by Dan Fox
Marcel looked around for the wheelbarrow and used it to transport each body to the large open drain at the other end of the warehouse. It fed directly into the sea, and neither he nor Jean was too bothered whether the bodies were found or not.
Jean and Marcel changed out of their blood soaked clothes needing to dispose of them later.
The ring leader refused to die despite his appalling injuries so he was wrapped in a heavy tarpaulin and loaded into the back of Marcel’s borrowed van. As Marcel drove back towards the bar and could see it ahead he shouted to Jean and she opened the rear doors and pushed the man out into the road. While she wanted them all dead there was a certain perverse satisfaction in knowing that if he survived he would never see, hear or rape again.
On arrival at Marcel’s apartment their clothes were disposed of in the incinerator and they showered to wash off the copious blood. That night their sex was good.
Chapter 17
The Team - continued
Over the next few months and as Jean continued to recover Marcel began to train her to be an even better fighting and killing machine. There was no question of her motivation and inherent ability just a few concerns as to how she used her skills in different circumstances. Essentially she was a traditionalist in that if she was boxing she boxed, if she was using Karate that was all she would use. Marcel trained her to break those habits and to combine all her talents and bring them all to the party when they were needed. This was an approach used by perhaps the most incredible fighting machine of all time, Bruce Lee.
When Marcel considered that she had learnt enough it was not because she had passed her exams with flying colours. It was because Jean told him that had she possessed those skills when she was attacked by the sailors from the Bangkok Star she would have comfortably defeated them. Marcel also considered that if he ever had to fight Jean he was no longer convinced he would necessarily win.
Marcel Jeveaux was the fourth and final member of Steve Black’s special ops team. He was born in the Marseilles area and had spent four years in the French Foreign Legion attaining the rank of Sergeant. He was a rebel mercenary par excellence. Communications and explosives were his speciality. He could drop any structure exactly where he wanted it, and a gentle cough into his handkerchief was enough to detonate a remote Improvised Explosive Device.
He’d been raised a little along the coast from Marseilles and was known as a rebellious, introvert but not unpleasant child. When his father left home for another woman when Marcel was thirteen, his mother replaced him with her long term lover. He didn’t like the boy. Perhaps it was that jealousy thing rearing its head. Eventually Marcel ran away to sea and worked on a number of ships for the next few years.
In his late teens he came back to Marseilles and got a job delivering and collecting anything he was told to. No questions, no lies, he was told. He didn’t care. All he wanted was a job. Although he didn’t immediately realise it, he had become a very junior member of the Union Corse. It taught him to drive, although he never took a formal test, and a number of other suspect skills.
When the Police raided his boss’s premises one night, Marcel was sitting in the office manning the phone and drinking wine. He escaped by the skin of his teeth although he had clobbered two of the Police with a baseball bat in order to make that escape. He remained on the run for a while and then realised he had to get out of the country, maybe for a few years.
He needed to be somewhere they didn’t ask any awkward questions. He made his way to Algeria and eventually to the Foreign Legion Recruiting Office. Officially it didn’t exist, but it was there if you knew where to look. Not a pleasant place to be. The job could be arduous, the training could be cruel, but they combined to teach him a very powerful set of skills.
He worked out in the Sahara for much of the time building and maintaining communications equipment. When one of his colleagues blew his own head off trying to improvise a bomb, he volunteered for that job as well. He was a natural and spent much of the early days getting as much information as possible about different types of explosives, fuses and detonators.
After a couple of years there was none better and he had at least survived his training. There were few comforts in such a remote place but occasionally the supplies deliveries would contain a few smuggled items with Marcel being particularly keen on good Cognac.
When he eventually returned to France with a new Passport and a Sahara weathered face he was unrecognisable as the fugitive. He re-joined the Union Corse and was given a much more serious role. He became one of their hit men. He liked killing. He liked to be professional. The work of an assassin is an art he told himself.
Whilst it was his explosives ability the Union Corse wanted he had also honed his fighting and weapon skills in the Legion and proved to be very useful and extremely effective. He remained with the Union for quite a while and then gradually, and fortunately with their blessing, branched out on his own. It was not long afterwards that the incident with Jean took place, Marcel having very recently concluded a job for one shipping owner who wasn’t too keen on another. The incident with Jean changed his life for ever.
Over the last several years he had done a couple of jobs for what he thought might be the long and unofficial arm of the CIA. It was on one of those jobs that he met up with Steve Black. They didn’t get on too well at the time. Maybe it was the garlic, but they had immense professional respect for one another. On the second job he did for Steve he brought Jean into the equation.
The target was a PLO front man who thought he was untouchable in Paris and had become accustomed to the softer lifestyle. Jean, because she was like that, had read up on a recent spate of what appeared to be serial killings in Paris. The facts were similar to the Jack the Ripper stories although the victims were both men and women. They were killed and mutilated and then disembowelled, perhaps not always in that order.
