Rete and Trident Vol. 01

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Special thanks to my beta read crew: TedL, MormonJack, and LPN.

I am grateful for the time and attention they put into this story. I've significantly retooled this story three times since the beta read. I did not ask my crew to edit this time, because I haven't published anything in months and months and I just want to get something out there.

***

The characters are fictitious and are of my creation. I reserve the rights to this story. Do copy this story off of this site.

All characters depicted having sex are adult.

***

The satellite phone rang for maybe the fifth time when I finally pulled it out of the cigar box hidden on the top of my bookshelf. I answered it, "This is Rete."

Rete, pronounced RAY-tay was my code name. There was a type of Gladiator called a Retiarius that fought while armed with a trident and a net. The net was called "Rete" and that's where my code name came from. My real name is Peter Kintrell. Most people called me Pete.

"Rete. This is Oscar Delta Alpha. Authenticate whiskey quebec tango foxtrot niner two niner."

I recognized the voice on the phone. It was Assistant Undersecretary Matt Gilbert, my father-in-law. There hadn't been so much as a hello.

I pulled out my copy of the "Complete works of Shakespeare" from the top row of my bookshelf. I pulled out an onionskin page of numbers that I'd hidden in the title page of "The Tempest". I looked up specific row and column based on the value he gave me. The authentication was a valid code. I looked up the response in the final column and said, "Authenticate hotel tango quebec seven one four."

"You are authenticated Rete. How's the weather?"

He was asking me in an encoded fashion to indicate if I was compromised or if I was nearby someone who could be listening.

"Weather is overcast. Repeat weather is overcast."

I gave Gilbert the figurative all clear.

Gilbert replied with obvious agitation. "We declare alert status one, condition red for Rete actual at site alpha."

I wasn't sure I heard that correctly. "Didn't copy you Oscar Delta Alpha. Please repeat."

The voice came back and was less rushed. "Alert status one, condition red for Rete actual at site alpha. It goes down in an hour."

My heart skipped several beats when he said that. What he was saying was that I would be attacked here at my house in an hour. I asked myself, "How would he know that?"

It had to be from a signal intercept. They must have found out from monitoring phone calls, or texts, or something like that. There was no other way they could get human intelligence that specific on short notice. This meant it was not a drill.

Gilbert continued, "Rete, it is unknown whether your cover is blown, but the target has decided to move against you. You are ordered to immediately exfiltrate. Be advised that the target has assets pre-deployed for roadblocks on routes one through three"

Shit. The three quickest ways out of this shit-hole county were roadblocked already? That would be an expensive and conspicuous operation for the Sheriff to undertake on the off chance that I slipped his ambush. He was a careful and covered his bases, that was for sure.

"Oscar Delta Alpha, location of Rete Two is unknown and will not be back for at least an hour."

There was a pause and then Gilbert replied. "Rete actual, Rete Two is compromised. Repeat. Rete Two is compromised. Do not make contact. Proceed to exfil without Rete Two."

My hackles rose. What the actual fuck? Rete Two was my wife, Riley. Riley was Matt Gilbert's daughter. He was telling me his daughter was compromised and I had to leave her at the mercy of these monsters?

I said, "Say again Oscar Delta Alpha?"

I could hear confusion and bewilderment in my own voice when I asked it.

He repeated. "Rete Two is compromised. Confidence is very high. Rete two is compromised. Do not make contact. Proceed to exfil without Rete Two. Leave no indicators of your plan of action. Did you copy?"

I was pissed. If they were coming here to attack me, as soon as the Sheriff's people knew that I was in the wind, they'd kill Riley. Still, Gilbert left no doubt that he knew that and wanted it to happen anyway. He was throwing his own daughter to the wolves.

I replied, "Copy that Oscar Delta Alpha. What is the incoming threat?"

"Rete Two was told to trick you into submitting to handcuffs. Once in handcuffs, she will open the door for an enforcement team."

Shit. About three weeks ago, a mail order package arrived at our house for Riley with four sets of handcuffs in it. Since then, Riley has started to play games where she'd put me into those handcuffs. It had been a lot of fun, but at the same time, she'd gotten me accustomed allowing myself to be cuffed so that she could take control.

