The Trigger Man by Aiden Bailey

Author:Aiden Bailey [Bailey, Aiden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

29

SAHARA, MALI

Baffled and overwhelmed, Mackenzie Summerfield stood among the carnage of Legionnaires and tried to understand.

Death and destruction were a job requirement. She accepted this whenever she watched the world’s most depraved insurgents fight it out via live satellite or drone feeds, on video files uploaded on the Dark Net, or when absorbing their brutalities expressed through the words of after-action reports. She’d expected high levels of detached exposure to human carnage when she applied for and was accepted into a career with the CIA. Real-world operations, however, proved to be something else altogether.

Personal. Real. In her face.

Back when she was an analyst at Langley and then briefly working in the field, reality hadn’t bothered her as much. Fieldwork had seemed easy, even exhilarating. Greece had changed all that.

Today the carnage felt too real. She could taste bile in the back of her throat…

Shaking her head to clear her anxiety, Summerfield focused again. She’d learned early in her career to compartmentalise feelings, as the CIA had trained her. She focused on the pieces, trying to build a picture of how this battle had unfolded.

Explosive detonations at two locations had vaporised the VAB armoured personnel carriers and their crews. Nine corpses lay scattered in the sand, peppered with fatal bullet wounds. No partially disintegrated corpses anywhere.

The bodies included Major Gabriel Travers with his skull blown open and a shattered right hand. His dead facial muscles expressed both surprise and resignation.

Many Legionnaires presented similar sentiments, for most had had no time to retaliate against whatever forces had ambushed them. A lack of casings was proof enough.

“What do you see?” Idris Walsh asked. He had walked the crime scene twice already. As the CIA Head of Operations, North Africa, the lack of clues frustrated him as much as it frustrated her. “Summerfield?”

“Sorry, sir?”

Summerfield had difficulty hearing him over the spinning blades of the CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter that had brought her, Walsh and a contingent of U.S. Marines to investigate the aftermath of the battle and to collect bodies for their return home and a proper burial. The helo would never power down on the off chance they needed to leave in a hurry. A Reaper drone — invisible overhead — provided real-time intelligence on any suspected insurgent group movements that might present a threat. So far, they were in the clear.

Two French Foreign Legion investigators, a female lieutenant and a male sergeant, conducted their own analysis. They had taken up the Americans’ offer to fly with them to recover the bodies. The carnage baffled them as much as it baffled Walsh and her.

“Summerfield?” he said again in a harsher tone. “What do you see? Is the scene talking to you?”

Summerfield wiped sand and sweat from her brow. “It’s too clean, sir. No insurgent corpses, and no tracks leading in or out.”

Walsh growled. “Yes, that is odd.” His cold tone suggested he had already thought of this.

Summerfield crouched next to a corporal with a ragged bullet hole in the back of his head. Hair around the entry wound was still sticky and wet despite the evaporating heat.

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