Target Deck - 02 (56 page)

“I never really knew what I was flying in and out, I just picked up the pallets and-”

“Shut up and fly Ed,” Deckard cut him off. “By the way,” he said turning back to Aghassi. “Can I borrow your notebook for a second? I think Ed needs to see something.”

Aghassi went into his kit and withdrew his notebook computer, handing it to Deckard. Opening the computer, he pressed the power button to get it fired up.

“Let me ask you Ed, have you ever seen one of the Arabs you ferried around with some really gnarly scars on his arms?”

“Like some deep cut marks on his arms?”

“Yeah, exactly like that.”

“There was one guy who had these crazy scars that walked all the way up his arms. One time I saw them when he was wearing a short sleeved shirt in the summer. He is the one I see most frequently, I think he is the leader of the group.”

“Take a look at this,” Deckard said turning the computer screen towards Ed. The Torreon beheading video played, The Arab's scars clearly visible on his arms as he sliced the head off a living teenage girl.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Hardly. The first time I encountered this guy was on Grand Cayman when he killed a couple CIA pilots by sending suicide bombers after us. The next time I saw his handy work was at a Christian mission. Listen Ed, it was a massacre. They lined up mentally disabled people and recovering drug addicts. Even the padre and the nurse who I found with her panties around her ankles. This Arab put them against a wall and executed them.”

“I have to ask you again man, who the hell are you guys? You obviously are not SEAL Team Six or Delta Force.”

“We are mercenaries. Freelancers. We fight and we get paid for it. This is what we do. This is what we are good at. When someone kills my men, when some coward takes the fight to civilians, when they cut the heads off teenage girls and execute the sick, then they have taken the fight to me. This isn't about money Ed, not anymore. This is about justice. We blew up that Mexican military base because those bastards were supporting this shit, just like you.”

“I had no way of knowing.”

“Now you do. Decision time. Make the call. You just ran out of gray areas to hide in.”

The pilot looked away, wiped his hand across his face, and then set it back on the controls.

“What do you need?”

“Who from Kepper or G3 Communications works at the hangar? You said something about a dispatcher.”

“There is a dispatcher and an operations officer who monitors black flights shooting up and down the flight corridor.”

“They will be there when we hit the ground?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Okay, are there any phase line code words you need to pass to them as we approach?”

“Just regular communications with the flight control tower.”

“Then play it off like any other day.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We are going to do what we do.”

“I can't believe this is happening. This means I've been helping that Arab group murder civilians, but why would G3 have someone doing that?”

“Because someone contracted them to transport these people. We still don't know who is behind all of this. But the murders are about pitting the Zeta and the Sinaloa cartels against each other. They murder members and family members from both of the two largest cartels in Mexico, then they stage it to look like the opposing cartel committed the crime. This gets them to fight and wipe each other out.”

“That is the anti-drug policy?”

“Maybe it is part of it anyway. The real objectives may be laying in wait, in a holding position somewhere in the background until the time is right for capitalizing on these massacres and making a strategic gambit, maybe for all of Mexico considering the amount of hardware you've been transporting into the country. Then we will see what this is really about. Someone is inducing a crisis in order to create political capital for them to advance their own agenda. You never want a good crisis to go to waste Ed.”

“That's sick.”

“You know what the funny thing about war atrocities is? Once you start killing, it is hard to stop. I mean, what do you do for an encore? All you can do is continue to escalate the level of violence in order to scare, intimidate, or outright kill your opposition. You cut off some girls head off, so your enemy disembowels someone and shows them their insides, then what do you do? Raise the stakes, film some torture porn that is even worse. It goes on and on.”

“But you said, once you start killing. You just blew up a base full of corrupt Mexican soldiers. Killing is what you do too.”

“I never said that we were not a part of this shit Ed.”

48

Briggs Army Airfield was dead quiet in the hot summer night. As a part of Ft. Bliss, the air base was located on the far western tip of Texas, was the home of a number of US Air Force strategic airlift capabilities that moved American soldiers and war material in and out of the Middle East and Asia. As a logistics hub, it was well situated for a covert logistical airlift company to hide behind the regular legitimate activities of the military base.

The Lockheed L-100 flying in from its milk run down to Mexico received a radio transmission from the G3 Communications hangar when it was fifteen minutes out. The flight dispatcher had received reports about a massive explosion at Militar No. 3 in Torreon and thought that he must have lost a pilot and an airplane. The concern was quickly alleviated as the pilot confirmed that he had escaped the blast and was soon calling in to the Air Traffic Control tower for permission to land at Ft. Bliss.

