Black Flagged Redux Read online

  He zeroed in on the second sentry and fired a hasty shot, knowing that the first round had passed over the remaining sentries, travelling at over 2100 feet per second, and the sound would be unmistakable. The second projectile struck the man center mass, and the wall behind the guard turned dark green in his scope. By the time he had quickly centered the crosshairs on one of the two guards near the SUVs, all three of the breach teams had reached the building undetected. Two of the teams ascended the stairs, and one climbed an affixed ladder on the far side and headed for the roof.

  He fired two shots, quickly alternating between the guards on the ground, dropping each of them unceremoniously to the hard gravel. One of the SUV windows shattered, reminding Petrovich that the high velocity rounds seated in his rifle’s magazine tended to exit humans at these ranges, unlike the smaller caliber hollow point projectiles fired from pistols. He checked the bodies for signs of movement. If one of them managed to operate their handheld radio, the breach team would have a big problem. He saw an arm move for one of the compact assault rifles lying in the gravel. Petrovich’s rifle bucked, and the movement stopped. He quickly changed rifle magazines and aimed at one of the second-story windows, waiting for the lights to go out.

  He didn’t envy the teams tasked with entering the building. Everyone inside was heavily armed and anything could go wrong. He felt lucky to be lying on top of a quadruple stacked shipping container, nearly three stories up, well removed from the danger below. Things had worked out decently enough for Jess and him in Argentina, and he had no intention of taking a bullet to help Sanderson pay off a debt to one of his crony supporters.

  **

  Five minutes later, over six hundred miles away near the Chilean border, General Sanderson’s satellite phone rang. He answered the call and listened for a few seconds.

  “That’s great news, Rich. See you back at the ranch.” He leaned back in one of the leather chairs situated around the lodge’s stone fireplace and relished in the team’s success, the program’s success…his success. He had sent twelve operatives into Buenos Aires to execute a high risk raid on behalf of Ernesto Galenden, their “unofficial” sponsor in Argentina, and it had gone off without a hitch. This was fantastic news, given that Sanderson had decided against fully stacking the team with their most experienced operators. With a number of them just over a year into their formal training, the newer recruits needed opportunities like these to hone their skills and instincts.

  The final body count at the container yard had been eighteen. He suspected that the message would be received clearly by the remaining Chechen mafia heads, and if not, Sanderson would gladly send them another. He wanted to keep Galenden happy. The headquarters compound and surrounding training areas turned out to be ideal, and he needed at least another eighteen months in Argentina before he could start pushing the newest batch of operatives into their assigned areas of operation (AO). Presently, he could deploy most of the operatives into their AO’s for short assignments, but they lacked the fine tuning necessary to ensure their longer term survival. Fine tuning that came with consistent practice and patience.

  So far, the program’s progress had exceeded most expectations, despite the challenges involved in getting the Middle East program off the ground. Viable recruits for this group had proven difficult to find and screen, especially candidates with prior military or law enforcement experience and most importantly, fluency in either Farsi or Arabic. Sanderson had overstated the program’s Middle East capabilities when he struck a sudden truce with Karl Berg and the CIA two years ago. He knew that Berg had seen a healthy portion of the original Black Flag files and would believe that Sanderson had re-engineered a new program to face America’s biggest perceived threat: radical Islam.

  The fact that Berg had gone “off the books” to hire a covert assassination team had led Sanderson to believe that Berg was a player. He was an expert at reading people, and Berg struck him as the kind of career CIA officer who normally worked within the system, but who had enough salt to cross the line if the potential payoff was big enough. Sanderson had been correct in all of his assumptions, and once Berg accepted the deal over the phone, there was no turning back.

  In less than two years, Sanderson planned to have the entire program fully capable of conducting sustained operations throughout the world, right on the doorstep of every pressing threat to U.S. national security. At that point, it would only be a matter of time before they stumbled onto something big enough to give him the leverage needed to pull his program back into the fold as a legitimate and necessary extension of the United States.

