The Last Operation (The Remnants of War Series, Book 1)

by Patrick Astre

  Taylor finished reading the last sheet of paper. He shuffled through the dozen or so sheets and reread a few paragraphs before he put the stack back down on the desk. Daniels broke the silence first.

  "Before we close out our business, I want to know something," Daniels said. "That operation in Mexico you sent me on ten years ago. Was that Rollie's idea to waste the entire team or did that come from you?"

  "Roland Washington was an idiot. Too much muscle and not enough brains for the nuances of delicate covert operations. He had orders to kill you all, a tragic but necessary sacrifice for the greater good. He let you live and as a direct result, he died."

  For the first time since he had first received Daniels' E-mail, Taylor smiled, a happy, satisfied smile. A small sound escaped his lips, a chuckling sort of low laughter.

  "Now about closing our business," Taylor continued, "closing it indeed, a very realistic turn of words. Tell me Richard, have you ever heard the term plausible denial?"

  Richard Daniels shifted his weight imperceptibly, the toe of his boot resting lightly on the raised bump in the floor. He stared without answering as Taylor continued.

  "You see Richard, plausible denial is a concept we have used for decades. This information, you probably somehow got from one of our technicians on the Bio-Soldier project. We discovered that young man's treachery and terminated him. Our tracks have been well covered on that score. The same thing applies to what happened in Mexico. A bungled operation, tragic casualties to be sure, but nothing that couldn't stand the scrutiny of our covers. As far as your personal notes and memos, they will simply be disregarded as the ramblings of a disillusioned, somewhat psychotic ex-special forces soldier. When this is received, it will be seen as one of a number of interminable attempts to undermine those ascending to power."

  Taylor stepped back, his eyes still on Daniels. He stopped when he was a few feet from Baker and continued talking.

  "So you see Richard, our business is truly and finally over."

  As Taylor turned toward Baker to give him the kill signal, Daniels stepped hard on the switch imbedded in the cement under his foot.

  A sharp, cracking explosion burst above Daniels' head. It echoed loud and sudden in the empty warehouse as cables securing three large panels ruptured by explosive bolts. Daniels dropped to the ground as the panels, eight foot by six foot, two inch thick steel, sandwiched between eight-inch thick slabs of hardened asbestos crashed down.

  The panels followed the loose guiding tracks on the sloping walls flanking Daniels. As the panels reached the end of the tracks, they slammed into the concrete floor, forming a tight seal. Daniel was now encased inside a sort of lean-to, composed of the two concrete walls, the heavy panels on top and the main wall behind him. The whole thing had taken about one second.

  Baker had reacted amazingly quick, but in the wrong direction. The customized weapon had appeared in his grip as if conjured by a magician. He'd pointed it at the upper wall and ceiling where the explosion had occurred. In the second or so it had taken for him to scan overhead and level the weapon back toward Daniels, the heavy panels had smashed into place. Baker turned toward William Taylor who had taken a jumping step backward. He opened his mouth, but before any sound could come out, there came four simultaneous explosions.

  The first two explosions detonated tubes of C-4 coated, Thermite heat explosive that had been secured within the two twenty five gallon drums that Bobby-Ray had purchased from the Alabama Militia. The two drums were hidden inside the planters on opposite sides of the warehouse.

  The drums were filled with napalm, jellied gasoline.

  Two tremendous fireballs erupted from both sides of the warehouse with devastating force. The orange fiery clouds instantly reached temperatures of thousands of degrees and pushed waves of scorching air in front of them at near supersonic speed. It would be impossible to know what William Taylor, Conboy and Baker felt as the intense searing heat consumed their bodies, changing all flesh and fluids to gaseous matters in a blinding second.

  The force of the fireball blew out all the windows and doors of the warehouse. Great spires of incandescent flames erupted up to fifty feet from every apertures of the building in glowing tongues that overshadowed the bright lights of the parking lot. Chunks of roofing materials were propelled upward, erupting like a volcano under the pressure of the fireball within. A thick cloud of black smoke billowed out like a noxious mushroom. The booming noise of the explosion rolled over the peaceful suburbs as the covert assassination teams outside scrambled away from the sudden inferno.

