Dead in Their Tracks (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Story Book 1) (3 page)

Chapter 3

Phoenix, Present Day

Mitch drove his dusty green jeep up I-10
then hopped onto the less congested Highway 101 which carried him across the
east valley. Though it was Sunday, drivers were still bent on exceeding the
speed limit by fifteen miles, tailgating and zipping between lanes without
signaling. For a moment, he was glad that he was not on the metro Phoenix
Police Department or he’d have gotten in his daily quota of speeding tickets
within the hour.

He stopped at the Safeway grocery store in
Cave Creek on the edge of the desert. He loaded up on a twelve-pack of cold Corona
beer along with enough trimmings for making enchiladas for dinner.

Driving along the sinewy dirt road that
led out of the small town, he skirted along Cottonwood Creek for eighteen miles
until he arrived at the ranch entrance which was little more than a
wrought-iron gate beside a stock pond laced with cattails. As he stepped out to
unlatch the lock, he noticed a set of boot prints in the dusty soil of the road
which overlaid the older tire tracks of the ranchers leading out from last
night. The pattern had two oval figures in the heel section and lightning
bolt-shaped lines running up the center towards the toes. There was a slight
micro-tear, a mere crack, on the right shoe near where the little toe would be.
The shoe size indicated a size seven or eight and the slender contours of the
inner arch revealed it was most likely a woman though there were no absolutes
in tracking. You gathered all the data you could from the ground and your
surroundings and made your best guesstimate. This time, though, he was puzzled
by the unfamiliar tread and hoped his precious days off wouldn’t be consumed
with a search.

Mitch figured the tracks probably belonged
to one of the owner’s daughters who may have stayed behind. The only other
person at the ranch was Miguel, an old, nearly deaf Mexican cowboy who rarely
ventured off his front porch anymore. Upon careful scrutiny of the tracks on
the road ahead, he could see that the person had a short stride which meant she
was either carrying a heavy load or was tired.

Mitch backtracked and saw the prints
coming in from the right side of the road, opposite his approach. He walked a
hundred yards up until he came to a bend in the road and noticed that there was
a green Nissan parked under the shade of a sycamore tree. The vehicle was
angled back behind a fallen branch and it appeared to be a rental with only a
crumpled map on the passenger’s seat and some empty water bottles on the floor.
Hmm…probably another dumb tourist who broke down looking for lost Apache
gold.

He retraced his steps and unlatched the
gate, swinging it open on its creaky hinges. He drove down the narrow road past
the main houses, waving to old Miguel who was sitting on a rocking chair on his
porch. The man did a partial attempt at a wave and Mitch could tell he had
woken him. Heading down the road, he saw the usual slew of black cows grazing
in the field to the left, near the edge of the rim where his bunkhouse was
situated.

Mitch kept hoping that he wouldn’t have to
render assistance to some dehydrated explorer waiting on his porch steps.
Cellphone coverage was spotty, especially in the basin where the ranch was
nestled, and he dreaded having to drive someone out even for a few miles to get
reception. He just wanted to unwind in the shade without anyone demanding his
time. All the same, he kept his seatbelt off so he could access the Glock on
his hip just in case it was more than a stranded motorist.

Arriving at the front of the historic
adobe structure with its white-flecked paint clinging tenaciously to the clay
foundation, he got out of the jeep and observed the ground. The tracks had
meandered around the other structures on the property and stuck to the treeline
near the rim until arriving at his place. Given the hard substrate of gravel,
most of the tracks were faint but he had pursued insurgents over much more
challenging terrain in other regions and could pick out the subtle disturbances.

Unusual for the average person to cling to
cover like that
.
Based upon the ‘dwell-time’ where there is greater track depth and tread detail
present when a person stands in one place versus walking, he figured the person
spent a few minutes near the corner of each building, scanning the field ahead.
This wasn’t feeling like a lost hiker as he’d encountered before at the ranch.

He moved back to his jeep and retrieved
his M4 out of the rear locker. Through experience in government-sponsored missions
abroad in the military, he had learned that when the tracks don’t provide
enough information, you have to rely on intuition. Trackers the world over
recognized that your subconscious collects far more data from your surroundings
than your conscious mind. His gut was telling him something was off and it was
further confirmed when he saw the tracks skirt around his bunkhouse and head up
a slope towards the water tower behind his dwelling.

