CHAPTER 1
They say that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
My enemies thought that if they hurt me badly enough, if they took away the people I love, that it would break me. That it would cripple me so thoroughly I would give up the fight, that my hands would be too numb to pick up my weapons ever again. That I’d be too ruined to come after them.
That was their plan.
They were wrong.
CHAPTER 2
TRSTENIK ISLAND
SOUTH DALMATIAN COAST OF THE ADRIATIC SEA
CROATIA
We came out of the darkest corner of the sky.
Silent and hungry. Gliding on the thermals, propelled by muffled motors that let us approach the island low enough to spook our way under the radar. Our avenue of approach was narrow, but we didn’t need much space. Havoc Team rode the night wind on TradeWinds MotorKites. Something my boss, Mr. Church, had commissioned long ago from a company that made ultralight aircraft. The frame was made from an aluminum-magnesium alloy that was lighter than a lawn chair but far stronger. Big silk bat wings filled the frame and extended beyond it, ribbed with flexible polymers. The motors were tiny two-strokes built for stealth rather than speed. Virtually silent. And they had a surprisingly hefty weight capacity, which is good because I’m a bit over two hundred pounds, and my combat dog, Ghost, is only fifty pounds lighter.
We wore Google Scout glasses—another gizmo concocted by one of Church’s many “friends in the industry.” He seems to have reliable friends in a lot of useful industries. These glasses were synced with our tactical computers, which were extensions of the MindReader Q1 computer system. The glasses could cycle from standard vision to ultraviolet, infrared, and adaptive night vision. Most NVGs cast the world in a thousand shades of luminescent green and black, and they’re fantastic as long as someone doesn’t turn on a light. The adaptive tech in ours used ultrafast reactive lenses to modify the light intrusion, keeping us from being blinded and also bringing in some natural colors that would otherwise be washed out.
My boss loves his toys. Got to say, I’m a bit of a fan, too. We all were.
I led our little flight of bats through the black night, following a line of swells that humped up as they climbed from deep water to shallows and then curled over into gentle waves. Those waves weren’t big, but they were continuous, with the soft hiss and sigh of tons of water hitting the sand and sliding back into the inky vastness of the Adriatic. Behind me, flying in a loose vee, was the rest of Havoc Team.
There were four of them, apart from Ghost and me. Our mission intel told us that we’d be more than enough for this gig. Trstenik Island was a tiny patch of wooded nothing off the coast of the much larger island of Korcula off the coast of mainland Croatia. Trstenik was only 3.66 acres, densely wooded, with some low hills and sandy soil. One of the islands nations try to lease or sell so that someone comes in and develops it into something that pays taxes. In this case, the buyer was Mislav Mitrovic, a tech billionaire who’d made his fortune with some kind of doohickey that made a gizmo work for a business that I couldn’t give a cold shit about. Not that I’m a Luddite. Hardly. It’s just that the owner of the island was actually a front man for a group of other rich assholes who had their fingers deep into the global black market. And we’re not talking guys who sell knockoffs of Galaxy phones. No, these cats were in vending technologies that were giving small groups of very angry extremists the kinds of toys that allowed them to do considerable damage to their industrial, political, and religious competitors.
Through six or seven removes, Mitrovic and his little crew of mad scientists were selling high-end guidance systems that turned the already dangerous RPGs into guided missiles capable of taking down passenger liners, military jets, and even ships at sea. Stuff like that. He also sold special depleted uranium loads for those RPGs that could punch right through the skin of any of the smaller navy vessels, including hospital ships.
Here’s the thing. Normally, if my crew—Rogue Team International, currently based on Omfori Island in Greece—caught wind of something like this, either Mr. Church or our COO, Scott Wilson, would pick up the phone and make a discreet call. Someone in the Sigurnosno-obavještajna agencija—the Security and Intelligence Agency, or SOA—and the SOA would send in a few helicopters crammed with shooters.
But this was a special case for us. The RTI computer team, led by world-class super nerd Bug, peeled back all the layers of the cover stories and shell corporations Mitrovic was using to hide who he was really in bed with. The name Kuga floated to the top of that particular cesspool.
Kuga.
Yeah, we wanted him really badly. There aren’t words to describe exactly how badly.
Kuga was an international criminal empire specializing in black market sales of everything from polonium for assassinations to the sale and distribution of the most lethal bioweapons you can imagine. Kuga was also very likely the code name for the chief executive of that group, and there was a good chance the person behind it all was a former CIA superstar and self-made billionaire, Harcourt Bolton. For perspective’s sake, imagine if James Bond and Tony Stark had a love child, and that kid grew up to be Doctor Doom. That’s Harcourt Bolton. Smart, rich, ruthless as fuck, and he holds the number-two spot on my bucket list of people whose lives I want to destroy in very ugly and painful ways.
The number-one spot is held by Kuga’s right-hand man, Rafael Santoro. The most feared and effective manipulator, blackmailer, and extortionist the world has ever known. He has the subtlety and tradecraft to deconstruct the lives of key people and then turn them into weapons for the Kuga empire. Not willing converts—he’s not into changing hearts and minds through motivational speaking. No, his method is to make it very clear what will happen to the target’s loved ones. He shows photos and videos of what has happened to the families of people who defied him. He’s broken Navy SEALs, and that is something that’s supposed to be impossible, and breaks my heart that it, in fact, had happened.
Nothing is impossible, though. Santoro follows the Archimedes philosophy of:
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
But here’s the thing … and this is why Santoro, not Kuga, was in my number-one must fucking eviscerate list: Santoro is also the man who murdered my entire family on Christmas Eve last year.
Yeah.
So there’s that.
Mitrovic was in bed with Santoro and Kuga, which meant that he was not going to be very happy at all to wake up and have me bending over him.
RELENTLESS. Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Maberry.