Today was Darden County day, which was a public holiday in this county. I'm a county prosecutor, so I was home with the day off. Riley worked as office manager for a private law firm that didn't give employees the day off. While she got up to shower this morning, I went into the kitchen and made eggs and bacon-- a hot breakfast was a rare treat for us.

When I called her to the table, Riley came to the kitchen wearing a sheer loose-fitting nightshirt. She'd showered and fixed her hair, but didn't have her makeup on. While we ate, she teased me by deliberately making her nipples hard under her nightshirt. She'd put off having sex for the last week, telling me she had something very special planned for this week.

At breakfast, Riley told me that she was coming home for her lunch hour. She said that my week-long drought would end with some special fun she had planned. The term "special fun" was the indicator that she planned to use the handcuffs again.

When I got up to clear our plates, Riley instantly fell to her knees, slid my pajamas down, and had her mouth on me. After not being touched for a week, I was very sensitive. She very quickly brought me just to the point of orgasm when she stopped suddenly, let go, and backed away. She left me hanging in blue-balled agony, miserably throbbing on the edge of orgasm. She laughed as she left to finish getting ready for work. "It'll be worth it at lunch time," she said over her shoulder.

When Mike told me Riley planned to handcuff me today, it was obvious that she'd planned it all. She'd been sandbagging our sex life for the last week and then got me worked up this morning to have me so hot I would do anything. I was primed to allow her to handcuff me. She set me up. She'd been grooming me for the attack since the handcuffs arrived just after the Fourth of July. Without Gilbert's call, it would have worked. A flash of anger at the betrayal went through my system. I was instantly nauseated.

I asked, "Oscar Delta Alpha, was the target painted?"

I was in Darden county, North Carolina, the most corrupt county in the United States of America. The Sheriff here, PT Hill, was the linchpin of an enormously powerful boutique smuggling operation. He had fingers in many pies including drug running, weapons running, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, and sex trafficking.

Darden county was perfect for it. Wedged between Craven county and Beaufort county, the population was rural, poor, and the county had a long-standing culture of corruption dating back to the days of Blackbeard the pirate. Darden had six small cities right on the Pamlico sound, and one large port adjacent to a cut in the outer banks which give the county direct access to international shipping. It was isolated and there were only three major roads in or out of the entire county, none of which were interstates.

Instead, there were dozens of tiny country roads that weaved in and out around the borders to the county. PT Hill had an unusually large Sheriff's department and controlled all of the roads with an iron fist. There were three abandoned military airfields which still operated with skeleton crews as General Aviation FBOs. It was ridiculously easy to slip domestic air traffic in and out with no records under VFR. There was also a high-capacity railroad freight line which serviced the container port. It was easy to slip contraband in with the normal traffic going down the rail line.

On paper, I was a recent law school graduate with a slightly shady past. I joined the Darden county prosecutor's office right out of law school. That was my cover.

In reality, I was a clandestine agent for the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS is a huge organization. One of the dozen major organizations in the DHS is the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The I&A is tasked with providing timely intelligence for the protection of the homeland. Within the I&A there is the State Government Corruption Mission Center. They are tasked with monitoring national security threats which emerge due to large-scale corruption in state governments. This mission is run by my father-in-law, Assistant Undersecretary Matt Gilbert.

Sheriff PT Hill's smuggling operation was Gilbert's number one source of heartburn. What made them scary is that it was small, effective, and largely unassailable. PT Hill's operation specialized in small shipments of extremely valuable contraband. They never, never slipped up. The analysts rated PT Hill's operation would be the most likely way for bad guys to successfully smuggle WMDs or Nuclear Materials into CONUS. PT Hill could bring anything into the US and we'd never know until it was too late.

In Darden county, I was a clandestine intelligence asset and an occasional operative. I was recruited into this role by Gilbert shortly after I married his daughter. The first year that we were married, my last in the Navy, I was ostensibly on a destroyer sent in an extended cruise in the Indian Ocean. In reality, I'd been secretly mustered out and was training as an intelligence asset at "the farm" run by the CIA.

