by JC Ryan
Rex believed the quantities of junk that made it to American shores meant the Mob, and by extension, one or more highly-placed government officials and by the same token, politicians, had to be involved. The same probably held true in Europe and elsewhere. He could cut the tail off the rattlesnake here in Afghanistan. But cutting off the end that delivered the poison, the head, would require intel from home and in Europe.
He wasn’t concerned about leaving his mission in Afghanistan to pursue that. He had a team at home who could do it and would do it. All he had to do was report his findings. So, he did. The Old Man replied that CRC would be working on it from that end. Just continue what he was doing, and they’d get word to him if anything else was required.
To pass the time, he planned a few more raids on the small-fry labs. Rex, Trevor, and Digger had a bit more fun, and the supply was cut by maybe five percent. It was too little for Rex’s preference, but more would have signaled the locals that an operation sanctioned offshore was probably in progress. That would have jeopardized his legitimate mission, so he had to be content with picking off the odd small farmer’s lab now and then.
He started a rumor that the farmers were targeting each other, which fomented a minor war among them, and in the process, some of them took out each other’s labs. With the terrorist groups distracted by sorting that out, he succeeded in interrupting the supply chain for another five percent, he reckoned.
Digger had finally begun to reluctantly accept him. Which meant the dog didn’t growl at his approach anymore but continued to make his opinions known during conversations between Trevor and Rex. Trevor thought it was hilarious, but he made sure to instruct Digger every time they were together that Rex was a friend. Not doing so would jeopardize any covert operations they carried out together. Digger would protect his pack with his life. Not so much anyone outside the pack. As far as the dog was concerned, although he would have seen Rex as part of his pack, Rex was still on probation.
In the evenings when Rex was inside the compound fence, they practiced having him give Digger his commands. Digger resisted a little at first. His expression often reminded Trevor of a kid, saying, “Really? Why am I being punished?” However, with enough play and praise, he began to obey without question. Rex was growing more confident of Digger’s abilities, though still not fond of Digger himself. Digger clearly picked up on the disunity of Rex’s thoughts and emotions. But, like Rex, when he was working, he kept his opinions to himself.
Other than the planning for the raids, Rex was done with his work out in the fields. He was now deep undercover in Kabul, which meant he’d acquired lodgings and a rattletrap pickup truck. He couldn’t be seen entering Phoenix’s compound. Everyone knew they were military contractors, whereas Rex was passing as a native-born lowlife who was looking for a way into the drug trade. Because he was new in town, he wasn’t yet trusted by the people he dealt with every day. His actions were closely watched, and it became more difficult to interact with Frank and his team.
Rex assumed that the telephone in his lodgings was bugged, and he couldn’t keep his cell phone or sat phone on him. He was subjected to a search anytime he met with a go-between, and he hadn’t yet earned enough trust to meet one of the regional drug lords. The majors were beyond his reach as well, and he was still trying to get names. Once he wormed his way into their confidence, he felt sure he’d have the names of the Americans he most wanted to find. Whoever was controlling the distribution network, he felt certain lived in New York and the other big cities. And he was a hundred percent sure some of them had addresses in Washington DC.
Naturally, with each step on the ladder to that end, Rex put himself in more danger. If he were caught he would very soon find his head separated from his shoulders. Only his prodigious memory and his facile grasp of the Arabic dialect most prevalent in Kabul stood between him and an early grave. It should have been terrifying. For Rex, it was like a euphoric drug. Before now, he’d been this exhilarated only in the midst of an action mission. Now he felt like he’d had a hit of the heroin he was tracing, only all the time.
As the weeks went by and temperatures began to drop to more pleasant seventy-degree levels, Rex, with the help of Frank’s team, began to make small breakthroughs.
He learned the names of a dozen minor drug lords, along with the strength of their bank accounts and their private armies. He acquired plans for their compounds, and he learned who controlled which major labs. He also learned that the two or three major drug lords didn’t sully their hands with the operational side of things. That was left to the small-fries. The big guns were Afghan officials, politicians, and Middle Eastern royalty. The US and European connections were still missing, but he had no doubt they were there. He would find them.
He wanted to sort the drug kingpins out, orders or no orders. But they were the key to learning who the traitors were among his own people. He was forced to leave them alone for two reasons. One, he had been ordered to gather intel and do nothing else. That one he’d violated already, but not in a major way, and no one other than he and Trevor and Digger knew about it. Two, he needed the slime, at least long enough to interrogate them when he finally got the order – if he finally got the order – to take them out. Because they were the only ones who knew the next link in the chain.
Chapter Thrity-One
Kabul, Afghanistan November 2013
BACK HOME, PEOPLE were getting tired of a war that was beginning to rival Vietnam for the longest in American history. From the beginning of the draft for Vietnam to the end of the war – not with a bang but a whimper – was eleven years, though the total was longer due to American involvement prior to the draft being reinstated. Afghanistan had just finished its twelfth year in the previous month.
