Dead in Their Tracks (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Story Book 1) (14 page)

Chapter 30

Ketamine was a tricky drug to use on
humans. Too much and the subject wouldn’t recover, succumbing to heart failure.
Too little and you’d have a wobbly drunk coherent enough to trigger the alarm
and foil your breaching plans.

The use of ketamine by covert operatives
was considered old school and many of the newer operators simply relied on more
powerful opiates that were less risky. Anatoly however had used the drug enough
to be able to roughly estimate the subject’s weight to deliver the approximate
dosage. More importantly, the drug and accompanying rifle could be obtained
through surreptitious entry into a veterinary clinic, which Anatoly had done on
7
^th
and Broadway in a quick after-hours stop he and his men had made
in Bakersfield. The rifle was used for subduing feral dogs or the occasional
coyote or bobcat that wandered into the neighborhood and Anatoly had liberated
it from the clinic along with a number of other sedatives.

As he squatted on one knee in the bushes
beside the electric fence of the building ahead, he slipped the miniscule dart
inside the tranquilizer rifle and steadied the front sight on the lone guard,
twenty yards distant. Killing wasn’t in the plan for breaching the compound
unless things really went south, though he wouldn’t hesitate to drive a round
through Nelson Ritter’s caveman skull if given the opportunity tonight.

He had never met the man but all of his
covert work during the years kept pointing to the despicable creature as the
conductor of endless suffering in the nations bordering the Caspian Sea.
Thwarting his plans would put an end to the strife Ritter had promulgated for
decades, costing the lives of thousands of innocent villagers in Turkmenistan where
the proposed oil pipeline was supposed to be constructed.

Anatoly’s mind drifted back to another
time and what seemed like a different era of warfare. Just after the fall of
the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkmenistan went from being a Soviet constituent to
its sovereign nation. Many other countries, including Israel, wanted to have
their claws sunk into the back of the world’s fourth largest reserve of natural
gas. Anatoly was a young Mossad officer on his first major assignment overseas.
His unit inserted into the Badkyz desert region that bordered northeastern Iran
and provided training and support for Turkmen rebels fighting against a newly
formed group called Al Qaeda that had just recently sprung up along the border
in northwestern Afghanistan. The Cold War carryover of the mujahedeen were
hoping to gain a foothold for opium production fields in the newly formed
country of Turkmenistan.

Anatoly was instructed to teach the ad-hoc
group of Turkmen rebels that were strung out in villages over a hundred mile
region in the Sangar Valley, a rugged desert region that depended on a
centuries-old trade route to move cotton to ports in the Caspian Sea. For eight
months, he lived and trained with the hardy desert dwellers whose austere
lifestyle he came to admire, eventually growing fond of a young widow and her son.

During the onset of fall, he was to lead
their first large resistance fight against a fledgling Al Qaeda group massing
near the mountain pass thirty miles to the southwest. Policy intervened at the
last minute, the order to pull out coming from central command in Israel. He
later found out this was caused by dwindling support for the rebellion in U.S.
political circles due to their backing of the Gulf War, which had just unfolded.
Anatoly and his men along with their battery of weapon platforms situated in
the mountains were recalled within days.

Two weeks after returning to Tel Aviv, he
learned that the main villages in the Sangar Valley were overrun by armored
vehicles from Afghanistan, his informants and friends amongst the Turkmen either
dead or missing. Eventually news of the deaths of the young woman and her
little boy reached him. He still remembered the dreadful December day that tore
the fabric of his soul. Anatoly never spoke of the failed mission and its
aftermath except to his daughter and only then after the veil of secrecy was
removed by the Israeli government when they de-listed classified documents
years later.

He had spent the past thirty years doing
what he could to trickle his own funds to the few survivors in Sangar, trying
to rebuild their villages. With the formation of his own company, he opened
several relief charities for people in Turkmenistan and always looked for ways
to insert his organization into rescue operations there.

Now with the impending pipeline that
Ritter was planning to build, the Sangar Valley people would be forcibly
relocated or even eradicated if Ritter could find a way.

Anatoly took a deep breath and focused his
mind back in the present, inhaling the fragrance of the lilacs around him. He
looked over at Petra, who was disabling the electric fence at the junction box
a hundred yards to his right. The young man with the anemic goatee turned and
gave him a thumbs-up. Anatoly refocused his rifle sight and sent the projectile
downrange into the soft tissue above the guard’s clavicle. The man winced,
staggered a few feet to the entrance door, and collapsed on the blacktop.

