Mission- Arctic Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  The End

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  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  THE EXTRACTOR - mission: arctic

  J.T. Brannan

  GREY ARROW PUBLISHING

  First Edition

  This edition published in 2019 by Grey Arrow Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 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

  “We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.”

  Isabel Allende

  Prologue

  1

  “Where is the target now?”

  “He’s already in the air, en route for Moscow.”

  Brad Thompson sat back in his chair, and sighed. That would make things harder, he admitted to himself. If the target had been located within the United States, or flying from the airport of any number of “friendly” nations, then the job wouldn’t have been hard to carry out.

  But Moscow . . .

  It was doable, he told himself. It was just about doable. He had the assets there, but it was important nobody would be able to find out who had been behind the operation. If the Russian government found out that the CIA had been operating on their soil, then all hell could break loose, and that was something that he didn’t want to encourage.

  Thompson was ensconced in his sixth-floor office at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. As the organization’s Deputy Director – a post he had assumed after a near-lifetime of operational work with the agency’s National Clandestine Service – he was one of the most senior officers in the entire United States intelligence community. He had a million and one things to occupy his attention, and yet he was still keen to rid himself of the thorns in his side thrown up by his earlier fieldwork, no matter how much time had passed.

  John Lee – a man he’d once worked with, as part of the Special Activities Division – was one such thorn, and one he had been trying to remove for many years.

  Lee had been seconded to Thompson’s unit in Iraq after he’d shown incredible combat aptitudes when rescuing some wounded Delta Force operators from under heavy enemy fire. He’d been a Pararescue Jumper with the Air Force before that, but his flair for battle meant that he was being wasted rescuing people; he was, Thompson had decided, better at killing them. And so that was what he’d had Lee do – targeted assassinations, tit-for-tat killings, muscle for interrogations, it was all necessary in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe not exactly legal sometimes, but necessary.

  And then the son of a bitch had had a change of heart – something about executing a few kids, whatever – and he’d demanded release from the program. Home on furlough, Lee’s wife and daughter had been killed in a revenge attack, and Lee had been badly injured. In hospital, he’d continued to beg for a discharge, but Thompson wouldn’t allow it – Lee was simply too valuable, and he knew too much. And so the little bastard had gone AWOL, simply up and left without another word; and Brad Thompson had been trying to track him down ever since.

  Word was that he’d gone back to his old job of rescuing people – only this time, it wasn’t for the USAF, but as a private contractor. Called himself the “Extractor”, helped locate kidnap victims, runaways, missing people, you name it. Supposedly didn’t kill anyone either – some bullshit moral code he’d developed after Iraq – even when facing off against professional kidnapping gangs, foreign soldiers, or organized crime groups.

  Crazy bastard.

  As far as Thompson was concerned, the guy was still a traitor, and a national disgrace. There was never any excuse for desertion, it was one of the worst crimes in existence. How the hell dare he? Thompson had been deep down in the shit himself – for years, for decades – and had been forced to do some pretty unpleasant things in that time. But what was he going to do, throw himself a pity party and cry himself to sleep over it? That was the job, and it was a job that Lee had accepted, and then abandoned. Illegally abandoned. And Thompson felt very strongly that he should be brought to justice for it. Not the standard courtroom-type justice, of course – the man knew too much to ever see the inside of a courtroom – but Thompson’s own particular brand of justice. Quick, and effective.

  Thompson had to admit that his desire to see Lee sanctioned was to a large extent influenced by what his old comrade held inside his head. Lee had experienced the full range of the SAD’s operations, and had followed what many people would assume to be quite questionable orders, many of them coming from Thompson himself. If any of that came out, Thompson could say goodbye to that sixth-floor office – and maybe hello to a prison cell.

  The fact that Lee hadn’t yet spoken out on the subject didn’t give Thompson any comfort – the man still had that knowledge, and he could decide to use it at any time. It was a sword hanging over his head that made him feel decidedly uncomfortable.

  Thompson’s men had come close a couple of times – once by chance, and once as a result of a fake mission that Lee had been hired to do, a set-up by Thompson and his men – but Lee had proven to be a slippery son of a bitch and had escaped the net so far. He’d been trying to find out where the man’s base of operations was located – he was more than happy to authorize a full assault, wherever it was – but had so far had no luck.

