Overbrook Farms

by Neal Goldstein

  1

  June 2015, Northern Virginia

  “Hey mate, the colonel has a job for my crew,” McMurray said in his cockney accent as he approached Hunter. “The thing is I’m one man shy.”

  Hunter was at a bench in the back of the armory bending a piece of aluminum with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

  “Makin’ another one of your toys, eh?”

  Hunter put down the tool and turned to look at McMurray. The man was short, a scrawny and sinewy five foot six inches, weighing in at 130 pounds, or eight stone as he would say. He was a former SAS commando, the Brit’s equivalent of a Navy Seal. He was a lethal killer; whose face bore the marks of close combat. He stared at Hunter with dead eyes.

  “You, me, and the Turk. We’ll be wheels up at 1700 hours. Flyin’ down to Venezuela. That’ll give you time to get your kit together. You in?”

  Hunter shook his head. Venezuela was the last place in the world he wanted to go. Too much had happened there, and he knew it would be best to leave it in the past.

  “Come on, mate, you’re the perfect man for this assignment.”

  “What’s the assignment?” Hunter asked.

  “Somethin’ right up your alley.”

  “And exactly what alley would I be walking into?”

  “Rescuing a poor pair of rich kidnap victims, a mother and her little girlie. You’ll be pickin’ up a load of quid and doin’ a good deed. What do you say?”

  Hunter had worked a few jobs with McMurray. The two of them weren’t what you would call friends, but he knew the man to be reliable in a scrum. He had never been paired up with the Turk, who was a Ukrainian, but McMurray didn’t bother to distinguish among Eastern Europeans.

  “What happened to your buddy Coslen?” Hunter asked about the third regular member of McMurray’s squad.

  McMurray shook his head, “Ivan? The poor wanker fecked up last time out. Ya know those Rooskies, always talkin bollocks, but not worth a pile of shite when the real fun begins. So, you in?”

  Hunter, McMurray, and the Turk were operatives who contracted with Global Security International, an organization that provided security services, some legal, some likely not, primarily for the U.S, Department of Defense, the State Department, the British and French equivalents, and a scattering of private entities with deep monetary reserves. In this instance after reasonable measures had failed, McMurray told Hunter that Global had been hired by the family to rescue the hostages and resolve the crisis, by any means necessary.

  Hunter was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the direction in which the organization appeared to be moving. Initially his assignments involved VIP security. Although he generally disliked the privileged class of self-absorbed, self-indulgent, super rich clientele he was charged with protecting, the work was honest, if boring, and the clients were for the most part tolerable.

  Lately he had been working for individuals of dubious character, involved in questionable activities with ambiguous justifications. All of it raised red flags which warned Hunter that he was in danger of crossing a line and entering a space into which he had sworn he would never venture.

  Hunter liked rescue missions. He realized he was rationalizing, but rescues made him feel heroic so he agreed to do this one. The two hostages, Elizabeth Montgomery, age thirty-five, and her eight-year-old daughter Haley, had been kidnapped two months ago while vacationing at a private resort on Curacao. Perhaps characterizing their stay on the island as a ‘vacation’ wasn’t quite accurate. The recently widowed mother and her daughter needed a respite in the aftermath of the tragic death of Michael S. Montgomery III, husband and father, whom everyone called Trey. Trey had been killed in an automobile accident.

  Trey was the son, and heir apparent to Michael S. Montgomery Jr, the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Montgomery Mining and Minerals, a Fortune 100 conglomerate, with mines and production facilities in 27 countries on four continents. Triple M produced the vast majority of the purest rare earth minerals in the world, 99.999% pure in fact, among them Scandium, used for aero-space components; Yttrium, in high temperature conductors; and Promtherium and Samarium, in nuclear batteries. The odds are that if you owned a refrigerator, drove a car, built a nuclear missile, or used any electronic gadget, the components contained in them were built with Triple M minerals.

  Hunter met up with McMurray at the airfield at four, forty-five pm as instructed. When the plane reached cruising altitude McMurray continued the briefing.

