Clear by Fire (21 page)

“It’s been a long time, Decklin.” Mason switched to English and watched his old friend squirm under the powerful light. His face was bruised and bleeding and was beginning to swell. “You’ve been busy, I hear.”

Decklin’s eyes adjusted to the bright light, and as soon as he saw Mason’s face his eyes opened wide with fear.

“Mason, shit, I—”

“You what, thought I was dead? Your friend Vernon tried, but it didn’t work out. I’m trying to get my head around what’s going on, but I’m not having any luck. I was hoping you could help me out.” Mason walked over to the table and grabbed one of the squeeze bottles before turning back to the chair. “I’m going to be real honest with you, buddy. You’re not leaving this room alive, so the only thing you need to focus on right now is how much pain you are willing to go through before I put a bullet in your skull.”

He didn’t have an ounce of sympathy for the man who had tried to kill him twice in the last month. If Decklin wanted to act like a hero, then Mason was going to make him pay for it. The American held up the squeeze bottle in front of his would-be assassin’s eyes and let him get a good look at it before he squeezed the bottle and sprayed its liquid contents over the man’s legs. The smell of gasoline filled the room. Mason took his Zippo from his pocket and held it up for Decklin to see.

“So, what’s it gonna be?” The Zippo’s lid clicked open with a metallic snap and he used his thumb to spark the flint. Slowly he knelt down and touched the lighter to Decklin’s pant legs, which ignited in a rush of orange flame.

Decklin tried kicking his legs in an attempt to put out the fire, but they were tied to the chair. The smell of burning fabric mixed with the black smoke of the gasoline as the flames crept greedily toward his waist.

“Mason, pleaaaase . . . ,” Decklin yelled as the fire burned away the fabric and licked at the exposed skin of his legs. Mason squeezed
more gas from the bottle and the fire jumped higher as the accelerant nourished the flames.

“What’s it going to be? You want to burn to death for that piece of shit Barnes?”

The smell of burning flesh hit Tarek like a slap to the mouth and he recoiled in horror at the sizzling sound.

Decklin was screaming, but the soundproof walls absorbed his howls. He pleaded with Mason for mercy, but his old teammate just watched. Fire had its place in healing and justice, but when Decklin passed out from the pain, Mason felt nothing.

Zeus stood by with the fire extinguisher, and when Mason told him to put the fire out, he sprayed the white chemical across the unconscious man’s legs.

“Tarek, you need some water or something?” Mason asked in Arabic.

“No, I will be fine. I have never seen this technique.” He was visibly shaken, but he was in control of himself.

“Mason, are you sure this is the best way? We can give him the drugs if you want.” Zeus checked Decklin’s pulse, careful not to brush against his blistered legs. “If we kill him, we get nothing.”

“He’ll talk, trust me. He once told me that his biggest fear was burning alive. Just give him the adrenaline.”

Zeus picked up a syringe from the table and jabbed the needle into Decklin’s neck. He was careful with the dose, giving him just enough to wake him up but not enough to blow his heart. The man jumped up in the chair, the veins in his arms bulging against the plastic restraints.

“Welcome back, bro. As I was saying, why don’t you fill me in on what you and Vernon were planning?” Mason squeezed another spurt of gas over his crotch and then waited with the Zippo.

“What the fuck do you want to know?” he screamed.

“Why are you in Libya?”

“To kill you.”

“Yeah, I know that part. Who’s running Barnes?”

Mason made a menacing movement with the lighter and Decklin tried to squirm away, his eyes wide with horror. “I don’t fucking know,” he yelled.

“Suit yourself.” Mason set the lighter to Decklin’s gas-soaked crotch and stepped back as he went up in flames. “Maybe I won’t shoot you. Maybe I’ll throw your body into the street so the dogs can get to you. If you’re lucky and they don’t eat you, maybe some nice person will take you to the hospital. I’m sure they’re real nice in Libya.” Mason had to yell over Decklin’s agonized screams. “You ever visited a burn ward?”

“Vernon was working for Colonel Barnes,” Decklin screamed as the flames burned through his pants and sizzled his flesh. “He bought some chemical shit from a doctor in the States. He got the guy to weaponize it.”

