The Emerald Scepter

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Terrance Aloysius Murphy probably wouldn’t have set out to kill someone that morning if he hadn’t happened to do some personal banking on his Blackberry just before the call from the States came in with the offer of a big money job.

Although the holdings in his Swiss bank accounts were in the seven figures, Murphy figured that with his transfer home looming he was going to have to do something soon to fill the hole that his losing investments in Florida real estate had dug in the original amount.

Murphy was the leader of a two-man team from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Kabul Country Office Strike Force. After the call, he had hastily pulled the operation together, saying he had a tip that a drug kingpin suspected of Taliban connections was about to leave town.

The target was already on the hit list, waiting for a go-ahead from Murphy. He had compiled the intel on the compound in preparation for a raid, but he had always managed to divert the DEA’s attention to more promising targets.

The DEA agents and a unit of Marines that included a drug-detection dog and his handler joined up with a six-man team of heavily-armed agents from the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan.

The DEA agents were part of a F.A.S.T team, government shorthand for Foreign Deployed Assistance and Support. With sixty percent of heroin profits going to support the Taliban, and a government riddled with drug-related corruption, the DEA had tried going after poppy growers, but that only angered the farmers and didn’t stop the heroin trade. So the agency had begun to interdict the heroin traffickers using para-military agents like Murphy.

The raiding party set out from the forward patrol base before dawn and took up positions near the compound the drug commander used as his headquarters. The intel file contained the exact lay-out of the compound. Informants had infiltrated the enclosure and identified the placement of IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, buried around the perimeter. Assuming that the booby traps would stop any intruder, the drug traffickers had grown complacent and no one was guarding the gate.

Murphy lay on his belly behind a low ridge. He was still brooding about his diminishing cash cache when someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was the platoon sergeant, a twenty-six-year-old Texas kid named Chavez.

“Five minute warning,” Chavez whispered.

Murphy reached down to the speed holster at his waist and tapped the butt of his Smith and Wesson compact 9 mm. Then he wrapped his fingers around the pistol grip of his Benelli M3 shotgun, making sure the lever was in semi-automatic position.

A pencil-thin beam of red light sliced the darkness.

The Afghan commander had given the signal for the attack. Answering blinks came from the Marines spread out around the compound. The Afghans crawled like crabs over the ridge, then ran, crouched-over, toward the gate. The DEA agents and the dog and handler were behind the Afghan agents. The Marines moved in to establish a cordon around the compound.

The Afghan agents forced the front door of the main building. Shouts could be heard in Pashto, ordering someone to surrender. Moments later the Afghans prodded a short bearded man out of the house. The leader of the Afghan narcs came over to Murphy, frowning like a big-game hunter who had only bagged a rabbit.

“This man says he’s only a caretaker. The one we are looking for isn’t here. Only a few women and children.”

“Keep an eye on the old guy and we’ll check out the house,” Murphy said.

The commander turned the job of room-to-room search over to the DEA and the Marine canine team, who went in first with Murphy and his teammate right behind them. They cleared the building without incident except for some screams as they entered the main living space where some women and children were huddled.

Murphy called the Afghan commander on his hand radio. Moments later, the commander appeared with a couple of police who spoke to the women and herded them into a room that had already been secured. The dog, a German shepherd, strained at his leash, pulling his handler toward a door off the main room. The dog sniffed loudly along the bottom of the door. His tail wagged with excitement.

Murphy kicked the door in, leveraging all the strength in his six-foot-three frame. He followed the leveled barrel of his shotgun into the room and found it unoccupied. The dog plunged ahead, dashing toward a pile of cloth bags. A quick swipe from Murphy’s knife showed that the bags contained heroin. Other bags held hundreds of pounds of hashish.

Another door led from the room to an opium lab, where he found evidence that IEDs were assembled in the same space, linking the kingpin to the Taliban.

A voice crackled over the radio. The Marines had spotted someone trying to escape from the compound and were chasing after him. Murphy told his teammate and the Afghan commander to help the Marines, that he’d stay with the detained caretaker.

