Birth of the Wolf (Wahaya)

Birth of the Wolf

Wahaya: Book 1

By:

J. B. Peterson

Copyright
©
2012 by J. B. Peterson

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission.  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. 

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and situations either are the product of the author's imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

About the Author

J.B. Peterson resides in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and 3 children.  He has always loved to read and begin writing to express himself. 

When he is not writing, you can often find him in the playground with his chidlren or enjoying a glass of wine at a cafe with his wife.

You can keep track of his writings on his blog.  Bookmark his blog and check it often to know when his next book is coming out.

http://jonbpeterson.blogspot.com/

Please take the time to let him know what you think of his books.

From the Author

I wanted to take the time to say thank you for purchasing this book.  I have put in a lot of time to research and find people willing to talk about the subjects in this book.

While this book in entirely a work of fiction, the situations in it are situations that are faced everyday by clandestine organizations operating both within and outside of the protection of the United States government.

I have always enjoyed watching serialized TV shows and reading serialized books.  My plan is to do the same sort of thing with this series.  However, each story will have an ending. And each new book will pick up where the old one left off.

This way anyone can throughly enjoy only one book, or they can continue to read to follow the entire story of Nick's group.

Your feedback is important to me.  After reading this story, please take the time to email me, comment on my blog, or post a review on Amazon.  This lets me know what you enjoyed and what other types of situations you want to see.  This will help me immensely in writing fiction that you all love to read.  After all, I want all of you to enjoy reading my books.

Prologue

In one of the extremely wealthy suburbs of Atlanta, a boxy flat black van was towing a trailer loaded with lawn maintenance equipment.  No one thought anything of them. Everybody was used to seeing groups of Hispanics tending to lawns. 

The van pulled to the side of the road next to a long driveway that stretched back to a house of monumental proportions.  Four men climbed out of the vehicle and begin to unload their equipment.

The roving security patrols charged with keeping the peace in the neighborhood, thought nothing of the four males tending a patch of lawn at the end of the gated driveway.  

The men were friendly. They smiled and waved at everyone who came by.  After all, they had legitimate work contracts in the neighborhood and they had been working here for months.

The fact that they had no contract for this particular piece of real estate on this fine morning was of no particular concern to them -- all they had to say to the stupid Norte Americanos was "I speak no English," and all would be forgiven and they would be forgotten. Just another group of immigrants getting paid to do the work no one else wanted to do.

The men smiled at each other.  This morning was to be the payoff for months of backbreaking lawn work, dismal living conditions, and being away from home.

In an hour or so, it would all come to an end, and they would be on their way back to Peru…and when they got there, they would be as rich as their Inca forebears for the rest of their lives.  Each of them had already spent their new money thousands of times in their heads.  It would not be long now and they could spend the money for real.

Luis sat in the driver's seat of the small skid-steer loader.  He was the smallest of the workers but he was their leader. The machine was fitted with forks instead of a bucket to handle the pallets of sod they usually used to repair damaged grass in the ultra-wealthy suburb.

The lunch of juane he had opened and was eating with his hands was the last they had from the basket brought to them this past weekend when El Jefe himself had visited to give them their final instructions. It would be nice to be home again, where the food and the people were familiar and not so crazy.

He sat erect and tossed the juane out onto the grass when the armored limousine turned the corner onto the road. He called out to the other men to be ready. The three other men moved to covered tarps on the side of the driveway and concentrated on the ground around the small pieces of heavy green canvas.

When the limo driver waved and turned into the driveway all hell broke loose. The skid steer loader darted forward with its forks down.  Raising the forks, Luis flipped the limo over on its side. Luis leapt from his seat and scrambled up to the top of the limo quickly followed by the other four men.

The armor of the limousine was never designed to withstand high explosives, especially at close range. Using some detonation cord and thermite, the four Peruvians had the front and rear doors opened in seconds. The driver, still stunned by the explosion, was incapacitated permanently by Luis, who dropped through the opened door on top of him slitting his throat silently with a knife.

Carlos, the oldest of the four, was momentarily flustered at finding two women inside instead of just the wife of the industrialist they had expected. He recovered quickly and passed them through the open door above him. The remaining two men grabbed the women and chloroformed them before tossing them into the van.

The workers all crammed inside the van and left, leaving the skid steer loader by the limo, still running.

The whole operation had taken less than a minute. The black van drove off at a moderate speed, drawing no attention to itself or it’s blacked out window.

Luis fondled the younger woman, whose skirt had risen high enough that he could see the tiny, black thong she wore over her slim hips. “This one is a bonus,” he laughed.  “The flight home will be more fun the flight up here, si?” he said to his companions.

Carlos opened the buttons of the woman’s blouse and stared at her bared breasts. “Madre de Dios,” he whispered, his hands reverently touching the perfectly shaped orbs.

