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10
Raptor cleared the door and leapt for the skies, but her wings malfunctioned. She got about three feet off the ground and sprawled face-first into the grassy clearing. “Shit,” she muttered.
“Saw that,” Blackout said in her ear. “Three O’clock.”
Sheila rolled over on her back and fired her pistol in the direction he called out, putting two rounds in the center mass of an onrushing woman carrying an AR-15. “These guys have got some decent hardware,” Raptor said.
“It’s all mass-market stuff, semi-auto,” Whisper replied. “You can buy it at flea markets. Nine O’Clock.”
Raptor sprang to her feet and shot the man kneeling behind her with a shotgun pointing her way. One round in his forehead and he died before he could squeeze the trigger. “How many of these motherfuckers are there?”
“Intel suggests fifty or sixty adults,” Duke said.
“Adults?” Tank asked. “Does that mean there are kids around here?”
“As many as twenty,” Duke replied. “From infant to teenagers.”
“Fuck,” Lone Star said.
“Yeah, smaller targets suck,” Viper replied. Silence greeted him across the comms. “What? I can’t joke?”
“No killing kids,” Raptor said, looking around the clearing to evaluate her forces. Tank and Breaker were back to back in the middle of the quad, turning in slow circles and spewing lead at anything that moved. Lone Star and Viper were essentially out of the fight, stuck in the Humvee with Duke. Blackout was still perched in a tree stand atop a ridge five hundred yards away, but his shooting skills made him a threat no matter the distance. Sheila had no idea where Whisper was, but she felt certain the woman was doing something scary to someone somewhere in the compound.
She was grounded, with an MP-5, two magazines of ammunition, and a Glock .40 with four magazines. Not the kind of armament she’d like to have for a ground assault, but things went sideways when she used her wings to shield Manus and herself from the blast of the grenade.
“Make a plan, execute the plan, plan goes to shit, make a new plan,” Raptor said under her breath as she moved to take cover behind a small nondescript car parked in front of the church. Her eyes widened as she saw a young man with a pistol was already there. The man, kid really, was sitting on the ground with his back pressed up against a rear tire, his knees pulled up to his chest and his gun pointed at the ground in front of him.
When he took notice of Raptor, his eyes went wide and he pulled the gun up. Sheila reached out with her cybernetic arm to hold the barrel down and looked right in the kid’s face. “You can live or die today, and you’re making that decision right now. You want to live, you let go of this gun and lie facedown on the ground with your fingers laced behind your head. I guarantee you none of my people will harm you in any way.”
“You want to die, you point that gun at me. I can see by your eyes that you’ve never killed anybody. I have. It’s not as easy as it looks in the video games and movies, and it stays with you for a long time. I have enough baggage on my soul that one more dead asshole with a gun won’t bother me too much. You aren’t there yet, and I pray to God you never will be. But the only way you find out, is to let go of that gun.”
The kid never spoke, just stared at Raptor for long seconds until finally, with a deep exhalation, he released his grip on the pistol and rolled over to lie facedown in the red dirt and sparse grass of the compound.
“Good call, kid,” Sheila said, ejecting the magazine from the pistol and flinging it away. “Blackout, give me a sitrep.”
“The center of the compound is clear thanks to Donkey and King, the Kong brothers and their big-ass guns. Turns out if he throws enough lead in the air, even Tank can hit the broad side of a barn.”
“On a good day,” the big gunner replied with a chuckle.
“The center of activity now seems to be the school, about two buildings from your position. I’ve seen at least a dozen men and women head in there since everything started, and nobody has come out.”
“What about Manus?” Duke cut in. “Anybody got eyes on him?”
“I kept him alive through the grenade attack, then I rendered him inert and left him lying on the floor of his office.”
“Inert?” Tank said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means she knocked the motherfucker’s block off and left him lying in his own drool and blood,” Whisper said. “I have him now. He is secure, and still unconscious. Next time you want to knock somebody out, Raptor, just shoot them. You’ll do less damage.”
“Sorry,” Raptor said, in about as insincere an apology as she’d ever given or heard.
“Meh, he’s still alive. Which is more than I can say for my boys yesterday,” Breaker chimed in. “I’m just glad you left us a little something to take apart when we get back to—holy fuck!”
“What is it?” Raptor said, standing up and turning to where Breaker and Tank stood in the center of the clearing.
The big men were both staring down the street, weapons lowered. Breaker pointed, and Raptor turned to follow his finger. “You have got to be fucking kidding me…”
“What’s going on up there, Raptor?” Duke snapped.
