SAFE HAVENS: Shadow Masters (A Sean Havens Black Ops Novel Book 1)

by J. T. Patten

  “Oh, God.” He closed his eyes.

  They were dead. And his baby, she was gone too. They would have been praying for his help that would never come. His daughter would be begging in her mind that her father would not let her down and save them before certain death. They would have been scared. They would have been terrified. They were alone.

  Havens wept inaudibly to others, but in his mind he was wailing. His role of husband and father pushed his inner warrior to the corner where he would be called upon later. For now, the parent would mourn the family he had fought so hard not to lose in his years of special missions. Missions tasked to create outcomes of death that made other families cry. Not his.

  He watched a family walk by dragging luggage and mini-roller backpacks. Overcome with the pain in his chest and head, he felt the need to attack someone. Repeatedly.

  Chapter 15

  The Crystal City, Virginia office building looked like every other structure on the block. Harrison Mann walked past the office complex’s lower level Italian restaurant, went to the elevator bank, and upon entry pushed the sixth floor button.

  Exiting at the sixth floor, he showed a badge to the armed security guard, and crossed to another elevator bank where he pushed a button for the tenth floor. On the tenth floor, he walked fifteen feet to an open staircase and climbed ten steps without acknowledging the guards in tactical advantage posted at the top of the stairs. At the top of the stairs he locked his mobile phone in the small metal lockers resembling post office boxes. He pocketed the key.

  “Good day, Mr. Mann,” said a guard with a KRISS Vector submachine gun strapped across his chest. The guard was much less comfortable giving a nod after a lifetime of requisite salutes to leadership. He bobbed his head acknowledging the Deputy Program Director of the supposed DoD Counter Terror Foreign Collection Task Force.

  As far as the guards knew the high security requirements were due to the Task Force’s need to house and receive human intelligence reports from non-official cover military assets globally tasked with targeting foreign threats.

  For the most part this was true, except for the fact that this particular shop was focused on domestic intelligence collection with a mandate not to share or deconflict with other agencies or law enforcement elements. Direct action follow on activities—a nice way to say violence—associated with the intel collections may be, as it was often described to insiders, “a bit outside the scope of DoD,” not to mention the restriction on military action on U.S. soil.

  Mann simply gave each man a half nod acknowledgement of their presence and greeting.

  He swiped the door pad with his badge and entered the office of the Domestic Support Activity, or DOSA as it was called by the select few bureaucrats and defense czars who even knew of its existence. DOSA was layered under a Pentagon basement program where Mann’s boss, Prescott Draeger, worked as Program Director to a number of interchangeable programs with ever-changing names. The czars thought they owned Draeger and assumed with all practical reason that he was one of their own. Like so many secreted programs, even the employees were often seconded to someone else.

  Internally, DOSA called themselves the pilgrim preachers, or the “Preachers” for short, as they were now the domestic version of an element that had travelled the world doing “God’s work” ridding humanity of whomever made the naughty list.

  Even Draeger, who was a career military and intelligence community member, was covered on the books as a technical contractor overseeing process improvement to special operations logistical supply. Secretly, and unbeknownst to even those working around him, he worked for an individual simply referred to as PASSPORT. PASSPORT, by his own right, led the operational activities of a U.S. intelligence rival of the CIA called the Pond.

  The Pond was long thought to be disbanded. In fact, it could not be a better living organization for shadow masters such as Prescott Draeger or PASSPORT.

  While his closest operator friends outside of the program could see Draeger’s lips moving and hear what he was saying about his new low speed job, few bought in to this benign story knowing of Draeger’s accomplishments in places such as the Congo and the Balkans. Guys like Draeger don’t improve organizational process as he claimed. No, a man like Draeger helps destroy process and all things organized.

  Draeger certainly wasn’t a business guy; he was initially a skilled HUMINT collector and ex-Special Forces indigenous forces instructor who later served on a special activities unit running surrogate operations. He took a desk job and found his way into technology after a freak lunch break accident while playing soccer behind their compound where he re-ruptured an already damaged vertebra.

  The damaging cheap hit came from one of the small community’s members, Trevor “Red” Peterson, who always fancied himself as the founder of full contact rugby soccer. Red’s overaggressive play was a result of wanting to end the tied soccer game quickly so he wouldn’t miss the Friday lunch dessert buffet, where even the most health-conscious hunter killers would deftly palm a cookie from the table near the exit when leaving the chow hall on their way back to their respective squadron’s corridors.

  In years to follow, Draeger would snap when anyone referenced Red, calling him the “oaf who broke my back for a piece of fucking carrot cake.” Most who knew the two men never brought the names up together, assuming they still didn’t talk. A sour man like Draeger wasn’t quick to forgive. One thing his peers all agreed on was that you can put Draeger in a suit, but you can’t stop the man from convincing any guy on the street to go kill someone.

  Doubt aside, no one ever pressed for more information from Draeger about his new job. They knew he also wasn’t a techie, commo, or hacker lead. Draeger was a hacker of men’s minds. They all knew that someone somewhere was dying and killing by the marionette puppet strings of Prescott Draeger. This tight nit community was used to odd stories of what people did for a living. Few cared that the newly created positions, units, or task forces didn’t always correlate to skills and experience. Even fewer ever asked. If you were in it or read on to the program, you knew. If you didn’t, you had no need to know or inquire. Amateurs asked. Professionals stuck to their beers and made other conversations.

