Rain unto Death: Rex Muse, #1

By Alex Ryan

A U.S. Army Ranger named Alex Dahl is wrongly accused and convicted of murdering his commanding officer by court martial. He manages to escape the throes of military incarceration and likely death, and is thrust in to the dark underworld of private contract intelligence under a new identity, Rex Muse.

Rex is employed by Simon Bowe, who runs a private agency that outsources intelligence, espionage, and security services to the major intelligence agencies and high level corporate entities. His first major assignment finds him entangled with an airborne terrorist plot that has the potential to make a nuclear attack look like a grade school playground fight in comparison.

He’s young, he’s green, and he’s learning. He’s slightly romantic, has strained relations with the opposite gender, and he’s one hundred percent badass. He walks a tightrope between survival and injustice, all the while searching for the answers that can clear his name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Ryan
• Release date: Jul 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386642992

Alex Ryan

Alex Ryan is an American author based in Northern California that has authored a series of action adventure novels in the Bruce Highland series, and the Rex Muse series. Bruce is a former US Army Infantryman, post-graduate degreed engineer, pilot, gym rat, bicyclist, and barbecue extrodinaire. He draws on personal experience in his creation of characters and plots.

Book preview

Introduction

A U.S. Army Ranger named Alex Dahl is wrongly accused and convicted of murdering his commanding officer by court martial. He manages to escape the throes of military incarceration and likely death, and is thrust in to the dark underworld of private contract intelligence under a new identity, Rex Muse.

Rex is employed by Simon Bowe, who runs a private agency that outsources intelligence, espionage, and security services to the major intelligence agencies and high level corporate entities. His first major assignment finds him entangled with an airborne terrorist plot that has the potential to make a nuclear attack look like a grade school playground fight in comparison.

He’s young, he’s green, and he’s learning. He’s slightly romantic, has strained relations with the opposite gender, and he’s one hundred percent badass. He walks a tightrope between survival and injustice, all the while searching for the answers that can clear his name.

A Note from the Author

What would you do if you were wrongly (or for that matter, rightly) faced with life imprisonment and possibly the death penalty? Hang out in a military stockade? Or the state penitentiary? Hope that some new evidence turns up and ends up clearing you? Hell no! You escape, if you get the chance; I would anyway. But then what do you do afterwards? This is an exercise in both survival and greatness on the other side of the prison bars.

For those familiar with detective hero, Bruce Highland, Rex Muse is a different animal. Think of James Bond. He had to start somewhere, right? The movies never really got into it, but you would think that at the beginning of his career as a notable International spy working for British Intelligence; he must have been green. But no, the way he's portrayed he probably exited the womb wearing a tuxedo, packing a Walther PPK, smoothly working the maternity ward nurses. Come on man, that's ridiculous. Rex Muse learned the trade the hard way. He was thrust in an unworkable, life ending situation, and he became a new man. Literally.

This work is a good, solid, old fashion military action adventure with some romantic interludes woven into the tapestry. You will see Muse transition from young, talented green paramilitary operative to a hardened, seasoned veteran of the game, who could kick Bond's ass and give Jason Bourne a healthy run for his money.

Here is a funny anecdote – In the original version of the novel, the first aircraft I had the bad guys flying around in was a Lockheed Electra L188 (a four engine turboprop.) I asked my cover artist to put in a Lockheed Electra L188. I sent him an image of a Lockheed Electra L188. What I got was an ATR 42. Or a 72. Both ATR’s look about the same, particularly when altered for cover art. Initially, I was going to have him go back to the drawing board, but the more I looked at the cover, the more I liked the ATR. In fact, I liked it so much that I rewrote the novel to include an ATR 42, which arguably fits the mission better than the Electra did.

Prologue – Breaking Away

Grenada, 1983

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It was just last night that Spec Four Alex Dahl had been drinking gin and tonics with Jones and Mifflin in that one bar with dimly lit blue lights in downtown Seattle. Drinking so late on a school night, and so far from post was generally inadvisable, but Mifflin was a short-timer, due to be discharged in less than a month. Dahl felt that it was his personal responsibility to keep him out of trouble, and Jones was always up for a drink any given time, day or night, when protocol dictated.

