He eyeballed the cluster of mud-brick walled buildings to their front. The intel guys had identified it as a key Taliban facilitation node. They had reports that weapons and IED components were being brought in from Pakistan for distribution. That’s if the intel was correct. So often it wasn’t. This could well be another dry hole.
“Alpha Two-One, this is Two-Zero, support by fire is in position. Commence infil,” transmitted the platoon sergeant.
Clem acknowledged the call and shook the squad out into an assault line. With a wave of his hand they surged forward. His pulse quickened and he flicked his M4’s safety off. Senses heightened, his finger was poised on the trigger. They were halfway to the high mud-brick wall when an AK barked, its muzzle flash bright through his goggles. The squad returned fire as they hit the deck. A gunner blasted the compound with a burst from his SAW machine gun.
“Bound forward!” bellowed Clem over the noise.
One team kept firing as the other four Rangers scrambled to a closer position. Like a well-oiled machine they leap-frogged until both teams reached the compound wall.
“Everyone good?” he asked when they were behind cover.
They checked in. No one had been hit.
Around them the valley echoed with gunfire as the other elements of the assault force made contact with the enemy. The radio was alive with call signs coordinating fire support. Clem glanced up as an Apache gunship sent its rockets streaking into the darkness. A moment later an explosion flashed on a hillside.
“OK, let’s do this.”
Clem’s men stacked, one behind the other, on the doorway into the walled compound. It was open and most likely covered by an AK-wielding Talib. He waited as one of his Rangers lobbed a 9-bang through the entrance. It detonated with a chain of sharp blasts and he charged inside.
He spotted a silhouette on the roof of the building to the rear and engaged, his finger pumping the trigger. The target fell. Behind him the rest of the squad swarmed inside the compound.
More gunfire broke out from the building and he felt the sting of rounds hitting the wall behind him. His machine gunner replied with a long burst. An AK barked again before the thump of a 40mm grenade silenced it. Clem rushed across the dust and smoke-filled courtyard weaving between piles of firewood, bundles of straw, and a tethered goat. The rest of the team followed.
He aimed his weapon through one of the windows and activated the IR flashlight. Invisible to the naked eye, the room was illuminated through his goggles. There were sleeping mats and blankets strewn on the dirt floor. He spotted an AK leaning against the wall. As he turned back toward the entrance he saw Rangers making entry. Gunshots rang out as he followed them in.
There were three bodies in the first room. One had taken the full force of the 40mm grenade. He was literally blown in half, his entrails smeared across the floor. The other two were bloodied corpses riddled with bullets.
“Good job,” he grunted as he scanned the living area. The building was single-story with one adjoining room; the bedroom he had already cleared through the window.
“Holy shit,” said his Alpha team leader, inspecting a stack of crates on the back wall. “We’re fucking lucky, man. If that guy hadn’t taken the forty mike-mike to the chest it might have set this shit off. This right here is a crap load of one-twenty-two mill rockets.”
Clem flipped his night vision goggles up and inspected the boxes using a light attached to his body armor. They were marked with Chinese characters. The team leader helped him lift one of them down and he prised off the lid with his multi-tool. Inside were two pristine olive-green rockets.
“Two-Zero this is Two-One, Objective Batman secure,” Clem transmitted. “We’ve uncovered a major cache of rockets.”
“Two-Zero, copy. Two-Two is taking fire from Objective Robin. Get a SAW gunner up on the roof, ASAP.”
“Copy.” He turned to his second-in-command. “Rig this to blow.” Then he led the gunner out to the courtyard and up mud-brick stairs to the rooftop. His other fire team was already hunkered down pulling security. He glanced at the Taliban fighter he had shot, before positioning the gunner at the edge of the roof.
“Hey Clem, you might want to get back down here,” transmitted his second-in-command over the radio.
He trotted down the steps and back inside.
The Ranger was standing over a hole in the floor. A heavy rug and a wooden cover had been hauled aside. “Chops found it.”
Clem frowned. “Where’s he at?”
“Down there.”
He knelt by the hole and peered in. The beam from his flashlight revealed steps carved into the rock. They led down into a basement no bigger than a broom cupboard. He could see Chops standing looking at something.
“What have you got, Ranger buddy?”
“There’s a guy down here.”
“Taliban?”
“Nah bro, he’s whiter than a bleached asshole and he’s pretty fucked up.”
***
LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTRE, GERMANY
Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre was the largest US military hospital outside the United States. The three hundred and ten bed facility was constructed in 1953 and had been providing surgical treatment to American servicemen ever since. In the 1990s it had been expanded and with the commencement of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq it became the closest advanced surgical facility for critically wounded personnel.
Colonel Kevin Baker had been posted to the hospital for over a year. In that time the doctor had seen hundreds of mangled bodies come through the facility’s operating theaters. Most were the victims of IEDs; home-made explosives that tore limbs from bodies, incinerated flesh, and caused horrific damage that he and his team would try, often in vain, to repair.