No, I'm not a CIA agent. I worked at the DHS. I was trained by the CIA because they had the expertise in training the skill set I needed. They taught me the exact same stuff they'd teach to CIA assets being inserted into hostile countries around the globe: how to keep a cover, how to sneak around and gather information inconspicuously, how to do basic espionage tradecraft, and how to manage risks on the fly so you don't get caught.

I think it is important to say, I'm not some sort of bad-ass special ops guy who can murder with his hands. In the Navy, my last assignment was as the Operations Officer on a destroyer. Surface warfare officer for the win! I was essentially a middle-manager on a war ship: I made decisions about operations and told the ship's NCOs and Junior officers what to do. In combat, I stood watch as the Tactical Action Officer. Although my role as TAO required me to know a lot about strategy and tactics, all I knew about hand-to-hand combat was a very basic course given to me at the farm which emphasized that my best course of action was to avoid combat on the first place.

After I completed my training, the DHS and the Navy stitched up a fake and precipitous resignation whose circumstances were highly classified. With a little digging you would get enough information to read between the lines. The official cover was that I had been caught trafficking contraband and had been allowed to immediately resign rather than face charges. It was just enough to make me look shady to anyone who knew where to look, but not enough to blow up a career.

I then went under long-term cover. I first went to law school at ECU in North Carolina. ECU has a decent law school, but not one known for high-flying legal achievers. At ECU, I intentionally cultivated a reputation as a likable guy who liked to party and who was willing to cut corners. I could have been at the top of the class, but my cover was that I was content with being somewhere in the middle. As I was preparing to graduate, some ringers for the DHS dangled my resume under nose of the Darden County prosecutor's office. Word was, they loved to hire guys like me. After I was hired there, my primary mission for the DHS was to monitor PT Hill's smuggling operation.

My secondary mission was to be an occasional operative and saboteur. I set up and maintained solar powered stingrays to monitor cell phone traffic on some of the country roads and near the airports. I installed viruses and key loggers on dozens of computers. I called in false fire alarms on warehouses where human cargo was being kept overnight. On three occasions, I gave someone a flat tire. I set up specialized device near the Sheriff's office that would rapidly deplete the batteries on targeted cell phones on demand by screwing with their radios.

I offered to do more, but my handlers declined. They said they spent a lot of money placing me in my current position. They did not want me to risk blowing my cover unless the payoff was worth it. Blowing my cover to make someone late to a meeting just wasn't worth it.

When I asked Matt if the target was painted, what I was asking as whether we'd collected enough evidence to put PT Hill in prison.

"Negative, Rete, the mission is a scratch. You are ordered to leave Rete two and exfiltrate. Proceed to any safe house you deem expedient, call the bat phone, and hang tight."

I still couldn't believe that. Gilbert had just told me that my wife had been compromised by PT Hill and his gang and that they were coming to attack me in my house. He ordered me to run away and leave my wife--his own daughter-- at the mercy of evil men.

This was a direct order from a superior.

I asked, "Oscar Delta Alpha, can I expect a backup team?"

Again there was a pause. "Negative Rete. We do not have authorization to deploy backup."

I asked, "Oscar Delta Alpha, am I weapons free?"

"Negative Rete. Civilian ROE."

Civilian ROE means I could only use deadly force if my own life was at clearly at risk and I could justify it as self defense under North Carolina criminal law. Not to get too technical, but this meant a felony had to be happening, I had to be in fear for my life, and most importantly, my attackers and I all had to be in the confines of the my home at the time. If the enforcers were uniformed deputies, I was utterly boned.

I replied, "Copy Oscar Delta Alpha."

He replied, "Oscar Delta Alpha out."

I hung up the sat phone.

***

Protocol at this point would be for me to grab my go bag, sat phone, and laptop and run for the hills. I had eight pre-planned exfiltration routes and three different safe houses I could go to. The quickest ways out of the county would be down the roads that were roadblocked. Going that way would be suicide, so I planned to use one of the contingency routes that I carefully planned.

I turned it over in my head. We needed more information to put PT Hill away. Otherwise my whole mission was wasted: four long years of my life. I had no idea how my wife was compromised, but orders or not, leaving my wife to the mercy of these animals without even talking to her first was inconceivable to me.

