Counter-Strike (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Novel Book 2) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Israel, Carmel Mountain
National Park

The sun was just cresting a ridge of thick
cedar trees above a thousand-foot cliff of granite. The ocean breeze was
carrying with it the sweet smell of blossoms from an orchard a few miles
distant. Carmel Mountain was a nature reserve south of the city of Haifa off
the Mediterranean Sea and the mountain was the highest point in the region at
546 meters. If a person climbed high enough, the border of Lebanon was visible.
The park’s proximity to the sea provided ample precipitation to make the region
lush with trees compared to the arid nature embracing the rest of the country.

Mitch had arrived in Israel a month ago as
a civilian contractor to head up the new combat tracker program for the Israeli
military. Now, he was on the run from men whose grip on the region, on his
whereabouts, was closing.

He knelt down and examined the half-moon
shape of a boot’s heel print on the dusty soil. It was hardly discernible
amidst the duff-like material of spent cedar sprigs littering the forest floor.
The size of the print along with the waffle-shaped tread pattern and direction
of travel confirmed that this track was connected with the soldiers he had been
eluding. He had fled downtown Haifa the previous evening and made his way into
the forests surrounding Mount Carmel, hoping to lose his pursuers.

Mitch took off his tan ball cap that had
an Arizona Diamondbacks logo on it and scratched his sweaty scalp. He looked up
and saw the looming image of Mount Carmel, which resembled a huge granite fist
standing in defiance of the heavens. In another mile, he’d be at its base but
not before he tried to turn the tables on his pursuers.

His knees were sore from sleeping in a
squatting position all night amidst a tangle of boulders. Adding to his
discomfort was the rumbling of his stomach from not having breakfast which made
him feel like he was a monk fasting in the wilds. The tantalizing memory of the
grilled lamb and hummus dinner still clung to his taste buds and he recalled
the adrenaline-soaked moment he saw the men coming for him in the outdoor
restaurant in Haifa. He and Dev were enjoying a quiet dinner when he abruptly
excused himself and fled inside, making his way to the rear exit and out into
the tangle of streets. After an hour of evasive moves through the city, he’d
managed to creep into the forests surrounding Mount Carmel and hide for the
night. He was wondering what Dev was thinking and how he’d explain his actions
when he saw her again. He was also questioning whether it would matter since
she had been so aloof the past week.

The lure of teaching combat tracking
wasn’t the only draw for Mitch in coming to Israel. Since meeting Dev in
Arizona last fall and their harrowing experience together, he had grown quite
taken with her. Her stunning beauty coupled with her considerable fighting
prowess awoken feelings he hadn’t felt before for another woman. They had seen
each other a few times since he arrived but her insane work schedule had
prevented much of their relationship from developing. With some time off coming
soon from his current teaching assignment, he was looking forward to getting to
know her better. That is, if she could ever pencil him in. He was patient but
knew that living in such a heavily populated region was grating on his nerves.
He despised large cities and didn’t know if his mantracking contract would be
enough to sustain him if Dev wasn’t interested in or capable of pursuing their
relationship.

His mind raced back to the present when he
heard a twig snap twenty meters below him. Mitch strained his eyes in the
post-dawn shadows and he saw five soldiers skulking along the narrow trail that
wound past the ridge where he squatted.
Come to daddy, boys. The predators are
about to become the prey.

The men were dressed in civilian clothing
so they wouldn’t draw attention from the tourists that frequented the park but
Mitch easily recognized the faces and gait patterns of the men he had been training
for the past six weeks
. We’ll see just how well you’ve learned your lessons,
fellas,
he thought to himself while scanning the route below where he had
placed some small-scale foot snares under the pine needles. He’d made sure to
walk on rocks and logs to obscure his passing. Route selection was the key in
evading mantrackers. The notion of stepping back on your tracks or brushing
them out with a handful of grass only worked in the fabricated reality of the
movies.

