Direct Action - 03

by Jack Murphy

  Aghassi shook his head.

  “This might come down to old fashion human intelligence.”

  “One of them is already suspicious of me,” Deckard told him. “Rick. He saw me taking photos of the device on the way out. Bill blew it off though.”

  “What device?”

  Deckard showed him the pictures on his cell phone of the device he had recovered in Egypt. Aghassi flipped through them on Deckard's phone while getting a brief rundown on how it worked and why it had been in Egypt.

  “Looks like a high energy radio frequency device. Where is it now? If you can get it to me, this could be our big break. We can use it to tap into their network.”

  “Too late. When our ship dropped us off in Djibouti there were a couple suits waiting on us. One took control of the three college kids to put on an airplane back home. Another took possession of the device.”

  “We're up shit creek.”

  “That isn't exactly comforting.”

  “Look, we've got one platoon from Samruk International in Madagascar. They hit the ground about twelve hours ago and are staging out of a hangar. They are arranging for contingency transportation to Mauritius by air and sea right now.”

  “Who is there?”

  “Sergeant Major Korgan and Frank running things. About forty shooters total. We'll be able to call on them when we need them.”

  “When the time comes I'm not going to have days to wait on their ship or hours to wait for their plane,” Deckard said. “It is anyone's guess who will still be standing when the smoke clears.”

  22

  Deckard relaxed and let the current carry him.

  Exhaling, bubbles escaped from around the air regulator he held in his mouth. The kelp was swept back, nearly horizontal with the sandy bottom in the strong current. His muscles were relaxed as he hung suspended in the clear blue water. Above him, ripples of yellow sunlight glimmered and cast shadows in the shallow water.

  He swam underwater through the channel between two small islands. As the ocean forced itself through the channel, it created an extremely swift current. At times it was like being in a liquid treadmill as Deckard kicked with his fins but made no forward progress. Having SCUBA dived all the way upstream to the edge of the islands, he now relaxed and let the current carry him back.

  The water between the two islands was shallow, maybe twenty five feet deep but with visibility that went out one hundred feet in any given direction. Now he was slowly sinking towards the bottom. Just beneath him, sand and shattered sea shells were blown with the current like tumbleweed in the desert. He inhaled, filling his lungs with oxygen. The added buoyancy was just enough for him to pop back up and rise above the sandy surface.

  Small fish darted around looking for food but there was little to be found. They were fighting the current as Deckard had been, but were somewhat better suited for it.

  The ocean blasted him back in the direction he had come, a half hour of swimming upstream was now a four-minute trip downstream as the horizons stayed neutral and the ocean bottom raced by below him.

  Finally, he was alone.

  Ten minutes later, he surfaced above the choppy waves. The wind was coming in strong, so Deckard kept his regulator in his mouth as he bobbed on the surface and kicked his way to the shore. Once he could touch the bottom, he took off his fins and snorkel, then walked in to the beach.

  “How was the dive?” Nadeesha asked as she sat up and cupped her hands over her eyes to protect them from the sun.

  “Good. Strong current down there today,” Deckard answered as he set down his oxygen tank and began stripping out of his wetsuit.

  Nadeesha, meanwhile, was completely naked as she had been sunning herself on the beach. The catamaran they had rented was rocking in the ocean one hundred meters out where they had anchored it. Gabriel Island was uninhabited, and being about eight miles off the coast of Mauritius, it seemed they had the entire island to themselves.

  Deckard set his dive gear aside and sat down as the wind blew her hair in his face. Looking at her naked body, she was already the darkest shade of bronze imaginable.

  “I don't know why you feel the need to tan, Nadeesha,” he said.

  “Call me Nadi. All my friends do.”

  “The guys on the team don't call you Nadi.”

  “They are not my friends.”

  “But I am?”

  Her wide smile contrasted her dark complexion with her white teeth.

  “Better than that,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down on top of her. Nadi held him close, pressing her breasts into Deckard's bare chest. They kissed deeply, forgetting completely where or when they were.

  When he pulled away, Nadi bit her upper lip.

  “I think you're a little excited.”

  “Just a little.”

  She laughed at that.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Deckard began. “Southern India?”

  “No,” she laughed again. “Sri Lanka.”

  “I was afraid I would make a real ass out of myself and you would say Kansas City.”

  “No, I grew up in Sri Lanka. My dad owned the largest bottled water import business on the island. That, and his political connections with the Sri Lankan government, helped us immigrate to the US when I was a teenager. Eventually we got dual citizenship.”

  “What does he think of your career decision? I imagine he wanted you to go to college.”

  Her eyes turned hard as she looked up at him. They were still in each other's arms.

  “Who cares what he thinks. I haven't talked to my family in years. He had decided that we would go to American schools. I was to go to med school and my brother would major in engineering.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was recruited.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was an athlete, even back then. Ran triathlons in college. Near the end of my sophomore year, someone took an interest in me because of the triathlons, but mostly because of my background and language ability. I did well on the tests the military gave, so I went into intel and then JSOC brought me in to work for them.”

