by John Grit
She carried a Glock in 9 millimeter on her side, but hoped the H&K would be the only gun she used that night. This was evidenced by the fact she carried six extra magazines for the submachine gun and only two for the pistol.
The night vision monocular she strapped to her head was fourth generation, and it lit up the night like high noon. It was hinged on its mount, and she temporarily pushed it up out of her vision. She slid her arms through the backpack straps before flipping the night vision monocular back into place in front of her left eye. A few quick steps and she was in the brush, swallowed by the night, the H&K in her hands, the selector switch on semi auto.
She expected there to be two or three guards — that’s what she had been told to expect, and was prepared to deal with. Beyond that, this was a straightforward assassination. The security detail had been watched for days and the guards were known to be of poor discipline. None of them were very alert. They were all trained killers, though, and once the element of surprise was lost, they would present a real threat. She had performed dozens of assassinations more risky than this one. The basic idea was to get in, kill the target, and get out alive. Simple. Only it seldom was.
Though she worked well with a team as long as every member was as good as her, she could be intolerant of mistakes. Her life was worth the rest of the team caring enough to do the job right, and she had no qualms about making her thoughts known on the matter when someone got lax and screwed up. In this case, she had argued convincingly that she would be safer completing the operation on her own. The station officer had hesitated, but ultimately acquiesced.
She had been in the most violent part of CIA operations for seven years, yet was still much younger than most of her male colleges, who were almost all ex-Special Forces and had already lived through a career in the military. Her abilities, which came from her natural talents and CIA training only, were a constant source of amazement by the Special Forces types. Amazed or not, they respected her record and therefore respected her.
The only other person she knew who was not ex-Special Forces and had a record to rival hers was Raylan. The macho ex-military guys gave him the full respect of a veteran and never considered him less of an asset to the CIA because he had never served in the military. He had seen the elephant and proven himself over and over again. That was good enough for them. The fact he never tried or wanted to stand in their glory so some would rub off on him but just presented himself as who he was, no more, no less, added to their respect for him. Neither Rayland nor she was particularly great as spies, gathering America’s enemies’ secrets. Their singular talent was killing and surviving long enough to do it again. Sanction, assassinate, take out, liquidate, kill – all simple little words that didn’t give the inexperienced a clue how complicated the simple act of killing a human being could be, not when it included getting out alive. Not just out of the area but out of the country.
At Rayland and Carla’s level of intelligence work – government-sponsored murder – the slightest mistake was deadly, and if the mission was carried out perfectly, someone still died. Death was always a constant companion. The danger and living with what you had done and would do again and again were more than enough to drive operatives mad, and often did. Suicide was a big killer. Early retirement, either voluntary or forced, was also a major cause of the high turnover rate in their division. Then there was getting killed by your target or his/her security thugs, another common hazard of the job. The bodies were seldom recovered. Man is called the most dangerous game for a reason. You either had to be insane, and the CIA was constantly checking on the mental health of their Direct Action operatives, or you had to possess superhuman psychological strength to do what they did.
Despite the hardships, she was one of the best and had become respected by the ex-Special Forces guys as a high speed operator, a member of an elite club, where testosterone ruled. Quite an accomplishment for a five foot ten, one hundred twenty pound woman.
Her footfalls crunched on dry leaves and pine needles, and she slowed her pace in an effort to silence her steps. She was getting close to a security guard and needed to be unseen and unheard. She deactivated the first motion detector, a cheap Chinese model probably purchased at a discount store for fifteen or twenty bucks. The home was dark, and there were no yard lights. Evidently the target was too cheap to have a generator for power. He certainly had the money, she knew that because he had just sold nuclear weapons components to terrorists for over two million in U.S. dollars, or that’s what she had been told. She peered through the dense vegetation and looked the scene over with her night vision device.
There was a trail that led up to the home, but she hadn’t lived that long by following trails. Most likely it was booby-trapped or had been mined. She paralleled the trail, staying twenty feet off to the side and moved in for the first kill of the night.
She paused in the underbrush to flip her night vision monocular up out of the way and mopped her forehead with her shirt sleeve, then flipped it back in place. Hunting season had just opened.
The guard collapsed into a pile when a bullet from the suppressed submachine gun penetrated his spine from behind and continued on through his heart and out his chest. Her plan was to take out the exterior guards as silently as possible, considering the weapon she was using. Knives were too unreliable and took too long to kill unless she got so close she could hold her off-hand over their mouth while cutting their throat. That might work great for a two-hundred-pound man, but even her uncanny strength and skill couldn’t compensate for her size, at least not that much. Throwing a knife was considered to be nearly useless, as it would likely not hit the brain stem or somewhere lower on the spine — no one is that accurate with a throwing knife — and the guard would have time to fire off a burst of full-auto fire before expiring, alerting everyone.
She moved slowly when in the starlight and faster in the veiling shadows, where she stayed as much as possible. Working her way closer to the building, she slipped back into the shadows under a tree, listening and watching to see if anyone heard the last guard die.
