Buck

By Buck Starr

A Greek island paradise; a criminal conspiracy involving multiple Countries; and one lone operative in the middle of it all. Find a new hero in Buck, the mysterious character who must unravel the plan of a terrorist attack and a murder, designed to orchestrate the takeover of a government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781649901118

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

N

o way. That did not just happen.

I’m lined up for the perfect kill shot, and the guy’s head explodes in my scope. My target, a middle–Eastern human trafficker who snatched the wrong Sheik’s granddaughter, is eliminated. The random thoughts won’t stop. Did someone else have a contract on this guy? Did someone steal my contract? Will I get paid anyway? I mean, who’s to say that other shot killed him and not mine? My word against the real shooter, and who knows if he’ll ever be heard from?

I dismantle and pack up quickly and am in the pickup heading south within 45 seconds. And on the burner immediately.

Market is down today. Hope your investments are safe.

Yes. They are right where they should be. Discon-nect. Phone goes out the window, never to be traced.

Good. The money will be waiting for me. And I either have a tail or someone else is trying to get out of here using my route. A vehicle is behind me and shouldn’t be. So I deviate. A turn on a secondary route I scouted out last week does the trick. And I get a good look at the other vehicle as it runs past the intersection, still heading south. A grey late-model Jeep Wrangler, nondescript, and the license plate obstructed. The driver is wearing a camo hat and sunglasses, looks to be about mid–thirties, maybe 6’, Italian or middle eastern if I had to surmise from the one quick look. I’m guessing that is the shooter. And I’m guessing that I haven’t seen or heard the last of him. And how unprofessional? Take the shot when the guy was still in range of collaterals. I mean, I was ready, but two seconds later and the guy would have been clear of his driver and his security as the walkway narrowed. But this guy couldn’t wait. Probably hit at least one other person with frags. Where’s the pride in that work?

I am not just an assassin. I’m a contract operative. I do more than just kill. But when the job calls for it, I am always crystal clear about who I am engaging and why. No good guys, only bad guys. No children, no women. Call me old fashioned. And no, I do not struggle with guilt over the death of drug lords who poison children, crooked politicians who willingly sacrifice innocent lives for their careers, thugs who make their money selling guns to extremists, and the extremists that use those guns to commit genocide. You get the idea. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, but perhaps he relies on me, and those like me, to help. I don’t pretend to judge them—that is between them and God. To steal an old adage, I just arrange the meeting. I’m okay with that.

And no complaints about living in the shadows either. I like my privacy. I don’t like anybody knowing my business. That’s why they call it my business, right? I like being able to choose where I spend my time and who I spend it with. And I really don’t like being told how to live. So this is a good lifestyle for me. I travel when I please. I stay where I want as long as I want. I am unknown, so being in the shadows doesn’t mean that I can’t go to bars, restaurants, wander the street markets in the Old World. That sort of stuff. Hiding in plain sight, so to speak, because those who see me really see nobody.

Enough about me for now. After going east for about 20 miles, I am able to follow a route south again, and find myself back in the city. This time, it’s a European city, one that you would surely recognize if I were to surrender the name. I detour around my hotel for several minutes, checking all the observation points to make sure that it’s clear. And it is. I park under a tree in front of a vacant Victorian, three streets away from my hotel, and weave my way to the alley behind the hotel kitchen. With no one close, and nobody watching for me, I slide in the kitchen entrance, slip the manager a bill on the way through, and take the service elevator to the floor above my room. And then I listen for a few minutes. Hearing nothing unusual, I find the west stairway, and walk up two flights, and listen again. Nothing. Go to the east stairwell, down to the floor below mine, and pause to listen one more time. Nothing. Back up the stairs, and a pause at the door to my floor for a minute. Then the short walk to my room, and a stop at my door to check for tampering. Into the room. Everything in place, no sounds that worry me. Good. Time for a drink.

I pour a bourbon into a tumbler (it’s a nice hotel) and take a swallow. Very nice stuff. I’m not one of those who commiserate over a drink. When I want one, I get one. It’s neither bad nor good; it’s just a drink. Between me and the bottle, as it were. And if I choose to have a lot of them, no biggie. I’m a spiritual person, but I think God has bigger things to worry about than whether or not I have a drink once in a while.

I remove my nano laptop from its hiding place. I made it look like the floor vent. Even if someone removed the vent to see if anything was hidden in the duct, they’d be holding the computer while they were looking, and then would put it right back into the hiding place. Good recon makes for good hiding places. I checked this hotel out a few days before the job and had a geek in a neighboring Country build the components into a model of the floor vent.

I set the vent/computer onto the charging pad, and pull out my phone. The phone allows me to access to the nano, and the data appears on my screen. All wireless. Most of what I need can be done on my phone anyway, but there are times that I need the additional features the nano gives me. Today is one such time. My phone doesn’t have the capacity to navigate all the cyber challenges necessary to access the bank account, which is fine. It stays safer from stray eyes that way. The deposit is made and pending validation. When you are as reliable as me, the client doesn’t have to wait for a second confirmation of your work. When you tell them it’s done, it’s done. And I get the money without delay. It pays, literally, to have a solid reputation. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that everyone I deal with knows that I could kill them if they fucked me. Not that I would ever do that.

This payment is tentative. Not sure yet if I’ll keep it. I need to know the deal with the other shooter.

