Direct Action - 03 (21 page)

“Which part?”

“All of it. Sticking the landing for one. Then jumping onto a chair while sliding across the room firing on full auto. That was some Bruce Willis shit. I can't believe you pulled it off.”

“We ran out of options, that's all.”

“The only reason why I left you on that rooftop was to make sure you could survive when you were really in a tight spot.”

“And Nadeesha?”

“I didn't know the girl's parachute was going to get shot the fuck up, obviously. Again, pretty ballsy getting her off the roof like that. I'm shocked that you two are alive, or at least not rocking a full-body cast.”

“I'm hard to kill.”

Bill held out his hand. Deckard took it.

“Welcome to the team.”

“Thanks, I-”

“250,000 dollars will be deposited in a Mauritius bank account for you. Payment for the three ops you've done for us. Don't let me see you sober again tonight.”

With that, Bill walked off to find another beer.

Deckard stood by the fire, his eyes getting lost in it for a moment.

“Don't let it go to your head, Deckard.”

He turned and to no surprise, he found Rick lecturing him. He was obviously half in the bag, already shaky on his feet and slurring some of his words.

“What's that?”

“Your amazing one combat operation with us. That other bullshit doesn't even count.”

“Whatever man.”

“Yeah, whatever man. That's all you got? I know you, Deckard. I've seen your type and you are not prepared to go all the way.”

“Obviously you missed my crash landing. Two jumpers, one chute, C4 burning down on the way out.”

“You don't have the balls to do everything that is necessary. My old unit has been fighting this war for a long time. That's why all the SEALs on this team know how it is done. We know how to show those savages who is the alpha dog. Killing is the only language that makes sense to them. That's why we take scalps. It's about sending a message.”

“I thought it was a hobby.”

“Its about establishing street cred. Simple as that. We don't believe in target discrimination. If you're brown, you're down. We go over the high walls, we blast down the doors, everyone inside dies. Period.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone. We cleared out entire compounds in Afghanistan on the reg. Standard Operating Procedure. Men, women, and children. They're all terrorists. We start clearing rooms, and we really clear fucking rooms. The kids make for smaller targets. Its funny, because they don't understand that they've been shot. Just like a dog or something, they will try to get back up so you have to shoot them again.”

“They're all going to grow up to be terrorists, huh?” Deckard remarked, trying to see how much more Rick would divulge. He was drunk, angry, and suffering from small-dick syndrome after their last mission.

“Americans don't want to know what we do, they just want us to do it,” Rick informed him. “We get shit done. Cleanse the earth of these savages. Dump the kids and there are no future terrorists. Tell the entire family to go back inside; everything will be fine. Then, drop a five-hundred pounder on their fucking heads. Babies too. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because fuck you, that's why.”

“You've still got a lot to learn in this outfit, and I still don't think you have what it takes.”

Rick stumbled off, tiring of not getting the responses he wanted out of Deckard.

Fucking Nazis
, Deckard thought to himself.
How the hell did this happen?

Special Operations soldiers were not choir boys by any stretch of the imagination, but these ex-SEAL Team Six guys were completely out of control. Deckard knew that something like this didn't just happen overnight. It had to be a long-standing cultural issue within the unit, a pervasive attitude that allowed these war crimes to occur.

Deckard looked back into the fire, remembering Bill's words.

Welcome to the team.

15

Deckard walked under a sign that stretched across the road on two posts at either end of the street. It announced that he was entering China Town. China Town in Port Louis. He walked his surveillance detection route through the city, visiting a number of shops along the way. They had only finished breaking down the staging area in Australia and landed back in Mauritius a few hours prior. By the time he got to the third shop, he realized he had picked up a tail.

Stopping at a fruit stand, Deckard picked a kiwi out of a basket and tossed it into the air several times. The person tailing him stopped alongside and picked up a mango.

“How long have you been in country?” Deckard asked.

“Long enough, brother,” Aghassi responded. “Long enough.”

They walked into a nearby Chinese restaurant and immediately sat down at the table they wanted without waiting for a server to seat them.

“You look beat, dude.”

“I'm hanging in there.”

“This is starting to come together. You won't have to do this much longer. I've done the forward reconnaissance of the address you gave me and scoped out all those bungalows. We can get a platoon from Samruk in here within a week and clean this nest of vipers out. Pat is already talking to people in Madagascar about it.”

“No,” Deckard said. “Not happening. It's not enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to effect an enterprise takedown.”

Aghassi nodded. They had recently conducted one in Mexico. One particularly nasty cartel was giving them a hard time in the Mexican province of Oaxaca. However, once they got their hands on a source, the cartel's money man, they had racked and stacked the entire organization in a night. Jimenez, the cartel boss, still held out in his fortress and had to be dealt with, but the cartel itself was functionally dead after that one night of non-stop raids by Samruk International mercenaries.

