by Peter Nealen
“No, we can’t,” Van Zandt said with a sigh. “And he knows it. He’s giving us hints, but he knows he’s valuable, and he wants reciprocation.”
“Has he hinted at what they were doing down there at all?” Brannigan asked.
“Enough to be scary,” Van Zandt said. “Gene-doping, performance-enhancing drug cocktails, and mental conditioning. He hasn’t been terribly specific, but it looks like they were trying to accomplish something akin to the Chinese ‘super-operator’ program, along with what sounds an awful lot like MK Ultra style mental conditioning. Some sick stuff.”
Brannigan thought about it. “I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that much,” he said. “These are the same people who were testing biological weapons in the hopes that they could ‘improve’ the gene pool by killing off the ‘unfit’ with a tailor-made virus.”
“My worry is,” Van Zandt continued, “that he’ll play this delaying game long enough that anything we finally get out of him is going to be outdated and useless. Somebody’s got to suspect that we have him. At the very least, if they’re careful, they’ll assume that whatever he knew was compromised as soon as you hit their facility.”
“Maybe,” Brannigan said, glancing at the door that led to the cell where Bevan was being interrogated. “In that case, I guess we’ll have to keep digging, and wait for the next opportunity.” He rubbed his chin with a thumb. “We never figured this was going to be a short war. Not once we found out who we were up against.”
Van Zandt picked up the cards again. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I just hate waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Brannigan looked across at him. The two of them would never be friends, as such. They had too much history for that. But the events of the last couple of years had meant that they could at least put most of that history behind them.
“You and me both, Mark,” he said. “You and me both.”
***
Winter looked up at the faint knock at his door, his hand moving to the Glock 43 sitting on the side table next to him. He recognized the pattern to the knock, but he still kept the pistol in his hand as he moved to the door, careful to stay to one side and out of the fatal funnel.
He cracked the door, and found himself looking into a familiar pair of cold black eyes.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Of course,” the woman replied. She was several centimeters shorter than he was, with long salt-and-pepper hair drawn back from the nape of her neck, dressed in a simple, businesslike blue suit. “I know you’re not stupid enough to let me in with bodyguards, so do me the favor of extending me the same courtesy. We are both at risk here.”
He opened the door just far enough for her to slip inside, then shut it and bolted it. It wasn’t a particularly out-of-place action; Rio de Janeiro was a hotbed of crime, despite the government’s best efforts. And while he wasn’t deep in a favela—a brown-haired German would stand out far too much there —his safehouse wasn’t exactly in a good neighborhood, either.
The woman looked around the tiny apartment. It was a step above a favela hovel, but not by much. The bed was little more than a mattress on the floor, and the end table and chair were the only other pieces of furniture in the room. The laptop and high-end comms system that he used to monitor the local Organization network—without making contact—were covered by a dirty tarp.
“So,” the woman said, sitting on the chair and leaving Winter to stand, “tell me what happened.”
He explained the mission and its failure as succinctly and dispassionately as he could. Only long practice allowed him to divorce his personal feelings from his dissection of the incidents as he described them. He was not given to anger, and he had had next to no personal connection with the team members he’d lost, but losing wasn’t something that agreed with him.
When he was finished, the woman sat back and thought for a long moment. She steepled her hands in front of her mouth, which was pursed in thought.
“If you are worried that I am going to put a termination order on you for the failure of the mission, you can relax,” she said. “We’ve known each other too long for that, anyway. Even so, I suggest you stay here for the time being, and avoid communications with the usual contacts on the Board. Let them think you’ve gone dark. Your account will be kept liquid; I will be in touch when we need you again.”
He frowned. “That is it? An Indigo Lithium site is destroyed, and a high-level contact is burned, but I just need to lay low?”
She stood up. “I don’t blame you for this fiasco, Dieter,” she said. “I have been increasingly shut out of our recent operations, and it shows.” She smiled, and the expression had all the warmth of a shark eyeing its next meal. “There will be some restructuring happening soon. In the meantime, all paramilitary operations will be suspended until further notice. Between the Board’s bungling and Flint’s loose-cannon carnage, our entire organization has become far too exposed. Everything is going to go dark for a while.
“At least, until I can get matters under control.” She went to the door. “Enjoy your vacation, Dieter,” she said. “I will be in touch.”
Look for More Hard-Hitting Action Soon, in:
Peter Nealen’s
Brannigan’s Blackhearts #8
Enemy of My enemy
Abu Mokhtar al Shishani wants to be the next Osama bin Laden. And if he takes deliver of the five former Soviet backpack nukes making their way across Central Asia, he just might accomplish that goal.
The nukes are in the wind. And going after Abu Mokhtar himself would be a suicide mission. But the Russians know where his money is. And for reasons they’re not telling, they’re willing to cut the US in.
But Washington doesn’t want to risk a SOF team in Azerbaijan with only Russian support. Enter Brannigan’s Blackhearts.
It’s already going to be hairy enough. But the Chechen and Azerbaijani opposition might end up being the least of their worries…
AuthoR’s Note
Thank you for reading Kill or Capture. This one ventured a bit more into the realm of “science fiction,” but the gene-doping methods that the Front was attempting have already been the focus of considerable Chinese research in the real world. I doubt that anyone knows the full repercussions if it’s ever truly tried, but I attempted to show some of them in this story. I hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride.
To keep up-to-date, I hope that you’ll sign up for my newsletter—you get a free American Praetorians novella, Drawing the Line, when you do.
If you’ve enjoyed this novel, I hope that you’ll go leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews matter a lot to independent authors, so I appreciate the effort.
If you’d like to connect, I have a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/PeteNealenAuthor. You can also contact me, or just read my musings and occasional samples on the blog, at https://www.americanpraetorians.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Also By Peter Nealen
The Maelstrom Rising Series
Escalation
Holding Action
Crimson Star
Strategic Assets
Fortress Doctrine
SPOTREPS – A Maelstrom Rising Anthology
The Brannigan’s Blackhearts Universe
Kill Yuan
The Colonel Has A Plan (Online Short)
Fury in the Gulf
Burmese Crossfire
Enemy Unidentified
Frozen Conflict
High Desert Vengeance
Doctors of Death
Kill or Capture
Enemy of My Enemy
The American Praetorians Series
Drawing the Line: An American Praetorians Story (Novella)
Task Force Desperate
Hunting in the Shadows
Alone and Unafraid
The Devil You Don’t Know
Lex Talionis
The Jed Horn Supernatural Thriller Series
Nightmares
/>
A Silver Cross and a Winchester
The Walker on the Hills
The Canyon of the Lost (Novelette)
Older and Fouler Things
