Boned: A Stepbrother Romance (Mandarin Connection Book 4)

by Stephanie Brother

  They went from room to room, quickly and quietly.

  Not a word passed between them, and when they had examined one place, a man would draw some manner of design on the wall or door.

  It looked like a “C” inside a triangle, and he drew it with a bright green marking pen.

  The lead man had some kind of enormous gun, and he would run to the front, then wait.

  Two more men would run to where he was, with the last two covering the retreat or whatever.

  Then, they would swap places with the first two, and the lead man would run further out.

  All of the men were doing this, and making these weird hand motions, signaling their team mates.

  After about an hour of this, Randy called Captain Spalding and let him know that the premises had been cleared.

  “Ocaba Bien” was secured.

  “Come look at this, David,” said one of the SEAL team, named Travis.

  Travis was a huge black man, with a gold tooth, and a shaved head.

  He had a beard, and tattoos on his arms.

  He seemed frightening, until he began to speak.

  Then, he could make a joke or tell a story and it was so easy to listen to his bass voice.

  Captain Spalding and two other SEAL team members, Randy and Walt I think their names were, gathered around.

  “This console is still active, sir,” said Walt. “I think I can hack in, and maybe find the root directory, or at least what other machines are still networked.”

  Travis nodded.

  Walt played around with the keyboard for a few minutes.

  “What do you make of this place, David?” said Travis.

  Captain Spalding looked over at me.

  “Where’s Stephan?” he asked.

  “He went with one of the other teams, over to that other building. Drake is with the other team, and I think Karl is with the last one,” I replied.

  I missed being next to Bone.

  But, when the men began their exploration of the site, they insisted I stay behind until it was secured.

  I didn’t really know why.

  When I asked Travis, he had told me they were checking for IED’s and other traps.

  Captain Spalding had been injured and the lesson he learned was forever engraved into his psyche.

  He wouldn’t allow his men, or anyone in his command, to suffer the same fate as he did, if he could help it.

  He had developed a protocol for his men to follow when they encountered situations like this.

  Since they had been trained in it, he’d never lost any of his team or the members of teams under his watch.

  “Radio the others to meet us here, Travis,” said Captain Spalding.

  “Roger that, sir,” said Travis. “Bravo and Charlie, rendezvous at our location, five minutes,” he barked into his headset.

  Five minutes later, my stepbrothers and I were shocked at what the men had found.

  —————

  “So, this is how they managed to run the heroin through the Caribbean, eh?” said Stephan.

  Captain Spalding reported on their discovery of a series of files on one of the main consoles in the control room.

  The display showed a number of illustrations, charts and spreadsheets.

  I couldn’t begin to understand all of it, but I thought I recognized some of the countries on one of the maps.

  Spalding stood at the front of the room, and began to speak slowly.

  “From our prior intelligence and the Alpha Team debrief, we now know that Blaise White was the boss of the organization in charge of delivery and transportation,” he began.

  “Derek and Travis discovered Robert King was the bag man, handling the distribution of funds. DEA and CIA confirm that George Tanner was one of King’s torpedoes, as well as being involved with Megan Greene’s mother, who was King’s wife. If you had not been informed, Derek White and Megan Greene are step siblings.”

  Spalding looked at Stephan, Bone and I and grinned.

  “Apparently, King tried to have Megan assist in killing her stepmother, to gain access to her money, so that he could pay off one of his contacts. We are not sure as yet who that is, but it may be someone in the United States,” he said.

  “Who is this other level here?” asked Walt, pointing at the chart.

  “That is what we haven’t been able to discover,” Stephan replied. “There is a code word, ‘Mandarin’, in the ledgers that refer to this person or organization.”

  “Wait! I know that word!” said Stephan. “It’s related to one of the businesses Om was running in Thailand.”

  “Are you going to let them know, Stephan?” said Bone.

  He raised his eyebrows, and walked next to where I was standing.

  I could feel myself warming to him, at our proximity to each other.

  “Is there something we should be made aware of, Mr. Jaeger?” asked Captain Spalding.

  Stephan extracted a stainless-steel flash drive from his shirt pocket.

  Spalding recognized it as an Iron Key encrypted drive.

  “Captain, have your man load this and bring it up on-screen,” Stephan said as he passed the USB stick to Walt.

  Walt in turn handed it over to Bart, one of the Black Dog team members.

  “Go ahead, Bart,” said Spalding, nodding at his man.

  Bart inserted the drive into the USB slot on the computer, and waited while the antivirus programs checked it. It came up clean, and then he asked Stephan for the password.

  “0cT@v1U$,” replied Stephan. “That’s ‘zero’, lower case ‘see’, capital ‘tee’, the ampersand, lower case ‘vee’, one, capital ‘yew’ as in umbrella, dollar sign.”

  “Zero, Charlie small, Tango large, at, Victor, one, Umbrella, dollar, roger that,” said Bart. “Yeah, I don’t want to mess up that password. How many tries you have for lockout?”

  “Three strikes and you’re out,” said Stephan.

  He was looking at Bone.

  An unseen message seemed to pass between them.