  “The tossers who took the Missus and her girl have them stashed in a compound in a ganged-up neighborhood on the outskirts of Caracas. They want $10 million in ransom,10 fookin million! I think the wankers have been smokin’ too much wacky weed. Don’t you think?”

  “According to the intel you showed me, they’re keeping the hostages in the cellar of the big house in the center of the courtyard,” Hunter said. “Thermal imagery has nine tangos inside the walls, and two, two-man teams patrolling the perimeter.”

  McMurray nodded.

  “Besides the three of us, what other elements are in play?”

  McMurray spread a map on the work table in the rear cabin of the Gulfstream G650. “The Colonel brought in the Kraut snipers and Calhoun and his good old boys. They’re in country now, waitin’ on us,” he replied.

  Hunter cursed himself for not getting a full briefing before agreeing to the mission. He knew the German snipers were professional mercenaries, but Roy Calhoun and his confederates from Kentucky were hard core, undisciplined stone-cold killers.

  Hunter remembered his first encounter with them during a joint training exercise. Calhoun, the squad leader, was a wash-out from Seal training, who was subsequently dishonorably discharged from the Navy. He blamed his training NCOs, especially his Master Chief, who he claimed had it in for him because of his Southern heritage. Hunter overheard Calhoun explaining his failure to a group of other contractors, “That’s what happens when you put a coon in charge of god-fearing white folks!”

  “Yeah, same shit happened to me,” Billy Joe Hunsicker, one of the squad said and spit a wad of chewing tobacco on the ground in front of Hunter who happened to be walking by. Some of the tobacco juice splashed on Hunter’s pants. He stopped and glared at the man. “Sorry, Chief,” Hunsicker said insincerely. When Hunter turned and continued to walk away, he heard Hunsicker and his pals chortling.

  From his observations, which included Swastika-prison tattoos, sported by all of the squad members, and the racist comments they purposefully uttered loud enough for him to hear whenever he walked by, Hunter knew if given the opportunity any one of them would kill him if they thought they could get away with it.

  McMurray saw Hunter’s reaction to the news that Calhoun and his men were part of the mission. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Don’t worry, the rednecks are only there for backup, y’know, to cover our arses if things go tits up.”

  “That’s just what I need, a gang of armed neo-Nazis behind me in a gun fight,” Hunter replied.

  “Well then, ya got nothin’ ta be concerned about. None of those wankers could hit you even if you were standin still directly in front of them!” McMurray quipped as he pointed to four locations on the map, “Each of snipers will be in nests no more than a few hundred meters from the compound, with enough elevation to allow the boys to cover both exterior and interior targets.”

  Hunter exhaled heavily as he studied the map, “OK, so what’s the plan?”

  “At sundown, twenty hundred hours, a lorry that’s supposed ta be haulin the ten mill in crates, will be pullin up to the gate. That will draw in the two patrols and some of the tangos inside. The snipers will mow them down, and Calhoun and his buddies inside the lorry will breach the wall.

  While the
scrum’s goin on, the chopper will approach from behind the hills to the west. The three of us will cable down, eliminate the tangos inside the main building and recover the hostages. Easy-peasey.”

  McMurray looked up at Hunter with a shit eating grin on his face. “What’s your problem now?” he asked in response to Hunter’s scowl.

  “The plan leaves the hostages exposed long enough for whoever’s watching them to kill them during the assault.”

  McMurray nodded, “Not to worry, mate. We got a friend on the inside.”

  El Hatillo, Venezuela

  By the time they touched down they had worked out all of the logistics, Hunter’s reservations notwithstanding.

  At twenty hundred ten hours, seconds after the truck had stopped at the gate, the helicopter carrying the three operatives began its approach to the compound. The two two-man patrol jeeps drove up and the guards stepped out. When the sentries moved away from their vehicles the snipers opened fire killing all four of them.