They were going to head back to the barracks, but then the three girls showed up. They were college girls. Seattle was a college town. Why they ended up in this particular bar was anyone’s guess, as it wasn’t a college bar. But then again, it wasn’t a GI bar either. And it was otherwise empty. Conversation turned from shop talk, the usual military stuff and the boasting, like ‘I can make a head shot at five hundred meters with a sixteen’ or ‘I once humped a hundred pound pack sixty miles with full ammo.’ They suddenly sobered up, immediately.

Now let’s say you could assign an advisor to the scenario. Had the advisor known that the three girls were on the way in to the dimly lit bar, probably taking cover from the rain, which happened pretty much continuously in this place, he or she would have had the three soldiers relocate immediately to the round table behind the bar stools. But there was no advisor. They were on their own. The girls, however, did choose to take the round table behind the bar stools, facing the backs of the boys.

The girls were in their senior year. That meant that they were roughly the same age as the boys, maybe even slightly older. It was clear that they were GIs; all three had the characteristic short, high, and tight Ranger haircut, which was just shy of a Mohawk.

In the pecking order, Dahl was senior. In the social order, Jones was the first to seize the opportunity to hit on a girl. Mifflin never had great luck, and wasn’t terribly attractive. Girls liked Dahl, but he was somewhat shy. But they all liked the game, and hated it too. Mind if we join you? It’s a little awkward with us sitting here with our backs to you. Good going Jones, you nailed it on the head. Now it was a table of six.

Now the posturing turned to a different type. The dynamics would soon determine who would be paired with who. Three is an awkward number though. In a situation where there are two guys, and two girls, they pretty much pick out each other from the very start. Or, more accurately, the girls pick who they want. If it were two girls, and a lone third girl, it would be easier. The two best buds would pair it up with the two girls that arrived together. And the two loners would pair. Or not. But two groups of three becomes a special problem.

In the end, it was Jones that got lucky. Dahl and Mifflin took a cab ride back to Fort Lewis. The three girls took a cab back to their dorm at the University of Washington, along with Jones, who hit it off with the redhead. Well, good for him.

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Spec Four Dahl sat on his cloth seat, with his pack in front of him, and jump gear hanging behind him, leaning forward on his M60 machine gun. The Rangers weren’t wearing their chutes, as the initial ops spec called for them to land and perform a ground deployment. Dahl was undecided about the new Kevlar helmet, referred to by the acronym of ‘PASGT.’ Unlike the trusted steel pots, it was one piece, and contained no steel shell that you could use as a washbasin or even to boil water in. And it was heavier. To his right was PFC Mifflin. Both were loaded down to the hilt and about to get their first taste of actual combat. To his right should have been Spec Four Jones, except Jones wasn’t there. He never showed up. He missed the morning alert, which was an actual combat deployment. Jones may have gotten lucky last night, but this morning, he became very unlucky. Missing a morning formation would get you a formal chewing out by Top, but that would be the end of it, as long as you didn’t turn it in to a habit. Missing a deployment, however, is generally a career ending move. He would likely perform garrison duty during the period of deployment, and then once the unit returned and things calmed down, he would likely be reassigned to a straight leg unit. Kicked out of the Rangers. They would probably send his ass to Germany. That’s where they send all of the fuck ups. It’s rumored that in a few months, they will start sending everyone that way to bulk up the presence in Western Europe.

Feeling for the black leather holster attached to his web gear, he confirmed that his sidearm, an M1911 .45 automatic pistol, was present. He had a problem with the holster latch. Normally, an Eleven Bravo ground pounder doesn’t get a sidearm, but squad level machine gunners are authorized to carry them. Carrying the pistol is more of a status symbol; if things went so badly that his primary weapon was out of ammo or not functional for whatever reason, and the enemy was close enough for the pistol to be in effect, it was probably over anyway. They used to joke that he should count the rounds as he fired them, to ensure he had at least one left for himself.

