Dead in Their Tracks (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Story Book 1) (4 page)

He rubbed the back of his neck and then
swigged down the rest of his drink, the concern in his eyes slowly melting away
with the infusion of liquid courage while he tried to refocus on the
forthcoming fiscal tsunami that was about to swell his pockets.

Chapter 5

Since her arrival in Phoenix, Dev had
spent her time tracking the movement of one man within the FBI and was still
unsure of who he was. Somehow he was connected with the Aeneid Corporation back
in Anaheim. The phone number she found on the dead man’s cellphone had given
her enough of a trail to use her own surveillance software to locate the
Phoenix caller. Now she just had to provide more solid evidence to prove that
he was connected with her boss’s nefarious undertakings at Aeneid and to prevent
the potential attack from occurring.  What she didn’t know was the big picture—why
launch a bunch of lone-wolf attacks around the western United States? What purpose
did it serve other than the obvious body count and short-term media frenzy? Something
this orchestrated required considerable planning and funding so there had to be
more to it than just shock and awe. And what was the timeline—this week or next
month?  

The coordinates her handler had provided to
direct her to a trustworthy former colleague from the spec-ops community had
led to this isolated ranch in the Sonoran Desert. Dev wondered how he was
connected with her organization back in Israel but had little choice in asking
for assistance after being on the run. She had driven by the day before and
scouted the location with her binoculars from a distant hilltop. It had
appeared that the cowboys were preparing to leave so she decided to wait until
the next day and make her entrance then. All she needed was a safe place to lay
low for a few more nights and she didn’t want to risk staying in Phoenix any
longer. She had picked the lock on the first house near the stock pond and
obtained some canned goods and replenished her water supply.

As the day wore on, Dev waited in
concealment along the thorny treeline for someone to arrive. It wasn’t until
mid-afternoon that she saw a jeep roll down the road with a lone muscle-head
inside. By his swagger and gear, she surmised he was probably law enforcement.
Climbing up beside the water tower gave her a better tactical advantage until
she could discern for certain if this was her man.

Dev saw the lean figure step out of his jeep
and briefly pause to look at the ground.
Shit, I don’t think I left any of
my tracks down below. They should just blend in with the rest of the cowboys’
prints anyway.
She heard the man go inside the house and close the door.
Dev kneeled down and peered around the side of the pumphouse to listen for
movement, then she crept down the hill towards the back door.

She had never been on a ranch before
though she had spent her share of time on desert operations. Those had been in
Africa and the Middle East, where she was assisting with her organization’s K
& R missions. She hated the scarcity of resources for surviving in
third-world desert nations and always relished returning home to Israel to
enjoy the civilized comforts. The past few days of surviving on the move had
worn her out and she felt stiff from inadequate sleep in her vehicle. All she
wanted was for this nightmare of undercover work to end so she could resume a
relatively normal life apart from the fictional persona that she’d had to
endure at Aeneid.

Moving along the wooden porch, she reached
for the handle on the door and turned it but then heard a faint sound behind
her. Dev spun around and pointed her pistol at a man who had just emerged from
the arroyo.

“Drop your weapon,” he yelled as he
shuffled forward in a smooth gait while aiming his AR at her head. She saw his
tactical vest, which indicated he was with the FBI. She kept her pistol grip
firm and focused the front sight upon him. Then she let out a sigh and turned
her weapon aside, raising both hands. The man kept his attention upon her while
darting a quick sideways glance around either corner of the building.

“Easy, I’m not here to cause any trouble.
Just looking for someone.” The words felt sticky in her mouth as she tried to
calm her breathing.

“Yeah, who’s that? You don’t look like
you’re here for horseback riding lessons.”

“Sergeant Major Mitchell Kearns.”

Mitch clenched the grip on his rifle,
squinting as he looked her over.

“Who the hell are you? You better start
talking fast. I may be with the FBI but I’m also Old West at heart and don’t
have any qualms about dropping your ass right here and running your prints
later.”

“My name is Devorah Leitner. I’m the
daughter of Anatoly Leitner, who sent me here.”

Mitch sucked in a deep breath and tilted
his head slightly before lowering his rifle. His eyes widened and he stared at
the mysterious woman as a breeze ruffled the dry leaves on the ground behind
him.

Chapter 6

FBI Bureau Chief Evan Ryker was a wiry man
with blond brush-cut hair that resembled the bristles on a new toothbrush and
belied his investment in hair gel. He was sitting at his desk in the downtown
federal headquarters in Phoenix when a high-priority email popped up on his
laptop. Clicking it open, he saw two facial shots of a raven-haired woman by
the name of Mira Sanchez with the title below indicating:
Upgraded to Ten
Most Wanted Fugitive List.

The bulletin revealed that she was a
domestic terrorist and was responsible for a recent security breach at a private
contracting firm along with charges of sabotage, violent crime, and weapons
violations.