  The heat was so intense that the steel girders melted, the concrete collapsed and any material less tenuous dissolved into gas and molten liquid. By the time the first fire unit arrived some ten or twelve minutes later, the warehouse had collapsed, turned itself into piles of giant white hot flaming rubble.

  The investigations that followed found only the barest traces of human remains. It was known that William Taylor, nominated to be America's first Czar of the new combined intelligence cabinet, had died within the conflagration. His car had remained in the parking lot and witnesses in the agency had reported his movements. Outside of that, precious little information was uncovered and for years the investigation went nowhere until it was quietly shelved.

  Conspiracy buffs would gleefully seize on the case for years to come, linking it to everything from international terrorism to UFO's and the Kennedy assassination.

  Inside the concrete, steel and asbestos lean-to, Richard Daniels was protected from the initial fireball. This protection however, could only last five or six seconds under the intense heat.

  It was all that Daniels needed.

  Chapter 56

  There'd actually been four explosions, all simultaneous. The first two detonated the drums filled with napalm, the third had been the Primacord woven into the cinderblock behind Daniels, the main wall of the lean-to. A five-foot high by three foot wide oval appeared as the hollow concrete crumbled under the explosive charge. Daniels dove through the opening as the fireball raged outside his temporary shelter. He dove into the adjoining small storage room through the blasted opening and into the results of the fourth explosion.

  The small storage room that Daniels jumped into had been added later and did not rest on the same foundation. The last explosion had taken out the thin ferro-concrete floor exposing a wide hole dug four feet down. At the bottom of the hole, a large drainage pipe was exposed. It was three feet in diameter and the concrete on the top had been removed creating a wide opening into the pipe.

  Daniels jumped down into the hole, entered the opening and started crawling away inside the pipe. The initial force of the fireball was dissipating, leaving blistering bone melting heat. He crawled for his life, feeling the heat entering the pipe, following him with tendrils of hot gas that burnt the soles of his boots. He held his breath as he crawled and the temperature rose within the tunnel. He came upon the first of Bobby-Ray's packages just when he believed his lungs would explode and the acrid smoke in the enclosed space burnt his eyes.

  He quickly put on the fireman's breathing apparatus that the Alabama Militia had stolen from the Tuscaloosa Fire department and sold to Bobby-Ray. He turned the valve to the small tank and drew a breath of sweet clean oxygen. He crawled, fast as he could, as the temperature rose inside the cement pipe and thick black smoke obscured any vision out of the full-face Plexiglass mask.

  The smoke inside the pipe seemed to suck out the light from the small lantern affixed to the top of the mask. He sweated from every pore and felt the heated grit of the cement on his knees and the palms of his hands. The inside of the breathing apparatus smelled of moldy rubber and he tasted the ashy smoke in his mouth.

  Time slowed as he crawled in the dark tunnel. He imagined the interior of hell couldn't be much worse than this subterranean pipe. He thought he could feel blisters on his ankles as the heat enveloped his body when suddenly the ground just disappeared under him and he fell headfirst into darkn
ess.

  Daniels didn't fall very far, two feet, maybe three. His martial arts training saved him from painful fracture as he rolled when he landed. He stood slowly as the light on the breathing apparatus illuminated the area.

  He had escaped through a three-foot diameter concrete drainpipe that passed under the warehouse. That pipe fed into one of several main drainage-runoff pipes that ran under the city of Washington and emptied into the Potomac several miles outside the city limit. Hundreds of pipes like the one Daniels had crawled out of connected to this main one. In times of heavy precipitation they carried away millions of gallons of water and prevented flooding.