The thing about deployments is that, during a training exercise, you know it’s coming, and you can prepare for it. If it’s an all-out war, you also know about it and can plan and prepare accordingly. Grenada was neither. It was basically a neutralization mission for Grenadian and Cuban troops, as well as a rescue mission for university students and displaced governmental heads. There was no planning to speak of, just jump in planes and make it happen. So far, the mission has been one cluster fuck after another. It’s moving, just not smoothly. Just not pretty. You watch the movies. The Dirty Dozen. They make it look easy. This is no movie. It’s reality.

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The vibration of the HC-130 transport aircraft made it impossible to get any sleep in route to the deployment location. Captain Tyrell Lewis was tired. He hadn’t slept in nearly twenty four hours. He was in the lead of the HC-130 ‘Talon’ aircraft, which was currently in a holding pattern seventy five nautical miles east of Point Salinas military airport in Grenada. The mission? The two lead ‘Talon’ transports would conduct a low level drop of Rangers at the end of the airfield to secure the field and clear it so the remaining three ships could land and deploy the remainder of the troops and equipment. Initially, they would capture the airfield, then race to the American university to free student hostages, among many other missions occurring simultaneously on the island, since the invasion was authorized to thwart a Cuban and potential Soviet presence.

It was a troubled mission from the start. The lead Seal team had previously lost some men in the amphibious assault. One of the UH-60 Blackhawks was shot down in an airmobile raid to free hostages at the Richmond Prison. Lewis himself had some command and control issues. He didn’t know exactly who the offenders were, although he had a pretty good idea, but he found a grenade in his office chair back in garrison. That was an administrative adaptation of the placement of a grenade in an officer’s boot, to signify that if the officer did not change his patterns of behavior to the aggressor’s liking, the next encounter with a grenade would not have the benefit of a pin in place. The act is referred to ‘fragging’ an officer.

Lewis was on the edge. Maybe it was racial. Maybe a couple of the junior noncoms felt he was riding them too hard. Maybe it was a combination. He didn’t know. A full investigation and subsequent disciplinary action had been planned, but that was all put on hold when the alert to mobilize for Operation Urgent Fury sounded.

Frankly, he was on that lead bird for the ride. He was baggage. He never should have been there. He should have been in the lagging three birds acting as the commander instead of letting his XO take charge so he could be in a different plane than Sergeant Mueller and Corporal Starr. It’s not that he didn’t trust them, but, well, it’s that he didn’t trust them. They were the subject of the investigation. It was sort of a chicken shit move, and had the Colonel got wind of the change had the mobilization been more organized and less chaotic, he would have gone ape shit.

More bad news came. An AC-130 gunship circling the area detected vehicles and personnel on the runway. That meant two things. More resistance than was previously expected, and the decision to airdrop the remaining three ships’ worth of soldiers and equipment, versus landing and unloading on the ground. That meant a frantic effort aboard the aircraft to reconfigure the Rangers and equipment with chutes. To compound matters, the number one ‘Talon’ HC-130 lost its inertial navigation system twenty five nautical miles off Point Salinas and had to call for a ‘no drop.’ Consequently, it had to fall behind the number three ship, and the decision was made to drop all at once, and several hours later, in the darkness.

The HC-130’s encountered small arms and antiaircraft fire as they made a low pass at the minimum 500 foot drop level, and deployed Rangers and equipment. Captain Tyrell Lewis found himself in the midst of a fairly large gaggle of Rangers scrambling to shed their chutes and to configure for battle.

Lewis was in a cold sweat. He made the decision to rejoin his company and take charge of it from the XO. Problem was, where the hell were they? Orders were being barked. Squads assembled. Things started working like magic. Rangers train for this kind of thing.

Out of the darkness, away from the pack, two figures appeared, as Lewis relieved himself. He recognized the faces in the faint light. They were grinning ear to ear. Mueller. Starr. The very two he needed to avoid.

How you guys doing? Lewis asked as he buttoned up his BDU pants.

