SAFE HAVENS: Shadow Masters (A Sean Havens Black Ops Novel Book 1) (30 page)

Yes, even in its infancy stages, this program had a very limited shelf life and Draeger would need to start planning his next gig in short time. In the interim, he had another idea as to how he could nudge Havens just over the edge of sanity and transform his former colleague into a homicidal maniac—or at least create evidence that would support such a claim. It would close the loop on Harrison and the entire Chicago operation.

This is going to be fun.

Now Draeger just needed his contractor to finish the new panic room and life might get back to being more enjoyable again.

His mood darkened quickly as he recalled his last mission with Havens, being forced to kneel alongside him in the corner of a Tehran apartment bedroom. Draeger had slipped up and missed a surveillance tail when they rotated spotters. The Iranian authorities had followed them to the apartment and surprised them. Two highly trained IRGC operatives now each had a gun to the heads of Draeger and Havens who were kneeling executioner style facing the cracked plaster wall. Draeger was pleading in Farsi while Havens remained quiet. Draeger looked at Havens who was fixated on something beyond the wall as if he were a million miles away. Draeger had continued his frantic negotiating when Havens interrupted, also in the armed men’s native tongue.

“Excuse me. We are indeed CIA spies. If you please, as fellow soldiers we would like to kneel before you, our captors. We will accept the bullet so you may know that power of Allah will prevail in this lost war.”

Havens further admitted to being sent by the Americans to kill the Supreme Leader despite that not being their mission. Havens gave his real name as well as Draeger’s. “Glory to the destroyers,” Havens had said in Farsi.

Draeger knew Havens had lost it.

Great, Sean, not only do we die but you just outed us and linked us to a cockamamie mission that will be a PR coup for the Iranians.

Entertained by this admission and the idea of making these weak Americans bow to the Persian power now before them, their captors all too eagerly honored the request as Havens was now denouncing his God and praising the almighty power and mercifulness of Allah. As Draeger was about to emit a final plea to save himself and stop Havens from talking, Havens started retching violently and vomited.

His captor, in disgust, cursed this dog, and instinctively looked for the reaction of his other IRGC comrade. In that instance Havens executed an attack with a Krav Maga left hand grab at the gun barrel and a right hand wrist wedge. He pulled back on his adversary to use the foe’s counter motion as a momentum lever to raise himself up and turn the man’s gun fire on the second operator while delivering a series of furious kicks to his first victim. Havens’ last action was firing off two more rounds into the heads of the now former IRGC members.

Havens shouted at his companion to get up, but Draeger remained motionless.

“Get the fuck up!!! We have to move now!!!”

“I can’t. I shit my pants.”

“You what? Who gives a fuck? Get up and move. Are you afraid someone is going to laugh at you, you pussy? Move it or we are both dead again with you lying in shitty pants. What the hell, Pres?”

Their escape and evasion had been successful due to Havens’ cool head and pre-deployment preparation, notwithstanding his use of some well thought out tools provided by “X” and an extraordinary amount of luck. It was apparent to both that God understood Havens’ ruse as a distraction and granted the men amnesty as they fled. And yet Draeger felt more humiliated by Havens than bound to him for a life of repayment. The two never spoke of the event’s personal aspects, and while Draeger demonstrated his own acts of heroism during that time as they retreated to friendly confines, he would never get past the embarrassment or the shame of his cries of self-preservation while selfishly questioning the actions of his protector’s operational mind still engaged in the last seconds of life.

You’re dead, Havens. And your little dog too.
Draeger writhed his hands in his fantasy depiction of himself as the wicked witch in
The Wizard of Oz
. He took pause in the moment of comic relief, knowing that little Dorothy from Kansas lived in the end while the witch died.

Note to self. Stay out of Chicago while that asshole is still alive. Fucking Havens will find a way to drop a house on me or melt me with a cup of coffee to the face. Fucking black ops Captain America. Hate you. I hate you, I hate you.

Chapter 38

D
ays later Havens met Harrison at a greasy spoon restaurant for a cup of coffee where the tasking orders were exchanged. Using an overkill of tradecraft, they split the bill with cash, and Harrison insisted on paying the tip with a few dollars and some change. He remarked that Havens had paid too much and pushed the change across the table. Havens noticed the fifty cent piece, which in his experience meant a micro-SD card was inside. Havens took the change, put it in his pocket, and parted with Harrison like old buddies just playing some early morning catch up.

“Hey, Harrison, you know no one uses 50 cent pieces anymore, right? I’ve got a guy who can make one with a nickel when you are ready to play with the big boys.”

“Budgets, Havens. Talk to your Intelligence Committee about it. Now maybe they can free up some cash with that roadblock bureaucrat dead in Missouri.”

That’s who that guy was in the paper. He was on a funding subcommittee who wanted more defense cuts.

“You can buy a quarter on eBay for about twenty-five bucks.” Havens watched Harrison squirm under the open chatter.

This guy is wound pretty tight
.
Not a lot you can do with a regimented shooter unless you have more stuff to shoot. Although there are some good JSOC intel guys who were Ranger shooters first. Who put him in charge of a program like this? He had to be an officer prior.

At home, Havens pushed with the edge of his thumb on the back of the coin’s America letters and the piece opened revealing the tiny storage device. He popped it into the larger adapter card he had on hand and viewed the benign list. With the context removed, it looked like a number of individuals who had made over a hundred dollars in contributions to a local arts campaign. To Havens it would have been a year’s work to really put the plan in place with airtight contingencies. Now Harrison had notified him the deadline was being pushed up by eleven months with no explanation.

