Target Response, page 17
Underlings had examined the package, inspecting it and its contents for an explosive device, even for indications that biological or chemical agents had been employed.
Once cleared, the package had been hand delivered by Knight to Gunther. Its contents consisted of a DVD in a hardened plastic case and, still more oddly, a picture postcard.
Puzzling…
The label had provided no clues to the sender’s identity. The sender was identified as one “Peter Collinson.” The name meant nothing to Gunther or Knight. The return address was a numbered room in Atlantic City’s main post office building. The room was revealed to be the dead letter office, the final resting place of letters that for some reason or another never reach their intended recipients and are returned to the postal system to be filed, forgotten, and ultimately destroyed.
The picture postcard held a still more ominous aspect. It was from Lagos, Nigeria, of a sort that could be picked up at the counter of any hotel gift shop. Considering Gunther’s recent shady dealings in that area and the setbacks he had suffered, he had summoned a business associate and partner in crime into the conference room for the first viewing of the DVD.
Blaise Carrollton was the founder and owner of the private security firm MYRMEX. He was middle-aged with wavy silver hair, a rosy, clean-shaven face, and the shiny, hard, dark eyes of a shark.
Only Gunther and a few trusted associates knew that rather than being safely ensconced in the tiny West European extradition-free principality of Lichtenstein, to which MYRMEX’s corporate headquarters had been relocated, Carrollton was back in the United States, in the Imperium penthouse, in fact. A number of Treasury Department agents and process servers would very much like to know that Carrollton was back in the States, where he could be subpeonaed and detained.
Gunther and Carrollton had sat down to view the DVD. Knight had loaded the DVD into the player. A big man built like a pro football lineman running slightly to fat, he had thinning, wispy blond hair and a jowly, hangdog face enlivened by shrewd blue eyes.
The DVD had started playing, the picture bursting into view on the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.
The footage had opened without preamble, explanation, or opening credits. A handheld cell phone camera had apparently been used to capture the sequence. It depicted a scene on the water, where a screaming man secured to the end of a long rope thrashed about in a cloudy, greenish-brown river.
Now, Carrollton started in his chair at the sight. He leaned forward, goggling, his mouth hanging open.
“Stop! Freeze the image!” he cried.
Knight worked the remote, freezing the frame. Carrollton peered disbelievingly at the face of the man in the picture.
“My God! It’s Thurlow!” he said.
“Thurlow—that’s our man in Lagos, isn’t he?” Gunther asked.
“He was,” Carrollton said. “He disappeared two weeks ago during that business in the Vurukoo fields. He headed the mission to, er, neutralize the two survivors who’d escaped the crash of the DIA flight.”
“Let’s see the rest of it,” Gunther told Knight. Knight resumed playing the DVD.
The scene shifted for a moment as the camera panned to the black mud beach, showing the mass of crocodiles crowding it. The sound track was uninterrupted, Thurlow’s shrieks and sobbing pleas for help continuing unabated.
The crocodiles picked themselves up from where they were lolling around in the mud and began streaming down the shore into the water. They moved surprisingly fast.
The camera returned to imaging Thurlow thrashing and screaming in the water as the crocodiles closed in on him. Surprising, too, was the amount of blood contained in a human body, as demonstrated by the red clouds that tinted the water as the crocs took Thurlow apart piece by piece.
No less surprising was how long and loudly Thurlow continued to scream even when there was so little of him left. He kept bellowing right until a crocodile bit off his head.
The DVD ended, the flat-screen TV going blank.
“Want to see it again?” Knight asked, after a pause.
“No, thanks,” Carrollton said crisply, biting off the words.
Gunther, white-lipped and shaken, got up and crossed to a sideboard where a minibar had been set up. He was so upset that he got himself a drink instead of having Knight fetch it.
Gunther splashed some bourbon in a glass and tossed it back straight, shuddering. He poured another and gulped that down. Some of the color came back in his face. He went to his chair and sank into it, staring at the blank screen.
“Well, now we know where Thurlow disappeared to—into the belly of a bunch of crocodiles,” Carrollton said grimly.
