War to the Knife (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 9) Read online

  The boy might only be thirteen, but both Javakhishvili and Burgess had taught him well. They’d taught as many of the men and boys of the small Eastern Orthodox parish as had been willing to learn. He checked the chamber, keeping the muzzle pointed down at the floorboards, then rocked in one of the two magazines, racked the bolt, checked the chamber again, and then flipped the selector lever up to “safe.”

  Burgess had already started them moving. If what David had overheard was true, they didn’t have much time.

  It was a short drive. David had known one of the young men who were their targets. And he knew where the young man lived.

  The farm lay about five miles southwest of Kyumvi. Burgess parked the Land Rover in the shade of an acacia tree about half a mile away. They’d gone without headlights for the last couple of miles—there was no cover and no place to hide for miles out there. Leaving David with the vehicle, the two men pulled out their rifles and started across the plain.

  They covered the distance relatively quickly. The sun was almost up, and they turned south first, so that they could approach the farm with the sun at their backs. Javakhishvili wondered briefly if they had enough time, but he’d had enough experience with these kinds of jihadis that he doubted that they’d get up early just to go slaughter some Christians nearby.

  Apparently, a visiting imam had condemned the presence of the Eastern Orthodox mission, and David had overheard one of the boys at a nearby soccer field bragging about what he and several of his friends were going to do to the “cross worshipers.” And that they had powerful friends bringing them the weapons to do it with.

  Now, Burgess and Javakhishvili crept up on the low wall around the farm, weapons at the ready. So far, they’d heard and seen nothing to suggest that they’d been detected.

  Reaching the wall, Javakhishvili crouched beneath it, rising just high enough that he could peer over the top.

  Two Toyota Hiluxes sat in the yard, facing the gate on the other side. Figures were beginning to move around, several of them converging on the trucks. And they were all armed. He counted three AKs, two G3s, four M16s, and a Sterling submachinegun. No RPGs or PKMs, at least not in the open.

  He crouched back down, thinking hard. They couldn’t just let the attack happen. Even if they were dug in at the church, innocent people were going to get hurt. But two men against ten didn’t make for good odds, even with the element of surprise on their side.

  Burgess was crouching down again, too. He’d seen—Javakhishvili didn’t need to fill him in.

  “I say we mag-dump into the trucks,” Burgess whispered. “Disable them if we can. In any case, it might scare the hell out of them enough that they call the attack off.”

  Javakhishvili wasn’t sure. He’d seen plenty of jihadis use resistance to their attacks as justification for even more violence. But they were in position, they were loaded for bear, and there was no time like the present.

  As one, the two men rose up over the top of the wall, leveling their rifles, the selector levers already down to “Auto.”

  They opened fire, the Kalashnikovs thundering and rattling, spitting fire as they raked the two trucks with fire. Glass shattered and flecks of paint and metal flew. The nearest jihadis scrambled back, yelling in terror, and the nearest actually dropped his rifle and turned to run, only to trip and sprawl on his face in the dirt.

  Javakhishvili’s magazine ran dry with a click, and he dropped behind cover, ripping a fresh mag out of his go bag, using it to hit the mag release and strip out the empty, then rocked it in and racked the bolt.

  When he rose up again, he saw that one of the Hiluxes was smoking, both were sitting slightly askew on flattened tires, and every one of the would-be jihadi warriors was running for the shacks.

  Burgess had just reloaded, and Javakhishvili motioned that they should retreat. Hopefully, they’d sent the message. They’d get back to the church and prepare to defend it if the jihadis decided to come after them anyway.

  The two of them faded away, staying low as they moved straight northeast toward the truck, keeping the sun off to their flank. They moved fast, not quite a jog, but faster than a mere walk.

  A few minutes later, they reached the Land Rover without seeing any sign of pursuit. The murderous little jackals hadn’t expected to get hit on their own turf.

  As they climbed in, after making sure David didn’t mistake them for bad guys, Javakhishvili felt his pack start to vibrate. He peered inside as Burgess pulled the vehicle away from the tree, turning back toward Kitengela.

