NIGHTSHADE: A Shadow Warriors Short Story

by Stephen England

with his skill set, he was being increasingly schlepped to the Dark Side—as analysts called the operations side of the house.

  “Nichols,” Kranemeyer responded, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. “They’ve been unable to confirm that HARROW is actually in the building.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.” He didn’t see that it was. They’d planned for this. Multiple redundancy. “SKYWALKER’s wearing a wire. He confirms HARROW’s presence, the team goes in. About as simple as it gets.”

  An unpleasant smile crossed Kranemeyer’s face. “That’s what the President thinks too, Carter. This isn’t a game. Once you’ve got men in the field, illegals in a foreign country—there’s nothing simple about it. Anything could go wrong. Any one of a thousand things.”

  6:46 P.M. Local Time

  Ciudad del Este,

  Paraguay

  “Roger that, boss. Yeah, I understand. Have Carter monitor the satellite feed—let me know if any problems crop up. We’ll give this a whirl.”

  Harry hit the END button on his TACtical SATellite phone and slipped the TACSAT back in his pocket.

  “What’s going on?” Hamid asked, glancing over at his team leader.

  Harry laughed. “Langley’s solved all our problems for us. Or they think they have. We don’t have to trust him. Once SKYWALKER is in place, they’re going to run voiceprint analysis on the conversation to determine whether HARROW is really in the room.”

  They both knew what that meant. “Five minutes?”

  Harry shook his head. “More like ten.”

  There went the quick part of it. Sometimes plans didn’t even survive contact with your allies. Forget the enemy. They walked back into the bedroom, where Han lay manning the Dragunov. “The target window opens in twenty minutes with the arrival of SKYWALKER. We need to be ready to strike the minute we have target confirmation, hard and fast. From shots fired we’ve got thirty minutes to clear the area.” He smiled. “The local policia may be too corrupt to put in an appearance, but the same thing can’t be said of the cartel’s muscle. They’ll be all over us.”

  “Tell me again why we couldn’t get a camera on the inside?” This from Han.

  “Too risky.” Harry reached down and picked up a pair of high-powered binoculars, aiming them down the street, watching the pedestrians, the shoppers moving in and out of the myriad of storefronts. Dusk was falling, the dirty, faded buildings casting long shadows in the setting sun. “They’re bound to have swept the room before the arrival of bin Abdullah. They find a cam—game over.”

  “Abdullah,” Hamid whispered behind him, uttering an Arabic curse under his breath. “The slave of God. Where do these people get off believing that they speak for Allah?”

  Harry didn’t take his eyes off the street, but a quiet smile touched his lips. A Christian himself, he and Hamid loved to debate. “It’s your religion, my friend. Not mine.”

  “My religion…” Zakiri walked over to the window, gently pulling back the shade. “Through history, men have always sought heavenly sanction for their evil deeds. Divine license to kill.”

  8:06 P.M. Eastern Time

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  It was a beautiful way to fight a war. Carter leaned back in his desk chair, peeling the rest of the wrapper off a Hershey’s bar.

  Movement on-screen caught his eye and he keyed his communications headset. “We have the package, EAGLE SIX. SKYWALKER’s entering the target area—look for a gray Volvo.”

  “License number?” Harry’s voice, from over four thousand miles away.

  The analyst’s eyes narrowed as he tapped a command into the keyboard, watching as the satellite image zoomed in on the moving vehicle. “Here we go…Echo Romeo Zulu oh-niner-seven. He’s about four klicks out.”

  Five million dollars. Cash. Non-sequential Ben Franklins. Carter interlaced his fingers behind his head. It was Agency money, squirreled away from Capitol Hill through a hundred shadow programs. If people only knew…a lot of government “waste” was simply money siphoned off into the black budgets of the intelligence community. Five million dollars in the back of that gray Volvo. It wasn’t by accident that Ciudad del Este was the largest cash economy in the Western hemisphere.

  The man codenamed SKYWALKER was a long-time player in the Tri-Border Area, known as a businessman—a middleman willing to deal in most anything. If you wanted enough RPGs to start a small war, enough heroin to send UCLA into orbit, or enough young Thai girls to start an underage escort service, he was your man. A facilitator. It had been five years since the FBI had caught him leaving LAX under an assumed name. Four years since Langley had flipped him, erasing the charges against him in exchange for having a man in Paraguay. Yeah. They’d put a pervert back on the street.

