The Hawaii Job: (A Case Lee Novel Book 5)

by Vince Milam

  “They’re parked before the bend. Three exited. AR-style weapons and holstered pistols. They’ve got their heads together, whispering.”

  “On it.”

  Bo’s voice in my earpiece. Catch remained silent. He’d position, as he always did, and cover us. Cover and catch the unexpected. His long-range sniper rifle would seek movement, out-of-place objects and shapes. Each trigger squeeze a guaranteed kill.

  “I’m on it,” Marcus said, his voice low and flat.

  “Just passed you, boss.”

  Bo had exited the back of the farmhouse and struck uphill opposite me and near Marcus. He’d already slid past Marcus, unnoticed, but had sighted Marcus’s hidden position. Marcus didn’t argue further. A ghost, the lethal specter of Bo Dickerson, team spearhead, was on the move.

  The three split up. One crossed the road toward my side and eased into the brush, his movements slow, cautious, professional. Another headed up the nearby rise before he turned and side-hilled his way toward the farmhouse. The third stepped just off the gravel and stalked through the tall, dead grass. Our two parked vehicles yelled someone’s home. And someone was either Case Lee or his mom and younger sister. The former preferable for them, but the latter presented a prime hostage situation, guaranteed to bring me running. Bastards.

  “Tell me.”

  Marcus demanded an operational update. I provided it, ending with “Going radio silence.” I couldn’t afford a whisper, given my enemy’s path straight past me.

  “Accommodating your incommunicado state, my brother,” Bo said into my ear. “I’ll take the uphill one, you take the wandering wayfarer passing your way. Terminate at the same time. Leave the third alone. He’ll understand he’s screwed. Perhaps a sea of futility will wash over him. You copy too, Catch?”

  Radio silence from Catch. Not from Marcus.

  “Let’s do it. I have visual on all three. On my mark.”

  Crosshairs centered against my victim’s forehead. Bo would have the same on his end. A crow called from a leafless oak tree; a squirrel scurried across a maple. Somewhere in the distance a cow lowed. The smell of winter earth, sleeping, and decayed leaves. Soft footfalls and light scraping of brush against clothing as my killer approached. No remorse, no qualms—ice-water aim, eliminating a direct threat to my family.

  “Execute,” Marcus said.

  Both shots simultaneous. A third came a half-second behind. Catch’s .300 Win Mag boomed, distinct and echoing across the landscape. At my back, thirty yards away, an unknown body sounded, crumpling through brittle brush. Three head shots, the last one unseen but assured. I had immediate acknowledgement of the scenario. A fourth assassin who’d left the vehicle when it stopped on the county road had worked his way through the forest and approached my rear. Caught by Catch. As always, relief and gratitude for a deadeye brother who covered my back.

  The remaining bounty hunter froze among the thigh-high grass and aimed frantic hillside sweeps for targets. Catch’s rifle boomed again. Pants material from the hitter’s crotch blew backward, followed by a yelp of surprise, not pain. A rifle shot as statement, an inch from the guy’s privates.

  We remained hidden, quiet, locked on the hitter. The message from Catch’s shot was universal and crystal clear. The killer made one last desperate sweep with his rifle, mind almost certainly reeling as he contemplated another crotch shot an inch higher. An agonizing slow bleed-out. A half-step uphill, quick consideration of going down with gun blazing. He halted, shoulders sagging, and opted for a sure quick death. His rifle dropped into the winter vegetation, hands held high.

  Silence. We didn’t know if this guy spoke English or, if so, whether he’d communicate. Or whether he knew who offered the reward. What we did know is we had the son of a bitch. Yeah, he still had a pistol, but Catch would blow his arm off if he reached for it. The hitter knew it as well. Marcus, thirty yards distant, raised his voice and spoke.

  “Who is paying you?”

  His voice, low and void of emotion. And straight at the heart of the matter. Not who are you or who sent you or any extraneous questions. Just the big kahuna—who offered the reward? The man shot a glance uphill toward Bo’s position, across the gravel drive at my hiding hole, and back toward Marcus. He understood death was imminent. The rules mandated it. There was no way he considered the possibility of walking away. He was a pro, an ex-military hired killer from an unknown part of the world. These were the rules. He was a dead man. How he chose to die was his lone option. Balls blown off or an executioner’s head shot. His answer—and he well understood it—dictated his demise.