  It was his satellite phone. Pulling it out and extending the antenna, he hit the “receive” button.

  “Herc?” Brannigan, like the rest of the Blackhearts, had never found Javakhishvili’s full first name all that pronounceable, so they’d adopted the nickname he’d gotten during his time in the Navy. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Africa.” He had to plug one ear so that he could hear somewhat clearly over the creaks and bangs the Land Rover was making as they bounced over the terrain. “Tom and I came out to do some missionary work. We got a job?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got a job. Can you be here in three days?”

  “Easy. We’re not that far from Nairobi, and a one-way ticket isn’t that expensive.” Especially given what they’d been paid for the last few missions. As a single man with simple tastes, Javakhishvili wasn’t hurting for money.

  “We’ll see you here, then. And Herc? Watch your back when you get here. This one’s… complicated.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  ***

  Flanagan glowered as he got out of his truck. We don’t have time for this.

  The dingy roach motel just outside of Vegas looked like something out of a true crime documentary. It was hardly The Strip. But under the circumstances, he’d expected that.

  Scanning the parking lot, he couldn’t see any trouble right at the moment. But that could change quickly. And with Kevin Curtis involved, it probably would.

  He found Room 107 and knocked. There was no reaction at first, but he might have seen the curtains move, and the peephole in the door darken for a moment, before the door cracked open.

  “Joe! I knew you’d come find me!” Kevin Curtis stood a good head shorter than Flanagan, quite a few shades darker, and almost thirty pounds heavier. And all of it was muscle. For all his excesses and gambling, Curtis rarely missed a session in the gym.

  Flanagan shouldered into the room. The inside was as run down and sketchy as the outside. The cheap carpet had some strange stains, the furniture looked extremely cheap, the single lamp on the end table was dim and yellow, and the place smelled slightly of cigarette smoke and piss. Curtis shut the door behind him, still peering through the peephole, and Flanagan confronted him and the girl in the tube top and short skirt who was sitting on the bed.

  “For fuck’s sake, Kevin. I thought we were getting past this.” The girl—who was quite attractive, if in a slightly trashy sort of way, looked at him with wide and slightly frightened eyes. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last day.”

  “It’s not my fault!” Curtis turned away from the door. “We were minding our own business!”

  “You’re always minding your own business right up until the point you’re hiding out in a sleazy hotel room from the local mob, Kevin.” Flanagan didn’t raise his voice, but kept it to a low, dangerous growl. There was a reason he had his .45 in his waistband and a couple of extra mags in his back pocket, aside from the two reloads he usually carried.

  “I didn’t know she was Vitti’s daughter!” Curtis had moved to stand next to the girl, who immediately held his hand. “I sure as hell didn’t expect him to get this pissed off that she was with a black guy!”

  “He’s a mobster with the name ‘Vitti.’” Flanagan was not amused, though he found that he was less angry this time. He was more tired than anything else. “What else did you expect?” He sighed. “Come on. We’ve got a job, anyway. As long as we can get out of the park
ing lot before the goombas show up, we should be alright.”

  Curtis didn’t move. He stayed there by the bed, holding the girl’s hand. “We’ve got to bring her with us.”

  Flanagan turned a baleful eye on him, but he was already thinking it through, and even before Curtis spoke again, he knew that the other man was right, tomcat or not.

  “You know what Vitti’s going to do to her!” Curtis was still holding the girl’s hand, as she looked up at him with something like devotion in her eyes. “We can’t leave her for him to find her.”

  Flanagan sighed. “Ah, hell.” He looked at the girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Monica.”

  “Okay, Monica, we’re going to move fast, and I don’t just mean to my truck. Kevin and I have some serious work to do in a couple of days, so we’ve got that long to get you set up in some sort of ‘witness protection’ arrangement. Fortunately, we know a few people who can make that happen.” He moved to the window and peered out past the curtain. “The coast looks clear.” He turned back and fixed Curtis with a glare. “Are you armed?”