  For now, he had the generosity of several wealthy and extremely influential powerbrokers who professed the same commitment to worldwide stability as Sanderson, but their support came with a price. The occasional “favor” had turned into a monthly distraction, which provided his operatives with real world experience, but also underscored the fact that he was no longer ultimately calling the shots. Sanderson’s practical side had long ago come to terms with this arrangement, but for a man who had “run the show” for decades, it gnawed at him. The sooner he could break free from these shackles the better.

  General Sanderson stood up and pushed the remaining glowing ashes around in the fireplace. The fire had long ago died, but the embers had kept him warm enough while he waited for word from the team. He turned off the light, relying on instinct to get him to the front door of the headquarters lodge, and opened the wooden door to step outside into the frigid winter night. A thin layer of snow covered the ground, illuminated by the first quarter moon that beamed through the valley at a low angle above the Andean foothills. The valley was deathly silent, except for the sound of water trickling past larger rocks in the exposed riverbed ahead of the lodge.

  He stepped onto a worn path to his right and cleared the lodge, crunching the freshly fallen snow under his boots. He glanced around, confirming that all of the compound’s lights were out, except for the one he had expected to see shining through the thick trees of the forest. His last duty of the night would be to let Jessica Petrovich know that Daniel was fine.

  The Petroviches remained somewhat of an enigma to Sanderson. He had never met two people more tightly connected than Daniel and Jessica. He had limited information regarding their relationship in Serbia, but he was convinced that something had happened in Belgrade to seal these two together forever, aside from their audacious plan to steal over a hundred million dollars from Srecko Hadzic. He wasn’t overly concerned about their secret, but it kept him from fully trusting them.

  He could already sense that Jessica was losing her interest in the program. Much to his surprise and pleasure, she had embraced her duties as an instructor with a raw eagerness that painfully contrasted Daniel’s less than enthusiastic arrival at the compound. Gradually, they had reversed roles, and now he found Daniel deeply immersed in the program while Jessica was drifting, which wasn’t the only thing that worried Sanderson. Lately, she struck him as less emotionally stable than when she first arrived. If he couldn’t control—or at least predict—her behavior, she could quickly become a major liability. It was something for him to consider, and watch with a keen eye.

  He softened his footsteps as he turned down the path that would lead him up to her door. Terrence Sanderson didn’t have many fears. An active thirty year career in Army Special Forces had cured him of that useless emotion. Still, as he slowly approached the Petrovichs’ timber A-Frame, he kept imagining Jessica inviting him inside and cutting his throat. Most men might have a different fantasy about Jessica Petrovich, but for Sanderson, his thoughts about her always involved a quick, razor-sharp knife. She was starting to get under his skin, and he didn’t like it.

  BLACK TIDE

  Early April 2007

  Chapter 1

  8:05 PM

  Foothills of Kurchatov

  Republic of Kazakhstan

  Anatoly Reznikov stared at the fading ribbon of cerulean blue sky over the darkened steppe. He sa
t in the back of a cheap Russian four-door sedan, likely rented at the airport in Semipalatinsk (Semey), where he would soon board a privately chartered aircraft. From there he would fly unescorted to an airport in western Russia. Generous prepayments ensured that he could walk straight from the plane to a four-wheel drive vehicle, with no questions or hassle. Of course, this had all supposedly been arranged for him by his new partners, while he worked on their product at the laboratory. Reznikov didn’t expect them to honor the final terms of the contract, so he had made his own arrangements.

  The driver was still headed vaguely in the right direction, but Anatoly knew the man had taken a subtle turn down a dead end spur, which might have gone unnoticed in the dark, especially if he hadn’t been paying close attention to every single action, facial expression…even word, uttered by his partners, as the project neared completion. It also helped that he could understand what they were saying, a fact he had kept secret from everyone, especially his new “partners.”

