Chapter 7

Carl Partley looked back at the pall of smoke rising over what used to be Baltimore and frowned. He knew that life in Baltimore wasn't worth living anymore for any decent people that might still be alive in the city. The mobs ruled the city entirely now and any decent citizen was either dead, about to die or had become a slave to one of the mob leaders. Instead of medals, the mob leaders gave pretty female captives to their followers for anything that the leader thought was worthy of recognition. What had been neighborhoods had become small countries that were guarded by semi-organized mobs that usually had a very short life expectancy. The mobs would fight with a viciousness that had been rarely seen by modern man. Carl shook his head and put the Army Humvee into gear and began to move down the country road.

Carl Partley was, until a few weeks ago, a member of one of the CIA's armies that some newspapers had mentioned in their articles about Iraq. The editors of the papers that mentioned the CIA's army were always visited the next day for a "confidential talk". Each time the editor was "convinced" to keep his mouth shut about the shadow army. The editors were always given a juicy exclusive to compensate them for their silence. Only one editor had refused to stop writing about the shadow army; just before he disappeared.

The CIA had covertly started an army for their own purposes. The CIA, being the organization that it was, needed men who had a different moral approach to war and, let's just say, knew what the interests of the United States were. The shadow army was recruited from the ranks of Delta, Navy Seals, Israeli Commandoes, Green Berets and several spec op forces of other countries. It was not hard recruiting as the type of person that joined "The Crew", as they called themselves, they loved the excellent money and they were killers that the governments dared not release on society.

A very compromising set of pictures and other documents, that each of the Senate Intelligence Committee was presented with, ensured that The Crew was well funded and kept secret. America would be up in arms if they knew that there were pedophiles, adulterers, sadists, thieves, child rapists and drunks in Congress. Congress had equipped the CIA with the tools to destroy Congress or at least to manipulate them to the will of the CIA.

The Crew had sufficient training for warfare, but a much higher level of training was required for these men and women. They had to fight a war that no one knew was going on and slip away without be detected; in fact The Crew often completed a mission and the targets never knew that they had been defeated until their own people executed them in a coup or a rebellion. Rarely did a country know that The Crew was at work in their country.

The Crew was often the cause of political fortunes being changed, lives being destroyed, families becoming missing, prominent politicians dying of a sudden illness and nations being overturned. Congress didn't want to know about the methods that The Crew used. It was better if no one outside of The Crew knew how missions were accomplished. The American public would never believe that civilized people could commit the acts that The Crew performed on every mission.

The training had been hard and there had even been killings included in the training. Captured prisoners had been hunted and killed as part of training exercises. Certain known criminals in the United States were targeted to be terminated in such a way that it would seem like a death from natural causes. Each time, the name and picture of the target was given to the trainee with only the purpose of the mission; termination with extreme prejudice. The address or even the general location of the target wasn't given to the trainee. It was up to the trainee to find the target and destroy it in two weeks. The trainee never knew the crimes that the target had committed or even if a crime had been committed. The instructors often hinted that this was just an innocent civilian that the CIA wanted to be terminated; the trainee was being tested to see if he or she would perform any mission given to them without question. This training came with a high price; all graduates of the training lost most of their emotions and any sense of caring for their fellow man. The only things that mattered were The Crew, the members of The Crew, the mission and the interests of the United States.

Carl's first mission was to slit the throats of the wife and children of a South American politician that had backed out of an agreement. The mission was completed 25 hours after he had received it. Pictures were taken of the wife and children and then the bodies were taken out to sea and disposed of. Carl made sure that the crime scene yielded no clues as to what happened to the family of the politician; it would later be blamed on the Marxist rebels. The politician was kidnapped and the pictures were shown to him. He was told that if he didn't fulfill his part of the bargain every member of his family, starting with the politician's mother and father, would meet the same fate. Carl promised him that it would take a very long time for them to die and that the man would have to watch his parents die slowly and very painfully.

Carl never found out if the politician agreed to honor his agreement. If further action was required another operative would take care of it. It would be years before Carl would ever be asked to go back to that country and then only after the politician had died; either naturally or by other means.

During his training he had overhead two instructors talking about how they had engineered the disappearance of two US Congressmen and how they had even made the plane disappear long ago. Their mission had been sanctioned by the CIA. After his training had finished Carl researched the incident and could only find one plane crash that fit the scenario; the crash of the plane carrying Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich and two others in Alaska. Neither the plane nor the bodies were ever found.

Carl had joined the CIA thinking that he was joining a small group of warriors that would perform missions that were too hot for regular forces. Though he had never seen any figures on the troop strength, he surmised from the different conversations that he had overheard, that the size of the CIA's army was in the thousands. In the CIA, any information that you didn't need to know was off-limits to you.

Carl had been in Africa when the oil was cut off to the USA. He completed the mission about three months after the Coalition forces had been overrun and sent to Iran. By the time that he had come back to his home in southern Maryland the mobs had begun to move into the suburbs. He went to his parent's house and found the bloated, decaying bodies of his parents, his two sisters and two women that he had never seen before. Carl's father had been hung from a tree in the back yard. All of the women were nude and they had apparently been gang-raped before being killed. From the wounds on the bodies he surmised that they had been tortured for hours before they were put out of their misery. He buried all of them in the back yard. Whatever emotions or feelings for his fellow man that Carl had left, he had buried with the bodies of his family and the two unknown women.