He was without any kind of field support
from his colleagues or the sheriff’s department. Even if he could get a call
out, it’d be over an hour before they arrived. Maybe it was some thief hoping
to break in and steal some of the vintage cowboy accoutrements lining the walls
of the main house or worse yet, some anti-ranching enviro-nutjob who wanted to
torch the place in hopes of putting a stop to cattle operations. He’d heard of that
happening before on spreads up in Nevada and he sure as hell wasn’t going to
let it occur to his friend’s land. Mitch crept to the edge of the house and peered
up towards the water tower forty feet away. It was a bulbous, gray receptacle
that stored twelve hundred gallons of water, atop four massive iron uprights.
The whole thing resembled a small moon resting upon angled rusty fingers.
Directly beneath it was a ten-by-twelve pumphouse whose door was still locked.

Mitch backpedaled to the front of his
place and went through the motions of closing and opening the door, loud enough
for the sound to carry. Then he stepped off the porch and moved past two large
cottonwood trees which had a blue hammock suspended between them. He slid down
into a drainage twenty feet below the rim then crept through the thick foliage
of raspberry bushes and wild grapevines. Rounding the bend in the wash, he
pressed his face between a patch of overhanging leaves and studied the water
tower. He had always taught his law-enforcement students that when a fugitive’s
tracks proceed to high ground then the subject is probably waiting to snipe you
from their perch. There had been two game wardens back east who had been killed
by poachers using this same technique and Mitch himself had used it on more
than one occasion in Afghanistan.
Whoever you are, you picked the wrong
ranch to fuck with. I may not even call this one in if you’re an anti-ranching
whacko.

He peered through the scope of his rifle
and saw a thirty-something woman with dark tussled hair squatting beside the
rear of the pumphouse. She had an athletic build with lean arms. Her face bore
a tired expression and he could discern a heavy coat of sweat hanging over her
forehead. Despite this, she had the poise of someone who seemed comfortable
working from concealment. Slung over her back was a leather shoulder bag.
Scanning down her left side, he saw she was holding a pistol—a Beretta by the
looks of it. Mitch took a deep breath and studied her features again.
She
definitely ain’t here for the enchiladas. And I sure as hell wouldn’t forget a
face like that.

Chapter 4

Inside the headquarters of the Aeneid
Corporation, CEO Nelson Ritter was studying a 3-D holographic image of their
current operations around the globe with particular attention focused upon
Turkmenistan.

Aeneid
was recognized as the leader in body armor for police departments, the
military, and the executive protection industry. Ritter had once been a soldier
of fortune in Latin America during the ’80s and later started the company in
the U.S. serving the law-enforcement community. He used any profits to slowly
start funding his own mercenary operations in third-world countries where his
fledgling investments were rooted. Over the ensuing decades his small army of
private para-military contractors had been used for implementing little-known
coups, staging riots, and swaying political outcomes in countries connected
with Ritter’s holdings which were mostly in the form of natural gas or oil. Surinam,
Guyana, and Eritrea were just a few of the countries where Ritter had oil
operations that were kept in play through the use of his private soldiers and
the backing of the totalitarian regimes to which he provided considerable
compensation. He always opted for establishing his presence in smaller
countries with oppressive leaders and away from the prying eyes of meddling
human rights groups. These overseas business ventures were kept separate from
the rest of Aeneid through shell corporations abroad and few people even within
the Department of Defense knew about it thanks to a connection at the upper
echelon of the Pentagon.

At a recent defense contractor’s expo in
Virginia, Ritter had procured a large contract from international investors
that would lead to further expansion of his reach. Corporate stocks had doubled
recently after the initial unveiling of a new concealable soft body armor for
civilians. Ritter’s goal was to use recent terrorist-related events to create a
need in the psyche of homeowners and concerned parents that they too should be
as protected as the police. The writing easel on the wall used at his daily
meetings with his board of directors had numerous reasons highlighted in red
ink as to who in America needed Aeneid Armor: postal workers, bank employees,
courthouse staff, delivery drivers, single moms with crazed ex-husbands, and
even teachers in cities with high violent crime rates. Ritter surmised, with
the latter, that if he could convince every gun-toting dad in the country to
buy body armor then school districts in Second Amendment-friendly states would
also be within reach. His end game wasn’t protection—it was just making enough profit
to further fund his operations abroad. The same body armor he retailed to U.S.
law enforcement was peddled under a different label to Taliban factions and even
Somali pirates. Ritter had learned long ago from analyzing his weak-kneed
competitors that possessing moral turpitude only served to hamper market
expansion.

