Starfish Prime (Blackfox Chronicles Book 2) (2 page)

This was not going to get any better with time and that same constraint meant his plan would have to be simple. Kyle instin
ctively reached for the personal sidearm he customarily carried and cursed as he remembered that he hadn’t taken it with him to Utah. He figured that sooner or later, the teens would notice one of the cowering patrons and the body count would start. Kyle exploded forward from the crouch, closing the approximate 40 feet between him and the shooters in about three seconds― it seemed like forever. He specifically targeted the larger teen as he appeared the greater threat. 

The teen partially had his back to him, pointing the weapon at a blond haired youth sprawled on the floor in front of him.

Kyle drove his shoulder into the middle of the fat teen’s back with the linear force of 220 pounds of lean muscle mass moving at fifteen miles per hour. The impact sent Lindy careening forward, his chin hitting the tile floor with an audible crack. One of the pistols clattered to the ground and Kyle scrambled after it, snatching it off the floor and leveling it at the other teen, just as a forty five caliber round struck him in his right shoulder. 

Kyle uncharacteristically swore under his breath and felt the pistol begin to slip from his hand. Luckily, MARSOC had trained
him to fire with his weak hand. He reached over with his left hand and grabbed the Glock from his now lifeless right arm.

Another round shattered against the tile wall behind him and Kyle knew he didn’t have much time. He raised the
Glock toward the skinny teen and squeezed off three rounds in rapid succession. 

All three bullets struck Ralphie in his birdlike chest, killing him before his body reached the floor. Kyle visibly sighed in r
elief and then felt the cold rush of adrenaline induced anxiety when he realized he had forgotten about the other teen. 

He turned just as Lindy fired the AMT Backup until it was empty―four of six .380 caliber rounds struck Kyle in his midse
ction. He felt the impact of the small rounds followed by the immediate pain associated with a gut wound, and knew it was bad. 

Even in dying, there was always something left to do and Kyle felt he would be damned forever if he let this unrepentant sinner escape divine justice delivered by a human proxy. He e
xpertly aligned the front sight post of the Glock with the rear sight and emptied the remaining rounds into Lindy Ray Boylin’s chest and head―thus prematurely ending a misguided and wasted life before it could do any more damage. 

The police cars arrived on the scene twelve minutes after the first 911 call was made. The first two man patrol to respond found little more than a bunch of hysterical shoppers and three dead bodies. Had Kyle Christiansen not been there, a lot more people would have died. A detective removed Kyle’s wallet from his body, found his military ID and called Hill Air Force Base to see if he was assigned there. “A Marine Captain,” he said to no one in particular. After a few minutes, he got his answer. 

The detective made a cursory inspection of the bodies of the teenagers and found the bullets had been delivered with the exactness of someone well versed in precision shooting. He interviewed several witnesses and began to take statements and they all basically said the same thing. “It would have been a lot worse, had it not been for a good guy with a gun.” 

The detective looked at the dead body of the Marine that one of the uniformed cops had covered with a blanket acquired from a nearby store and then did something he hadn’t done in over a
decade. He smartly brought the heels of his rubber soled shoes together, conveyed the knife edge of his hand up to the side of his head and saluted the dead Marine.

“Godspeed, Sir!”
he said quietly.

At eight thirty five that evening, the duty officer at the MARSOC Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility was notified by the staff duty officer that an incoming team member for a pending contingency mission had been killed and was ther
efore, no longer available for temporary duty at the Command. 

MacDill AFB, 

Tampa, FL 

Major General James K. McElroy, or “Mac” to his confidants, was showing all of his forty-eight years. One day a month, usually on a Friday, the MARSOC Commander hosted the Commander’s Run, an exercise meant to instill
espirt de corp
in an outfit that already brimmed with it. 

The run started while it was still dark and normally finished just as the sun was peaking over the horizon, long before the line of civilian workers and line troops commuted onto the base to begin their workday. The five-mile course ran along MacDill’s oceanfront boulevard toward the golf course, out to the marina, and then ended at the base gym. It started out in formation and ended with a two-mile sprint to the finish line.

The general was a marathon runner, but some of the hard assed studs in his outfit were near Olympic-quality sprinters and quickly left the old man in their dust. Either by design or by luck, he finished in the company of his G3, Colonel Richard Hearth, a Naval Academy grad, class of ’93, who seemed quite focused on making General Officer one day.

The few Marines not participating in the run occupied the
mselves handing out bottles of water, shouting out finish times, or otherwise looking busy. The general’s aide finished well ahead of the old man and was standing by the finish line with a cold bottle of Costco water and a hand towel. 