  Bone looked over at me, and I tried to smile, but my face felt like a grinning skull from the tension.

  I wanted to just grab him and run the hell out of there, maybe to one of the guest rooms.

  I couldn’t understand just why I was suddenly so turned on.

  “It’s okay, Baby Doll,” he said.

  He grinned back, and winked at me.

  I turned my attention back to Stephan and the others.

  Bart had brought up a series of files, and began opening them. In moments, a map showed up on the display screen, with a bunch of colored lines traced all over it.

  “This is the distribution system Om set up to handle the shipment of our clothing products,” said Stephan gesturing at the screen.

  “You notice how it starts in Vietnam, where our raw material is procured? The next leg of the trip is into Thailand, where the clothes are manufactured,” he said.

  His finger traced the lines on the map, finally resting on a central point.

  “Then, they are boxed and shipped to Hong Kong, where they are then sent to their final destinations,” he said.

  Stephan looked over the assembled men, and found Bone’s eyes.

  He nodded at him, and Bone walked out of the conference room.

  Then, he went on with his presentation.

  “Most of the routes are coded. ‘Mandarin’ is one such route, and it goes into China. From there, the product is shipped across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii,” he said.

  Stephan paced back and forth in front of the display.

  He looked as though he were choosing his words carefully.

  “Four months ago, we noticed some discrepancies in the way the US Customs was handling our manifests. We placed a team of investigators on the problem. We labeled the operation internally, using the code word ‘Octavius’,” he said.

  Stephan pointed to the screen.

  There was an orange line drawn on a navigation chart.

&
nbsp; It was labeled “Octavius”.

  Next to it was another line, this one in green.

  The label next to it said “Mandarin”.

  A third line, this one blue, ran at an angle to the others. It looked vaguely familiar to me.

  Then, I gasped when I recognized it had begun and ended.

  It was the route our cruise ship had taken!

  “Stephan, what is this?” I cried, pointing. “Am I, was I under surveillance this whole time?”

  He looked at me, puzzled, then laughed.

  “Oh, my! I’d forgotten Kevin!” he sputtered.

  “What? Who? What do you mean?” asked Spalding.

  “Kevin Mitchum was one of our contacts, who’d approached us after he’d found out information that his brother Randall had left for him in a safe deposit box,” said Stephan.

  “Randall was killed in an unfortunate incident that occurred at Indian Wells State Park last year, and Kevin was contacted by his attorney to gather his effects,” he said.

  “When Kevin reviewed the contents of the box, he immediately tried to get in touch with Om. We also found out that he’d called Martin Freiberg, of Ghent International, Inc. to let them know what was in his brother’s notes,” he said.

  “When we got wind of the weird stuff going on with Mr. Mitchum, we contacted the FBI. We asked the State Department and US Customs if they knew anything about this. Nothing came from our inquiries, even after we had escalated it through our legal team. We requested FOIA documents, but were stonewalled,” he added.

  “Then, one of our agents found out about this route, here,” he said, tapping the line labeled ‘Mandarin’.

  “When he went missing, we had another security team investigate. They found his laptop, and our agent. The laptop was destroyed, in the fire that had occurred when his car had been driven off a cliff and landed at the bottom of a ravine,” Stephan said, looking dour.

  “We found a key to another safety deposit box, this one located in Miami. Travis and Derek were given orders to retrieve whatever was in the box. About that time, Megan Greene was implicated in the murder of her stepmother. Then, she was kidnapped by King and Tanner. Derek and the Alpha Team rescued her, and King and Tanner were killed in the action.”[2]

  “Derek and the others then found evidence that conclusively proved King’s involvement in the heroin ring. They also found out something that, until today, we had no idea of its relevance, “he said.

  “It was a file folder on one of Tanner’s computers on the “Disco Inferno” that listed all the field agents from DEA, CIA, FBI and a half-dozen other agencies, and had their handlers, cut-outs and proxies as well. It was priceless espionage information. Any intelligence agency on the planet would have killed for this list,” he concluded.

  “Apparently, somebody did,” said Spalding. “They got Om.”

  “He’d been a great field agent, and a true friend,” said a voice from a corner of the room.

  “Alpha Team! Attention!” shouted Travis.

  I looked over at the tall man walking out of the shadows.

  He immediately commanded the attention of everyone else in the room with his presence and booming voice.

  I looked at him, not knowing who this man was who was apparently revered by everyone else there.

  Stephan stood up, and walked over to him.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you in person, Sir,” he said.

  Captain Spalding rose as well.

  “Admiral Decker! A pleasure to see you again, sir!” he said.

  “At ease, gentlemen,” said Admiral Reginald Decker, as he sidled up to the conference table.

  “Yes, Sir! Admiral, sir!” said Travis.

  “Now tell me more about how my best friend, and the best damned agent in our organization, was killed,” he said.

  —————

  Decker was an elegant man, about Om’s age.

  He was hard and tan and looked like the sea had turned him into a piece of weathered jerky.

  But, on him, it looked good.

  He emitted a glow of health and vitality, and was one of those men whose presence in a room caused everyone else to stare in his direction.