  The pipe Daniels had reached measured a diameter of six feet. About two inches of water sloshed in the center and the interior had the musty rotted smell of a place that has been damp too long. In the beam of the headgear light, he could see black smoke spilling out of the smaller pipe like poisonous ground fog. Crackling whispering shushing noises echoed from the smaller pipe and resonated throughout the larger pipe to fade away in the distance. The light could penetrate a little further and the smoke had thinned out, carried away by the moist, moldy breeze that ran through the drainpipe buried twelve feet underground.

  Daniels started a slow jog down the large pipe. He had to stoop a bit so his head wouldn't hit the concrete top of the pipe. After a few minutes he was able to take off the breathing apparatus. The light was dimming when he came to a wide-angled bend in the pipe. The link was a large concrete block that joined two pipe lengths, allowing a change of direction without creating stress in the concrete. The junction of the two pipes inside the block formed a small alcove. It was there that Bobby-Ray had stashed the second set of items.

  There was a light plastic helmet with a heavier light mounted on top. Daniels put that on first. Next, he donned the backpack. Afterwards, he took the folding bicycle and in two quick moves snapped the lock pins together. It was a small bike, portable and designed to be carried where space is at a premium, like a boat or the trunk of a car. It had short fat tires and was about three sizes too small for Daniels.

  But Daniels was not entering the Tour De France. All he had to do was get out of the large drainpipe in reasonable time. He pedaled down the center of the pipe, the wheels splashing the two or three inches of water in the bottom. A huge rat, eyes glowing and small fangs gleaming white, darted away from his light and disappeared in some hidden crack in the cement wall.

  It took a little over twenty minutes for Daniels to pedal the small bike to the end of the pipe. He could see the lighter circle of the opening ahead and shut off the light. He stopped the bike at the end of the pipe.

  He stood on the edge of the great drainpipe where it emptied into the river. A narrow trickle of water fell twenty feet to the slow moving dark mass of the Potomac below. Daniels held the side of the pipe, stuck his head outside and looked around. There was no moon and although the night was clear, most stars were obscured by the bright glow of the city of Washington a dozen or so miles away. A slight breeze carried the scent of autumn vegetation and riverbank mud. A few miles upstream, the lights of the Wilson Memorial Bridge glistened like a string of bright jewels studded with the pinpoint headlights of traffic passing the bridge from I95. Twinkling dots of lights danced on the crest of tiny waves from the light chop on the river and he could see the red and green light of a small boat a couple of hundred feet away. Beneath the green light a small white signal blinked every three seconds.

  He stripped to shorts and tee shirt and put on the neoprene wet suit and swim fins that had been in the backpack Bobby-Ray had placed with the bicycle. He threw the backpack and bicycle in the river.

  He jumped feet first into the water twenty feet below. The ice-cold river shocked him when he first splashed in but quickly warmed with his body heat inside the wet suit. He started swimming with powerful strokes and kicks from the fins.

  When he approached the boat he saw it was a ten-foot Boston Whaler yacht tender with 40HP Mercury outboard. He swam alongside, placed one hand on the gun whale and held the other hand up. Bobby-Ray grasped his hand and helped him roll aboard the small boat.

  "Hey boss," said Bobby-Ray, "looks like you had yourself some kind of barbecue back there."

  Richard Daniels looked toward the banks of the river he had come from. There was a red glow inland and occasional lick of flames and eruptions of sparks could be seen in the distance. The night air carried the sound of sirens and a helicopter circled the scene with spotlight reaching down like a distant firefly. The breeze held a whiff of smoke and gasoline.

  "Yeah, I cooked me up some rats."

  Bobby-Ray started the engine and the little Boston Whaler ran down the river. Fifteen minutes later they came up behind a much larger boat. It was a fifteen years old Grand Banks 42. A sturdy ocean going pleasure trawler that Billy had purchased and set up in a nearby marina. Daniels could make out the form of Carlos at the helm, his face orange with the reflected glow of the instrument panel.

  Daniels helped Bobby-Ray secure the Boston Whaler on its davits and went inside the cabin where hot food and a bear hug from Carlos awaited him.