After wiping the sweat from his face and taking a long drink of ice cold water, the general noticed Colonel Hearth hovering nearby, slowly stretching his hamstrings. 

“Got something on your mind, Dick?” the general asked in between sips of water. 

“Yes, sir.
I’ve tried to find an acceptable replacement for the Marine who was killed, and I’m drawing a blank among active duty MARSOC personnel.” 

“Not surprised. The man had a very unique skill set. I suggest you redouble your efforts or broaden the field.” 

“Roger, sir. I can make a request up through Big SOCOM for an interservice personnel requisition, but I wanted to pass that by you first.”

“No, I don’t want you to go in that direction. We do that, and we open this mission to scrutiny from above. This is our dirty laundry, Dick, and I choose to clean it myself. Widen the net, look in RECON, ANGLICO, the reserves, and among recent r
etirees. My guidance is that the only must-have qualifications are HAHO, a 3/3 level of competency in Spanish and Yanomami, and some expertise in computer hacking. The guy doesn’t have to be Kevin Mitnick, but he needs to be able to operate the automated hacking tools the six has assembled.” 

“Roger, sir, I took the liberty of doing that and I think I found someone.”

“Well, do tell, Dick. Don’t keep an old man in suspense.”

“The guy I found was a Marine Captain separated in 2004 at Lejeune. His name is Blackfox. He’s a Recon Marine, has a Si
lver Star, and was wounded during the war, but not badly. I looked into his medical history and it seems they were trying to re-class him based on a gunshot wound to the upper right arm, but the standards have changed since then, and I doubt we would re-class him now.” The General nodded. Nowadays, you could stay on active duty absent a leg if you could pass the physical fitness test with a prosthetic.  Encouraged by the general’s nod, Colonel Hearth continued.

“According to his Service Record Book, he attended several computer security courses, including one run by the Air Force and another by a private group called the SANS Institute.” “Rea
lly?” asked the general. “When did we start sending snake eaters to geek school?” 

“He was Acting Battalion Six for a while,” he said, referring to the communications officer battalions and above have on their staff, “and I guess he took advantage of it to attend some schoo
ling. All the services have been funding these slots for years in response to China’s growth as a cyber-threat.” The general gave a slight nod of understanding.

“What about the other qualifications?”

“He hits the mark as far as languages are concerned. It’s kind of interesting that, according to his records, he’s part American

Indian, a Seminole, I think.” 

“Probably why they sent him to study Yanomami,” 

“And he is an experienced HAHO jumper. According to his records, he has over two hundred jumps,” said Hearth.

“Okay, Dick, it sounds like you did journeyman’s work, so what’s the problem?” 

“We can’t find him, General. He left active duty at Lejeune and no one has seen him since. He’s still in the IRR,” said Hearth, referring to the Individual Ready Reserve, a non-drilling status where Marines are listed on a roster should they need to be recalled to active duty. “And he did show up for one muster at a reserve center in Tampa, a few months after leaving active duty, but the contact number has been reassigned to another user.”  “Well, hell, Dick, it seems like you got a problem you need to solve. I suggest you get some of them highly motivated Marine NCOs you have on your staff involved to see if they can flush this guy out.  Work through the weekend if you have to.” “Roger, sir that was my intention, all along.” 

The general looked at his Chief of Operations and nodded. “I don’t have to tell you that we’re on a fast moving train do I?” 

“No, sir, it just feels like we’re
laying the tracks as the train is moving. “ 

“Well, Dick, that’s the business we’ve chosen to be in.” McElroy thought for a moment before he added, “Recon being who they are, you might want to check the jails.”

“Yes, sir, it always pays to be thorough,” replied the colonel.

Cartagena, Colombia

Char and his son, Michael, had been island hopping now for a few years. Most of the gold from the heist had been deposited in one large safe deposit box in a Dutch bank in Willemstad, C
uraçao. The ill-gotten booty had been secreted away for thirty years after Char and four accomplices robbed a seagoing casino of what turned out to be over a million in gold. The ship was sunk by a rogue wave that also foiled the robbers’ escape. 

One of the gang members had managed to hide the loot m
oments before being captured and returned to Angola Prison. Nearly thirty years later, he escaped with some outside assistance and joined Char and Michael in recovering the gold. He and all of the original accomplices were now dead. This left Char and Michael in possession of the gold aboard a dead gangster’s yacht on an extended Caribbean vacation. 

They used Curaçao as a base of ops, returning often to sell off a little gold to replenish the larder. Michael had thought he would grow sick of a life of leisure, but after almost three years, he was still relatively content. 

The price of gold was generally rising, so the value of their stash had continued to increase slowly. Even after selling some of it to support their lifestyle, they were still sitting on over a million. Char had discussed eventually unloading the boat and finding some nice windswept beach to live out his old age, but nothing had been decided yet as there were many more islands to visit.

