Unleashed Read online

UNLEASHED

  By Patrick McLaughlin and Greg Ó Braonáin

  Copyright © 2014 Patrick McLaughlin and Greg Ó Braonáin.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the publisher.

  HIT-PICS LLC

  www.HIT-PICS.com

  [email protected]

  Contact the publisher for information concerning the original screenplay, .JPEG The Movie.

  By Patrick McLaughlin (WGAE # 1250220) and Greg Ó Braonáin (WGAE # 1250222)

  Copyright Registration # TXU 1-887-716

  Cover photograph © 2014 Patrick McLaughlin. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  First Edition: June 2014

  ISBN 978-0-9915624-1-1

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

  For Robert Steven “Goob” Underhill

  When you part from your friend,

  you grieve not;

  For that which you love most in him

  may be clearer in his absence,

  as the mountain to the climber

  is clearer from the plain.

  —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

  Table of 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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Authors

  Chapter 1

  A bead of orange trimmed the horizon and began its crawl across the silent Mojave blackness, and with the sunlight came heat, promising to melt the desert frost and deliver another sweltering day. A dark, eight-armed, spiderlike craft rose up from the shadows of an ancient creek bed. Its two propellers hosted sixteen blades slicing through the dry air. The bright red eyes of the octocopter scanned the desert, intently seeking its target. The mechanical creature darted first in one direction, then another. Its motion as swift as a dragonfly, it bolted only a few feet above the surface, narrowly zipping past brush and cacti, sensing and avoiding every obstacle along the way.

  Beneath the head of the aerial platform hung an advanced imaging device where deep within the “camera” were both optical and thermal sensors sandwiched between prisms of glass. Grey slices of tungsten rapidly opened and closed at over 12,000 times per minute to control the rate and volume of energy colliding into the sensors. With each passing millisecond, heat from the thermal-infrared signatures and visible spectrums of light were sucked into the camera’s abyss, smashing against the electro-optical sensor. The recording device instantly acknowledged, absorbed, and deciphered billions of data bits with the aid of bio-genetically engineered receptors. This was not your everyday camera.

  A translucent dome at the core of the aerial platform housed a gyro-driven motor, stabilizing the surveillance device by delivering continuous, synchronized commands to each of the eight extended arms. To make the craft self-aware and to reduce collisions, an advanced radar package containing an electro-optical sensing device and global positioning system was mounted on the aircraft. Remotely-piloted, the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, was created by an Australian company for filming in the Outback. The U.S. government had purchased all the associated patents and brought the entire research development team to the U.S. for further expansion of the craft’s capabilities. Millions more dollars were poured into the design. The final fusion of technologies created the most stable platform in avionics and was known as the world’s most advanced unmanned surveillance craft.

  As the drone arched above a bluff, the sun came up and reflected off the titanium body, clearly highlighting the symbols “SXII” etched deep into the metal camera housing. It rose another eighteen inches, turned a few degrees south and then froze. Only seconds later, from the belly of the device, a pen-sized rocket blasted towards a target in the distance, ripping the silence with an explosion lighting the landscape for miles.

  In all three headsets came a voice: “Target acquired, identified, and terminated as ordered. Major Craig, with your authorization, I’d like to move to the next test phase.”

  Thomas Craig acknowledged a nod from the woman beside him before answering. “Affirmative,” he said.

  The woman was his government-contractor counterpart and essentially the first in command during this live test drill. They both fixed their gaze on the hi-definition monitor mounted on the side of the tactical Humvee.

  “All go. Isolate biological subject, minus the theatrics though,” Craig ordered. “No need to kill anything if it’s not part of next phase requirement.”

  These words broke Dr. Sally Evans’ focus and she glanced abruptly at Craig. His words contradicted what she knew of him from the few bits of information she gleaned from talking to other intel officers in her field. At best, Craig was a professional assassin, or in more politically correct terms, an operator. Though she suspected him to be dangerous, she could only find fleeting documentation of his past. For all intents and purposes, he simply did not exist anywhere in the U.S. Government’s Intelligence or Department of Defense arsenals.

  Sally had looked even deeper to discover all Craig’s missions were financed with black money or funding approved by secret congressional committees. She only uncovered one file about Craig on a gnome server within CIA titled, OP_TC_Yemen_A:NTR. But its content remained inaccessible. The acronym NTR, though seldom used, meant in the DoD mission descriptions “Never to Return.” It was Craig they sent when the extermination of a dangerous international adversary was more important than the life of the agent.

  Craig confirmed the “handy-rocket,” as they liked to call the tiny projectiles loaded with punch, had detonated directly on target and reported this back to mission headquarters. Sally wondered why the man would care about the killing of a wild animal. Maybe there was more to this deadly hard-ass than her intel revealed.