  One of the snipers fired a smoke grenade and another an M84 flash grenade into the compound. The sound of the explosion, the chaos of the snipers’ attack, and the blinding light of the setting sun diverted the kidnappers’ attention from the approaching helicopter that was suddenly hovering sixty feet above the ground as the cables bearing the three operatives lowered to the ground.

  Three tangos ran out of the big house firing their AK 47s recklessly at the operatives as they descended.

  McMurray and the Turk hit the ground and immediately ran to the big house. Hunter’s cable stalled halfway through his descent, leaving him dangling in the air with no cover as automatic rounds whizzed past him. He knew he had only a second or two before the pilot would release the cables from the winch and fly the chopper out of range. Shit like that happened in the bedlam of battle. Hunter had to make a move now, or he was a dead man.

  He swung his body over to one of the other cables as he simultaneously cut himself free. He grabbed the cable with one gloved hand and slid down, nearly making it all the way to the ground before the pilot released the cables, and dropped him the remaining twelve feet or so. Hunter prepared for the landing as much as possible, bending his knees, hitting the ground in a posture that would allow him to roll away from the point of impact. The shock of the landing was jarring and he felt a sharp pain in his right ankle as he stepped into a forward roll.

  He came to his feet with his HK416 ready to fire. He would have to ignore the injury to his ankle for now; he had more pressing matters that demanded his complete attention. He quickly scanned the compound; his companions were nowhere in sight. “Mac, what’s your 20?” he asked on his molar mic.

  Two seconds passed. Nothing but dead air; not good. He heard the sound and saw the flash of automatic gunfire ahead and limped towards the open door of the big house.

  When he got to the entrance, he hoped their man on the inside was protecting the hostages. Before his eyes adjusted to the dark interior, he nearly tripped over the Turk’s body that lay on the floor inside the doorway. Two other bodies, probably the men who guarded the victims, also lay dead in the hallway.

  Hunter stepped over the dead men and made his way to a door that led to what he assumed were the stairs to the cellar. He heard a woman crying and ran down to where he found McMurray standing at the foot of the stairs pointing his Sig Sauer 9 mm at a woman kneeling in front of him.

  “No!” Hunter screamed as McMurray squeezed two rounds into the woman’s forehead.

  McMurray turned to Hunter and raised his weapon. Before the killer could get off a shot, Hunter fired a burst from his HK416, nearly cutting the man’s body in half.

  In his peripheral vision he detected a movement to his left; he turned ready to fire. A girl with long blond hair and crystal-blue terrified eyes was standing there staring at him. He slowly lowered his weapon and moved the strap so that the assault rifle hung behind him. His movements were calm, measured, and non-threatening. Hunter could not conceive the shock and horror the child must be experiencing having witnessed her mother’s brutal murder.

  “You’re Haley, right?” he spoke softly.

  The girl nodded.

  “I’m here to take you home; I’ll keep you safe.” Hunter stood completely still.

  Haley moved her eyes from Hunter to her mother’s body that lay in a spreading pool of blood. She began to tremble.

  “Haley, please look at me,” he said and took a small step closer to the girl.

  He reached out as he saw the child lose her balance and pass out. He gently held her in his arms and carried her up the stairs. He had to get the girl out of there! Out of the compound, out of Venezuela, somewhere safe!

  Of all the obstacles in his path, two loomed largest. The first was, whom could he trust to assure the girl’s safety? The second was, how could a black man traveling with an 8-year-old girl with blond hair and blue eyes stay under the radar?

  2

  Twenty-one hundred hours, El Hatillo, Venezuela

  “Where the fuck you takin’ the kid?” Calhoun shouted at Hunter when he stepped out of the big house with the girl in his arms.

  “The colonel changed the plan,” he replied as he limped past the man without stopping. Hunter wondered if he was the only one on the op who didn’t know it was a wet job and not a rescue mission.

  He figured it would take a few minutes until Calhoun and the rest of the complement sorted out what had happened and reached out to management. He left the compound as fast as his ankle allowed, put the girl in the back of one of the kidnappers’ patrol jeeps, strapped the seat belt around her, and drove away. He needed a place to hide and come up with a plan to get out of Dodge and get the girl to safety.

