by JT Sawyer
He saw the lead man below, a stout figure with a hatchet-like nose, give the hand signal to halt. Then the soldier pointed to the ground where the snares were buried and instructed his men to walk around. Sneaky bastard—he was always the one with the best eye out of the group. Looks like those simulated traps weren’t worth my time.
Getting up to stretch his legs, he saw a sand wasp dragging a paralyzed spider to a dime-sized hole in the ground. He had witnessed similar ghastly endings like this happen in Arizona between tarantulas and hummingbird-sized wasps that sting the spider and drag it into a burro where they lay their eggs in the stunned figure. The larvae feed off the live tissue for three weeks, eventually hatching as winged wasps to repeat the macabre cycle all over again. He put his boot over the wasp-spider duo but then paused, instead squatting down to ponder the scene. If I kill you the spider dies anyway and if I put you out of your misery, then the wasp will just continue on another hunt. He twirled a twig in the sand, making a figure-eight while chewing on his lower lip. “The whole thing sucks—nature is a cruel master sometimes.” Walking away would be easy—the timeless struggle would go on. He wasn’t needed to right the big picture of how things worked. He flung the stick down and stood erect, crunching his boot over both creatures. “Sorry, amigo,” he said, looking down at the flattened spider.
He glanced down at his watch. Only an hour left to completion of this scenario. Better get to the base of Mount Carmel where we all have to meet. Mitch wound his way down the hill, walking parallel to the group, careful to keep a low profile in the brush. He kept his head covered with a multicam scarf to break up the outline of his head, which was usually the most obvious feature that gave away a concealed person’s location.
An hour later, he came up the rear of the group and congratulated the team on their well-planned mission and counter-tracking moves. He did a half-hour after-action review with them and then they headed down the trail together to the vehicle rendezvous site near the highway. Mitch’s cellphone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out to scan the text that he figured was most likely from Dev. Instead, he stopped in his tracks and glanced over the troubled message from the wife of an old friend.
Bob’s missing. I need your help—can you call me. Margo.
Chapter 3
Sweden, Island of Faro in the Baltic Sea
A faint trickle of sunlight was stabbing past the white curtains in the forested cabin where Kyle Redstrom was resting, his eyelids partly fluttering from the nightmare unfolding in his mind. The past thirteen hours of work had been unrelenting and he had allowed himself this brief rest before the coming events, hoping that the haunting images from three years earlier would stay submerged.
Howling, screaming, clawing sounds echoed off the walls of his tortured mind as he slept. The same pictures unspooled in his mind: his lovely wife, Mae-Lin, sitting by the window with her velvety black hair blowing in the gentle summer breeze. Then her smile turning to a pained grimace as the door of their Beijing apartment burst into tiny splinters and armed men in black assault vests streamed through the opening like hungry eels. Within seconds, she was being dragged away while Kyle’s ears rang out with her piercing shrieks. As he struggled to regain his equilibrium from the blast, he was slammed to the ground and felt a knee compressing his trachea. His hands clutched at the two men on top of him until he felt the sting of a rifle butt slamming into his forehead. In his half-conscious state, he heard the muffled voices of the men around him speaking in Cantonese; they radioed in that they had retrieved the spy and were en route to the safe house—the woman would also be interrogated. He could hear the faint voice of his wife several flights below then the slamming of a van’s sliding door which silenced her. It was the last time he would hear from Mae-Lin, who was doomed to a hasty interrogation and then summarily executed.
Kyle had been undercover CIA agent for four years in Beijing, his assignment to gather data on a suspected Chinese bioweapons program that was operating out of the lower levels of a hospital. His background as a former army combat medic coupled with his fluency in Cantonese that he had acquired at the agency made him a prime candidate for the job with the recommendation of his mentor, Darren Crenna. Kyle’s job was to observe and track the whereabouts of a Chinese scientist, Sau, who was believed to be the lead suspect in the bioweapons division. Posing as a pharmaceutical rep, Kyle was able to attend many of the same international conferences as Sau along with weekly monitoring of his whereabouts around the city. Three other agents from Crenna’s team were assigned to Kyle with their sole job of running counter-surveillance measures so he could perform his duties without drawing suspicion from the Chinese government.
After twenty-eight months of work, Kyle observed an exchange of goods between Sau and a Chinese spy who was high on the U.S. watch list. Kyle surmised it was a sample of a deadly pathogen that Crenna believed Sau had finally perfected. The green light was given to intercept the package and eliminate the spy after Sau had left.
Kyle accomplished his mission flawlessly—it was the perfect op. He hid one vial of the pathogen in a secure location then retreated back to his apartment with the rest of the vials. For two hours, he waited for orders from Crenna about how to safely extract himself, his family, and his team from the country.
Kyle delivered the pathogen to a designated location with a courier Crenna had sent. He was told to head out on a flight at midnight with his family. His team had already been extracted. Then there was word on the news about Sau’s brutally stabbed body being discovered along with fabricated images of Kyle fleeing the scene. Thinking he could avert the noose tightening around his neck, he made a desperate call to Crenna only to find that the man’s phone number was disabled. With the thunderous howl of his apartment door exploding, he knew his fate was sealed.
