DUAL DECEPTION Read online

  DUAL

  DECEPTION

  DUAL

  DECEPTION

  A PROJECT MOLKA NOVEL

  FREDRICK L. STAFFORD

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 Fredrick L. Stafford

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher.

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  Contents

  My Thanks

  PROJECT MOLKA

  PROJECT LAILI

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  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

  CHAPTER 65

  Keep Reading! Molka’s Next Task!

  A Grateful Word to You from The Author

  More by The Author

  My Thanks

  To all the PROJECT MOLKA readers and supporters. The journey is still just getting started.

  PROJECT MOLKA

  At the peak of her warrior skills, Molka resigned from an elite special forces unit and chose veterinary medicine as her post-military career. She opened a small clinic, built a small practice, and sought to live her life in humble obscurity.

  And she did—until the Traitors Scandal intervened.

  Her country’s foreign intelligence service—known as the Counsel—suffered an unprecedented disaster when moles burrowed in deep for 10 years popped up and exposed the identity of almost every covert operative.

  In a small state with many enemies sworn to annihilate it, the safeguarding role of covert operations is indispensable. The Counsel, gutted and demoralized, fell into panic mode.

  In the short term, they used a few uncompromised retired operatives—along with some career bureaucrats who never qualified for field work—to fill the gaping void. The results disappointed, to put it mildly.

  In the long term, new operatives would be recruited and formally trained, but the process would take several years.

  It was the time in between when the country faced the most danger.

  The Counsel’s solution was Operation Civic Duty—more often called the Projects Program. They recruited ordinary citizens who held what they deemed a useful skill or skills. Each citizen recruit—or project, as they were dubbed—received some quick, very basic operative training before being sent straight out to complete what the Counsel called a task.

  It sounded desperate and borderline suicidal, and it was. Even so, they found willing projects everywhere: university students, factory workers, athletes, scientists, housewives.

  But the Counsel’s prize recruit was Molka.

  Their best recruiter, Azzur, told her as much when he came to her office. He said she was the preferred age range—not yet 30—maintained superb physical condition, retained a useful skill set from her military service, and could claim an excellent cover. Who could be suspicious of a person who lives to help to animals?

  He told her that the Counsel required her help. She told him she was a patriot, but she had already done her duty. She wasn’t interested. Please leave her alone.

  He smiled and left.

  He came back a week later with more information for her. Azzur can always find more information. He told her all about her worst special forces mission, how that mission led to the unavenged murder of her little sister, Janetta. He said the Counsel knew the identity of the one responsible and where this one hid. And if Molka completed 10 tasks for them, her 11th task could be personal. They would give her the identity and location of the one she would die to kill.

  She agreed to the Counsel’s offer.

  She agreed to serve under Azzur.

  She agreed to become his project.

  Project Molka.

  PROJECT LAILI

  Born to a drug addict mother and a father killed in a gang fight before she was born, Laili’s life started rough.

  And it went downhill from there.

  But young Laili determined that it would not be her fate to live in a filthy, foodless, one-room ghetto apartment being abused by the various men her mother brought home.

  So at age 13, she ran away to Europe with a man. The authorities returned her. At age 15, she ran away with another man to the United States. The authorities returned her. At age 17, she ran away with yet another man to New Zealand. The authorities returned her.

  By age 18, Laili had grown into an exceptional beauty, with a virulent disrespect for authority. And when it was time for her compulsory military service, she decided to use extreme disobedience to get herself dismissed. All she wanted to do was get away from her home country and forget she had ever lived there.

  As usual, she pushed things way too far. She was not given a discharge; she was given two years in a military prison.

  While Laili waited to start her sentence, an army psychiatrist, who examined her before her court martial, wrote a report based on his findings and interviews he conducted with her training sergeants and commanding officer. The report stated Laili showed genius level intelligence, and when interested, she responded remarkably well to training. Also, from her runaway travels, she spoke very good English, excellent French and Spanish, decent German, and passable Russian. Her anti-authority behavior was likely a, “trust no one but yourself,” defense mechanism developed from her horrendous childhood.

  The psychiatrist passed his report along to an old army friend who served as the Counsel’s top recruiter for their controversial Projects Program. If anyone could harness and exploit Laili’s raw abilities and useful skills, it would be Azzur.

  Minutes into their first meeting, Laili physically attacked Azzur. Azzur quickly and violently subdued her and then offered her a cigarette and a ch
ance to avoid serving in prison by serving him.