“Who could have been responsible for that atrocity?” Gunther asked.
“Thurlow was hunting two men, Kilroy and Raynor. We know he got Raynor because he reported it in. Looks like Kilroy got him, though,” Carrollton said.
“And how!” Knight exclaimed.
“Kilroy—that’s the one who shot our Nigerian deal all to hell when he blew the head off of Derek Tayambo,” Gunther said.
“We think so. There’s no concrete proof but the circumstantial evidence certainly points to it,” Carrollton said.
Having recovered from his initial fright at viewing the snuff footage, Gunther began to get angry. When he was angry he looked like a sullen, pouty child; he looked that way now.
“That was sloppy work, Blaise, very sloppy! Your MYRMEX people in Nigeria were responsible for getting Kilroy and you failed, costing us a great deal of money!”
Carrollton’s face stiffened. “The preliminary intelligence failed to detect the fact that Kilroy was a member of the Army’s Dog Team unit, a trained professional killer. That was Thurlow’s fault. We were relying on him and his sources in the CIA for the background material. He was the one connected to the agency, not us. He made the mistake.”
“He paid for it,” Gunther said.
“Kilroy’s Dog Team involvement prompted us to contract the Moray family to eliminate as many active-duty members of the unit as possible. As you well know, Simon.”
“I ought to,” Gunther muttered, scowling. “I had to give them a solid minority shareholding in MYRMEX before they would accept the deal.”
“A small price to pay. You’re still the majority stockholder in the company. You control it outright with ownership of fifty-one percent of the shares. I’m the second largest single shareholder,” Carrollton said.
“Which is why you’re still MYRMEX’s chairman of the board. But remember, Blaise, that chairmanship is predicated on success.”
“I’ll stand on the record. Since contracting the Morays, they’ve managed to eliminate eighteen active-duty members of the Dog Team, out of twenty-five members whom we know of. Eleven members here in the States and seven members abroad. It’s a small unit and it’s been virtually decimated, effectively put out of business.”
Carrollton went on, “What’s more, by using our Washington connections to wield the threat of public exposure of the team’s activities, we’ve managed to checkmate the Army from retaliating in kind against us. What more do you want?”
“I want Kilroy dead!” Gunther said.
“We’re working on it, Simon.”
“How so, Blaise? By dangling me as live bait to flush him out into the open?”
“Frankly, yes. Here in the Imperium you’re safer than the president in the Oval Office.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“Well, maybe that was a bad choice of words,” Carrollton said, shrugging. “But you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re here at the top of the Imperium tower, guarded by a small army of MYRMEX’s finest—fifty heavily armed trigger-pullers. What’s more, as your own personal private bodyguards, you’ve got the Morays right here at your beck and call. And no one is better motivated to want to finish off the Dogs. Remember, they’ve lost family to the team.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?” Gunther snapped. “I’d feel better if they were all hale and hearty and the last remaining Dogs were dead.”
“This is war, Simon. You can’t have a war without casualties. Besides, what do you care if some of your hired guns get smeared while protecting your interests? That’s what they get paid for,” Carrollton said.
That last comment caused Knight to look up from what he was doing at the DVD player and cut a hard side glance at Carrollton. Knight was unaffiliated with MYRMEX; he was directly in Gunther’s employ, and he had little love for Carrollton and his private army.
Neither Gunther nor Carrollton took any notice of Knight, any more than they did of the furniture.
Gunther picked up the picture postcard from Lagos and examined it. It depicted the pink and white Arabian Nights fantasia of the presidential palace. Written in block letters on the back of the card was the message:
WISH YOU WERE HERE.
“Kilroy sent this, didn’t he?” Gunther asked accusingly, as though Carrollton were responsible for the postcard and DVD.
“We think so,” Carrollton said.
“So he’s in the U.S.?”
“That’s a fair assumption.”
“Not just in the U.S. but near. Here—in Atlantic City. That’s where it was sent from,” Gunther said. “‘Wish you were here.’ That’s the palace in Lagos where Kilroy shot Tayambo dead with a sniper rifle.”
