Rex Dalton Thrillers: Books 1-3 (The Rex Dalton Series Boxset Book 1)

by JC Ryan

  He couldn’t get over it, even though he knew intellectually that the dog was as much a victim as he was, or so he’d been told. “There are no bad dogs, only bad dog owners,” they said. Fine, if they said so. But his gut twisted every time a dog approached him, especially that big black bastard, Digger, who looked enough like a German Shepherd to trigger the phobia from yards away.

  He was sure they could smell his fear and it turned them all into predators, with him as their natural prey. Even lapdogs. Little bastards were the worst. His ankles had more recent scars to prove it. No – he’d never been a fan of dogs, but he’d never told Trevor or anyone else about that.

  He was convinced that Digger was the same, sensing his fear and thinking in his twisted dog mind that if Rex feared him, he must be a bad guy. The posturing and growling was just to make sure he established dominance and let Rex know he wasn’t part of the pack and to back off. That was how dogs thought, and Trevor had demonstrated before how they worked and used that instinct in military work. Rex at least respected the role Digger had played in a couple of previous missions.

  But he wasn’t at all surprised that the only welcome he got from Digger was bared teeth and a low growl. He was more surprised by Trevor jumping up and hugging him enthusiastically, thumping him on the back, and giving every evidence that he didn’t believe Digger’s implication that Rex was the enemy. Maybe it was because of the last time they’d worked together.

  ***

  THE FIRST TIME Rex and Trevor had met was outside Islamabad, Pakistan. Trevor’s former employer had been tasked with getting the layout of a compound where a terrorist cell had taken refuge. Nothing had been able to smoke them out, and the US intelligence units in the area suspected they had tunnels through which they transported supplies. The official US position at the time, though it changed later, was that no combat action could be taken against them in case there were innocents in the compound with them. Therefore, CRC was to clean up the problem.

  However, Trevor’s employer had not been able to get the intel. Instead, they lent Trevor and Digger to the CRC team as the next best thing – an advance scout to clear the unoccupied rooms and let them know which were occupied. Rex had never seen anything like it. Trevor parachuted out of their transport plane with Digger harnessed to him, into the middle of the compound. Rex hadn’t known it at the time, but Trevor had previously outfitted his dog with an in-ear coms unit, and his harness had a miniature night vision video camera wirelessly connected to an iPad Trevor held. Trevor commanded the dog with a series of instructions that a human kid couldn’t have followed, sending him into this room and that, pulling him out, and into another room, all as silently as a ghost.

  Digger had saved the life of one of Rex’s teammates dramatically. As the teammate was bending over the terrorist he’d just dispatched to retrieve his KA-BAR, another was creeping up behind him. Before anyone could warn the CRC operative, Digger had been on the threat in a flash, leaping on him to take him to the ground. He’d gripped the terrorist by the throat and held him there before the operative even knew he was in the room. It took Trevor’s command to let the man go before Digger opened his jaws and backed away, still snarling and growling, and obviously not happy about it.

  The terrorist had voided his bladder in the meanwhile. Under interrogation, he’d admitted he thought it was a demon about to rip his throat out. While Rex admitted the dog had done the right thing, it did nothing to reassure him that Digger wasn’t going to someday rip his throat out. He was in the peculiar position of admiring the dog’s skills and being terrified of him all at once.

  Another time, right here in Kabul, Trevor and Digger had been Rex’s lookout as he talked to an informant. They were expecting a friend of the informant, who would bring more information. When the friend arrived, Trevor was ready to let him in, but Digger refused. He stood in the doorway with his hackles raised and snarled at the new arrival. Trevor knew something wasn’t right, so he had the man stand against the wall, kicked his legs apart, and searched him.

  The guy tried to explain away his gun, but after they relieved him of it and shoved him inside to interrogate him, Digger also snarled at the informant. With Digger threatening them and Rex providing a little physical persuasion, they determined the informant was fake and his ‘friend’ was there to give them false information to lead them into a trap.

