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

by JC Ryan

  It was about eight-thirty in the evening when Rex entered the Afghan border town. Cruising through the poor neighborhoods in any type of car was not a good idea, so he stashed the SUV in the parking lot of the only hotel in town and took Digger on a ramble through the nearby neighborhoods. Three miles from the hotel, he found a road that crossed a dry wash, which led in the right direction, southeast. He’d cross here. He planned to dump the SUV as soon as he reached India and found someone who’d sell him a less memorable vehicle with legitimate plates. Preferably someone who’d take cash, ask no questions, and had a deliberate bad memory.

  The plan was laughably simple, but it worked.

  By 10:00 p.m. he’d checked into another hotel, this time in Chaman, south of the Wesh-Chaman border crossing, a city with a little over four-hundred thousand people and the second-largest city of the Balochistan Province of Pakistan.

  Again, Rex paid cash and, adding a generous tip to the desk clerk for anonymity, no entry into the guest register and a room of his choice. He promised another tip in the morning if he was left undisturbed, and for the first time in days, he and Digger enjoyed a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Digger, of course, had to be smuggled into the hotel in similar fashion to the last. As he went to sleep, it dawned on Rex that this was going to be his new normal life until he could establish a new identity and a base of operations somewhere. Or maybe not a base of operations, which would make him vulnerable to discovery. He drifted off while cataloguing the European cities where he’d rather live and be far more comfortable than in any Middle Eastern location.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Langley, Virginia, 7:12 p.m., June 24

  AT A SMALL but private restaurant near CIA Headquarters, Bruce Carson was leaning into John Brandt’s personal space and inviting a punch in the nose.

  Brandt didn’t appreciate the encroachment nor the endless stream of verbal diarrhea from Carson’s mouth.

  When he’d gotten the call eight hours earlier, he’d known something out of the ordinary was up. Otherwise, the DCIA would have just told him on the phone what was on his mind. They had secure com links, naturally. Whenever he was summoned to Langley in the past, it was serious business. However, it had only happened once during Carson’s time as DCIA, and that was for a meet and greet. So, this must be something serious then, he thought.

  The news that he’d lost his best operative, a man he considered as close as a son, was too fresh. Brandt had briefly considered this was about Rex, but it didn’t make sense. Carson had been heartless enough to report the news of Rex’s death on the phone, so he surely wouldn’t be asking him to come to Langley for less momentous news. But Carson was a political animal with higher aspirations than DCIA, so there was no telling what he could be up to now.

  Now, what Carson was dancing around he couldn’t imagine, but the man’s foul breath in his face, enhanced tenfold by the vodka he was drinking, was about to make him lose his temper. Carson had been asking some strange questions about how his operators might carry out an assignment. He’d told the man countless times that he wouldn’t answer that kind of question. He did so again, “Carson there is no point in asking questions like that. I already told you that the first time we met.”

  “What do you mean, questions like that?”

  “It means I won’t answer your questions, and I want you to get to the point, Carson,” he said. “You had me schlep all the way here. Do me the courtesy of not beating around the bush now.”

  “All right. Here’s the long and the short of it. Early this morning, the four top opium lords in Afghanistan were executed in a particularly brutal fashion, and the home of the top guy where they met was destroyed by arson. It was those same guys who were supposed to turn up at the house where your guy and his team would have surprised them a few days ago.

  “Whoever did it managed to kill several servants, a security advisor, and six guards, along with the principals. The Afghan government is up in arms. They’ve accused us of doing this and threatened to expel the ambassador and all our troops.”

  Brandt interrupted. “So, what's the problem? They're dead. That's what you wanted. What bugs me is the Afghan government is basically admitting that these pigs are operating with their full cooperation?”

  “Pigs?”

  “The drug lords, Carson.” Brandt injected all the disgust and sarcasm he could into those four words.

  “That’s beside the point. We didn’t do it.”

