Black Flag: A Taskforce Story Read Online Free Page B

to put up with this?
Then he remembered that he was one of the idiots. He had gone to them, looking for muscle as insurance after he’d come across a man willing to sell U.S. military-grade semiconductors and microprocessors used in ballistic missiles. Something worth a great deal to the right buyers. The original plan had been fairly routine, with the contact placing the chips in with a batch of vanilla ones being shipped by the same corporation. Ordinarily hand flown back to the Department of Defense contractor working with the ballistic missile technology, these would now cross the ocean as boring, normal cargo. After all, who could tell the difference just by looking at them? Certainly not anyone who inspected shipping containers.
    When they arrived in Charleston, Dylan was simply going to receive them in exchange for money. After the contact had placed the chips into the shipping system, he’d gotten greedy, threatening to back out and go somewhere else, and Dylan had learned what a mistake it had been to use the Romanians as muscle. Intending to cut the contact out and leverage his partners, they’d sabotaged a boat the contact used, and it had exploded right on time. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to either Dragos or Dylan, the partners had no idea where the chips were located on the giant ship and had no ability to make the transfer in Charleston. All they’d known was that the container information was in the boat Dragos had conveniently destroyed.
    Dylan shuddered at the memory of that meeting, sure that Dragos was going to kill all of them out of sheer rage, projecting his own failure as their mistake. In an attempt to keep Dragos from going on a rampage and butchering everyone in the room, Dylan had come up with a plan to steal the chips, and things had slowly but surely spiraled more and more out of control.
    He tapped the PVC pipe against his leg, waiting on someone to answer the door. At least they had the container location now. At least he could show
some
good news.
    He heard the chain slide and felt his pulse increase. The door opened and he found himself facing Dragos’s right-hand man, Costin. He swung the door inward, allowing Dylan to enter. Dragos saw the PVC container and clapped his hands, “So the plan is proceeding as you said. Good. Very good.”
    Dylan said, “Well, yes and no.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He took a deep breath, then let it out. “We had some complications with the academic company. They got suspicious and we had to take them out.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Dylan relayed what had occurred on the boat, leaving out the part about how scared he had been to pilot the vessel home to Kingston Harbor by himself.
    “So my men are on this island? Right now?”
    “Yes. It couldn’t be helped. We have other preparations to make. We’ll just have to switch out the container crew.”
    “It’s not that easy. The three men with you were specially selected for the ship takedown. I can’t just throw in three different ones.”
    Dylan held up his hands, not wanting to trigger the well of anger that he knew Dragos kept bubbling inside of him like magma under the earth’s crust. He said, “It couldn’t be helped. The container is being loaded on the ship in three hours. The men need to be inside it before it goes through customs. I didn’t have time to wait on them to track down the academics.”
    Dragos said, “What of these ‘academics’? You were going to use them to place the drugs on the ship.”
    “All of them are certified scuba divers. I made sure of that. We’ll just have to use the ones doing the research here.”
    Dragos continued as if he hadn’t heard. “And you were going to use them as bait to cover up our theft. What of that now?”
    “Same answer. Instead of four bodies on the ship, it’ll be two. It will still work. You said Stefan had planted evidence in Charleston, correct?”
    Dragos said, “Yes, but I don’t like all of these changes. Every time you