  Despite his apprehension, Rex managed to praise the dog, though he couldn’t bring himself to pat him and rough-house with him like Trevor did. He was wise enough to see and understand how valuable a dog trained like Digger could be. He and Trevor had talked about Digger’s capabilities after that, and they were truly amazing. Unlike American military dogs that specialized in one area, Digger had been trained in multiple tasks. He could scout, detect drugs, and protect his human pack, among other tasks.

  Trevor even claimed he learned some of his tricks on his own, like climbing ladders. Rex didn’t believe that. He’d have to see Digger acquire a new skill on his own before he’d believe the dog was a damn genius. But with a near-perfect memory, he took in everything Trevor told him about Digger’s skills, and he remembered them to this day.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kabul, Afghanistan, June 2013

  REX NEEDED LITTLE in the way of mission briefing, only the facts the FBI and CIA had turned up so far. He’d studied the sit-rep in Afghanistan and other volatile Middle Eastern countries avidly since joining the military. For eight years, much of his focus during down-time had been the proliferation of terrorist organizations and their sometimes-confusing relationships. In fact, everything that could be known about them, he devoured. While most Americans struggled to keep up with who their troops were fighting, Rex applied his understanding of history to the subject of why group after group sprang up, like zombie soldiers in the wake of eradication of one cell or another.

  The answer was discouraging. Not since the Second Sino-Japanese war, when Japanese occupation governments depended on opium taxes as a major source of revenue, had a corrupt government been so complicit in the production of opium poppies. In Afghanistan, the complex drug operation, from the farming of poppies to the illicit transport of the opium worldwide, ironically funded not only insurgents and the lawful provincial governments, but also the drug lords down to the drug dealers on the streets of Europe and the US.

  Nearly twelve years had passed since the start of the war in Afghanistan, costing American taxpayers over eight hundred and fifty billion dollars, and more importantly, the lives of over 2000 soldiers. The cost in support of hideously maimed troops and those whose wounds were invisible, but no less debilitating, would continue to add to that burden for the next half-century. And they were no closer to winning the war on terror than they’d been when George W. Bush declared it. To a large extent, the little pink flower, Papaver somniferum, commonly known as the opium poppy, was to blame.

  It put the military complex in the peculiar position of occasionally having to patrol and protect the fields that funded their opponents. And the Taliban, by tapping into the supply chain that Afghani officials taxed for their own profit and government funding, had become indistinguishable from a dedicated drug cartel. By now, the poppy farms represented more than forty percent of the country’s total crop and provided an estimated sixty percent of the Taliban’s funds for wages and weapons, as much as three billion dollars. That went a long way in the Middle East.

  The President had done nothing to deal with the underlying issue, so the Director of the CIA unilaterally and covertly provided a long-overdue order to destroy the middle part of the chain. He wanted the opium laboratories bombed. But there were an estimated four-hundred to five-hundred labs across Afghanistan. Carrying out the order would take extensive preparation and observation by surveillance, both on the ground and by air. Rex, in covert mode, was a major part of that surveillance.

  But before he could do much observation, he needed to develop a network of native collaborators. As a previous missi
on had so dramatically demonstrated, that required care and careful vetting of each person he enlisted to his network. One double agent, so to speak, in the chain, and Rex’s day would take a decidedly bad turn.

  He began the day after he arrived in Kabul. Though he was well able to run the mission on his own, he was grateful that CRC command had arranged the in-country support that Phoenix Unlimited would provide. His first task was to determine if they had any contacts he could leverage, and if those were trustworthy. He asked for another meeting with Frank after spending part of his night forming his operational plan, which by its very nature would have to be flexible.

