Defector: CIA Assassin (Jack Hunter Book 4) Read online

  DEFECTOR

  JACK HUNTER BOOK 4

  RAWLIN CASH

  Copyright © 2020 by Rawlin Cash

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  I want to sincerely thank you for purchasing this book.

  God bless,

  Rawlin Cash, January 2022

  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

  ONE

  The moon glowed bright between heavy, black clouds as the waves of Kowloon Bay roared against the newly cemented pier of Second Harbor Centre in Hong Kong. It was the largest complex on the harbor, housing sixteen large warehouses, a twenty-five-foot perimeter fence with barbed wire at the top, and twenty-four lookout towers that each had large searchlights.

  Tropical Cyclone Barry was rolling in—and quick. A thick fog rose from the waters, signaling a change in temperature. Hong Kong would soon be covered in heavy rain—the moon hidden behind dense, dark clouds—Second Harbor would be immersed in the darkness and fog of the storm, those patrolling the dock would have limited visibility.

  The clouds above the city displayed a kaleidoscope of color, lit by the hundreds of skyscrapers that showcased why Hong Kong was the technological marvel that it was. Red, green, blue, and neon yellow—Hong Kong during a storm resembled a movie-still from Blade Runner.

  The waters at the western edge of the dock raged as the dockmaster, an older man with a white goatee and a slight frame, walked toward a quiet corner—one where he wouldn’t be seen by his employers. He leered over his back, making sure that no one was watching him.

  He put more weight on one foot on account of the back pain that he’d been suffering from for many years. He’d been working on the docks of Hong Kong since the early sixties—since he was fifteen. His first shift was when The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show. He remembered watching them on a television inside a noodle shop during his lunch break. He didn’t quite get what the big deal was when he saw them. He liked the Rolling Stones more.

  He walked to the edge of the harbor, the tips of his boots hung over the edge. He pulled out a pack of camels from inside his thick coat. He lit it up a cigarette, closed his eyes, and inhaled. The humid wind of the coming storm felt nice. The sound of the waves as they crashed against the cement of the peer drowned out his thoughts.

  She was too young, he thought. What did they want with a young white girl? Stop it. Stop thinking about it. You know what your job is. It’s to stay quiet! Stop thinking of her. Focus on the waves. Focus on …

  He opened his eyes.

  He thought he heard something.

  The waters and horizon enveloped in their nothingness. He looked over the edge. He saw nothing.

  He shrugged. He needed to get back to work. His employers—the CCP—were meticulous about breaks. If he wasn’t at his post when he was supposed to be, he’d be docked pay.

  The Second Harbor Centre was controlled by the Chinese government. Every international spy agency knew it, but none could prove it.

  The old man was selected to be the dockmaster because he was fluent in Cantonese and English. He was tasked with making sure that the dock looked inconspicuous to curious eyes.

  It was mostly nondescript. The rusted gates and paint-peeled buildings hid the fact that it was equipped with next-generation surveillance equipment, everything from lidar scanning cameras, heat maps, and high-definition cameras.

  Still, many of the citizens in the city called it the Guantanamo Bay of China.

  The analogy wasn’t exactly wrong.

  The Second Harbor Centre was the most protected dock in all of Hong Kong—it was the Chinese military’s filter from the west, its cleanse. Anyone they were going to take to the mainland would first visit the innocuously named Second Harbor.

  The dockmaster sighed.

  He hated the CCP.

  But he hated himself more.

  He finished his cigarette and tossed the butt into the waters that roared below. The waters swallowed the faint glow of its remnants. The wind howled—the cyclone was moving in quicker than the weatherman had predicted.

  “Stupid woman,” he muttered to himself.

  He turned away from the waters and walked back to the main building. Beyond the iron walls that surrounded the dock, out on the street, atop a building, in the corner of his eye, he saw the Hong Kong flag wave. A single tear slid from his eye, which he knew betrayed the oath he’d given to China more than twenty years earlier to get the job.

  When he was young, he dreamed of democracy.

  He dreamed of a Hong Kong more akin to America; a place of opportunity, of freedom.

  Had Hong Kong ever known freedom, he wondered.

  It didn’t matter.

  From the British to the Chinese.

  Hong Kong was not free.

  He was as trapped as the woman in the yacht.

  He needed to get back to his office.

  He needed a drink.

  If the waves couldn’t clear his mind, he knew the booze would.

  __

  Dressed in a jet-black wet suit, Jack Hunter climbed a ladder out of the water and carefully took off his oxygen tanks and mask. He walked up to the dockmaster. He needed to get to him before he walked into one of the searchlights from one of the lookout towers.

