Russian Roulette - A Mike Ducane Adventure: Shadow Force Series

by Sean Wilson

  ‘Come over here, you lazy cur. You’re disgusting! You look as if you’ve been sleeping in the bilges!’

  Mike shrugged and started walking towards the guard, head down and slightly stooped beneath his crate. When he was close enough he looked up with a beaming smile and swung his boot hard and fast into the man’s groin. The guard collapsed with a low groan of pain and disbelief and Mike slipped the crate smoothly onto the floor. With one devastating punch, he crushed the man’s throat and then sprang up from the floor to run the last few yards in a low crouch to the concrete edge of the dock. It took him a precious minute and a half before he located a ladder leading down to a small boat, tied up securely next to the dock wall. A boat with an engine. Great! But it was a false friend. He couldn’t take the boat. Too noisy and it would be way too visible and an easy target for anyone scanning the oily waters of the naval yard. No. If he was going to escape the steel jaws of this closing trap, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. He took a deep breath. Yeah. He’d have to swim for it.

  Mike got rid of his boots over the side and lowered himself down the rusty ladder. Once he was submerged to his chin the dark, oily waters, he began a smooth and deliberate stroke that minimised any disturbance on the surface and propelled him gently through the muck and grime that covered the diesel-streaked surface. His ribs still hurt and his diaphragm felt as if he’d been kicked by a psychopathic mule. He had to ignore the pain and the numbing discomfort, so he concentrated on breathing deeply and kept moving, an invisible shadow moving slowly through the black waters. He heard shouts behind him in the distance. He was beyond the first destroyer now and hugging the outline of the second ship, a ghost in the swell. They must have found the dead guard. Searchlights flashed across the water but he was hidden behind the bulk of the first ship, moving slowly but steadily round the bows of the second vessel and suddenly aware of the sound of the open sea in the distance. Navy SEAL training was extremely tough, incredibly demanding and only the fittest and the most determined men were ever going to pass the rigorous selection process. Most applicants quit. It was expected. Mike had passed selection and gone onto become a valued member of the Teams. So he was supremely confident that he could swim further than most people could ever dream of. With every pull of his arms and kick of his legs, he was slowly heading towards the welcoming embrace of the Mediterranean Sea and the longest swim of his life. The real risk was that he would be spotted in the water as the sun cast its light across the boat yard and lit up the port’s dark waters. He hoped he’d blend in with the bobbing flotsam and rubbish that was scattered across the water. The one small advantage he enjoyed was that the guards were still focused on searching the ship yard’s interior and no one would imagine that he could be crazy enough to swim out to the open sea without a support boat to rescue him.

  He kept swimming until he emerged on the far side of the last ship and then took a break to tread water, checking his position and searching for a sizable piece of debris that would help him disguise his presence in the water. A length of discarded timber was bobbing in the light swell and he moved carefully towards it, aiming to use it as a simple way to hide his outline in the water and to use its natural buoyancy as a handy flotation device. With the rough beam tucked alongside his body, he used one arm to paddle himself towards the open sea, careful not to disturb the water but determined to keep going. The swell increased as he put more distance between himself and the small flotilla of Russian ships tied up behind him in the port. Half an hour later and the waves were lifting him up and dropping him down quite forcefully as the swell increased in the open water. He clung to the wooden beam and paddled hard on the downward side of the waves, still putting distance between himself and the ship yard. He felt it was safer now to take breaks, to rest with his weight on his wooden float and recover his strength. It would take time but he was going to get as far away from the Syrian coast as possible, hoping the tides would carry him back towards land before he succumbed to exhaustion and drowned. He shook himself and cancelled the negative thoughts that were threatening to overwhelm his resolve. With a deep breath, he gritted his teeth and spat out the salt water that had washed into his mouth. He would survive. He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to survive but he was damn sure he wasn’t going to quit. The water was cooler out in the open sea. A strong breeze blew salt spray into his face and burned his eyes. Buffeted by the rising waves, salt water stinging his eyes and nose, clinging onto a piece of cast-off lumber in the open sea – it wasn’t an ideal situation but all these discomforts were infinitely preferable to being tortured by his Russian captors. They’d have killed him anyway. And he had no intention of doing their work for them by drowning. With a shake of his free shoulder, he struck out forcefully and paddled himself further out to sea.

