The Devil's Shadow: A Gun-for-Hire Thriller Read online

  The Devil’s Shadow

  A Gun-for-Hire Thriller

  J. E. Higgins

  Mercenary Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by J. E. Higgins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Also by J. E. Higgins

  Other Gun-For-Hire Thrillers

  The Montevideo Game

  The Sauwa Catcher Series

  The Dublin Hit

  The Bosnian Experience

  Cyprus Rage

  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

  Aftermath

  The Players

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  2009.

  The Iranian embassy presented a conspicuous display at its place at Paseo De La Reforma #2350 in the upscale Miguel Hidalgo district of Mexico City. A three-story compound of creamy white adobe, it wasn’t much different than the architecture of most of the more modern buildings that sat along the street. The street itself was the center of one of the city’s more affluent business districts, housing numerous eminent high-rise modern architectural works.

  At first glance, one would assume it was just another one of many historical sites in the second most visited district in the city. Its older adobe walls and traditional clay tiles gave it a look of an old government building. However, it was the present headquarters of the Iranian diplomatic mission to Mexico.

  It was a little after 1330hrs, the remainder of the embassy staff was returning from their lunch break. The final group of returnees slowly filed through the narrow entrance of the gate as guards from the Revolutionary Guard Corps worked with local security agents to check identifications, and conduct a quick search of any bags and containers being brought in. This was a routine the employees detested as they impatiently waited to be cleared and allowed to go back to work.

  The Iranians had enjoyed relative peace in the country. Unlike Mexico’s US neighbor to the north, they had no concern with narco-trafficking and felt no need to badger the government about their efforts to control such forces. Therefore, to their minds, the situation presented no threat or reason for being targeted by such organizations, but there was always the fear of kidnapping. However, after the 1980 Embassy siege in London, when the Iranian government refused to negotiate and were willing to let their people die as martyrs, kidnappers now looked upon such an exercise as a futile endeavor.

  Even though the city, like many parts of the country, was gripped in the violence of battling narcotic organizations, the Iranians felt relatively safe in their current location. There was no need for the security their embassies in the Middle-East maintained ─ the premises surrounded by walls of sandbags, high-rise guard towers for scanning the grounds below, using powerful floodlights, and response teams ready to move in fully armored vehicles.

  That wasn’t to say that security was taken lightly. Apart from the metal gate that surrounded the building, cameras were placed at all corners and offered a central security hub full view of the estate grounds. Veteran soldiers of the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard, provided the physical security presence, along with off-duty members of the Mexican federal police who earned extra money augmenting forces helping with access control. Well-armed security forces patrolled the grounds irregularly to ensure that a pattern could not be established by any would-be intruders.

  Looking out his window on the top floor of the embassy, Ambassador Bijan Afshin grimaced as he stared down at the grounds below. An avid gardener, he felt the need to occasionally review the state of the embassy grounds and its vegetation. He typically found something that required a confrontation with the gardener ─ this time it was the uneven display of the tulips. He was sure that they were not maintaining the proper uniformity becoming of a state representative of the Islamic state. He would make a point of speaking to the gardener soon about fixing this wholly unacceptable situation.

  The alarm on his cell phone buzzed to remind him of his next appointment diverted his attention. He liked to have an early warning so he had time to review his notes and reports to enable him to discuss the subjects intelligently. In this case, it was the person he liked speaking to the least, the head of the economics department for the mission, Ebrahim Bahrom.

  Bahrom was an economist who had received his doctorate in economics from the University of Tehran, one of the oldest and most distinguished academic institutions in the Middle-East. He was by all accounts a brilliant man who understood the economic situation in South America well. He was also snooty, conceited, and inclined to remind everyone about the prestigious status his family enjoyed in the government. It didn’t help that he often made his briefings long, boring, and deliberately filled with needless technical jargon designed to make him sound intelligent but condescending to those he was addressing. It was a meeting Afshin did not look forward to.

  Taking his seat, Afshin set about carefully reviewing the report that had been forwarded to him earlier that morning from Bahrom’s office discussing what to expect from the incoming finance minister, a subject that promised to be boring. He got through the first few pages then turned his attention to the notes from a recent meeting that had been held a few days ago with the outgoing finance minister. After a quick scan of them, he leaned back into his comfortable leather seat and stared at his image in the large mirror across the room.

