by JC Ryan
“Digger, leave it.” Rex couldn’t think of what Trevor always said when he meant for Digger to stand down, but he did remember the command for the dog to leave something alone, typically a piece of trash on the ground. He thought it was appropriate for the situation, and apparently Digger did, too. He got off the man but sat near him, staring.
The man didn’t try to rise. He brought his hands together in an entreaty and spoke to Rex in Arabic, apologizing and thanking Rex for saving him.
Rex answered in Arabic. “Get up. Do exactly as I say, or I’ll let the demon devour you.”
Ammoniac odor rose as the man’s bladder control failed him. “Please. I beg you. I’ll do whatever you want. Kill me yourself, but please do not let the demon have me, I beg of you.”
Rex took a deep breath to get control over his temper. “Stand up, you piss-ant. You triggered that explosion. Who helped you?”
The haji found enough courage to claim he’d done it on his own. He was lying, and Digger started growling.
Rex said, “The demon says you’re lying, and he says he’s hungry.”
“I only followed orders,” the man stuttered. “The house was to be demolished…” He stopped talking and wailed as a hand signal Rex found somewhere in his memory brought Digger to his feet, his upper lip pulled back in a silent snarl, his teeth bared.
“Tell the truth, or it’s breakfast time for the demon,” Rex said. He was impressed with himself for remembering the signal for ‘threaten’, and with Digger for following it without balking that it was Rex who ordered it.
“Please, make it stop. I will tell you.”
Rex said, “Leave it.”
Digger let his muzzle relax, backed away one step, and sat down again, never taking his eyes off the man. Occasionally a low growl rumbled from his throat.
Rex spoke again, this time to the haji. “Start talking and leave nothing out.”
Stumbling over his words in his eagerness to comply, the Afghan spilled the plot, named the two men who’d rigged the explosives and then left.
He pointed out the bunks in which each had slept and stressed that they were acting on the orders of Usama the Lion. They were to rig the place with explosives and leave only one to trigger it, which he’d done. He had no idea where Usama lived; he only spoke to him on the phone twice – once when he got instructions to rig the house with explosives, and once when he reported the explosion. The two men who helped him worked for Usama.
It didn’t surprise Rex. Despite still being a little concussed and hazy, he’d already figured out that one or more drug lords gave the orders to blow the house up. What he wanted to know was how it all fit together. This was just part of the big picture. One didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that someone in America had a finger in this pie.
But the haji had no information about that. Not even Digger was able to get that information out of him. Simply because he didn’t know; he was only a lowly bomber.
The haji soon told him that he had to make a call to an Afghan cellphone number after triggering the explosion, which he dutifully did. He was told to not visit the site after the explosion or be seen in the proximity.
The Director of the CIA gave the order to John Brandt, who gave the order to Rex. Rex would not believe the Old Man to be corrupt until he had incontrovertible evidence to that effect. The DCIA corrupt? Maybe, maybe not – he didn’t know the man. Anyone else? Possible, actually, highly likely. Rex didn’t think that the DCIA, if he was part of this treachery, would be directly connected to the Afghan drug lords. Whoever was involved, one thing was certain, Rex and his team had been sold out. To protect the Afghan drug trade.
There was no one he could trust now, not even the Old Man or anyone at CRC. The people he could trust, Frank and Trevor, plus the rest of the team, had been killed to protect the Afghan drug trade, and he was supposed to be dead with them.
He’d been cut off from everyone and everything that was part of his life so far.
Rex shook his head. He’d have time to mourn lost friends later. He’d have time to wreak his rage and vengeance on this cabal of conspirators. For now, though, he knew he needed a plan, a watertight one.
Therefore, step one for Rex was he had to stay dead. The problem was at the site there were only seven bodies, there needed to be eight. It had been a couple of hours since the explosion, but he’d heard no sirens. Someone had been bribed and police weren’t coming. It gave him time to take care of his problem and disappear.
Only a few minutes had passed while Rex thought at the speed of a supercomputer. Now his attention returned to the inside of the mud hut.
Rex looked at his captive and then at Digger and said, “Stay. Guard.”
Digger took a step closer to the man and screwed on his terror face. The haji closed his eyes and shivered. He kept his eyes closed.
Rex quickly searched the place for any documents and anything else that might lead him to the other bombers and their leaders. There were no documents or computers, but he found the cellphone, switched it off and took the battery out so no one could track it down. He found C4 wrapped in a plastic bag inside a tin and three detonators in another tin and a remote trigger in another.
Rex walked over to the two bunks pointed out by the haji as the place where his bomber friends slept and called Digger over.
The haji kept his eyes closed and remained unmoving apart from the uncontrollable shaking.
Rex placed the cellphone, the battery, the three tins with explosives, detonators, and the trigger in his backpack.
“Let’s go,” Rex ordered as he unceremoniously pulled the haji up by his hair and shoved him out the door.
Digger rose and followed.
The three walked up the hill, but as soon as the man saw the destruction, his steps slowed.
“Keep going.” Rex’s voice was implacable. He encouraged the man to go faster by shoving him in the back with the muzzle of his silenced SIG Sauer P226 every few steps.
