THE EXTRACTOR Read online

  THE EXTRACTOR

  J.T. Brannan

  GREY ARROW PUBLISHING

  First Edition

  This edition published in 2017 by Grey Arrow Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 J.T. Brannan

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental

  All rights reserved

  For Jakub and Mia;

  and my parents,

  for their help and support

  “These Things We Do,

  That Others May Live”

  Motto of

  US Air Force Pararescue

  Prologue

  “So, they gonna come through for us, or what?” asked Pete Fletcher, his large frame silhouetted against the dying rays of the evening sun.

  Hank Thompson looked across the barren mountaintop at his old friend, checked his watch, and shrugged. Although the man’s petulant tone grated, Fletcher had a point. Was the Evans family – and in particular, Patrick Evans, the girl’s father – going to come through for them?

  Thompson damned well hoped so. After all, there was a million dollars riding on this, and that wasn’t chicken feed in anyone’s book. But time was running out, and there had still been no word about the ransom. Patrick Evans had until midnight to make the cash drop-off, or else Patricia Evans was going to get thrown off the top of this damned mountain; and at this height, the fall would seriously damage those good looks of hers.

  The girl was a climber herself, which was how Fletcher and Thompson had come across her in the first place. She’d shown up one day, strutting her stuff in front of the boys; and before long, she’d become one of the group. Funny thing was though, she’d never mentioned who she really was. Who her daddy was.

  Thompson could understand it, he really could; she’d wanted to be taken on her own merits, as a real person. Only, she’d picked the wrong damn crowd to hang with. Thompson and his boys were climbers, alright; but they were also meth dealers, armed robbers, carjackers, and now they were kidnappers too. When Brandon Janes, the youngest of their little gang, had spotted a picture of the girl with her father in a local paper, what happened next was a no-brainer. Tricia had been bundled up and thrown in the back of their truck, a safe location had been found, and the ransom notice had been sent out. The work was new to them, but they’d all taken to it pretty naturally.

  There were eight of the gang on the mountaintop, with another couple strung out on the road below, in opposite directions, to watch for the cops. Thompson’s hacker friends told him that Evans hadn’t called the police, but it paid to be sure. They hadn’t crossed any state lines anyway, so at least the Feds wouldn’t be getting involved.

  There were another two of his gang all the way over in Salt Lake City, where the drop-off was supposed to go down; and he hoped he would be hearing from them real soon.

  Thompson watched as one of his other guys tried to get a bonfire going. “Jules,” Thompson hissed across the flat rock, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “Damn, Hank,” Jules Beddoes said, lighter in hand, “we almost froze our asses off last night, don’t you remember?”

  Thompson sighed. He was older than the others, he had to remember; some of them still needed a little guidance. “Jules, you dumb sonofabitch – you light a fire up here, it’s gonna be seen for a thousand freakin’ miles around, are you crazy?”

  Jules stopped, looked at his lighter, looked back at Thompson in disappointment, then slowly nodded his head and put the lighter away. Kid had probably just been smoking too much reefer, Thompson figured. Well, he laughed to himself, maybe they’d all had a bit too much. What kind of crazy-ass idea was it to come up here anyway? Yes, it was pretty secure – you’d have to freeclimb the thing to get up here, and what cops were gonna do that? Thompson and his boys would see them coming from miles away, anyway. But they could easily have just stayed at the house back in Provo, where they’d kept the girl for the past week. And yet, with the deadline approaching, Thompson had got nervous, and brought the girl out here, where he felt safe. Perched atop one of the great sandstone columns of the Courthouse Towers, within Utah’s incredible Arches National Park, Thompson felt like a king. But a bonfire would soon draw attention to them, and that was something he didn’t want.

  The girl was being kept in one of the tents they’d set up on the mountaintop, and had been well looked after; or at least, as far as he knew. But some of his guys could have problems keeping their dicks in their pants, he knew, and he supposed there were no guarantees. But she was still alive, and that was the main thing.

  It didn’t worry him that Tricia would identify them, once the ransom had been paid. After all, with a few hundred grand in his back pocket, he wasn’t going to stick around here. No, he’d move on south to Mexico, and maybe Brazil after that. If the boys wanted to come with him, they were welcome. And if they didn’t, they could go to hell.

  Thompson sighed as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, night falling across the park. He checked his watch – just under four hours to the deadline. Who was he kidding, anyway? There was no way in hell that Tricia was making it off this mountain alive. At the end of the day, what possible sense did it make to leave a living witness?

  No, he knew what would happen come midnight – whether the ransom was paid or not, Tricia would die.

  John Lee steadied his breath, completely silent as he waited at the base of the huge sandstone tower, fingers tentatively gripping the dark rock in front of him.

  It was pitch black out here in the park; it was far enough away from civilization for there to be precious little artificial light, and a dense bank of clouds meant that even the moon and the stars were going to be of no help tonight.

