Undercover War: Black OPS: Black OPS, #1

By Michael Kasner and Florent Vilbert

From Action/Adventure novelist Michael Kasner comes a covert military thriller series! Formed by an elite cadre of government officials, the five member Black OPS team goes where the law can't - to seek retribution for acts of terror directed against Americans anywhere in the world.

UNDERCOVER WAR: BLACK OPS - BOOK #1: AMERICA CAUGHT IN A CARIBBEAN UPRISING! The strident call to action comes from Cuba as an unprecedented wave of violence against Americans that Castro's inheritors can't-or won't- control. When the U.S. offers of military support are turned down, the Black OPS force is dispatched on a clandestine down and dirty mission.

In the tradition of Don Pendleton's Executioner Mack Bolan and Warren Murphy's Destroyer classic paperback book series!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caliber Books
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215168851

Book preview

Chapter One

Karadera, Cuba

December 5, 1999

The winter equinox of the last year of the twentieth century was swiftly approaching. But one couldn’t tell it by looking at the blazing sun high in the china-blue sky over the sparking waters of the Caribbean. The man and woman walking along the beach in front of the Sol Oro Hotel basked in its warmth, she more than he. The fire-engine-red, minuscule Cuban Tanguita bikini she wore contrasted vividly with her lawless golden skin and the silky, night-black hair swinging freely down her back.

As was the case with most Orientals, it was difficult to tell this woman’s age. Her small but full breasts and sleek hips proudly proclaimed that she was of legal age regardless of her petite stature. The subtle way she strolled across the white sand told every man in sight that she was fully aware of the effect the minimalist bikini was having on them. Her face, however, was that of a guileless teenager, totally innocent of the havoc her barely covered charms were causing to every male in the vicinity.

Among the sunbathers on the bench, there was no shortage of stunningly beautiful, nearly naked women, but even these other women took note when this petite Oriental beauty walked past.

The man who walked beside her was also drawing his own fair share of attention from the other sun worshipers. Though he was a fraction of an inch shorter than six feet, he looked like a giant beside the woman’s delicate frame. His perfectly proportioned male body, deep blue eyes and fashionably long blond hair made a vivid contrast to her black and gold Oriental features.

Though most of his forty years showed on his face, the man’s body didn’t have an ounce of fat on it and he was conditioned in a way that didn’t come from a Soloflex machine. Though he kept his stride short so as to not run away from his companion, his movements were those of a confident outdoor athlete. And, since he was a world class mountain climber and skier, this was to be expected.

Have we done enough trolling yet, Mel? he asked the woman.

Melissa Bao looked up at her companion and smiled teasingly. What’s the matter, Alex, is the scenery getting to you? I thought you liked walking on the beach with pretty girls in string bikinis.

Alexander Sendak grinned sheepishly and almost blushed as he glanced down at the expanse of tempting flesh beside him. As long as he had worked with Mel Bao, he had never gotten to the point where her stunning beauty did not affect him. And it wasn’t because he had been taken in by the pubic facade she put on. He had seen Mel in conditions and circumstances that most men had never seen a woman, not even their wives.

He had seen her covered in sweat and blood. He had seen her kill with her bare hands. He had seen her hit and wounded, but continuing to fight. He had seen her dangling from a rappelling rope firing an H&K sub-machine gun with her free hand. But, once the action was over and she had showered and changed, he always had a hard time imagining her ever doing anything that wasn’t the epitome of femininity and grace.

Of all the women he had ever known, this was the one who shattered all of his notions of femininity. But, as well as he had thought he knew her, this unabashed exhibitionism she had unleashed was a side of her personality he had not seen before.

Sendak glanced around the beach. You’re supposed to be on the job, damn it, not making a public spectacle out of yourself.

Bao tossed her head, swishing the thick black mane of hair across her back. I’m on the job, she said. But there’s nothing in the team SOP that says I can’t enjoy myself while I’m doing it, is there?

