Direct Action - 03 (15 page)

Windspeed, jump altitude, weather conditions, and much more could be adjusted on the software side to give the most realistic experience possible. In this case they had the sub-contractor, where they were now located in Australia that ran the staging site, and programmed the exact scenario they had in mind for their mission. It was constantly being updated based on the feedback sent from Ramon who was already watching the building in Manila.

They were still working out what their jump altitude should be, what their pull altitude should be, and what their angle of attack should be as they came in on the objective building. Beyond that, they were all still having trouble controlling their wing suits.

“Come up five hundred feet on the jump altitude,” Bill told the technician.

“Got it, resetting now,” the technician announced.

Deckard flipped down his VR goggles as the suspension lines began to retract and pull him up into a freefall position.

“Don't fuck it up,” he heard Bill say, his voice echoing in the warehouse.

Then they were jumping out of the back of an airplane over Manila and blasting over the city again. Deckard overshot the target and slammed into another building.

Everybody else died too.

Rick pushed a piece of plywood into position and held it for Deckard. While holding a half dozen nails in his mouth, Deckard began nailing the plywood into the wooden frame that they had spent the day constructing. Each of the Liquid Sky members were covered in sweat, their clothes soaked through while they labored in the Australian heat.

Nadeesha weaved her way through the mock-up they were building with a clipboard in her hand.

“When you finish with that I need you two to help Paul frame out the dining room.”

Rick and Deckard looked at each other as she walked off. She was taking her role as foreman a little too seriously. Using the pictures that Ramon was taking of the objective area, they were building a scale model of the rooftop apartment they were going to raid. Once they finished building it, they would run through it, training with guns that shot paint pellets.

Nadeesha kept pushing them to work faster. They still had a mission brief to do and then it was back into the simulator until they didn't suck anymore.

Deckard finished nailing the plywood in place, and then went to go find Paul.

Back in the warehouse, everyone was relieved to be able to sit in the air conditioning for a while. Nadeesha had just gotten off the phone with Ramon and was now ready to start the brief. A map was laid out on the table alongside some overhead satellite photography taken from Google Earth. The next step would be to make a three-dimensional model of the city to help conduct talk-throughs of the mission.

Bill turned on a tablet and passed it around. It showed a thirty-something Filipino with a goatee and eyeglasses.

“This is our target,
Kanor De Jesus. He runs a finance network for the moose limbs. Some of them are targeting the royal families in the Gulf States, so the client wants this guy out of the picture. The problem is that various players, including JSOC, have already tried to kill him. Five botched assassination attempts in the last two years. These days he doesn't ever leave his rooftop apartment. The building is locked down with security from top to bottom. It would take a battalion of soldiers to fight their way up to the top. He knows there will be another assassination attempt and has taken precautions.”

“For some reason De Jesus just doesn't sound like a Muslim name,” Zach remarked.

“It isn't. This guy is a businessman; not a moose limb. His MO is providing financing to individuals and small cells that conduct terrorist attacks back in their home countries. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, Iraq, and so on. He has a network that goes out and buys pre-paid cards. You have to show identification to buy the cards, but not to reload them. So De Jesus has some local patsies buy the cards, then he has his men reload them with cash, all the way up to 10,000 dollars which is more than enough to get into the Middle East and run a small-scale terrorist operation. Sometimes he will hand out multiple cards anyway.

“The thing is, these attacks he is funding are becoming so frequent that each country's intelligence services are having a hard time countering them. He is using swarming tactics. Remember those anus bombs?”

“Butt bombs?” Paul asked.

“A couple moose limbs stuck HME,” Bill said, referring to home made explosives, “along with a cell-phone detonator right up their poop chute.”

“Sounds painful.”

“These fuckers have lots of practice playing butt darts so I'm sure it wasn't that big a deal. They almost killed the intelligence minister of Jordan a few months ago with one of those attacks. The other went off and killed a bunch of people in Riyadh during Ramadan.”