“Subject should be considered armed and
extremely dangerous…yada, yada…” Ryker muttered, reading over the last line
which he’d seen dozens of times on such warnings each month. He hit the approve
button to circulate it to his staff and then printed off copies to post on the
main bulletin board in the briefing room. Before getting up to grab the flyers,
he picked up the hardline on his desk and called the software analysis
technician one floor below. 

“This is Ryker. I’m forwarding an email to
you about a subject and I want you to run her photo through facial recognition software
in and around the city here for any recent hits as soon as approval from D.C.
comes in.” After he hung up, he stared at the lovely features of Mira. She
wasn’t the usual pasty-faced criminal with unkempt hair and poor teeth that
graced the FBI billboards. “Ooh, too bad such a beauty is so tarnished,” he
muttered to himself. “Whoever crosses your path is going to be disarmed in more
ways than one, I think.”

He retrieved the copies from his printer
and headed out the door, sliding his reading glasses down on the bridge of his
beaky nose, hardly noticing his busy staff as he walked by their desks.

Ryker had been assigned as interim
director for the Southwest Division as a stepping stone to a coveted job in
Seattle. During the past three months he had slowly come to appreciate the
climate and culture of Arizona which contrasted sharply with his former posting
at the D.C. office.

With a nice home in the upscale
neighborhood of Scottsdale and the pleasant lack of humidity, he was
reconsidering his assignment to the dreary Pacific Northwest and thinking about
requesting a permanent position in Phoenix.

He walked by his field operators, who were
milling around a table discussing an upcoming training event. Ryker nodded at
them as he strode over, sliding a copy of the Most Wanted flyer towards them.
“Bet you were wishing they all looked like her.” He grinned. He patted the man
to his right on the shoulder, one of those men whose name he always got mixed
up—Dave or Dan—knowing him by his aptitude and qualification scores instead.

When he was finished, he headed downstairs
to introduce himself to a group of new recruits fresh from FLETC (federal law enforcement
training center). He spent an hour briefing the agents on his expectations, the
particulars of the Southwest division, and their work rotations. Near the end
of his lecture, he was interrupted by a woman who came down to inform him of
the facial recognition trace he had requested. She insisted that the memo was
urgent.

He picked up the phone on the wall and
spoke with the agent in charge at the D.C. office, a man by the name of
Perkins.

“If this is about the woman Sanchez then
you should know she’s a high-priority fugitive,” said Ryker.

“I know. She’s been bumped up the list and
I’m actually calling to inform you that there’s been a hit on her northeast of
Phoenix. She was spotted near a gas station in Cave Creek yesterday.”

“Very good. We’ll get someone on this.”

Ryker was pleased things were moving along
so quickly. He dismissed the new agents and headed back upstairs. Looked like
he would be putting in overtime on a weekend once more. He didn’t mind as long
as it didn’t involve him being outside in the afternoon too much when the temps
spiked to triple digits.

Chapter 7

The thirty-something woman’s black hair
was pulled back in a tight ponytail, revealing her high cheekbones and olive
skin. She had a tiny comma-shaped scar off the left side of her chin. Her almond-colored
eyes stared intently at Mitch as if boring a hole through him.

“Anatoly Leitner—now that’s a name I’ve
not heard in many years,” Mitch said, moving closer to her as she slowly
reholstered her pistol while he kept his hands on his rifle.

He thought back to the days when he’d had
the pleasure of working with Anatoly Leitner, one of the finest teachers of
tradecraft in counter-terrorism that he had ever met. After Anatoly’s service
with the Mossad, he was hired by several U.S. agencies to provide training to
special operations units. The U.S. and Israeli militaries have a long history
of sharing training methods and Anatoly was the first of many seasoned combat
vets to go freelance after 9/11. After spending nearly a year training Mitch’s
unit at Fort Lewis and abroad, Anatoly’s contract ended and he returned to
Israel only to disappear into the shadows again. In addition to being a
legendary figure in the world of clandestine ops, he had been like a father
figure to Mitch, who had lost his parents at the age of twelve. Now, here was the
man’s daughter, staring at him with that same look he remembered in Anatoly’s
eyes—one of controlled fury, like a tempestuous storm at sea about to swallow a
ship.

“He mentioned he had a daughter but never
spoke much about his family. I only saw a few photos once during a rare barbecue
dinner me and a bunch of my old SF buddies had for him before he left.”

“So you worked with him in special
operations?”

Mitch lowered his rifle, shoving the sling
off to the side of his shoulder. “You’re asking
me
what your old man did
for a living? That sounds like the guy I knew—always keeping everyone in the
dark about what he’s up to.”

He moved a few feet over towards the trunk
of a large cottonwood, resting his back against the twisted bark while she
stood with her feet shoulder-width apart as if ready to bolt.

“My father never spoke about his work
overseas. My mother insisted that when he was home, we would have some
semblance of a normal family life that didn’t revolve around chaos and warfare.”