  Frank met with him in a small conference room and brought one of his operatives with him. With a little reluctance, maybe because he didn’t know Rex and worried he’d burn the contact, he agreed to introduce Rex to someone who’d supplied reliable intelligence before. Rex understood the reluctance. He didn’t like sharing his contacts, either. Unfortunately, any he’d made in previous missions couldn’t be used again, because his cover this time didn’t match what they’d been told before. In addition, no one ever knew when a contact might have been turned, by persuasion, money, or pressure. And the various jihadist groups were not above spying on each other, either. So, anyone who could inform on the Taliban for him might as easily be informing on him to ISIS or a remnant of al-Qaeda. The saying among special operations people that you can’t buy an Afghani, you can only rent one, was still very true.

  Rex knew his efforts would require great patience. Nothing in the Middle East happened as fast as he liked, but pushing his new contacts too far, too fast, would be a good way to make a mistake and get dead. That wouldn’t help anyone, least of all him. So, the first day’s task was simply to meet the contact and pretend he was an agricultural consultant looking for a driver to take him out into the countryside as he learned the lay of the land.

  Rex also trusted that his unit would have put backup in place, in case the new contact wanted to investigate his story. He assumed the embassy would have been informed that an agricultural consultant would be operating in the area, along with a convincing backstory, including who’d sent him and why. If anyone dug much further, however, the story wouldn’t hold, which was why he had a second and third layer of legend with which to cover his true identity. Certainly, embassy personnel, even undeclared intelligence agents, would not know the ultimate truth. That would have put them, Rex, and CRC itself, in a precarious position.

  An ordinary man’s head would have spun with the interwoven layers of deceit. All CRC operatives had to have superlative memories, but Rex’s was outstanding even among the highly functioning memories of his colleagues. Though he didn’t quite have the near-mythical eidetic memory some attributed to him, it was so close that he could fool anyone challenging him. Maybe a psychological test could trip him up, just maybe. But otherwise, and for all practical purposes, he remembered everything. And that made him adept at sorting who knew what about him.

  So, after meeting the Phoenix operator’s contact, acting like a naïve and nervous civilian, and arranging for the Afghani to drive him the next day, Rex had some time on his hands. He filled it by acquiring some Afghani man-jammies from the local market and wandering the streets of Kabul to refresh his knowledge of what was happening in the areas he knew to be rife with Taliban-controlled businesses. It was much as he remembered from his last sojourn in Kabul. The next time he wandered down those streets, he’d look different, and no one would suspect he was the same hapless tourist he’d been today.

  ***

  HE RETURNED TO the compound in time for lunch, and accepted Trevor’s offer to show him a few new tricks Digger had learned. The man would never stop trying to get his two friends to accept each other, it seemed.

  “So, yesterday you told me the dog teaches himself new skills. Prove it. Show me something he couldn’t do last time we worked together,” Rex challenged.

  Trevor smiled. “First, ‘the dog’ has a name. And he understands when you call him a dog instead of by his name. I mean how would you feel if I called you ‘human’ instead of Rex or Dalton? He’s never going to accept you, if you don’t acknowledge his intelligence.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Trevor. You don’t expect me to apologize to the d… Digger… for my rudeness, do you?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt. He’s got feelings too, you know.”

  “Oh, great. Okay, then, Digger, I apologize for hurting your feelings.”

  “You have to say it sincerely. He understands sarcasm.”

  “That’s it. Does he know any new tricks, or are you just stalling?”

  Trevor grinned again. “Watch this.”

  More stupid human tricks had been proceeded by that phrase than any other. Rex expected to be wowed by whatever Trevor had up his sleeve. But he didn’t expect what happened next.

  Trevor looked at Digger, who had started wagging his tail excitedly, as if he already knew something exhilarating was going to be required of him momentarily. Trevor pointed to the roof and said, “Roof.”

  Rex couldn’t believe his eyes when the dog took off for a scraggly Russian olive tree near the sprawling, two-story residence. The tree branched low, maybe two feet from the ground, and one major trunk leaned toward the house at approximately a thirty-degree angle, branching into smaller and steeper growth as it hung over the top. In a flash, Digger’s dark body seemed to levitate as he ran up the trunk until he found purchase among the smaller branches. He hesitated, apparently deciding on which branch would support him best, then disappeared into the leaves before re-emerging in a leap that took him to the roof of the house.