  “Musa Kibir.”

  The voice, heavily accented, was definitive. The answer, real and viable and spot on. There was a limited pool of feasible candidates for the bounty master. Our Delta missions—while plentiful—still presented a finite data set of potential funding sources. A dozen or so, max. But his answer mapped, and dots connected. And presented a next-steps mission as dangerous and gnarly and risk-ridden as any of the potential options.

  “What’d he say?” Catch asked. While he could hear Marcus’s question through his earpiece, he was positioned too far away to hear the answer.

  “Musa Kibir,” Marcus said in reply.

  “It maps,” Bo said.

  “He could have tossed out any name,” I said. “But we had ops in Kibir’s neighborhood. It rings true.”

  “Agreed,” Marcus said.

  His statement triggered the execution. Catch’s rifle blasted one final time. The bullet struck the killer’s forehead. Instant death. Bo ambled downhill. Marcus stood and made his way toward the body. I joined them as Catch strolled from his hidden position. Our gathering spot, staked with a dead man. No one spoke; each contemplated the ramifications of our new target. Marcus’s Zippo clacked open, lit a cigar. Catch ambled up and joined us.

  “Son of a bitch,” Marcus said, shaking his head.

  He referenced the challenges moving forward. The carnage at our feet, the death strewn about us, a matter of the past.

  “Indeed, older brother,” Bo said. “Challenges aplenty.”

  “We gotta think this through,” I said. “Think it through big time.”

  We stood silent, lost in private thoughts. Gunfire over, wildlife voiced their return. A crow called, winter-over small birds chirped and fluttered among the bare brush. The light breeze picked up, blowing from the north, cold and stark.

  “What’s this scratch-our-asses-and-worry-about-it horseshit?” Catch asked. “Screw that noise. Let’s go take the bastard out.”

  Chapter 20

  Musa Kibir. There was a blast from the past. The cousin or nephew or who-the-hell-knew of Abdel Baabas. Genocidal Janjaweed leaders in Sudan’s Darfur area. Oh, man. We’d taken out Baabas. Musa Kibir, second in command, took his place. We weren’t allowed to take that SOB out. So here we were, years later, bearing the price for our decision. Or rather, the Company’s decision.

  Sudan. The largest and by pretty much anyone’s definition one of the most messed-up African countries. Long a training hub and safe haven for violent international terrorists and radical Islamic groups. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Abu Nidal Organization—you name it, Sudan welcomes you. Slavery is widespread throughout the place. The real deal. Arab raiders from northern Sudan enslave thousands of southerners, who are black. The raids intensified during the 1980s along with the civil war between north and south. The civil war killed two million people, driven by ethnic and tribal hatred. And oil. And gold. The Chinese run the Sudan oil business. The Russians, with the support of the government in Khartoum, have large mining interests. Gold interests.

  Official cease-fires and treaties have come and gone. A low-level civil war continues to this day. Plenty messed-up. But Khartoum’s government leaders—thugs and maniacs—intensified the messed-up factor during the early 2000s.

  Enter the Janjaweed in Sudan’s Darfur region—a California-size area nestled against the country of Chad. Janjaweed is an Arabic colloquialism a
nd translates as a man with a gun on a horse. Or a camel. Or a Land Cruiser or a Renault truck or a military vehicle.

  Janjaweed militiamen are members of nomadic “Arab” tribes who’ve had a long history of conflict with Darfur’s settled “African” farmers. The Janjaweed were also card-carrying members of the homicidal maniacs tribe, backed and encouraged by the Sudanese government. So it began.

  A typical Janjaweed raid started with a Sudanese air force attack, using helicopter gunships or Antonov bombers targeting mud-structured villages. Within hours, mounted Janjaweed would sweep into the area and kill and mutilate the surviving men. Then rape and kill the women. The children were rounded up and either killed or kidnapped. Slaughter and horror defined.