  Beside the point for you, maybe, Brandt thought. Aloud, he asked, “Who’s we? The US government, or your people?”

  “Neither,” snapped Carson. “I mean both. Shit. Neither the government nor my people, as you so elegantly put it, authorized or participated in this operation. You’re here to answer for your people. Specifically, for the man who wrote all those reports asking permission to do exactly what was done last night?”

  Brandt felt a spark of excitement deep within. Could it be? It lasted for a brief moment only. Outwardly, he didn’t show it. Instead, he counterattacked.

  “Back the hell off, Carson. You told me not forty-eight hours ago that my man there was killed in an ambush that I’m still wondering who set.

  “Strangely enough, if it is as you said, what happened last night - the killing of the drug lords - isn’t that exactly what you ordered me to get my man over there to do? Why now, suddenly, is it such a big deal that they are dead?

  “Furthermore, you’re accusing me of what now? Spell it out, preferably in words of one syllable, because I’m not getting what you’re saying.”

  Carson leaned back on his chair. He had said too much, better to quickly turn the conversation in another direction. “We have reason to believe this was the work of one or more highly trained operators. An operator or operators with the skills and training like the men of your outfit have.”

  “Bullshit. One man? Carson, what have you been smoking? One man? You should stop watching those action hero movies, man. You described something that would take a team of at least four, if not more,” Brandt said, knowing he was bluffing. Rex could have done it, and if he were alive, would have done it.

  “Not even your wunderkind? Your Ghost?” Carson asked.

  “Especially not him,” Brandt lied. “That’s not his MO. Besides, I’d never send my best man to babysit a pure intel assignment for over a year. He’s got much better things to do. And let me tell you, just in case you were thinking different, for the past year I only ever had one of my men in Afghanistan. Definitely not a team of four or more, which would be required to pull off what you’ve described.

  “I suggest you stop wasting my time, stop smoking that shit, or change whatever medication you’re on that bedevils your brain, and start looking for real answers in the right places.”

  Carson backed down.

  He and Brandt finished their dinner in silence, but both, for different reasons, were remembering the stories Brandt had told Carson about the Ghost about four years ago.

  Brandt was remembering how Rex had flown a battered helicopter into their headquarters from a Mexican border town, mission accomplished, and every team member accounted for, though two were dead because of a traitor who compromised the mission and almost got all of them killed.

  Carson remembered the story of how the Ghost had solved the gun issue in the UK during a deep undercover mission to kill an arms dealer. Brandt had told him of the irony of the Russian target being killed by an antique Russian semi-automatic pistol, stolen from another Russian whom the Ghost had taken down by stealing kiddie-porn pictures in the bastard’s possession at the same time he took the weapon. Two assholes for the price of one, Brandt had called it. Carson didn’t say it, but that was the type of mission that would never have been greenlighted if he was DCIA at the time.

  While Brandt’s mind went quickly from reminiscence to the current state of affairs, outwardly he reassured Carson that no one, not even his Ghost, could possibly have done everything Carson described on h
is own. But in fact, his mind was working overtime to figure out how Rex had done it. If there were one man who could do it on his own, he knew of only one who had the ability. It couldn’t have been anyone else.

  Rex Dalton was alive!

  Brandt clung to the hope even as he recognized it could have been someone else’s team – not one man but three or more. Maybe Carson was even lying that it wasn’t the CIA.

  Brandt was determined to investigate the incident on his own to corroborate the one-man theory. In his heart, though, he couldn’t help but think this was as good as getting a personal call from Rex saying, “I’m alive and well, and I’m on my way home, but don’t stay up for me. I'll come in late.”

  It was the last thought that sent a cold shiver down his spine as he remembered the conversation with Longland a month or so before Dalton was posted on the Afghanistan mission a year ago. “If it ever becomes necessary to eliminate him, make sure it’s done properly, because if you screw that up and he survives… we’re dead… all of us. He will hunt us down and kill us all first. And then he will go after the politicians, officials, and other scoundrels — the domestic enemies. There won’t be any stopping him.”

