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7
Except there wasn’t a fight to go back to. When the trio reached the main ballroom, they found nothing but scattered bodies and spent shell casings. The room looked like the set of a mediocre action movie, except for the dozens of dead civilians scattered across the floor. The smell of gunfire and blood mixed together into a miasma of wartime death that Raptor knew all too well. She saw on the faces of the other TECH Operatives that they remembered it, too. She didn’t know the men well, just from occasional sparring and training sessions, but she remembered both were vets, having done at least a couple of tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. She got the impression that Blackout did some wetwork in some unofficial places, too, but he never talked about those things, and she never asked.
“Fuck,” Breaker muttered as he stepped up onto the platform where they’d left the other two Bravo Team ops. Speakeasy, their surveillance and communications expert and a legendary quickdraw artist, lay decapitated in the center of the platform. Their team leader, A heavy gunner named Bulldozer, a thickly muscled white guy with a shaved head and goatee, was bent backwards over the podium at the center of the stage, his throat cut from ear to ear and his chest split open.
“Whoever did this…this shit was personal,” Blackout said, surveying the scene. He waved a hand around, indicating the entire room “Look at this shit. Everybody is taken out clean. One shot, maybe two or three if it looks like crossfire. But our guys? They wanted to hurt our people.”
The ballroom was still teeming with activity, even after the attack. Civilians screamed in pain, shouted for help, and some just sat on the floor crying. Secret Service agents and police officers walked through the room, kicking guns away from the hands of the dead attackers. The cops flipped a few of the living over and cuffed them, but the majority of the terrorists were dead.
Agent Santos caught sight of Raptor and came running. “Raptor, what was the explosion we heard? Did the candidates get evac’d?”
Raptor pulled the woman aside and spoke in a low voice. “Both candidates, their wives, and a couple of other civilians are fine. We’ve got them in the dock master’s office under guard. Two of my team are back there with them, along with some of your other agents.”
Santos let out a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear. Our comms went down at the beginning of the attack, and our frequency has stayed jammed ever since. What about yours?”
“We’re good,” Raptor replied. “There’s a dead spot that covers most of the corridors, but the dock is good, and we can communicate in here. Whatever jammer they’re using, it must only have enough range to cover the hallways.”
“What about the explosion?” Santos repeated.
“There was a bomb. We reduced the payload, but it still did some damage to the dock. We managed to avoid any casualties, but it was close. How many did you lose up here?” Raptor looked around the room at the scattered bodies.
“I don’t have a good count on the civilian casualties or the police. We have seven agents KIA, with four more wounded, plus whatever condition the men with you are in.”
“None of them are seriously injured. It looks like we lost two in here. Do you have a sitrep on Alpha Team?”
Santos’ angular face was grim when she looked up at Raptor. “I…I’m fairly certain they were all taken out.”
Raptor felt herself stagger, and a sudden weakness passed through her phantom legs. She knew it was purely psychological, her prosthetics couldn’t get weak in the knees, but it didn’t matter. All of Alpha Team killed? That was inconceivable. “What happened?”
Santos took a deep breath. “There was an RPG attack at the far McCain Street entrance, where Cap was stationed. We believe he was killed instantly. The woman on the team, I’m sorry, I don’t remember—“
“Siren,” Raptor supplied. Tansy Grant was a communications specialist and former karaoke queen who lost her legs in a car accident and joined TECH Ops to atone for the harm she caused when her car crossed the center line and smashed into a minivan coming home from the bar one Saturday night. Raptor blinked hard. Siren wasn’t really Sheila’s usual kind of girl-pal, but being two of the women in the program had forged a very unique bond between them.
“Yes, Siren. She ran to help Cap and was killed by a suicide bomber in a followup attack.”
“Get the first responders,” Raptor said. It was a classic, right out of Chapter One of the Fuck Shit Up Playbook. A secondary explosion following an attack can often have greater impact than the first one, because it take out EMTs, Firefighters, and others who are typically considered off the target list. Except nowadays, nobody was off the target list.
