OUTCAST Ops: Red Ice

CHAPTER FIVE

The DEA San Francisco office was located in the Tenderloin section of the city, in the federal building on Golden Gate Avenue, between Polk and Larkin Streets.

The mood in the office when Sarah Vessler and Danny Choi entered was somber. Eight DEA Agents and twelve SFPD officers were dead, including Rhonda James, whose narcotics team had been wiped out by several RPGs striking their vehicles as they raced in. Pelton and five officers were in the hospital, all wounded, four critically.

Vessler looked away from the empty desks that would never again see the men and women who had once occupied them. She spotted Brock and Meechim at their desks, neither man looking rested or in the mood to talk. Daniels was slumped in his chair, all the arrogance and cockiness he usually displayed gone. Anger burned inside her, anger at Billy Hong and his goons. He would pay, and she would make sure of it.

She spotted her superior, Special Agent in Charge George Glimsdale, near the conference room. A small, neat man with a high forehead and glasses, Glimsdale looked more like an accountant than the head of a DEA office. He spotted her and Choi and motioned to her, then pointed to the conference room. Vessler changed directions, Choi following silently in her wake. She ignored the looks the other people in the office were giving them — the news had been plastered across all media.

The conference room was already occupied when the three DEA agents entered. Vessler saw Naomi and recognized both Tanner Wilson and John Casey. Besides them, three men and another woman sat around the table. All seven were dressed in business suits, but Vessler suspected that everyone but Casey was armed.

Casey sat at the head of the table. He stood slowly and said, “Agent Glimsdale, on behalf of the President of the United States of America, I extend the condolences of the entire country on the loss of your agents.”

“Thank you, Director Casey,” Glimsdale said. “The best thing we can do in their memory is to find the bastards who did this and make sure they never do it again.”

“We agree on that,” Casey said. “Everyone, please take a seat so we can get started.”

Vessler sat on one side of the table, Choi on the other, while Glimsdale sat at the opposite end. Vessler recognized the woman sitting next to her as the one who had helped save them. She wore glasses and typed on a laptop. She looked up and extended a hand to Vessler. “Danielle Sunderland,” she announced.

Vessler took the hand. Despite her appearance, the handshake Vessler received was strong and firm. “Sarah Vessler.”

Next to Sunderland was a tall man with a long, thin face. Vessler recognized him as the driver of the van during their rescue. He extended a large hand. “Dante Alvarez.” Vessler shook his hand.

Casey cleared his throat. “Maybe introductions are in order.” He motioned to the man sitting to his left. “This is Liam Riley, and the gentleman next to him is Stephen Shah.”

Glimsdale nodded. He didn’t look happy. “I’m George Glimsdale, head of this DEA office. Sarah Vessler and Daniel Choi, lead agents in Operation Golden Carp.”

“Golden Carp?” Liam said in a low voice.

Vessler scowled and folded her arms. “Who the hell are you clowns?”

Liam looked at Tanner. “We’re clowns?”

“You forgot to take off your red nose,” Dante said.

Casey sighed. “Enough. Back to business. Agents Vessler and Choi, this is OUTCAST.”

“OUTCAST?”

Tanner nodded. “It stands for Operational Undertaking to Counteract Active Stateside Threats.”

“Clever,” Vessler said in an annoyed tone.

“We tried to reach you before you moved in, but our plane was delayed and we landed an hour later than scheduled.”

“You’re the D.C. suits?”

Tanner shook his head. “We’re not D.C. suit types.”

“OUTCAST does jobs for the government that need to be done without bureaucratic roadblocks,” Casey simplified.

Vessler’s scowled deepened. “You’re a black ops group.”

“Let’s just say we don’t advertise our presence.”

“So, you’re here to trample all over my case in order to pick up a paycheck?”

“Vess…” Naomi said.

“Sorry, Nay. I’m not going to be jerked around by some special ops team more interested in running up a body count the following the constitution!”

“Vess,” Choi said quietly. “They did save our lives.”

“And I’m grateful for that. But I will not have my case against the Black Daos tossed out because some gun-happy crew violated their rights!”

“Are you finished?” Casey asked.

“I haven’t even started.”

Casey sighed. “Agent Vessler, due to circumstances beyond your control, the case is no longer DEA’s.”

“What?” Vessler shot to her feet. “What in the hell is going—”

“Sarah!” Glimsdale surprised everyone with his tone. “Sit down and shut up. Director Casey will explain.”

“Maybe one of your agents can brief my people on Operation Golden Carp first?”