He yawned as he did his rounds. The previous night had been exhausting with four new patients. He’d performed emergency surgery on three Marines who’d been blown up in Helmand province. Their Humvee had hit a stack of anti-tank mines. One of them had succumbed during surgery. The other two were clinging to life. If they made it through the next twenty-four hours he gave them a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
The fourth patient, a solidly built blonde-haired Caucasian, was an anomaly. Baker stopped at his bed and picked up the chart. Discovered in a Taliban stronghold during a raid, he had been imprisoned underground. His wounds were horrendous; he’d lost a leg below the knee. His right arm was mangled almost beyond repair and was infected with gangrene. Thick scar tissue covered his torso and one side of his square jaw was badly burned.
Baker shook his head. He had seen worse wounds but never this old. In his opinion the injuries had been inflicted well over a month ago and it was a miracle he’d survived with only the barest of field medicine provided by the Taliban. He was a hard man; the damage to his body was evidence of that.
Footsteps rang on the polished floor and Baker turned to greet one of the nurses. She flashed him a bright smile as she checked the IV bag hanging above the wounded man’s bed.
“God knows how he survived,” she said checking his dressings.
“Big guy’s got the constitution of an ox.”
She studied the patient’s face. “He’s handsome too, such a waste.”
Baker turned his attention back to the chart he was holding. “His vitals are good. If we can get him out of the coma he should be OK. Have we had any luck identifying him?”
She shook her head. “No sir, we sent back a full set of prints. Heard nothing yet.”
“Might take them a while. Did he come in with any personal effects?”
“No, nothing.”
“It’s strange. No one’s mentioned any missing coalition soldiers.”
“He might be a contractor or a journalist.”
“True. So we’ve also sent photos through to ISAF headquarters?”
“Yes sir, they haven’t got back to us either.”
“Our first John Doe?”
“Looks that way.” The nurse gave the unconscious man
’s mouth a dab with a cold compress then moved on to the next patient.
Baker spent a few more seconds checking the chart before hanging it on the end of the bed. He sighed. “Hang in there, buddy. You’ll be alright.”
***
Baker was sitting at his desk staring at the charts for John Blonde, as the nurses now called the mysterious casualty. In the seven days he had been at Landstuhl his vitals had improved dramatically. They now had the infection under control and his wounds had started to close over. However, he still hadn’t come out of the coma.
He picked up the MRI report and read it again. The brain surgeon had identified significant bruising but that had begun to subside. He was baffled as to why the hulk of a man hadn’t regained consciousness. He dropped the report and leaned back in his chair. What’s more they still had no idea who he was. Everyone they had sent his fingerprints and photos to had come back with zero hits. It was as if the guy never existed.
“Dr. Baker.”
The urgency of the nurse’s tone told him something was wrong. She stuck her head into his office. “Sir, there’s a bunch of men here and they’re trying to take John Blonde.”
He frowned, left his chair, and strode out of his office. He stormed past the duty desk and into the recovery ward.
There were four men in civilian clothing standing around the patient. His head nurse was glaring at them with hands on her hips. “What’s going on here?” he asked as he arrived.
The men all turned toward him revealing their scruffy beards. He noticed that one of them was wearing a pistol on his hip.
“You do realize this is a hospital and weapons are not allowed.”
“Hey bro, we’re just here to collect the stiff,” said one of the men as he chewed gum.
Baker clenched his jaw. “I’m not your, ‘bro’. I’m a Colonel. Show me your identification.” He thrust out his hand.
The man shrugged as he displayed his ID.
Baker checked it. It was as he suspected, they were CIA. “So, Mr. Weddell, do you have paperwork for the transfer?”
“Course I do.” He reached into the pocket of his cargo pants, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it over as he chewed.
Baker inspected the transfer document. It was correctly signed. There was nothing he could do.
“Are any of you by chance a doctor? I can only release this patient into the custody of a qualified medical professional.”
The guy chewing dipped his head in the direction of one of his team. “Miller here is a medtech, that should cover it. OK boys, let’s get the retard loaded up and get on the road.”
Baker held up his hand. “I don’t think you heard me. The receiving officer needs to be a doctor. It’s standard operating procedure.”
The team leader stared at him for a few seconds. “Look pal, I don’t think you get what’s happening here. The CIA is taking custody of a goddamn terrorist. You can bitch and moan about needing a doctor as much as you want but it ain’t gonna change a thing. This asshole is coming with us.”
Baker made eye contact with the head nurse. She shrugged. “Fine. But I want you to know that I will be lodging a formal complaint regarding this.”
Weddell gestured for his men to grab the patient. “No problem. If I was you I wouldn’t waste the time but if that’s what you want to do, knock your socks off.”
Baker watched as the men moved the unconscious patient onto the steel gurney.
The medic transferred the IV bags to the gurney. He took the paperwork from the end of the bed, folded it half, and stuffed it in his pocket. “We’re ready.”
The leader flashed Baker a broad smile. “Thanks, doc, been good doing business with you.”
They wheeled the casualty into the corridor. Baker followed at a distance wracking his brain for a way to stop the transfer. Something told him if the patient left the hospital he was going into a far worse situation.