“What about Rockstar and Pyro?” Raptor asked after a few seconds. “They were supposed to hold the main entrance.”
“And they did, as long as they could. But eventually they were overwhelmed. You guys are tough, and some of the shit you can do looks like Superman, but your soft bits aren’t bulletproof. Throw enough lead at you, and you go down. That’s what happened to your other two men. Apparently they went down under a hail of automatic weapons fire.”
“Dammit,” Sheila took a deep breath, trying to still the whirlwind of emotion roiling through her. Focus. None of that shit helps right now. Deal with it back at the Bunker. “Okay,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “What’s the plan? This is still your rodeo, so what do we do?”
Santos shot her a grateful look, probably just happy she wasn’t going to have to fight for jurisdiction with anyone else. Raptor didn’t give a single shit about jurisdiction, or credit, or any of that crap. Their people were dead, the men who killed them needed to pay, and the candidates still needed protection. That’s all they could focus on.
“The mission hasn’t changed, it’s just shifted location. We need to make sure the candidates are safe. This is now an active crime scene, so we need to clear out and let the FBI techs do their work. A team has been called in from CITY, they should be here any minute. I need to set up an enhanced detail with the protectees, so let’s pull all your people and all my people back to the dock office until we can get an extraction in place.”
“Sounds good,” Raptor nodded, then relayed that through comm to her team. “But you should know, nothing is getting in or out of that loading dock for a long time, vehicle-wise. We blew up a lot of shit out there.”
“That’s fine. Worst case, I think I can count on you guys to make a hole.” Santos gathered her remaining agents, relayed their intentions to the FBI agent in charge of the scene, and they headed back to the loading dock. Raptor hung back to cover their rear and to watch as Blackout knelt by Bulldozer’s side for a moment before reaching over and sliding the big man’s eyes closed. He fell into step beside Raptor, who could have sworn she saw a glimmer of moisture in his eyes.
*****
“You want us to what?” The incredulous question came from Edmund Carstairs IV, the current Freedom Party Presidential candidate. His red face shifted all the way to purple as he attempted to stare down Agent Santos.
Santos was having none of it. “I don’t want you to do anything, sir. I am telling you what you will do. You will remain inside this office while Tank creates an extraction point on the far wall. Then you and your wife will carefully step through the rubble and make your way, along with Mr. Henry and Mr. Fortuna and their spouses, to the waiting Suburban, which will take the six of you to a secure location. This is not a request, this is not an option, and this is not up for debate.”
“Young lady, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I’m—“
“Shut the fuck up, you ignorant twat,” Viper’s laconic drawl cut through the room like a machete.
The candidate whirled around, somehow managing to look even more apoplectic than he had seconds before. “What. Did. You. Say. To. Me?” He asked, accentuating each word.
“I said, ‘Shut the fuck up, you ignorant twat,’” Viper replied. “I’ll be a little gentler this time if you need it. Please shut the fuck up, you ignorant twat. Santos is giving you a ride out of here in a bulletproof SUV. Fucking take it. If you don’t want it, in about thirty seconds, there’ll be a big fucking hole in the wall. It’s a lovely day for a walk.”
“Come on, Ed,” Jared Henry, the Republican candidate said. “We’ve all been through a terrible experience, let’s just get back to our airplanes safely and get this place behind us.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Santos said. “But you will all be staying here in Albequerque for at least the next 48 hours while this incident is under investigation.”
Henry, the current leader in every major poll turned to Santos, his million-watt smile undimmed by the carnage he’d witnessed in the past hour. “Young lady, I’m not sure if you noticed, but there is an election in barely two months. This was to be one of our most important stops, but certainly not the only one, and—“
“Do I have to call every motherfucker in here a stupid twat, or can I just issue a blanket goddam proclamation that you’re all fucking idiots and let that be all?” Viper said, stepping to the middle of the room. “You,” he pointed at Carstairs. “You don’t have a snowball’s fucking chance in the first place. Everybody knows you’re in this asshole’s pocket,” here he pointed to Henry. “So this limp-dicked shitweasel,” he pointed at Vincent Fortuna, the Democratic candidate. “Just has to stand around with his wee little cock in his hand and watch you siphon off enough votes to get your twatwaffle pal Jared into the White House so you can ride off into the sunset to a cushy job at some Libertarian think tank or some other useless piece of Washington bullshit.”