  That was the nasty side of the spy business. Carter made a face, throwing the rest of the Hershey’s bar into the trash. Lost his appetite. “EAGLE SIX, you should have eyes on SKYWALKER any minute now.”

  7:15 P.M.

  Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

  “Boss, we’ve got a gray Volvo inbound from the north.” It was Zakiri, standing well within the shadow of the apartment’s window. Harry moved to his side, taking the binoculars from him.

  The crowds had dispersed from the street with the setting of the sun—leaving behind the detritus of the red-light district, the neon lights of a distant bar flashing in the gathering darkness. Harry’s binoculars picked out the shivering form of a half-naked young prostitute standing beneath the harsh glow of a streetlight. She was doing her best to look seductive, but it came across as desperation. Couldn’t have been more than thirteen.

  He looked away, re-focusing on his target. Sooner or later, you had to realize you couldn’t save the world.

  He switched on the night-vision, zoomed in on the Volvo as it pulled into a parking space in front of the target building.

  The passenger door opened and a short, balding white man exited, holding a briefcase in his hand. His light jacket did nothing to conceal his growing paunch.

  “I have VISDENT on SKYWALKER,” Harry announced, more for Langley’s benefit than their own. Visual identification.

  The Libyan muscle moved from the shadows, advancing on the white man. Not bad, Harry thought, watching them as the big man flattened SKYWALKER against the hood of his car, frisking him.

  Head to toe, and back again. James Bond movies aside, there just weren’t that many places on the human body from which you could comfortably and quickly draw a weapon. His partner turned his attention to the briefcase, ostensibly checking it for explosives.

  Harry aimed the binoculars at SKYWALKER as they hauled him to his feet, adjusting the focus until he could see the sweat on the businessman’s cheeks. Stay calm, Harry breathed. Stay calm.

  Stay calm, the man called SKYWALKER told himself. It’s what he’d been telling himself ever since this hellish ordeal got started.

  He took a look around as they pulled him to his feet. The street was deserted, except for a few drunks and the hooker. She looked familiar—then again, all Asian girls looked alike to him.

  Anyone but the Arabs. That’s what he’d told them when they’d read him in. He’d do business with anybody but these pyscho ragheads. That’s what he’d kept telling them—until the leader of the CIA team had laid his choices on the table.

  Convey the money to Ramzi bin Abdullah, or be outed as a U.S. government informant. In a city like Ciudad del Este, that would have cut his life expectancy to hours. Three or four of them.

  So here he was, working as a courier again. The money was supposed to be from some two-bit Saudi prince—what was his name? Crap.

  The little one pushed open the door of the apartment building and waved the Kimber, motioning him inside. He glanced back to see the big guard still standing by the Volvo. Good choice. There were four more identical briefcases in the trunk of the Volvo. A million each.

  Enough money to have set him free. Leave, go somewhere in Europe, Eastern E
urope preferably, out of reach of the blasted CIA. Eastern Europe, a cash economy with women almost as cheap and desperate as Southeast Asia. To start anew.

  Freedom. He licked his lips nervously. It wouldn’t work. The Agency was tracking the bills. How, they wouldn’t tell him.

  Metal on metal behind him, a pistol slide being racked. His heart almost stopped at the sound.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered, instinctively raising his hands. “Please God, don’t.”

  7:23 P.M.

  There was no warning. No time to react. The explosion hammered their eardrums, the sound of a pistol being discharged only inches from the microphone. Han ripped off his headset with a curse, throwing it against the wall. “What’s going on?”

  A second pistol shot followed the first. They could hear SKYWALKER struggling to breathe, hear him cough, a rough, hacking sound. The sound of a man dying.

  Harry’s face hardened, watching the second sentry, by the Volvo. He hadn’t moved, despite the gunshots. He had been expecting them.

  And in that moment, Harry knew—a disconcerting flash of certainty. A sixth sense, warning of danger. “Scratch this,” he announced, “we’ve been played.”

  He saw the look of shock on Han’s face. “Leave the long gun where it is, it’s sterile—nothing to connect it with us. Carter, are you getting this?”

  “What’s your sitrep, EAGLE SIX?”

  “SKYWALKER’s dead and I’m calling an abort on NIGHTSHADE. My