Swell SIR, how are you doing, SIR? Mueller asked, in a baiting voice. It was obvious that the grenade he left didn’t get the message across.

Look, I know you guys got some issues with me, but I’m going to ask you to put them on the shelf until we get this mission complete, you understand that?

We understand perfectly, SIR, we just came to help you out, SIR. It was clear that Mueller and Starr were not there to help him out in any way, shape or form.

The first shots fired by the Ranger teams against the Grenadian and Cuban aggressors sounded off in an uneven staccato as the teams alternated advancement with covering fire. A moment later, Lewis encountered his ultimate worst dream. And it wasn’t a Cuban soldier with an AK-47 pointed at his head; the Cuban soldier would have probably preferred to take the captain hostage. No, it was an American issue M1911 .45 automatic service pistol, leveled just below the rim of Lewis’ helmet.

One single shot rang out. The bullet entered his head, but did not exit. Lewis fell backwards to the ground. Nobody ever heard it. It didn’t even make an audible noise to anyone engaged in advancing the movement to the control tower building. Mueller tossed the pistol on top of Lewis’ lifeless body.

C’mon, Mueller said softly to Starr. We gotta get with the unit. Let’s kill some more motherfuckers while we can.

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Upon return from Grenada, Spec Four Alex Dahl’s next move was supposed to have been to be promoted laterally from Specialist Four, to Corporal E-4. That meant he would become a squad leader. He would trade his M-60 machine gun for an M16A1 assault rifle, like the rest of the leadership below Company Commander. And actually, it got better than that. He took and passed the E5 board and First Sergeant Wilson pinned his sergeant stripes on his uniform personally. Then, not more than two days later, the MPs came for him during the night, cuffed him, and hauled him away at gunpoint.

It was all like a very bad dream. They really wouldn’t say exactly what he was doing there; they probably didn’t know. Dahl was facing a court martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not some kind of civilian trial where there were all of these rights and advisements and whatnot. There were rumors. The word in the pen was that Captain Lewis had been shot by friendly fire. As in deliberately. Murdered, in cold blood. Fragged.

Life was rough. He was in chains. There were hard work details. The MPs looked down on him as the worst traitor scum that could possibly occupy the earth.

He was cut. Bloodied. His hands were ripped from heaving the rough concrete blocks with his bare hands. But he was strong. He was pushing six feet tall, and only weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, but it was pure muscle. He had hard, angular features. He resembled a kick boxer. He was a kick boxer. He fought in semi-professional PKA full contact matches. And won. Consistently. Few people could kick his ass and those that could, outweighed him by fifty pounds or more. He had a reputation for being a skilled fighter, a damned fine machine gunner, and one of the best marksmen in the unit, with any weapon.

The two MPs clapped the nightsticks in their hands as Dahl took a shower in solitude. The stinging hot water and soap actually felt good, as it made the muscle ache seem to go away.

You like that, you fuckin' puke? The tall MP with a shaved head towered over Dahl, who was curled on the floor in pain, letting the warm water rain down on his body. Dahl ignored him. I'm talking to you. And when I talk, you listen, and you respond.

Dahl continued to ignore him, staring in to space. The MP delivered a hard, swift kick to his stomach, causing Dahl to reel over in pain.

Sarge, come on, ease up on him. The young, black MP, also with a shaved head said.

I don't like assholes like that. Killing our own. I'm gonna head back to admin. You clean him up and take him back to his cell then.

Yeah. Yeah sarge, I'll do that. The tall MP left the room. The young, black MP turned the water off, and tossed a brown issue towel to Dahl. Dahl didn't attempt to catch it, and it fell into the pool of water. Man, I'll give you one more towel. One more towel. You let that get soaked, you're going back wet. Dahl looked up at the young, black MP. He extended his arm and took the second towel. Yeah, I know what you did. the MP spoke. But I also believe you deserve a fair shake until your trial.

Dahl looked up at him and spoke. "I don't even know what I did. All I know, is you guys came for me in the night, cuffed me and stuffed me, and I've been getting the crap beaten out of me every goddamn day, and night."