Arriving back at the site, Rex picked a spot, one of the craters left by the explosion before. To relieve a little of his rage, he decided the man would be treated to a little of what his fellow terrorists would do to their enemies.
“On your knees.”
He’d have preferred to let Digger rip out his throat, but it might have set a bad precedent to allow the dog to kill when he didn’t have to.
He pointed the pistol at the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger.
The bomber tumbled forward into the crater.
Rex divided the C4 into three pieces and fitted each piece with a detonator and placed it under the body; one piece each under the head, the torso, and the lower part of the body. He covered the body with some of the debris.
Rex wished he didn’t have to do his next task, for Digger’s sake and his own, but he had no choice. He went back to the spot where Trevor’s body laid and retrieved the mic, which Trevor used to communicate with Digger. The iPad was damaged beyond repair. At least he could now talk to Digger remotely if the situation called for it. He also retrieved Trevor’s SIG Sauer P226 and the three spare magazines, and stuffed it all into the canvas bag.
Rex got up and called Digger to follow him.
The two of them took position behind the perimeter wall of the property and Rex detonated the explosives.
He and Digger made a quick inspection. Rex was happy, there were now pieces of eight bodies onsite. The last body in significantly more, and much smaller, pieces than the other seven.
It was 1:53 a.m. Now to find the remaining two bombers who would give him the information about Usama’s whereabouts.
Chapter Fifteen
CRC Headquarters, Arizona, June 22, 11:30 a.m.
JOHN BRANDT HAD every confidence in his man, but after handing down the DCIA’s orders to Rex he had time to sit back and think. The nature of CRC’s work was such that they always had to be ready to swing into action at a moment’s notice. Short timeframes were not new to Brandt or h
is men. However, something about the abrupt about-face of the government’s Afghan opium policy was bothering him. He’d read Rex’s reports, practically begging for a chance to do something about the Afghan drug trade for the past six months or more. Brandt had personally sent those reports to Carson. But Carson gave all except one of the reports the silent treatment. The one exception was a two-word reply: “Permission denied.”
Now, suddenly, totally out of the blue, CRC had been ordered to gatecrash a drug lord/Taliban meeting, kill all the participants, and blow up all drugs found on the premises. If Rex and his men were caught, they’d face Afghan justice, or worse, terrorist justice. When Carson had called him, Brandt had only thought of two things – one, that Rex would finally get his chance, and two, that there was no time to waste.
Now that the operation was in progress, maybe even over, with no word yet, he started to wonder if he shouldn’t have wasted a little time to think things through and ask a few more questions. But the nature of the work they did and the shadow world they operated in was such that they were not expected to question the motivations for missions, only to execute them successfully.
He’d been expecting Dalton’s call any time after midnight, Afghanistan time. Normally, his sleep patterns were serene, even when he had one or more teams in the field with dangerous mission parameters. His men were the best on the planet, he had no doubt in his mind about that. Therefore, he didn’t worry like a parent whose teenage daughter was out late on a blind date. But after apprising Dalton of the changed mission parameters, despite the confidence he had in the man, something, which he couldn’t lay his finger on, was bedeviling the melatonin in his brain, making it impossible to get back to sleep.
At eleven-thirty on the morning of June 22, he began to fidget. Dalton’s call should come in any time now. Brandt downed his fourth cup of coffee of the morning, an indulgence because of his sleepless night, which didn’t do anything but make him even more jittery. He attributed his nerves to the unusual caffeine load and schooled himself to be patient. In the next half-hour, he snapped at his adjutant for no reason and had to apologize, handled a supplies delivery snafu, and began pacing aimlessly in and out of his office as noon approached.
Telling himself that Rex must be dealing with some kind of cleanup issue, he forced himself to go to the mess hall to have lunch with the teams who were onsite. He usually had his lunch in his office. Eating with the men didn’t help either. He wolfed his food down as if he had to be somewhere, stat. He mumbled what sounded like an excuse, left the table, and hurried back to his office, with his senior instructors staring askance at each other. It didn’t have to be vocalized – the Old Man was out of sorts and they knew not to ask.
By 12:30 p.m., he was pacing again. Why hadn’t Dalton called? He found busy-work to keep from panicking, but an hour later, he was about to pick up the phone to call Carson to tell him something was not right, when it rang under his hand. He snatched it up.
DCIA Carson was on the line. “Congrats on a good job!” he said, failing to announce his name.
He wouldn’t think to say who it is, thought Brandt. Damn narcissist. Aloud, he said, “Afghanistan?”
“What else?” Carson said, but he continued without waiting for an answer. “I just got word from Kabul, the COS, Chief of Station,” Carson explained as if Brandt wouldn’t know what the acronym meant. “Seems there was a huge explosion in that strange-name place Koh-e something, a couple of hours ago. Apparently at 11:40 Juliet, to be exact.
“But I guess you already know all of it, don’t you?”
Brandt cleared his throat. “No, in fact I don’t. I haven’t heard from my man as yet.”
“Hmm, is that normal?”
