Disavowed
Authors: C. G. Cooper
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thriller & Suspense, #War & Military, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Thriller
Book 8 of the Corps Justice Series
Copyright © 2014 Corps Justice. All Rights Reserved
Author: C. G. Cooper
This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, locations and events are all products of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to actual events or real persons are completely coincidental.
Any unauthorized reproduction of this work is strictly prohibited.
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Warning: This story is intended for mature audiences and contains profanity and violence.
Dedications
To my loyal group of
Novels Live
warriors, thanks for your help in crafting this novel.
To our amazing troops serving all over the world, thank you for your bravery and service.
Semper Fidelis
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Corps Justice Oath by Col. Calvin Stokes, Sr. (USMC, Ret.)
1. We will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
2. We will protect the weak and punish the wicked.
3. When the laws of this nation hinder the completion of these duties, our moral compass will guide us to see the mission through.
+++
Si Vis Pacem, Para Iustitiam: In order to have peace, you must first have justice.
Chapter 1
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
9:12am, August 23
rd
It was a game. At regular intervals throughout the day an old Afghan would unchain the rickety wood slat door. He would peer in with one rheumy eye through a hole in the door, then open it. Always careful. His gnarled and heavily tanned arm reaching in to place a dented aluminum tray on the concrete floor. It held a plate covered with a dented metal dome.
Sometimes the covered plate contained a bottle of water, a piece of bread and a scrap of stringy meat. Goat meat. It was the other times that his captors had their fun.
The second time he’d reached for the tray, relishing the thought of a sip of water, he’d almost dropped the metal top in surprise. Lying on the cracked earthen plate was a severed hand, fresh blood pooled like a bed of soup.
The time after that they’d given him an ear. Then, earlier that morning, he’d found out where the parts were coming from. When he’d uncovered the plate he found the head of a man he knew, his eyes bulging from his final death throes. Not a man. Almost a boy.
Ikram was a nineteen year old Afghan he’d recruited weeks before. The boy had a knack for languages and had helped his employer master the local Pashtun dialect. They’d often stayed up well into the night, Ikram pronouncing words for his friend, always patient.
He’d learned that Ikram was a tenth son, the youngest. While his brothers and sisters chose to stay close to their ancestral home, Ikram left for a shot at seeing the world. They’d met by chance in a small cafe where Ikram was waiting tables. He’d surprised the foreigner with his mastery of English and the two had struck up a conversation until the cafe owner yelled for the boy to get back to work.
The memories of their time together played over in his mind as he’d looked down at the young man’s contorted face. By the jagged and ripped look of the neck wound they’d butchered him alive. Ikram had felt every cut. He said a silent prayer for the boy.
Major Bartholomew Andrews, USMC, Andy to his friends, sat in the corner of the ramshackle room picking at a scab on the back of his hand. He’d been captured days before. Time ground by as if accompanied by a maddening dirge. Memories spun. The rest of his team slaughtered in a dank alley. At the time, Ikram and Maj. Andrews were the only ones left standing. There’d been time for one last phone call, to the only person Andy knew he could trust.
After the satellite phone had been knocked from his hand, he’d taken down six until someone threw a concussion grenade and knocked him unconscious. It was the last time he’d seen Ikram until uncovering the gruesome platter.
The game aside, no one had touched him. He’d awakened to find himself in the room he now occupied, shackled to the stone wall by ancient iron manacles strapped to his wrists and ankles. They clanked together as he tried to shift into a more comfortable position. Impossible. Sleep came in waves.
Although his body ached and his throat screamed from thirst, Andy’s mind analyzed the situation, searching, calculating. Something wasn’t right. If he was the target of a kidnapping, why the games? Why didn’t they torture him, try to get information out of him?
The lack of physical abuse worried him more than if he’d been strapped to a wooden beam and beaten until he broke.
Andy held no illusions about his ability to outlast interrogation. He was a Marine infantry officer. He was a Navy Cross winner. He knew the horrors of war and the price paid for victory.
But he also knew that eventually everyone cracked. The trick was to hang on as long as you could and hope that you’d either escape or get rescued. Death was the only other obvious alternative. The problem for Andy was two-fold. First, he was in possession of troves of classified information. His time in Afghanistan had been well spent. Second, no one knew where he was. This was his mission, the first he’d been allowed to plan and execute while on loan to the CIA. There was no oversight. He was on his own.
He’d handpicked his team. Three former American special forces soldiers plus him and Ikram. Small. Mobile. Undetectable.
It was as if he’d given the attackers a detailed description of the operation, from timelines to check points. He remembered the hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention as soon as they’d landed. He should have listened to the warning and aborted the mission. It was pride that pushed him forward, ignoring the alarm bells in his head.