“We've been here before. After we took down Jimenez, we followed the flow of guns upstream. The problem is that we thought we were dealing with one rogue operation. We didn't realize that the weapons trafficking into Mexico was but one of many programs run by G3 Communications. We shut down the weapons pipeline and killed their MEK terrorist proxies in Nevada, but at that time we didn't know about the other arm of that enterprise.”

“Liquid Sky.”

“Right. I've confirmed that they are no longer working for G3, their CEO cut sling load on Liquid Sky after we hit Area 14 in Nevada in order to distance himself. Now they are working contracts that are coming out of the Gulf States, with a retired American General acting as a cut out, proxy, and pay agent.”

“Who is he?”

“I don't know yet. I was only taken off probationary status after this last mission. Maybe now I can dig a little deeper, but if we bring Samruk in now and clean out Liquid Sky, we will never find out who the puppet masters are.”

“Once we know that, then we take down the entire enterprise,” Aghassi finished for him.

“With pleasure,” Deckard told him. “I don't want to be here any longer than I have to be. Speaking of which, what did you find out about these dirtbags?”

“Shit,” Aghassi said. “How much time have you got?”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Pat and I have been making phone calls. Cody has been digging through the net as well. We found the phone number in your kit and have called Dusty and Flakjacket but haven't heard back from them yet.”

“Probably still deployed off the coast of Somalia.”

“Here is what we do know. In 2007, the U.S. Navy commissioned a study on retention rates within Naval Special Warfare Development Group AKA SEAL Team Six. Guys were popping smoke left and right, not re-upping even if they were only a few years away from retirement. The study concluded that it was because of a ramping up of private-sector contracts.”

“They were getting out to do private security contracting. That was happening long before 2007, though.”

“Yeah, but this is what the report didn't uncover: A former SEAL Officer who was running a private military company at that time was offering big money to SEAL Team Six operators who came to work for him. He was pitching individual operators in person at one point. He would pay them three times their normal salary, plus the equivalent of their military benefits and pension after they got to a combined twenty years between the military and contracting.”

“No wonder why they were leaving for greener pastures.”

“You said in your text that the leader of Liquid Sky is named Bill?”

“Yeah.”

Aghassi took out his smartphone and brought up a picture to show to Deckard.

“This him?”

It was Bill's Department of the Navy photo from the military.

“That's him.”

“He was one of the first to take that offer and jump to the commercial side. Bill Geddes. A rock star operator in Dev Group. Got into some real nasty shit in Afghanistan when another recce team had their OP overrun. Both elements were denied air support and their Quick Reaction Force because of some political bullshit going on at the time.”

“They got hung out to dry.”

“Oh yeah. Bill got out as a Master Chief with 18 years of service in the SEALs, nine of it with Dev. After that, he went to work with that one former SEAL but they had some falling out over a botched operation in Liberia. He jumped between contracts but it gets difficult to track him as these programs are hidden behind both corporate proprietary as well as levels of classification. Who knows what the fuck he was doing.”

“He mentioned that Liquid Sky was not his first team, that he burned through his other guys.”

“That seems to fit his personality.”

“Who else?”

The former ISA operator brought up another picture on his phone.

“Zach?”

Deckard looked at it for a second. He was a little younger in the picture but still a good-looking blonde kid who could have jumped off the cover of a surfing magazine.

“Yup.”

“Zach Larson. I talked to a teammate of his. He wasn't a SEAL, actually, but a Navy EOD guy,” Aghassi said referring to Explosives Ordinance Disposal. “They are allowed to apply so he got picked up, went through Green Platoon and spent ten years in Dev.”

“He take the same offer as Bill?”

“Nope, they kicked him out. Remember when all those Dev Group guys got the boot because they were consulting with a video game company while still active duty?”

“I've been a little out of the loop.”

“Well, it was a breach of military ethics at the minimum, if not completely illegal. They were giving this video game company sensitive Dev Group tactics to use in their game, putting on capability demonstrations for them, all kinds of shit. Zach was one of those guys, but also took it a step farther and was doing public speaking engagements. He did one in Las Vegas just a few months after getting back from the Bin Laden raid, the speech itself being about the raid. It was for the Forbes 100 set and was supposed to be about leadership, but he divulged all kinds of classified information. That was the final straw, so they kicked him out of Dev. He could have gone to the regular SEAL teams, but with your reputation ruined like that, not too many guys want to face being ostracized by their team mates. He separated from the Navy and went to work with Bill.”