  “The special cell they have?”

  “That's the one. Not many women were qualified for the type of work we did, and of those that were, the others were white bread American girls except for me and one Puerto Rican girl. It was a very small group and we were pretty close. You know Special Operations. It's a sausage fest.”

  Now it was Deckard's turn to laugh.

  “Yeah, we can be kind of sophomoric.”

  “Kind of?”

  “Want to see my dive watch?”

  Nadi sighed. “Is that the one where you pull your dick around your wrist and go around showing it to girls in the bar?”

  “It's a classic. They were pretty hard on you?”

  “Most guys we worked with were professional, but you still get the haters, the doubters, the people who resent you just for being there. That was an additional issue we had to deal with on top of our normal job. Besides that, they kept us deployed constantly. Seemed like eleven months out of the year we were overseas. Back-to-back deployments with no end in sight. We all kept going on them because we didn't want anyone to see us fail. A lot of the men already thought we were doomed to implode.”

  “You had something to prove.”

  “The same as any man in Special Operations, but some people couldn't see that. I got sent all over the world. They trained me as a marksman so I could infiltrate into areas and do overwatch. Sometimes I'd have to pretend to seduce some terrorist asshole in London or Bogota and then install some software on his computer. A lot of that type of thing.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were right. We imploded. Not because we were incompetent, but because JSOC ran roughshod right over us. There were only a half dozen of us girls, and they would send us on back-to-back deployments without any time to decompress. They used and abused us until the inevitable happened. My bes
t friend, Jennifer, she killed herself. Another girl was trying to have a baby with her husband, and after her third miscarriage she had a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalized. Lauren got into drugs and alcohol. But nobody would throw in the towel or speak up because we knew what kind of political pressure our cell was under. Everyone wanted us to fail, but simultaneously needed us to go places and do things that the operators couldn't. I was the first to take the plunge. The writing was on the wall, so I got out while I still could.”

  “And came to work for Liquid Sky?”

  A cloud passed in front of the sun and cast a shadow on the couple as they lay on the beach. Nadi was now able to open her eyes wider as she looked up at Deckard.

  “I tried to go back to school, tried some other jobs, but I just wasn't the same person as that nineteen year old girl that got cherry-picked out of college. They changed me. The war changed all of us, Deckard, even you.”

  “I wouldn't do this job if I didn't enjoy it.”

  “You enjoy your job, not theirs.”

  “I guess my motivations have always been kind of selfish.”

  “You're a fucking boy scout, Deckard, an obsolete joke that should have died storming the beaches at Normandy or some such shit.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Get real. No one gives a fuck about America anymore and the more loudly they talk about their patriotism the more full of shit they are. Why don't we do our own thing. Literally sail away in that boat right over there,” Nadi said as she nodded towards the catamaran. “We could open our own intelligence consulting business. Travel around the world as a couple. I know from my previous work that the intel community has a huge market for that sort of thing. We could go places with that cover that others couldn't.”

  “You willing to put this whole Liquid Sky thing behind you?”

  “I was ready a year ago. Now you've given me a reason.”

  “I'm a soldier, not a spy.”

  “You can't be a soldier forever,” Nadi pulled him back down until her lips were just a few inches from his. “But together we could pull purse strings and puppet strings until we're eating applesauce and shitting ourselves in a nursing home somewhere.”

  “How romantic,” Deckard said dryly.

  “I think you'll warm to the idea.”

  Nadi smiled and kissed him again.

  Deckard returned the kiss, knowing that one of them was destined to kill the other.

  23

  Admiral Russ Corbett scrolled through the messages on his cell phone as he waited in one of the booths at the back of his favorite restaurant in Washington, D.C. He was off the clock, wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants. The JSOC commander was a busy man. He oversaw the military's top priority Counter-Terrorism units as well as managed a number of highly classified special access projects nestled within his command.

  At the moment, he was using Libya as a battlefield laboratory for JSOC's new ground-level architecture. The CIA's drone based targeted-killing program was falling out of favor with the administration due to political fallout in places like Yemen and Pakistan. Meanwhile, JSOC provided a working model of up-close and personal assassinations that slipped completely under the radar. The program was already spreading to Yemen and Jordan, but the bureaucrats were dragging their feet way too long with Syria. He needed to get his boys into the country so that they could start cutting the grass, otherwise Syria would become a straight-up terrorist stronghold.

  Every study confirmed that the rebels would be defeated within another year by Assad's Hezbollah-backed regime, so the President finally made a decision. They would begin backing the Free Syrian Army, first only covertly, but now they would overtly assist. Still, no authorization for JSOC to play, just support. Like Angola during the Cold War, America's policy was not to win in Syria, but rather to deny the enemy an easy victory. If that sounded Machiavellian, that is because it was.

  Corbett set his cell phone down as he saw his old friend approach.

  “Jim,” Russ Corbett said as he got to his feet and shook his friend's hand. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Anything for you, Russ.”