  Still, Lee figured as he rested there, attuning his senses, such a situation was already working in his favor. The guys down on the road – hardly concealed, sitting in their pickup trucks – hadn’t noticed him as he’d hiked right past them. He’d considered taking them out, but had decided against it – if they were supposed to check-in with the guys at the top of the Courthouse Towers on a regular basis, it could create more problems than it solved.

  Finding the gang had been easy; or at least that’s what Phoenix De Maio had told him, anyway. Phoenix was a computer whizz, and was responsible for intelligence gathering, hacking, electronic surveillance, and a whole load of other hi-tech stuff that Lee just couldn’t get his head around.

  He had worked alone for the first missions of his new “career”, but when he’d rescued Phoenix – a graduate of MIT, and the daughter of one of France’s wealthiest industrialists – from a team of kidnappers in Marseilles, she had begged to help him with his work. He’d reluctantly agreed, and they’d operated side by side ever since, although their relationship often veered away from the strictly professional. Lee was aware that she wanted something more, but – still haunted by memories of what had happened to his own family – he was reluctant to let things go too far.

  The fact that she had herself been kidnapped, meant that Phoenix always took these particular missions personally. After their team had received the call from Alexandra Grayson – the ex-sports agent who handled the business side of things for Lee – alerting them to Patricia Evans’ abduction and ransom, Phoenix had wasted no time in going to work.

  Lee didn’t know how she’d done it – and nor did he want to – but within a day of being contacted, she’d located the gang that had taken Patrick Evans’ daughter. The only problem was time – Evans hadn’t contacted the police, or the Feds, but h
ad left it late in the day before deciding to risk contacting an outside contractor. So, by the time Lee was ready to go, Patricia Evans had already left her prior location in the basement of a house in Provo and had been transported to the top of a sandstone column in the middle of the Utah wilderness.

  It tied in with the background of the alleged kidnappers – a nasty little crew led by Hank Thompson, who got their kicks freeclimbing their way around the state when they weren’t knocking over diners, burglarizing houses, stealing cars or dealing drugs.

  Lee’s team had the resources to call in a helicopter for a direct attack on the mountaintop, but such a tactic would do nothing for Patricia’s survival – she’d be thrown off the top of the sandstone column as soon as they heard the telltale roar of the rotors.

  From Lee’s experience of such missions, Patrick Evans had done the right thing by not contacting the cops – far too often, the kidnap victims ended up dead when law enforcement got involved. Lee’s success rate, on the other hand, was one hundred percent.

  To date, anyway; but he had no intention of letting that percentage slide.

  The climb up would be hard, Lee knew. Not only was it pitch black out here in the park, but he was also unable to use conventional equipment. There were pitons already in place – presumably used by Thompson and his boys – but there were no ropes attached, and Lee didn’t want to risk the sound of metal on metal from using them. At night, sound seemed to travel a lot further, especially in such an unpopulated area. If they heard him climbing, they might just send Patricia Evans over the side to meet him.

  It meant he was going to have to free-solo the rockface; not an impossible task for a man like him perhaps, but far from an easy one. There was a positive side to having no ropes or safety equipment, he told himself as he edged toward the tower; it would make climbing the thing a hell of a lot quicker.

  But maybe, he considered as he reached out to grip the rough sandstone in front of him, he should have agreed to the helicopter after all.

  Forty minutes later, John Lee was at the lip of the mountaintop, ears straining along with his muscles as he clung to the side of the huge sandstone column and tried to listen for movement nearby.

  His team, back at their base on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Bahamas, were constantly trying to make him go hi-tech. Marcus Hartman, his logistics specialist and a former US Army quartermaster, was relentless in his campaign to get Lee to use the most up-to-date gear; but his complaints were nothing compared to those of Yukio Mabuni, Lee’s weapons and specialist equipment guru. A former officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, Mabuni believed every problem had a technologically-enhanced answer.

  Sometimes, Lee gave in and followed their advice; after all, his prior work with the US Air Force’s Special Tactics Unit ensured that he was well aware of what capabilities were out there, and how to use most of it.

  But – at this stage in his life – John Lee had gone back to basics. Hartman could use all of the technology he wanted to get Lee to where he needed to be, along with his gear; and Mabuni could provide him with modern versions of tried-and-trusted – and sometimes ancient – weapons and equipment; but when it got down to the nitty-gritty, face-to-face stuff, Lee wanted to keep things old-school. He’d tried the modern way, and it wasn’t for him.

  Mabuni, for his part, still had a hard time accepting that Lee didn’t kill people. Not anymore, anyway; his past had left him scarred, and he had vowed never to kill again. The weapons he demanded from Mabuni, therefore, were all non-lethal, which seemed to give the ex-CIA man a constant headache. But it was a vow that Lee intended never to break, and one that set him apart from his competitors in the “extraction” business.