Ritter had always reveled in his ability
to manipulate others. He’d started out working on his father’s used car lot
after high school and knew the mouth-watering pleasure that came with closing
the deal. A year later, broke and bored, he joined the army, doing a stint in
Honduras in the early eighties where he fell in love with the tropics and the
political climate. After his discharge he stayed on in Latin America, acquiring
work with former Columbian military personnel who were running their own
mercenary outfits.

Everything was unfolding smoothly with his
latest venture until the troubling alert he received two nights ago from building
security who informed him of a breach in their computer firewall. A hacker,
working from inside, had obtained files from Ritter’s own computer on a new para-military
operation—information that could compromise a potential billion-dollar undertaking
and which involved his colleague at the Department of Defense.

As Ritter rubbed his thumb under his lower
lip, contemplating the holographic layout in front of him, the wooden double
doors opened behind him. Jessica Carter, the company’s head of the cyber division,
strode in, accompanied by the chief of security Drake Redlyn. The hulking brute
was clad in a suit that barely fit his muscular frame and he looked oddly out
of place beside the sleekly dressed woman who wore a blue dress with three-inch
black high heels. Ritter normally performed his office tasks and Skype meetings
from his mansion in northwest Anaheim two days a week and the woman gave a
surprised look at seeing her boss.

“Ms. Carter, have you located the
whereabouts of our employee Mira Sanchez yet?” Ritter said, walking within
bad-breath distance of the two, causing her to take a step back. She saw the
hulking figure of Drake, the bodyguard, casually move to her right.

“She was just spotted near Phoenix. Our
men on the ground there will have her shortly,” said Drake, interrupting.

“Am I to assume that we have containment
of this problem?” said Ritter, who ran his fingers through his silver hair.

Carter fidgeted with her fingers. “Yes,
the cover story we provided with the feds will be lending a hand to her capture.”

“The data file you spoke of is on her?”

“That’s not clear yet,” said Carter with a
nervous exhale.

“Then all of the loose ends are not tied
up. I can’t have that information floating around God knows where.” He walked
around the holographic image and gazed at the blue orb. “You do realize this
happened on your watch—you hired the woman and trusted her.

“She will be back here shortly so I’m not
worried—she was just a mid-level software technician,” she said as Drake slowly
inched towards her while she cleared her dry throat.

“Mid-level, you say. So her act of penetrating
our firewall was a stroke of luck?” He emitted a deep sigh and flicked out a
fake smile, the glow from his white-crowned teeth nearly blotting out his lips.
“Well, well, if you say she’ll be here shortly then my faith in you is
restored. Bravo, no harm done.” Ritter continued grinning, his lips slowly
decreasing in width. He shifted his gaze to Drake, who shuffled forward with
surprising grace and swiftly wrenched Carter’s head with his bear-like hands, snapping
her vertebrae like a fistful of wet twigs. The delicate figure collapsed to the
floor like an inanimate puppet.

Ritter moved over to the crumpled woman,
shaking his head. “That is for your lack of foresight in preventing this
problem in the first place.”

Ritter returned his gaze to the blue image,
enhancing a region in Turkmenistan near the Sangar Valley and then tracing his
bony finger over to the Caspian Sea. “It’s all coming together. We just need
this woman back in our clutches. Soon this whole pipeline dispute will be
resolved and the killing and drilling can commence. Then oil will flow freely
to Europe without the involvement of Iran.”

Ritter’s thoughts floated back to the next
step in his overseas venture. Aeneid was responsible for training a garrison of
elite Turkmen troops modeled after Army Special Forces. This required him to
send over a team of mercenaries, or as he referred to them, strategic partners,
to begin their work training the soldiers. These Turkmen would ultimately be
responsible for protecting the pipeline and U.S. corporate interests. The
trainers were former spec-ops soldiers hailing from different countries which
fell in line with having plausible deniability and avoided appearing like a
backdoor U.S operation. If the plan was successful, few in the White House
would balk at the end result of weakening Russia and Iran’s grip on the region
and there would be no need for them to disavow actions that they were
completely in the dark about.

If he was somehow connected to the
operation, unlikely as that was, Ritter would say he was merely supplying
advisors to a fragile geographic neighborhood and was aiding in the war on
terror by laying the groundwork for a potential staging area for any future
U.S. actions towards Iran. He was assured by his Pentagon connection that such
inquiries would never materialize. The Turkmenistan parliament certainly
wouldn’t disapprove as they were interested in receiving a massive infusion of
foreign dollars for providing one of the longest pipelines in the world.