  Chapter 4

  Mike was beginning to feel very, very tired. The effort and the water temperature were sapping his strength and he was finding it harder and harder to cling onto his narrow wooden life raft. His arms felt numb and the hours of swimming in a worsening sea were taking their toll. He’d lost all sight of the land as the tide and currents carried him further out to sea. Low cloud denied him any sense of where the sun might be and he had no way of knowing where he was drifting. No compass and no heading. He’d tried turning back towards where he thought he would sight the coast again but he lacked the strength to fight the currents. There were no sea birds. Another worrying sign. And he was very thirsty. Not a good sign at all. Surrounded by water and not a drop to drink. His mind drifted and he closed his eyes for what seemed like a moment and he almost fell asleep. The water in his nose and sinuses woke him with a snort and a start and he realised with alarm that he could have drowned. The shock gave him a burst of adrenaline and he struck out again to get his circulation moving, finding some warmth in his numbed limbs and wondering where in hell he was heading. He didn’t even give a thought to the sharks that cruised the eastern Med. At that point he was just too tired. He changed arms, holding onto the length of timber, and swam a few yards with the other hand, kicking his legs and suddenly wondering if he was just going round in circles. It could easily happen when you had no reference points and no compass. After five hours, he began to think he wouldn’t make it. The cold was leaching his strength and the effort to move his arms and legs was proving too much. It was all he could do to hold onto the wooden spar that kept him afloat. After a titanic effort, he felt he was losing the battle to survive. The shock of being captured, the loss of his men, Fatima’s cruel and calculated betrayal, the brutal beating in the hangar, the narrow escape from certain death, the hours of swimming in a rough sea. It was beginning to look like the game was coming to an end. He closed his eyes for a moment, desperate to sleep, and then he opened them wide as he heard a faint noise that sounded like a small aircraft engine. It was difficult to hear with the water in his ears and he looked up in fear, wondering if the Russians had despatched a patrol aircraft to find him. The waves were lifting him and dropping him back down and it was almost impossible to see beyond the wave peaks that surrounded him. Then there was a momentary flash above him, a glint of reflected sunlight as something descended beneath the cloud cover. Something small, something shiny, something compact and circling above him. Mike started in surprise. It was a drone. Holy shit. A drone! The miniature, pilotless aircraft was homing in on his position, tracking the tiny transponder hidden in his belt buckle. It circled above in a wide lazy loop, nose camera pointing towards him and then disappeared into the cloud and Mike was alone again in the wide expanse of the cold, salty water. He blinked the salt water out of his eyes and wondered frankly if he was hallucinating.

  He had to wait for almost another full hour, shivering in the cold water, struggling to keep hold of his precious wooden float, before he heard the familiar whine of a powerful helicopter turbine in the distance. The US navy chopper pinpointed his position with millimetre precision and, in a matter of minutes, Mike was being hoisted up in a sling with a
navy diver alongside and then he was being hauled to safety through the open hatch of the machine. He could barely speak as a crewman wrapped him in a blanket and two DIA executives crouched next to him on the wide bare floor of the helicopter’s cargo bay. ‘Hey, guys’ he stuttered. ‘I hope you bastards aren’t expecting a tip. I ordered the cab hours ago. What the fuck kept you?’ He drank deeply from a bottle of water, spilled half of it down his chin and chest, closed his eyes and drifted into a deep and dreamless unconsciousness.

  Chapter 5

  DIA Central had not been optimistic about seeing Mike and his team alive again. The emergency response team had been activated as soon as the evacuation chopper had reported no contact with Mike’s squad. The team had been listed as lost. If a rescue was judged to be possible, the DIA would despatch a fire team to assist with an extraction but that was a very rare occurrence. By the time a covert and deniable mission went bad, it was usually too late to extract people. When a covert mission went wrong, there were usually no survivors. It was the nature of the business. It was the nature of the game. Everyone knew the risks when they signed up so, when the shit came down, team members harboured no illusions about the possibility of being rescued. Stranded behind enemy lines in a compromised position, there would be no bugle calls and no cavalry racing over the hill to deliver the beleaguered troops from harm. That’s why they were prepared to fight for their lives. That’s why they took such care to avoid being compromised in the first place. But, as any experienced soldier will confirm with a slow nod and a shot glass, shit happens.