  Similarly, Mann also came from the world of off-the-books black special projects. Mann, however, had started out as an academy graduate Navy SEAL and later ended up with a Drug Enforcement Agency role with their Special Operations Division. DEA had him chasing down traffickers globally undercover, but as part of task forces that increasingly moved from the white overt world of law enforcement and oversight to a more nebulous grayish shade where parallel construction and investigative lines were crossed, criminals were kept on payrolls, and the reputations of operator units grew as notorious in the underworld as their targeted cartels and mafia families.

  Mann was well suited for his role, having been the son of a tough New York Bronx cop. His father was well respected on the force and it was assumed by family and police friends that Harrison Mann would one day be working with his father. As such, rules were often bent so young Harrison could hang around in the precinct or go on patrol squad car ride along with “the boys.”

  The job was initially appealing, but Mann wanted to get away. An avid swimmer, he crossed the New York neighborhood’s cultural lines one day and asked some of the firehouse guys across the way if they could teach him how to scuba dive when they went on Search and Rescue trainings. The fire chief, a crusty old Vietnam veteran who had served as a SOG SEAL, was more than happy to try and convert an up-and-coming police officer to the firefighter side.

  Recognizing Mann’s potential, even a dedicated firefighter who had a fresh recruit in his clutches, saw different opportunities on this boy’s horizon. The old SEAL vicariously pushed his newly trained scuba diver to the open arms of the Navy, and sealed the deal with a few phone calls and cache of favors that would expire when his cancer-filled lungs finally gave in.

  Mann’s father, who had often reminded his son
that the Navy was for pussies, was shot in the line of duty and paralyzed from the waist down while Harrison was at the Naval Academy. Quickly turning into a raging alcoholic in an increasingly obese condition, the father became unbearable to live with. Siblings quickly left the house and Mann’s mother, who was no longer able to cope, shot herself in the head with her husband’s revered service revolver. Her dying wish to herself was that his beloved gun would now be taken away as potential evidence in her suicide. With a split family, Mann became immersed in his profession with ties neither holding him back nor bringing him back home. His family was the job.

  Mann now dialed his boss on a DSN secure red line for news.

  “I don’t have any more news on the investigation of your international ‘preacher’s’ family. Everything else is cleaned up on our end. When does he get back CONUS?”

  “I am sending him back on one of our planes so we can give him the warm and fuzzy treatment. He is going to take some time. This guy isn’t our typical pinch. I am going to have to really work him from the sidelines as his friend and make the slow introduction to you.”

  “And you are certain he has no clue where you are in the Pentagon and who we are working for?”

  “No, and it doesn’t really matter. He is rarely in DC, and when he is it is around Arlington or Langley. He’d never know that I am running this program. We are safe from that standpoint. Foreign Collections Deputy has all contact with him, so he still has no clue that he has been working for me, nor will he when we transfer him to domestic. He’s used to working that way. And I have a feeling he is going to stay put in Chicago for a long time after this. Bit of a shame, given my relationship with him and his family, but war has its casualties, and we need him to fight. His daughter was going to be a problem for him in the years to come anyway. I read the file on her texts. Social media posts and associations were starting a pattern. I think she was getting to the point of exploring outside her world and Dad’s sheltering. Whore in the making. We had to play the screaming rabbit card to get his attention. The rest just had to be done to solidify his commitment.”

  “Yeah, well whatever. Job had to be done. Just like the rest. We have the laptop all rigged up now and will get it back in the house. We wiped down anything leaving traces and all the evidence plants are set. Took a while to get the surrogate set. I’m not challenging you, but this idea of a predator rapist and hood burglars was a bit off. I think this whole scheme is a pretty damn long stretch. Too many parts to orchestrate. Too complex.”

  Draeger let Mann continue to see if it was a rant or a real issue.

  “With all due respect it leads to fuck-ups. I had to convince this maniac that the girl had printed out a picture of him from the registered offenders so he would act on her. I think he got off on it. Guy is freaking now off meds. I think your boy Havens will see that he had a lonely kid and that will feed his guilt and then we will tie our surrogate to the issues DHS has been having with the Eastern Euro car thefts and heroin networks. Once we get Havens up and rolling we will release him and make him up a pretty intel package. I still don’t see how those gang members fit in. You turned about three different fairy tales into one.”

  “You just stick to the plans. As for the stretch, cut the DHS and Eastern Euro segment. It’s overkill and too much to deal with. I have another team working that from a different angle.”

  “Roger that. Oh, I will also make sure that we cover the wife and girl’s funeral expenses by the foundation. I have a guy who can do it so I don’t need to touch anything.”

  “Sounds good. Can you make it look like a suicide and clean up our rapist? Psycho stalker guy was in love but then when the girl was killed he can’t live anymore?” Draeger cringed realizing that one would hit close to home with Mann. Still it was a decent plan to tie up these loose ends.