“No, absolutely not normal. He should have been in contact long ago but has not. Especially if it’s as you said, that there was an explosion in that area. I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Let me see what I can do from my end to speed things up. The COS told me he has been trying to get more information, but in that place nothing happens fast. However, I think we can tick this one off as a success. Cheer up man, sounds like everything went according to plan. I’m looking forward to reading your man’s detailed post-mission report. In the meantime, congrats to your man over there on a job well-done.”
Brandt made suitable noises, just to get Carson off the line as quick as possible, but his mind was going a million miles a minute. No way would the COS have received word before Rex Dalton reported in, if everything had gone according to plan. That was not how he was trained, and that was not how he operated.
He kept his thought to himself. Maybe it was his sense of self-preservation, or maybe it was his years of experience as a spy dealing with deceit and misdirection. In either case, this wasn’t the time to blurt out his misgivings about the situation. He thanked Carson for the update and put the phone down.
Brandt now had more reason to be concerned as he stared at his satellite phone, willing it to ring. He couldn't help but start playing out all possible scenarios in his mind, concluding in the end, the least likely of them all was the one the DCIA told him about.
He was not a pessimistic kind of man by nature, but he was not stupid; he was a realist. If the mission was a success, Rex would have phoned him by now. Rex had a satellite phone with him. If he was incapable of calling because of injury or worse, one of the team members would have called someone in the CIA office in Kabul. Whatever the situation, it just didn't make sense that the COS would have gotten information through the Afghan police and military grapevine before Rex or a team member would’ve called.
There was probably only one logical inference one could draw. The mission was in some kind of trouble, and then the questions were: What went wrong? How did it go wrong? Where did it go wrong? Who was responsible for it going wrong?
Every avenue of thought led him back to one dead end, unbeknownst to Brandt, the same as Rex’s – betrayal.
The question now was who was behind that? Was Carson directly involved, or had he been duped as well? If by some miracle, Rex was alive, the next question was how would he see it, and how would he react to it?
Brandt called Rick Longland to his office. “Have a seat, Rick. I want to run something past you.”
Longland had one look at Brandt and knew something was wrong, and it was not just a niggly little problem, this was a major problem.
Brandt explained the situation, how he’d been called just about twelve hours before by the DCIA, and the mission details given to him, which he had passed on to Rex to execute. Without stating his own concerns, he related the call he’d just taken from Carson.
“What do you think?”
Longland’s face had turned white. He and John Brandt were old friends. They’d known each other for more than thirty years. As the chief psychologist at CRC, his job was not just to test the agents to make sure they hadn’t lost their marbles and become a menace to society. He also had to support them and help them deal with loss, and grief, and killing human beings, nightmares, and stress such as Brandt was displaying right now.
“John, it’s obvious something’s out of the ordinary, no argument there. Difficult as it might be right now, you’ll have to wait until you have more information. I don’t have to tell you that – you know it as well as I do.
“Dalton is your blue-eyed boy, that’s no secret to me, and for that very reason, it’s necessary that you get hold of yourself and wait until you know more.”
“Yeah, right,” Brand sighed. “Easier said than done.”
“Bring your sat phone and let’s go for walk,” Longland suggested, as he could think of nothing else to say that would calm his friend down.
Chapter Sixteen
Koh-e Shir Darwaza, Kabul, Afghanistan June 23, 2:23 a.m.
REX DECIDED HE had to get back to his truck, get out of there, disappear for a while, and stay low until he could gather information about the other bombers and locate them.
Digger w
as sitting a few yards away, looking at Rex as if studying his mind.
“Come on, Digger, let’s go.”
Digger didn’t get up, but he looked back in the direction of the hut where they’d found the haji. He turned his head back toward Rex, yawned wide, and then snapped his mouth shut with an audible click of his teeth.
Rex was tired, discouraged, and grief-stricken. Saddled with a dog he neither wanted nor knew how to handle, he was in no mood to brook mutiny. He thought about grabbing Digger’s collar and dragging him to the truck. Second thoughts stopped him.
His own phobias left him reluctant to get that close in the first place. More to the point, he’d seen Digger take down men and he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that treatment. Another thought quickly followed. Physical force had never been Trevor’s way of handling Digger. Rex suspected he’d blow his chances of ever working with the dog if he tried that. And if he was going to be responsible for Digger, though he didn’t yet know how that would even be possible, then the dog would certainly need to earn his keep.
Rex had to admit, Digger could be a useful ally. He certainly had been during the raids he and Trevor had visited on the drug operations so far. He’d been vital to the operation they’d just completed – Rex wouldn’t have even known the haji was out there without Digger. He could see potential. But if it was going to work, the damn dog had to listen to him and obey, not just some of the time, but all of the time. He was honest enough to understand he would also need to learn how to interpret the dog’s cues.
For now, though, Rex was certain he knew what was best. Impatiently, he called the dog again. “Digger, come!”
Digger tilted his head in that questioning gesture all dogs have. But he didn’t get up. Instead, he gave a short, soft growl, and then a sharp yip. If Rex hadn’t known the dog couldn’t literally speak English, he’d have sworn Digger had just said, “No!” From the look on his face, maybe even “No! Get lost!”