Cleared for landing, the L-100 touched down at Briggs Army Airfield in the early morning hours and taxied towards the leased G3 Communications hangar. The massive hangar doors retracted open and swallowed the aircraft whole before shutting behind it. The airplane had a tail number but no official markings of any kind.

The flight dispatcher left his office to meet with the pilot. He had been scrambling to assemble what information he could about the explosion in Torreon. His employers would be demanding answers. With the engines powering down, he walked to the rear of the aircraft as the ramp lowered. Five commandos with non-standard weapons and equipment walked off the ramp and into the hangar. They were clearly para-military troops.

The dispatcher was outraged, marching over to meet them. He knew damn well from the flight manifests that they were not scheduled to pick up or drop off any contractors. They were running a compartmentalized program and this was a serious security breach. He opened his mouth to say something but only wind escaped his lips as one of the commandos slammed the butt of his rifle into the dispatcher's stomach.

Deckard flung open the office door and walked right in as if he owned the place, which at that moment, he did.

“Are you the operations manager?”

The man behind the desk stood straight to his feet, “Who the hell are you?”

Three other mercenaries flowed in behind Deckard, pointing their rifles at the man.

“House cleaning,” Deckard answered. “Now sit your ass back down and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Nikita pushed the flight dispatcher into the office and flung him into a chair next to the operations manager. He was still clutching his stomach where he had been butt stroked.

“What are your names and duty positions?” Deckard demanded.

The two middle aged men looked away. The flight dispatcher was overweight, bald, and wore eye glasses while the operations officer looked trim despite his age. A former military or intelligence man no doubt.

“Kurt?”

Kurt Jager handed over his Hooligan breaching tool. With a pry bar on one side and a spike and another pry bar sticking out of the other end, it looked like some kind of war hammer straight off a 14th Century battlefield.

“Now hold out the bald one's hand.”

Nikita and Pat grabbed his arm and held it out in front of him.

“Wait, wait, wait!” he pleaded.

Deckard didn't believe in torture, but in this case he might make an exception.

“I'm Danny,” the fat one said.

Deckard looked over at the second prisoner.

“Chris.”

“Your job here?”

“I'm a dispatcher,” Danny said.

“Ops manager,” Chris answered.

“I'm going to keep this simple then. Where are the guns coming from?”

Both men clammed up.

“I'm not going to ask a second time.”

A single bead of sweat dripped down Chris' face.

Deckard slammed the spike coming off the side of the Hooligan tool down on Danny's hand, impaling it on the desk. He let out a scream that was more terror then pain. His body was already going into shock, the pain would come later.

“We're just logistics people for G3 Communications,” Chris pleaded for his friend.

“Start talking or you're next,” Deckard said as he pried the Hoolie tool free from Danny's hand.

“They don't usually tell us where the guns are coming from,” Chris explained. “We've seen them flown in on US military aircraft but also on CIA chartered aircraft. We think the foreign weapons are coming out of Libya, maybe Iraq as well.”

“Enemy weapons captured by the US military?”

“That or weapons captured by rebel fighters in the Middle East and then bought from them by the CIA. There were also a number of Private Military Companies in Libya during and after the civil war to secure Gaddafi's stockpiles. He had warehouse after warehouse of small arms, that's probably where most of it is coming from.”

“So they're flown here to Ft. Bliss. Then what?”

“The guns are loaded on chartered aircraft and flown to Mexico. The Office of Bi-National Intelligence in Mexico City coordinates with the El Paso Intelligence Center here on Bliss to instruct our pilots as to what airfield to drop the weapons off at.”

“Who is giving the orders?”

“We get our orders from the El Paso Intelligence Center, on the receiving end, the Mexicans get their orders from OBI but these are just coordination centers, not decision makers.”

“So G3 Communications is the shot caller? They get to decide who gets what?”

“Maybe,” the operations manager said. “But I hear it goes up to NORTHCOM and the National Security Council. G3 doesn't do shit on their own. I've worked for this company for almost ten years now and they always have paper to protect themselves. Paper that goes straight to the top.”

Deckard hesitated. He knew he was now deep into a nebulous area where privatized military, intelligence, and logistical companies merged with the US military and the civilian government. Five men were not about to wage war against NORTHCOM or the NSC, the White House's national security team. The President of G3 Communications was probably somewhere inside the beltway as well. They needed priority targets before their opposition figured out that a rogue group of mercenaries was back tracing their gun running operation and took counter-measures, the type that would quickly leave them dead.