***
CAMP X-RAY, GUANTANAMO BAY
Secluded in the furthest corner of Camp X-Ray was a cluster of buildings off limits to all but a select few. A closely guarded secret, the facility was known as the Bin by the men who worked in it, and the Extreme Rendition Site by a select number of senior CIA officials. Even the President and his closest advisors had no idea it existed. What’s more, they wouldn’t want to know what was going on behind its blacked-out fences.
The Bin was small; only a single interrogation room, an office, and holding cells for half a dozen prisoners. However, it wasn’t the size of the facility rather the techniques employed within that made it unique. Unlike Camp X-Ray where interrogation was tightly controlled and monitored, there were no rules in the Bin. All video footage was wiped on a regular basis. When a prisoner was sent there they literally had two options; talk or die.
For Detainee 3459 the journey to the Bin had started with three weeks in the Guantanamo Bay medical facility. Five days after arriving he had come out of his coma thanks to an experimental drug that stimulated brain activity. The doctors had granted him an additional two weeks to recover before allowing him to be interrogated. Despite having no recollection of who he was or where he had come from, the CIA had moved him to the darkest corner of the camp. It was there that he met the Company’s most experienced and innovative interrogator, Aaron Small.
A qualified medical practitioner specializing in the study of pain, Small had been contracting to the CIA since the late nineties. Initially he was a consultant for the Directorate of Science and Technology, however, after 9/11 he’d been brought onto the books full-time.
The Company’s psychologists had labeled him a sadist; a sociopath who took great pleasure in dealing out pain, both physical and psychological. Small saw himself as a professional with a set of skills that some senior CIA directors felt were necessary in the Global War on Terror.
With slick black hair receding to a widow’s peak, dark brown eyes that looked almost black, and a narrow pasty-white face, Small resembled Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was an image he frequently enhanced with dark eyeliner. The subjects were usually terrified by his appearance, sometimes breaking before he had the chance to employ any coercive techniques. Detainee 3459, however, seemed totally unfazed by Small, much to the veteran interrogator’s frustration.
He’d been working on 3459 for three days and failed to get anything out of him. The horrendously scarred invalid simply did not seem to remember anything, even when juiced up on a cocktail of psychoactive drugs. Small shook his head and leaned forward on his desk scrutinizing a video screen. The detainee was sound asleep in a room filled with white noise and flashing strobe lights.
He glanced down at 3459’s file and flicked through the pages again. James Castle had an impressive record, both with the Marine Corps and the CIA. However, it was the intelligence report contained in the file that was most intriguing. After allegedly faking his death in 2004 Castle had disappeared. The rogue operative had remained off the grid until a month ago when he was found half-dead in Afghanistan.
That was reason enough for the CIA to be concerned. They needed to know exactly what Castle had been doing over that period of time. They also wanted to establish whether his partner, Vance Durant, was alive. The report assessed it was likely the two of them had conspired to assassinate a very influential member of the UAE government. That was another mystery that needed to be solved and Small was yet to produce any answers.
He was actually beginning to think that Castle had truly lost his memory. It was not inconceivable considering the significant traumatic brain injury the man had received. He’d never worked on a detainee that had suffered such severe blast injuries. The cripple had maintained the amnesia story through multiple sessions of waterboarding, electric shock treatment, and even blunt force trauma.
Small had only ever had one other detainee who’d maintained his innocence right till the end. In that case the man’s heart had given out and he died. Castle on the other hand was a hard man. His body had endured and Small had no do
ubt he could take the interrogation even further.
He rose from his desk, walked down the corridor, and turned into what he called his ‘lab’. It had been built to his exact specifications. In the center of the room was an adjustable chair not unlike a dentist’s, except it had nylon straps on the arms, legs, and headrest. The chair could manipulate a prisoner’s body as he saw fit. He could lay them flat, tip them head down for waterboarding, or sit them up so they could see exactly what he was doing to their body. It was an effective contraption in which he took great pride.
He sat on one of the stainless steel cabinets containing his tools and studied the chair as he planned his next session with Castle. A knock at the door broke his concentration and one of the guards stuck his head in. “Sir, we’ve got trouble.”
“What? More detainees?”
“Ah not exactly, sir.”
Small followed the guard down the hallway, through a security door, and into the front office. On a screen displaying the camera feed from the front gate, Small could see the problem. The Commandant of Camp X-Ray was there with Small’s boss from Langley, Thomas Larkin. “Have all the drives been cleared?” he asked the guard.
“Yes, sir, half an hour ago as scheduled.”
“OK, let them in.”
Small waited in the reception area for Larkin to appear.
The barracuda-jawed CIA officer stormed in with the Army Colonel in tow. He thrust a document into Small’s hand. “This facility is now officially closed, Aaron.” He locked eyes with the interrogator. “All prisoners will be transferred into the custody of the good Colonel here and into Camp X-Ray.”
Small glanced at the paper. “As you wish, sir.”
He stepped aside as a squad of Military Police and medical staff streamed in. It only took them half an hour to remove the two prisoners and search for evidence of torture. When it was over Small sat on a bench outside the fence and smoked a cigarette. His boss joined him and they stared out over the blue water of the Caribbean Sea.
PRIMAL Nemesis (Book 2 in the Redemption Trilogy, A PRIMAL Action Thriller Book 6) (The PRIMAL Series) Page 27
