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

by JC Ryan

  For the first time in recent memory, Rex couldn’t think of a thing he could do to resolve the impasse. If Digger had been a human team member and defied him like that, Rex would have knocked him down and showed him who was boss. He’d already rejected that tactic with Digger, but the only alternative he knew was persuasion, and he didn’t think that would work, either.

  He tried. “Digger, please get in the truck.”

  Digger looked away.

  “Digger, get in the truck!” Shouting didn’t work, either.

  When Digger still defied the direct order, Rex threw up his hands in frustration. Shit, he thinks he’s the alpha. How am I supposed to take care of him if he won’t listen to me?

  “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked, certain he was losing the argument, along with his patience.

  Digger got up and started sniffing around in widening circles. Rex watched, mystified. A few minutes later Digger stopped, sat down, gave a low growl to get Rex’s attention and started off back in the direction of the mud hut.

  “Damn it, Digger, it’s just you and me now. You better learn I am in charge, and you have to listen to me. Come on, get in the truck, or I’m leaving without you.” Rex knew it was a hollow threat. His buddy, Trevor, maybe his best friend in the world after the year they’d spent together and all the adventures they’d had, had asked Rex with his dying words to take care of the damn dog. And take care of Digger he would, whether Digger liked it or not.

  Digger must have known Rex was talking out of his hat, too. He just looked over his shoulder back at Rex as if to say, “You coming or not?”

  “All right, have it your way. Shit, now I’m following orders from a dog. I must be losing my mind.” Rex soon realized he was also speaking his thoughts aloud, and if Digger’s behavior was any sign, there could be more tangos out there. In fact, he knew there were, though he thought they were out of the area by now. Digger, though, seemed determined to find them. Rex stopped talking abruptly.

  He gave up and followed the dog. It had paid off last time. Maybe the haji’s companions had returned. Rex hoped so. It would save him the trouble of tracking them down later, and he thought it might be prudent to let Digger follow their scent trail before too many hours passed, as well. He’d learned a lot about Digger’s capabilities from Trevor, but he’d never thought to ask how long a scent remained viable for the dog to follow.

  Had Rex asked Trevor about it, Trevor would have told him that once a dog gets a human’s scent it gets engraved in the dog’s memory. He never forgets it and will point out the human regardless of time passed. So even if the scent in the air and on the ground might be wiped out over time, and the dog might not be able to follow it, he will remember it when he encounters it again, even years later. And the dog will associate that scent with how the human treated or mistreated him or anyone of his pack. Some say an elephant never forgets; it’s the same with dogs.

  But it was too late now to ask Trevor anything. He’d have to trust the dog.

  As he’d thought, Digger’s destination was the hut. When Rex got there, Digger was sniffing and pawing at the bedding on one of the two bunks. He ripped the thin mattress to shreds and buried his nose in the mess, then snorted and started on the second mattress. Rex didn’t stop him. He was too busy wondering how much of the terrorist’s confession Digger had understood. It made no sense to him. Digger ‘spoke’ English, or to be precise, Australian English, not Arabic.

  Rex was a little spooked at the thought that Digger could have reasoned out the meaning of the haji’s confession. Not only that, but he remembered long enough to help Rex before coming back to finish the job he’d set himself – finding everyone responsible for the tragedy. Being spooked didn’t stop Rex from being impressed, though. He decided to let the dog’s intentions play out.

  “What is it, boy? Have you got the scent of the others?”

  Digger looked up and gave Rex a stare with eyes that looked alert. He’d stopped tearing the mattresses apart. He gave a soft woof and began snuffling along the floor, following the random movements of the missing tangos, Rex assumed. For some reason of his own, Digger continued out the door after sniffing over what Rex could only think of as a grid he’d laid out in his canine mind. Rex followed him.

  Rex decided it couldn’t hurt to make the dog think it was his idea to follow the trail. “Digger, track.”

