The Suicide Cartel, page 1
part #5 of David Rivers Series
The Suicide Cartel
The David Rivers Series, Book 5
Jason Kasper
Regiment Publishing
Copyright © 2019 by Regiment Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, brands, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
For information contact:
Jason@Jason-Kasper.com
Jason-Kasper.com
Contents
Also by Jason Kasper
FORTUNE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PENANCE
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
FREEDOM
Chapter 7
ENDGAME
Chapter 8
WILLPOWER
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Thanks for Reading
About the Author
Also by Jason Kasper
ALSO BY JASON KASPER
The David Rivers Series
Prequel: The Ranger Objective (free)
1: Greatest Enemy
2: Offer of Revenge
3: Dark Redemption
4: Vengeance Calling
5: The Suicide Cartel
Receive a free copy of The Ranger Objective by visiting Jason-Kasper.com/newsletter
To the men of MACV-SOG
FORTUNE
Palma non sine pulvere
-No reward without effort
1
September 2, 2009
The Mist Palace
British Columbia, Canada
“Ian, I understand that I’m about to enter a new war. Before I go, what advice do you have for me?”
Ian, an intelligence analyst and my only surviving friend, leaned toward me from across the table. His entire demeanor shifted from nervous to forceful, veins near his balding temples swelling with intensity. Then he folded his hands together as if in prayer, and opened his mouth to speak.
Before he could say a word, the guard standing over us held up his watch and announced, “Four minutes remaining.”
I glanced at the guard irritably as he lowered his watch. Neither he nor the other guard made any effort to conceal their eavesdropping, even though they needn’t worry about missing a word—black orbs in the ceiling concealed security cameras, and I could only guess what was behind the one-way mirror covering the wall beside us. This level of paranoid security was normal here at the Mist Palace, a secluded wilderness compound serving as the headquarters of a transnational criminal syndicate.
But Ian’s intense look drew my attention, and he spoke quickly. “Look, David, there’s no easy way to say it, but they’re sending you into total chaos, not a war. The Triple Frontier of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina is a breeding ground for narcos, terrorists, and gun runners. On one hand you have free-roaming cartel militias securing facilitation corridors. And on the other you have the world’s largest population of Lebanese expatriates, so there are Hezbollah training camps in the jungle.”
“Sounds cozy,” I said.
“There’s zero effective border control throughout the zone, and it’s filled with unregulated airstrips and waterways. Civilian spotters monitor all of them and report any movement to the cartels.”
“Stay away from the rivers. Got it.”
“You’ll probably run into primitive cocaine labs all over the jungle.”
“How well defended are they?”
He shook his head. “They were all decommissioned when the cartels shifted cocaine production out of the area. But trust me when I say those labs are about the only thing you don’t have to worry about—”
“Three minutes remaining,” the guard interrupted.
Ian drew a breath. “Other than that, everything’s gotten even worse in the past year. The ongoing criminal war has further destabilized the region. A lot of new players are fighting for a piece of the frontier now that the previous kingpin was ousted by the Handler.”
The Handler—the reason for the season, I thought bitterly. Hell, the reason for everything that brought us here. To the world of high order crime, the Handler was an enigmatic mastermind. He occupied the helm of the ultimate criminal syndicate; he was the king to whom all other criminal fiefdoms bowed.
But to Ian and me, he was a target for revenge.
The Handler had killed our entire mercenary team, the very people who proved to me that even after the military, life had a purpose and my skills had value. Only Ian and I survived. After our botched assassination attempt against the Handler eight months earlier, Ian was enslaved and forced to target the Handler’s highest-ranking enemies in South America.
But I’d just turned all that around by negotiating Ian’s freedom. We’d only been granted a few minutes together before being separated forever. A private jet would whisk Ian away to spend the rest of his life under passive surveillance, while I would be shipped to the war in South America.
Every word of our final minutes together would be scrutinized by the Handler’s intelligence agents. Ian knew that better than I did, as well as the harsh reality that if he said anything remotely suspicious, the deal for his newly-won freedom would be null and void. And yet, Ian’s body language and expression told me he was about to pass along a coded message, something that everyone would hear but only I would understand. He was smarter than they were, and he knew it.
I just had to pick out the clues—but I’d heard nothing so far besides information I’d surely receive later in a mission brief. Was Ian laying trivial groundwork for the real code?
But Ian’s tone switched from informative to almost wistful as he continued, “You know, David, now that my career is over, I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. When you and I worked together on Boss’s team, it was a golden era. We were one of a dozen or so teams handling mercenary work at any given time. But all that changed after Boss’s last mission.”
