Jackal: Barrett Mason Book 3 Read online

  Jackal

  Barrett Mason Thriller, Volume 3

  Stewart Matthews

  Published by Stewart Matthews, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  JACKAL

  First edition. January 20, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Stewart Matthews.

  Written by Stewart Matthews.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Stewart Matthews' Newsletter

  Other Works

  Chapter 1

  IT WAS A NICE BANQUET. But even the fanciest parties lose their charm when a bullet rips through the President’s head.

  From his vantage point near the painted western wall of The Peoples’ Great Hall of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Colonel Nestor Milares watched the whole thing play out.

  Behind a table turned up on its side, Colonel Milares knelt in a covered firing position, his right hand holding his Glock 17, his palms sweating.

  He almost didn’t believe it would happen like this. One moment, he sat next to General Barrios at a large, round table covered in a royal blue tablecloth, listening to a politician from the Constituent Assembly—an energetic old man with a shock of wild, white hair named Marco Erazo—passionately speak about the heroics of the common man, and how Venezuela’s legitimate government must stay in line with President Toro. How their only chance to hold against the Capitalist Class as they ripped Venezuela to shreds was to stay unified.

  Before Erazo finished his speech, the Capitalists made their rebuttal.

  An ear-splitting bang reverberated through the back of the hall. Colonel Milares and the other military men sitting at his table knew what it was. A shaped charge. Someone breached the doors at the southern end of the Great Hall.

  Smoke leaped into the room. Cordite smothered the fragrance of the banquet’s gourmet dinner—lemon and leek roasted Cornish game hen.

  Milares hit the floor. The table turned over, and the sound of AK fire hammered through the Great Hall. The Capitalist militants streamed in. Milares couldn’t count how many. More than enough to get the job done, that was damn sure.

  President Toro, now somewhere on the floor near the center of the room, was hiding in a bunker of human flesh, body armor, and high-powered small arms. The president seemed well insulated by his bodyguards.

  But nobody expected one of the President’s men to coolly draw his weapon, press it to the back of President Toro’s skull, and fire.

  Even Milares was in disbelief as he watched the President’s rotund, sweaty body tense up, fall forward, and go slack. How could it all happen that quickly?

  And Milares helped General Barrios plan the entire thing.

  Venezuela was now free of President Fernando Toro. His nepotism, his back-dealing, his government stuffed with cronies skimming off the top of everything from trades on oil futures to trades at the farmers’ markets.

  Tonight, men, women and children across Venezuela would still go hungry. The sick would still lack the medication they couldn’t afford. Venezuela’s elders would still die in droves. But now, at least, there was an end in sight.

  “There it is, Nestor!” General Barrios said into Colonel Milares’ ear. “History unfolding before our eyes. Now, let’s make sure we’re the ones left to write the book, yes?”

  Barrios stood up. He drew his sidearm—an old Browning Hi-Power ceremoniously given to him by President Toro five years ago, at the conclusion of a bloody campaign of jungle fighting against capitalist militias. He rested the bottom of his palm on the edge of the table, steadying his aim. The assassin was twenty yards off struggling for control of his weapon against another of the President’s bodyguards.

  Most men wouldn’t risk a shot now, but General Barrios never shied from calculated risks.

  He fired. His bullet lodged into the assassin’s back. Dead center. And the man flopped forward in an instant, his arms and legs loose. The bullet must have severed his spinal cord, the poor bastard.

  But at least he suffered to save Venezuela.

  Chapter 2

  I DUCKED LEFT. THE sticky vinyl on my opponent’s boxing glove grazed the top of my close-cut hair. A pretty damn quick right hook.

  All the holed-up losers around me hooted with excitement as I slipped the punch.

  “Let’s go, Mason!” somebody shouted.

  Sweat dribbled off my brow as I bent at the waist, avoiding a left jab, and then sprung upright again.

  “I got two packs of cigs on you!”

  Three rounds into the match and my chest worked to pump the salty, stale, recirculated air of the United States Disciplinary Barracks into my body. But I wasn’t uncomfortable yet. Not like the other guy was. I always out-worked whatever sucker they threw in here with me.

  Part of me wished I at least knew the guy’s name. Felt bad, housing some chump, and not knowing his name.

  Most I knew was my opponent shot his Company CO while he was sleeping. He was two months into a twenty-year stay in Pod C—the cell block across the prison from mine. Being as we were from different pods, I never met him in the yard, never saw him at chow, never even passed him during 6 AM PT runs.

  On paper, the kid was a match for me. He and I were both every inch of six and a half feet. But I found out by the end of the first round that his reach was a couple inches shorter than mine. And my best guess was he clocked in at 230 pounds—about twenty less than me.

  Otherwise, we were both white guys, dark brown hair, though mine had a few specks of gray. And I had a better tan than him, with all the time I spent in the yard. His eyes brown, mine blue. More scars on my face.

  So, like I said, we were practically the same on paper. But I had reach and weight on him. Conditioning too.