Their hotel sat at the very tip of the thin fishhook-shaped peninsula, and it offered beautiful, expansive views in three d
irections of the Caribbean and the old city. Bocagrande was a place where rich, well-heeled, mainly male tourists mingled with the young, beautiful, but predominately poor ladies of Colombia. 

The hotel restaurant was called Las
Chivas and according to the marquee was ‘furnished with rattan chairs and black and white tables made from natural products that showcased Colombia's cultural identity.’  More important, at least to

Michael,
was the fact that it offered bone-chilling air conditioning as he had a throbbing, Tequila-induced hangover. He stopped by the gift shop and bought an International Herald to help kill time while waiting for the arrival of his perennially late father. 

Michael had made tentative plans to meet Char for breakfast at noon, but that hour slipped away and after numerous cups of strong Colombian coffee, he tired of waiting and decided he would order lunch, figuring the old guy would eventually give his girl the slip and come down to recharge his batteries.

It was now just shy of one in the afternoon, and Michael badly needed a piece of red meat to jump-start his thinking and cut through the fog of last night’s alcohol. Toward that end, he poured part of a bottle of Aguila beer into some Sangrita and sipped it, hoping that a little hair of the dog would ease his hangover. “Carne asada, termino medio,” Michael said to the waiter. The man nodded and hurried away. Michael and Char were staying at the Hilton for a few days while the
Good as Gold
, their 80 foot Hatteras, underwent long-overdue maintenance.

He had exited the two-bedroom suite without waking the man, deciding instead to leave Char in the clutches of the stri
kingly beautiful Rubia, whom he had met, last night at the hotel’s nightclub. Michael was unsure whether his dad would be presented with a bill for the evening’s pleasure or whether the young  ‘art student’ was really as into viejos, or old guys, as she had claimed. Her friend had liked Michael, but for some reason he had felt like being alone last night. Running into Ramos had engendered a lot of old memories and left him deep in thought. 

They had partied the night away in the club, buying and draining two bottles of top-shelf Tequila, about a dozen beers, and another three bottles of French champagne to lure in the women. At least ten hot
Colombianas had hovered about the table over the course of the evening, although some had just used the venue to refill their glasses. 

They concluded the evening at four in the morning and the bill came to just shy of fifteen hundred dollars; in Miami it would have been twice that. 

He had bumped into Marco Ramos last night. The guy was now a captain in the Counterinsurgency Brigade of the Infanteria de Marina and had served as an exchange officer with Second Reconnaissance Battalion during the invasion of Iraq from March to May in 2003. 

It’s believed that such officer exchanges build camaraderie and cooperation among military units from friendly nations, and since common ground was usually sought, it normally involved a significant amount of drinking, even in supposedly dry operations in Muslim countries like Iraq and Kuwait. 

Such officer exchange programs have existed in one form or another since Hannibal crossed the Alps, and are sometimes done on a very ad hoc basis. In Ramos’ case, it was rumored that his politically connected father pressured the commander of the Colombian Naval Infantry (COLMAR), who in turn called his old friend, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Ramos was subsequently assigned to Task Force Tarawa, a combined arms organization built around the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade. 

Ramos had participated as an eager, if not overzealous, o
bserver during several key engagements. These included the seizure of the Jalibah Airfield as well as the conduct of offensive operations in the vicinity of an-Nasiriyah. 

Recon was part of a lead element providing relief in place of the Army’s Third Brigade Combat Team, holding several bridges across the Euphrates River. During the operation, Ramos, Blac
kfox and other Second Recon Marines received enemy fire from small arms, light machine guns, rockets, and mortars in the vicinity of an abandoned power plant. The attacked Marines were able to kill twenty to thirty Iraqi soldiers. At one point during the firefight, Ramos’ lead vehicle was hit and disabled, leaving the occupants wounded and pinned down by a withering volley of enemy fire.

Under fire, First Lieutenant Blackfox and two other Marines drove their High Mobility Military Vehicle, or HUMMER, into a deluge of enemy fire and scooped up Ramos and his driver before multiple rocket-propelled grenades stuck Ramos’ vehicle. Ramos suffered light wounds from flying glass and was sent back to the rear to recuperate and avoid engendering an international inc
ident.

At the time, Ramos was a newly minted Second Lieutenant; the only difference between him and a Private First Class was that the latter had been promoted. Blackfox thought Ramos to be a good, albeit inexperienced officer with tons of potential. He also thought it unlikely they would meet again, but life is funny sometimes. 