  She agreed.

  Azzur put Laili though accelerated training in weapons, martial arts, helicopter piloting, and veterinary technician procedures. Her results in each were beyond off the charts.

  In Laili, Azzur knew he possessed the most gifted operative recruit he had seen in his 20-year career. However, he also knew her extreme volatility was a prohibitive handicap to her vast talent reserves.

  In normal times, Laili would be rejected for covert duty as too high risk. But thanks to the Traitors, the times were not normal.

  Perhaps if he paired Laili on her first task with his star project—Project Molka—she would learn to temper her inner demons and maximize her potential.

  Azzur stamped Laili’s file: approved.

  She became Project Laili.

  CHAPTER ONE

  OUCH!

  The hard puncher floored Molka with a surprise straight right to the chin when she walked in the door. And if she had ever been hit harder by another woman, she couldn’t remember when. But she would always remember that an oil worker’s bar in Pasadena, Texas on a Friday night was no place to start a fight.

  Actually, Molka didn’t start the fight.

  The brat did!

  The brat being: her new partner, Laili.

  Molka sprung back to her feet, landed a front kick on the puncher’s chin—returning the flooring favor—and kept advancing toward Laili’s Alamo-type position.

  The lean, long-legged, long blond-haired, green-eyed, 19-year-old beauty—hypersexualized in a tiny black crop top, tight jean short-shorts, and platform sandals—stood trapped behind a corner table by eight other irate women.

  Laili fired alternating kicks to fend off their double flank slap and punch attacks.

  Twenty plus oil worker men watched and laughed and cheered and jeered the unfair “catfight” and the jukebox blared out moment appropriate Outlaw County.

  Molka hadn’t come dressed for combat either. She arrived straight from her acting class at the community center attired comfortable-cute in a white sundress and new bright-white-canvas sneakers. She had taken care all evening not to get either dirty, but Laili’s distress call made her caution moot.

  Laili’s eyes locked on Molka. “It’s about time! And they just called the cops on me too!”

  Molka grabbed a cue from atop a pool table and tossed it to Laili. “Rolling extraction! Can you make it?”

  Laili nodded. “Yes! Hurry!”

  Molka turned to leave and get the truck.

  Another brawler babe pointed at Molka and yelled: “That’s her partner! Don’t let that bitch leave either!”

  Clad in western shirts, Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots, four hardworking, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, daughters of the Lone Star State formed a skirmish line across Molka’s exit path to do just that.

  Molka admired such women.

  She would have liked to be friends with them.

  They did not feel the same, and they expressed their sentiments with cussing, spitting, and wild swings targeting Molka’s head.

  Even so, Molka didn’t want to hurt them too badly. It was their bar and their town and their republic. And they hadn’t invited Laili to bring her nonsense into any of them.

  Molka used moderate front and side kicks to push them back and kept moving toward the door.

  Behind her, the pool cue helped Laili hold her own and prepare to make an escape hole for an exit run. Using her freakish-fast reflexes and incomparable dexterity, she forced the women surrounding her to give ground to keep teeth.

  Molka’s forward push toward the door continued. In her peripheral vision, she caught a skinny girl behind the bar cocking her arm to throw something. Molka glanced over her shoulder and tracked a brown flying blur heading toward Laili.

  CRASHHHHHH!

  If the bar girl had to heave a full bottle at Laili’s head, why did it have to be Crown Royal? Why not opt for a cheaper brand that would have done the same damage? Shame to waste the good stuff.

  Either way, it missed Laili, and everyone else, and shattered on the bar’s prized relic: an autographed, authentic Houston Texans jersey mounted in a glass case on the wall.

  The tragedy didn’t go over well with the oil worker men and they started to yell for everyone to “whoa up,” and that, “the law would be there directly; let them handle it.”

  The Texas ladies blocking Molka heeded their calls.

  Her route to the door cleared.

  Exploit it.

  She fast-twitched into a run.

  Two strides in, a non-conformist cowgirl grabbed Molka’s ponytail from behind and yanked. Hard.

  Molka’s mother had used to do the same thing to her when she was being bad, to get her attention.

  She had hated it as a little girl.

  She wouldn’t tolerate it as a grown woman.

  Playtime’s over.

  Molka spun around and fired an elbow strike into the hair puller’s nose.

  Cartilage crunched; blood ran.

  Molka spun back and advanced again.

  A woman swung a punch at her face.

  Molka ducked it and fractured her ribs with a side kick.