“They said not to hurt her,” Luis jerked his thumb at the dormant form of the attractive older woman, “nobody said nothing about this one...an’ we ain’t going to hurt her anyway. This will make her feel good inside.” 

Carlos grunted, and then a wicked smile spread over his face as he began to unfasten his pants. 

The black van drove into the salvage yard and stopped beside a brand new stretch limousine with diplomatic plates.  The four men carried the women and entered the limo without anyone seeing them. The limo doors closed and drove off.

The van, still running, was grappled from above by the salvage crane and lifted into the auto crusher.  There was no explosion as the gas tank cracked and spilled, just a loud whoosh as the flames rapidly consumed the fuel that had spilled. In minutes, the van was just a cube of crushed metal headed for the smelter along with a thousand or so other cubes.

The two women were manhandled onto the Gulfstream G VI at a private airfield.  The plane made a brief stop at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International where it took on a load of diplomats from the consulate in Atlanta. 

The craft took off unmolested from the airport, and Mrs. Amanda Dunn and Cynthia Cohen were officially off the grid.

Chapter 1

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with the rest of your life now Nick?” asked Major General Hilton Swain abruptly over the telephone.

Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas T. Harris, Army of the United States, Retired, sat at his antique, roll top desk, his back rigid and a scowl that anyone who had ever worked with him would recognize on his face.  It was a handsome face, but the scowl made his Cherokee features fearsome. 

He was shirtless, wearing only the trousers of his digital camouflage uniform and his rough out boots.  It would take only a little imagination to see him in soft buckskin pants and moccasins, a throwback to the warriors of old whose blood ran thick in his veins.  Nick was almost pure blood Cherokee, a single dalliance five generations before had lasted long enough to give him an English last name.

Nick remembered that the General was never one for small talk.  “I haven’t even turned my gear in sir,” he said, “I haven’t had time to consider it.”

“I’ll have the Sergeant Major handle your out processing Nick, consider yourself on terminal leave as of now.” The man sounded dead serious. Nick had known him since Swain had been a kindly Lieutenant Colonel at West Point who had taught him to get even with upperclassmen in the boxing ring.  When the General sounded like this, something was brewing.

“What’s up sir?” he asked.

“I need to talk to you about a job Nick.  Nobody I have ever known is as qualified for it as you are.  Nick it has to be now, and I mean right now.  Can you be at Pope in twenty minutes?” 

Pope Air Force Base was located at Fort Bragg.  It was the center for the hundreds of aircraft required to support the massive Eighteenth Airborne Corps, of which the 82nd Airborne Division was just a small component.

“Roger that, sir,” Nick said. “Civvies?”

“That’s what you are now son, sort of,” the general snapped. “Wear a suit, we have to meet someone.”

Nick brushed his teeth, changed his clothes, and jumped into his truck.  As he drove over to Pope, he thought about how he had met the General back before he was "The General." His father had won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam for action above and beyond the call of duty. This assured him a slot in the United States Military Academy at West Point.  In spite of a series of incidents in which he was punished for fighting, he had graduated with honors. 

Nick was not a fight starter, he was a fight finisher
. 
A kindly Colonel who had known Nick’s father had guided him towards the boxing team, where Nick had excelled.  Unremarkably, Nick had excelled at all things physical at the Academy.

When he had arrived as a plebe he had been given the appellation of ‘Chief’ as a joke. 
By the time
he left, he was known as Iron Eagle and no one was laughing.

At the end of his sophomore year, Nick had volunteered for Airborne School and Ranger School because he did not wish to return to the r
eservation that summer.
He thought it pointless since both his father and grandfather had
passed away
the previous spring.

To his amazement, he loved being a parachutist
-- for a brief moment it allowed him to become one with the eagles. 
The experience was mystical for him. 

Ranger school seemed to be not much different from his normal summers on the
reservation, only busier.  The instructors couldn’t match his survival skills, and the SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) training was fun
.  He spent the entire time less than twenty five feet away from the catcher team
. 
Then he ran the entire escape route in a couple of hours.  It was
pure excitement.

The only blotch on the seven week course
was when he warned an instructor away from a bad spot on the rock face on the back side of Yonah Mountain during the Mountain Phase of training.  The cocky instructor had taken the only opportunity he had gotten to ride Nick about anything at all (it’s considered bad form to go through one of the most physically demanding courses in the world without doing something stupid or drawing negative attention to yourself, and Nick was actually resented by some of the professional soldiers in the cadre) by challenging Nick's evaluation that the rock face had been damaged by lightning and was no longer safe to climb on.

The only reason the instructor did not die of his injuries is because Nick climbed down the wet rock face with a radio and carried him to an LZ a few klicks away. 

