Sabotage: Beginnings (6 page)

Ben pressed his flush cheeks into both palms as he pondered. He knew what he wanted to do next—he just wasn’t sure he had the energy to get it done. There was an entire village below. Everyone now knew what he’d done the day before and they’d know what he just did. They also knew why he did it—hunt for Osama bin Laden. It was clear what his next step had to be.

Ben sawed off eight of Aabdar’s fingers. They plopped against the bottom of the leather pouch. He sauntered into the Popi Tribe’s camp. He’d seen Sunni cross the hard dirt yard to enter a tent to the east. He followed.

“Hello Sunni.” Ben flashed his teeth, not exactly a smile. “Who’s your friend?”

Sunni crumpled onto the woven rug and began to plead for mercy. The old man with him pointed a condemning finger and demanded the Western infidel exit at once.

Ben reached into his garment and opened the pouch. He grabbed four of Aabdar’s meaty fingers and tossed them into the old man’s lap. The elder’s mouth gaped as wide as his eyes. He tried to escape the fingers, but the coagulating blood stuck to his waistcoat. Sunni never looked up.

Ben zipped his knife from its sheath and easily made another ragdoll out of Sunni, then killed the elder. He sat on the rug for a bit to plan. He was unsure of how many people remained in the village. There looked to be about twenty or so tents, so he assumed there was that many adult males.

Throughout the remainder of that afternoon, Ben methodically eliminated every adult male in the village. He never hurt a child or a woman. They were allowed to leave once he completed his task. They were no threat against him—but though he never touched their bodies, he permanently destroyed their minds.

Just as dusk turned to night, Ben returned to the first tent where it all began. He was exhausted, and contemplated spending the night. There had been many more victims than he anticipated, but he wasn’t feeling well.

Maybe mommy was right about eating flesh making me sick.

Ben threw up twice just outside the tent before he returned to claim the rings off Aabdar’s departed fingers. He looked at Sunni’s corpse and thought it was a shame the man had escaped death the day before only to face it today.

The process of skinning, consuming and posing all of the adult males was intoxicating. He felt another arousal coming on, but there were no more victims to target. It was his biggest feasting yet.

“I’m feeling rather frisky if I must confess,” Ben said.

He pulled the elder’s corpse next to Sunni’s and ripped at their clothes until they were bare.

“Lets have a ménage a trois, shall we?”

T
he ancient military
Jeep rambled across rocky terrain until it lurched to a halt above a jagged cliff near a ravaged body. Soon, Justice and Batya had identified Aabdar’s corpse as a Popi tribesman. They were just outside of the actual village but feared what lay on the other side.

Batya slapped her palms together. “This animal sickens me. You know what he did to my countrymen, do you?”

“Well, to be fair, it was your countrymen who raped him within an inch of his life. Seemed like turnabout was fair play in Tel Aviv.”

Justice tried to reassemble Aabdar’s clothing to cover his exposed rectum. It wouldn’t take long before the US Embassy caught wind of the murders. That meant it wouldn’t be long until CIA HQ would jaw Justice’s ear off about his kill mission taking so long.

He’d begun to have his fill with government service. He was the best they had—he knew it and they knew it. Still, that didn’t stop his handlers from treating him like a second-class citizen. He’d already erased twenty-four experimental prototypes over the last two years. But Ben was different. He hadn’t become a victim of the CIA’s experiment—he’d embraced it.

“I assume that after I save your life, you not have nerve to defend that serial killer,” she spoke in a very formal but broken English. Despite the deplorable conditions, it drove Justice wild.

Her language training hadn’t focused on American English dialect because she was never destined for US infiltration. She was pure European and Asian assassin assignment material. As most agents of the Mossad, her knowledge of trivial American facts were amazing. They studied their ally as well as their enemy. And sometimes it was difficult to tell which side of the coin the US was on depending on the administration’s policy.

“I’m not defending anyone. Just stating the facts that Ben didn’t bomb a café full of civilians or drive a truck through a police academy graduation. He erased bad ass criminals who’d victimized your very own people.”

Her eyes rolled. The light grey glinted in the sun’s glare. She’d never fully revealed herself to Justice and he was dying to see what she looked like. Even her hair remained bound for safety reasons. This was still a very entrenched religious sect of the Middle East.

Expected to wear the headscarf and burka, women were not allowed to move freely within the country. Even American female soldiers were pressured to cover up at certain times on duty. Batya cared nothing for their religious demands, but she did understand the sexual mores of operating in country.

“I saw that. You can roll those beautiful eyes all you want, but the truth is the truth, little sister.” Justice said as he finished photographing the scene.

Her nose crinkled, showing rare signs of lines across an otherwise unblemished brow. “Sister? Why do you call me sister?”

“It’s an expression.”

“So do I call you,
aleph chet
?” Her eyes smiled.

Justice paused and let the words rattle around his head. It was an ongoing game of cat and mouse played by operatives—everyone had a weakness—who’d find it first. Her slight manipulation of the term brother wasn’t by accident—he let her know he knew the game.

“Baby, you can call me anything you’d like. Just make sure you call me.” Justice dropped his face into his hand. He tried to hide his laugh at the miserable attempt to flirt while poor Aabdar lay stiff and violated just ten feet away.

At least someone got laid.

“What did you just think?” Her expression, solidly serious with slits that emitted a piercing stare told him he was busted. She stood frozen and waited for his reply.

Justice felt heat flush his cheeks. She’d damn well read his mind—she was that good. Justice turned toward the Jeep to hide his awe and feigned fiddling around with the gears.

“You are a typical man. No, let correct me. A typical American man. I know exactly what you just thought. Shame on you Justice Boudo.”