  The political fallout from a team of international mercenaries operating behind enemy lines had to be neutralised. Deniability was of paramount importance. Officially, Mike and his team didn’t even exist. The DIA recognised them as important and very useful assets but they were also conveniently disposable commodities, combat personnel who would be denied help, ransom or recognition if they were caught. The DIA board often worried about what would happen if their operatives revealed sensitive information - presumably under extreme torture - details and procedures that could be used to compromise other DIA operations. So the team members were kept in the dark as much as possible. The DIA board also needed to know exactly what went wrong. They needed to understand how and why any operation had been compromised. They assumed nothing. So, when a US satellite picked up the tiny homing signal from the beacon hidden in Mike’s innocent-looking army belt, the reaction team was told to stand down because no one was about to launch a rescue mission to extract someone from the middle of the Russian navy base at Tartus. That was not going to happen. DIA Intel was suddenly very interested in the Russian presence in the game and the fact that there had been a failed attempt to kidnap Mike back in the States raised even more questions about the Russian involvement, about a humungous quantity of pure heroin and about the hidden connections to ISIS. During all the excitement, the DIA never for a moment considered the possibility that Mike might survive his encounter with the Russkis. They knew where he was. His miniature beacon had revealed his location. They acknowledged Mike’s confirmation of Russian military involvement. But they never planned to be sharing cold beers with their operative anywhere outside the mythical feasting halls of Valhalla. He was listed as missing in action and would eventually be reported as an unfortunate casualty in a military training exercise. But, against all expectations and to the surprise of his employers, Mike’s beacon had started to move again as it left the safety of the Russian port and crept at a painfully slow pace out to sea. Too slow for a boat that had been despatched to dump the body. More like the speed of a tired but determined swimmer. DIA Central tasked a drone to scan the area and followed up the search with a US navy destroyer complete with its sea-going rescue helicopter. They really hoped that Mike was still alive. Not that they weren’t pleased to see him but he sure had an awful lot of very interesting questions to answer. He might have intel that would be vital to future operations.

  Chapter 6

  Back at the base camp in Syria, the medical team checked him carefully and made sure he was thoroughly hydrated via a saline drip that contained a potent cocktail of anti-biotics and nutrients. The medics dressed his wounds and discovered a cracked tooth that had been caused by a bruising, vicious kick to the chin. They told him he was lucky that none of his ribs had been broken, especially considering the extensive beating he’d received to the abdomen. One of the nurses quipped that he looked like he’d just had a nocturnal encounter with a jealous husband and, despite his fatigue, Mike couldn’t help smiling. He looked up at the dark-haired nurse and asked if she was married because he was officially back in the dating pool and then it was her turn to laugh. The biggest problem had been dehydration but he was responding well to the IV drip and, after a few hours sleep, started to look a lot like the old, familiar Mike Ducane. Not a very happy Michael Ducane but definitely a recovering and pensive Mike Ducane, a man who couldn’t rid himself of a vivid and persistent image that kept running through his head. He kept seeing the bodies of his squad, stretched out, shot up and bleeding out on the desert sand, a Spetsnaz NCO coldly shooting each of them in the head to make sure there were no survivors, no witnesses. And alongside this nightmare mental video footage, Mike imagined in perfect detail a row of sharpened wooden stakes, each one decorated with the heads of the Spetsnaz soldiers who’d slaughtered his team. He’d added Fatima Trigo to the ranks of the condemned and the thought brought him a disturbing degree of comfort. In a way that only the Company shrink could possible appreciate, the grisly images made Mike Ducane smile. Not a happy smile, to be sure. More like the smile of a sociopathic cat with a freshly-caught mouse pinned and bleeding beneath each set of sharpened claws. The kind of smile that would produce a deep sense of unease in anyone who happened to stare into those cold, remorseless eyes. In his heart, Mike Ducane demanded a full and extreme measure of payback and, if he ever had the opportunity, he intended to get damnright Biblical on the sons of bitches. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t business. It was personal and he intended to make damn sure the Russians paid the fullest possible price for their transgressions. Biblical? Mike was thinking pure Old Testament, fire and brimstone, the kind of righteous and lethal punishment that would wash away his anger in a tide of blood. Heads on spikes. Yeah. The hard currency of cold-blooded vengeance.