But how had they known? No one knew the details of the op except for Andy and he’d burned the notes before leaving Camp Leatherneck. How had they found him? And, more importantly, why were they keeping him alive?
His thoughts rattled as the chains on the door creaked open, another tray set on the cracked concrete floor.
Chapter 2
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
9:57am, August 23
rd
Kyle Hazlitt was a third year student at the University of Virginia. A red-shirt walk-on for UVa’s football team, Hazlitt felt the constant need to keep himself conditioned. If he wanted to keep his hard fought position as #2 wide receiver, he’d have to work for it. Even though there’d already been morning practice, he was back to lifting at Memorial Gym.
Just having drained the last of his gallon jug of water, the college wide-out walked to the water fountain to get a refill. He passed one of the private rooms where he occasionally stretched on the wrestling mats. A large figure flew past the window.
What the…?
Hazlitt moved to the door and watched as two men charged at each other. It looked like an unfair fight. The one he’d seen run by the window was a huge black guy. He figured the man had to be close to seven feet tall and was built like an NFL lineman.
The other guy was white and more than a foot shorter than his partner. He was trim where the other guy was muscle bound and hulking. Despite the size difference, the smaller guy didn’t seem to care. He bulled in, diving and rolling at the last possible moment, narrowly missing the hands of the giant with the flat top.
He watched as they circled each other, both men smiling, soaked in sweat. Like two combatants in a mixed martial arts ring, they maneuvered around each other, sometimes grasping a leg or arm of their opponent, but each always twisting away. To Hazlitt’s surprise the smaller guy was holding his own. He couldn’t tell how, but it looked to be a subtle shift here or a quick slip there.
The big guy finally got the brown-haired guy on the ground and flipped him around, getting him to tap-out with an arm-bar. Hazlitt shook his head and continued on. He wouldn’t want to take on either of those guys.
+++
Master Sergeant Willy Trent, USMC (retired), helped his boss up. Cal Stokes grinned up at his friend.
“I thought I had you, Top.”
Trent shook his head and laughed, the sound deep and rumbling. “How many times do I have to tell you, Cal? I cannot be beaten!” He stood with his hands on his hips like a kid wearing a red cape pretending he was Superman.
Cal chuckled. “You know, you do have me by like a hundred pounds.”
Trent shrugged. “Tell that to Royce Gracie. Dude took out guys bigger than me in UFC One.”
Cal shook his head. “Fine. You win.”
“Now, was that so hard?”
Cal gave Trent the middle finger, but smiled as he grabbed a towel off his gym bag. He didn’t like to lose, ever. But he guessed that if he had to, he might as well lose to one of his best friends who was possibly the strongest man he’d ever met. Even during his time in the Marine Corps, Cal had never met anyone who could manhandle the formidable MSgt Trent.
Ten minutes later they walked into the renovated home that housed their budding corporate headquarters. Situated on the corner of Rugby Road and Preston Avenue, The Jefferson Group owned properties on two corners of the intersection. The second property was still under construction, so they were walking in to the recently finished ‘pentagon’ property, named for the shape of the lot.
On paper, The Jefferson Group was a small consultancy that sourced its highly qualified principals to private corporations and the federal government. They even gave the occasional guest lecture at the University.
While Cal Stokes was the de facto leader of the small company, billionaire Jonas Layton was its face. Layton had made his billions in the tech industry. By using his genius level brain to build software widely adopted by multi-national corporations, and his uncanny ability to predict future events, Layton was increasingly being called “The Fortuneteller” by industry insiders. His prognosticative powers were becoming legendary.
Layton dealt with the day-to-day minutia of running a business. Although Cal was still majority owner of Stokes Security International (SSI), a private security company founded by his father, Marine Col. Calvin Stokes, Sr., he now handled The Jefferson Group’s burgeoning covert division.
Months before, he’d left SSI and been tasked by his good friend, U.S. President Brandon Zimmer, to form a new entity. This secret endeavor would have a public face but a very private mission. The Navy Cross winner was given the opportunity to be the president’s secret weapon. He’d done it for years with SSI, but now he had a better cover. So while local police and government agencies battled bureaucracy and fickle lawmakers, Cal and his team of operators at The Jefferson Group were free to battle the hidden forces that were attacking America.
Just days before, the team had returned from overseas where Cal had directed the complete destruction of the budding terror organization called ISIS. Through careful coordination with American and coalition military assets, the president’s men conducted a shock and awe campaign that was now pursuing global terrorists back to their homes. The gloves were off. America was playing for keeps, and Cal and his team were an instrumental part of it all. They were the emergency asset in President Zimmer’s back pocket.