  The Grand Banks accelerated to its cruising speed of nine knots as it followed the river eastward toward the Chesapeake Bay and the open Atlantic. It would take about seven to eight days for the Grand Banks to round the tip of Florida and head toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Everglades.

  Epilogue

  The town of Islamorada is not quite like the average American small town. Lying on mile marker 32 of the Florida Keys, it straddles Highway 1 about a third of the way to Key West. Surrounded by the transparent waters of Upper Matecombe Key on one side and the coral reef-studded clear green waters of the Atlantic on the other, it is host to an amazing bio-diversity of ocean life. The climate is one of the most temperate on earth, with balmy salt-water scented breezes and clear skies adorned with small puffy clouds mostly the rule. Once in a while, tropical storms will descend in violent waves of wind and rain and crashing surf, providing a counterpoint to the normal tranquility.

  For an area that has no traditional industry, there is quite a bit of economic activities provided by local small businesses. Food stores, restaurants, hotels, emporiums, repair shops, marinas and the ever-present souvenir shops. Most of these businesses are grateful for local patronage but depends mostly on the constant streams of tourists pouring down Highway 1. The population is about equally mixed between retirees, artists, writers and craftsmen and the owners and workers of local businesses and those who choose to commute to jobs in Homestead and Miami.

  In one respect however, Islamorada is like any small town in any corner of the United States. Gossip is one of the main activities and takes the attention of the residents as much as the World Series or Super Bowl.

  The speculations among the townspeople started the day ground was broken for the luxury home on a spit of land that juts out from Upper Matecombe Key, pointing its shell and white sand covered ground, like a finger toward Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The house was not overly large, nor was it built with the pretentious gaudiness that the nouveau riche will sometimes bring to this part of South Florida. In fact, it had been carefully designed to blend with the beauty of the environment. But the luxury was there nevertheless as the local tradesmen brought back the stories of the Jacuzzis and saunas, the observatory and heated pools.

  The couple that owned the house brought more mystery and speculations then the residents of Islamorada could remember since the days of the bootleggers and rum-runners. The woman was tall and blonde with Hollywood good looks. Speculations ran that she had something to do with the entertainment industry, perhaps the theater or movies. Many a gossiper thumbed through hundreds of entertainment publications looking for a tidbit that would identify the woman and enhance their status as gossip emeritus.

  The couple was always friendly and polite and would often chat with the locals. Somehow, the chats never went beyond the usual banalities of weather and tr
affic. They never gave parties and always politely declined invitations. It was noted with approval however, that they never missed contributing to local charities and fund raising events.

  The gossip bogged down considerably when it was discovered for sure that the woman had been a senior partner at a prestigious Naples law firm. With the possibility of Hollywood or Broadway scandals eliminated, the gossip died down, unable to sustain itself on the banality of a law practice.

  Speculations still abounded for the man. Tall, lean and muscular with those rugged good looks, consensus had it that he was a retired pilot, possibly military.

  This speculation was fueled mainly by the twin-engine seaplane emblazoned with the name Albatross, kept moored at the dock that was joined to the house by a cedar walkway. Periodically, residents passing by the small remote road that ran to the house, could observe the couple getting into the plane and casting off.

  The plane would be seen taxiing down the sparkling emerald water until it lifted off. As it gained altitude, the residents could see it banking, always north.

  Toward the Everglades.

  The End

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  THE DOPPELGANGER PROTOCOL

  The Remnants to War Series

  Book Two

  The Doppelganger Protocol

  The Remnants of War Series

  Book Two

  by

  Patrick Astre

  Award-winning Author

  Inside the cargo hold, the gale screeched like demented furies as dark clouds and sheets of spray tore across the open hatch. Dr. Immirov finished fastening the GPS, Global Positioning System, to the Chutka with the specially designed leather harness. He had opened two crates, all he would need for this particular job. He looked up at the opening, then turned to the creatures and gave the command.