“So, in other words, no one talked much at
mealtimes,” Mitch said, giving a knowing look to what she was describing.

She grinned and shook her head. “Yes, it
was all a veneer of pleasantries to mask the pain etched in his eyes.”

“Anatoly was the best teacher in special
operations that I’ve ever met.”

Dev looked him over like a boxer would an
opponent in the ring, then she glanced over the trees in the arroyo below. “I
need a place to stay for the next few days. There’s a potential terrorist attack
that is about to unfold somewhere in the southwestern U.S. and I need to piece
together all the players.”

He thrust his chin forward, chuckling. “Oh,
is that all. I thought you were going to say you and your pops needed my help
quelling a revolution in Paraguay or some crazy shit.”

“Please, can you help me?”

“Did I mention I work for a federal agency?
Let me take you downtown and you can present what you know to my bureau chief.”

“I can’t do that. There’s a reason I’ve
been hiding out for the past five days. Someone in the government, in the FBI,
is trying to get to me. That’s what brought me to Phoenix in the first place.
There’s a man in your organization who’s in on this.”

“In on a premeditated attack on U.S. soil—somebody
in my agency? Not likely.” He moved up to the porch and sat down on a frayed
wicker chair beside her.

“Your bureau chief, his name is Ryker, is
that right? How well do you know him?”

Mitch raised his eyebrows in surprise at
her question. “Not well—he’s only been there a few months. Seems typical of
government management—lots of Tony Robbins motivational speeches and little
action to support it.”

Dev remained standing, her body seemingly
relaxed on the surface, but Mitch sensed she was on high alert. “I can’t say
for sure that he’s connected but I traced a call to the downtown division that
came from my former employer at the Aeneid Corporation in Anaheim after they
tried to kill me.”

“The defense contractor—the one that makes
body armor?
”

“That’s right. I’ve been on
the inside there for months trying to track down a connection between them and
some intel we picked up from a hostage my father and I rescued.”

“Whoa, your father’s running
his own outfit of spooks? Wait a minute, back up here and pretend I don’t know
what Anatoly’s been into since my days in SF. Your father literally dropped off
the radar after he left. He sure as hell never returned any of my calls or
emails.”

“He’s operating his own agency
now doing freelance work, mostly involved with liberating hostages
—
you
know, the kidnapping and ransom industry. We run missions all over the world
but do a lot of work in Turkmenistan
—
a place my father is fond of.”
She shifted her weight to one foot, leaning her shoulder against the wall. “I’ve
been working with him
—
training,
doing field ops and intel. This was my first assignment over here, though, and after
this mess I’ve uncovered, it might be my last for many reasons.”

“Now, why would you want to go
into that line of work? I mean, don’t get me wrong, Anatoly would be the guy to
operate under if you’re serious about learning the trade but you seem…” He
paused, glancing into her eyes and studying the contours of her face. “Well,
let’s just say that there are other ways to save lives than traipsing around in
the shadows of third-world shitholes.”

Dev’s eyes lit up. “You don’t
think a woman has a place in…”

Mitch held his hand up, palm
facing outward. “Stop right there. That’s not what I was saying at all. I’ve
just seen what that work can do to people. How you enter the ranks wanting to
do good and help others only to end up needing to mend your own soul years later
after dealing with all the horror.”

Dev looked out at the canopy
of trees where two canyon wrens were competing for a coffee-colored bark
beetle. “You spent a lot of time with my father?”

Mitch shrugged his shoulders.
“Around eleven months, nearly 24/7 here in the U.S. or on various overseas
operations.”

“What I wouldn’t have given
when I was younger to have such an uninterrupted stretch with him.” She ran her
hand through her hair while sighing. “But then the wistful prayers of a child sometimes
go unanswered, don’t they?”

“Let’s go inside where it’s
cooler and you can lay out what you’ve uncovered.” Mitch’s trust didn’t extend
very far with an intruder showing up on his doorstep with a story like she’d
just delivered but his instincts told him to hear her out. And no one except a
handful of his old SF unit buddies knew about Anatoly so he was pretty certain
of her connection, not to mention her subtle resemblance to the man.

“You may not like everything
I’ve got to say. It involves corruption at the highest...” She paused as Mitch
raised his hand and then craned his head towards the front of the house.

Something was off. The purple
finches that normally nested in the sycamores near the rim were silent and the
wind held a musky locker-room scent, the odor Mitch knew was associated with
human perspiration. He lowered his body near the edge of the back porch and
peered around the side. Moving down the rocky slopes near the main entrance of
the ranch were close to fifteen heavily armed men in body armor. The men flowed
along the terrain like one organism
—a
well-trained group who were
no strangers to small-unit tactics. They poured over the slope like ravenous fire
ants, sweeping their weapons along the upper houses two hundred yards from
Mitch’s location.