Brannigan studied him. “You said, ‘looked a lot like the FBI,’” he noted.
Van Zandt nodded grimly. “None of my connections are saying that it actually was. It wasn’t local SWAT. It wasn’t County SWAT. And HRT was nowhere near the place.”
Brannigan shook his head as he looked down at his beer. “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.”
“No, we shouldn’t,” Van Zandt agreed. “This is going to be a long, uphill fight, John. These people have resources we can only dream of.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brannigan said, finishing off the beer in one long pull. “I’m still gonna bury them.”
***
The man who walked into the conference room didn’t look like he’d been one of the top performers in the German KSK. He was hardly the Aryan poster-boy that the name of the unit conjured up in some minds. He was short and slightly built, with longish brown hair and a brown beard that somehow made him look more like a professor than a soldier.
He came to a halt at the end of the conference table and clasped his hands behind his back. “An interesting week,” he observed.
“Indeed,” the portly, gray-haired man at the far end of the table observed. “Two operations gone bad within days of each other.”
“Neither one well thought-out,” the German said.
“Agreed, in part,” the hatchet-faced, gray-haired woman said. “Flint was always a loose cannon. He never should have gotten approval for his little adventure in the first place.”
“Flint should never have had a team,” the German said. “You should have let me kill him years ago. He was a liability. A mad dog, not a soldier.”
“Even mad dogs can have their uses,” the hoary ancient sitting across from the hatchet-faced older woman said.
“But was he really that useful in this case?” the German asked. “Performing a kidnap operation on American soil? Hardly circumspect.”
“It hardly matters,” the middle-aged blond woman said. “He has paid for his mistake. The situation in Africa, however, is of far greater concern.”
“No,” the ancient said. “It was of concern. Frankly, that program needed to be shut down after the Tourmaline-Delta incident. I was never in favor of it in the first place. The change we need will come through control, not playing around with dangerous microorganisms. There were simply too many ways it could go wrong, even if the program was never discovered.”
“Doctor Nabors is sure that they would have hit upon the correct genetic sequence before long,” the blond said.
“Then he is a fool,” the old man replied. “Viruses aren’t computer programs. Better that this happened, before his hubris really blew up in our faces.” He turned to the German.
“With Flint dead, you are taking over his paramilitary command duties,” he said. “I trust that you will do a better job than he did.”
The German smiled, the expression almost hidden by his beard. “Trust me, Mein Herr,” he said. “I will.”
Look for more hard-hitting action soon, in:
BRANNIGAN’S BLACKHEARTS #7
KILL OR CAPTURE
The Mask is Off.
The Humanity Front is the biggest, richest, most fashionable humanitarian Non-governmental Organization in the world.
It is also a ruthless terrorist organization, hell-bent on violent global change.
Brannigan’s Blackhearts know their enemy now, after shutting down a Front biological weapons test in Chad. And they’re on the hunt.
A shadowy, underworld kingpin has offered Brannigan target packages on several of their targets. But one of them has been tipped off and has fled to South America.
The Blackhearts are heading to the Altiplano, with righteous vengeance on their minds. But is their enemy running scared, or laying a trap?
AuthoR’s Note
Thank you for reading Doctors of Death. A lot of hints and bits and pieces have started to come out with this one. It also ties in the standalone novel Kill Yuan. I’d debated just leaving that one a complete standalone, but decided that in many ways it fit in the Brannigan’s Blackhearts universe. I hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride.
To keep up-to-date, I hope that you’ll sign up for my newsletter—you get a free American Praetorians novella, Drawing the Line, when you do.
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If you’d like to connect, I have a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/PeteNealenAuthor. You can also contact me, or just read my musings and occasional samples on the blog, at https://www.americanpraetorians.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
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Kill or Capture
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