  He’d be sought out for advice, intrigue, and of course, he’d never want for attractive women.

  Decker was a legend to anyone who knew anything about the military, and even had made the papers quite a few times with his hard-ball politics and take no prisoners attitude.

  I knew little or nothing of this, of course.

  I mean, I’d heard his name tossed around once or twice at a fancy dinner or a social event, but I never made the connection between him and Om.

  But, he’d just told all of us that Om was his friend.

  And, something more important, to me…

  “What do you mean, agent?” I heard my voice ask with a quiver.

  I was in shock.

  I had just listened in stunned horror, as Stephan outlined the plans of a group of evil men. They’d worked out a way to poison countless people, trafficking heroin across the world, and smuggling it into the USA.

  Somehow, they had been running their operation in parallel to Om and Stephan’s clothing line.

  I was stunned, finally realizing that Om had been caught in a web of lies and deceit.

  There were forces at work that had managed to paint him as being a crazed, suicidal and murderous criminal.

  Sadly, my mother and Om were collateral damage in this evil dance.

  Someone had framed him, burned down the factory, and then crashed the plane.

  At least, that was where my mind was heading until the Admiral arrived.

  Until then, I only thought it was bad luck that Om and Moms were killed, almost a footnote in this whole sordid affair.

  All of that changed when the Admiral finally let the cat out of the bag.

  —————

  “Young lady,” said the Admiral, “Your stepfather was a Fregattenkapitän in the German Navy, in charge of submarine fleet operations in the sixties.”

  Decker leaned against the table, choosing his words carefully.

  “Om decided to come over to our side when the tensions of the Cold War caused him to reconsider their effects upon Germany. He became an agent for us when the Russian Navy had an incident with a nuclear sub,” he said.

  “Although it is not common knowledge, it was his submarine that rescued the crew of the K-19 Soviet ballistic missile submarine. After that event, he considered that the threat of nuclear warfare was so great it became an obsession. He became convinced that the only way to prevent it was to aid the United States in its efforts against the Soviets,” said the Admiral.

  “But, I thought the Germans were allies against the Soviets?” I said.

  The men in the room all laughed.

  “Rachel, it’s not too common knowledge, but espionage makes for strange bedfellows. The Germans were not too happy in the wake of the Second World War. They had good reason to hate the Soviet Union, but remember that a large portion of their defeat had occurred due to the influence of the United States armed forces. Especially the Navy,” he said.

  “Matthew Jaeger made a decision to help end the possibility of nuclear war between our countries. You may remember the hullabaloo about NATO planes with nuclear bombs being stationed in Ramstein? Om was instrumental in staging the majority of the antiwar protests!” he said.

  “But, why?” I asked.

  It was impossible to believe that Om had been some kind of secret agent.

  What about all his money?

  The family business?

  “Well, Rachel, that’s classified,” said the Admiral, with a lopsided smile.

  “I’m sorry. I truly am. But, Om was one of the best operatives the Agency has ever fielded. And, he was my best friend for over twenty-five years. I really was happy when he found your mother, and hoped that he could finally get out and just enjoy his life. But, he wound up somehow entangled in this mess with Reighl
and and King. And, whoever that is,” he said as walked over and slapped his hand across the org chart.

  The box at the top was empty, but everyone knew that whoever was there was the kingpin of a drug empire that spanned the globe.

  My mind reeled with the possibilities.

  I knew Om was rich, and that he’d been a ladies’ man.

  I thought my mother had tamed or at least allowed him to leave that all behind.

  I never imagined that my stepfather had been in the CIA!

  Then, I gasped, again.

  “Bone! Stephan! And Karl! Are YOU all agents, too?” I said, incredulous, gaping at Stephan.

  He laughed.

  Most of the men in the room were chuckling as well, as was the Admiral.

  “No, Rachel, I am not a secret agent, nor a Ranger or anything,” said Stephan.

  “That was Father’s dream, but I didn’t have the heart for all the skullduggery. At least, not until now,” he said.

  “Bone is also not an, agent, exactly, Rachel,” said Stephan.

  “What about Karl,” I said.

  “Oh, most definitely. Karl is indeed a… well, again, that’s classified,” he said, eyeing the Admiral.

  “Rachel, I am hereby granting you a compartmented SCI clearance for this particular operation, and you are on a need-to-know basis,” said the Admiral.

  “Karl, Drake and Stephan are part of a secret long-term project that we have been building for almost thirty years. They were all given special training, and segregated from the normal population of students once their skills matured. You may have noticed that they all are very adventurous, capable, and athletic? That is no accident,” he said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted.

  “Rachel, your brothers are the prototypes for specially augmented soldiers, each one a deadly weapon. You may have noticed the tattoos?” he asked.

  Those tattoos.

  What did they mean?

  “Well, they aren’t exactly -just-tattoos,” he said, cryptically.

  —————

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Jaeger Family Secret

  Captain Spalding had left a small contingent of men at “Ocaba Bien”, who were turning it inside out to find any clues or evidence that would exonerate Om.