Choi stood and turned on a projector. He slipped a thumb drive Glimsdale gave him into the computer and opened a file. “Lights please,” he said without looking up from his work. With an annoyed huff, Vessler got up and turned off the lights. Choi walked around to the table to stand near the projection, which showed an image of reddish crystals on a white background.

Choi pointed to the image. “About three months ago, we started getting reports of a new form of methamphetamine on the street. It’s purer and stronger than most forms of meth, and there’s an unknown chemical compound in the formula that gives the crystals a reddish tinge to them. The street name is Red Ice.”

“The DEA has classified it as a Schedule I Drug,” Glimsdale said.

Choi nodded. “There have been reports of it popping up all along the West Coast of the United States, as far north as Seattle and as far south as San Diego. But so far, most of the cases have been in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area.”

“How bad is this Red Ice?” Dante asked.

“As I said earlier, it’s much stronger and purer then normal street meth. This doesn’t have the common crap like drain cleaner and lye like you’d find in a back-room crank cook mash. Whoever made this stuff knows their chemistry. It’s also more expensive than normal meth — two to three times as much per dose.”

Choi pressed a button and another picture appeared. It depicted what looked like nicotine patches on a strip of paper. “What’s more worrisome is the new method of delivery. The first picture showed you the only Red Ice we’ve managed to seize in crystal form, and that was six weeks ago. Now, we’re beginning to see these patches show up on the street. Each patch has a half- gram dose of Red Ice that’s absorbed through the skin with no loss of drug strength.”

“What’s the body count?” Liam asked.

“So far, we’ve had twenty-three reported Red Ice overdoses in the last month, eleven fatal. Several of the ODs reported vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, overwhelming feelings of grandeur, obsessive behavior focused on a person or object and paranoid delusions. At least three of the ODs were first-time users.”

Choi changed the image again, this one of a pickup truck being pulled out of water. “The latest OD was William Dyachenko. Two days ago, he drove his truck, which had been targeted for repossession for lack of note payment, through parts of Fisherman’s Wharf, killing fourteen people and injuring fifteen. The autopsy showed he’d died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage brought on by Red Ice. The amount of Red Ice in his system was enough to get everyone in this room as high as a kite for most of the day.”

He changed slides again, this time displaying an Asian man in a tailored suit surrounded by bodyguards. “The DEA’s number one suspect in the manufacture and distribution of Red Ice is the Black Dao Triad. This is Billy Hong, leader of the Black Daos. He controls two-thirds of the drugs flowing through San Francisco.”

He cycled through more photos of Hong and other Asian men. “The Black Daos are an offshoot of the 14K Triad and have been active in San Francisco for the past twenty years. They deal mostly in prostitution, human trafficking, illegal weapons, and drugs. In the last six years, Hong has extended the Triad’s reach to cover most of central California. There have been a few clashes with the Mexican cartels, but nothing serious up to now.”

“What led to the ambush at the pier?” Tanner asked.

“We had developed intelligence that the Black Dao would be picking up a chemical shipment last night.”

“You were set up.”

“Hong doesn’t operate that way,” Choi said. “He knows that something like this will bring the heat down on him and his gang.”

“You’re assuming that Hong was behind the ambush,” Tanner said.

Vessler scowled. “If not him, who?”

“Nay, please get the lights.”

While Naomi got up and turned on the lights, Choi shut off the projector. Tanner stood and picked up several folders on the table, handing one to each DEA agent. “The full details are in these folders, but I’ll hit the highlights. American intelligence suggests the North Koreans are back in the meth business.”

All three DEA agents frowned. “I thought they’d stopped.” Vessler said.

“They had, but it appears that not only have they started up again, they’ve done so with a vengeance— establishing a network of meth labs world-wide.”

“They say half the North Korean population is hooked on the stuff,” Choi said, opening the folder and skimming the contents. “In a lot of North Korean homes, it’s offered to guests like it’s coffee.”

Casey nodded. “The Chinese dispatched extra troops to the North Korean border to crack down on a meth epidemic on their side of the border.”

“That’s not going to make the Mexican cartels happy,” Glimsdale said. “They dominate the West Coast meth market.”

“The North Koreans are preparing to deal with the Mexicans, one way or another.”

Choi frowned. “Why does that sound ominous?”

Tanner took a photo out of the folder he held and placed it on the table facing Vessler and the other DEA agents. “Because the North Koreans sent a man like this.”

The photo highlighted a scowling Asian man with short dark hair, a narrow face and dark eyes. He could have been anywhere from late twenties to early fifties, but regardless, he had the look of someone used to killing people.