“Apparently.”
“When he says he wishes I was there, he means he wishes I was in the same spot as Tayambo so he could shoot me dead, too.”
Knight chimed in, “It could mean that he wishes you were where Ward Thurlow was.”
“That’s a cheery thought. He’d like to feed me alive to a bunch of crocodiles,” Gunther fumed.
Knight looked away in order not to betray the glimmer of pleasure that came into his eyes at the thought of his tempermental boss being devoured by killer reptiles.
“Don’t get hysterical, Simon,” Carrollton soothed. “Kilroy is doing just what we want. Finding him and his last few remaining associates in a nation of 333 million is like searching for a needle in a haystack. We want him to come to us. Then we’ll have him. No lone handful of ragtag Dogs, cut off from all official Army assistance, can ever get by the MYRMEX guards we’ve got posted all over the Imperium.”
“They’d better not, because if they do you’re going to be right here with me,” Gunther said.
“That’s why I’m here now instead of in Lichtenstein. I’m betting my life along with yours and I say it’s a no-lose wager, no gamble at all,” said Carrollton.
“It’d better be,” Gunther fumed. He examined the mailing label on the envelope the package had come in. “What’s this business about the return address being the dead letter office?”
“Some of Kilroy’s twisted sense of humor, I imagine. Apart from any negative connotations a dead letter suggests, it also refers to the fact that for some time the Dog Team operated under the cover of Mercury Transport Systems, a private courier company.”
“And the sender’s name, ‘Peter Collinson’? What’s that all about?”
Carrollton scratched his head. “Beats me. None of my people have been able to figure that one out yet. The name doesn’t track with any of the known Dog operatives or aliases.”
“I can shed some light on that,” Knight offered.
The other two looked at him.
“‘Peter Collinson’ is a piece of slang from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used primarily by railroading men. It means, simply, ‘nobody’—a phantom, someone who doesn’t exist,” Knight said.
“Where’d you pick up that nugget of information?” Carrollton demanded.
“I searched for it online,” Knight said, smiling meaninglessly.
Carrollton scowled.
“Some joker, that Kilroy! A real funny man,” Gunther said, his voice dripping sarcastic venom. “You could die laughing.”
“Let’s hope not, sir,” Knight said.
The other two gave him dirty looks. A knock sounded on the conference room door. It was one of Gunther’s executive assistants. Gunther told him to come in.
“Phone call for you on line five, sir,” the assistant said.
“What are you bothering me with that for? I’m busy. That’s what I keep you around for, to screen my calls,” Gunther said.
“This sounded important, sir. It’s a Dr. Dunkel.”
“Dunkel? What does he want?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Gunther, he wouldn’t tell me. Says he’ll only speak to you. An emergency, he says.”
“All right, I’ll take it,” Gunther said. “Get out!”
The assistant exited. Gunther picked up the phone, pushed the button for line five.
“Gunther here. Who’s this? Dunkel? What do you want? I sent you the check for this month—”
Gunther fell silent as the caller relayed his information. The news rocked him. He reeled, as if struck by a physical blow. Already pale, he took on a deathly white pallor.
The receiver slipped from his hands to fall clattering on the conference table. Gunther’s legs folded at the knees. He sat down hard in his chair.
Carrollton went to him. “What is it, Simon? What’s wrong?”
Gunther forced himself to respond:
“My wife—she’s been taken!”
THIRTEEN
Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Steve sat in the passenger-side seat of the cab of a Polar Pride laundry truck parked to one side of the Dunkel Wellness Center in the township of Mantoloking in south-central New Jersey.
Blazoned on both sides of the truck was the Polar Pride logo along with its motto: “Laundry White as the Driven Snow.”
Steve wore a white commander’s cap with stiff black visor, a long-sleeved white tunic and pants, and a pair of black boots. He held an M-4 carbine cradled in his lap, out of sight of anyone glancing at the truck.
“They’ve been in there a long time,” he said to the driver seated beside him.
The driver, Fred Osgood, rested his hands on the steering wheel. The truck idled, motor running.