  —————

  Major Thomas Craig, Ethiopian by birth, had become a U.S. Citizen as a teenager after his entire family was whisked out of Africa by the State Department. During the ‘80s, when Ethiopia turned towards the Soviet Union, the United States recalled its
Ambassador, along with the entire diplomatic mission.

  Prior to closing down the embassy, and while taking “inventory,” Department of State analysts realized Craig’s father was a unique national asset. The elder Craig had been enlisted as an in-country contractor responsible for network and communications management, part of the ambassadorial practice of hiring local nationals to keep peace with the host nation. The talented Mr. Craig designed a communications protocol which effectively created an encrypted tunnel for secure traffic among worldwide embassies. His encryption protocol was now utilized throughout State, CIA, DIA, NSA and the rest of the three letter agencies which maintained stations within the embassy compounds. Then, as the World Wide Web started to consume society, the threat of internet-tapping became real. Very simply, those at State who knew what needed to be known understood the senior Craig possessed the vision necessary to protect their communications infrastructure for years to come.

  So it was goodbye Ethiopia, hello Beltway, as they cast aside their family names in exchange for Craig, one more common to protect their identities. All six children were re-baptized with Christian names in a Coptic ceremony to help them melt into the international madness of Washington, D.C. In the many years to follow, Craig’s father left their home in Manassas each morning with a laminated picture ID dangling from his shirt pocket. He crammed into a twelve-seat commuter van for the tortuous drive into Arlington, where State maintained numerous secure intelligence offices. Ah, life was grand in the U.S.!

  Of all his siblings, Thomas Craig was the only one to inherit his father’s remarkable IQ. While his siblings read the comics in Sunday’s Washington Post, he scoured the international pages. By eight years of age, “Little Tommy” held his own during his parents’ political conversations. On frequent occasions, dinner guests would find themselves pinned down by young Tommy and quickly discovered whatever information went into his head, stayed in his head. More astonishingly, Tommy’s logic was clear and concise. He methodically built his library of knowledge as one would build a house, laying a foundation, dropping the needed cinder blocks in place, and then constructing each floor. Each fact was interpreted, organized, and always at the ready for the moment he needed to make a point and later, as an operator, to save his ass.

  At Yale, Thomas Craig carried a double major in the departments of Political Science and Psychology yet bored easily maintaining a habit of frequently popping his head into lectures in other fields of study. Dubbed “Terrible Tommy” by his rugby teammates, he surgically removed larger opponents from play via nimble yet decisive attacks, taking out key players to secure yet another Yale victory.

  One CIA recruiter, who was a former rugby player himself, had heard of a brilliant but tough Ethiopian at Yale who manipulated the entire rugby field of play. During Craig’s junior year, the recruiter made a point of stopping in to see the young Thomas compete in an early-season scrimmage where he expectedly carried his team to victory. The agent had caught the last ten minutes of play and afterwards cornered Craig at the end of the field away from his teammates. Listening patiently to the recruiter’s pitch, Craig heard the words “your actions on the front line of our nation’s clandestine operations will help shape the world landscape, and secure our freedom at home.” He then accelerated his course load and completed his last two semesters in just three months after which, he headed directly south to Langley, Virginia.

  Once he completed all of the required testing, clearances, and paperwork, he was shuttled off to spy school, or basic spook training, at “The Farm” near Williamsburg, Virginia. Quickly mastering the disciplines of secrecy and deception, his stay was extended twice, but not for further training. True to form, Craig not only perfected the stealthy spy craft techniques, he went on to intuitively improve upon them. His training interrogations yielded unheard-of results. He excelled at improvised weaponry. He conquered and absorbed all they threw at him until inevitably, the student became the teacher.

  The instructors at The Farm had even tried to delay his leaving a third time, but the terrorist attacks of 9/11 brought to bear the harsh realities of the new world order, and he was called into action. Langley could not afford to keep their most promising agent in the classroom while U.S. citizens, both stateside and abroad, were threatened by al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

  Craig was at once thrust into a three-month, two-prong preparatory schedule. Starting with training alongside the 3rd Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he then went on to Georgetown University in D.C. for further polishing of his linguistic skills. Craig soon went “hot” and for seven years no one knew (or if they did know, they wouldn’t acknowledge it) his assignments or whereabouts. The heads of terrorist cells vanished, drug cartel leaders were found in oil drums, and not a single successful terror attack was carried out on U.S. soil.

  During his deep and dark CIA career, his ultra-secret success, known only by a few, drew the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Even before he “landed” after his last mission in Pakistan, DIA had requisitioned him, and he was ordered to report to the DIAQ (Defense Intelligence Headquarters) at Bolling Air Force Base, just outside of D.C. Thomas Craig, the U.S. government’s most elite operative, would now be applying his skills on a broader level — against entire enemy cells.