Sendak shook his head in mock despair and carefully scanned the area around them again. Along with the sunbathers, the windsurfers and jet-ski riders challenging the waves and the paragliders in the sky looked the same as those at any tropical resort. But, there were far fewer people enjoying the sun than one would have expected at this time of year, the height of the tourist season. In fact, the broad expanse of brilliant white sand and crystal-clear water was comparatively deserted for a major resort area.

Situated a two-hour drive east of Havana on Cuba’s northern coast, Varadero was the main hope for the island’s new democratic government. In 1999, Fidel Castro had been dead for two years, fallen before an assassin’s blade wielded by one of his mistresses. In the turmoil following his sudden demise, the long-suffering Cubans finally revolted against the harsh socialist society he had imposed upon them for so long. They over-threw the remnants of the old Communist regime led by Fidel’s brother Raul and invited the Miami Cuban exiles back home to form a new democratic government.

The Miami exiles had spent the long Castro years amassing capital in the United States, and many of them had become quite wealthy. So, along with their ideals of democratic government, they also brought badly needed business know-how and capitalist seed money to revitalize the island’s shattered economy. They were turning Cuba into the newest Caribbean vacation resort paradise as fast as they could. And they were concentrating much of their capitalistic efforts on the world- class beaches at Varadero.

In the later Castro years, the Communists had started building the resort hotels, but with the austerity of Communist Cuba, the resort’s services had not been able to compete with the other Caribbean sun spots. And without the almighty American tourist dollars coming in, the venture had not been successful. Once the returned exiles took over, they poured millions into bringing the hotels up to Western standards, building additional bars, restaurants and discos. When they were done, the new Varadero facilities rivaled any of the more famous Caribbean resorts. All the place needed now to be a complete success was more people to frolic in the sun and surf.

A hint as to why there were so few tourists could be seen at each end of the beach, where armored vehicles and hard-eyed police manned sandbagged checkpoints along the highway fronting the beach. They tried to be as inconspicuous as they could, but it was hard to hide ten tons of olive-drab-and-tan camouflaged armored steel with a 7.62mm minigun and a 40mm grenade launcher in the turret.

As jarring as the armored vehicles were, however, the few sun worshipers there welcomed their presence. Just three days before, a terrorist had thrown a grenade into a crowded beachside cantina. Two tourists had been killed in the blast and several more had been wounded. Every few days, another incident brought home the point that even though the government was bringing prosperity formerly unheard of to the battered Cuban economy, not all of the Cuban people were happy about the new regime.

After a booming grand opening of the new tourist resorts, the exiles’ economic recovery plan was not going well. For the past two months, random acts of terrorist violence had stalked the resorts and threatened to destroy the Cuban democratic experiment before it even got off the ground.

The Cuban government was doing everything in its power to guard against these incidents, but its efforts were only marginally successful. As was almost always the case, it had proved impossible to defensively combat the terrorists. As the Israelis’ experience with the Palestinians had shown the world, to be successful against terrorists, you had to go on the offensive against them. The question for the Cubans was, who were they to go on the offensive against?

The obvious culprits were the Castroities who had lost their positions of power and the old hardline Communists. The American Mafia was also dissatisfied with the new regime. In the old, pre-Castro days, they had made untold millions from the wide-open clubs and gambling casinos on the island, but the new government had prevented the crime Families from coming back to their old haunts. It intended to build the economy on tourism and didn’t see any reason to send badly needed money to feed the already overflowing coffers of the American Mob.

Because of the Latin temperament of the Cuban people, and of the new government as well, the exiles had been reluctant to call upon the United States to aid them in this crisis. They feared that asking for help would give their powerful northern neighbor too much say in how they ran their own country. Their pride dictated that they go this one alone, but they were not handling the crisis well.

When more Americans were killed and injured and the Cubans seemed powerless to stop the terrorists, a small clandestine American team had been activated and sent to Cuba. Their mission was to locate and eliminate whoever was behind this wave of terror. And the mission had to be accomplished without involving the United States government in any way.