  He looked older than his sixty-five years ─ his hair was thinning on top with only a few light strands still covering what was fast becoming a shining cue ball, and his beard was well trimmed, though the whiskers that were once black had turned to salt and pepper. Combined with his weathered face, he had the look of a man who had just returned from years living in the mountains somewhere, and his gut had begun to protrude beyond what his dark black suit could conceal.

  It was hard to believe he was the same man who, in his youth, had cut such a muscular image. As a young man, he had lived a dangerous life as a revolutionary fighting the Shaw. He had been a fugitive for years dodging the forces of the SAVAK, the dreaded secret police of Iran. He had trudged several times over Iran’s high rugged mountains and harsh deserts delivering messages from the underground movement in Iran to their exiled leadership hiding in the Shia dominated areas of Iraq. He had been one of the first to breach the doors when he, along with so many others, had stormed the US embassy.

  It was hard to believe he was the same man looking back at himself in the mirror. He had changed so much from that high minded revolutionary he once was. But at the same time, he felt like his weathered features were a badge of honor from those days, a reminder to what he had been through for his country. Enjoying enough nostalgia, he returned to his reading, dreading what h
e was sure was going to be a needlessly long and boring meeting with a man who had never lived rough in his entire life.

  The final horde was always the worst. The embassy staff crowded the gate as they impatiently pushed to get in. The sun was hot and the high temperatures made the remaining people in line irritable. They started to badger the guards with demands to perform their duties faster causing a distraction for the security that was now doing both security checks and crowd control.

  The security guards were so overwhelmed they took no notice of a woman, dressed smartly in black slacks, a light blue collared shirt, and a black sports jacket. She had stood quietly in line next to a man dressed in a similar fashion. With their obvious Mediterranean features, they were clearly not Iranian. If anyone had noticed them, they would have been easily dismissed simply as visitors looking to attend some meeting or discuss business with an official from one of the many departments.

  The couple had waited specifically for the afternoon buildup to get in line. During the time they had waited in line, they made only occasional comments to each other avoiding opening a dialogue with those around them or attracting any attention. When the horde of employees began to accumulate, the two slowly made their way around the mob toward the fence. They went completely unnoticed when the woman allowed her handbag to drop slowly from her shoulder onto the ground just a foot or so from the entrance. In the chaos of the exasperated crowds, they withdrew escaping notice from anyone and casually departed by walking across the street.

  Thirty minutes earlier, a group of painters dressed in baggy white coveralls walked through the service entrance of the building directly across the way. Showing the proper work documents, they were allowed through security and pressed on to the elevators. The large service elevator accommodated all six men and their long canvass rolls. Going up to the fourth floor they were met by a pinch-faced man with a thickly lined face and a severely nervous look. Pinched-face said nothing as he waved for the painters to follow him.

  Leading them to the end of the hallway, he unlocked the door and ushered them into a large meeting room. The room was long with a dark mahogany table dominating the middle. Surrounding the table were several dark brown, leather chairs. Lining the room were smaller pieces of periphery chairs with side tables. The room felt like a mausoleum with its dark furniture and low lighting. It was apparent that everything was designed to exude power. It was also the perfect location for their purposes.

  Four men stayed in the room as Pinch-face led the remaining two to another room at the other end of the hall. Carefully laying down the two canvass bundles at opposite ends of the room the men slowly unrolled them. With the parcels fully unraveled they were looking at two PSG1 rifles. These German-made sniper rifles were specifically designed for counter-terrorism and urban operations. They were also a favored weapon of the Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales, the Mexican Special Forces Corps, by whom these men had been trained.

  Laying out their weapons, the men designated as the shooters took seats at the large meeting table and studied the embassy grounds across the street. Eyeing the building from the first floor, they adjusted their positions until they were confident they had found a place that gave them maximum coverage of their target.

  Next, the men set to work draping the canvass covers over the chairs and the back half of the table. The inside of the canvass covers had been painted to match the colors of the room. Once the shooters positioned themselves, the canvasses were neatly draped over them by their assistants, although there was still a possibility a shooter’s silhouette could be noticed if people in the embassy started looking. The white painter’s coveralls they were wearing created a noticeable outline, but sitting far back in the room helped guard against this possibility, and the canvass covers aided the shooters to blend into the darkness of the room.

  The shooters sat down and lifted their rifles so they could peer through the narrow slits between the canvasses to make last-minute adjustments. Two days earlier they had sighted in their weapons and practiced live fire with using some old buildings in a small town that gave them similar conditions to the embassy to gain familiarity with them.