  He hadn’t told Carson that it was Rex ‘the Ghost’ Dalton in Kabul. Carson’s probing for that information was a non-starter. Brandt suppressed his need to form contingency plans for the moment and circled back to the original question after they ordered dessert.

  “Carson, there’s no chance this was my man. He couldn’t have survived the explosion. If he had, he’d have been in touch. Even if by some chance he did survive, neither he nor anyone else, not even the Ghost, could have done this latest thing alone. You’re mistaken – it wasn’t a one-man job. And on the ridiculous assumption that both of those things were true, it still couldn’t have been my guy, anyway. It’s against our operating procedures to be acting on an operation this big without proper instructions.” In every part of that assurance, Brandt was lying. If Rex were alive, he would absolutely be doing exactly what Carson had described. It was that, most of all, that gave Brandt his brightest hope.

  Carson desperately wanted to be convinced, so he accepted Brandt’s word for it.

  He was startled, therefore, when Brandt went on the offensive. Brandt had been given plenty of time to think about what happened to Rex’s team two days before. He’d put two and two together and had questions only the DCIA could answer, if only he would.

  Their dessert had arrived, and Brandt had noted Carson’s dramatic change of demeanor after his last assurance. It confirmed what he’d been thinking. Carson was somehow involved in that ambush, and Brandt made a decision he’d get to the bottom of it. If Carson was involved, he’d arrange for him to have a horrible accident.

  He began with a seemingly innocuous statement.

  “You know, it’s obvious that explosion that killed my man and his team was an ambush.”

  Carson was caught off-guard with a mouthful of Crème Brûlée. He swallowed convulsively and stared at Brandt.

  “What are you saying?”

  “What do you think I’m saying? The CIA’s information – or should I say your information? – was wrong. Terribly wrong. So wrong it cost the lives of eight people, good men. Soldiers…”

  Carson stood so rapidly he almost upset the table. Glasses rocked from the collision. “You’re accusing me?”

  “If the shoe fits, Carson. How the hell could your intel be so wrong? Who screwed up? More to the point, who was the traitor? Who gave it away?”

  “Gave what away?” Carson hissed.

  “How did the bad guys know the team was coming, Carson? Gave that away. Answer that. That’s the issue I’m dealing with here, and now it’s in your court. Until the CIA sorts out what happened, we, CRC, won’t take another contract from you. I also find it interesting that you’ve not thought of this yourself and that you’d take my questions as a personal attack on you.”

  Carson scrambled for the high ground, missing it by yards. “I do take it personally when you call my agency’s competency into question, much less our patriotism.”

  “Oh, hogwash, Carson. If your agency were competent, there’d be no need for my outfit and others like mine. Sit down. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

  Carson sat heavily but continued to bluster. “Fine. We don’t need you. You won’t get another contract from us. There are plenty of other contractors. What happens to your precious outfit then?”

  Brandt smiled. “I’ll tell you what happens. I’m a wealthy man. I’ll shut down CRC in the blink of an eye, disband my teams, and retire to a golf community somewhere with a perfect climate. But my men – well, they might not be inclined to retire. They might just decide to offer their services to the highest bidder anywhere in the world. Especially after I tell them the CIA can’t be trusted, and you better believe me - I’ll make sure they know that.”

  Carson’s face went white. “How many agents do you have?”

  Brandt grinned. He had Carson worried. “Enough to cause so much shit across the globe and the US you would miss the good old days of Islamic fanatics,” he replied.

  Carson was indeed worried. He knew it was more than just CRC. Brandt’s outfit was off the books, as were a few others. They didn’t exist on paper. No written contracts, no audit trail. He had no way of knowing how many agents there were, and had no way of finding out, but he suspected Brandt knew some of the other private contractor organizations. If he spread his suspicions and private operators started going rogue, he had a shipload of trouble on his hands.