Why is he keeping me at arm’s length about this? Harrison isn’t even finger pointing bureaucracy or some bullshit reason. I should be included in these kinds of decisions if we’re going to be working together. Unless there are no plans for extended interaction…

The time frame was unrealistic as it always was in this business. Timelines are often artificial and decisions are made by people who are not the ones doing the actual work. With no comprehension of the difficulties involved, operational dates are set like the planning of an ad hoc family get together that would be better done sooner than later due to other more important commitments that may arise. Why should this job be any different?

Havens resolved himself to this being his fate until he could find something he was more suited for. But he had no idea how he could do anything else in life at this point. He knew that he needed the money for his daughter, but he knew money was tight in this budget climate and that the defense and intelligence committees were recommending a pinching of pennies, especially the guy who…
yeah, that committee member that Harrison mentioned. He was killed with that Lincoln thing I glanced at on the plane. I have to check with Red on that. A lot of people are going to be out of work if that budget doesn’t pass.

He reviewed the names. All he knew was that the names would be intermingled. High value targets were mixed in with some lower value targets, all of whom had apparently committed some offense to the families of soldiers now abroad. Based on his initial discussions with Harrison, efforts to cease the infractions by the accused were not working and it was starting to stress the family situation and operational effectiveness of the soldiers.

Havens considered Chicago’s most violent communities like West Englewood, Austin, Woodlawn, Greater Grand Crossing, Humboldt Park, South Shore, West Garfield Park, and looked to tie them to other areas with lesser violence such as Rogers Park, West Ridge, and Lincoln Square. With most of the violent communities experiencing between fifteen to twenty-five homicides in a given year, that gave Havens only one to two bodies per community without raising a pattern or concern about the rise of violence. As a crutch, Havens had the luxury of an additional one to two killings in each community, violent or otherwise, with some accidental deaths, suicides, or manslaughter. If they were able to spread the victims out over eighteen months, their operation would be that much safer. It was fortunate for Havens that so many of these criminal cartels had become transnational organizations performing just as many astute business transactions to solidify their power as they had acts of violence.

Havens would also hit core elements of Chicago as an important drug distribution center that connected groups throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central and South America. He would have to gain an understanding of specific neighborhoods in order to learn how the cartel leadership and traffickers blended into their neighborhoods without arousing suspicion while still interacting with the lower henchmen gang members who handled the retail aspect of drug sales. The nexus of instigation would have to be within the trafficking of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines. With an increased presence of AK-47s on the street, there would also be ties to munitions flows as well as the sex trade through human trafficking. Gangs would be easy to identify with their open air drug markets and untrained lookouts making overt signs to their counterparts.

Havens thought it over. He had also heard of some ruthless cartel assassin squads that were reported to have committed killings of rivals in and around the city. Perhaps they could be used somehow. Havens pondered how he could use the roving bands of Somalis who moved drugs across the upper Midwest. With between six to seven identified Somali gangs, that gave him some room to play with, especially since some of them were connected. The fact that many were involved in the trafficking of minors to engage in sex acts meant Havens had no issue with inflicting both pressure or death on those gang members or their associates.

Since the Somali gangs didn’t protect territories, it would be feasible that they would interact with different communities around the city and be in competition with new market entrants as well as established groups. The fact that the Somalis didn’t identify themselves publicly with typical gang attributes and generally kept a low profile only added to their utility. Havens could find the volunteer agency contracted by the State Department to determine where Somali refugees were resettled. Havens started to make notes and Google various social services, charities, and relief agencies in Minnesota. He thought he might be able to tie that to the local mosques and some of the recently reported sex trafficking.

With ties to mosques, Havens could extend to the greater Muslim community, of which a select few were on the list. With Minnesota banks ending the transferring and routing of money to Somalia, Havens suspected that Chicago ethnic communities would pick up the new business of informal value transfers in their back office hawala remittance system. Their incited or planted attacks would typically be honor based and not well thought out. Such murders were typically one individual carrying out a shooting or knifing, but arson was also a common method of avenging a grievance.

Havens also tied the assaults to the notion that pedophilia was more acceptable in pockets of Islam. There were reports of attacks on non-Muslim children where well-organized networks of like-minded rapists preyed on pre-pubescent boys and underage white girls. The community of cohesion granted the offenders immunity from prosecution when discovered. In these cases, the offenders were most often Pakistanis and Moroccans, which would also widen the aperture for Havens to work by leveraging the Middle Eastern liquor and convenience store ownership within the various ethnic enclaves where Havens would be targeting gangs. Those ties could be broadened to the Lebanese and Persian communities who had targets on the list for suspected Hezbollah ties with links to illicit free trade zone commerce and funding schemes in Venezuela.

The trick was to identify catalysts so strong between the differing groups of targets that Havens would luck out and have some random domino effect revenge killings that would taint any potential link to the Activity’s movements. Havens would have to ensure in good conscience that the second and third order effects and unintended consequences would not take out a single innocent.

With notes strewn all over the table and nearly eighteen hours of straight research, Havens had created his recommended courses of action to cover his human shopping list. What Havens didn’t know was that some of the targets selected would be used to place other groups in power who had the funds, community connections, and access to influence U.S. political elections, while others could be framed to start a domestic conflict for Prescott Draeger and the powers he supported.

Chapter 39

A
simultaneous doorbell ring and knock at the door startled Havens from his thoughts. Glancing around at all of the notes and printouts strewn across the dining room table, Havens closed the lids to his laptops and scooped up the papers and stuffed it all into the lower kitchen cabinet reserved for a couple of big pots that the Havenses only used for chili, gumbo, and boiling mountains of pasta for family birthday meals.

Through the peephole Havens recognized the two police officers who had harassed him about Albanians and Greece.

Not in the mood to deal with these idiots again.

Havens opened the door. He grimaced at the thought of another round of questions.