Sendak looked off toward the armored vehicle. Definitely not the right kind of ambience, he thought. It was a marvel there were people on the beach at all. He and Mel Bao were doing their job, so it was different for them.

Just then Mel broke into his reverie. What time it? she asked, looking up at her companion.

Sendak glanced down at his watch. Quarter to one.

That’s probably enough for today, she said. I don’t want to overdo it.

Overdo what? he growled. The suntan or the tourists’ eyestrain?

She smiled impishly and thrust out her barely covered breasts. What do you think?

IN WASHINTON, D.C., there was no doubt that winter was upon the land. The sun did not show itself through the leaden clouds and a thin covering of dirty snow lay over the city. In a small office on the second door of the outer ring of the Pentagon, the man behind the desk didn’t know, or even really care, what the weather was like outside.

Winston Steadman was forty-four years old. His dull- brown hair, slight build and conservative attire did little to distinguish him from any of the thousands of faceless bureaucrats who populated the nation’s capital. He was easily lost in any crowd, even when he was walking by himself. But then, he liked being the man that no one ever saw, and even if they did see him, they immediately forgot that they had. It made his job considerably easier.

In the Pentagon telephone book, Steadman, W.T. was listed as a midlevel functionary in the Defense Procurement Agency. It was a secure job and, with a GS-14 rating, he had a nice pension coming to him when he finally hung up his briefcase, his department-store suits and the Department of Defense supply requisition forms. At least, that was what it said in the Pentagon phone book.

But there was more to Winston Steadman than his GS-14 rank and his small second-floor Defense Procurement Agency office indicated.

What wasn’t included in his lengthy federal job description was the fact that Steadman was more than merely another paper-pushing, faceless Pentagon bureaucrat. When he wasn’t ensuring that the shrinking Defense budget dollars were being spent wisely, he was making life a little safer for Americans throughout the world. He accomplished this by the expedient of seeing to it that the terrorists who preyed upon Americans were preyed upon themselves.

There was an increased need for this. The last half of the 1990s had seen a violent resurgence of international terrorism. In the fierce ethnic fighting that followed the breakup of the old European Communist bloc, terrorism had again become the chosen tactic for small groups of people trying to institute change in their favor. And, as in the severities and eighties, Americans again were terrorists’ target of choice. With the greater American business presence on the world stage, and with the United States the sole superpower in the world, its citizens had become even more vulnerable to this brutal violence.

The liberalism that had swept through American politics following Clinton’s election in 1992 made battling this new wave of terrorism even more of a problem. While the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six were the nation’s premier counterterrorist agencies, they were held under tighter political control than had been the case in the eighties.

Aside from the fact that political gridlock made the effective use of military counterterrorist forces almost impossible, it required a crisis of major proportions before Delta Force or the SEALs could be sent into action.

Admittedly, not all terrorist actions in the late nineties were major events. Most were small, isolated incidents that did not seriously threaten the security of the United States. All they did was kill or maim American citizens and, in a political age where any use of American power was suspect, most of these acts against individuals escaped punishment.

There was, however, a small group of like-minded men from the major American government agencies—the State Department, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, FBI and CIA—who felt that a threat to an American citizen anywhere on the globe was a threat to the entire nation and that not responding to each and every terrorist incident sent terrorists the wrong message.

To ensure that an adequate response was given to every act of terrorism, no matter how small, these men had joined together to create a clandestine action agency completely outside of the official United States government. A small group of people in deep cover known as the CAT Team, Clandestine Anti-Terrorist Team, was recruited and trained.

Whenever a terrorist attack on Americans was not addressed at the national level, it would not go unanswered. Those who were responsible would be swiftly punished, the CAT Team would see to that. That was why they had been sent to the tropics in the middle of the winter.

The situation in Cuba had gotten out of control and several Americans had died in the terrorist attacks at the new resorts. Help to track down these terrorists had been offered, but the new Cuba government had turned the offer down cold. And, when they did, Congress prevented the President from taking unilateral action. But if a gridlocked United States government would not act to avenge the deaths of American citizens, the CAT Team would.