While planning the mission, I clashed with Gilbert over whether Riley would be told about what I was doing here. I thought Riley was smart, discrete, and could be trusted to keep the secret. Gilbert, however, thought that if we told Riley about the mission that it would greatly increase the risk that she would accidentally blow my cover. He overruled me and I brought her on this mission completely in the dark about why I was here. It was now clear that this had been the fatal flaw of the operation. If she knew why we were here, she never would have compromised herself.

I decided I needed to speak with Riley before I left. It would increase my risks substantially, but I wasn't sure I could live with myself otherwise. The risks I was taking would probably get me fired. At the very least, I would be raked over the coals by Gilbert after I exfiltrated. I was willing to take that risk.

There was a big upside to my plan, which gave me two things I wanted: I wanted to know how my wife had been compromised by PT Hill's gang. I wanted some payback.

***

I spent my hour productively making preparations.

I went straight down my mental checklist.

The first thing that I did was to throw my onion skin of confirmation codes down the toilet. It dissolved even before I flushed.

The second thing I did was to stash my go bag and my laptop with my exfiltration vehicle in my storage shed. I deliberately threw the sat phone up onto the air and let it crash down the cement pad of the shed. When it did, I stomped it until it was just pieces. I would file a report stating truthfully that the sat phone had fallen to the ground and was rendered inoperable. Per procedures, I completely destroyed it and left it on site. It would give me plausible deniability for not taking incoming phone calls.

The third thing that I did was to take some pictures of me apparently handcuffed to the headboard of my bed. I figured that when Riley came in to handcuff me, she'd be asked to send pics to the enforcement crew. I took some photos where I faked being handcuffed to the headboard of my bed. In some, I faked being horny. In others, I faked being scared shitless.

The fourth thing that I did was to get my emergency supplies box from the attic. The box contained a couple of dozen super-heavy-duty zip-tie handcuffs, standard DHS issue, which I purchased off of the internet. Also in the box were a dozen ball gags which I'd bought from a sex shop in Fayetteville. The other thing I had in the box was pepper gel, which was raw paper spray liquid mixed with Vaseline. This was as nasty as it was noxious. Vaseline was not water soluble, so it wasn't easily washed off. I put the jar of gel on my wife's dresser and threw some of July's crafting paint brushes on it to use to spread the gel.

I grabbed large watering pot that my wife used for gardening off of the back deck. I filled it full of water and put it into the bedroom bathroom. When working with the pepper spray gel, I wanted to make sure I had an emergency supply of water.

The fifth thing I did was locate all four pairs of steel cuffs that Riley had ordered off the internet. I put two sets of the steel cuffs into my back pockets. I put the rest of it into my nightstand drawer where it would be handy, but not conspicuous. I pocketed all of the handcuff keys.

The sixth thing I did was pull out my timed lockbox. It was a simple plastic box with a time-release latch which would only open up after an elapsed time had passed. It was supposed to be used for locking your phone or your devices away so you would be forced to be productive for an hour or two. It was not very heavy duty, but it would suffice for what I planned.

The seventh thing I did was to get out my Mossberg pistol-grip pump shotgun out of my gun safe. I loaded it with buckshot.

The last thing I did was to try to eat. My stomach was closed, but I choked down a ham sandwich. I also forced myself to drink two sixteen-ounce bottles of water. I had a long day in front of me and I needed all of my wits about me.

***

At a few minutes before 12:00 PM, I got a text from my wife. "Leaving work. Be ready for something special! Meet me in the bedroom with the handcuffs."

I texted back, "Come and take it." I doubted she would understand the historical reference, but it did allow me to get into the right mindset.

Fifteeen minutes later, I heard the garage door opener grind to life.

I turned on the bedroom stereo very loud and queued up our sexy time playlist. I picked up the shotgun and closed the bedroom door. The hallway went quiet. I hid in the entry hall closet.

Riley walked into the house from the garage and said loudly, "Yoo hoo! Husband? Your sexy lady is here. You better be ready for me!"

I heard her walk past the closet. When she got to the bedroom door, I heard her ask, "Pete? Where are you Pete? Peter Kintrell, this isn't funny! Where are you?"