  A team of senior DIA personnel flew into the forward operating base from Cyprus later that morning to de-brief Mike and their first instruction was to urge the medical team to add a couple of unorthodox chemical stimulants to Mike’s saline drip. They wanted him wide awake and fully functioning for a few hours and they needed to extract every ounce of intelligence material he could divulge. He could sleep off the drugs over the next few days. The doctor protested but, in a clandestine military environment, the Hippocratic Oath was rarely referred to and, after a token protest, the doctor reluctantly complied with his orders and added the chemical cocktail to Mike’s IV line. Within minutes, Mike was wide awake and feeling super-charged with new energy and a surfeit of raw aggression. Looking at the cords of muscle tensing along Mike Ducane’s arms, one of the DIA execs suggested the patient should probably be tied down, for his own good, just in case he became a little too animated. But the doctor casually waved away their concerns and assured them that Mike was unlikely to become dangerous. Besides, the medic wouldn’t be in the room if anything went wrong so he didn’t feel inclined to appraise the DIA brass of the dangers of pumping a highly-trained killer with a surfeit of chemicals. If something really did go wrong and Mike went postal, the execs would know all about it soon enough. And it would be their problem to handle.

  Fortunately for the DIA execs, Mike remained firmly in control of his aggressive instincts and the de-briefing turned out to be thorough, intense, repetitive and deeply revealing. The DIA knew the Russians were working with ISIS to move opium from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to their processing facilities in Syria. Local ISIS commanders used their share of the heroin as currency to
pay for luxuries, to pay for weapons and to raise much-needed hard cash. The DIA could now confirm beyond any doubt that the bulk of the refined drug was being sent to the Russian naval port at Tartus, where it was destined to be loaded and shipped in complete secrecy to distribution points dotted around the eastern Mediterranean. It was a high value and extremely lucrative business, guarded, hidden and protected by the military, and it provided a very efficient means of raising billions of Dollars for the politicians and crime lords who ran the Russian Federation. It also provided clandestine funding for ISIS. It made ISIS less dependent on their fickle paymasters in Saudi Arabia. Peace then was of little value to these men. As long as the war dragged on, the chaos and confusion could be used to disguise an industrial-scale production programme and the highly efficient movement of vast quantities of pure heroin. It was trafficking but on a truly staggering scale. The last thing they needed was peace. Peace could mean the arrival of United Nations inspectors and neutral peacekeepers, TV crews and journalists, and that could spell the end of the entire trafficking business. None of the players would be willing to give up their share of all that cash without a fight. No. The war had to continue. Even if that meant that the Russians were prepared to secretly equip and supply key elements within ISIS with weapons, munitions and illegal drugs. Even if that meant that the Russians would willingly direct their bombers and helicopters and cruise missiles to hit targets that were identified as competitors within the Syrian drugs trade. It was brutal. It was cynical. It was business as usual and a group of apparent enemies, opposing forces who were supposed to be fighting each other to the death, were secretly co-operating in order to line their pockets with vast amounts of hard currency. It was breath-taking. It was mad. It was Syria and the Defence Intelligence Agency was preparing a Top Secret report on their discoveries that was destined for the highest echelons of the US government. The DIA execs were particularly curious about Mike’s dubious relationship with Fatima Trigo, a high-level Russian security service agent who’d enjoyed unrestricted access to the Agency’s forward operating base. Mike just shrugged with the unavoidable admission that he’d fallen up to his balls into a well-designed Russian honey trap. ‘Perils of the job, Mikey. Perils of the job,’ quipped one of the execs. ‘From all the screaming and hollering we’ve heard about, at least we know you had a hell of a good time with Ms Trigo!’ Mike tried to smile but the experience had left a bad taste in his mouth. ‘Hope you did your country proud, Ducane.’ Yeah, there was going to be a lot of ribbing about Fatima and deep down he knew he deserved it. But right now they had more important issues to worry about. Planting Fatima Trigo in the forward operating base had provided further confirmation that the Russians were determined to protect their interests in Syria at all costs. It was proof that they were prepared to go to extreme lengths to identify and remove any perceived threat from the equation. Removal always meant permanent removal. The Russians needed to know what the DIA teams had uncovered during their recent missions and they needed to seal the gaps in their security net. Deploying a Spetsnaz team to capture Mike and kill his companions must have been sanctioned at the highest level of the Russian military hierarchy. Someone at the top of the food chain must have given the nod to eliminate the threat by any means. Despite all the experience and professionalism of the DIA team, the Russians had come very, very close to succeeding.