He pointed his finger toward her and wagged it like a tail. “It’s Boudreaux.”

“Oh, so you can speak. You just decided to ignore my question.” She tsk-tsked at him and climbed into the passenger’s side of the Jeep. “We got work to do, Mr. Boudreaux.”

“Yes, sir.” He saluted.

She leaned back toward the outside of the vehicle and sneered at him. “I know you are trying to cover your embarrassment for getting, how you say, busted, but no need to insult me by calling me a man.”

“It was a joke.”

“I can assure you I’m very much a woman.” Finally, a real smile as she unfeathered the garment from around her head.

A low guttural moan rose from within Justice’s gut. He lost it; she was gorgeous. The childish manner in which he’d behaved caused him to wince with a twinge of shame. This wouldn’t change a thing though—they had a mission and she was capable of handling her own business.

“Umm, yes. Yes, you are very much a woman.” Justice couldn’t seem to stop sounding stupid so he shoved the buggy into first gear and hutched it around the area until he found a path.

Batya grabbed his bicep and tugged on his shirtsleeve. He struggled to keep his shit together as the Jeep rolled to a halt, idling quietly. The village was vacant of movement. The only sound that accompanied the wretched stench was the drone of swarms of mosquitoes and the flap of bird’s wings as they bounced away with full beaks of human flesh.

He canted his head. “You okay?”

“Me, okay? Didn’t you say something about speaking in Ben’s defense?” Her glare created more heat than the desert’s sun. He saw the moisture in her eyes, but knew his words would hold no solace.

“I’m sorry for saying that earlier. You know I got no sympathy for him.”

She blinked back a tear. “Now you get soft on me? No time, cowboy. This is escalating at a rapid pace. We both risk organizational reprisal if he is not stopped soon.”

Justice walked to the rear of the vehicle to grab his gear bag. The images he was about to load onto his camera caused a heavy weight to drop in his core. He yanked at the nylon bag’s waxed zipper to check the battery and connection that would transmit photographs back to CIA headquarters.

Usually dicey at best, the technology for this mission was exceptional. He assumed the Agency wanted to show their best assets in front of his Israeli counterpart. Every intelligence agency was always looking to one up each other.

Justice mashed the connection button that pinpointed their position via the GPS system of triangulation coordinates. Within minutes, CIA headquarters would also experience the inhumane shit their experiment had created. Justice doubted anyone back in Langley, Virginia truly believed—let alone understood—the horrific effects of their twenty-five man wrecking crew, gone awry.

Formerly, the CIA had focused global efforts on collecting and analyzing human intelligence—HUMINT—as the main player in the intelligence community (IC). After the black eye of 9/11, focuses changed to an offensive posture that relied on cyber-operations and para-military offensives using the Special Activities Division—SAD.

The aggressive tactics used included training militias and making targeted assassinations. Justice was the perfect fit for both. His ability to communicate and natural leadership charisma led to numerous successes in recruiting and leading civil disorder demonstrations and violent coups of brutal regimes. He was also a natural born killer.

It was the latter that drew Justice into the CIA’s Operation Taz. The Agency experimented with twenty-five carefully selected citizens. Most had military, law enforcement or criminal backgrounds. They were meant to be disposable from the start. Each was immersed in highly specialized survival and combat training, and subjected to intense psychological restructuring through drug, counseling and torture sessions.

Each test subject was globally dispatched to wreak havoc on the indigenous people of a particular region. The goal was to create an environment of terror from an anonymous source. Disconnected from national affiliations, and with identities erased, the subjects were meant to be disposable. CIA operatives would then gain the locals’ trust by eliminating the murderers. The goal was to gain regional cooperation by killing off their own operatives.

Problem was, the killers—now experts at their task—began to kill the CIA agents. As with anything repetitious, they also grew bored. Creative and grotesque imaginations led to mass murders beyond the scope of anything the CIA could’ve ever imagined. Shock soared inside the Beltway.

Justice recalled each of the previous twenty-four experimental subjects he’d tracked around the globe to eliminate. His only regret was that each had once been naïve of the hell they’d experience before signing up with the Agency. By the time he was assigned, killing them was the most merciful thing he could do.

He pushed the reality of the CIA’s human experiment from his mind as the device buzzed. Muscles clinched in his forearms as the zing of a connection signaled he was on live stream with his handlers back at base camp Langley. He lifted the camera, held it before him, and introduced himself, the date, time and location. There was no mention of Batya Cohen—she didn’t exist.

“Let me show you what you’re responsible for causing,” he sneered into the viewfinder before flipping the camera so it pointed away from him.

Careful in his footing, Justice circled the camp’s perimeter to show the big picture of devastation. Bile rose in his belly as he noticed the symmetry of the death scene. Ben was becoming much more efficient and less filled with rage during his kills. Bodies formed patterns and were purposefully posed to leave messages. It would now become Justice’s job to decipher the puzzle’s pieces.

He pressed the earpiece deeper into his ear.

“What do you make of it?” asked an anonymous voice back at HQ.

“I don’t know.” Justice pushed the circle in as he rounded the camp on his second pass. This time, bodies became more clear. They looked to be grouped by men’s ages and various stages of consumption. Justice hurried past the pile of smaller bodies.

He swatted at the flies that swarmed the young boys’ corpses. Vomit spewed through his nostrils as he pressed his hand over his mouth. He looked for Batya, but she’d taken a position safely out of the camera’s view.

“You okay?” asked the CIA handler.

Justice didn’t bother with an answer—it wasn’t as if they gave a shit.

The camera shook as Justice made his third pass around the campsite. Injuries and mutilations became obvious. Strips of flesh removed, objects impaled through bodies, faces frozen in fear and ropes around wrists showed the method of organizing and enslaving the entire population.