  As the two sat down the waiter came over to take their drink orders. Russ ordered a Blue Moon. Jim asked for a glass of water. The retired General was known to be a long-distance runner who kept an immaculate diet, even since separating from the military several years prior. The two Officers had first crossed paths way back when Jim McCoy had been the commander of 2nd Ranger Battalion. Then, later, they'd worked together in JSOC. McCoy had the honor of being JSOC commander for an unprecedented six years. Someone liked him in that position. Really liked him.

  Then, it all came crashing down and Corbett got tapped for the job.

  To his credit, McCoy had taken it all in stride and admirably fell on the sword as the administration demanded his resignation.

  “So what are you up to these days, Jim?” Russ began.

  McCoy waited until the server had set their drinks down and left before speaking.

  “Staying busy with my leadership courses that we run through the McCoy Group. Some solid contracts in Yemen and a few other places. What's up?”

  “It is the other places that I'm interested in.”

  “You know me Russ. First and foremost, I'm a patriot. If there is anything I can do to help, you just have to ask.”

  “Well, this is the thing Jim, a number of people that my office has been looking at have been getting killed lately. It is too systematic to be random. I've talked to the Agency, talked to the Israelis, talked to all the players and they deny it. I've got private verification at this point as well. Whoever is behind taking down these targets is a pro.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I'm saying that these are our people.”

  The Naval officer lifted his glass of beer and took a drink. Jim McCoy's expression was unreadable. Blank. He said nothing. That's how Russ knew he was on the right track.

  “I don't know what tribe they came out of, but these have to be our people. Separated from the service, working for some off-shore military contractor,” Russ continued.

  “I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion.”

  “So we're on the same page?”

  “I'm afraid I don't see how I can be of any help in this matter.”

  The waiter interrupted their conversation as he came to take their food orders. Russ had his usual. McCoy ordered the Bison burger and asked the waiter to hold the fries. He would eat the burger with a fork and knife and leave the bun as he always did. Taking their menus, the waiter departed for the kitchen.

  “The world is tearing itself apart,” the retired General began. “This administration is compromising national security. In another few years he will be gone to go write his memoirs and tour the country doing speaking engagements before picking up a job in some think tank. Then guys like you and me will be left holding the mess that he created. We will have inherited an unworkable situation in the Middle East.

  “He forced Mubarak out; clearly the wrong move. We had a good deal going with Gaddafi and many worked very hard to get him into our camp, but we did flip him. Then the President helps the militias overthrow him without the slightest understanding of the region and the complicated east, west, and south tribal conflict overlaid on top of sectarian issues.”

  Russ sighed. He dealt with it everyday and knew of the issues far too well.

  “It isn't even him, Jim. Look at who his advisers are. The dynamic duo of Cass Sunstein and Samantha Powers are crafting foreign policy. This administration is way out of their league and they've got a bunch of amateurs running the show. Meanwhile, the President is content to deal with petty domestic issues because the racial stuff is what he is comfortable with. And what his staff is comfortable having him deal with.”

  “What do you expect from an inexperienced bureaucrat?” Jim said. “He had one term in the Senate and prior to that he was what? A community organizer? What the fuck does that even mea
n?”

  “I fight this battle everyday, Jim. Trust me, I know. It has never been this bad. He has staffers on his National Security Council calling four star Generals in the Pentagon and reading them the riot act. It is unprecedented. The President has put out this bullshit message that he has a team of rivals working together but the reality is that he has a staff with zero national security experience calling the shots.

  “I'm lucky that I have a good relationship with him, but others are not so fortunate. The Secretary of Defense can't even talk to him, he has to go through his staff. It is even worse for the Director of Central Intelligence. I admit that it is bad, but things will change after the next election.”

  “It isn't enough,” Jim stated flatly. “Al Qaeda is not on the run, they are not backing down. We are. Meanwhile, the administration has been fomenting revolutions in the Middle East without knowing how to control or contain them. The way this is going, we're going to end up like Robespierre in the French Revolution. In the end, everyone gets their head cut off.

  “We can't let some radical in the White House undo decades of work,” Jim finished.

  Now, Russ was starting to put together what this was about. Jim McCoy saw himself as holding together America's counter-terrorism strategy. After his unprecedented stint at JSOC commander, he was not willing to let it go, resignation or not.

  “You have to let me fight this battle,” Russ said. “We can negotiate with him. Then we contain him and stall his people until the next election.”

  “Do you know how much more damage he can do over the next couple years? We don't have that kind of time here. With or without him, we've got business to take care of. There is a group of us that are not content to sit by and watch this happen. You box him in and slow him down. I understand your position better than most. Let us do our part.”

  “This is going to blow up in our faces.”

  “Just hold the high ground as long as you can. Once he is out, there is a group of people waiting in the wings. Once the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and all these other idiots are done destroying each other and their countries, then we will move in. The next Presidency is going to take charge of this mess and clean things up. I'm talking about completely redrawing the map of the Middle East, redrawing it in a manner favorable to our national interests. Then we deal with Iran. Then China.”