  He’d been watching the routine of the dockmaster from a small, nondescript fishing boat for a couple of days. He knew the old man liked to smoke alone.

  Hunter pulled out a combat blade from a sheath attached to a belt across his chest.

  He snuck up behind the old man, put him in a chokehold, and made sure to make it quick.

  He slit the man’s throat.

  He knew the old man was just doing his job.

  But so was Hunter.

  He held the body as it twisted and convulsed and then went limp. The lashing rain washed the blood from his wetsuit. Before tossing the body into the water, he pulled out a keychain from the dead man’s pocket. He now had access to the main building, the one where they had taken her.

  The roaring waves hid the sound of the old man’s body as it splashed into the water.

  Hunter wiped the blood off his blade off on his wetsuit and re-sheathed his only weapon.

  He knelt down to one knee. He tapped a small radio that was in his inner left ear.

  “I’m in.”

  “You’ve got five minutes,” the voice on the other end of his headset said. “That’s when our friends will arrive and give you a distraction while you get the hell out of there.”

  “That’s more than enough time.”

  Hunter stripped out of the
wetsuit. Underneath were his combat clothes, an armored vest, combat pants, and running shoes.

  He put the dockmaster’s keys in his pants pocket.

  The clouds from the cyclone had finally rolled over the city. The moon was now hidden. The rain picked up, and the wind was relentless.

  It was time to move.

  A clap of thunder echoed out into the air and briefly drowned out the sound of the crashing waves. Hunter moved with the thunder.

  He sprinted toward the main building, which was less than sixty yards away. The main building had a covered dock entrance. That was where his intel said she would be.

  Two guards stood at the entrance of the building.

  Due to the rain, lightning, and the speed at which Hunter ran toward them, they weren’t sure what was happening. They didn’t have time to draw their weapons—two AK-47s.

  Hunter grabbed his blade and cut them down in seconds. Before their bodies hit the floor, he unlocked the door and kicked it open. He then dragged both bodies inside so that the searchlights wouldn’t spot them.

  Once inside, he grabbed one of their rifles and looked around. It was mostly dark quiet. A large, white yacht was parked inside the building.

  Hunter checked his watch.

  He had two minutes.

  A dock worker with headphones on walked from the deck of the yacht.

  Hunter lifted up the rifle and waited for a flash of lightning. He fired when the thunder growler. The dock worker fell into the water off the ramp he was walking on.

  Hunter walked slowly up the ramp and onto the yacht. He checked his corners. The Chinese military officers were overly confident. They weren’t expecting to be infiltrated so quickly, so surgically. The security inside the main building was light, to say the least. He heard the sounds of two men talking on the lower decks. They were laughing.

  “Tā hěn piàoliang.”

  “Dāng wǒmen shāle tā, wǒ zhīdào wǒ huì zuò shénme.”

  The two men laughed.

  Hunter knew a little Cantonese.

  He knew they were talking about her—one of them mentioned killing her and defiling her body.

  He felt his blood boil.

  He knelt and tapped the earpiece. “Is the distraction close?”

  “Are you already on the boat? Jesus, that was quick. You still have over one minute.”

  “I need to get to her.”

  “They’ll be ready. As soon as you get her, let me know. I’ll tell them to do what they have to do.”

  Hunter stood up, lifted up the rifle, walked toward the steps that would take him to the lower decks of the yacht. The two laughing military officers looked at him. He fired. Their bodies dropped in a pool of blood. One of them knocked open the door they were blocking.

  Hunter moved down the stairwell of the yacht into the lower deck cabin. As he passed their bodies, he noted the uniforms they wore. They were high-up Chinese officials—top brass.

  The opened door led to a brightly lit room.

  A man inside had heard the shots and had hidden behind a wooden desk.

  Hunter unleashed a full magazine into the desk.

  He saw a man’s hand fall motionless from the left side of the desk.

  He walked into the room.

  A woman, naked, strung up like a dead pig in a freezer. He ran to her. He checked her vitals. She was still alive. Barely.

  “Margot,” he said, holstering his gun over his shoulder and grabbing his combat blade. He cut the wires that were tied around her wrists. “It’s Jack. I’m here to rescue you.”

  She opened her eyes and said in a hushed, weak voice: “Jack?”

  Hunter held her body as she fell from the pole she’d been tied to. She didn’t have the strength to hold herself up.

  “Shhh! It’ll be okay,” he said. “Keep your strength.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Hunter stood up, sheathed his blade, and put her over his shoulder. “I’m taking you home. Now please, shut up.” Hunter tapped on his earpiece. “I’ve got her.”

  “Roger that, amigo.”