“Okay. So Barnes hooks up with Vernon; what’s the next target? Who’s running the op?”

Zeus stepped forward with the fire extinguisher, but Mason blocked his path.

“I don’t know, I just picked it up and dropped it off. I swear.” Decklin was beginning to hyperventilate, but Mason didn’t care.

“Mason, he’s going to die,” Zeus shouted as he tried to get past.

Mason knew he was close and refused to back down.

“Fuck him. Tell me, damn it.”

“He can’t tell you if he’s dead.” The Libyan pushed Mason out of the way and mashed down the extinguisher’s handle. The flames had burned a blackened hole in the man’s crotch and lower abdomen. The stench was overpowering and bits of pink flesh were poking out of the terrible wound.

Mason didn’t care how much pain the man was in. He was going to get the answers he needed or kill the man trying. Snatching the syringe off the table, he held it up in front of the man’s face. Decklin’s head lolled to his shoulder, his mouth stretched wide as he screamed.

“You want morphine, then talk.”

“Mason, look what you did to me . . .”

“Where’s Barnes?”

“He’s in Pakistan,” Decklin whimpered.

There was no fight left in the man’s eyes. He was dying and everyone knew it. His beard was matted with blood and saliva, and the bottom half of his destroyed body was still smoking. Blood, fat, and melted fabric dripped from his legs and collected in a puddle near his feet.

“There is a safe house in the city with all my gear. It’s got everything you want to know on it. Please kill me,” he begged.

“Tell me the address.”

Decklin was fading fast and softly told him the address.

“Who’s running the operation? Someone is giving Barnes intel, who is it?”

“It’s Swift, General fucking Swift,” he panted.

The hugeness of the confession was not lost on Mason, but he knew he couldn’t let up yet.

“What’s the next target?”

“Syria . . . the computer . . . it’s all there.”

Decklin’s head slumped forward and he passed out.

“What do we do now? More adrenaline might kill him,” Zeus said.

“The pain will wake him up,” Mason said as he capped the syringe and tossed it back on the table. “We need to get to the safe house. I can promise you that it’s going to be wired tight.”

“I’ll go,” Tarek said weakly from the corner. He’d seen enough and would do anything to get away from the grisly scene.

“All right, but be careful and take your time. Don’t fuck this up, we need this information.”

Tarek practically ran for the door. Decklin moaned for morphine from the chair and tried to raise his head.

Zeus ran over to the table and jabbed the needle into his arm
before Mason could respond. The relief was almost instantaneous as the drug shot through his system.

The two Americans looked at each other while Zeus backed away.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Decklin slurred.

“You always had to be a hard-ass bastard, didn’t ya?” Mason lit a cigarette and moved around behind the man. Leaning down, he placed his hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “You always had something to prove, but there is something that I have to know.” Mason paused and took a deep drag before leaning in. “Was it worth it in the end?” he whispered.

Decklin looked down at his mangled body, and his shoulders shook with silent sobs. When he raised his head, Zeus could see the tears streaming from his eyes but was unable to hear his tiny reply.

Mason stood up behind him and gently pulled his old friend’s head softly over to his chest. He felt disgust welling up inside him past the rage that had fueled the interrogation. In the reflection of the camera’s lens he caught a brief flash of his hateful visage and almost recoiled in horror. Pushing the weakness away, he grabbed a handful of Decklin’s hair and jabbed a knife deep into the left side of his throat. Bright arterial spray shot from the wound as he dug the knife across the man’s windpipe.

O
ne of the “armchair commanders,” a major Renee had never seen before, came flying out of the operations office, his mouth twisted in anger as she and Kevin and Bones made their way toward the hangar.

“Is that a hot weapon?” he yelled as he marched across the tarmac, his finger pointing directly in Renee’s face.

“Yeah, we just got off a mission. Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?” she asked, stunned by his blatant aggression.

“I don’t give a shit about some ragheads outside the wire. What I care about is you securing that weapon.”

“Ragheads? Have you ever been outside the wire?” she demanded.

