Search and Destroy A Cal Shepard Black Ops Thriller JT Sawyer Contents Thank You Prologue 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 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 More Adventures to Come Contact Information Additional Titles by JT Sawyer About the Author Copyright April 2021, Search and Destroy, by JT Sawyer www.jtsawyer.com Edited by Emily Nemchick Cover art by ZamajK No part of this book may be transmitted in any form whether electronic, recording, scanned, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. This is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, incidents, or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author. Thank You Thank you for buying this book! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it. Join my email list if you would like to receive notifications on future releases or a FREE copy of the Cal Shepard short story, Lethal Conduct, which recounts Cal’s harrowing mission in North Africa with his former search & destroy unit. Prologue Bethesda, Maryland The high-end security system, video surveillance cameras and three bodyguards at Ian Landis’ two-story home on the northern edge of the city would be enough to deter anyone who was unwelcome. It would even enable Landis to quickly scurry into the panic room with the steel door in the back bedroom in the event that someone was brazen enough to breach his layered security protocols. There he could wait safely, clutching his .357 revolver, until the police arrived within their eight-minute response time. These things had entered Cal Shepard’s mind during the past few days of planning, and he knew that eliminating a target like Landis would require reverse-engineering a solution, beginning with the panic room, whose vault-like door required a sufficient amount of energy to open and close. All panic room designs depended on a numeric keypad that in turn depended on electricity still flowing to the house. Even the pricey panic rooms that were built by specialty contracting firms like the one Landis had used or the type that Cal had penetrated before in Middle-Eastern palaces employed a dedicated hardline independent from the home’s main power source and circuit breakers. The weak link in each case was always the electrical conduit leading into the house from a subterranean cable linked to a hidden service box buried in the ground near the utility line, which the contracting company tapped into. No juice, no numeric keypad, and no access to the $50,000 panic room. Cal scanned his phone one more time, examining the blueprint image for the layout of Landis’ house coupled with the copious notes he had taken during the past three nights of physical surveillance around the property with a tiny drone obtained from a colleague at Langley. For several hours since sunset, he’d remained hidden in the thick tangle of scrub oak at a nature preserve a quarter-mile distant from Landis’ home, peering through his binoculars at the two Colombian bodyguards casually strolling near the back porch while the third man was on the second-floor balcony, which overlooked the country club grounds to the east. The forested hillside in this valley was peppered with large mansions with liver-shaped pools amid neatly manicured lawns just like this, giving the illusion that you were out in the country when in fact you were never more than thirty minutes from the city center. Though Landis divided his time between his home, DC and Texas, he spent most of his nights here, out of the spotlight, so his sexual habits didn’t draw attention to him and sully his image as an upstanding businessman and oil lobbyist in political circles on the Hill. Cal watched the black four-door Crown Victoria turn into the driveway then head up the hill towards the house, stopping briefly to deposit a young woman in a sleek black dress and heels. The bodyguard nearest the swimming pool walked towards her, opening the front door and motioning for her to go inside after letting his eyes linger on her figure. Cal briefly saw Landis in the foyer, his face paler than usual and his eyes darting nervously beyond the woman towards the driveway before the guard closed the door. The man had good reason to be nervous, since he was one of the principal architects behind framing Shepard for the murder of his wife and friends. And now your day of reckoning has come. Cal had shown up at the natural area an hour before sunset for much of this week, blending in with the other joggers and hikers as he trotted along the web of trails, eventually making his way to the eastern flank of the property, which overlooked the luxurious homes across the two-lane road. There he would wait until night descended before secreting himself into the cluster of oak scrub to monitor his target. Unlike other outings, tonight he was armed with a daypack that contained a windbreaker, trauma kit, binoculars, a suppressed Glock 19 with a red-dot scope, three spare mags, a lock-pick set and a small specialized shape charge with a detonator. And unlike any other recon mission he’d been on, this time he was also equipped with four bricks of cocaine. Shepard sat perched like a wildlife biologist intent on studying a particular animal. Only this one is feral…a traitor to its own kind. Shepard would study him like he had each of his intended targets during the past sixteen years of working in clandestine ops with the Special Activities Division. Only Landis was special, and this job was unsanctioned. It was personal on a level Shepard had never felt before. Ian Landis normally would not have been able