  The compound was located in El Hatillo, about twenty kilometers southeast of the center of Caracas. The capital city of Venezuela had over 3 million inhabitants. Like most major metropolitan areas, it was a place of extreme contrasts. Large areas of abject poverty and desolation bordered conclaves of middle-class residents and the elite super-rich. The population was predominately mixed race - European, African and Afro-Venezuelan. He knew from the time he had spent there that under the right circumstances it offered several locales in which the girl and he could hide for a time.

  Hunter sped down the dirt road that led away from the compound. As he approached the intersection with a paved two-lane road, what they euphemistically refer to as a highway in rural Venezuela, there was a sign with an arrow pointing west that read ‘Caracas - 6 Kilometers.’ He checked his rearview mirror and was relieved to see there was still nothing but empty road behind him. When he turned onto the paved road, he pressed the accelerator to the floor; the speedometer arrow jumped to 120 kilometers per hour, with what appeared to be clear sailing ahead.

  So far, so good he thought as he raced down the empty thoroughfare. His feeling of euphoria was short lived. Three minutes later he came upon traffic at a dead standstill. As he slowed, he checked the rearview mirror again and saw the truck that had been used in the op in the distance. If he stopped the jeep Calhoun and his squad of killers would be upon them in seconds.

  He turned the steering wheel sharply to the left and drove off the highway across a drainage ditch to a dirt path that ran parallel with the road. The sudden impact when the vehicle flew off the road and bounced across the ditch and onto the dirt road jolted the girl awake.

  “Hold on!” he shouted and grabbed for her.

  He saw Haley instinctively reach for the sides of the rear seat and hold on. “Good girl!” he shouted and turned his full attention to getting them out of harm’s way.

  Hunter looked for a turnoff, any place he could go to get the vehicle out of sight. Two hundred meters ahead he saw a break in the sugarcane field where the dirt path led away from the highway. He shifted his eyes to the mirror and saw the speeding truck at the crest of the road 100 meters or so behind the stalled traffic.

  The truck accelerated and turned off the road and onto the dirt path. It was gaining on
the jeep. Calhoun leaned out the front passenger side window with an assault rifle. “Get down!” Hunter screamed as the shooter discharged a burst of rounds. Hunter jerked the steering wheel to the left and back to the right and the bullets zipped overhead barely missing them.

  When the truck was less than 50 meters behind them, Billy Joe Hunsicker leaned out of the driver’s side back window and fired. His bullets hit the mirror beside the driver. Shards of glass exploded, sending a cascade of broken pieces from the mirror into the cab of the truck. A second later Hunter saw the driver’s blood pulsing out of his neck and splash onto the front windshield.

  As Hunter approached the bend in the dirt path, he saw what had caused the traffic jam; a broken-down flatbed truck and the vehicle that had rear-ended it were blocking the road. The debris from cages that had been stacked on the flatbed, and the chickens that had escaped from them, were all over the road.

  He accelerated and yelled back at Haley, “Here we go!” as he drove past the site of the collision, jumping the ditch and back onto the highway. He turned back and saw the driver of the Global Security truck slumped over the wheel with Calhoun trying to move him out of the driver’s seat, and stop the speeding vehicle.

  The truck lurched wildly from the field to the ditch as it continued to accelerate. The vehicle drove off the road, lost traction, slammed into the ditch and flipped over. For an instant the truck was entirely air bound. It crashed upside down in the drainage ditch with its wheels still spinning. Hunter could smell the fumes of diesel fuel and accelerated to get as far away from the wrecked vehicle as possible. In seconds he felt the oxygen being sucked into the wreck. It exploded in a flash, sending debris and black smoke high into the sky.

  When he was sure he was clear Hunter slowed down to a normal speed and checked the rearview mirror. Haley was staring at him wide eyed. “You did good kid; really good,” he said. She nodded.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked her voice barely above a whisper.