  The dog’s ears pricked back at the sound of his name, and he stopped, twisted his head back toward Rex, and yawned again. He wagged his tail, to the right, and then trotted off, with Rex jogging to keep up.

  What did Trevor tell me about wagging tails? To the left, happy, to the right… what the hell? He’s annoyed with me? Rex was beginning to understand that he had a lot of dog lore to learn before he’d be able to interpret all Digger’s non-verbal cues. What’s all that yawning about, anyway? Does it mean he’s tired, or is he telling me something? When people yawn, they’re sometimes bored.

  Half a mile away, Digger went into what appeared to be a cave in a hillside and didn’t come out again. Alarmed, Rex called him. Rex wasn’t prepared to go into a cave where an ambush might have been waiting without a lot more scouting and maybe some backup.

  A minute later, Digger came to the opening, looked at Rex with an expression that plainly said. “What are you waiting for?” and ducked back in, Rex had no choice but to follow, albeit cautiously.

  Digger has never led me, us, into trouble before.

  Ducking through the opening, he discovered a big, airy space that had been artificially enlarged and braced with lumber. No one was there, but evidence of recent occupation remained in the lit lanterns that gave him a good view of the space. Including, it seemed, the scent of at least one of the two men Digger was tracking. The dog was disappearing into a narrow opening at the back of the cave that looked like a tunnel.

  “Digger, no,” Rex said. He thought it may have been his urgency, or maybe that was a command he was trained to follow without question. In any case, it worked.

  The dog turned around and gave him a ‘why not?’ look. Rex felt a little ridiculous as he conversed with the dog, but he didn’t know of any other way to keep him from disappearing down that tunnel, and Rex wasn’t going there. Not right now. Who knew where it led? “We don’t have time right now. We’ll come back to it, I promise. Please come with me now. We have work to do.”

  Digger’s ears pricked up at the word work. He turned and padded to Rex, then sat down and cocked his head.

  “Hey, what do you know? You do understand, don’t you?”

  Digger smiled. That was how Rex thought of it, the only way he could think of it. He took it to mean, “Yes, you idiot, of course I understand.”

  “I think we’re going to get along okay,” he said. “But I still don’t like you.” He was only half-kidding. Digger gave him a disdainful stare and then padded out of the cave. Rex was going to have to watch what he said to the damn beast from now on. Maybe he was a demon.

  Or maybe, just maybe, Rex thought, I could learn to like him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Koh-e Shir Darwaza, Kabul, Afghanistan June 23, 2:59 a.m.

  IT WAS ABOUT 3:00 a.m. when Digger set off in a direction away from the caves and the mud hut, clearly following the scent of at least one of the men who slept on those bunks in the mud hut. Relieved, Rex followed. He was tired and hungry and still a bit unsteady from his concussion. His emotions were playing havoc on him. The explosion and death of the team brought back all the memories of his family being killed in the same way more than ten years ago.

  Following the dog mindlessly, trusting it to warn him of any approaching danger, he turned to trying to figure out who betrayed him. He strongly suspected someone either in the CIA or controlling the CIA, but how did it all fit together – who were all the players? Where were they? Most of all, he wanted to be confident that John Brandt, his mentor and leader, had nothing to do with it. Could he trust his judgement on that? He thought so, bu
t his thinking was muddled right now. He had at least a minor head injury, and he wasn’t sure he was firing on all cylinders. He was going in circles - his initial reasoning was all he had to go by – someone in America, that much he was sure of. Either someone who’d fed the DCIA false intel, or it could be the DCIA himself, although that was hard to believe, but not impossible. More than likely, others were also involved, no matter which it was with the DCIA. But who and how?

  Did the CIA get wind of his actions over the past few months and decide to stop him? If so, then why didn’t they just force Brandt to recall him? Otherwise, they would have set this up by conferring with the drug lords. Or the drug lords had contacts in high places in America, which he knew had to be the case, or the policy would have been different from the beginning. Maybe the whole thing was initiated from the Afghan side. Maybe the drug lords got in touch with the US contacts and persuaded them to stop the destruction of their business.