Nick managed to climb back up the wet rock face and catch up with his patrol before their next mission.  When the class finished the Florida phase and climbed out onto a hot Florida highway, the rest were laid out exhausted on the hot
pavement
. Nick was talking with the Tactical Officers,
showing them how the Cherokee hunt deer with a knife.

Nick joined the Black Knights U.S.M.A. Sport Parachute club on his return to campus that year, learning to skydive and giving him a regular outlet for his desire to be one with the eagles…and his nickname was
born.

That very morning, twenty years after graduation, he had been sitting in his private study, rereading the letter in response to his appeal to remain on active duty for the hundredth time.

“
We regret to inform you that there are no slots available for personnel with your time in grade and time in service in any of your skill areas. It is therefore the decision of this board that your involuntary separation after twenty years of service stands.”

Even now, in his truck on the way to Pope, those two sentences haunted him.  He could read between the lines and knew what they really meant:

“
There is no room in the Army for a maverick red man who won’t back down when he believes he is right.  We call it “discretion” and we take exception to your description of deferring to the judgment of your superiors as ‘ass licking.’ Remembering that a General is a General, right or wrong, is encouraged. What we
require
is political savvy.”

What is meant was that at the ripe old age of forty two, Nick Harris was out on his ass.  His world was upside down.  All he had ever wanted to be was a warrior.  He excelled at it, some of the very people who were denying him the right to continue his chosen path had been known to say that he was perhaps the best that had ever been.

Nineteen minutes later Nick boarded a C-37A (Military version of the Gulfstream V) and it was rolling to its takeoff position before they were even seated.  The general was in a hurry.

“
What do you know about the Peru TPA (Trade Promotion Agreement)?” Swain asked. 

Nick reviewed what he knew of the framework to promote U.S. exports to Peru that had been approved by Congress in 2006. Under the agreement, eighty percent of U.S. exports to that country were no longer subject to tariffs, and the rest of the tariffs were to be phased out by 2026. 

The U.S. had been growing in the neighborhood of forty percent each year since the agreement.  The agreement also protected U.S. investments, patents, and copyrights. The agreement had been great for both countries, and currently Peru was opening up government contracts for procurement to U.S. bidders.

General Swain nodded at Nick’s appraisal. “Elements of the Senderista’s (followers of the Shining Path Movement, a Communist organization dating back to 1920) from the south of Peru are moving north.  As you know, or as you should know, the group up north in the Huallaga Valley area of San Martin Province has been primarily political in nature. Since their political leader, Artemio, was captured in February, a group run by the druggies down around Ayacucho has been spreading its criminal activities north and it’s getting critical.

"Do you follow me so far?" 

Nick knew better than to interrupt the General when he was talking like this.  He simply nodded his head

Swain continued, "As you are intimately aware, political kidnapping and terrorism are endemic in Peru, and you also know that the Special Forces have been actively involved in helping the Peruvian Government to suppress these criminals. 

What you don’t know, is that Senator Dowling of Massachusetts has been recently appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee…and the good Senator has decreed that the U.S., and Special Forces specifically, should wash its hands of internal politics in Peru.” It had been a long speech for the usually quiet general officer, and he took a sip of the coffee the aircraft steward had brought them.

“
The Atlanta P.D. has secured a crime scene, a kidnapping that has some disturbingly familiar elements in it and I want you to take a look at it.”

“
You want me to become a cop?” Nick asked in surprise.

“
I wanted to get into this later Nick,” the general said, “but we’ve got a few minutes yet before we land at Hartsfield-Jackson so let’s get the cards on the table now. You can think it over and let me know something the first of the week.  Fair enough?”

“
Fair enough sir,” Nick said.

“
One thing you need to remember, Nick…when we get off this plane you are a civilian.  There can be no hint to the public, and unfortunately that includes the police, that you are military.  From now on I’m Hilton or General Swain. No more yes sir or no sir.

"You are a private contractor, and who pays your bills is
nobody’s
business.  You will receive monthly checks as a security contractor for the Department of Agriculture in the standard amount for those contracts.  The amount is considerably higher than what you have been making as a Lieutenant Colonel on active duty, plus your retirement pay.  Any monies paid to you on contracts with foreign governments or private individuals are yours to keep.”

Nick grinned, “Who do I have to kill?”

“
Not funny Nick, it will almost certainly come to that.  I can only assure you that it is discretionary…if you do not feel the target is a legitimate enemy of U.S. interests, or the legitimate best interests of the host country; you are not obligated to terminate anyone.  Do you want to hear more?”

Nick found himself listening with increasing interest.  This job was not significantly different from the job he had been doing for the Seventh Special Forces Group, and his knowledge of Peru and its problems was significant.  He found himself warming to the idea.  “What makes you think this thing in Atlanta is tied in with Peruvian terrorists?” he asked.

“
You’re the expert,” Swain said, “I’ll let you tell me.”