I check my super-secret website. Two jobs await my decision. An assassination in Iraq and a sting in the Greek Isles. I like the one in the Greek Isles, mostly because it is one of my favorite places on earth. And it involves an interesting woman. It doesn’t appear that anyone is going to get killed, an upside when you can get it. Usually there are no G-men looking to get you when no one actually dies. I mean, criminals don’t report lost guns or lost drugs or the theft of dirty money. And they don’t like admitting that they got swindled or out-foxed. But bodies lying around tend to draw attention. So I indicate my acceptance through a complicated series of clicks and dropdown menus, close down the computer, and return it to vent status for now. When I leave for Greece, the nano will be destroyed. A bit of a waste, but an expense that I figure into every job.

I settle in to relax and ponder. The drink is good, and my enjoyment of it only mildly reduced because of the thoughts of the other shooter. I may encounter them again, and I want no more surprises. My serenity depends on knowing what’s going to happen. And I am very selfish about my serenity. I have no room for the unknown. I have to find out more. So I slam back the last of the drink and set out.

CHAPTER 2

I

find a little cafe about a two mile walk from the hotel. I haven’t eaten here. I try not to go the same place twice when on a job. The longer jobs sometimes dictate that I hit a place more than once, but I’ll do so at different times and keep the visits as far apart as possible. After a fresh whitefish on a bed of seasoned rice and two martinis—like tits, one’s not enough, three’s too many—I grab a cab and have him take me to the hotel district. I almost never stay in a hotel district, because, well, people from all over tend to be around there, and people from all over could be people that I have run into before. I don’t need that. I like to stay in isolated hotels, or rent-by-month apartments. Or even hostels now and then, when I need to get some local information.

It’s late enough now and the crowds on the street have thinned, so I cruise the parking lots and parking garages for 25 minutes, and sure enough, there is the Jeep. The sticker on the front windshield reveals that it is a rental from the airport. And it’s parked in the valet section of the Hilton. Absolutely no imagination. Could anybody be dumb enough to shoot someone and then drop their car off with a valet? Where’s the weapon? In a hidden compartment in the Jeep? Or did he carry a disassembled sniper rifle up to the room with him in a violin case or something? And is he really that stupid to not only telegraph that he is in the area, but actually give away which hotel he is in? I can’t believe that anybody in this line of work is that clueless. So I keep investigating.

The Marriott across the street has a business center, and I hop on one of the computers. I send a message to another geek I know, and she sends me back a list of the room occupants of the Hilton in about 30 -minutes. My geeks are really good. And this particular one happens to also be a knockout. That’s what us old guys used to call a hot woman back in the day. She hasn’t wasted her advanced degree from Ohio State either. She is a full professor of IT or cyber security or some such discipline there. What a great cover. Hopefully driving that Ferrari won’t draw too much suspicion to her side pursuits.

She has gone to the trouble of annotating by every name whether they are obviously legitimate or not. No wonder it took her 30 minutes. She has a sixth sense about requests like this and in this case, as usual, it takes a lot of the guess work out of my next step. There are only three unknowns in the entire hotel, so I start with them. With some googling and historical searches, I find out that one of the names is likely a lady who is having a little tryst. She is from here, and rents hotel rooms out locally every couple of weeks. One name is mysterious in that there is no history whatsoever. But the third, well, that is probably my guy. Even though I suspect the name is a fraud, he seems to have used it before. That means he has a fake passport or some other fake ID that carries this fake name. He has travelled from Kuwait under the name at least twice in the past four months, and stayed in hotels in the same cities as my target here did, in the same general time frames as the target. A little more surfing and Viola!, the fake passport. The picture could very easily be the guy that I saw in the Jeep. The hat and glasses don’t help, but there is something about seeing a guy and then seeing him again. And this seemed like him. I shop the picture around a number of sites and come up with a match. While the name is fairly common in Kuwait, the address tells it all. Remember the Sheik? This guy is one of the granddaughter’s uncles, which I know from my preparatory research. He spent time in the Kuwaiti Military. Likely had the skills to pull off that shot, but not a pro. Shit. I can’t keep the entire fee. So out of what little honor remains of my character, I will return half of the fee. Keep enough to cover my expenses and a little pocket change. But I cannot begrudge a family member the taste of revenge. They deserve it. The Sheik, while richer than God, shouldn’t be paying in full for a service that his son gave for free. Mystery solved and overall I feel rather good about it. Scumbag gets to go to the devil and be told Oh, BTW, the uncle did you in and laughed about it all the way home. Now strip down and jump in that fire over there. And I get $1.5 mil. Just another day at the office.

CHAPTER 3

I

decide to take the long way to Greece, since I have plenty of time. Flying gets me on cameras and burns passports. Driving and busses and trains and hopping boats can be almost anonymous when used correctly. So I drive the pickup to the eastern European border, ditch it, and get a train ticket to Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The truck won’t cause any problems. If anyone checked it out when it was found, the farthest they would get would be a birth certificate and headstone of a dude that lived and died in Montreal. I score a private cabin on the train and catch up on my sleep. You never know when you’ll have to stay awake for 48 hours, so catching 8 straight hours of sleep is always welcome. From Plovdiv I take a bus down to Petrich—that was the easy part. I had decided it best to forge a walking path across the border into Greece. Petrich is on the eastern edge of the Belasica Mountains, and the terrain is no picnic. So even though Fort Roupel, Greece was close—only about 25 klicks—the walk would be difficult since I would need to divert off the roads the last two or three miles in Bulgaria and the first couple in Greece. Fort Roupel would have a bus to the coast of the Aegean Sea—more specifically, Thessaloniki. So I get off the bus in Petrich, and stop at a local mehane—fancy Bulgarian word for a bar—to have a meal and a Carlsberg. I have the meshana skara, which is basically just a lot of Bulgarian meat. Refueled, I start the