Jean suggested that mimicking such a death would take the focus away from any political motive and the hue and cry that would inexorably follow. Anyway, and whatever the real motive, that was exactly what happened. Marcel hacked into the Police files and got all the gory details Jean required, and because it might become useful, he also obtained all the clues and leads which might help find the real serial killer culprit. She then lured the PLO guy to his death in an apartment off the Rue Montmartre. The scene was as grizzly as any horror movie could be. The guy was found propped up in bed with his entrails wrapped around him.
The Paris newspapers were full of the serial killer panic. There were no political overtones. He was just another unfortunate victim.
Unknown to the police Marcel and Jean had tracked down the actual serial killer using the intelligence Marcel had gathered. They had already disposed of him with a double tap to the back of the head and immersion in the River Seine with about two hundred pounds of steel chain wrapped around him.
As there were no more victims the press and the public quickly forgot about it, but Marcel and Jean’s reputations were enhanced no end. Eventually they were formally brought into Steve’s special black ops team who were sort of funded and run by a tenuous arm of the CIA but no-one would ever confirm that. There were only about three people who knew anything and one of those was the President of the United States.
Steve’s team were a tight, competent and smart bunch. Not too big or too small. They were perfect for clandestine operations where stealth and speed were essential. Prisoners were not on their agenda.
Jean and Marcel had previously posed as interviewer, and cameraman or sound man, using the names of Elodie and Xavier Deneuve. She had that professional air and used her mid-French accent to great effect. Marcel acted the part well. You would not believe the cons they had made and yet nobody remembered them. They were too ordinary. No particular distinguishing features. They were the French couple from that well known magazine that no-one could quite remember the name of. In and out like a rat up a drain-pipe. A class act.
On the other hand
Steve Black was built like a professional soldier. He was tall, broad shouldered but relatively slim and wiry with a frighteningly powerful presence. Fair close cropped hair, greenish eyes and as hard as a really big bag of nails. He had seen more action on more continents than most people had eaten hot dinners.
Seasoned and extremely dangerous would be good words to describe him. Dressed in a suit and tie he was a charmer. Insurance broker, Estate Agent, maybe even a Solicitor. In battle gear he was your worst nightmare.
Steve was born in Sheffield, England, the famous steel town in 1980. His Scottish father had worked in the English steel trade for almost all of his adult life but saw the writing on the wall for his work prospects following the major coal miner’s strike of 1973/74, the Winter of Discontent, the years of rampant inflation, and the beginnings of a slowdown in steel production followed by a big recession which cost thousands of people their jobs.
His father was a great fan of the American Wild West and had always had a desire to live in the USA. In the early 1980s when his employers asked for people to take voluntary redundancy, offering a very substantial severance package, he grabbed the opportunity migrating the whole family to Dayton, Ohio. Steve was only a babe in arms at the time. It was relatively easy to move to the States in those days and his father secured a similar job with a large steel company and doubled his wages at the same time. So the family Black embarked upon the American dream, Mom, Dad, Steve and older brother Martin.
Steve had no memories of Sheffield as he was too young when they left there, but his early speech was a family influenced mixture of English Yorkshire accent, a touch of Glaswegian and street acquired American drawl. It caused him a few problems with his peers in the early years in America and he learned to deal with it with his fists. This was to prepare him well for his later life in the armed forces.
Chapter 18
Tehran, Iran, late Spring 2012
Abdul Ashiq had been living near Tehran, the capital of Iran, for a couple of years. He was Afghani by birth and was raised to speak several of the languages of his native region. In his two years in Iran he had learned to speak very passable Farsi which made him a valuable person in his employer’s view. At thirty-four years old and unusually single, his main role as a rising member of his extremist organisation was to coordinate weapons and munitions shipments through the country. All of the shipments were illegal with many of the weapons being stolen from Military establishments all over the Middle East and occasionally from further afield. They were all destined for the tribal area border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This was a huge virtually lawless region and had been the birthplace of the most extremist Islamic groups. It was home to the fundamentalists and was a recruitment and training ground for terrorists. Pakistan had no real answer to it, whether it tried hard or not. The problem area was always one of the stumbling blocks in any discussions or negotiations for economic assistance, particularly from the Unites States. It was probably the sole or at least the main reason why the American, British and United Nations forces had been given such a torrid time in Afghanistan.
It was not very difficult to ship men and armaments over the border into Afghanistan. The border between the two countries approached two thousand miles and you couldn’t erect a fence to keep people from crossing it and you certainly couldn’t patrol it. So the western forces were performing a containment job until their electorate’s voices forced them to publish withdrawal timetables. It was a sad and sorry state of affairs with thousands of military and tens of thousands of civilian deaths. It was simply a no win situation.
Afghanistan had been a problem country for hundreds of years. It had little industry, minimal commerce and no tourist trade. It was really a bankrupt nation being propped up by well-intentioned foreign governments. Its only success was in the cultivation of the Opium Poppy and the sale of its derivative products which pervaded the rest of the world and created untold misery and deprivation.