  In the end, Rex realized it didn’t matter much who initiated it – there was a network of high ranking corrupt people in Afghanistan and the US. They were working together, and they were all responsible for what happened tonight. All of them were guilty, and he was going to pay all of them a visit – not right now – not in the next month or year or maybe a few years, but a visit from him was in the cards for each and every one of them.

  Rex was so lost in his musings that he barely paid attention to where he was going, just keeping Digger in sight and stumbling along, tolerating his hunger and thirst because he was trained to ignore them. His injuries would heal, so he ignored them as well. But when he almost tripped over Digger, the jolt of adrenaline brought him back to full alertness.

  “What the hell?” He started to go around Digger, but he just stepped forward and barred his way. When Rex simply reversed his course and started around in the other direction, Digger bared his teeth and growled at him. That stopped Rex in his tracks.

  “Hey, boy, I didn’t mean it. Well, I did, but I’m trying to like you. Why are you trying to scare me?”

  Digger stopped growling and smiled, then looked away and growled softly, backing up. Rex took that as his cue to back up as well, and he’d gone only a couple of feet before sixty pounds of black beast leapt at his chest, knocking him to the ground. Rex barely suppressed a shout of alarm, while covering his head with both arms. None of that prevented him from hearing the whine of a bullet as it passed above him where his upper body was a second before.

  Suddenly, the dog’s weight pushed off him, and Digger became a shadow blacker than the surrounding night. With deadly silence, the dog crept in the direction from where the bullet had come. Rex stayed down, army-crawling along the uneven ground. He could no longer see the dog, but an unearthly scream told him someone had.

  How many of them were out there? Did they have night-vision scopes? Rex had lost his night-vision goggles in the scuffle with Digger, so he stopped and turned around. For all he knew, he was fully visible to an army of hajis, but no one was shooting. All he could hear was the screams and begging that all of a sudden started from somewhere in front of him. He felt for his goggles, found them, and pulled them on.

  Turning around again, relying for direction on the sounds of the dog roughing up the tango, Rex stood. He’d have heard more shots if there’d been anyone else. Maybe they’d run away when the tango under attack had screamed his first shocked, “Alshaytan!” From the sound of it, Digger wasn’t going to let him live long. If Rex wanted to interrogate him, he’d have to get there quickly. But he didn’t dare command Digger to ‘leave it’ until he arrived on the scene to see what was going on.

  Rex ran forward in the direction of the sounds until, through his night-vision goggles, the situation was revealed. Digger had the man’s right arm in his teeth, clamping down, growling, and violently shaking and jerking his head as if he wanted to tear the man’s arm off. The rifle was several feet from the struggling haji. As Rex approached, he saw an arc of blood sail away from the mangled arm.

  He supposed he should stop the carnage, but he was in no mood to show mercy, definitely not to anyone who shot at him. This had to be one of the men who’d rigged the explosives at the house. He strolled over and picked up the rifle. He pulled out his Sig Sauer and pointed it at the man’s head before giving his makeshift command. “Digger, leave it.”

  Digger let go of the arm, but he stood over the man with one paw on his chest, drooling into the terrified face. Rex noticed the haji was staring at the dog rather than the gun pointed at his head.

  “Who are you?” he asked in Arabic.

  “I am no one, effendi,” he said. “I heard an explosion. I live over there.” He tried to lift his injured arm to point but moaned in pain. “I came to see if my neighbors were all right, but I saw this demon. I’m sorry, I did not know you were there.”

  “Yeah right, and you’re the kind of neighbor that shoots first and asks questions later.” The story was full of holes, but maybe there was some truth to it. “You knew that house was unoccupied.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, I knew. But sometimes poor travelers use it as shelter. I swear it by Allah!”

  “Don't worry, you and Allah will momentarily have the opportunity to talk about your lies,” Rex said.