The problem with setting trail deterrents
and mantraps is that it took precious time that the evader often didn’t have in
abundance. Mitch always advocated gaining time and distance when being pursued
by hostile forces and he knew he had violated his own training philosophy by
trying to employ some Hollywood methods of slowing the trackers. However, he
needed to see how good these guys were, especially if he was to sign off on
their certification after this final culmination exercise. The entire drill had
been revealed to his students only 72 hours before when he informed them in the
classroom that they would be trying to capture a nefarious criminal in Haifa.
They would receive the location and time of his arrival the day before but
would have to practice their surveillance skills in the morning and then apprehend
the subject that evening at a place of their choosing. What they didn’t know was
that it would be their instructor and what Mitch hadn’t expected was that they
would make a brazen attempt on him during dinner at an outdoor venue with
plenty of people, one of whom was Dev, who he’d kept in the dark about the
exercise.
Damn, I wish I could’ve finished that fine meal of lamb,
he thought,
resting his hand over his growling stomach.

He saw the lead man below, a stout figure
with a hatchet-like nose, give the hand signal to halt. Then the soldier
pointed to the ground where the snares were buried and instructed his men to
walk around.
Sneaky bastard
—
he was always the one with the best eye
out of the group. Looks like those simulated traps weren’t worth my time.

Getting up to stretch his legs, he saw a
sand wasp dragging a paralyzed spider to a dime-sized hole in the ground. He
had witnessed similar ghastly endings like this happen in Arizona between
tarantulas and hummingbird-sized wasps that sting the spider and drag it into a
burro where they lay their eggs in the stunned figure. The larvae feed off the
live tissue for three weeks, eventually hatching as winged wasps to repeat the
macabre cycle all over again. He put his boot over the wasp-spider duo but then
paused, instead squatting down to ponder the scene.
If I kill you the spider
dies anyway and if I put you out of your misery, then the wasp will just
continue on another hunt.
He twirled a twig in the sand, making a
figure-eight while chewing on his lower lip. “The whole thing sucks—nature is a
cruel master sometimes.” Walking away would be easy—the timeless struggle would
go on. He wasn’t needed to right the big picture of how things worked. He flung
the stick down and stood erect, crunching his boot over both creatures. “Sorry,
amigo,” he said, looking down at the flattened spider.

He glanced down at his watch.
Only an
hour left to completion of this scenario. Better get to the base of Mount
Carmel where we all have to meet.
Mitch wound his way down the hill,
walking parallel to the group, careful to keep a low profile in the brush. He
kept his head covered with a multicam scarf to break up the outline of his head,
which was usually the most obvious feature that gave away a concealed person’s
location.

An hour later, he came up the rear of the
group and congratulated the team on their well-planned mission and
counter-tracking moves. He did a half-hour after-action review with them and
then they headed down the trail together to the vehicle rendezvous site near
the highway. Mitch’s cellphone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out to
scan the text that he figured was most likely from Dev. Instead, he stopped in
his tracks and glanced over the troubled message from the wife of an old
friend.

Bob’s missing. I need your help
—
can you call
me. Margo.

Chapter 3

Sweden, Island of Faro in
the Baltic Sea

A faint trickle of sunlight was stabbing
past the white curtains in the forested cabin where Kyle Redstrom was resting,
his eyelids partly fluttering from the nightmare unfolding in his mind. The
past thirteen hours of work had been unrelenting and he had allowed himself
this brief rest before the coming events, hoping that the haunting images from
three years earlier would stay submerged.

Howling, screaming, clawing sounds echoed
off the walls of his tortured mind as he slept. The same pictures unspooled in
his mind: his lovely wife, Mae-Lin, sitting by the window with her velvety
black hair blowing in the gentle summer breeze. Then her smile turning to a pained
grimace as the door of their Beijing apartment burst into tiny splinters and
armed men in black assault vests streamed through the opening like hungry eels.
Within seconds, she was being dragged away while Kyle’s ears rang out with her
piercing shrieks. As he struggled to regain his equilibrium from the blast, he
was slammed to the ground and felt a knee compressing his trachea. His hands
clutched at the two men on top of him until he felt the sting of a rifle butt
slamming into his forehead. In his half-conscious state, he heard the muffled
voices of the men around him speaking in Cantonese; they radioed in that they
had retrieved the spy and were en route to the safe house—the woman would also be
interrogated. He could hear the faint voice of his wife several flights below
then the slamming of a van’s sliding door which silenced her. It was the last
time he would hear from Mae-Lin, who was doomed to a hasty interrogation and
then summarily executed.