  Hastings, Inc., for example, was a case in point; Matt Hastings, its infamous CEO, had no moral qualms about ordering his men to do whatever it took to complete the task they were being paid for, and he had an army of lawyers ready and waiting to deal with the aftermath. They were the Apple of the extraction world, the top player in the corporate market. Lee’s own outfit was rather less well-known, and for good reason – Lee himself was still wanted by the US military for allegedly going AWOL. It wasn’t strictly true – Lee had asked to resign after his last disastrous, psychically-damaging mission in Iraq, but had been refused – but he was still a figure of some controversy. The CIA had spread damaging rumors about him, and nobody knew what to believe. The military, the intelligence services and the government said one thing – that he was a deserter of the worst sort – while the popular press, aided by the constant work of Alexandra Greyson, said quite another. While some denounced him as a traitor, others hailed him as a hero.

  Like most things in life, Lee knew that the truth might well be found somewhere in the middle.

  He breathed out, low and quiet, centering himself for what lay ahead.

  This, he supposed, was the hero part.

  There were four lookouts, each one stationed at a side of the column that coordinated with the points of the compass.

  Light discipline was surprisingly good, Lee saw; but there were occasional flashes from cellphone screens, and a couple of the gang were even smoking. Lee recognized the sickly-sweet smell of marijuana, which tied into what he’d heard about the men.

  Lee knew that the light from the smokes, and looking into those cellphone screens, for however little time, would ruin the men’s night vision. Lee’s, however, was operating perfectly. Before setting out on his hike across the desert, he’d taken herbal concoctions designed to improve the eyes’ sensitivity to light, and then used the first couple of hours of darkness to grow accustomed to it, adjusting his senses to the conditions until he could see almost as well as during the day. Well, he admitted, maybe that was overstating the case; but he could see well enough, and that was all that mattered.

  Mabuni, of course, recommended that he wear the latest night vision goggles, but they reminded Lee too much of his time in the military, the later years of which he was trying very hard to forget. Besides which, he’d always found the NVGs to damage depth perception to an unacceptable degree. It was fine for shooting at medium range, but when things went hand-to-hand – as they now often did, since he had foresworn the use of guns – the goggles could be a liability.

  Lee lay on the cold stone floor, just twenty feet away from the nearest guy, who was stood at the edge, staring out toward the east. He silently withdrew the slender blowpipe from his combat vest, placed his lips over the end, aimed, and blew.

  Lee watched as the man’s hand went to the back of his neck, where the poisoned needle had struck, then he was up and moving fast across the mountaintop, catching the body as it collapsed and easing it silently down to the ground.

  He crawled along the edge of the sandstone tower, taking out another two sentries in the same fashion – get close, aim the blowpipe, fire, run and catch.

  The darts weren’t fatal, the poison mild – enough to induce unconsciousness but far from death.

  Lee saw that there was a tent in the middle of the rocky expanse that made up the peak of the sandstone column, and he knew that was where the girl would be. Four more men were stationed outside, and Lee could see that Hank Thompson was one of them, recognizing him from photos provided by Phoenix. The guy was constantly checking his cellphone, presumably waiting for the call from Salt Lake to tell him the ransom had been paid, and he was a rich man.

  Lee wasn’t sure about the second guy, right next to Thompson, but thought it might be Pete Fletcher, the leader’s right-hand man, and a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His jacket included charges of robbery, rape, aggravated assault and manslaughter. A violent man, and one Lee would have to be careful with.

  The other two were facing away from him, and Lee couldn’t make them out. They were talking in low whispers, which carried across the barren mountaintop.

  “They gonna call, do ya think?” one of the men with his back to Lee asked, anxiety heavy in the whispered voice.

&nb
sp; “They’ll call,” Hank responded. “One way or another, at least.”

  “But what if they don’t pay?” asked the fourth man. “What are we gonna do, are we really gonna kill her, are we –”

  “What the hell else do you think we’re gonna do?” Fletcher said gruffly. “She’s seen our faces, and kidnap’s a hardcore deal, we’ll be goin’ down for life, you get it? Whether we get the money or not, there’s no freakin’ way we’re lettin’ her walk, you got that?” He spat on the floor. “I’ll throw the bitch off the mountain myself.”

  Lee knew there was less than an hour until the deadline, and he had no doubts that someone in the group would do as promised, whether the ransom was paid or not – if not Thompson himself, then Fletcher for sure.

  That left Lee plenty of time to get to the girl though.

  But first things first, Lee told himself as he edged across the dark mountaintop toward the fourth sentry. Take out the outer perimeter first, before moving inward.

  Tommy Conway was bored. What the hell were they doing out here, anyway? They’d had a sweet deal going back at the house; nobody was gonna bother them there, with the rich bitch stashed down in the basement. They’d never got caught there selling meth, and they’d been doing that for years, why would anyone have come down there to find the girl?

  But Hank had got a bug up his ass about being discovered, and demanded they all take a ride out here. It wasn’t that Tommy didn’t like it out on the towers; quite the opposite, he was a climbing freak, he loved to be out there, doing what he did best. Only they’d normally have a fire going, music playing loud, beer flowing freely . . . but Hank was having none of that stuff. It was all business. But at least he could still smoke his pot, Tommy considered as he drew in a lungful and breathed it out into the cool night air.