  Another woman swung a face-aimed punch.

  Molka slipped it and gashed her head with a front kick.

  Another woman tried to kick Molka.

  Molka eluded it and rocked her world with a hammer fist.

  Laili yelled approval: “Yeah! Fuck them up!”

  Another woman attempted to tackle Molka.

  Molka broke it and round house kicked her unconscious.

  They wanted no more from Molka.

  But she wanted more from them.

  But the police were on the way, and Azzur would not abide her and Laili getting arrested.

  Molka made it to the door and yelled to Laili, “Thirty seconds!”

  Laili yelled back: “I’ll be there!”

  Molka ran in the humid, night air to a gigantic, dual rear-wheeled, diesel-powered Ford pickup truck parked three rows back. She fired it up and cooked rubber pulling out and aligning the truck for a pass by the bar’s front door.

  Laili burst from the bar and swung the cue at her pursuers.

  Molka approached Laili from behind at about jogging speed.

  Laili flung the cue to back off the attackers, faced her body in the same direction the truck traveled, and looked over her shoulder.

  As Molka passed by her, Laili grabbed the truck bed’s side and vaulted herself up into the bed deft as a gymnast.

  Rolling extraction executed.

  The entire lady mob surged from the bar and launched a longneck beer bottle barrage. Two exploded against the truck’s side.

  Laili poked her face through the open rear window slider. “Go fast! Go hard!”

  Her command wasn’t necessary. Molka fried more rubber leaving.

  When they cleared the parking lot and pulled onto the main road, Molka asked, “Anyone following us?”

  Laili checked their rear and then poked her face back in the widow. “One white pickup. Two bitches inside. Can’t believe they want some more.”

  “They’re probably trying to get our plate number for the police. We need to lose them. But we’re about to get slowed down in traffic ahead.”

  “Turn there!” Laili pointed through the window to a dark, narrow side street ahead on the left.

  Molka cut across oncoming, honking traffic, made the turn, and found the street to be a narrow dirt access road. Impenetrable woods ran along the right side, and a fence fronting a deep ravine ran along the left side.

  After about 100 yards, Molka stopped, cut the lights, and checked the rearview mirror.

  Laili crawled to the truck bed’s rear and squinted into the darkness. “I think we lost them.” The white truck made a high-speed sliding turn onto the road and raced toward them. “No, we didn’t!”

  Molka stamped the gas.

  But the smaller white truck moved f
aster. The gap closed quickly, a double barrel emerged from the passenger window, and took a low forward aim.

  “Oh shit!” Laili ducked.

  BOOOOM!

  Shotgun pellets pinged the rear bumper.

  Laili yelled up toward the rear window. “Double barrel 12-gauge! They’re trying to shoot a tire out!”

  Molka zigged hard right.

  Laili slid and slammed into the truck bed’s left side.

  Molka zagged hard left.

  Laili slid and slammed into the truck bed’s right side.

  BOOOOM!

  More pellets hit the tailgate.

  With both barrels fired, Laili peeked back. The white truck had stopped. “What are they doing, reloading?”

  Molka stopped too.

  “And what are you doing?” Laili said.

  “Dead end coming,” Molka said.

  Laili spun to look. Three hundred yards ahead, the road ended at more impenetrable woods.

  “They’re going to keep us boxed in,” Molka said. “Until the police get here.”

  “No, they’re not,” Laili said. “Here they come again.”

  The white truck started moving toward them at low speed.

  Molka put the truck in reverse, sped backwards, jerked the wheel hard right, and spun the massive vehicle 180 degrees to face the white truck.

  “Cool!” Laili said. “Where did you learn to do a J-turn?”

  Molka grimaced at the approaching headlights. “I can’t believe I’m going to do this again.” She turned her headlights back on.

  “Do what again?” Laili said.

  “Play chicken. Hold on.”

  “Oh shit!”

  Laili dropped and hugged the wheel well.

  Molka punched it.

  The white truck kept coming.

  Collision in 100 yards.

  Molka kept coming.

  The white truck kept coming.

  Collision in 60 yards.

  Molka kept coming.

  The white truck kept coming.

  Collision in 40 yards.

  Molka kept coming.

  The white truck kept coming.

  Collision in 20 yards.

  Molka Kept Coming.

  The White Truck Kept Coming.

  Collision In 10 Yards.

  MOLKA KEPT COMING.

  THE WHITE TRUCK KEPT COMING.