Tanner pointed to the picture. “That is Major Rhee Kyu-chul of the North Korean Special Forces. He’s one of their best overseas operators, and has been spotted over the years in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, El Salvador, and South Korea. He’s suspected to have assassinated multiple North Korean defectors and critics of the Kim family. He’s devoted to the state, ruthless, and has a track record of success.”

“You think he’s involved with the Red Ice?”

Tanner took another photo out of the folder and laid it down next to Rhee’s picture. The image showed a pale and frightened woman surrounded by several hard-looking Asians, including Rhee. The major was gripping the woman by her arm.

“This was taken at Vancouver International Airport little more than three months ago. The Canadian customs official who dealt with this group is married to a Korean, and is sure the men spoke Korean among themselves.”

He pulled out a third photo and placed it on the table. “This is Dr. Candice Mori. Japanese father, American mother. She’s a chemist, specializing in amphetamine research. If anyone could develop Red Ice, it’s her.”

The photograph showed the same woman in the previous photo, only she looked composed and calm. She was Asian, mid-thirties, pretty in a severe way with turtle-shell glasses and a birth mark on the right side of the chin. Vessler flipped the photo over and saw someone had written her height, weight, eye color, and date of birth on the back.

“You think she broke bad?” Choi asked.

“We don’t think so,” Casey said. “Mori had a twin brother who died from a meth overdose. Lately she’s been devoting her efforts into finding a way to neutralize the drug once it’s in the body.”

“She was working in Japan four months ago when she disappeared,” Tanner added.

A trilling phone interrupted the conversation. Casey frowned as he pulled out his device. “I need to take this. Everyone, take a break.”

Naomi caught up with Vessler outside the conference room. “Can we talk? Somewhere private?”

“My office.” Vessler motioned toward a door a few feet away.

The windowless office wasn’t very large and looked like Vessler didn’t spend much time in it. A few pictures of her hung on one wall, including a couple with recent presidents, a senator, and a famous actor. The desk held piles of folders, a coffee cup filled pens and pencils, a name plate, and a San Francisco Giants bobblehead.

“Nice place,” Naomi frowned at the mundane space.

“Cut the charm.” Vessler dropped into her chair. “What the hell’s going on, Nay? You had a good job with the ATF. How the hell did you end up with a black ops gang?”

Naomi sighed. “Had is the operative word. And need I remind you that this gang just saved your butt?”

“So what happened with ATF?”

“You remember the Environmental Protection Front bombings? The ones that destroyed a sawmill and a bunch of million dollar homes?”

Vessler cringed as she mentally pictured the devastation. “Yeah, wasn’t there something about the ATF being involved in selling explosives to one of the EPF suspects?”

Naomi nodded. “The same sort of thing the ATF did with Operation Fast and Furious, they did with Operation Backburner. They set up and sold what they thought were inert explosives to a known supporter of the EPF. Only they weren’t inert, and by the time those assholes realized it, two homes were destroyed and three people injured. They tried covering their asses, but I was lead on the case and I traced the explosives back to them. They tried shutting me down, blocked every attempt to trace the explosives, and finally took me off the case and assigned me to the Bismarck, North Dakota office. After three months of banging my head against a bureaucratic stone wall, I’d had enough. I contacted a reporter I knew, turned over all the evidence I had to them, and waited for the media shitstorm.”

“That didn’t go over well.”

“It sure didn’t. They spent months trying to cover their asses, but it was too late. They threw a couple of their own to the wolves, endured the media and congressional scrutiny, and made a few internal policy changes. But in the end they got a big black eye, and a few careers were derailed.”

“They fired you?”

“They knew I did it, but they couldn’t prove it. I was ‘encouraged’ to resign, and by then I was tired of the entire situation, so I did.”

Vessler leaned back in her chair. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re in a black ops outfit.”

“Well, I was sitting in a bar in Bismarck, having resigned from the ATF a few days before, feeling like crap, when this guy with mismatched eyes sits next to me at the bar and asks if I want a job. Not a drink, but a job.”

“With a lot of guys at a bar, that line could backfire easily.”

Naomi chuckled. “True, but Tanner Wilson is not a lot of guys. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and I’d been hit on by more than one guy that night already. So, I told him I wasn’t a dancer, a hooker, or a model, and if he didn’t go away, I would break both his legs.”

Vessler snorted a laugh. “He must have loved that.”

“He did. He smiled at me and said, ‘Good, because I need someone with your skills, someone who’s not afraid to throw out the regulations if that’s what the mission calls for.’ He left me his phone number and told me to call when I was ready. I did the next morning, and that’s how I ended up with OUTCAST.”