In similar fashion, Rex was also getting tired of his longest and most boring mission ever, not to mention the frustrations he experienced. He could see nothing that indicated the intel he was sending over to CRC was put to use by the CIA or anyone else. He was the only one who was making any difference to the drug trade, and that was not even a drop in the ocean. Around the time people back home were planning their Thanksgiving feasts, Rex ended his report with a simple request to make his extracurricular activities official. “Permission to take out the trash.”
The answer came back, “Permission denied.”
Rex didn’t think the Old Man was part of the problem, but he was certainly preventing Rex from being part of the solution. Rex just sighed and continued to follow orders, to the extent he’d been following them for the past few months. He continued pulling on the threads of information he and Frank’s team found. The raids on minor opium labs run by farmers ended, since the poppy growing cycle was now in the planting stage, and the harvest wouldn’t begin again until next May.
Rex wanted to target the stores of raw opium, morphine bricks, and heroin that were making their way through the supply chain, but these were bigger targets and would attract more attention. Instead, he turned his focus to finding one or more threads that stretched overseas, all the way to America. Now, instead of blowing up ramshackle sheds where opium was beginning its transformation to morphine, he went about searching for information in more sophisticated and surreptitious ways.
Even though he was a man of action now, Rex had not forgotten the lessons of his university days, nor those from CRC training in electronic surveillance and hacking. He divided his time between two locations; the streets – the market and the simple lodgings where he slept – and furtive entry to the Phoenix compound where he could access state-of-the-art internet and top-of-the-line computer equipment that would have excited comment if anyone had seen it in his humble rooms.
The threads he was pulling on all led to the dozen or so local drug lords, and from there to the majors. Any open breach in the middle-man organizations would send the top people into hiding. Rex therefore began actively trying to be ‘hired’ into those organizations, though he made it look casual. At coffee with people he met
in the marketplaces, he’d mention he was looking for work. Sometimes he’d take temporary jobs when they were offered. He knew he was being tested and failing a test would be the end of him. So helping to build mud huts, digging a trench here and there, and even cleaning places was not beneath him.
All the while he’d silently observe, pick up a name here or there, and then the next time he’d visit the Phoenix compound, he’d run the name through his search programs, through the Deep Web as well as hacking into banking records, government files – the usual lines of inquiry. He was building a database that would topple the entire network when it was complete. If only the powers-that-be back home would pull their heads out of an anatomically impossible place and do something with his intelligence.
The issue wasn’t that he couldn’t get information. The issue was that there was a lot of noise – disinformation – to sort through to get at the truth. And that truth itself was a slippery concept among these people. The phrase ‘there is no honor among thieves’ originated in the Middle East, after all. Too much information was just as bad as not enough, and Rex was ready to be done with this part of the mission and go after the real problem.
For nearly two months, he patiently gathered the information and pieced together the network from the farmers to the buyers, from the buyers to the money-men, and from the money-men to the controllers – those three to five drug overlords who pulled all the strings.
By the time the President was a year into his second term, Rex felt he had everything anyone could possibly need to take down the trade in Afghanistan. It would have been a quick operation for a few Special Forces units who could strike in one coordinated effort. One big bang, end of the Afghan opium trade. But the silence and inaction were deafening. Neither was he authorized to act on it, nor even to lift a finger.
Rex had been in Afghanistan for seven long months and he had to question the purpose of his mission. If no one is going to do anything about it, what the hell have I been doing here for seven months? Their inaction was as annoying as it was beyond understanding.
He recalled with perfect clarity what he’d been told years before about the situation that gave birth to CRC. Political correctness, lack of will to act or support field agents, looking out for ‘number one’ and the rest of it hadn’t improved. If anything, it was worse than before. He was beginning to believe that those very factors that necessitated the establishment of CRC had now crept into its mission parameters. And if that was the case, he was in the wind, questioning whether he’d become one of those unsupported field agents through creeping corruption that may have tainted even the Old Man.
The situation was intolerable, and it wouldn’t be resolved here. He had to wrap this up, orders or no orders, and get back home. Rex decided to shake things up before he headed home and before the new poppy harvest started the whole process over again.
***
ONE NIGHT, WITH Trevor and Digger along as his wing-men, he sneaked into the compound of the second most-powerful drug lord in Kabul to steal any records they could find. Failing that, they’d kidnap one of the guards to extract codes and passwords and try again. They didn’t want to target the boss himself. That would have raised too much alarm. One guard going missing would be enough to cause security to be tightened, maybe. But Rex had observed enough to know that the concept of tight security in Kabul was an oxymoron.
The man’s office was guarded, even in the wee hours of the morning that Rex preferred for reconnaissance. Digger’s tree-climbing trick got him into the walled compound and onto the roof of the residence. From there, he slipped down a set of stairs that led from the roof to the second floor, and inside. From their observation point outside the compound gate, Digger was a shadow on the roof and stairs, until he disappeared inside. From that point, they observed his progress on the iPad.