Kyle had been undercover CIA agent for
four years in Beijing, his assignment to gather data on a suspected Chinese
bioweapons program that was operating out of the lower levels of a hospital.
His background as a former army combat medic coupled with his fluency in
Cantonese that he had acquired at the agency made him a prime candidate for the
job with the recommendation of his mentor, Darren Crenna. Kyle’s job was to
observe and track the whereabouts of a Chinese scientist, Sau, who was believed
to be the lead suspect in the bioweapons division. Posing as a pharmaceutical rep,
Kyle was able to attend many of the same international conferences as Sau along
with weekly monitoring of his whereabouts around the city. Three other agents
from Crenna’s team were assigned to Kyle with their sole job of running
counter-surveillance measures so he could perform his duties without drawing
suspicion from the Chinese government.

After twenty-eight months of work, Kyle
observed an exchange of goods between Sau and a Chinese spy who was high on the
U.S. watch list. Kyle surmised it was a sample of a deadly pathogen that Crenna
believed Sau had finally perfected. The green light was given to intercept the
package and eliminate the spy after Sau had left.

Kyle accomplished his mission flawlessly—it
was the perfect op. He hid one vial of the pathogen in a secure location then
retreated back to his apartment with the rest of the vials. For two hours, he
waited for orders from Crenna about how to safely extract himself, his family,
and his team from the country.

Kyle delivered the pathogen to a
designated location with a courier Crenna had sent. He was told to head out on
a flight at midnight with his family. His team had already been extracted. Then
there was word on the news about Sau’s brutally stabbed body being discovered along
with fabricated images of Kyle fleeing the scene. Thinking he could avert the
noose tightening around his neck, he made a desperate call to Crenna only to
find that the man’s phone number was disabled. With the thunderous howl of his
apartment door exploding, he knew his fate was sealed.

Kyle’s hand was shaking violently and fell
off the armrest of the suede couch as the nightmare ended. The suddenness of
the movement caused him to gasp for air and his startled breathing sent him to
his feet with his FEG pistol clutched tightly. He looked around at his austere
surroundings and then at the locked front door and realized where he was. Kyle
rushed to the front window and opened it slightly, kneeling down by the gap and
sucking in the cold air. He hated being indoors, sealed off from the elements. Two
years locked in a six-by-six cell with only a slot for a plate to slide through
had caused him to suffer from extreme claustrophobia. Even the flight to Sweden
on his private jet had required a few Xanax coupled with brandy. He staggered
forward a step before correcting his balance and then wiped the cold sweat off
his forehead with his shirt sleeve, being careful not to graze the palm-sized
burn scar beside his right eye.

He pried back the corner of the weathered
curtains and surveyed the sylvan surroundings. The cabin was perched on the
slope of a spruce-forested hillside overlooking a small village on the island
of Faro. Since it was wintertime, the inhabitants of the isolated region were
reduced to two hundred and twenty people, down from over three thousand when
the summer visitors inundated the tourist haven. It was an idyllic and isolated
setting but, most importantly, it had no medical services or police force.
Communication with the mainland was sparse, with an antiquated military radio
tower serving as the main method of relaying ham radio dispatches. The mayor
had the only satellite phone on the forty-two-mile-square island and the
residents preferred the seclusion until the next tourist season began.

Kyle had rented the cabin under the guise
of a geography crew who were re-mapping the region. His four men were almost
done placing the canisters of deadly pathogens and accompanying C4 in the
community center where all of the residents would soon be gathering for their
annual winter festival. He looked down at his watch, noting that his experiment
would begin within eighteen minutes.

Two years in a Chinese prison had led up
to this day. Prior to that, his life as a covert operative with the CIA had
been relatively smooth. After graduating at the top of his class at the farm in
Virginia and excelling in Chinese language studies, he had progressed to working
field operations in Beijing.

When the Pacific Trade Commission,
fostered by the U.S., had unraveled due to mishandling of classified
information that was leaked out of China, the agency sent out a burn notice on
Kyle, throwing him to the Chinese government as a corporate spy. At least
that’s what he was told by his interrogators at the prison. He knew when he
signed on that the world of covert affairs was precarious but he was told a married
man embedded in a foreign culture was less likely to draw attention to himself and
that his wife would possess diplomatic immunity if something should befall him.
He would later learn from his fellow prison inmate, Anton Tokarev, that his
wife had also been implicated in the treason and was whisked off to another prison
where she was later executed.