All three candidates looked on the verge of aneurisms, but Viper wasn’t finished. “Now, personally, I don’t give a single fuck about any of these assholes. But Santos, she seems like she’s mostly not a moron. She’s lost a lot of friends today in the name of keeping you idiots alive. Same goes for Raptor. Me, I don’t have any friends, and don’t care if you walk out of here into the back of a safe ride, or leave in eight different body bags. But in about fifteen seconds, the big stupid one over there is going to make a hole in the wall. I’d suggest when that happens, that you exit through it. Because I sure as fuck will.”
Raptor just leaned against the wall and watched as her newest team member launched his profanity-laced tirade against the three men most likely to be elected leader of the free world. If they survived to November. She didn’t like Viper. She didn’t trust him yet, either. But he certainly had a way of getting his point across that was unmistakable. The men fell silent, glowering at the skinny hacker and probably mentally composing the emails they’d sent to the Director of the Secret Service and anyone they thought would listen at the Pentagon.
Too bad those emails would get them absolutely nowhere. Viper had evaluated the situation perfectly right from the start. He could do and say almost anything and it would have almost no consequences. He, in fact all of the TECH Ops teams, were simply too valuable to cut loose. At nearly half a billion dollars each, the only thing that was going to get them pulled from active duty and their parts reassigned was a felony, and even then it had to be one of the bad ones.
“Can I please fuck some shit up now?” Tank asked. Santos gave him a nod, and he left the office, walking over to the exterior wall. He made a big show of sizing it up, patting the cinderblocks in a few places, then he walked back about twenty feet and planted himself. He held out his arms and squeezed his fists, extending a pair of shoulder-mounted mini-guns from his back. The barrels spun in the air for the briefest of seconds, then hundreds of 7.62mm rounds spat from the rotating barrels.
The deafening roar was punctuated by Tank’s howls of glee as the bullets chewed into the soft concrete, sawing a rectangular opening in the wall within seconds. Devastation wrought to his apparent satisfaction, he strode over to the wall and kicked it with his right foot. The entire section of brick and concrete collapsed outward, covering him in a cloud of fine gray dust.
Raptor just shook her head, watching the big goof work. He was good with those mini-guns, a real artist, and strong as his namesake. Now she just had to keep him alive.
A black Suburban pulled up to the hole in the wall and the rear doors opened. A black-suited Secret Service agent hopped out of the passenger seat and stopped dead at the sight of the behemoth standing in the newly-created doorway. Tank stepped aside and gestured for the man to enter the loading dock. The agent just nodded at him and stepped up to the hole, waving at Raptor where she stood by the door of the office.
Raptor cleared the door and Santos lead the candidates and her surviving agents out toward the waiting car. They piled in and sped off without so much as a nod goodbye, peeling rubber along the street in their hurry to get their protectees out of the area.
Viper stepped up to stand next to Raptor. “I suppose this is the part where you tell me I’m a dick for talking to those morons like that.”
“No,” Raptor said, looking up at the shocked man. “This is the point where I thank you for saying what I couldn’t. I’m a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, and I always will be. But you’re a civilian, and you don’t care anything about the chain of command, or respecting anything or anyone. That’s what we needed at that moment, and I appreciate it.”
Viper looked a little shocked, but he recovered and a grin spread across his narrow features. “So you’re saying that you want to reward my initiative?” He leered down at her.
“No, I’m saying if you ever use that kind of language when talking to me, I’ll shove your razor blade so far up your ass you can shave with it from the inside of your face. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”