“Killing their own people,” Zach remarked. “Fucking savages.”

Deckard said nothing. He wasn't at all surprised. That was how groups like Al Qaeda operated. Muslim or not, you, your wife, and your kids were going to be turned into corpses if you didn't believe in AQ's bronze-age worldview.

“The thing about these pre-paid cards is that they are an easy way to transport large sums of money across international borders, and they are completely untraceable. It allows terrorists to access funds in ways that would set off trip wires otherwise. If they were moving cash around in some other manner it would get picked up by banking software and red-flagged by American and foreign agencies.

“There was also an IED that injured a Saudi prince a couple months back. The scale of the attacks is increasing while the duration between them is decreasing. De Jesus is handing out these pre-paid cards to moose limb motherfuckers like it is going out of style. But this is what really has the client freaked out,” Bill said as he grabbed the tablet and flipped to a new picture.

“This guy works for the People's Liberation Army with the General Staff Development's Third Department.”

“The what?” Rick asked.

“Uh, it's like China's version of the NSA.”

“Not really,” Nadeesha chimed in.

“Well, then tell us knuckle draggers what the fuck this guy represents.”

“He goes by the name Dai Kexue, a mid-level executive with a state-owned manufacturing consortium. His real name is Major Shen Banggen.”

“And what does he do for Red China?” Rick asked again.

“He facilitates certain programs and projects, only a few of which we know anything about. We do know that the Third Department is invested in securing China's cyber infrastructure and protecting its national security, but it isn't anything like the NSA. The Third Department takes a more holistic approach to national security called
informatization.
This means that their cyber security initiatives work in tandem with China's efforts to secure its place in the global marketplace, continue its economic growth, and compete commercially.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Paul asked, clearly frustrated.

Deckard leaned forward and began to speak.

“It means that Major Banggen is tasked with ensuring that China has total information dominance for political, economic, and military purposes. Baggen is clearly working with De Jesus as part of a Chinese shaping operation. They are facilitating outcomes in the Middle East that they feel are favorable to China and unfavorable to the United States.”

“I still don't get it,” Paul said rolling his eyes.

Nadeesha blew air through her teeth.

“It means we have to kill De Jesus,” Deckard said.

“You should have just said that in the first place.”

“You guys can go bone-to-bone and see who is bigger later on,” Bill told them. “Nadeesha has been compiling the intel that Ramon has gathered so far and will brief you on the general layout of what you will find on the rooftop of the Aquino building when, and if, you make it there.”

They slept in cots in the warehouse. The team was cut off from the rest of the world and kept in isolation. The technician who ran the simulator would bring them food in the morning and other odds and ends they requested.

Bill woke the team at nine in the morning. Using replica M4 rifles that shot paintball pellets, they began clearing the mock up that they had begun constructing the previous day. Most of De Jesus' apartment was framed out, but it still needed some work. Still, they were just familiarizing themselves with the floor plan. Bill only set up a few paper targets inside for them to shoot at.

Deckard had to give it to Bill, as unprofessional an outfit as it was, Liquid Sky had a pretty squared away training plan for this mission. He was using the crawl, walk, run method to train up the team and prepare them for their mission in the PI. The simulator, the mock up, using the kit they would have on the mission, it all made sense and greatly increased their probability of success.

After a few hours in the mock up, Bill called them back to the warehouse before they got burned out and lazy running through the wooden structure again and again. The human mind reached the point of diminishing returns after a while.

Then it was right back into the simulator.

Bill was the first one to stick the landing on the rooftop. Deckard was the second but was still hit or miss. Then Paul made it in the next couple simulations. Zach made the landing once, but just barely. Rick still had a big goose egg for a score in the simulator that night. It was early in the morning when Bill decided they were done for the night.

They were getting better.

Slowly.

At least they had a high degree of confidence that their target wasn't going anywhere.