  Over the past few weeks, he had overheard some interesting conversations about “covering their tracks” and “getting rid of any links.” The phrases had churned his stomach and made it nearly impossible for him to focus on the transfer of his product to the delivery devices. He had expected to be killed at any moment, either in the lab or his room, and the suspense had nearly crippled him as he played scenario after scenario in his head, trying to determine if they had realized that either of his assistants could complete the final steps of the project without his help.

  He had become a nervous wreck during those weeks, plagued by stomach problems, unexplained sweating episodes, and numerous other symptoms of severe paranoia. All of that suddenly vanished when they announced that he would be transported to the airport as agreed. His “friend” Ahmad spoke right in front of him to a rough-looking man Reznikov had never seen at the lab complex: “Get rid of him.”

  As soon as the words were spoken, Anatoly felt calm, almost relieved. He found himself looking forward to the ride. Finally, he could get on with the plan he had set in motion nearly three years earlier, when he first tried to contact these traitorous jackals.

  He wished there had been some way to keep the final product out of their hands, but this crew didn’t mess around and there had been no opportunity to sabotage the project while keeping what he needed. He wouldn’t get the second part of his payment, but it didn’t matter. He had exactly what he had set out to obtain sitting in two innocuous, specially designed, thermos-sized coolers, snuggled into the backpack sitting next to him.

  The car continued for another minute and then slowed to a stop.

  “I think we took a wrong turn. I need to look at the map to try and make sense of these dirt roads. This is the middle of nowhere,” the driver said in broken Russian.

  The driver opened the door and walked forward, unfolding a map. The front passenger joined him, and they flattened the map on the hood, examining it with a flashlight for a few seconds. Suddenly, the interior roof lamp bathed the car in a dingy orange light and the man in the rear passenger seat next to Anatoly started to exit the vehicle. He exchanged a few words in Arabic with the men huddled around the map and stuck his head back in the car.

  “It’s an old Russian map. They need your help reading it,” Ahmad said.

  “No problem,” he said.

  Reznikov opened the door to join the three Al Qaeda operatives, who were staring quizzically at a map that had given them no problems on previous occasions. As he approached, the new passenger pointed to an odd cluster of hills to the southwest.

  “We’re trying to figure out where we are. Can you see if those hills break apart in the middle? If they do, I know exactly where we are. You might have to walk down the road a bit,” he said and went back to the map.

  “Sure,” Anatoly said and continued walking.

  As he reached a point alongside the three men, he drew a compact GSh-18 pistol from a large flapped pocket on his dark brown overcoat and fired two 9mm hollow point bullets into each of their heads. He started with Ahmad, who faced him on the other side of the hood, and rapidly dispatched the remaining two extremists, before they had even straightened their bodies in response to the deafening noise.

  In the reflected light of the car’s high beams, he watched the mystery passenger’s body slide down the side of the car, taking the blood and brain matter-stained map with him. Ahmad and the driver lay on the road next to the car. In the dusty illumination of the dropped flashlight, he watched Ahmad’s left foot twitch erratically, until it slowed and stopped.

  Satisfied that the men were dead, he returned to the car and opened the trunk. Inside, he found exactly what he had expected. A cardboard box filled with spray bottles of cleaning solvent and assorted rags. Like Reznikov, his “partners” had no intention of returning a bloodstained car to the rental agency at the Semey Airport. He took the cleaning supplies and grabbed the flashlight from the side of the road. He’d start with the larger brain pieces.

  Chapter 2

  1:24 AM

  Caucasus Mountains

  Southern Dagestan

  Captain Vasily Tischenko fought with the controls as he tracked the infrared navigation lights of the lead helicopter through the incredibly tight, tree-lined canyon. His grainy perception of the scene through night vision goggles (NVGs) told him that he had plenty of room, and his limited experience flying similar missions validated the deceptive green image that flickered and changed without warning. He had supervised the detailed route planning with the other pilots and knew logically that the Mi-8MS “Hip’s” rotors had ample clearance from the rocky, pine-covered sides of the small river valley, but he had long ago learned never to trust anything but his instruments while flying at night.