  The US declared the Darfur terror a genocide. The United Nations not so much, although they did send thousands of ineffective peacekeepers who had minimal effect. The Sudan government and the Chinese and the Russians declared, “What conflict?” The International Criminal Court filed war-crime charges against Sudan’s leader. He responded with a middle finger. Meanwhile, Darfur’s bone-dry terrain soaked up the lifeblood of over three hundred thousand innocent people.

  A quarter-million people fled over the border into Chad—another basket-case country. But at least the refugees weren’t slaughtered on a regular basis. Until Abdel Baabas decided Chad’s border—and the collection of refugee camps—was no hindrance to the Janjaweed’s movements. He had that wrong. Enter Delta Force.

  The US wouldn’t be seen as engaging in what was termed by the international community as a “conflict.” Well, it was less a conflict and more the slaughter of village inhabitants. Slaughter in the tens of thousands. So it was black ops all the way, led by the CIA.

  The Company set up shop in eastern Chad. The town of Goz Beïda. Thirty miles from the Sudan border. Operations were run by Marilyn Townsend, CIA. She later became director of clandestine services within the Company. Using intel from satellites and NGOs—nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, and CARE—Janjaweed incursions into Chad were tracked. Townsend and her Company cohorts would identify the nails. Delta Force brought down the hammer.

  Five of us. The four at Grandma Wilson’s place plus Angel—a brother who went bad in later years. Five would appear a minimal effort to the casual observer. It was more than enough to deliver a major impact. We’d patrol in a two-Land-Cruiser convoy. Stay afield three or four days at a stretch. Satcoms from the Company would provide the movement, direction, and size of the Janjaweed militia entering Chad to attack refugee camps. We’d hustle toward a decent ambush spot and unleash hell. Kill them all. Then move on.

  We paused at refugee camps along the border and gathered our own intel from the NGOs working there. Some camps held a few hundred wretched villagers. Others held more than ten thousand. As black ops, our uniforms displayed no insignias, no identifiers. Just five rough men armed to the teeth. But the NGO workers knew who we were and why we were there. They were citizens of the US, Britain, France, Canada, and various African countries—and NGO workers held as a cardinal rule never to participate in or aid military activities. But they would surreptitiously provide support with intel and fresh water. Along with subtle thumbs-ups and the flash of an occasional smile. They knew.

  Word spread, and the refugee camp attacks in Chad were dramatically reduced. But the Janjaweed had time on their side. We didn’t. Townsend had gathered sufficient intel to identify the Janjaweed leader who orchestrated the attacks. And his location.

  Although nomadic by nature, the Janjaweed leader Abdel Baabas had established a base near the town of Garsila, forty miles from the Chad border. Townsend made the call. Chop off the head of the snake. We were more than happy to comply. A high-risk ops from two perspectives. For the Company, a military incursion into Sudan had the potential for massive political blowback. It would be buried deep inside Company catacombs, beyond sniffing by a congressional oversight committee. A side-note operational fact was that the Company would disavow any knowledge of us. Of Delta. No rescues, no on-the-ground aid. We were fine with that.

  The ops were high-risk for us as well. Forty miles at night across semi-roadless terrain dodging Janjaweed patrols as well as Sudan military movement. The latter weren’t armed with just automatic weapons. They were equipped with Chinese and Russian cannon and mortar.

  We hid the two vehicles for the day within a couple miles of Abdel Baabas’s large mud-buildings compound. Undetected movement wasn’t an easy feat given the desertlike conditions. But the terrain was also rough, jagged. Small ravines and large rock outcrops and bone-dry wadis dotted the landscape. We spent the day hidden, scoping activities and communicating via Satcoms the presence of Abdel Baabas.

  Once in place, our mission was cut-and-dried. Confirm the presence of Baabas. Confirm he remained there. Confirm his compound’s coordinates via laser tracking. Death could be delivered night or day.

  Circling silently, high overhead at twenty-five thousand feet, was a Predator drone. With Hellfire missiles. A lethal Valkyrie, prepared to escort a gaggle of Janjaweed to Valhalla. Our job was ensuring that the prime target was available for the trip.

  The Company’s job, other than release the Hellfire, was to afford us the cover of darkness so we could get out of there alive. The destruction of Baabas’s compound would light a fuse with surrounding militia and military. Our odds of escape were exponentially better at night.