“That’s not the point—”

“Look,” she said, raising her rifle up to his face. “Do you see that smoke covering the horizon? Do you know what’s going on right now? An American drone killed President Karzai, and those ‘ragheads’ want blood, because assholes like you keep sticking your finger in their face. So unless you want to try and take my weapon away from me and unload it yourself, I suggest you stand the fuck down.”

She stood there staring hard at him as his mouth opened and closed a few times in disbelief. Renee guessed that most people allowed him to bully them with his rank, but she wasn’t about to take
shit from a guy who had never fired a shot in anger. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to say anything else, she walked through the hangar door and headed to the operations center. Swift still wasn’t back, but there was plenty of activity.

Men in a mixture of civilian and military dress were crammed into the operations center, and she knew right away that this wasn’t the place to address her team. Renee had been in Jbad long enough to recognize Tier 1 contractors when she saw them, and she wanted no part of what they were involved in.

Typically, these men were contracted by the CIA and the NSA to conduct operations illegal to the military. They were paid operatives who worked outside of military channels on operations never meant to see the light of day.

Renee motioned for her team to head back to their room, where they could talk in private.

Five minutes later they stood around the table in the privacy of their team room and Renee asked, “So, who is Master Sergeant Mason Kane?” She wanted to know now that she’d had time to cool down.

“From what I heard, he’s a guy who decided to grow a conscience at the wrong time,” Bones said from his place at the briefing table.

“Why is he labeled a terrorist?”

“That is the million-dollar question,” Kevin said as he opened his knife and began cleaning his fingernails.

“There was a team around here, about the time you went to Iraq. Guys called them the Ghost Squad,” Kevin chimed in. “Their colonel was handpicked by General Swift.”

“You mean the Anvil Program?”

“They had a lot of names. One of those urban-legend things,” Kevin said, looking up from his battlefield manicure.

“So, what do you know about him?” Renee was intrigued. “Joe Rumor” was the military’s unofficial information channel. The information usually came from a private who overheard a briefing and passed it to his friends.

She’d always found that there was a kernel of truth in every story, if you were patient enough to search for it. More often than not, the rumor mill was more accurate than an intel brief.

“I can only tell you what I’ve heard,” Bones said.

“Well, let’s hear it.”

“First time I heard about Mason Kane was in 2008. I was at Firebase Lilley, about four miles from the Pakistan border. The CIA was using the firebase to run counterterror ops into Pakistan. We received actionable intel that a high-value target was holed up in some compound across the border. He was using opium money to finance anyone willing to come across the border and hit coalition troops.

“We knew where he was but couldn’t get clearance to take him out. The CIA didn’t like that, so they made a call to some general named Nantz who was the liaison between the CIA and JSOC at the time. Long story short, Nantz sends one guy across the border to neutralize the HVT. Guess who it was?”

“Mason Kane?” Renee guessed.

“Yep. Two days later, the target’s head shows up in one of those foam coolers you buy at the gas station. The dude who brought it was the target’s bodyguard. Said he found his boss dead on the toilet, with a note telling him to take the head to the firebase or get ready to bury his family.”

“Holy shit,” Renee said with a whistle.

“Like I said, it’s all rumor, but I ran across a guy I know who said that Mason ran into a bit of trouble about six months ago. Something happened on a mission they ran up north.”

“What happened?” she asked, intrigued by the story.

“People said he flipped out and murdered a bunch of civilians,” Bones answered. “Single-handedly got all the Special Forces kicked out of Wardak.”

“I remember hearing about that,” Renee said. “The rumor was that some Special Ops guy was cutting off hajji faces and wearing them around like masks.”

“Yep, that’s the one. Anyway, it was right around election time in Washington, and General Swift began taking a lot of heat. He was told to send a team to take a look, but what they really wanted was for us to sanitize the site before anyone could get a handle on the situation.”

“So what happened?”

“Hard to say, because Colonel Barnes sent Mason to Libya before anyone could talk to him, and right after that is when he left the reservation and got put on the kill list,” Bones said.

Renee rolled her eyes at the two men. They were like kids at camp telling ghost stories. “That’s pretty convenient. So no one actually saw anything?”