  Unfortunately, the only useful information he received from his cockpit controls told him that he had one hundred feet between the helicopter and the ground, and the altimeter hadn’t been installed with night-vision flying in mind. Normally, he could check the altimeter and trim gauges with a flicker of his eyes, but the night vision goggles severely limited his field of vision, requiring him to move his head and take his eyes off the helicopter ahead of them.

  He despised flying with NVGs and relied on his copilot to check several instruments for him, most importantly, their route. His copilot monitored a recently installed low light GPS screen and called out their position relative to the calculated track, which gave him some reassurance that they wouldn’t slam into the side of the valley. Tischenko figured that if the lead helicopter didn’t crash and burst into flames, they would probably be fine on the approach. He had enough distance between them to avoid a deadly pileup.

  As with all Alpha Group Spetsnaz operations, the pilots had been given scant details regarding the nature of the target, only the ingress and egress routes, timeline, and expected support tactics. Tischenko had only flown two other missions for Alpha Group, and one had been aborted thirty minutes into the flight. The other had been a fairly straightforward insertion, in an uncontested landing zone near Grozny.

  Overall, Tischenko’s year in Chechnya had been quiet, as most of insurgency had been quelled by the time his helicopter squadron had started its year-long rotation. This had suited him well. A ready supply of SA-7 “Grail” surface–to-air missile launchers had been distributed to the rebels by mutinous Chechen regiments, and dozens of helicopters had been lost in similar operations during the early years of the insurgency. Helicopter losses were a rarity these days, which gave Tischenko all the more hope that he would make it back to attend his daughter Elena’s third birthday party.

  The captain’s stomach pitched as the helicopter unexpectedly dropped fifteen feet, and he nudged the collective to raise the 22,000 pound chunk of metal back to a steady altitude. He was careful not to overreact, since the close walls of the canyon would not be very forgiving of an overcorrection. The helicopter bucked again, and he repeated the process, fighting a sudden torque problem, as wind shears from his own rotor was
h came back from the valley walls directly across his tail. He delicately applied pressure to pedals that controlled the tail rotor blade pitch, and kept the fully-laden assault helicopter pointed at the center of the Alpha One. He had fought thousands of these small aerodynamic battles since entering the river valley fifteen minutes ago, and could barely wait to get out of these narrow confines. He sensed no change to the vibrations of his helicopter, which settled his stomach…slightly. He could detect the slightest changes to his helicopter and could often detect a problem before the helicopter’s own fault sensors.

  He wished there was an easier route to their target, but he understood the need for their clandestine approach. Three helicopters were about to drop sixty Alpha Group “special operators” onto a single site, which meant their target was important and probably heavily defended. He figured they had another minute before banking hard left and dropping directly into the middle of the insurgent base.

  Once he made the turn, his helicopter would be less than one minute from dropping twenty of Russia’s most highly trained Spetsnaz into the darkness. There would be no room overhead to hover and provide cover fire for the commandos. They had been instructed to climb out of the valley and use the nearby hills for cover until the operation had concluded. If requested, one helicopter would return for close air support. Luckily for Tischenko, that task fell to Alpha One.

  “One minute to Final Waypoint,” the copilot said over the internal communications circuit.

  Following standard procedure, the copilot flashed the muted dark red lights in the troop compartment, which would let the commandos know that their insertion was imminent. They knew the drill better than Tischenko’s crew and would be moving around the compartment making last second preparations. His two gunners would start to spin the barrels of their GshG-7.62mm miniguns, in preparation for the short period of time they would be allowed to engage targets of opportunity on the ground. It would be the only support Alpha Group would receive from the air, and his gunners wanted to make it count.