Chapter Two

Washington, D C,

December 5

Winston Steadman’s job as a faceless functionary in the Defense Department was the perfect cover for the man who ran a counterterrorism team that didn’t exist in anyone’s phone book. He was the CAT Team’s operations officer and he controlled their missions.

His Defense Procurement Agency job also allowed him to supply the team with the latest in high-tech weapons and equipment for their missions directly from military stocks, no questions asked. His associates in the FBI and CIA ensured that the CAT Team had the most complete intelligence information that the nation could provide. Lastly, Steadman was responsible for the team’s finances, both the operational mission expenses and those necessary for them to lead their civilian lives when they were not on operation.

All of this was done from a single office and Steadman didn’t even have a secretary to help him. But then, he didn’t need a secretary. He had the greatest computer network in the world to work with, and the computer would never ask questions about what it had been told to do. The same could not be said for a human secretary.

The situation in Cuba was made-to-order for a CAT Team operation. They had been sent to the island three days ago. Now that they were in place, things should start happening soon. Things always happened when the CAT Team showed up.

Steadman called up the dossiers of the five members on his computer screen and reviewed them one more time.

Judson Rykoff, the team’s leader, was a Special Forces veteran of the ’91 Gulf War where he had operated behind Iraqi lines for a month before General Norman Schwarzkopf kicked off the ground-war armored sweep. Then, a year after the war ended, Jud Rykoff had suddenly resigned his Army commission. Not even Steadman knew why he had left the service. He had also never said why he willingly got back into the counterterrorism business when he was contacted and asked to form the team. Though independently wealthy, Rykoff ran a rare book shop in Huntsville, Alabama and, in his spare time, wrote paperback thrillers under a pseudonym.

The team’s second in command was Alexander Sendak. Alex had been an NCO with the Army’s Delta Force during the Gulf War, and after the war, had taken an active role in several classified counterterrorist operations, including one where he took out some high-ranking Hezbollah officer while on loan to the Israeli Mossad. Two years later, Sendak had been medically retired after being injured in a training accident and established a mountaineering guide service in the Colorado Rockies.

Jacob MacLeod—Jake, for short—was an African- American ex-Navy SEAL, a Latin American drug wars veteran and an electronic wizard on the side. An imposing figure of a man, he set up a scuba diving school and Gulf deep-sea service out of Corpus Christi, Texas.

Erik Estevez was an Army-trained gunship pilot who had transferred to the DEA to fight the Latin American drug wars. But when he returned to the frustration of stateside DEA work, he quit to run a charter flight service in Tucson, Arizona.

Melissa Bao was a twenty-eight-year-old Nung Chinese American, a veteran of the Seattle Police Department Narcotics Division undercover unit, and was the team’s linguist, photographer and edged-weapons expert. When not hired out as a freelance photographer, she operated a photo shop and developing service in Greater Seattle, Washington.

Normally, five people would seem a small team to undertake such critical assignments. But the team’s small size had been determined by the need for absolute security, and their capabilities in the field were far greater than their number alone would indicate. Each of them brought a particular deadly skill set to the team.

Steadman blanked the computer monitor and stared at the vintage print of the famous Budweiser Custer’s Last Stand painting that was the sole decoration on his walls. The print was a gift from Jud Rykoff and was a private joke between the two men. Rykoff and his team were Custer and his cavalrymen, while the fierce band of Indians circling them represented the terrorists they fought against. All too many times, the painting unfortunately reflected the grim reality of CAT Team operations.

Jud Rykoff was the only one of the team Steadman had ever met, and that had only been once, at the very beginning. Since then, his only contact with him had been electronically via the computer’s modem. As a fairly lower-ranking government official, Steadman was tied to a nine-to-five desk job that didn’t allow him to go on long jaunts for spy-movie secret meetings at a moment’s notice. But that was one of the strengths of the CAT Team. Since they only got together on mission, their deep cover would never be compromised by someone being seen someplace where they shouldn’t be.

