Headshot: CIA Assassin (Jack Hunter Book 1) Read online

  Jack Hunter

  Headshot

  Rawlin Cash

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

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  One

  In Manhattan’s Civic Center, between a federal courthouse, an FBI field office, City Hall, and One Police Plaza, stands a twelve-story high, rust-colored, brick fortress. The windows are opaque slats. Federal marshals man the gates. The receiving area is an underground, bomb-proof bunker, its concrete three times thicker than that of the Führerbunker built by Hitler to withstand the destruction of Berlin.

  It is among the most secure facilities ever built on US soil. The LA Times called it the Guantanamo of New York. Journalists and civil rights activists have sought information from the inside for years.

  On a normal operating day, no one goes in and no one comes out. The building’s services are so automated that almost all staff and guard duties are performed remotely. Food delivery, cell rotation, and prisoner processing is completely automated. There is a control center in the basement where guards monitor every process and function on screens. In the event of an emergency, authorization from the attorney general is required to enter.

  The building is as close to a legal blackbox as the US constitution will allow.

  In 2011, the New York Times learned of the entry procedure from a former inmate, a Saint Petersburg computer science graduate who’d built a server-farm in Rockville, Maryland. He was eventually found not guilty of espionage and released. The story published a month later read like something from a science fiction novel.

  The only way in is through the basement. A bus pulls up to a receiving bay, a single prisoner gets out, and federal marshals tell him to strip. The prisoner can still remember the daylight he was in just a few minutes before. Unless he is released, transferred, or required to make a court appearance, he will not see the sky again until the date of his release. In a tiled room he is strapped to a chair and his head is shaved. He is showered. The water smells like the over-chlorinated swimming pools of his childhood. He squats. He coughs. Someone puts a finger in his ass and someone else checks his mouth. He puts on an orange jumpsuit which has a number and the words Federal Correctional Center stenciled on the back.

  He is shackled at the ankles and wrists. The shackles are connected to a chain around his waist and are locked and unlocked remotely. He is brought barefoot to a large electronic door like the sealed door of a submarine. Through the door is a long tunnel, forty feet below street-level, and he is instructed to walk to the door at the other end. He walks alone. The first door locks behind him. The second remains locked until he reaches it. The doors are controlled remotely by guards watching on monitors. There is no local override. Any interruption in the feed to the control center and the doors cannot be opened.

  Beyond the second door is an open elevator. The prisoner looks at the elevator. There are no buttons. There are no guards. It is obvious what he must do but even so, he is confused. A voice on an intercom tells him to enter the elevator but it cannot rush him. The elevator contains a cage large enough for him to stand in. He can look into it for a minute or an hour, but eventually he must step inside. It locks behind him and he is taken to his floor.

  Each floor is self-contained. Only a handful of technicians have ever set foot on more than one floor. The highest priority prisoners exit on the tenth. The confinement conditions are so severe the United Nations has lodged formal anti-torture complaints with Washington.

  This is 10 South.

  The prisoner will not speak to another living soul for the duration of his sentence. He will never meet another inmate. He will never face a guard or member of prison staff. For twenty-three hours a day he will be in a sealed, windowless cell. He is constantly monitored by four high-resolution cameras. Food is delivered by machine. The fluorescent lighting will never be turned off, never dimmed. It is so intense that within six months he will suffer measurable sight degradation. Within six years, a significant proportion of prisoners are blind or close to it. For one hour each day he will visit a small exercise room. He will not be escorted. His cell will unlock and an LED light strip will lead him to the room. The room has an opaque window that lets in natural light but cannot be seen through. The room contains a treadmill, a bike, and a rowing machine. After an hour he returns to his cell or is subjected to an auditory alarm that increases gradually from one-hundred-twenty decibels, about as loud as a chainsaw, to one-hundred-fifty decibels, at which point there is a risk of eardrum rupture.

  This is the pinnacle of penal security. This is the place where the highest-risk prisoners in the world end up. The Al-Qaeda leaders who stood trial ended up here. The terrorists who bombed the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam ended up here. The perpetrators of classified attempts to assassinate senior government officials, including President Bush in 2002 and President Obama in 2010 and 2014, ended up here.

  This is not a place for serial-killers or psychopaths, rapists or child molesters. This place, this level of confinement, this degree of isolation, is reserved solely for enemies of the state, people so dangerous they don’t just threaten the law, they threaten the nation that wrote the law.