Petra and three other men began feverishly
snipping a small entrance through the fence with their bolt cutters while
Anatoly kept his eyes focused on the building entrance and main road. Thirty
seconds later, they all crawled through, running in a low squat across the open
field to the steel front door. Anatoly paused to check the guard’s pulse while
Petra took the man’s keys and opened the heavy door.

The sign above them indicated,
State of
California Power Relay Substation #12.

The location was ideal: off the main
roads, minimally protected, and of small significance to the larger power grid
in California. Anatoly’s computer techs back in Israel had identified the sight
for its vestigial connection to estates and businesses located in northwest
Anaheim. Aeneid’s internal power systems were too well-protected to breach from
inside and they had their own internal generator system in the event of any
issues with the power grid. However, any ripple effect in the electricity
output from the relay substation would send an immediate alert to the Los
Angeles County Fire Department which would then dispatch units to each of the
affected homes or businesses to inquire about critical power surges that could
result in fires. Such lessons were gleaned from the ’94 Northridge earthquake
and it was standard protocol for electrical-related emergencies.

Anatoly walked to the back room, opening
the door silently and slipping behind another guard at a work station. He
artfully slid his arms around the man’s wispy neck, employing a sleeper hold,
then lowered his limp figure to the floor. He stood before the control console,
searching for the manual override lever that would temporarily deactivate the
current emanating from the forty acres of electrical towers outside the
building.

He found the lever and then glanced at his
watch. “Four minutes,” he muttered to his men behind him who were fanned out
along the entrance door. “That’s a long time to be stuck in a building with
only one exit.”

Chapter 31

Mitch was kneeling beside a terraced
assemblage of rocks near the entrance to a two-story mansion. The eight-foot-high
wrought-iron fence came to a flared point sharp enough to deter a climber. He
knew it was also electrified given the faint humming emanating from the main
support posts.

Through his binoculars he could make out
the shapes of two Rottweilers roaming around the front entrance. The manicured
lawn between the fence and the house was nearly one hundred feet long and he
knew that such trained dogs would be on him within seconds. Mitch had done
extensive counter-dog training against Belgian Malinois attack dogs while in
the Special Forces and was well aware of the savagery contained beneath their
stolid eyes.

“Why the hell didn’t we get a tranq gun
like your pops?” he whispered to Dev, who knelt a few feet away, her eyes fixed
on her small laptop screen.

Dev sighed and hit her fist against her
leg. “We have to get closer to the house. I can’t force my computer to pair
with Nelson’s system from here.”

Mitch rubbed the whiskers on his chin and
took a hard swallow as he looked at the Rotties again. “What the hell do you
mean, ‘pairing it from here’? I thought we were going inside to use his setup
to decrypt the file you have.”

“The computer network inside Ritter’s
estate is routed into the mainframe at Aeneid, true, but it doesn’t access
critical files like the one in my possession. However, if I can hack into his
remote work terminal from here and route it through Jessica Carter’s system in
her office, we should be able to access it that way.  Coupled with the power blackout
my father is about to implement, it will hopefully create the panic needed at
Aeneid to drive them to their weapons cache.”

Mitch grabbed her arm, pivoting her
slightly. “You can’t access the files you have at all, can you? You never
could.”

“At first I suspected it might work but
the more I labored on it last night at the cabin, the more I realized the
encryption was unbreakable except at Aeneid. If we can draw them out, make them
think we’ve gained access through Carter’s system, then they can lead us to the
staging area.”

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“Only when I knew for sure it was our only
option. My father said you can be, well,” she paused, weighing her words, “rigid
when it comes to certain things.” She averted her eyes from his and resumed
glancing at her laptop. “I was here once for a work party he and his wife put
on so I know the general layout. I need to be within twenty feet of the house
for my malware to slip past the cyber defenses in his home office.”

Mitch kept glaring at her while shaking
his head. “You and your old man make a good pair alright—all these endless
fucking secrets. You sure that’s the world you want to live in?” He shrugged
his shoulders and exhaled. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yeah, I need to be within twenty goddam
feet of Ritter’s house—you got that?!”

He muttered to himself and then stood in a
partial squat, waving his arm furiously for her to follow him along the fence
line to the rear of the property.