  Wasn’t his fault. The MPs had to sift pretty deeply through gen-pop to find somebody to match my build, and apparently, they had to dig through a lot of dirt, else they wouldn’t have settled on somebody so new. Especially after I’d whupped the last three, more experienced, fighters they’d paired against me.

  Then again, weight class didn’t matter much. The Kansas State Board of Athletics didn’t care what a bunch of bored, court-martialed servicemen did to pass their time at Leavenworth. Or that they knew.

  “Stay loose, Barrett!” my trainer yelled at me. He was a salty, old Marine everybody called Gunny Junior. He had a voice like Popeye. Sounding like that, Gunny Junior was damned to be either a fisherman, a Marine or a boxing coach. Guess he made two out of three.

  My opponent threw a jab. Would’ve popped my nose open, but that shorter reach of his gave me a window to back-step. Then another jab came at me, and I backed off again. A third jab pushed me into the wall of convicts hemming me and my oppo
nent into our “ring.”

  Somebody shoved me forward, and a boxing glove crunched into the end of my nose.

  I felt his knuckles hiding under his glove like a concrete bulb. The hit made my eyes water. My nose went hot, then tingled as I reared back and caught my footing.

  “Nice hit, hoss!” I said to him.

  He smiled at me, his thick red lips revealing two missing teeth.

  Then he got cocky. Maybe he thought I was letting my guard down, or I was soft because I complimented his jab, but he took a big step toward me, swinging.

  So I side-stepped. Let him almost pass me by, and I clocked him with a sharp right, square into his ribs. The bones tried to hold strong, but my knuckles had been hardened by a lifetime of dealing with the consequences of being a hard-headed pain in the ass.

  One of his ribs crunched.

  Getting too far into your opponent is a mistake a lot of green boxers make—or so Gunny Junior told me.

  I almost felt bad for the other guy. He yelped instantly, and dropped to a knee, holding his left elbow against his snapped rib. He grunted like a bull with a broken leg.

  The MP who refereed most the matches stepped up from behind me and started the count.

  “One! Two! Three...”

  The other fella wasn’t getting up. Not after a hit like that. Not if he had half a brain in his head. On the outside, a broken rib isn’t a huge deal. But here, in Leavenworth, the medical staff isn’t exactly the cream of the crop. Take all the “shake it off and keep moving, maggot!” of the US Armed Forces and combine it with the “you’re not fit to live in society, maggot!” of the US prison system, and you’re looking at health care worth less than a full spittoon.

  I wouldn’t want to break a rib here. And I if I did, I’d sure as hell wouldn’t push my luck.

  Too bad for me, I was thinking like Barrett Mason, the insubordinate ex-spy with a family on the outside and a reason to keep breathing. A guy who murdered his CO and would be stuck in Leavenworth for a long, long time carried a different mentality.

  “Eight!” The MP screamed.

  I held my arms up. Looked away from my opponent. Premature celebration. Stupid on my part.

  My opponent didn’t like me showboating, I guess. Next I knew, I lost my breath, and felt like I’d caught a cannonball with my gut. Everybody watching the match hollered out in unison.

  I doubled over and saw a second boxing glove come swinging upward at my eyes.

  But I lifted my glove up at the last second. Wasn’t enough to stop the blow, but I softened it a little.

  I was able to straighten up just in time to see the other guy lumbering to his feet.

  No way in hell was he getting a chance to square up with me again. I whipped the top of my foot into the back of his knee. Something made a popping noise, and he fell on his side against the concrete floor, holding his leg and howling.

  That was the last clear look at him I had. When I lifted my eyes, I saw a wave of guys in Pod C’s mint-green jumpsuits rushing toward me. Must’ve been a hundred of them. Guess they didn’t like me repaying a cheap shot in kind.

  I wasn’t stupid, so I turned and ran for a splotch of tan jumpsuits—my guys from Pod A. I wasn’t the most popular inmate in my Pod, but I was one of them, at least. And that’s all the excuse they needed to run past me and clash with the fellas from Pod C.

  Within seconds, I was scrambling out of an impending riot. The MPs’ whistles chirped. I heard tasers and stun guns chattering like rattlesnake tails. Men screaming, men shouting, and men laughing.

  In my time here, I found out pretty quickly that a lot of guys look at riots like a sport. They train for it. Think about it. Strategize. Hell, if they could get to the security cams, I bet they’d do video sessions like an NFL quarterback dissecting opposing defenses before a game.

  In short: plenty of guys here are spoiling for a good fight. And as it’s going down, guys count up all the skulls they crack and arms they break. After the MPs crack a few skulls of their own and everybody’s had enough, I’ve seen guys trawling the floors, picking up knocked-out teeth to keep for souvenirs.

  “Barrett, get your ass over here!” Gunny Junior yelled. No sound could cover up his voice. He could’ve talked over an artillery barrage.

  Gunny Junior glared at me from the nearest wall. He and all the other old men who’d lost the joy in a good riot tended to either get out of the room or stay near the perimeter when these things happened.

  “Yeah?”

  He slapped the back of my head.

  “Don’t ‘yeah’ me like you don’t know what you did!” He motioned toward the center of the room, where the fighting was at its most furious.