In Michael’s opinion, Ramos was a thoroughly honest and honorable man. Given Michael’s current dubious legal status, he wasn’t sure whether or not it would have been wiser to slip out of the club before being seen by the man. 

After a moment’s hesitation, he walked up to the bar where Marco Ramos stood among a small group of well-dressed twe
nty-something men and women, and shouted “Ramos!” Ramos immediately recognized the tall dark haired American, and smiling in return shouted “Pinchy Gringo,” Mexican slang taught to him by one of Recon’s Mexican non-commissioned officers (NCO). 

They managed to kill most of a bottle of tequila together, and then retreated to the large exterior balcony to smoke two
Cohiba Esplendidos that Ramos magically produced as they reminisced about their time spent together in the shithole of Fallujah. Michael deftly parried any direct questions about his current status. He was just on vacation with his old man, a rich, retired investment banker from St. Pete. 

Ramos had just returned from duty with Joint Task Force Bolivar, which was deployed near the Ecuadorian border. He was in charge of a company conducting area patrols of waterways, the primary means of transporting narcotics across the border. 

“Morning, Chief.”

Michael looked up from his newspaper and beheld his father. Char was dressed in a light blue Polo shirt he’d bought yesterday in one of the boutiques at the hotel and a pair of Navy dive shorts he’d probably had since Vietnam. Char sported a slight grin, not looking much like a man rapidly approaching sixty. 

“Sleep well?” Michael asked with a slight grin on his face.

“Didn’t sleep at all.”

“Not surprising. La
Rubia looked like she had some plans for you. What did it cost? If you don’t mind me asking…”

“Not a peso, my dear boy, not one thin peso!” Char said as he flopped down heavily into one of the rattan chairs. 

Thankfully, Michael had decided to eat inside, as it was already in the mid-nineties, causing perspiration that made any activity outside a shirt-soaking event. “She must be working the long con,” quipped Michael. 

“Maybe so, lad, but I was thinking it’s about time I got ma
rried again, as you are in need of a mother’s influence.” 

Michael snorted the beer up his nose and spit it back in the glass. “Please, I’m trying to drink here.” 

“Good idea. Char could definitely use a beverage,” he said while signaling the waiter, who stood just out of range of the conversation. 

“Si, Senor?”

“Una cerveza, Azore, y la misma comida que está teniendo, said Char deciding to order the same meal. 

“Bueno, Senor,” said the waiter before quickly scurrying away. Michael looked at Char skeptically.

“Azore?”  

“Yeah, the little honey I was with last night turned me on to it. Best beer in Colombia and local to Cartagena
,” replied Char.

“Jeez, Dad, your Spanish is getting better and you’re drinking what the locals do. We have an expression for guys like you; it’s called going native!” said Michael.

“Maybe so. I could get used to this.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get too used to it, we may have a pro
blem.” 

Char looked at his son quizzically.

“Remember Ramos, the guy we were drinking with last night?”

“Yeah, your old
war buddy. Gee, I hope he is better than the last one of your war buddies we ran into. What was the guy’s name? Triple H?” asked Char. 

“G, as in Gunny Gordon Groves.
Yeah, he was just a greedy scumbag. This guy is different, a real straight shooter. The family is connected―his old man once ran for president and lost. But, if he gets an idea we are wanted or on the run, he might decide we are worth turning in.” 

“OK, so make an excuse about tonight. The
Good as Gold
should be ready tomorrow; we can head for Bonaire and do some diving like we had originally planned,” said Char. 

The carne
asada arrived a short time later and they discontinued talking. The marinated, grilled beef was a traditional dish of Colombia. The marinade was made of orange or lime juice with garlic, spices and beer. It was accompanied by arepas―a soft tortilla—salsa de aji picante and some black beans. They had run short on meat after leaving the Dominican Republic and sailing south. 

This was the first fresh piece of beef that they’d had in weeks. Michael filled the
arepas with the grilled meat, black beans, and salsa to make tacos. It was tender and delicious. 

When he was done with the meat, Michael used another
arepa to clean his plate. That accomplished, he finished the last of his beer and signaled the waiter for another. Char watched in amazement while still only halfway finished. 

“Son, you haven’t changed at all―still like a human eating machine.” 

“In Recon, we were never too sure how much time we would have to eat, so I made a habit of making sure I finished quickly.” After some thought, Michael looked at this father and said, “No, I better take Ramos up on dinner tonight. He wants to have dinner at the Naval Club on the base, and it will be a grave insult if I stand him up.”

“OK, you go, I’ve got a date.” 

“Shopping for engagement rings?” asked Michael with a raised eyebrow. 

“Not just yet. I figured I would let her show me some of the sights, but right now, I think I need a nap.”