Kyle’s hand was shaking violently and fell off the armrest of the suede couch as the nightmare ended. The suddenness of the movement caused him to gasp for air and his startled breathing sent him to his feet with his FEG pistol clutched tightly. He looked around at his austere surroundings and then at the locked front door and realized where he was. Kyle rushed to the front window and opened it slightly, kneeling down by the gap and sucking in the cold air. He hated being indoors, sealed off from the elements. Two years locked in a six-by-six cell with only a slot for a plate to slide through had caused him to suffer from extreme claustrophobia. Even the flight to Sweden on his private jet had required a few Xanax coupled with brandy. He staggered forward a step before correcting his balance and then wiped the cold sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve, being careful not to graze the palm-sized burn scar beside his right eye.
He pried back the corner of the weathered curtains and surveyed the sylvan surroundings. The cabin was perched on the slope of a spruce-forested hillside overlooking a small village on the island of Faro. Since it was wintertime, the inhabitants of the isolated region were reduced to two hundred and twenty people, down from over three thousand when the summer visitors inundated the tourist haven. It was an idyllic and isolated setting but, most importantly, it had no medical services or police force. Communication with the mainland was sparse, with an antiquated military radio tower serving as the main method of relaying ham radio dispatches. The mayor had the only satellite phone on the forty-two-mile-square island and the residents preferred the seclusion until the next tourist season began.
Kyle had rented the cabin under the guise of a geography crew who were re-mapping the region. His four men were almost done placing the canisters of deadly pathogens and accompanying C4 in the community center where all of the residents would soon be gathering for their annual winter festival. He looked down at his watch, noting that his experiment would begin within eighteen minutes.
Two years in a Chinese prison had led up to this day. Prior to that, his life as a covert operative with the CIA had been relatively smooth. After graduating at the top of his class at the farm in Virginia and excelling in Chinese language studies,
he had progressed to working field operations in Beijing.
When the Pacific Trade Commission, fostered by the U.S., had unraveled due to mishandling of classified information that was leaked out of China, the agency sent out a burn notice on Kyle, throwing him to the Chinese government as a corporate spy. At least that’s what he was told by his interrogators at the prison. He knew when he signed on that the world of covert affairs was precarious but he was told a married man embedded in a foreign culture was less likely to draw attention to himself and that his wife would possess diplomatic immunity if something should befall him. He would later learn from his fellow prison inmate, Anton Tokarev, that his wife had also been implicated in the treason and was whisked off to another prison where she was later executed.
During a transfer to another prison, some of Tokarev’s men hijacked the convoy and expedited their escape. The Russian mob boss and oligarch offered Kyle a place to recover back in Moscow. There Kyle spent a year recovering and planning while Tokarev lent his considerable financial assets to helping Kyle set up their current operation. The former CIA agent reciprocated by extending his knowledge of black ops experience to increase Tokarev’s business reach. Now their new scheme would bring them access to power that few men were capable of achieving though that mattered only to Tokarev. Kyle had a different agenda in mind, one that involved bringing one man’s career to ruins and shattering the already fragile economic ties between China and the U.S.
Kyle pondered his forthcoming actions on the innocent civilians below. You seem like good people but even being good comes with a heavy toll. The world that will be ushered in soon is something you would want to be spared from anyway. He clenched his teeth. Besides, there is no good or evil—that is a human construct.
He heard the clank of boots on the rear porch of the cabin and levelled his pistol at the door. A cold blast of air and snowflakes swirled inside as the four figures in their wool overcoats moved into the main room. They were all of Indonesian descent but spoke flawless English; the goateed man at the front nodded to Kyle. “Everything is set, chief.”
Kyle waved them over with his pistol and directed them to the gas masks spread over the table. He looked at his watch one more time as the men gathered to his right and donned the protective equipment.
“Why do the trial run here on this tiny rock of nothing?” said Alex, a lithe figure who stood a foot shorter than the statuesque Kyle.
Kyle counted down the seconds under his breath as he moved the gas mask over his face, the puckered scar next to his eye socket crinkling from the pressure of the rubber edges. “If the pathogen can work in the extreme cold then the target in the tropics will not pose a problem for dispersal. Plus, this little shit-nugget of a village can be easily obliterated after the experiment. It’s a perfect petri dish.”
The men each retrieved binoculars from a duffel bag and then studied the scene below where the last of the villagers were entering the two-story community building beside the old church. A few seconds later, the timer on Kyle’s watch began beeping.
The first man below who exited was in his sixties with a trim silver beard and a gray wool beret. Kyle nervously exhaled, watching the figure for signs of infection from the invisible gas that had just been released into the heating ducts. He saw the man lean against the door and then cough before reaching into his coat pocket for a cigar. A sigh of frustration pulsed out from Kyle’s lips as he saw the man fumble for a lighter. As the flame flickered onto the ends of the cigar, Kyle saw the man’s eyes widen and rivulets of blood trickle from his nose, the man’s mustache hairs becoming crimson. The cigar fell, the man pivoted towards the door, spewing steaming red droplets from his mouth onto the white facade. As he yanked on the handle, the door burst open. The rush of dozens of panicked souls, their orifices oozing blood, shoved their way past the older man who had fallen to his knees. Several people stumbled out a side door and collapsed but were not bleeding. Their hands were clutching their throats and they appeared to have milder symptoms.