Another guard came around the building. The range was only twenty yards, an easy shot. She took a tenth of a second to aim before squeezing the trigger. The suppressed H&K burped once, sending a 10 millimeter full metal jacket bullet through his Atlas joint. He crumpled to the ground, his weapon clattering a little when he dropped it. Carla stepped over his motionless form. A third sentry was in the process of spinning around after hearing the last bullet strike flesh when Carla sent a bullet through his skull.
Carla sprinted over to make sure he was good. Three guards down. That should be all of them. She froze when a radio in his jacket pocket squelched at low volume and then a voice demanded a situation report in Spanish. She opted to let the call go unanswered. Her Spanish was as good as her English, but there was no way she would get by with faking a man’s voice she had never heard speak. What concerned her most was there seemed to be more guards than she had been told. How many more?
Movement in the shadow of a free-standing garage behind the home caught Carla’s attention. The night vision monocular had allowed her vision to penetrate the dark and spot him. The guard was fumbling in his shirt pocket for a cigarette lighter when the bullet hit him just above and between the eyes, fragmenting his skull on impact and sending chunks of bone slicing through his cerebrum. He was dead before his body hit the cobblestone plaza. Carla sleeked around the backyard, staying in the shadows, searching for more guards. Finding none, she ran all-out for the back door.
She pressed a charge of C-4 to the door hinges, stabbing each small clump of high explosive with a blasting cap. They were wired together and the wire connected to a battery that she placed on the porch under the bottom door hinge. After setting the timer for ten seconds, she ran around the corner of the home to wait for the explosion, shielding the night vision monocular from the flash, so its electronics would not be damaged from an overload of light.
As soon as
the door was blown off its hinges, she ran into the home, MP5 on full auto and held at the assault position. Bursting through the kitchen and dining room, she entered the hall and ran to the master bedroom. The door swung open just as she reached it, and there was her target standing before her, a pistol in his hand. She nearly cut him in two with a ten-round burst. From the dark bedroom came a woman’s screams. Carla stepped over the dead man and kicked the pistol she was scooping off the floor beside her dead husband out of her hand. “He is past help,” Carla said in Spanish. “Do not make me kill you too. I came only for him.”
Her job done, she swiveled on her feet to leave. A door to her right opened. She swung on a small figure but didn’t fire when she saw it was an eight-year-old boy standing in the hallway. The woman screamed in Spanish, “Please do not kill my son!” A dark figure rushed in from the living room. Carla aimed high, shooting over the boy’s head, and turned the man’s face to red mush. The boy ran down the hall. At first, Carla thought he was running to get away from her, and that suited her fine. But then he bent down to grab the man’s M4 carbine. Carla screamed “No!” At the same time, she charged down the hall in an effort to get to him before he could bring the barrel up. Shooting him was suddenly out of the question. Just as she reached to push the muzzle aside, the boy fired. The 5.56mm bullet entered below her lowest rib on the right side, traveling at the reduced velocity of 2800 feet per second because of the short barrel of the carbine. Nevertheless, it hit with the same energy as a .44 magnum revolver, just missing her right kidney and exiting out her back. She gasped and leaned against the wall, her hand still grasping the barrel of the carbine. She yanked it out of the boy’s hands and threw it into the living room. “Go to your mother little man,” she said in Spanish. “She is unharmed.” The wide-eyed boy took off and ran to his mother’s arms, as she stood in the hall begging for his life.
Carla pressed her right hand against the entrance wound, knowing the exit wound was many times larger. She staggered to the back door, racing against time and praying there were no more men waiting outside. Expecting to feel another bullet slamming into her at any second, she made her way to the Land Cruiser. After cranking the engine and heading down the dirt road with the lights off, she grabbed a phone off the seat and set it on her knee. Stabbing at a button with her bloody index finger, she picked it up and held it to her ear while she drove, picking up speed.
A woman answered. “Yes.”
Carla grit her teeth and took a deep breath before saying, “Code broken wing.”
“We have your position,” the woman said, in a calm voice. “Turn left three miles ahead.”
Carla acknowledged. “Left at three miles.” She stomped the pedal and bounced down the rough road at sixty miles per hour.
The woman stayed on the phone with her, trying to keep her awake.
She missed the turn. Slamming on the brakes, throwing up a cloud of dust, she yanked the gear shift into reverse and soon had the tires spinning. Shifting into four-wheel-drive, she surged forward down a Jeep trail that was much rougher than the road she had been on. “I’m tunneling out,” she said, referring to the tunnel vision she was experiencing from blood loss.
“Stay with me,” the woman on the other end said. “Pickup zone is only a few miles farther.”
“ETA?” Carla asked, in a groggy sounding voice.”
“Five minutes,” the woman said. “Stay with me.”
All the woman got for an answer was the crashing of the Land Cruiser through brush and slamming into small trees. Then the blaring of a car horn.