Digger padded silently through the upper floor, alerting at doors where he detected people, but then continuing. No doubt the people he’d found were asleep and snoring in their beds. There were no guards in the halls, so Trevor instructed Digger to continue down the next set of stairs he found.
Downstairs, it was not as dark. Wall sconces in the hallways left pools of yellow light that Digger’s predator instincts assured he avoided, sticking to the shadows in between.
He slipped through the halls without raising any alarms, and when he found a set of double doors guarded by a man with a gun on either side, he crept under a chair where he and the camera on his back had a direct view and settled in, waiting for Trevor’s orders. Outside, Rex and Trevor watched the pattern of the guards’ movements on the iPad, while Trevor provided praise and commands to Digger to stay where he was.
When they’d established the guards’ pattern, Rex and Trevor exhibited some tree-climbing skill of their own and took the same route Digger had into the residence. They flowed through the upper hallway like smoke, and down the stairs. Around the corner from the office, they waited, hidden, until one guard left in the other direction on a patrol of his side of the residence. They knew he’d return in about fifteen minutes, and then the other guard would patrol his side – the side where they were waiting.
With hand gestures, Rex indicated to Trevor that he should recall Digger and wait with him in the furthest part of the wing where they were hiding. They’d take ‘their’ guard when he made his rounds. Rex would wait, hidden, until he’d passed and another five minutes. Then, with Trevor’s whispered assurance in his coms earpiece, Rex would overpower the remaining guard and force him to open the office.
Both guards would have to be taken so they wouldn’t raise the alarm after Rex had left the office. For the crime of working for a drug lord, they’d receive the death penalty at Rex’s hands. But that couldn’t be helped. As far as the drug lord and the rest of his minions would know, the guards would have just run off for some reason. Rex had an idea about that, too.
The plan went off without a hitch, until it came time for Rex’s captive to open the office doors. He pleaded that he didn’t have a key, nor the combination to the electronic lock. His boss’s finger was the only thing that would open it, he claimed. After some ungentle persuasion failed to shake his story, Rex concluded he was telling the truth. He’d have to try again, with a different method next time. However, they’d already overstayed their mission schedule. At any moment, either guard could decide to risk making a noise in spite of being told it would cost them their lives.
Rex hustled the guard down the hall to where Trevor and Digger were holding the other. A pungent odor coming from the vicinity of the second guard testified to his terror of the large, menacing dog standing guard over him. The guard Rex was herding drew up short and whispered a horrified, “Alshaytan!” before joining his cohort at Rex’s prodding. Even when Rex asked him, in whispered Arabic, if he could walk, the second guard wouldn’t speak. Trevor had the unpleasant task of helping the man up, damp serwal – his loose pants – and all.
With the guards’ reluctant cooperation, the trio of would-be thieves exited the compound through a back gate into an alley. They pushed the guards in front of them until they reached Rex’s old pickup, where they tied them up and boosted them into the back. An hour later, they dispatched each with a bullet to the back of the head.
“Well, that was a waste of time,” Trevor remarked.
“Not entirely. The terrorist count has gone down by two,” Rex answered.
“Drug traffickers,” Trevor corrected.
“Same difference,” Rex said.
They didn’t talk on the way back to Phoenix. Rex wanted to think about how he’d get in again and this time make it into the inner sanctum.
One possibility: the drug lord now had two vacancies for guards.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kabul, Afghanistan January 2014
FOR A MONTH that in most of the US would be the coldest of the year, January in Kabul was not too bad. Some days it was as warm as forty degrees Fahrenheit, and the average was about twenty-eigh
t. Rex preferred to think in Fahrenheit, because a negative two-point-something sounded much colder. In Kabul, adding a traditional sadri, or sleeveless vest to his man-jammies was sufficient.
However, it was much colder in the higher mountain villages, so on this day Rex went to the market in search of a warmer coat. He was trying to decide whether to purchase one made of heavy quilted fabric, felt, or sheepskin, when a soft cry from the back of the stall where he was shopping earned his attention.
It sounded like a child in distress. All primates, even childless humans including Special Forces operators, are programmed to respond to a juvenile distress call. Rex could no more have ignored it than he could have voluntarily stopped breathing. He dropped the two coats he was comparing and moved swiftly in the direction of the sound he’d heard.
In a moment, the shop’s proprietor appeared through the opening in the curtains that divided the stall from the family’s living quarters. Apparently reading Rex’s intentions, he stepped smoothly into his path.
“Do not worry. It was nothing. My son fell and hurt his knee. His mother is attending to him.”
Rex looked at the older man. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that the man, who appeared to be in his sixties, might have a young wife and a toddler. But something in the man’s expression made him suspicious that it wasn’t so simple. Nevertheless, he heard no more cries, and he couldn’t put his finger on the reason for the hunch.
“I am glad it was no more serious,” he answered politely.
Rex went back to comparing coats. Deciding he didn’t like the man who now watched him like a vulture, he smiled, bowed slightly in the man’s direction, and went to the next stall to buy his coat.