I nodded distantly, thinking of our team’s final job for the Handler. We’d delivered mission success in the form of a decapitation strike against his US-based criminal opposition.
And for our efforts, the Handler had us massacred.
The memory elicited a tumult of conflicting emotions in me—grief for Boss’s team, rage at the Handler, a desolate sadness that my last surviving teammate was about to walk out the door, and I’d never see him again.
Ian shook his head. “Made me sad to think all those teams are gone now. And then, David, I realized that they’re not.”
I frowned at him. But those teams were gone now, and everyone knew that. Many had fled the country, especially after a few of their fellow mercenaries inexplicably went missing. Other teams, like the one Ian and I served on, had been killed before being able to escape the Handler’s wrath.
I rubbed my forehead and replied, “I don’t understand. What do you mean, those teams aren’t gone now?”
There was a gleam in his eye as he leaned in to explain, “Don’t you get it? Boss’s team is still alive, in us. You and I carried the torch to the end.”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” I agreed reluctantly. “As far as that type of work goes, I’d say this moment is the definition of the bitter end.”
The guard announced, “Two minutes remaining.”
Ian still appeared to be fondly reminiscing as he asked, “Remember the first mission you did for Boss?”
If Ian had already passed a coded message, then it had sailed cleanly over my head—or was I wrong? Maybe he didn’t have a message at all. Perhaps I’d misread him completely, or he was just going batty after his long months of indentured servitude.
I nodded. “My first mission—assassinating Saamir. Of course.”
He shot me a knowing look. “Since I’ve been working here at the Mist Palace, I’ve been having dreams about Saamir. That he’s hiding out in his office, still alive.”
“I recall killing him pretty clearly, but okay.”
“I didn’t get it either, until today. This morning I realized why I’ve been having these dreams. When security found out you were inside Saamir’s building, Boss thought it was too dangerous for you. He ordered you to abort the mission. But you disobeyed. Against all odds, you shot your way to the roof to parachute off and escape.”
My eyes were locked on his, waiting for some emphasis that didn’t come.
“Hard to forget, Ian.”
“The time between those two events—you disregarding Boss’s order to abort, and then actually freefalling off the roof—was the most scared I’ve ever been for an operative. In hindsight, it was the most memorable moment of my career.”
“Glad I could contribute,” I offered, trying to leave an opening for Ian to speak further. “Anything else I need to know about South America?”
“One minute remaining,” the guard called.
Ian gave an almost parental grin at my impatience. “The most important part. No matter how bad things get—it’s an ugly war, David—keep hope. If you could blow off a mission abort and still come out of Saamir’s building alive, then you can make it back from South America.” He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied expression and folded his hands across his belly. This wasn’t the end, I thought. This couldn’t be the end. Not of t
I nodded helplessly. “I got it, but—”
“I won’t be able to help you,” he cut in, “but you don’t need me anymore. Remember that.”
“Time’s up,” the guard called. He and his partner grabbed Ian’s wiry frame and hoisted him upward.
I leapt up from my chair. “You motherfuckers—”
Ian put up a hand to stop me. “Don’t worry about me, brother. You’ve got a war to win.”
The guards forced him toward the door. My last sight of his face revealed a smile and a wink as he yelled over his shoulder, “You will get out of this, David.”
Oh, how the tables had turned.
Eight months ago I’d returned from Rio de Janeiro and managed to smuggle a weapon into the Handler’s garden with the full intention of assassinating him. But when I instead found Ian a bound captive, I utilized that weapon to spare my friend’s life.
And just before the Handler’s men separated us, taking Ian to a cell and me into a deep cover assignment almost certain to end in my death, my last words to him were, “I will get you out of this, Ian.”
I’d now made good on that seemingly hopeless promise by securing Ian’s release. In return he’d just fed my own words back to me, presumably indicating I was headed into a trap myself.
But what was it?
A wave of despair crashed over me as I lost sight of Ian, the guards whisking him down the hall and letting the door slam in their wake. After Ian and I survived the decimation of our team, after we’d come so close to avenging them in a year-long journey, he was gone and I was left behind, truly alone.
2
After being locked in my bedroom for the night, I paced the small room like a caged animal.
In a way, I was.
It was the same room where I’d been kept earlier that year, rehabilitating from surgery to repair a trio of gunshot wounds. Surely glamorous accommodations existed somewhere in the secret compound, but this room certainly wasn’t one of them.