  With Margot on his back, Hunter walked up to the deck of the yacht, made his way down the ramp, and carried her to a small motorboat near the exit of the building. He put her inside as the sound of a loud explosion reverberated inside the large warehouse. He felt the impact of the explosion in his chest. The alarms of the facility went off. Everything had been like clockwork. It’d been perfect.

  The explosions had been from a white van that crashed into the entrance of the facility’s street entrance. Hunter had made plans with a group of Hong Kong anti-Chinese, pro-democratic rebels a week earlier. They owed Hunter the distraction. He’d helped them, and now they were helping him.

  Shots rang off in the distance. It sounded like a war outside.

  Hunter jumped into the small motorboat alongside Margot and turned on the engine.

  A small fishing boat would be waiting for him out in the middle of Kowloon Bay. That was where Hank, the man he was speaking to via the earpiece, would be waiting for him. The two of them would sail to Taiwan and then part ways.

  TWO

  Two ex-wives, four children that he knew about (there were probably more out there), and high-blood pressure—Hale’s time as CIA Director had done a number on him. Enough so that when he died, no one who knew him batted an eye. Everyone he knew just said to themselves that it was about time. He’d been riding himself too hard for too long. No engine can last that long being pushed that hard.

  Yet, Hale wasn’t dead.

  He’d faked his death.

  He needed a reset.

  Two weeks after he died, he put on a long trenchcoat and top hat and made - his way to his funeral. He noted who was in attendance.

  His kids hardly looked upset.

  His wife looked almost happy.

  He smoked a long cigar and left the funeral ceremony. It was raining and cold. He got into the back of a cab and told the driver to take him back to the hotel.

  “Something wrong, mister?” the cabbie asked. “You know that dead guy?”

  Hale smiled. “Kinda,” he said. “He was always a stranger to me, though. I never really got to know him. He always felt like a man I would never fully know, you know.”

  The cabbie shrugged. “I can’t say I relate,” he said. “But death hits us all in different ways. I hope you find some solace in your grief.”

  “If you take me to the hotel quickly, I’ll find solace in the bottom of a bottle.”

  “Now that’s a kind of grief I can relate to,” the cabbie said.

  Hale got on a flight the next day and left DC for the capital of Venezuela.

  He took the money that he’d stored away for years in a Swiss bank account and moved purchased a small island off the coast of Venezuela. For months he lived in Caracas hotels. Each day, he’d take a small bus from Caracas to Maiquetía. From there, he’d hop aboard a fishing boat and pay the fisherman a handsome price to get him to the island. He’d wait for the contractors to show up—in their private boats—and then he’d get to work.

  Despite his age and bad heart, he helped them work. He needed it. What he was building was important. It wasn’t his legacy—he didn’t give a rats ass about that—he technically dead, after all. He was building something that would revolutionize the world; a new kind of intelligence agency, one that was free from the influence of government overreach and control.

  After six months of non-stop building, his fortress was complete, and he got to work. With a command center, one located in international waters and secured with impressive firewall technology, Hale had all he needed.

  His first bit of business was getting his old protege within his ranks. He needed capable men and women on his side. The only problem, the people he was usually affiliated with, didn’t much like him.

  But there was one he needed.

  Mastodon would have been dead in the water if he didn’t have him.

  But two years after bring
ing Jack Hunter on board—after convincing the former CIA assassin that he was an essential cog in the machine that Hale was building, Hale was beginning to have serious doubts.

  Had he made a mistake?

  “Where the fuck is he?” Hale grunted into his phone. He paced back and forth in his office in front of the large open window that overlooked the Caribbean Sea. “I want to know where he is! He has something I want. He should have been here already. Has he lost his damn mind!”

  “He should have been there by now,” the man on the other end of the line said. The man was the other agent with Hunter in China—Clarkson—the one on the boat. “He said that the mission required more intel. He said it was part of the operation—“

  Hale cut him off. “He was lying to you. Ya, damn fool! You should have come back immediately after you secured the package.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Sorry!? Ah, stay the hell away from my services. You’re off my list. You’ll be lucky if I ever ask for you’re help again, you damn fool!”

  Hale hung up, sat down, and rubbed his brow. He should have known better than to trust Hunter—but then again, he had to rely on the people he could trust. Still, he should have known that sending Hunter to China was a risk. He should have been more careful.

  For the past two years, Jeff Hale, the former CIA Director, had been running his own shadow intelligence organization called Mastodon. He’d faked his own death to get the organization off the ground. He’d become too entangled in the bullshit and politics of Washington. He needed to free himself from the ties that were holding him back.

  Mastodon was his answer to every problem that had plagued the CIA, an organization that he believed had become too corporate and vulnerable. An organization that had become weak from bureaucracy and stagnation.