  The United States has the most powerful military of any nation or empire of any era in history in any part of the world. Active and reserve personnel exceeds two million. Annual expenditure exceeds six-hundred billion. It has over thirteen thousand fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, six thousand tanks, thirty-eight thousand armored fighting vehicles, two thousand self-propelled or towed artillery vehicles, and over a thousand rocket projectors. Total naval strength is four-hundred-fifteen vessels, including twenty aircraft carriers. It has a current usable nuclear stockpile of four thousand warheads, two thousand deployed. Nuclear strike range is ten thousand miles from land, seven thousand from sea. Nowhere is out of range.

  Absolute supremacy can be projected to any theater.

  Absolute powe
r can be brought down on any actor.

  Absolute destruction can be delivered to any spot on the globe.

  This prison, this anonymous high-rise that could be mistaken for a medium-grade municipal office building, contains the people, the men, who threaten that power.

  It has six cells.

  It is hell on earth.

  Two

  Segundo José Heredia, also known as El Sucio, or the Dirty, is not your average drug lord. When he was arrested crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border in 1993 and sentenced to thirty years, he didn’t just escape Federal Social Readaptation Center Number 1 in Almoloya de Juárez.

  Escaping is what your average drug lord would do.

  El Sucio went on a kidnapping spree. His men snatched the governor of the prison, four-hundred-twenty of the four-hundred-twenty-six prison guards, as well as over a thousand wives, girlfriends, parents, children, grandparents, and grandchildren of those guards. Governor, guards, men, women and children, he rounded up over sixteen-hundred people.

  And he didn’t just kill them.

  That wouldn’t have sent the message he wanted to send.

  Instead, he took over the Toluca City Sewage Treatment Plant, blew open the thirty-foot deep raw sludge tank, and forced his sixteen hundred captives into it. They floated for as long as they could, and then they sank.

  No one survived.

  As a side effect, half a million people in Toluca, Metepec, and San Mateo Atenco had no sewage treatment for six weeks. The stench reached the Mexican parliament, forty miles away, at the National Palace.

  And more was to come.

  Within a year, the Guatemalan president was dead, assassinated by sniper from a helicopter while on vacation in Cancún. So many attempts were made on the Mexican president that he was forced to resign his office, go into hiding, and has not been seen in public since.

  El Sucio walked free and grew his cartel with impunity. It would be decades before another Mexican president attempted to stop him.

  And then, in 2013, El Sucio was captured for a second time when the Mexican army launched an all out assault on his convoy in Chihuahua. It was the biggest military operation on Mexican soil since the days of Pancho Villa. Four thousand troops were involved. Six hundred were killed. In less than a month, while still awaiting trial, El Sucio escaped Federal Social Readaptation Center Number 2 in the state of Jalisco through a tunnel from his cell to a barn four miles away. The night of his escape, fifty-eight Guadalajara city buses blew up during rush hour. The death toll exceeded eleven hundred.

  The struggle against the cartel continued, but eventually the Mexican government was forced to admit de facto defeat when it pulled the entirety of its military, as well as all federal and state law enforcement personnel and all judges out of the province of Sinaloa. In the preceding twelve months, total federal and state casualties in Sinaloa exceeded thirty thousand. Civilian casualties exceeded one hundred thousand.

  Wars had been less deadly.

  The city of Culiacán, El Sucio’s birthplace, had long been a no-go area for government forces. When that area suddenly expanded to include all of Sinaloa, a full fortieth of Mexico’s territory containing three million people, the international community took notice. It was the biggest threat to global order since the Islamic State declared the Caliphate in 2014.

  The Mexican army set up checkpoints on all roads in and out of the state. The airports were closed and the airspace patrolled jointly by the Mexican and US Air Forces. Residents were notified officially by the Servicio de Administractión that they were no longer required to pay taxes.

  No one paid closer attention than the US military.

  This threat wasn’t halfway around the globe in Afghanistan or Iraq, it wasn’t on the Korean Peninsula, it wasn’t in Palestine, it was on their doorstep. If some drug dealer wanted to launch rockets over the fence into US territory, it wasn’t going to happen on their watch.

  The politicians urged caution, they didn’t want to create panic, but the joint chiefs closed ranks. In a heated argument with the president, the attorney general, and FBI Director Willis Chancey, who all wanted to tread softly, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Harry Goldwater, threatened to resign if extraordinary measures were not put in place. The national security advisor backed him up.