Their greatest strength, however, was that they didn’t exist anywhere on paper. Since the team drew no government funds, not even the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Operations could uncover them. Further, the team members all had legitimate civilian jobs that could stand up to any scrutiny. Not even the IRS could find any trace of government funding in their lives.

Thanks to Steadman’s financial planning, their civilian jobs prospered. It had been relatively easy to arrange for each one of them to buy the winning lottery ticket and even easier to that the prize money had been invested well. Also, a few well-placed words in the right circles saw that their businesses were well patronized. As a result, they all had enough money that they could afford to travel whenever they wanted to, no questions asked. On this mission, everyone was covered with a reason to be in Cuba that would stand up under even the closest scrutiny.

Mel Bao was there on a legitimate assignment to photograph the new resorts for a national travel magazine, and the photos would be published. Since his mountaineering school was closed down for the winter, Alex Sendak had gone with her posing as her sometime lover and traveling companion. Jud Rykoff had landed a temporary job in Havana tied in to his bookstore business. Jake MacLeod was on vacation in his persona as an outlaw biker. Only Erik Estevez was in Cuba under the table. But because of his charter flight service, anyone checking up on him would find that he was on a month-long charter somewhere in the Caribbean.

The CAT Team had been in Cuba for two days now, but so far, Rykoff had not reported back to Washington. All that meant was that he had nothing to report. Steadman knew Rykoff would get to him when he had something to say, but it was hard to wait, not knowing what was going on.

On some CAT Team missions, Steadman kept track of the team’s activities through reports from the FBI or the CIA. This time, however, because of the deep Cuban involvement with the CIA, he didn’t dare risk it. There were too many Cuban agents with ties to both the new and the old regime. All it would take would be for one Cuban CIA agent to notice that the Company was keeping too close an eye on what was happening in Havana to blow the team’s cover.

This time, Steadman would just have to sit in his small office and wait for the modem to ring. It was at times like this that he envied M in the old James Bond series. The fictional head of the British Secret Service had had all the help and support he could possibly use to keep track of his agents in the field. Winston Steadman didn’t even have a Miss Moneypenny.

THE BLACK MAN sitting at the outside table in front of the Sol Oro Hotel at Varadero was a six-foot-four giant, and at age thirty-four, a giant in his prime. His broad shoulders threatened to burst his Hawaiian shirt and his thigh muscles strained against the legs of the white cotton cutoffs he wore. His shaved head and the gold chains around his neck only added to his look of being a man you didn’t want to have pissed off at you.

Jake MacLeod wasn’t only show, he was every bit as tough as he looked. He had honed his act as a SEAL in the Navy and, even though he had hung up his fins, he was still SEAL tough. For amusement he rode a Harley chopper with a south Texas biker gang. Right now, though, he was bored. Sitting around soaking up the sun was not his favorite thing.

Sendak and Bao slid into two of the empty chairs at MacLeod’s table. The waiter hurried over to them and took their drink orders—a fresh-squeezed pineapple juice for Sendak and a Campari with a lime twist for Bao.

Where’s the major? Sendak asked when the waiter had moved out of earshot.

MacLeod shrugged. Beats the shit outta me, man. I haven’t seen him since last night.

The three of them had gone into Havana the night before to take in a show at one of the clubs and to recon the city. Their leader, Jud Rykoff, had met them there and the four had done the town properly.

What was that dance he was doing? Mel asked.

The mambo?

MacLeod shrugged. Mambo, samba, tango, they all look and sound the same to me.

I didn’t know he could dance like that.

Sendak laughed. He can do a lot of shit he doesn’t let on. You should see him shooting craps, he’s a demon with a pair of dice. He changed the subject. Has Erik checked in yet?

The fifth member of their team was working solo on this mission, trying to infiltrate the Castroite organization known to be hiding up in the hills. In many ways, Estevez was ideal for the assignment. He had a Latin fiery temperament and a Teutonic attention to detail, thanks to his parents’ contribution to his genes. And he was addicted to adrenaline highs, which