When he was alone with the old man, he spoke to him in Pashto.

“Who are they chasing, Abe?” he said.

The man, who had been hunched over, straightened to his full height and a crooked grin came to his lips. “I ordered my caretaker to escape, knowing he would run into your Marines.”

“Pretty smart, Abe. What isn’t smart is the fact that you’ve been lying to me about your operation.”

“I wouldn’t cheat you. I’ve been sending your cut of every shipment.”

“You’ve been shaving the payments,” Murphy said. “That’s not holding up your end of the agreement.”

“Maybe, but I’m not the only one who has failed to keep his word. You were supposed to warn me of the raid.”

“And you were supposed to keep your operation out of politics. No support for the insurgents.”

“I have to pay them a little to keep the operation going. Not much.”

“Not talking about the baksheesh. You’re making IEDs, and that makes you Taliban, instead of a plain old drug lord.”

The grin vanished. “I was forced—”

“Not buying it,” Murphy said in English. “I saw your boom-boom lab. You’re one of the bad guys. Those Marines out chasing your man have been hit hard by your little surprise packages.”

“No one in Afghanistan has clean hands. Not even you. If I’m arrested, I will have to tell them about our arrangement all these years.”

“That’s why I’m not going to arrest you. I’m going to let you go.”

“You won’t regret this,” Abe said, a sly look in his eyes.

Murphy waited until Abe was heading for the shadows before he squeezed the trigger of his shotgun. The pellet blast caught the fleeing man dead center in the back. His arms flew in the air and he pitched forward onto the ground face first.

“I know I won’t,” Murphy said.

He went off to rejoin the rest of the strike force and encountered them escorting the terrified caretaker back to the compound. He explained to Chavez and the narc commander that the detainee had tried to get away, but in the dim light, he had misjudged his warning shot.

No one really cared as long as no citizens were killed. They had neutralized a drug and weapons factory and captured a potential informant, all with no casualties. The strike force was in a good mood on the trek back to the patrol base.

A CH-47 helicopter came in and gave the DEA men and the Afghan narcs and their prisoner a ride back to Kabul. A couple of hours after the operation, Murphy was in his apartment showering, washing the desert dust out of his short, straw-colored hair. He wrapped a towel around himself, poured a glass half full of Makers’ Mark whiskey and contemplated the day’s events.

The whole operation and his exchange with Abe had been nothing more than a charade to set up the drug lord’s elimination.

Murphy didn’t care how cozy Abe had been with the Taliban as long as he’d proved a source of revenue. But Abe had been skimming off the take, and Murphy couldn’t let word get around that he could be cheated with impunity. Only thing now was that Abe’s loss would cut off a supply of cash.

No matter. The payment for the job would help his bottom line. And he would easily cultivate another source: Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world’s opium and exported more heroin than Colombia exported cocaine.

He downed the contents of the glass and turned his attention to the second part of his assignment.

He started up his computer and gazed with hard blue eyes at the photograph of Matt Hawkins on the monitor. The photo had come from the Woods Hole Oceanographic website. The old Hawk had aged pretty well, whereas Murphy’s broad face was weathered and crevassed from the effects of hard living. Even without the booze and women, and the blasting sunlight, the dangerous life of a DEA agent had etched premature age lines around his mouth and eyes. He experienced a rush of resentment. Hell, while he’d been chasing down drug traffickers and insurgents as many as two to three times a week, the Hawk had been leading the small town life. Not that he would ever underestimate Hawkins.

He actually liked Hawkins. He was a ballsy, competent and resourceful bastard. But the same admirable qualities made him dangerous. And now Hawkins was headed back to Afghanistan. It was a no-brainer what he would do when he got there. He would try to find out what happened years before. The trail would have led to Abe, then to Murphy, and eventually to those Swiss bank accounts.

Murphy didn’t need anyone to tell him Hawkins could simply not be allowed to get that far. He would have to stop him again, although this time he would make sure Hawkins was put away for good.