the president’s campaign for reelection.”
“And there it is,” said Kane.
“There what is?” Thurston asked curiously.
“The reason why our journalist was killed. If that footage along with proof got out, Carter is screwed, doesn’t get back in office, and Black Shield loses any chance of getting the missile contract. We all know what the other side of politics thinks of them.”
“You think they would do that?”
“They’re coming here for some reason,” Kane pointed out.
“No,” Swift said, “they’re here.”
They stared at the screen and watched as two SUVs pulled up. Doors opened, and eight people exited. One of which, Kane knew really well. “Iona.”
They strode through the front door as though they owned the place. Arrogance seemed to ooze from every pore of their skin. And they even came armed with M4s. Stopping in the middle of the operations room, they looked around, ignoring the team’s presence. What surprised Thurston the most was that Newcomb hadn’t come alone. He’d brought another suit with him. This one had a lot more influence than most others. He was a thickset man with wavy hair and a square jaw. His name was Paul Horn.
“What can I do for you, Paul?” Thurston asked him.
Still, he ignored her and pointed to where Swift sat at his computer. “There. Start there.”
An armed contractor walked over to where Swift sat and said, “Move away from the computer, sir.”
Swift glanced at Thurston who nodded. He did as asked, and the contractor slung his M4 and leaned down below Swift's desk and pulled all wires from his hard drive and took the whole thing.
“Hey!” called Axe who’d suddenly appeared in the doorway with Cara. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Stand down, Axe,” Kane snapped. The tall ex-recon marine’s eyes blazed.
Axe’s gaze settled on Newcomb. “Oh, it’s this motherfucker again. Come to shit in our nest, have you?”
“Who are you?” Horn snapped at Axe.
“None of your damned business,” Axe snapped back.
Horn turned away, his face red. He pointed at two more men. “Requisition anything you think is relevant.”
“Just what the hell are you looking for, Horn?” Thurston growled as she ran out of patience.
“Anything we deem necessary to take, Mary.”
Kane stared at Iona. He couldn’t help himself and asked, “What’s your name? Your real name?”
“You don’t need to know that, Mr. Kane,” Horn assured him.
“Uh, huh,” Kane said. Then to Horn, “Are you the prick who ordered me burned?”
“And if I was?”
“Then you’re an asshole. It almost got me killed.”
Horn gave Kane a disinterested stare and turned to Thurston. “Tell your people to pull their heads in, Mary. I’m growing bored with their whining.”
“Why’d you send your boys after the journalist? I’m sure it wasn’t to kill him.”
“Kane!” Thurston barked. “Let it go.”
But the damage was already done. Horn’s gaze grew hard, and he spoke in a threatening tone, “You’d do best to forget everything you saw out there. It has nothing to do with the likes of you.”
Thurston knew Kane would keep pressing if she didn’t intervene, and she caught Cara’s eye. Cara hurried across to Kane and took his arm. “Come on, Reaper. Time to get out of the sandpit.”
; “I was only just getting started.”
“And now you’re finished.”
Kane allowed Cara to lead him from the operations room. Once outside, Kane hissed, “I’d like to put a slug in that bastard’s head.”
“I’m sure the general would too, but obviously there’s more in play here than I know about. Care to tell me?”
Kane filled her in on what he knew. Cara was stunned. “Wow.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Horn and his men finished what they were doing and started to leave the building. Outside, Kane and Cara were standing, talking. As they walked past, Horn turned to him and said, “I’ll remember you, Kane.”
Reaper smiled coldly. “Be aware of this, Horn. I come across any of your men down range, and I see something like that again, I’ll put them down, Horn. Understand?”
“Big talk for a little man, Kane,” Horn said arrogantly.
“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”
Horn climbed into one of the SUVs with Newcomb and Iona, whose real name was Nicole Cresswell. Newcomb said, “He’s trouble.”
Horn nodded. “I feel we may have to kill that man someday.”
By the time the CIA had finished, the operations room was a mess. When Kane and Cara walked back inside, the team was already starting to tidy up. Thurston caught sight of him and said, “Mr. Kane, a word.”
Out of the corner of her mouth, Cara said, “Time to get spanked, Reaper.”
Kane joined his commanding officer off to one side of the room. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she wasn’t happy and she let him know. “What the fuck was that?” she hissed.
“I’m sorry …”
“I don’t give a shit what you are. I expect better from my commanders on this team.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You let Horn know that we know about the journalist, which will have him wondering what else we know about what went down. And on top of that, if whoever is pulling the strings on this one thinks we know more than what we should, then you just made us targets as well. There is a time and place for anger, Kane, and that was not it!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Help the others get tidied up.”
“Ma’am.”