Kyle’s carotids pulsed and he gulped down a breath through the crackling intake valve of the gas mask as the men around him did the same, their heads swiveling like periscopes as they took in the carnage unfolding below. People were crawling on their elbows towards loved ones who were already dead while blood streamed onto the snowy pavement which looked like it had been pelted by red hail. Kyle’s men began nodding in silent rejoice, two of them shoving elbows into each other’s sides and muttering something about a bet on the timing of the deaths.
Kyle stood still, his eyes still peering through the binoculars but his gaze turning inward, the faint sounds of his wife’s long-ago cries growing quieter as the parched landscape of his soul sprouted a few tendrils of hope for the work that still lay ahead.
He casually extended his hand out towards Alex, who handed him the C4 detonation device. Kyle flipped up a red switch and then depressed the button below it. The community center’s windows blew out, followed by a small mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke which roiled upward into the sullen sky. The right rear corner of the building remained untouched and Kyle depressed the ignition switch again and then a third time but nothing happened. He tossed the device against the window while cursing. He gave the young man beside him a disconcerting look. Alex held promise as a skilled mercenary but seemed to be challenged, at times, with a slight attention-deficit for details that had no place in Kyle’s world. He picked up his pistol and fired a round into Alex’s head, spraying brain matter onto the gas mask of the man next to him.
“Go down below and finish the fucking job the right way this time. Then cancel any survivors.” As the three remaining men scurried for the back door, he yelled out to them, “The helo leaves in thirty minutes. If you’re not back by then don’t bother coming back to my outfit.”
Chapter 4
Central Intelligence Agency, Pacific Division, Singapore
CIA sub-station chief Darren Crenna was sitting in his office, the morning sunlight filtering through the window onto the papers strewn about his desk. He sat back and loosened his black necktie, his scarred knuckles clutching at the knot as if it were a hangman’s noose. He scanned the blond-haired woman’s image on his laptop, comparing it to a hard-copy photo in a personnel file beside his computer. A bead of sweat started to lose its grip on his temple and he briskly wiped it away while bolting upright from his seat. He strode to the window and began tapping the side of his fist against the steel frame. Jessica Yin has reared her head—that contemptuous bitch. All my efforts at trying to locate her, to kill her three years ago, and she disappeared like a Goddam phantom. Now she’s back—what the hell is her game? Yin had served as a field agent on a surveillance detail for one of Crenna’s deep cover teams inside of Beijing several years ago. After the op was over, Crenna sent his own off-the-books murder squad to eliminate any traces back to him. Yin slipped away and hadn’t been seen since.
A few minutes later, the double doors on his spacious office opened and he heard the footfalls of his top field operative, Von Harut. At twenty-six, Von was the youngest member to join the coveted anti-terrorism unit under Crenna’s command three years previously. He’d been handpicked by Crenna based upon his linguistic abilities, negotiating skills, and considerable tradecraft. Like a lot of agents in the Asian division, Von had dual citizenship, with his mother coming from Florida and his father hailing from Jakarta. Von had been a valuable asset on Crenna’s team and had outlasted or outlived most of his colleagues that had been recruited with him. Prior to joining the Malaysian branch, Von had been stationed in Jakarta where he excelled in his position as customs inspector with the government, working on breaking up human smuggling rings and as a liaison with Interpol. He’d become so adept at detecting how smugglers and pirates moved surreptitiously in and out of countries that he later taught other covert operatives the nuances of slipping across international waters.
Von’s boyish appearance and striking hazel eyes gave him the look of
a starry-eyed college kid and cloaked the shrewd killer beneath his exterior.
“We’ve got an interesting dilemma that requires your special skills,” said Crenna as he grabbed the corner of his laptop and spun it around towards Von.
Crenna rubbed the back of his neck and exhaled. “This is Jessica Yin. She was recently spotted getting off a plane in London where she was connected with the abduction of Professor Robert Schueller, a scientist who was also one of the agency’s civilian contractors.”
“Isn’t this a job for the UK branch?”
“Yin has ties to espionage cases that have taken place right here in our own backyard so that makes her a person of interest. Plus, Schueller’s work is something we can’t have falling into the wrong hands.”
Von leaned forward, studying the petite woman’s face. “You need Schueller retrieved along with the woman?” He didn’t look up at Crenna, continuing to absorb the details of the picture.
“If the professor is still alive, he’s of value but I need to find out what the woman knows and if she’s extracted any intel on Schueller’s work.” Crenna arched his back and shot a glaring look at Von. “But be certain that she has the intel first. If the data has been passed on then you’re going on a hunting trip and she’s the first one to have her head mounted on my wall.”