As Cal and Trent entered the front door, they were greeted by a short Hispanic with an eccentric beard braided in dual strands running off his chin. Gaucho was a former Army Delta soldier and head of the squad-sized team who’d volunteered to follow Cal from SSI to The Jefferson Group.
“You take him down, boss?” Gaucho asked. By the grin on his face he obviously already knew the answer.
Cal shook his head. “Top kept trying to hug me. I hate it when he does that.”
Trent punched his fellow Marine in the shoulder, knocking Cal a foot to the side.
“That’s for not hugging me back,” said Trent.
Cal rubbed his shoulder. “Any word from Travis?”
Travis Haden was Cal’s cousin and the previous CEO of Stokes Security International. Earlier that year the former SEAL had accepted the invitation to be President Zimmer’s Chief of Staff.
“Not yet,” answered Gaucho.
Cal frowned. Two days before he’d gotten a call from his former platoon commander, Major Andrews. After saving each other’s lives on deployment, the two Navy Cross winners had stayed in touch. Andy was the brother Cal never had. But the phone call hadn’t been a “Hey how’s it going?” type of call. Andy was in trouble. He hadn’t said so over the phone, but Arabic shouting and gunfire in the background preceded the conversation being disconnected.
The first person Cal tried to contact after the line went dead was the man Andy had told him to call, Rich Isnard. Isnard was another former Marine who now served as the CIA station chief in Baghdad. Cal had met the rough-around-the-edges spook weeks earlier just as ISIS delivered an almost catastrophic attack against the American embassy in the heart of the Iraqi capital.
Isnard was the man responsible for recruiting Andy. While Andy wasn’t yet an official member of the CIA community, he was sort of on loan to the agency, kind of a trial period to see if he’d leave his beloved Marine Corps behind. The way Isnard had explained it to Cal, it was Andy’s call, but the Marine major had a knack for the intelligence business.
Unfortunately Isnard was nowhere to be found. When Cal had contacted the director of the CIA through the president, he’d been told that Isnard disappeared on occasion, sometimes for weeks at a time. It was his job to oversee covert missions throughout Iraq. Sometimes that meant going into the field.
Cal didn’t like it. Something was wrong, and he was tired of waiting. Who knew where Andy was and he was sitting in Charlottesville twiddling his thumbs.
“I need to make a call,” said Cal, turning down the hall and heading toward the secure War Room. Its reinforced metal door was armed with a retina scanner and the latest in security enhancements. Trent and Gaucho did not follow him.
He entered the official brain of The Jefferson Group and was surprised that no one was there. Typically there were at least two or three people manning one of the many computers arranged around the perimeter of the space. Neil Patel, their resident hacker and tech geek, was there most of each day.
Cal picked up the handset of the secure phone in the middle of the conference table and pressed the only button he ever used.
It rang once.
“Cal?” asked President Zimmer.
“Yeah. I was just checking to see if you’d heard anything about Andy.”
“It’s not really a good time right now, Cal.”
Cal’s jaw clenched. “It’s been almost three days. You know what his chances look like as more time goes by.”
Zimmer’s voice lowered. “They’re looking into it.”
“What’s the CIA doing to find him?”
“I have guests. Let me call you back.”
Cal took a deep breath, his frustration simmering but he bit it back. “Okay. When?”
“Five minutes.”
“I’ll be here.”
The line went dead and Cal stared at the phone. He counted down the seconds, his heart beating as his head pounded. It was just like a government agency to take its sweet time doing anything. In his time since leaving the Marine Corps, Cal’s loathing for politicians and bloated bureaucracy had grown by the day. He’d experienced the lies and corruption of senators and congressmen. He’d seen billions of dollars squandered on black hole programs that the American people would never see.
All of those thoughts made him want to tear Washington down and leave it in smoking ruins. But the patriot in him knew he had to trust someone. As fate would have it, that person was a Democratic congressman turned president, Brandon Zimmer.
Their relationship had not begun well, but after saving each other’s lives and surviving numerous attempts to have their careers torpedoed, the politician and Marine were close, trusting friends dedicated to the well-being of America.
The phone rang and Cal snatched it up.
“Stokes.”
“Hey, sorry I had to call back. I had Secretary of Commerce in with his staff. I couldn’t talk.”
“No, it’s my fault. I should’ve given you a heads up. So what do we know?”
There was a pause. Why was Zimmer hesitating?
“I just got word from the CIA.”
“And?”
“It’s not good.”
Panic seized Cal’s chest. “Just tell me. Is he dead?”
“No.”
A tiny measure of relief.
“Then what?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Come on, it’s me. Just tell me.”
Another pause. Cal tried to control his breathing.
“The CIA has officially disavowed Andy.”