“I don’t hear any shooting yet,” he said. “So far, so good.”
Like Steve, Fred was a Dog Team member, one of the last few such left alive. Since returning to the United States from Nigeria, Kilroy had managed to assemble a squad of veteran Dogs. In addition to Ireland and Osgood, he’d also collected team members Jessie Toler and Reuben Diaz, Jr.
The group had made its headquarters at a safe house in the town of Egg Harbor at the Jersey shore. Kilroy had laid out the whys and wherefores of the unprecedented onslaught that had been leveled at the Dog Team.
Behind it lay the hidden hand of financier Simon E. Gunther. Using his complete and unlimited control of brokerage house Saxbee Mangold’s Transworld Capital Fund, Gunther had assumed majority ownership of private security contractor MYRMEX. Gunther kept MYRMEX founder and owner Blaise Carrollton on as company CEO.
The Transworld Capital Fund and MYRMEX worked in concert with Nigerian strongman Minister of Defense Derek Tayambo to cut a billion-dollar deal to build an oil transshipment port in Lagos. Central to the deal was the understanding that the completed port would be bought by the People’s Republic of China. Rich, resource hungry, the PRC made its primary foreign goal in the Third World locking up future supplies of oil and rare minerals. The PRC had involved MYRMEX as a cutout to hide its part in the arrangement from U.S. intelligence. Once the completed port was in Red Chinese hands, Tayambo would ensure that Nigeria’s vast oil reserves would be sold exclusively to the PRC, cutting the United States off at the oil spigot.
The Defense Intelligence Agency sent an investigative team to Nigeria to probe the murky doings. The investigators had unearthed the Transworld/MYRMEX/PRC triumvirate and was about to head back home to Washington to make a full report to the Pentagon.
Rogue CIA agent Ward Thurlow, MYRMEX’s man in Lagos, alerted the Gunther interests to the DIA team’s threat. Gunther had ordered that the investigators be neutralized, that is, killed. Their homeward-bound plane was blown up in midair, slaying eight investigators and destroying their painstakingly amassed evidence. Kilroy and Raynor escaped the slaughter by virtue of their being away in the Vurukoo oil fields following up some investigative leads.
Raynor was killed but Kilroy escaped the net, feeding Ward Thurlow alive to the crocodiles. Kilroy had his own connections in Lagos, contacts and friends unknown to his Dog Team handlers and the CIA. They enabled him to surface in Lagos and assassinate Minister Tayambo with a sniper rifle.
Tayambo’s death monkeywrenched the Transworld/PRC oil deal. Vice President Johnny Lisongu, pro-Western in sympathies and aware that Tayambo had been killed by an American assassin, thereby securing his place as the new power center in the Nigerian governing cabinet, threw out the MYRMEX contract to build the new port and the PRC oil deal, negotiating a new arrangement with Washington.
Unaware of the extent of the Dog Team’s knowledge of his dirty dealings and fearing their vengeance, Gunther authorized MYRMEX CEO Blaise Carrollton to contract an elimination operation against the Dog’s strike force, the active-duty field operative assassins, who numbered about two dozen in all.
Carrollton farmed the contract to Clan Moray, a family dynasty of private assassins who’d been in the murder-for-hire game for more than a century. The Morays were paid a substantial sum along with a large block of stock shares in MYRMEX, allying their fortunes with that of the company.
A traitor inside the Dog Team apparatus gave the Morays detailed inside information about their targets, the active-duty operatives. Using the arts of subterfuge, deceit, and sudden death, the family killed some eighteen Dog Team members, all of them unaware that they had been fingered for death.
Gunther’s go-betweens communicated to Pentagon bigs the message that the Army’s assassination unit’s existence would remain a secret as long as the military took no action against Gunther, Transworld, or MYRMEX. Otherwise the explosive information would be leaked to Transworld’s many friendly contacts in the media, who would splash it all throughout the mainstream media, creating a firestorm of negative press that would adversely impact not only the Army and the U.S. military but the nation’s vital national security interests throughout the world.