  There was silence at the other end. Contrary to Draeger’s thought of a major faux pas, Mann liked the idea and was simply thinking of how he would convince Draeger to let him do it as opposed to using one of the surrogate team operators.

  “Prescott, I think that will be tough to do in the time we have. I know it is risky, but let me handle that. You have too many lines of effort running into this one and since I had to cage this guy and take him off his meds, I can at least make sure there’s no screw up.”

  Draeger didn’t care for the idea but wanted to think for a moment. This activity was supposed to draw all connections away from their organization. It would be too risky, although Mann did develop this asset and built trust. And the plan Draeger had given him was outlandish and rather fucked up to say the least.

  Little did Harrison know, Draeger was testing his deputy with as many far-fetched ideas as he could come up with while still making sure it could be pulled off. He was training his men to push their limits of creativity and manipulation. He was also tugging on strings so his guys would tug back. That in time would lead to autonomy. Autonomy led to plausible deniability for Draeger. Now his man wanted to keep his hands in the mess. Draeger would ensure there was plenty of mess to play in.

  “I’m still thinking.”

  When you are running wolves, you have to let them make the occasional kill, Draeger thought to himself. He expelled a breath in contemplation. Mann, like a good salesman, knew to remain silent and not interrupt the customer’s thought process. He would wait for an objection and then aggressively rebut it.

  “God help you Harrison if this goes south. I respect your wishes and hope that you will respect the Activity’s work and that you are not simply satiating your own desires. I know you are a professional. This is a soldier’s duty. You are a soldier and you will execute by orders, not personal interest. Do you understand?”

  Harrison understood Draeger’s point. It was worth the slight chastisement by the boss so the underling would still get his way. So far they were a good team and Harrison respected Draeger as the commander in that he was not afraid of the unconventional, even though Draeger was a spoon feeder of intel and ops plans.

  Harrison, however, did recognize that Draeger was yet another one of this country’s toxic, narcissistic leaders who wouldn’t accept criticism, didn’t accept new ideas, and had likely built a career and reputation on exaggerated achievements. It was self-interest, but Harrison could tuck that away as par for the course and think of his interactions with his superior as an objective and tasking order fulfillment. Even if he clicked his heels in deep satisfaction when it was finished.

  Harrison also knew Draeger walked a fine line between effective operator and veritable psychopath, his leadership style aside. Acute self-awareness told Harrison that he too was increasingly going to the dark side of behavior, but at least wasn’t a psychopath. Maybe a slight sociopath. While it slightly concerned him as a matter of diagnostic labeling, he was actually having the time of his life. He looked forward to the challenge with Havens.

  “Hey, boss, give me some more gouge on Havens. I read the files but I want a better feel.”

  In his office, Draeger rolled his eyes. He wanted to be thorough but detested the thought of having to ramble through the highlights of Havens’ career. “Havens is a hunter but is also a homebody. He is always looking for good sources like one where you scan a table for a specific corner or color jigsaw piece in a grand cardboard puzzle. But he never looks for sources near his home. Home is hands off. We just gave him a big bitch slap. He’s going to be dazed from this blow. What else? If he can keep the job away from his life, he loves it. Guy loves the idea of being able to walk among others without casting any initial or sustained suspicion. And he is decent at it. As you see in the file, he is usually used to establishing and overseeing surrogate infrastructure contrivances and schemes that support clandestine indigenous operating forces. Like us, he does it in places where the United States holds no military title authorities. The good news for you is he isn’t a killer, per se. Clean black support. Procure safe houses, non-attributable vehicles, black hole sites, and cutout payment schem
es. Kind of pussy stuff. He’s the geek that finds storage sites and escape and evasion routes with friendly support or plausible commercial covers. While he isn’t a death merchant as a primary trade he can fall back on it. Havens won’t kill if it doesn’t serve a purpose. That’s also a weakness. He will risk himself or others to disable a man if it can serve a purpose. He has solid restraint. Probably why the risk-averse lawyers that approve Tier One missions like him. Ironic, because Havens as a softer approach still makes for spillage, which is why he is perfect for this. He isn’t a meat eater, nor is he just a plant eater. He’s more like…a stir fry…with extra hot sauce. Enough of this. Why don’t you fly in next week again? We can discuss more then go saw a steak at Ruth’s for dinner. I am not going to stall Havens with any other obstacles.”

  “I can expense it right? No per diems? No orders?”

  “No one said this isn’t without its perks, Harrison. You will be rewarded and you will be reimbursed.”

  “OK. Thanks. How did you end up delaying him?”

  “Don’t worry about it. All handled. Check in to the Ritz by the Pentagon.”

  “Fine.”

  “Just don’t use your military ID for a cheaper rate.”

  “Can I use my rewards card for the points? I mean it worked in Italy for those CIA folks a few years back, right?”

  “Easy on the sarcasm, I am serious. We have to play this tighter than we ever have before. This is where the gloves come off and we really make a difference, but we don’t have get out of jail free cards. We have to keep things compartmented and air tight against blowback. You’ve done a great job these past couple years, but now that we have tested the program we can start going after the fatty part of the snakes, but we don’t want to cast a trail.”