  “I’ll be damned,” Rex said, impressed in spite of himself. “He taught himself to do that?”

  “Well, I may have helped him enhance the skill,” Trevor admitted. “I was playing with him, tossing him a Frisbee, and a gust of wind took it into the tree one day. He went after it, and next thing I knew, he was in that fork in the trunk. I just encouraged him to go higher, and then when he got to where he was climbing out over the roof, I combined what he’d learned to do with a command to jump over to the roof.”

  “And now he knows that roof means climb the tree and jump on?” Rex summarized.

  “Yeah. I’ve tested it with a few different trees and roofs. As long as the angle isn’t any steeper than this one and the tree is close enough to a structure, he can do it.”

  “Any tactical advantage?” Rex asked.

  “You know he can climb ladders and stairs are no issue for him, right?” Trevor asked. “So, if there’s a way into the house from the roof, he can infiltrate from above. No one expects that. He can sneak through the house with his camera, showing us what to expect. And if there’s only one haji in the house, he can subdue him before we even start to breach.”

  “I guess that would be handy,” Rex said. “Hmm. we can even drop Digger on a roof with a rappel line if there’s no tree nearby.”

  “Digger, off-down,” Trevor called. He handed Rex an oddly-shaped object made of hard rubber with a hole in one end. “Here,” he said. “You praise him. Maybe that will help him get over his distrust of you.”

  Rex blanched. “Hand him this? He’ll take my hand off!”

  Trevor cocked one eyebrow. “No, mate, just toss it to him. The Kong is his favorite toy. He won’t mind your scent on it, because he knows it’s a reward. Just toss it.”

  Rex glanced at Digger, who was charging toward him. He threw the Kong, and Digger caught it in mid-air, stopping his charge to joyfully play with the toy. Rex composed himself to suppress the sigh of relief he felt coming. That was close!

  “Want to see another?” Trevor asked.

  Rex did, and he didn’t. The dog was behaving itself and not threatening him, but he had some studying to do to plan how he’d get a close-up look at the poppy farms and the transport routes from them to the laboratories. He figured the easiest way to find the labs was to follow the goods. He had satellite images of the country, which wa
s slightly smaller in area than the state of Texas. Of course, Texas bragged it was the largest state in the union, dismissing Alaska as not counting because it wasn’t one of the contiguous forty-eight states.

  In any case, he had over two-hundred and fifty-thousand square miles to cover. It required a plan.

  “Nah, I’ll pass for today. Have some work to do.”

  “No worries mate. I’ll show you more next time then.”

  Rex pretended to be interested in the game of Frisbee Trevor started with Digger as he backed away. No way was he turning his back on that beast.

  ***

  REX DID HAVE a reason to be glad to get reacquainted with Trevor, despite his dislike of the canine company Trevor kept. Learning languages and speaking them with no accent was a talent as much as it was a skill for Rex. However, he’d been intrigued with various accents of English speakers he’d encountered in his travels. It was one thing to pass for French in France or for a native speaker of Arabic, but English was his mother tongue. To pass for British in the UK, or Aussie in Australia, he had to acquire an accent.

  He knew that whenever he learned a foreign language, he took on the accent of the teacher. Therefore, to acquire the accent of another English speaker, he had to immerse himself in that speaker’s presence to learn it. So, whenever he was in the compound, he took pains that it was in Trevor’s company.

  After only a couple of days, he thought he had it down cold. In some ways, Trevor’s accent was like that of Americans from the south or west of the country. Dropping the ‘g’ at the end of words came naturally to him, and so did the pronunciation of some vowels. Softening the ‘r’ at the ends of words was similar to a Boston accent. But remembering to do both took practice.