You don't know? You're being honest? You really don't know?

I really don't. Nobody will tell me.

They say you killed a captain. Your own company commander. Captain Lewis.

What?

You heard me.

Where? How?

During deployment in Grenada. You shot him.

"They say I shot Captain Tyrell Lewis? Why?"

I have no idea. Are you saying you didn't?

No. No! I mean, no, I didn't! Why would I shoot the man? I respected him!

That's not what the scuttlebutt is. Look, you're facing a court martial and a possible death sentence. I'd stay quiet for now until you can talk to your lawyer. Your JAG attorney is scheduled to visit you tomorrow.

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It was a rather healthy assignment to lob to a first lieutenant, but the major felt that it would be good experience. It was a pretty cut and dry case. There was a preponderance of evidence. First Lieutenant Shatz really only had to ensure that due process via UCMJ was delivered. Dahl was pretty much beyond hope for any kind of defense. At least that's how JAG command viewed it.

He had been in the interrogation room before, sitting on the sidelines, taking notes. Then he started interviewing. He did a good job. He was careful. Meticulous. And the thing about it, was that there was absolutely no advantage career wise, or evaluation wise to do some sort of grandstand move to proclaim Dahl's innocence. He just, purely and simply, had to go through the motions.

The room was only slightly less stark and sanitized than the holding cell in which Dahl had resided for the past five days. Dahl was handcuffed, and the mere mention of a code word would have a storm of MP's descend upon the room. No, there was no expectation of privacy. This was UCMJ, not Perry Mason. The wooden table had a long history of etchings implanted from the thumbnails and metal cuff edges of inmates for a series of years. Some of the images were heartbreaking. Some disturbing. All were desperate.

Lieutenant Shatz paced the room, pretending to study the contents of the manila file folder containing the case paperwork. He did it as a reason to stall. He already studied the material. He knew it in his sleep, but he wanted some quality time. He wanted to get a read on Dahl.

Alex Dahl himself was actually somewhat in a state of acceptance and denial at the same time. He was almost beginning to doubt his own mind. He watched the lieutenant pace the room, dressed in his Class B uniform consisting of his dress green slacks, black shoes, short sleeved shirt, epaulets, and no tie.

Shatz plunked the manila folder on the table and took a seat facing Dahl. Do you know why you're here? Shatz asked. Dahl damn well better know.

They say I killed Captain Lewis. Dahl replied.

Hmm. Yes. Didn't they tell you that when they arrested you?

No, they didn't.

They probably should have. They weren't required to.

So, does that mean anything legally?

No, not really.

Sir, are you on my side?

Sergeant Dahl, I am assigned to represent you as your defense attorney for your upcoming courts martial for the murder of Captain Tyrell Lewis, your former company commander.

In other words, no. Dahl could read between the lines. Sir, no offense intended, but do I have a right to a civilian attorney?

No offense taken, sergeant. Sure. You do. They cost money though. And I can assure you that you don't have the money it will take to hire one for your case.

I didn't do it.

Well, I have to tell you, there is a hell of a lot of damning evidence and testimony that says you did. Before you speak, let me just tell you what's out there. First of all, your issue M1911 service pistol, the one you were issued by virtue of being an M60 gunner authorized to carry a sidearm, was found on top of Captain Lewis' body. With your and only your fingerprints on it. One shot was fired. The shot that entered the captain's head, which was ballistically determined to have been fired from your weapon.

Sir, someone had stolen my pistol. I reported that when I turned in my sixty to the arms room.

But you had a motive. The lieutenant said. Two days before the mobilization alert came, Captain Lewis had discovered a live grenade placed on his office chair. It was a warning. It had your fingerprints all over it.

Sir, I was issued three grenades at the range. I threw two. I turned the unused on back in to the arms room.

Negative, sergeant. The inventory chit indicates that no grenades were returned. You are saying you threw two and did not throw the third?

That's right sir.

Think about it. That doesn't look good.

But I have no reason in the world to want to kill Captain Lewis.

"Is it not true, that