“What’s your plan for tracking them if
they buy into this?”

“I’ve got satellite imagery of their
facility and my computer is set up for auto-surveillance of any of their
vehicles coming or going from Aeneid.”

“Ah, I don’t even want to know what satellite
was hacked to obtain that.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you anyway,
cowboy.”

Arriving at the rear of the property,
Mitch reached into his pack and carefully removed six water balloons whose
liquid contents were an amalgamation of bacon bits, sardines, and peanut butter
that he had picked up at a grocery store on the outskirts of Anaheim. “If this concoction
doesn’t work, then I don’t know what will.” He readied one of the balloons in
his palm. “Most high-end guard dogs won’t defer to a slab of meat laced with
tranquilizers tossed on the ground as they’ve been forcibly trained out of that
temptation. This shit, though, will trigger their scent drive long enough to
distract them while you work your magic.”

She looked at the flash-bang grenades
dangling off his vest. “You can always go the easy route. It won’t kill them.”

“No, but it will fuck their hearing up for
life. Ritter is the only one that’s a true son of a bitch, not the dogs.”

Dev glanced at her watch, counting down
the seconds to the timeline she and her father had calibrated on their watches.
It was nearly 4 AM and they would lose the benefit of darkness soon. She raised
her hand up, showing her five fingers extended, then counted down as the
designated time arrived. When the last finger folded, Mitch flung the balloons
thirty feet onto the pavement by the nearest wall then whistled. The exterior
security lights went dim as Anatoly’s sabotage efforts came to fruition.

Dev bolted a hundred yards down to the
gate and belly-crawled under the tiny spacing, making sure not to touch the
metal in case the power went back on unexpectedly. Confirming that the dogs
were gone, she ran from shrub to shrub until she was at the back wall. With her
laptop bag slung on her back, she climbed up the protruding exterior rock
façade until she reached a patio on the second floor. She saw French doors with
thick glass. Inside was Ritter’s office with the computer a few feet away.

Dev knew the type of security system
Ritter had in place and that she had to use her laptop malware to force pairing
with his computer before the main power came back online. Once a modern hard drive
was affected by power loss, its older network systems were vulnerable for a few
minutes until security patches were overlaid. Dev began typing, uploading the
malware that would insert itself into a back door into Aeneid’s mainframe via
the portal inside the office. Whether she could access the file in her
possession was another story but it would alert the technicians at Aeneid that
there was a security breach and hopefully put the dice in play. 

She just wanted this to be over. Too much
time away from home, away from her parents, and submerging herself as Mira
Sanchez had chipped away the layers of her psyche. She wasn’t sure if she was
cut out to take over her father’s company one day as he had alluded to and
while she was good at what she did, the main reason for staying was to be
closer to him.
Hopefully this will do it and my life can return to some
version of normal. How I miss Tel Aviv, my mother’s cooking, and the smell of
cedars.
She saw the icon for the file indicating it was opening. Dev hastily
scanned the documents and email headings, searching for the answers she had so
desperately sought for days.

Down below, Mitch kept his suppressed
pistol focused on the Rottweilers, which had swung over his way after the
shrill sound only to come to a temporary halt at the wall of scent hovering over
the cement pathway. The strong odor in the air was almost too much for him and
he kept holding his breath.

A few minutes later, he saw Dev climbing
down from the upstairs porch. A moment later, the lights flickered back on,
illuminating her in the open like a dancer in the spotlight. The Rottweilers
immediately caught sight of her movement and emitted a low growl, which turned
into machine-gun barking before they bounded off in her direction.

There was no time to use the flash-bangs
and it would only impair Dev’s escape. He took off running along the fence,
raising his pistol and firing off two rounds into a propane tank attached to
the outdoor barbecue. The patio erupted in a small mushroom cloud, rattling the
back windows and sending lawn chairs airborne. The dogs split apart in a panic,
veering off from their trajectory and away from their target. They retreated to
either side of a woodshed at the property’s edge while Dev retraced her steps
under the fence, making it to the curb where Mitch caught up with her.

“Nicely done,” he said. “Now all we need
is a helicopter to whisk us away to the crime scene I hope you’re gonna tell me
you got the location of.”

She gave him a thumbs-up as they sprinted
back to their vehicle. “Everything but the helo, anyway.”

Getting inside, Mitch gunned the Subaru
down the winding road to the city lights below.