  The president responded by providing comprehensive military support to Mexico, enhancing security along the southern border, calling up thousands of additional troops for deployment in California and Texas, and fully funding the border wall. The prototype for the wall approved by congress was to stretch the full two-thousand miles from the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area in Brownsville, Texas, to San Ysidro south of San Diego, California. It was a forty-foot high concrete barrier with high-tech, full-spectrum surveillance, experimental anti-climbing measures, and sensors capable of detecting underground vibrations to a depth of two hundred feet. The price estimate was not publicly disclosed, but the project was hailed by both the president and lawmakers as the largest and most ambitious manmade structure built since the completion of the Great Wall of China by the Ming Dynasty in the sixteenth century.

  Within months, the joint chiefs were proved right.

  Satellite imagery of Sinaloa showed new air fields, anti-aircraft installations, and the initial phases of construction of what appeared to be missile launch pads. In January, US and Mexican patrol aircraft were shot down by cartel pilots flying Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets. The Department of Defense’s best guess was that the jets, and possibly the pilots, had been purchased from Belarus, which had inherited thirty of them from the Sixty-First Fighter Aviation Regiment after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since 2010, NATO had not been able to account for the location of the fighters, and when one of them was shot down in Angola by a terrorist with a shoulder-mounted SA-14 Gremlin rocket launcher, it was confirmed that the Belorussians had sold them to the highest bidder. Evidently, the cartel had been one of the buyers. The number of jets in their possession was unknown.

  The official position, supported by a joint report by the DEA, the FBI, the DoD, and the CIA, became that the cartel of Segundo José Heredia, also known as the Sinaloa Cartel, had graduated from a law enforcement issue to a full blown military threat. A bipartisan congressional report concluded, ‘Heredia’s cartel has verifiable and confirmed military hardware capable of launching a credible military threat to US territorial integrity.’

  El Sucio could wage war on the United States.

  The most up to date DoD analyses estimated he was capable of posing a more significant challenge to the military than all but twenty-one of the world’s sovereign nations. The DC-based Fire-Power Analysis Center put the cartel’s military capability on a par with Israel. And it noted, ‘unlike sovereign militaries, El Sucio, as his name suggests, can be expected to fight dirty.’

  Three

  When the cartel took over Sinaloa, El Sucio was already the most wanted man in the history of US law enforcement. He had been federally indicted in fourteen federal court districts for drug trafficking, bribery, murder, torture, rape, and in one count, cannibalism. According to an indictment filed in the northern district of Illinois, he had ordered that three members of a rival Chicago drug gang be boiled alive in a nine-hundred gallon oil-fired water tank. After thirty minutes, El Sucio cut flesh from the bodies and served it on skewers to his men.

  Across all US state and federal courts, he was listed as a defendant or codefendant on over two thousand indictments, accounting for over forty thousand murders.

  The president, in discussion with the military and the government of Mexico, was weighing a number of options. The military and the CIA wanted to move aggressively to contain the threat. The FBI and attorney general argued for a more law enforcement based approach.

  The team that apprehended Osama Bin Laden was consulted.

  After rejecting the possibility of US Army units crossing the border into Sonora and Chihuahua in force, plans were drawn for an operation resembling the int
ervention in Iraq against ISIS. Limited US ground troops would assist the Mexican army on the ground, while four US carrier strike groups would provide massive air support from the Gulf of California.

  The operation was given the codename Everglade.

  Based on the ISIS experience, Everglade would take years to degrade the cartel’s fighting power, and there was an extremely high risk of major counter attacks on US soil during the process.

  Parts of southern Texas and California would almost certainly experience air and missile strikes.

  It would be a grim operation.

  The cartel was expected to fight to the death.

  No one relished the prospect.

  But it was the best option on the table.

  And then, while plans for Everglade were being finalized, El Sucio was arrested.

  It came from nowhere.

  A complete surprise.

  A single, uniformed police officer in the Mexican resort town of Cabo San Lucas thought he recognized Heredia on a beach with his family. He called in the sighting. The Mexican federal forces ignored the report, not regarding it as credible. The state governor was skeptical but authorized a local tactical unit to make an arrest. Without notifying the military, and without the assistance of US or Mexican special forces, a squad of fifteen men and three helicopters moved in on a luxury beach villa outside Cabo.