  Luck had, however, smiled upon him recently in quite another way. During routine surveillance of some Russian intelligence officers, a telephone intercept had been picked up which detailed a conversation between one of their number and a woman called Alexandra Grayson, a former sports agent who handled contracts for Lee’s extraction business. Thompson had previously tried to find Lee through Grayson, but she was cagey about security, using burner cellphones for individual calls, and never meeting her client directly. He’d thought about capturing the woman and interrogating her, but if she went missing, Lee’s radar would undoubtedly perk up, and he’d be long gone before Thompson could find him in any case. Added to which, she was quite a high-profile personality, and her abduction would certainly create a storm of media attention that Thompson could well live without.

  But the Russian’s call was useful, as it was a line the CIA was already monitoring. It seemed that they wanted to hire Lee for some sort of job – which wa
s strange, given that they must have had plenty of their own resources to employ – but Thompson wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If he could find out where Lee would be travelling from, for the assigned meeting in Moscow . . .

  But they had evidently been too late in following up this lead, and Lee was already in the air. His colleague had just sent him over the details, and he could see that Lee was traveling under the name of John Whitman, on a nonstop Aeroflot flight from Miami International to Sheremetyevo International, just thirty kilometers outside Moscow.

  Thompson understood that intercepting Lee at the airport would be problematic – US-Russian relations were strained at best, and he had to remember that Lee had been requested to be there by elements of the Russian government. If Thompson was to ask for a favor, it would most assuredly be summarily rejected; and then, if he chose to move unilaterally, the finger of suspicion would be immediately upon him.

  No, Thompson told himself, he would not be asking favors of anyone; the unilateral action would start right now.

  After all, a lot could happen in the thirty kilometers between Sheremetyevo and Moscow.

  2

  John Lee sipped from his bottle of water and stared out of the window, although there was nothing to see; below him, through the clouds, would be the Atlantic Ocean and nothing more.

  He wondered, not for the first time, about the job he was travelling nearly six thousand miles across the world to hear about. Alex had told him that the client – apparently a man named Leonid Sokolov, a fairly high-ranking officer in the FSB, Russia’s internal security service – was unwilling to provide details over the phone, but needed to meet face to face, for security reasons. However, it was, he’d assured Grayson, a matter of extreme urgency, and one which couldn’t be handled “inhouse”.

  This fact intrigued Lee, and worried him somewhat – what could it be, he wondered, that the FSB couldn’t – or wouldn’t – handle themselves? The Russians weren’t exactly known for asking for outside help, which meant that these had to be pretty special circumstances.

  But what?

  Back at their base in the Bahamas – on a private island thought to be uninhabited – his team were already gearing up for a potential mission. Phoenix De Maio especially, was hard at work trying to hack into the Russian systems to see if she could figure out what this all might be about. Lee knew that good intelligence was half the battle, and forewarned was, he believed, forearmed. Before the flight, however, she had turned up exactly nothing.

  Phoenix was a computer expert, a genius hacker and prodigy of MIT, whose father also happened to be one of France’s wealthiest industrialists. In fact, that was the reason Lee had first met her – she had been kidnapped by a gang who’d hoped to take advantage of Claude De Maio’s immense wealth. But the businessman had instead hired Lee – on only his third mission as a private contractor – and the man’s daughter had been successfully brought home. Phoenix had begged to become a part of Lee’s team, and – seeing how valuable such a computer whizz could be for his future operations – he’d agreed.

  Things had turned out rather more complicated though, as she had fallen in love with him. He sometimes had to admit that he felt the same way – and indeed, they’d had more than their fair share of romantic encounters over the years – but after what had happened to his wife and daughter, Lee was reluctant to get too close to anyone else, even Phoenix.

  He’d been glad of the Moscow job, he remembered. He’d just rescued two young boys from kidnappers in the Australian Outback, and once back home, Phoenix had started talking about children – a conversation that Lee was very far from wanting to have. And then the phone had gone, and it was Alex, telling him about the meeting with Sokolov. And so it had been back to business, awkward conversations to be left for another time.

  Lee shook his head as he thought about the absurdity of the situation – he would rather be on a mission that could see him killed, than have a simple conversation. What, he wondered, did that say about him?

  And yet he already knew that he lived for the mission – any mission. Everything else was filler. It was what the abbot Zhao Xiaobo had recognized in him, when he’d sought refuge in Buddhist monasteries after going AWOL. The old monk had perceived a hole in him, a gap which could only be filled by a mission. And it was Zhao who had led Lee toward his second career as an extractor, by asking him to rescue a fellow monk being held under armed guard in China. The job had reignited the fire in Lee’s heart, and turned his life around; after flailing in the dark for so long, he was once again filled with purpose.

  But conversations about kids? Forget it.