  We departed at midnight, took our time, skirted tribal campfires and militia encampments. Hid the vehicles down a wadi with steep walls and jumbled boulders. Positioned for daybreak. It was baking hot, and we hunkered among shaded crevices, our spotting scopes active. Baabas was there. And remained there the entire day and into the night. The incongruity of a satellite dish near a hand-crank water well wasn’t lost on us. The good news—the women and children had removed themselves after serving supper and walked several hundred yards away toward their own compound. Baabas ran a male-only ship.

  We waited until midnight. A short Satcoms correspondence with the Company in Goz Beïda pulled the trigger. Two minutes later, with a white-hot flash and cacophonous explosion, the Janjaweed compound was blown away. We hauled ass away from the area.

  The trip back to the Chad border was fast and furious. We encountered two separate Janjaweed militia contingents in vehicles. We headed full-bore toward them. Our automatic weapons sent a sheet of lead across each one. No time for subtlety, no time for avoidance. Make the border, pronto. There were no markers, no fences, to indicate the Chad border. But our GPS told the tale, and we eased off both the speed and the tension for the Chad leg of the trip.

  With Baabas gone, we heard through the grapevine that a man named Musa Kibir had taken his place as the local Janjaweed leader. We pushed Townsend to let us whack his sorry ass as well. In response, she shut down the ops. Although the raids against the refugee camps in our sector came to a standstill, we knew it wouldn’t last. The Company had struck a blow, our couple of months in the area saved countless lives, and the hidden victory flag was planted. Then we packed up and left. There wasn’t a damn thing Delta could do about it.

  It wasn’t hard to connect a few dots from our time there. Musa Kibir, to strengthen his position, had collected five million for a bounty. One million for each of us. Posted it on the dark web. A show of strength and influence on his part, solidifying his leadership position.

  Who supplied the money didn’t matter—the Sudanese government in Khartoum, the Chinese oil company, Russian gold interests. Or all three. Our names were collected via an operational shortfall, no doubt. The Company camp in Goz Beïda, as at every locale, hired locals to handle chores and cleanup. One of them could read English and had snuck a glance or three at hard-copy files. Files with our five names inside. Try as everyone might, it happens. A risk not accepted, but understood.

  But what was also understood as we collected in Grandma Wilson’s driveway was the daunting task ahead. Take out Musa Kibir and his lieuten
ants, so the bounty wouldn’t rear its ugly head again. In Sudan. Without the Company alongside. Without the luxury of Hellfire missiles. Or outside support. And without the vigor and knife-between-teeth capabilities of young men. Son of a bitch.

  Chapter 21

  “Thanks, bud.”

  Catch shrugged in response and punched my upper arm. I owed him, once again. He’d covered my back while a killer approached from the rear. We remained huddled, each lost in thought over our next steps. Except for Catch. In his black-and-white world, the solution was simple: Find Musa Kibir. Then blow him away. Everything else was extraneous. The rest of us didn’t share his worldview on the matter.

  “First things first. Burial cleanup,” Marcus said. “While we continue a watch. More are on the way. Maybe not tonight. But more at some point.”

  Grim work. Grandma Wilson’s 1954 Ford 8N tractor fired after we’d futzed with it for thirty minutes. One of the beauties of the old Ford was that you could fix almost anything on it with rudimentary tools. It had an old add-on front-end loader with a manual bucket drop that clanged loudly every time it was released. I took body duty. It was only right.

  Catch stood watch while Marcus and Bo convoyed the SUVs—their own and the one the killers had arrived in—into Greenville. They’d leave the latter at a Walmart parking lot. Before they split, we checked the bodies for artifacts. They were Moldavians. Tucked between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova—dirt poor—was known for sex trafficking and murder-for-hire. No surprise regarding their origin, and it emphasized the word-on-the-street aspect of the ratcheted-up bounty. More to come, for sure.

  A wood-cutting path led toward a small clearing. The ground was soft enough for the tractor’s front bucket to take a bite. Thirty minutes later, I’d dug a decent mass grave. A hand shovel finished the job. I loaded each body in the front-end loader, one at a time, and as they dropped, the heavy steel bucket sounded their eulogy.