During a transfer to another prison, some
of Tokarev’s men hijacked the convoy and expedited their escape. The Russian mob
boss and oligarch offered Kyle a place to recover back in Moscow. There Kyle
spent a year recovering and planning while Tokarev lent his considerable
financial assets to helping Kyle set up their current operation. The former CIA
agent reciprocated by extending his knowledge of black ops experience to
increase Tokarev’s business reach. Now their new scheme would bring them access
to power that few men were capable of achieving though that mattered only to
Tokarev. Kyle had a different agenda in mind, one that involved bringing one
man’s career to ruins and shattering the already fragile economic ties between
China and the U.S.

Kyle pondered his forthcoming actions on
the innocent civilians below.
You seem like good people but even being good
comes with a heavy toll. The world that will be ushered in soon is something
you would want to be spared from anyway.
He clenched his teeth.
Besides,
there is no good or evil
—
that is a human construct.

He heard the clank of boots on the rear
porch of the cabin and levelled his pistol at the door. A cold blast of air and
snowflakes swirled inside as the four figures in their wool overcoats moved
into the main room. They were all of Indonesian descent but spoke flawless
English; the goateed man at the front nodded to Kyle. “Everything is set,
chief.”

Kyle waved them over with his pistol and
directed them to the gas masks spread over the table. He looked at his watch
one more time as the men gathered to his right and donned the protective
equipment.

“Why do the trial run here on this tiny rock
of nothing?” said Alex, a lithe figure who stood a foot shorter than the
statuesque Kyle.

Kyle counted down the seconds under his
breath as he moved the gas mask over his face, the puckered scar next to his
eye socket crinkling from the pressure of the rubber edges. “If the pathogen
can work in the extreme cold then the target in the tropics will not pose a
problem for dispersal. Plus, this little shit-nugget of a village can be easily
obliterated after the experiment. It’s a perfect petri dish.”

The men each retrieved binoculars from a
duffel bag and then studied the scene below where the last of the villagers
were entering the two-story community building beside the old church. A few
seconds later, the timer on Kyle’s watch began beeping.

The first man below who exited was in his
sixties with a trim silver beard and a gray wool beret. Kyle nervously exhaled,
watching the figure for signs of infection from the invisible gas that had just
been released into the heating ducts. He saw the man lean against the door and
then cough before reaching into his coat pocket for a cigar. A sigh of
frustration pulsed out from Kyle’s lips as he saw the man fumble for a lighter.
As the flame flickered onto the ends of the cigar, Kyle saw the man’s eyes
widen and rivulets of blood trickle from his nose, the man’s mustache hairs becoming
crimson. The cigar fell, the man pivoted towards the door, spewing steaming red
droplets from his mouth onto the white facade. As he yanked on the handle, the
door burst open. The rush of dozens of panicked souls, their orifices oozing
blood, shoved their way past the older man who had fallen to his knees. Several
people stumbled out a side door and collapsed but were not bleeding. Their
hands were clutching their throats and they appeared to have milder symptoms.

Kyle’s carotids pulsed and he gulped down
a breath through the crackling intake valve of the gas mask as the men around
him did the same, their heads swiveling like periscopes as they took in the
carnage unfolding below. People were crawling on their elbows towards loved
ones who were already dead while blood streamed onto the snowy pavement which
looked like it had been pelted by red hail. Kyle’s men began nodding in silent
rejoice, two of them shoving elbows into each other’s sides and muttering
something about a bet on the timing of the deaths.

Kyle stood still, his eyes still peering
through the binoculars but his gaze turning inward, the faint sounds of his
wife’s long-ago cries growing quieter as the parched landscape of his soul
sprouted a few tendrils of hope for the work that still lay ahead. 

He casually extended his hand out towards
Alex, who handed him the C4 detonation device. Kyle flipped up a red switch and
then depressed the button below it. The community center’s windows blew out,
followed by a small mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke which roiled upward
into the sullen sky. The right rear corner of the building remained untouched
and Kyle depressed the ignition switch again and then a third time but nothing
happened. He tossed the device against the window while cursing. He gave the
young man beside him a disconcerting look. Alex held promise as a skilled
mercenary but seemed to be challenged, at times, with a slight
attention-deficit for details that had no place in Kyle’s world. He picked up
his pistol and fired a round into Alex’s head, spraying brain matter onto the
gas mask of the man next to him.

“Go down below and finish the fucking job
the right way this time. Then cancel any survivors.” As the three remaining men
scurried for the back door, he yelled out to them, “The helo leaves in thirty
minutes. If you’re not back by then don’t bother coming back to my outfit.”