“Are you still with me?” the woman asked.
Nothing.
A storm cloud of dust erupted outside the Land Cruiser, but Carla was out and never saw or heard the helicopter and crew that saved her life. The pilot pulled pitch and lifted them into the sky. He swung the craft around, accelerating to maximum velocity, and raced her north to a hospital while the paramedic and doctor labored to keep her alive.
Chapter 6
Raylan saw Carla sitting at her laptop, tears running down her face. He rubbed her shoulders from behind. “You’re writing about a bad one, huh? The time you took two bullets to the chest?”
She blinked tears. “No.”
“Well, I’m guessing it was the one when you took a bullet because you couldn’t shoot a little boy trying to save his mother.”
Raylan remembered how she’d reacted when their division officer asked her at the hospital why she couldn’t shoot the little boy. He’d pushed the jerk out of the room. “You asshole,” he’d said. “Despite all efforts to turn us into machines, we’re still human beings.”
Later, Carla learned she had been given inaccurate information about more than the number of guards at the home, and that the man was not a danger to the free world at all, but had fled a Mexican drug lord after costing him a two million dollar shipment by informing the DEA of the time and place it was to cross the U.S. border. It turned out the drug lord had CIA connections from feeding a little information to them in return for an exclusivity agreement for most of the northern part of Mexico, granting him full rights to a percentage of every ounce of pot or cocaine smuggled into the U.S. The guards she’d killed were actually Mexican Federal police, and the man they sent her to kill was innocent. She’d nearly quit the CIA on the spot, but had been talked out of it… or more accurately threatened out of it.
“It certainly will not be the first time the CIA has been accused of being in the drug trade,” Raylan said. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “That’s what the reporters and politicians will concentrate on, not the price you’ve paid to serve your country. In their eyes and the American people’s eyes, we’re far from heroes. We’re just killing machines working for a corrupt organization few know anything about.”
She stood and turned to him. Looking up into his eyes, she said, “I’m not even half joking this time.”
“I thought you would never ask,” he said. They walked into the tent together.
~~~
President Preston Riley stood in the Oval Office, looking out a window onto the White House lawn. “Those two traitors must be stopped. There’s no telling what information they will release next.”
CIA Director James Dulling sat in a plush leather chair. “We’re working on that. We’ve been working on it since long before they broke their non-disclosure agreement. You must understand, those two are the best we’ve ever had, and they’re experts at surviving impossible odds.”
Trey Kraust, National Security Council threat assessment analyst, spoke up. “They sent sensitive information to the press only after you tried to have them killed. Exactly what was the reason for that?”
Dulling glared at Trey. “Why, isn’t it obvious? They were and are a national security threat. They went rogue and we tried to take them out. It’s as simple as that.”
“Oh?” Trey shifted in his chair so he could see Dulling’s reaction clearly. “Don’t give me the same shit you feed the media. Why is it my people tell me it was a Russian white slave and arms trader who wanted Maddox sanctioned? Why is the CIA in bed with an asshole like Janowski?” His face revealed nothing as he searched Dulling’s face for perspiration. “Carla Baylor got involved after the fact, when your thugs came after her because she was at one time close to Maddox. Hell, she’s been inactive for longer than he has, officially retired from the CIA. You’re a lying son of a bitch, Dulling.”
Dulling forced a smile, as President Riley spun around, surprised but not shocked. Dulling’s eyes flicked to the president for a second and back to Kraust. “Being a lying SOB is part of my job.”
“Uh huh,” Trey said. “Is putting the president’s reputation and his last term in office in jeopardy part of your job? If you hadn’t been the lapdog of some asshole white slaver in Russia for some unexplainable reason – unexplainable only because you will never tell us the truth – both of these operatives would have lived out their lives without ever revealing a damn thing. T
his whole crisis is the result of your crooked deals with the lowest assholes on the face of the earth.” He gulped a stiff drink down. “To think that the U.S. Government sent killers after two of the finest patriots this country has ever been blessed with on the behest of one of the lowest pieces of shit that ever came out of the former Soviet Union’s ass turns my stomach.”
“That’s just your problem,” Dulling said. “You don’t have the stomach for intelligence work.”
“I don’t have the stomach for shit like you,” Trey said.
President Riley raised his hands. “Enough. The fact is even if those two were already at room temperature we would still be in deep trouble. Congress is forming committees right and left as we speak. There is no way I can talk the Republicans into stopping the investigations.”
Dulling jumped up from the chair. “You have to!”
President Riley raised his eyebrows, his forehead furrowing. “How? I’m open to suggestions. Uh, short of having every Republican in Congress sanctioned.”
Dulling didn’t hesitate. “We’re working on fabricating dirt to destroy the traitors’ credibility, so no one will believe their stories. But we still need to find them before they release more classified information.”
“You know the story I’m interested in,” President Riley said. “Concentrate on that. Keep in mind if I go down, you will certainly follow.”