  “Of course I’m armed, Joseph. I’m irresponsible, not stupid.”

  Flanagan rolled his eyes. “I’ll go first. Give me ten seconds to get out in the parking lot and confirm that it’s clear, then follow. I’m parked just outside.” He narrowed his eyes at Curtis again. “You get to call Frank and get things rolling to get her into hiding. This is your mess; you get to do most of the legwork.”

  Then he was going out the door, clearing visually to his right and left, his hand near the butt of his .45.

  The parking lot was still relatively empty and still. His eyes were drawn to movement over by the corner of the building, but it was just a drunk, passed out on the porch, moving in his sleep. Under some circumstances, that might be a bad guy, but he didn’t think that the mob was quite that tactically sophisticated, especially not when their target was one gambling, bodybuilding tomcat who’d bedded the boss’s daughter.

  Satisfied, he climbed into the cab and started the truck. A heartbeat later, Curtis appeared, pulling the girl after him as he rushed to the truck. He helped Monica into the middle, then climbed in and slammed the door. “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Flanagan already had the truck in reverse, and moved out quickly, pulling a Y-turn and roaring out onto the road. He saw headlights in the distance, coming from the city, but he was already turning right, out into the desert.

  Half a mile away, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the headlights turning into the parking lot. It looked like they’d just made it.

  “Get on the phone, Kevin. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  ***

  Carlo Santelli walked out the door and down toward his car with a mixture of satisfaction and sadness. He was about halfway to the vehicle when the phone rang.

  “Yessir.” He’d been expecting Brannigan to call. After all, today was the day that they finally got Sam Childress installed in a house of his own, with full-time care and state-of-the-art security. After getting shot in the spine in Transnistria, the young mercenary had then been kidnapped out of the hospital by operatives working for the Humanity Front. They’d worked him over pretty good, fractured his skull, and left him with some permanent brain damage. The Blackhearts had found allies who had gotten him to a secret hospital site out in the country, but it had been far from any of the Blackhearts’ homes, and it had taken a good deal of resources.

  And the man couldn’t live the rest of his life in a hospital.

  Now, while Childress was a backwoods boy who’d never liked cities, he was just down the block from Santelli’s own house in the Boston suburbs. That meant that not only could they get him the care he needed, but Santelli could keep an eye on him. He’d had a fatherly concern for the younger man since their days in the Marine Corps, when Sergeant Major Santelli had needed to discipline the hotheaded Corporal—or Lance Corporal, depending on the month—Childress a few times.

  “How’s our boy?” Brannigan must have been busy, since he hadn’t been there to get Childress settled in. Which meant they had a job.

  “Getting used to the wheelchair. I don’t think he’ll ever get used to being fussed over. I might have made a mistake—the permanent nurse we found is awfully pretty. And she’s really good at fussing over him, too.” Santelli chuckled a little, even as he tensed up a bit.

  He knew there was a job in the offing. And he’d been wrestling with the fact that he wasn’t sure he was up to it anymore since before Azerbaijan.

  It wasn’t that he was scared. Not really. At least, he wasn’t scared for himself. He’d lived with death since he’d been a teenager, first in the old neighborhood, then in the Marine Corps, and finally with the Blackhearts.

  No, he was afraid for his family. He had a retirement, but he could only imagine how that might get screwed up if the VA found out that he’d bought it on an illegal mercenary mission somewhere in a country Americans weren’t supposed to be.

  Carlo Junior hadn’t been born yet when they’d gone to Khadarkh. He hadn’t had this concern when they’d started.

  “I think he’s getting better, Colonel.” He tried to continue the conversation as normally as he could. “He’s always going to have some short-term memory problems—don’t we all—but he’s more alert now. More aware of what’s going on around him.”

  “Good.” Brannigan sounded a little pensive. “We’ve got a job.”

  Santelli stopped in his tracks, angry at just how tense and nervous he felt. But if he’d given anything away by his silence, Brannigan acted as if he hadn’t noticed.