  The non-shooters leaned over the weapons and screwed the flash suppressors onto the ends of the barrels. Pinch-Face returned still looking pale and nervous. “The rest of the men are in position,” he said as he wiped his forehead and the back of his neck with a white handkerchief. “I will go see to the rest of the details.”

  One of the shooters nodded in acknowledgment. Pinch-Face gave no reply as he exited from the room. The assistants set about placing small charges against all the windows using a sticky adhesive. The windows were thick and did not open which meant they would have to be blown when the time came.

  Reaching into beaten work bags the men produced ammunition magazines and a pair of headsets. Adjusting the headsets and the switches they were soon communicating with not just the other team down the hall but with the rest of the unit. “Eagles nest is set,” said the lead shooter into the small microphone as he sighted through his rifle scope and watched the young woman at the gate drop her bag and edge her way out of the crowd with her male cohort. The team responded with similar calls of readiness.

  The bag exploded into a wild fury as a loud earth-shaking blast quickly manifested into a powerful, hellish ball of fire incinerating everyone nearby. Blood-curdling screams rang out as the victims, who had once been a crowd of impatient office staff, burned or were torn apart in the blast. Soon the street was inundated with body parts raining down from the sky followed by the acrid smell of burnt flesh.

  At that moment the small charges against the windows of the office above detonated, spreading a storm of glass shards onto the street below. Similar explosions occurred as the windows across the entire floor and the two floors above dissolved in a similar manner. With the barrier now gone, the shooters were free to begin their grim work.

  Inside the embassy, ambassador Afshin slowly regained his faculties. Instinctively he had dropped to the floor the moment he felt the terrible concussion of the explosion and the trembling building. “Ebrahim!” He shouted over his desk, but the buzzing in his ears made it difficult to hear. He cried out again to the economics attaché. “Ebrahim Bahrom, can you hear me?” The faint voice of Bahrom answered back. Carefully the aged ambassador crawled to his feet.

  He was still shaky, and he could tell he was partially in shock as he drunkenly wobbled towards the window to investigate. Behind him, he could hear the squeaky nervous voice of Bahrom beckoning him to stay in the safety of cover. As an old veteran of the revolution, he was not about to be cowed by a terrorist act. Not when his staff, his people, were possibly in danger. Ignoring his subordinate, he moved forward.

  Once the smoke cleared, the prime shooter had a clear view of the Ambassador’s office. Through his scope, he could see two men slowly getting to their feet after lying pressed to the floor. An older man with a protruding gut edged towards the window while a much younger man in a grey suit and horn-rimmed glasses carefully rounded the desk to join him. The older man walked up to the large glass window placing him directly in the cross-hairs of the sniper’s sight picture. A slow squeeze of the trigger and the free-floating barrel recoiled as the 7.62x51 mm round launched from the muzzle.

  A short distance of fewer than eighty meters, he had barely felt the trigger pull and the kickback of the rifle stock when he watched the glass of the embassy window web and the ambassador’s head explode in a red cloud. The spent shell casing ejected automatically from the chamber readying it for the next shot. The hardwood table helped steady the weapon as he angled it slightly to capture the younger man in his sight picture.

  The young man stood frozen, apparently not having had a chance to process what had just happened to his boss. The sniper squeezed the trigger once again. His rifle barrel bucked as it launched another round. This time the window completely shattered as the metal projectile tore into the torso of the younger Iranian who, like his su
perior, stiffened on impact before dropping dead. By now the other sniper teams had focused their attention on the lower floors, issuing reports about whatever movement they could see in each of the other offices.

  While the embassy was awash in flames and carnage, groups of onlookers began to form on the street. Only seconds ago, these people had been just a collection of pedestrians who didn’t know each other. After the blast, they changed into an organized unit. They dawned balaclavas with white skeletal faces painted over them then proceeded to make their way in a tactical formation toward the consulate gate. Their side bags and knapsacks produced an assortment of compact assault weapons, their buttoned jackets, and coats opening to display tactical vests.

  The crowd kept a steady pace as they approached the entrance. A disciplined force, they kept their weapons low but at the ready. They fanned out in a loose diamond formation as they arrived at the embassy gate while being fed reports from the snipers as to what was happening.

  Arriving at the entrance they walked dismissively over the shreds of human remains as they filtered through the gate and fanned out onto embassy grounds. A short way up the lawn they were met by a weak resistance when a few of the guards raced around from the side of the house and attempted to stop them. Young and inexperienced, the guards, accustomed to vandals and youthful trespassers rather than an actual threat, screamed orders to halt as they charged towards the large group of masked figures; not even thinking to open fire.