  Rex gestured for Digger, who had backed off a few feet, to come closer and threaten the man, just to help him remember better and stop lying.

  “Now listen carefully, this demon works for me. He knows when people are lying. So, I am now going to ask you a few more questions. If you lie the demon will know, and this time I am not going to stop him from eating you.”

  The tango nodded.

  After more questioning, Rex was satisfied this guy hadn’t been one of the two he was hunting. That didn’t make him innocent. “You’re Taliban, are you not?”

  The man started to shake his head in denial. Digger growled and bared his teeth. That quickly made him change the motion of his head in another direction and start nodding.

  Rex raised his silenced gun and shot the man between the eyes.

  He dragged the body into some nearby rocks. If someone discovered it, they’d find a Russian weapon and hopefully assume a rival terrorist group had killed him.

  He sat down to take stock. He was tired from going on three days with no more than a few hours’ rest, hungry from his exertions, still feeling a bit fuzzy in the head, and he’d almost walked straight into an ambush.

  Digger had saved him.

  He looked around. Where was Digger, anyway? “Digger, come.”

  The dog appeared in front of him and sat without being told. A normal person would hug the dog, Rex thought. He began speaking, slowly, letting the emotion pour out.

  “Thank you for saving me, boy. I sure wish we’d let you in the house. You’d have smelled the C4, wouldn’t you? I’m so sorry. You lost your best friend, but so did I.” He sighed deeply. “You and I, we need to learn to get along. I never thought I’d say that or trust a dog again. You know you’re a dog, right?” Rex laughed as Digger broke out one of his signature smiles. “I fully believe you can understand everything I say. So, let me tell you why I don’t like dogs.”

  Digger closed his mouth and stared into Rex’s eyes. Rex had heard that was meant to dominate, and that he shouldn’t stare back, but somehow, he knew it meant Digger was paying attention. He began to tell the dog about that long-ago attack on him by a pitbull, and that he didn’t know what he’d done to provoke it.

  Before long, he was telling Digger about his family, how much he’d loved them, and how devastated he was to lose them. He’d wanted to die, too, overcome with grief that he alone had escaped. And now it had happened again. Why him? Why was he saved, when those he loved weren’t?

  As he poured out his grief, Digger stood and came closer. He leaned against Rex’s shoulder. When Rex tried to put an arm around him, Digger put his paw on the arm and pushed it down. Rex didn’t understand it, but he knew that he’d have to let Digger teach him abo
ut dogs – or at least about this one.

  “Have we done enough for tonight, boy? Let’s go get some rest.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  CRC Headquarters, Arizona, June 22, 5:30 p.m.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Brandt was a seriously worried man. There was no question now that something had gone very wrong. Without a team nearby, he was forced to wait for news from the CIA, and that galled him. How did it come to this? It was supposed to be just an information-gathering mission.

  When the phone rang, he jumped and picked it up with shaking hands. A quick look at the caller ID made his heart sink even lower. Not Rex… Carson.

  “Brandt,” he snapped.

  “John, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. I’m afraid we were wrong earlier. Seems maybe… well…”

  Brandt snarled. “My man’s dead, isn’t he?” In the few seconds of silence that followed, he pictured the offended expression on Carson’s face, but he wasn’t sorry.

  “You’re right. I mean, it was a major disaster, it seems. No conclusive information, though. There was an explosion, all right, and people were killed, but…”

  For the love of God, Brandt thought, stop pussyfooting around and give it to me straight! But what he said was, “Have they been able to make identifications?”

  “That’s the thing,” Carson said on a sigh. “Information is still coming in, but no, they haven’t identified anyone for sure. The bodies are… somewhat damaged.”

  No shit. Probably in pieces, Brandt thought. “What’s the holdup?” he asked.

  Carson seemed a little more comfortable now that he’d said the worst. “The problem is, it’s a Taliban-controlled area. The government, I mean the Afghan government, is reluctant to send any officials in there.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me!” Brandt exclaimed. “What are you doing about that?”