Unfortunately the Afghani government was forced to turn a blind eye to the cultivation and trade as it formed a big part of one of its only revenue streams. In the corridors of the world’s more influential governments, it was often heard that the only real solution to Afghanistan was to nuke it and force it into a barren landscape for the next several hundred years.
Nobody dare do that, yet. It would take a terrorist atrocity of immense magnitude for such a step to be considered seriously. Something like another 9/11.
It was clear to many observers that the use of the Tribal Zone was not simply about providing recruits to fight in Afghanistan it was also to help the tentacles of terror reach further and deeper into the world’s security. In one sense it was similar to some of the old Russian cold war tactics of attempting to create chaos although the modern equivalent was through much more direct and often indiscriminate action.
Abdul Ashiq found that when difficulties in transportation for his armaments arose the best way around the problem had been to either threaten or bribe the officials or whoever was over-doing their job. The strategy had metamorphosed over the years so that now the officials were first threatened and then given handsome payments to reduce their fears. It was not possible or practicable to simply murder all of the offenders although those who protested too much or were perhaps too greedy ended up missing from their posts, permanently.
Abdul Ashiq had been quite successful in building up the transportation route and had increased both the frequency and volume of weapons and armaments reaching their destination. In the higher echelons of the terrorist organisers, Ashiq was spoken about in glowing terms for his operational abilities, but rumours of a number of suspect personal habits had been largely ignored to date although that would not always remain the case.
In more recent times and to his initial dismay, he was asked to recruit a good lieutenant to take over from him if he were ever needed for a more important role. His dismay came from the potential of losing the position and power of his job. Like many from an originally strict religious background, he had been sorely tempted by the opportunities that abounded and had begun to sample the delights of shall we say a more western lifestyle.
He was particularly keen on Scotch whisky and on a number of questionable sexual activities. If either caused embarrassment or brought undue attention to his employers he could find himself dead. His lifestyle was at least partly financed by syphoning off some of the money he was given for bribes and he was most anxious to keep it. In fact he had to keep much of his private life hidden from public view as it would have generated equal amounts of jealousy and outrage. He had to be very careful how he appeared to others. It would take only one whisper in the wrong ear and all his hard work would be undone. All his planning for the future would be gone in an instant.
Nevertheless that which was suggested started to become a reality. On one apparently innocent progress visit from someone much further up the terrorist food chain, the conversation was gradually turned into a discussion about his ability to do a most important job in the near future. The job as described was to prepare a disused military airfield in the extreme south east of Iran for the arrival of a large Russian ex-military transport plane. It was explained that this plane would be most important for the operations in the Middle East and beyond and particularly in shipping arms directly into Africa which had become more difficult in recent times due to increased security levels. Ashiq was not thick, but he did appreciate the need to ship large quantities and a mule train across the Arabian Sea was not very practicable. He was quickly persuaded to take up this new if only temporary role.
The details of the operation were initially very scant but would be expanded upon in the next few weeks. He therefore needed to be prepared to depart with probably less than forty-eight hours’ notice, and be gone for perhaps two to three weeks. His job would be to manage the transition and prepare the base, or so he thought. He was told that although his journey from Tehran to the south east coast would be a long one, he would b
e accompanied on the way by men and equipment that were commandeered from other local enterprises.
A short while later he received detailed instructions and plans of the airfield. He was told in some detail what it had got and what it hadn’t got. It was his task to make the difference and to make the airfield operational. Of course, that would be without the Iranian Government knowing anything about it. On reflection that would be the easier part. The more difficult job would be to keep the changes to a visible minimum so that the Spy satellites would not pick up any differences.
He would have to be very careful who he selected to work with him on this. He also realised that they would have to do any exterior work, like patching up the runway, at night or when there was sufficient cloud cover. He would need to have hundreds of photographs showing before and after conditions to make sure everything looked the same. He knew that the people who studied the satellite images could spot even the most minute differences. He would have to educate his workforce carefully and thoroughly if he was going to succeed.
Ashiq also realised that a lot of money would have to change hands to buy silence. There would be dozens and dozens of people who would get to know what the job was about. Maybe the job was not so bad after all as he would still be able to use that money with discretion and maybe contribute a little more to his funds.
Ashiq proudly believed that this new job would enhance his career no end. Unfortunately for him it was more likely to end it.
When he was given the go ahead by his bosses, Ashiq started to recruit builders, electricians and plumbers. He found people who could lay pipes and repair roofs, and mechanics who could work on all sorts of vehicles. Of course he had to buy, beg, borrow or steal everything he needed, plus he had to transport all of it and the tradesmen to the airfield and provide for them whilst they were there. People would need to be recruited from the local area to provide food. He would need at least one doctor or trained nurse and probably a couple of cooks to make sure that all the people could work and that they were fed properly. Site communications and walkie-talkies would be required and probably a computer to allow him to monitor the project’s progress.