  “Hell, Gunny,” I said, “They’re always trying to start something. I didn’t ask anybody to—”

  His palm smacked the back of my head again.

  “I’m not talking about the riot! I told you to keep your feet moving until you’re out of the ring! What were you doing standing flat-footed? You practically begged to have that son-of-a-bitch uppercut you in the jewels.”

  What could I say? I nodded. Gunny wasn’t the kind of guy to get bent up over a little riot. The man had a focus like a starving coyote catching the scent of a hen house.

  He started pulling my gloves off. Gunny’s hands were always busy. If he wasn’t taping hands or peeling off boxing gloves, he was popping his knuckles or twiddling his thumbs or flicking a coin around.

  The riot horns began howling. In minutes, this normally empty basement under the Leavenworth kitchen would be swarmed by every spare MP from here to Camp Lejeune.

  “A man your age has gotta be more careful,” Gunny said as he pulled off a glove, then tucked it under his arm. “Or you’re gonna get your jaw twisted around your haircut one of these days.”

  “I’m thirty-nine,” I said as a Pod A inmate crashed into the cinderblock to the left of Gunny, and dropped to the floor.

  “That’s one year shy of retiring age,” Gunny said. “If you want to live to see it, you keep your feet moving.”

  “Retiring age for what?”

  “If you’re dumb enough to step into a boxing ring at 40, you’ll figure it out pretty damn quick,” Gunny said. Then his big bug eyes looked over my shoulder.

  I turned to see what grabbed him.

  A cadre of MPs hustled down the steel staircase from the kitchen, their dark helmets bobbing like beetles in an earthquake. They spilled into half-dozen or so of the ballsier inmates waiting at the bottom of the steps. The MP’s clubs came out, and more stun guns crackled like tiny thunderstorms. The inmates didn’t stand much of a chance. They started falling before the column of MPs like barbarians crushed under a Roman Phalanx. The MPs pushed into the room and turned right—away from the heart of the riot.

  Toward me.

  “What the hell did you do?” Gunny Junior whacked my ear with one of my own boxing gloves. “I told you to keep your nose clean, dammit!”

  “My nose is clean,” I said, turning back to him. “Aside from the fights.”

  “You ain’t screwing around with drugs?”

  “No.” I set my eyes back to the MPs, who were two or three men away from me. I saw the MP at the tip of the column—a short black guy with squinty eyes and a mouth always turned down in a scowl. Staff Sergeant Fulton. I’d learned to keep away from him when I saw him shatter another inmate’s skull during my first week in Leavenworth. I came to find out the inmate hadn’t made his bed properly. Four months had passed since then, and I’m relieved to say Fulton and I never had a run-in.

  Until now.

  “Mason,” he shouted over the sirens. “Present!”

  He wanted me to stick out my arms. They were going to cuff me. I wasn’t too comfortable about being cuffed so close to a riot, especially if Fulton was the guy doing it. I’m sure being near all these “infractions” (what he liked to call bad behavior) had him itching to break some arms. I could practically see his eyes twitching. I don’t know how the
other guards ever kept him away from our little basement boxing league.

  “Present, inmate! Final request!”

  Gunny Junior nudged me in the back. I guess it was handcuffs with a chance at the infirmary or the infirmary for sure.

  I stuck out my arms. Fulton slapped the cuffs over my wrists with supernatural speed.

  He and four other MPs walked me back to the stairs, clubbing faces and roasting inmates with tasers all the while. As soon as they had me at the top of the stairs, Fulton turned around and charged back down the steps, into the melee.

  The other MPs dragged me through the door and into the kitchen. We moved past big silvery fridges and stoves scrubbed so clean the Pope could kiss them.

  “Am I going to solitary?” I asked. I figured Fulton had gotten fed up with the boxing league, and decided to finally do something about it.

  “Commandant wants you,” an MP answered.

  Chapter 3

  THE MPS LED ME BY THE chains around my wrists. Through the mess hall and down a corridor. They guided me past two security checkpoints, blocked by steel doors and more MPs squeezing the stocks of shotguns. Bet any one of them would’ve loved to blow my head off.

  But, considering the riot being put down a hundred paces behind us, I felt like I was going on a leisurely walk.

  Eventually, we crossed into the front of the building. The presentable part. The part wives and girlfriends and politicians saw. It was light and airy like a cheap rental office building. A little cold, for my tastes. And I missed the stomach-turning prison smell of old beef and chlorine. The tiled and wallpapered rooms up here didn’t smell like anything at all. Guess I’d gotten used to living like an all-but-forgotten animal, left in a pen.

  We continued our march across the processing office—past a white wall marked in inches with a camera pointed at it—and into the administrative wing.

  From behind a big walnut desk, the Commandant’s secretary (the only civilian employee in Leavenworth) eyed me. With her graying up-do, the silver chain hanging from either arm of her thick-rimmed glasses, and her lips constantly puckered like her teeth were made of sour lemons, she looked more like somebody’s caricature of a secretary than an actual secretary. Like she belonged in the funnies of a 1960s newspaper.