Fighting Land: Costa Luna

Never Trust a Mason

Chapter Two: Never Trust a Mason

"'Never trust a Mason'?" Timofeyenko asked Kane. "Why so?"

"Why ask me?" the former general asked. "You seem to already know why."

"Just wanted to hear it straight from the source," Timofeyenko shrugged. But in fact, he did already know everything about Kane's family and its history. Before he had recruited the Costa Estrellan for his employer's purposes, he had done a lot of research on the man. He knew that Kane had Russian blood because his mother Elena Estrada used to be Yelena Nikitovna Dragovich, the spoiled daughter of a Soviet general, before she legally changed it by moving to Costa Luna and marrying a rich plantation owner named Juan Rodrigo Estrada y Buenaventura. Kane's "Russian grandfather", and Elena Estrada's father, was Major General Nikita Zoranovich Dragovich, son of a Yugoslavian Communist who moved to the Soviet Union before he was born, and a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Even though Dragovich had a bit of a dubious record during the war—he commanded three penal battalions in three years and lost three-fourths of the men he commanded—he was trustworthy enough for Stalin to name him commander of the newly formed 999th Special Warfare Division of the Red Army, which did special operations even the vaunted and feared Spetsnaz wouldn't dare touch.

Dragovich's specialties were espionage and chemical warfare. Using a deadly nerve gas called Nova-Six, which was developed by German scientist Friedrich Steiner, who defected to the Soviets after World War Two, Dragovich was about to initiate an attack that would severely cripple the United States with simultaneous gas attacks on all fifty state capitals when he disappeared from the surface of the Earth. Word in the intelligence community was that he was killed when the Americans supposedly attacked the secret submarine base that Dragovich had built off of the coast of Cuba. The Americans denied ever attacking any submarine base, and the Soviets denied even building a submarine base off the coast of Cuba. In any case, the Soviets declared Dragovich a rogue general and Brezhnev himself thought that his death was good riddance because Dragovich wasn't playing with a full deck, so to speak, so Dragovich's family had no choice but to get as far away from Communist or Socialist soil as possible.

Throughout his research on Kane, Timofeyenko would always stumble upon one particular name: Captain Alex Mason. In every file he uncovered about Dragovich, Mason would always turn up, one way or another. Using his numerous sources, Timofeyenko delved deeper into Mason's backstory. He learned that Mason had been born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1932, and was a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars; but a deeper look revealed that that was not all of the conflicts that he had been involved in. Mason was apparently involved in a lot of black ops for the United States, including the infamous Operation 40, the operation to assassinate Fidel Castro during the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion. Unfortunately, the op failed, and Mason was captured by Dragovich himself and sent to the gulag in Vorkuta. He managed to escape from the gulag during its 1963 riots with the help of fellow political prisoner Viktor Reznov, and he made it back to friendly lines safely.

Things took a more sinister turn after his escape. American special forces were claimed to be responsible for the failure of the first Soyuz Two mission, and one of the faces of the supposed attackers was an almost perfect match to Mason's face. Dragovich had been present at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at the time of the attacks, and one of his personal vehicles was reportedly attacked by the armored vehicle that the attackers used to escape the cosmodrome.

Mason and Dragovich met in Laos once again, when American agents tried to investigate the crash site of a downed Soviet cargo plane that was carrying stocks of Nova-Six. This time, it was Mason who came close to death, after the Viet Cong interrogators to whom he had been entrusted to by Dragovich began torturing him. Only an unnatural amount of luck had allowed him to get out of Laos alive.

The final piece of Timofeyenko's puzzle fell when he discovered that Mason was part of the US Navy task force that converged on an old Soviet tramp freighter just outside Cuban territorial waters. Dragovich disappeared at about the same time that the fleet sunk the freighter, and a few days later, Cuban authorities discovered the body of a man with an uncanny resemblance to the Soviet general beached at the southern part of the country. An autopsy conducted by the state's medical institute revealed that the man had been choked to death, not drowned as previously thought. A mysterious woman known only as "Elena" claimed that the body was her father's, and she had it buried at an undisclosed location. The Cubans agreed to look the other way when she paid them $10,000 in cash.

For a time between 1978 and 1982, Mason dropped off the scope completely, before resurfacing for a brief period in 1986. Records revealed that he had a wife, Rosemary, who died when Mason supposedly returned to the CIA after being "retired" from the agency. They had two sons, US Navy Captain David Mason and US Army Major Joseph Mason—Joe to his friends and associates. David's whereabouts were currently unknown, even to Timofeyenko and his world-spanning intelligence network, but Joseph moved to the small town of Lake Monroe, Louisiana with his daughter Alexandra Josephine Mason, who preferred to be called Carter. Strangely, he could find no information about Major Mason's wife, but he did find out that a Claudia P. Mason had been killed in the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1997. A closer look on Major Mason's records showed that one Claudia Perry was listed as an associate in his files, so there was probably a good chance that this Claudia Perry was Major Mason's wife and Carter Mason's mother in all but name.

Major Joe Mason had served in the First Gulf War and the War in Afghanistan, before being recruited by the mysterious organization known only as the "Princess Protection Program".

During the rehearsal of then-Princess Rosalinda's coronation ceremony, Mason had been disguised as a member of the princess's personal protection detail when Kane made his grand entrance and usurped the throne. Mason singlehandedly rescued the princess and lodged her in his house in Louisiana, where she tried to establish a friendship with his daughter. At first, they rubbed each other the wrong way because of personality clashes, but as time went on; they became the best of friends. This Carter Mason was the one that masterminded the plot to bring Kane down, and that plan went off beautifully, much like Timofeyenko's bombing of Domodedovo Airport in Moscow back in 2011. It was almost embarrassing on Kane's part, being captured by a sixteen-year-old girl. To add insult to injury, both the Major and his daughter were given honorary Costa Lunan citizenship, honorary commissions in the Royal Costa Luna Armed Forces, and awarded the Order of Santa Corazon, the highest honor in the kingdom.

Kane was right not to trust the Masons, Timofeyenko thought. They always seemed to interfere in his family's affairs. It wasn't a funny matter, but there was a comedic quality to it that he just found amusing. And then he came to a sudden and unexpected realization while thinking about it. No wonder the two PPP agents that had been botching up his operations seemed so familiar. They were Carter Mason and Rosalinda Fiore.

"Yob' tvoyu mat!" he exclaimed.

"Excuse me?" Kane didn't speak Russian, but he knew enough words to guess the context of what Timofeyenko had just said.

"I've just discovered something of great importance to all of us, my friend," Lavrenty told Kane. "Don't worry, Juan; you'll be out of this place sooner than you think. Much sooner. Just hold on tight. We will get you out."

As the boat that Timofeyenko had rented to get him to Isla de los Penitentes moved away from the island's only dock, he happened to glance up at the sky. An Avialuna 747 was lining up with the runway of Santa Corazon-Alberto Monteaguiluz International Airport, and it passed over the island prison as it prepared to land. He knew that the Costa Lunan delegation to the newly independent Chechen Republic was due to come home on this day, and that the newly-crowned queen of Costa Luna was with that delegation. Lavrenty wished that he had a surface-to-air missile with him, even just a cheap SA-7. It would be child's play to shoot that big lumbering aircraft out of the sky and kill everyone on board. But he quickly cast that thought aside. He had become what he was by being contemplative, not bloodthirsty.