  He started to run through in his mind the routine once he arrived at Sheremetyevo. He would be met at the gate, and escorted to a private vehicle that would take him onward to the as-yet unspecified meeting place.

  It was risky, Lee knew – there were plenty of people who wanted him dead, after all – but as far as he knew, none of his enemies had any connections to Russia, or the FSB. And anyway, he would be updating Phoenix constantly on all the details – snapshots of the person who met him at the airport, car and license plates, anyone else in the car – and she would be tracking him in real-time via the mobile app on his secure cellphone. It had already been agreed that he would be allowed to keep it on him, as part of the arrangements.

  If it all went wrong, he wouldn’t have weapons; but then it wouldn’t be the first time that he’d had to handle a situation like this, hand-to-hand. His father had been an American diplomat, his mother Chinese, and he’d traveled the world as a kid from one embassy to the next, studying martial arts at the source – Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines, he’d trained in combat his entire life. And before joining the Air Force, he’d enjoyed a short career as a stuntman with the Hong Kong film industry – and if you could survive that, Lee thought with a smile, then you could pretty much survive anything. It had made his training as a PJ – allegedly the hardest course in the entire US military – seem like a cakewalk in comparison. While his colleagues were nearing collapse, he had just been getting started.

  Lee’s decision not to kill made his confrontations more dangerous, of course, but he simply couldn’t countenance the thought of intentionally ending a person’s life any longer. Back in the Bahamas, his colleague Yukio Mabuni – an ex-member of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology – constantly worked on developing a range of non-lethal weapons for Lee to use on his missions. Many of them were refined versions of military and law-enforcement items, but he also used a wide range of more traditional weapons from the various martial arts he had studied. Lee had to remind himself to target non-lethal areas, but he welcomed the challenge – after all, anybody could kill; the real skill lay in defeating someone without making them a fatality.

  He almost dropped the bottle of water as he had a sudden flash of memory, saw the head of the eight-year-old boy he had shot exploding against the white-painted wall of the Iraqi interrogation cell, the screams of his father as the body fell to join the others on the floor, the tiles awash with blood and brain matter.

  He gagged, almost vomited, but caught himself; knew that more images were coming, tried to stop them but couldn’t.

  The men in his house; the blow to his head; the barrels of the guns placed against the heads of his wife, his daughter; the shots, following close, one after the other, the bodies falling, his screams loud and anguished like those of the boy’s father back in Iraq; the pain as the bullets struck him in the chest, leaving him gasping on the floor, choking on his own blood as he stared into the frozen, lifeless, wide-open eyes of the two people who had meant the most to him in the entire world, who were his entire world, dead, dead, dead . . .

  The vision must have only lasted a moment, but it seemed an eternity and he knew he must have cried out loud, because the man in the next seat turned to him, a look of concern on his face. “Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Lee managed. “Yes, I . . . I
must have drifted off, had a bad dream.”

  The man just nodded and went back to his newspaper, but the incident left Lee shaken. The visions still came, even so many years later, and they never failed to hurt him; but they served as a reminder, at least, of who he was.

  He was no longer a killer, as good as he had been.

  No, his sacred duty now was to rescue people; and only through that, could he perhaps make amends for his past.

  3

  Tom Addison stared across the concourse at the flood of travelers coming through security; passport control was dealing with flights from multiple destinations, and there were a lot more people than those from the Miami route. It was possible that one of the drivers holding signs up was waiting for John Lee, but Addison knew they wouldn’t use the man’s real name, and so looking at them was of no use to him; he just had to keep on scanning the crowds, and he could ID his man from the photos that he’d been sent. One of his teammates was checking from another angle, and he hoped that together, they would be able to spot him.

  Addison was fairly new to the CIA’s Special Activities Division, but had proved himself while serving as a Navy SEAL for many years. This kind of mission was different perhaps, but it was a mission nevertheless, and he knew how to handle the stresses of such work.

  He was part of an eight-man team that had been covertly assisting the Ukrainian military against the Russians in the eastern war zones when the call had come for them to get to Moscow as fast as they could; it was to be a quick shoot-and-scoot, and they could then get back to their primary mission. None of the team liked being disturbed in this manner, but when the orders came down from the top, you just did what you were told.

  Addison had no idea what this man had done, but it must have been serious for the Deputy Director himself to get involved. The orders were simple – kill the man – but achieving that aim would be anything but. They were operating in a foreign, decidedly unfriendly country, they’d had no time for reconnaissance, and it was believed that their target might even be meeting members of the Russian government, or military – people who were expressly not to be harmed.