  “I want you here for the brief, but under the circumstances, with your family and Sam’s situation, I want you to stay back and handle logistics and information support.” He paused for a moment, and Santelli heard him sigh a little. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Carlo. I’m not just doing this because I think you need to take some down time. We’ve been leaving a lot of our support to offices and people we can’t see. I want somebody back here who’s one of us, who can be the first point of contact if things go bad. We’ve been out in the wind without a parachute for eight missions, now. We should have known better. I should have known better, and made better arrangements. The fact that you’ve got a family to worry about and Sam just moved in down the street just puts you in the best position.”

  Santelli hated himself a little for the wave of relief that passed through him. He knew that he’d hate himself even more after the Blackhearts left. But Brannigan was right. Azerbaijan had been extremely hairy. Building more of a support network was long overdue.

  “Roger that, sir. I’ll be there.”

  Chapter 5

  The fire crackled in the middle of the little campsite. It was the only sound in the aftermath of Brannigan’s summation of the situation and the mission.

  Wade finally leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Well, now. ‘Be at this spot at this time, whack this guy, and don’t ask questions.’ That’s not suspicious at all.” He shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with murdering a Communist dictator, whatever he’s done, but this really sounds like a setup.”

  “We’re almost certain that it is, in fact, a setup.” Brannigan took a deep drag on his cigar and blew the cloud toward the treetops. “But as I said, we’re also pretty sure that we can’t just say, ‘No,’ without some serious repercussions. Which is why we’re meeting almost three weeks before the planned time on target and making contingency plans.”

  “I’ve been digging already.” Santelli wasn’t sitting on one of the log rounds—he’d brought a camp chair so he could lean back while he sat by the fire. “This Clemente character hasn’t been on anyone’s radar up here before now. Hell, he barely is now. I found one mention of San Tabal or any kind of takeover in the media, and that was some small, alternative online newspaper. It’s like nobody cares.”

  “If this is so minor, and this guy’s such a no
body, then why is somebody in DC so keen to see him get whacked?” Burgess had also brought his own chair, and was sprawled in it, stroking his short beard thoughtfully as he stared at the flames. “It don’t add up.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Brannigan looked around at the rest of the Blackhearts. “Which is why Van Zandt gave us some extra warning. We need to get in and run some reconnaissance before the hit’s supposed to go down. We’re on a relatively short timeline, here—not that that’s anything new.” A low, humorless chuckle went around the fire. None of the Blackhearts’ missions had allowed for anything like a generous amount of preparation time.

  “Van Zandt’s office is arranging charter flights. Originally, it was going to be all of us in one go, but we’ve since arranged for two flights. Joe and I will go in first and do our initial reconnaissance. The rest will fly in two days later.”

  “What about weapons?” Wade was usually their self-appointed weapons guy.

  “We’ll have to sort that out on the ground, unfortunately.” Brannigan had fully expected the grimaces that went around the fire. “Whoever’s behind this little game, they don’t want official American fingerprints on this, so they’ve put all of it in our court. Full deniability.”

  “Getting weapons in Colombia’s going to mean dealing with some shady characters.” Flanagan kept his voice even, but Brannigan knew he was remembering Dubai. “I doubt that Colombia has regular gun stores, never mind the kind we can find in, say, Texas.” The Blackhearts had gotten most of the hardware for the Tourmaline Delta op in an ordinary gun store in south Texas. Santelli, being from Boston, had been mildly shocked at what kind of weaponry they could get over the counter there. Happy, but shocked.

  “They don’t.” Santelli had already been looking into it. “There’s no way you’re getting weapons outside of the black market there. The Colombian Army has a monopoly on legal gun sales, all weapons have to be registered with them, permits are required, and only Colombian citizens can get a permit.” He folded his thick arms over his barrel chest. “We might need to lean on Van Zandt to include some weapons. Charter flights should make it easier, especially since he’s got full control over the birds. They should have some smuggling compartments, or something.”