Mine was more like a second-rate hotel room, though here I had no control over the keypad-controlled deadbolt whose code was unknown to me. I didn’t even know my location within the confines of the Mist Palace—I was always transported to and from this space while blindfolded and under guard.
Now I’d be alone until the following morning, when the Handler would fly me to South America to meet my new mercenary team. We’d be off to wage war against the Handler’s enemies, an assignment I’d requested—but the long night ahead of me would be unbearable.
I was plagued by mental claustrophobia, my thoughts swarming in a bar brawl fight to decipher Ian’s message. Or was there anything to decipher? His facts about the Triple Frontier were surely true at risk of the Handler’s people catching him in a lie—but what about the rest? Why reference Boss, or my assassination of Saamir? He’d said nothing that couldn’t be fact-checked there, either. The Handler had quoted my dead teammates during my Outfit interview, proving what I’d later been told—our team house was under surveillance the entire time.
A sudden spike of pain ran up my spine, forcing me to stop pacing and sit on the bed. I lay sideways on the mattress, shifting uncomfortably to prevent the full-body ache from intensifying.
The source of pain was obvious enough.
When Ian was imprisoned eight months earlier, the Handler forced me into service as a deep cover agent. My mission was to uncover a disloyal operative, who turned out to be a beautiful redhead named Sage. She was an assassin and seductress of such skill that she alone stood capable of outsmarting and killing the Handler.
And that’s exactly what she’d tried to do.
To say that Sage had rescued me would be truthful but misleading. In this bizarre criminal underworld, she saved my life only by faking my death. I’d been a willing disciple to her assassination plot up until the bitter end, when I discovered that she intended to detonate the Handler’s nuclear device amid thousands of innocent people in Rio de Janeiro. It took considerable effort to dismantle her coup, and even more to kill her. I was quite handy with a gun, but she was a trained martial artist and quickly disarmed me.
Now, my body still ached from the hilltop battle that ensued—one that had very nearly killed me. But in the end I’d cheated to win, using a poisoned pen to kill Sage. In the process I’d saved the Handler’s life, earned Ian’s freedom, and been assigned a mercenary team to lead in South America.
I rolled to my side on the bed, tucking my hands beneath my head in a failed bid to get comfortable. The physical pain was, as usual, bearable. But far worse than the bruises and welts from hand-to-hand combat was the scene that unfolded in the Handler’s court upon my return. I could happily endure the judgment and hatred of him and his executive staff, but when his daughter Parvaneh entered, it took everything I had not to beg her forgiveness.
She had fallen in love with me after I saved her life in Rio, but that sentiment cooled considerably upon her discovery that I was her father’s would-be assassin. Moments later, when she found out that my former mercenary team had mistakenly killed Roshan, her fiancée and the father of her daughter, any love Parvaneh felt toward me turned resolutely to hate.
She was unable to even look at me in the courtroom, and her resentment had turned my participation in the upcoming war in South America from a career move into a welcome reprieve.
The thought of Parvaneh made me restless, and so I heaved myself up from the bed and began to pace once more. Checking my watch, I saw that I’d scarcely been in the room for an hour.
I forced my mind back to Ian’s message as I walked back and forth, turning on my heels when I reached the wall. His dream that Saamir was alive in his office—what had that meant? And why had he tried to assure me that I could return from South America alive?
I had to figure it out—if I didn’t, the Handler’s people would.
Or maybe they already had.
Suddenly I heard the clatter of the keypad outside my door—someone was opening my cell, a process that inevitably ended in me being transported like a prisoner. The armed guards, the handcuffs and blindfold, the visionless shuffle to wherever they were leading me next.
But no one was scheduled to get me until morning.
They’d figured out something in Ian’s message, I realized, and were coming to take me away. The deal was broken, or the Handler had simply changed his mind.
The door swung open and closed with alarming quickness, a single tall figure sweeping inside my room in the interim.
Parvaneh.
Her electric green eyes met mine as she stood before me.
She made no move to advance further, though I could reasonably guess why she had come. I looked to her hands—to my surprise, they were empty.
“If you want my life,” I said, “you can have it.”
“I’m not here to hurt you. I came alone, and in secrecy.”
I almost laughed in her face. “There are no secrets here. No one walks around the Mist Palace unnoticed.”
“No one,” she said, with a confident smile, “except me.”
“What about the guards, the cameras?”
“I have my own way around those.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’m the only one who has seen this place through the eyes of a child.”
I shrugged. “Meaning…what?”
“Meaning no one is aware that I am here.”
I remembered Sage’s description of the fort’s exhaustive defenses and security protocols, and felt at my core that no such secret route existed. It was simply inconceivable.