  If the other private contractors got word of this snafu and believed the CIA’s incompetence was to blame, they’d refuse to work with him, and that incompetence would be manifest in the resulting world chaos. If they knew it was his treachery, he was a dead man. Even if they didn’t discover his role in it, and even if the other contractors didn’t refuse to work with him, word could leak out that the CIA was incompetently led. The whole situation could ruin his career prospects.

  He changed his stripes so fast it made Brandt’s head spin.

  “You’re right, John. I overreacted, and I’m sorry. I’ll put my best counterintelligence team on it as soon as I get back to my office. You deserve to know what happened to your man.”

  Brandt didn’t buy it for a minute. It was too easy. He also knew he bore a certain amount of the blame, for trusting the DCIA. But if he couldn’t trust the head of his country’s foreign intelligence agency, who could he trust?

  Nonetheless, he knew he could trust this: Rex was coming for him and everyone else. Not now, not soon, but one day, he would turn up out of the shadows, like a ghost, and it would then be exactly as Longland said, “we’re dead… all of us.”

  Maybe he would have time to make his excuses, not that Rex would or should listen to them. Maybe he wouldn’t. He could only hope he would have the opportunity to tell Rex what happened on this side and what he, John Brandt, had done about it.

  He left Carson with a very chilling thought. Fortunately, they were alone in the restaurant, and there were no recordings.

  “Carson you need to get to the bottom of this and very quickly …” Brandt stopped there and didn’t complete the sentence.

  Carson took umbrage again, his fears whipsawing his mood. “You threatening me?”

  Brandt said, “Nope, not at all. Think of it as something like the weather prediction. A foreshadowing of things likely to come.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just that, Carson. You need to get to the bottom of this and very quickly. It’s your duty to get to the bottom of it. If you don’t, you are not doing your duty. And usually, when people don’t perform their duties as expected, then someone gets rid of them.”

  Carson got up and left the table without another word. In his white-hot rage, he might say too much, but he vowed Brandt would get his comeuppance sooner or later.

  After all, I’m going to be President someday.

  C
hapter Twenty-Eight

  Quetta, Pakistan, June 25, 9:00 a.m.

  REX SAT IN his SUV, feeding Digger a take-away breakfast of scrambled eggs and qeema, a minced-meat concoction with peas. He’d worried at first that Digger wouldn’t like the curried meat or the peas, but apparently hunger was more important to his companion than taste. He had ordered Digger’s curry only mildly spicy. Rex was a bit worried what effect the unusual diet the dog had enjoyed since his last normal meal would have on his digestive system. He only hoped that if Digger needed a veterinarian, it would wait another twenty-four hours.

  They had left their hotel in Chaman at 6:00 a.m., waiting for breakfast until they’d reached the larger town of Quetta. The capital city of the Balochistan Province, with more than one million people, was known as the ‘Fruit Garden of Pakistan’ because of the many fruit orchards in and around the city.

  Here, Rex hoped to exchange some of his dollars for Pakistani rupees without causing a stir. That would make it easier to buy gasoline at small villages on his marathon trip across the country to Lahore, where he’d once again have to sneak across the border.

  Historically, Pakistan and India had been hostile neighbors for decades since the partition after independence from British rule. Religious differences in the majority of citizens from each country were partially to blame. In recent years, attempts to improve the relationship had been only mildly successful. The tension between the two nuclear powers flared up at times, and on a few such occasions the military on both sides had been mobilized and moved to the border. Fortunately, Providence had thus far protected them from itchy-trigger-finger syndrome, thus preventing either of them from pushing the nuclear missiles’ launch buttons.

  Rex himself had been instrumental in one thaw in relations, after finding and punishing the Pakistanis responsible for a reprehensible attack on Indian civilians at a hotel in Mumbai in 2008.