Ritter walked in a circle around the orb,
stepping over Carter’s body like she was a stuffed animal. “For most of the
past fifty years, the American sheeple think the U.S. has been fighting ground
wars to protect them when it’s always been about protecting American business
interests in foreign lands. Corporations not countries determine war and peace.
Not that it matters; as long as the masses have their precious Facebook and their
Hollywood celebrities telling them what to think, their world will go on.”

He turned and walked to the door, stopping
at the entrance and glancing at Carter’s face. “I’d rather not know the cover
story on this one,” he said to Drake. “Report back to me with the missing data files
in Ms. Sanchez’s possession after you’ve returned from Arizona. I’ll be at home
going over some operational plans on my computer. We only have a few days until
things unfold and we cannot deviate from the timeline.” He gave Drake a
piercing look. “I need you to find that bitch.”

After Ritter left, Drake flung the woman
over his immense shoulder like a wet beach towel and carried her to the
stairwell six floors down where he placed her on the landing. As he arranged
her limbs in a contorted fashion, her lifeless eyes stared upward, resembling
the bottoms of two mini whiskey bottles. He removed one of her black high heels
and broke off the spiked end, tossing the piece on the stairs above. Then he
unscrewed the light bulb in the ceiling and rattled it until the filaments
inside broke, twisting it back into place.

In the past six years of working as head
of security for Aeneid, Drake had grown fond of the increasing power that
Ritter had provided him. He frowned upon the title ‘bodyguard,’ preferring the term
‘problem-solver’ instead. Drake slunk off into the darkness, ascending the
stairwell to the roof where the company’s private helicopter was awaiting his
arrival.

***

Twenty minutes after Carter’s demise, the
phone of Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Monroe rang as he sat at home in
his mahogany-lined library in Arlington, Virginia.

He slid his glass of brandy onto the table
and grabbed his phone, which was resting next to a pewter-framed photo of his
wife and four children.

“Whenever I see your number on my screen,
Nelson, it makes me wonder if I’ll be getting any sleep.”

“There’s a slight problem. We had a
corporate spy who obtained a file—a file that contains information on our
upcoming venture.”

Monroe sat erect and his shoulders tensed.
“Tell me this is contained.”

“It will be. I need you to grant approval
for facial recognition software to be employed by one of our agents on the
inside so we can pinpoint the culprit’s location.”

“Listen, you better…”

“Spare me the finger-pointing. If you had
provided me with the clearances and funding when I asked months ago, this whole
operation would have been underway already so grant the approval with the
lackeys on your end and let me do my job.”

Monroe took a long pause, trying to calm
his nerves. “Very well but keep me informed when you have this under control. I
have a budget meeting tomorrow with the sec-def and we don’t need any ripples
in the media about Iran just yet.”

“I wish you a good night’s sleep then,
Thomas.”

Monroe placed the phone down and poured
himself another glass of brandy from the bottle beside him, spilling some on
the table as he tried to steady his hand. He’d never had reason to doubt Ritter
before in all of their business dealings but those seemed small-scale compared
to what was at stake this time.

Monroe saw to it that allegations of war
profiteering or misappropriation of funds for private contracting never reared their
heads in his meetings with the Senate Oversight Committee. His office, which
had a $125 million budget, was responsible for overseeing the lucrative defense
contracts of which Aeneid held a considerable slice. It was largely through
Monroe’s efforts that Aeneid went from being a small provider of body armor for
law enforcement to a major player in the mercenary trade with millions of
dollars in U.S. government sponsored contracts.  Prior to his ascension to assistant
sec-def, Monroe had been an attorney in international trade in Washington D.C.
and on the payroll of many of the defense companies whose budgets he now had
the means of manipulating.

This new venture though was unlike
anything he’d undertaken before. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
obtaining oil from the Caspian Sea region had been nearly impossible given the
terrain challenges and the divisive politics of the many post-Soviet states. A
consortium of American oil companies were interested in ways to obtain a
stranglehold on the considerable oil reserves. Ritter was one such
puppet-master they sought out through backwater channels. His previous
connection with Monroe, through their mutual history of involvement with the
DOD, proved beneficial to moving the wheels of geographic dominance forward.

Monroe needed Ritter as much as the old
curmudgeon required his services and he was confident that Aeneid’s operation
would proceed without any bumps—at least until this latest phone call.