“I did some asking around Washington about OUTCAST. Their somewhat of a legend already, but no one seems to really know much about them. What’s Tanner’s story?”

“Former FBI, one of the top guys in the agency’s counter-terrorism section, before a bogus sexual harassment suit forced him out.”

Vessler nodded. “That’s what I heard. And the others?”

“Same deal. All good at their jobs until their respective agencies got rid of them for reasons having nothing to do with their actual duties. Dani was NSA until she used their resources to search for her ex after he took their son. Stephen was CIA until he filed a discrimination lawsuit against the agency. Dante, until he got caught up in that South American prostitution scandal, had been Secret Service. Liam’s ‘crime’ was that he wrote a tell-all book about the Bin Laden raid — he was one of the SEALs on that mission. So, we’re all damaged goods one way or another. That’s our common bond, other than our professionalism and sense of duty to our country. Tanner’s given us a purpose and we’re making a difference.”

“By being a black ops outfit?”

“Oh, we’re not exclusively U.S. government. We have a group of clients for which we handle security, investigations and now and then, hostage retrieval. But when Casey calls us in, we know there’s a serious threat to this country.”

Vessler’s gaze took on a harder edge. “Nay, this is a DEA case.”

“Not any more. Rhee’s presence expands the scope.”

“We have no proof Rhee was behind the ambush!”

“Vess, you were set up last night. They eliminated your observation team and your sniper squad, then had security teams in place to stop your police reinforcements. That kind of logistical coordination hints at someone with a military background.”

Vessler shrugged. “Doesn’t seem too sophisticated to me. They have to know that killing law enforcement officers would only bring more heat on them.”

“Last night was meant to be a warning; back off or there will be more dead people. That’s why we’re here.”

Vessler looked at her friend in shock. “You’re talking about all-out war in the city!”

“Vess, as far as Rhee is concerned, the Korean War never ended. Last night was just a continuation, a flare-up, and it won’t be a one-time thing. There’ll be another incident like this, maybe here, maybe in another city, but with similar results. We need to nip this in the bud, now.”

“But there are rules! Laws!”

Naomi smiled. “Rhee’s just started a new game, one the DEA is not ready to play. That’s why we’re here.”

There was a knock at the door, then it opened and Dante stuck his head in. “We’re back in session.”

Casey waited until everyone was in their chairs. “That was the President. As of now, Tanner’s team is lead on the Red Ice case.”

Vessler rose. “Wait a minute—”

Casey’s tone was soft as he addressed her. “Agent Vessler, this case has been taken as far as you can take it, and at a heavy price in lives. It’s up to someone else now to take the burden of bringing these bastards to justice.”

“But these people are—”

“Shut the hell up, Vess!”

Vessler stopped and turned to look at her partner, Daniel Choi. In the five years she had known him, the last three as her partner, she had never seen him anything but calm and composed.

He returned her stare, anger etched in his face. “I’m sorry, Vess, but Casey’s right. We can’t deal with these bastards like these…” His head swiveled around as he looked at Tanner and the other OUTCASTs. “…like these ghosts can.”

“But the law—”

“Screw the law.”

Vessler stared at him, stunned. “Dan—”

“No, hear me out. I grew up listening to my grandparents who told me about the North Koreans and what they did to entire villages during the Korean War. I have cousins serving in the ROK army who’ve told me about hunting down North Korean infiltrators and rescuing people kidnapped by the North Koreans. You may think of the Kim family as nothing more than the comically insane leaders of a fourth-rate country, but to my family it’s no laughing matter. If the North Koreans are behind that attack on our people, then as far as I’m concerned, the gloves are off.”

He motioned to the OUTCAST group. “If they can do the job, let them do it. I’ll gladly hold their coats.”

“Danny!” Vessler pressed. “What if innocents get in the way?”

Choi scowled. “Do you think Rhee cares about innocents? My grandfather still carries the scars from the beating a North Korean officer gave him when he was eight, during the war. You don’t understand the hate North Koreans have for Americans. They see us the same way the fanatical Islamics do — as a great evil. They’ve been drilling that lie into their population’s heads every day for decades.”

“What does—”

“We are well aware of innocents,” Tanner said. “I suggest the DEA lends us a couple of agents who know the streets. There are going be pieces left over, and it would be a good idea if the law was able to pick up those pieces.”

Glimsdale looked over at Vessler. “You want in, Sarah?”

“You want me to be part of this?”

“You know the case better than most.”

“I’m in,” Choi said.

Vessler slumped into her chair. “You’re going to do this no matter what I decide?”

Tanner nodded. “That’s right.”

She scowled. “Then I’m in. What’s our first move?”