Sheila stepped out of cover and into the main thoroughfare of the compound, which was almost big enough to be a little town square. She looked up the street at the small wooden schoolhouse, which was totally engulfed in flames. Fire shot out of every window, and in seconds the roof was completely ablaze. “Sir, it looks like the school is burning.”
“The school where every person in the town is holed up?” Duke asked, his voice hushed.
“Yes, sir, that school. Whisper…” Raptor hesitated, then pushed on with her question. “Is that us?”
“Not a chance, Sheila. I don’t do civilians. There were kids in that school.” Nobody failed to notice her use of the past tense.
“Guys, you’ve got company,” Lone Star said. “Half a dozen news vans just passed us on the road, hauling ass to your location.”
“Son of a bitch!” Raptor spat. “This whole fucking thing was a setup.”
“What?” Tank asked.
“Get our extraction ready, Tank. We need to be out of here, like ten minutes ago.” Raptor said. Normally she would take to the skies and not worry about an extraction, but with her damaged wings, flight was out of the question.
“I’ve got Manus. We’ll meet you back at the Bunker,” Whisper said.
“I’m in the wind, too,” Blackout said. “I’ll be at the Bunker by morning. Don’t sweat me. Radio silent unless I need you.” His comm clicked off, and the sniper was gone. Raptor had no concerns about the two of them. No one would ever see Whisper unless she wanted them to, even with the battered Manus in tow. Now she just had to get out of there with Breaker and Tank, unless she wanted to learn the intricacies of the Gitmo lunch menu.
Raptor scanned the grounds, empty now except for a few bodies and some flaming bits of debris from the demolished school building. Her earpiece crackled to life and Tank’s voice came over her comm. “Heading your way, Raptor. Breaker, to you in sixty seconds. Be ready to jump for it, we won’t be stopping.” The rumble of a big diesel engine came to her ears and Raptor stood, her head on a swivel.
Tank came around from behind the building housing Manus’s office in a battered Dodge dually pickup that might have started life as white, but now was as much Bondo and rust as paint. The cybernetic behemoth pulled the truck alongside the car Raptor was hiding behind, and she leapt into the passenger seat.
“Strap in, boss,” Tank said, jamming the truck into drive and kicking up dirt and gravel as he headed for the compound’s gates. One news van was already inside, its door open and a cameraman sprinting toward Breaker with a blonde reporter in tow. Breaker crouched, then sprang into the air as Tank barreled past them, his bulky frame landing in the bed of the truck and making the heavy vehicle slew sideways as they shot out of the gate and down the dirt road. The big man pounded on the cab of the truck, then sat down and slumped against the cab.
“Any casualties?” Duke asked.
“None of ours, sir,” Raptor replied.
“How many of theirs?”
“Unknown, sir,” Sheila said. “At least a dozen in the firefight, but I have no idea how many people were in the school when it went up.”
“All the children,” Whisper’s voice was low and tight. “I have confirmation from Manus that there were at least two dozen children in the school, along with another dozen adults.”
“Whisper, I need him alive,” Duke said.
“Nobody needs this motherfucker alive, sir.”
“Do not kill Manus. That is a direct order.”
“Yes, sir,” Whisper said, almost too low to hear.
“And do not put him in a situation that you could let him die accidentally. You are to transport him to the Bunker in at least as good a condition as you acquired him. So I make myself clear?”
“Crystal, sir.” Raptor could almost hear Whisper’s teeth grinding together, but she knew it wasn’t in the other woman’s makeup to defy a direct order from Duke. No matter how much Manus deserved to die a horrible death.
“Get back to the Bunker. I’ve got to talk to the Secretary of Defense about this clusterfuck. I’ll debrief all of you when you get home. Duke out.” Their leader’s comm went silent, and Raptor slumped back into the truck seat, her head bouncing with the rough road and Tank’s erratic driving.
“He sounded pissed,” Tank said.
“You have a gift for understatement, big guy,” Raptor replied.
“How are we going to explain this one to the brass?”
“I have no fucking idea, Tank. I have no fucking idea.”
*****
“What the ever-loving fuck was that?” Duke’s voice roared through the conference room.
“I have no idea, sir,” Raptor stood at the end of the line of TECH Ops at rigid attention.
The stark contrast between the career military members of the team and the previously civilian personnel was apparent in their posture. Breaker, Blackout, Lone Star, and Raptor were at attention, while Tank leaned against a wall, his nonchalant posture doing nothing to calm their irate CO. Viper was the only member of the team seated at the table, his chair leaned back and his feet on the large oval table. Whisper was nowhere to be seen, off somewhere with Manus no doubt.
“How did the news crews know we were there? Were they monitoring our comms?” Duke motioned for the team to sit. They did, Raptor smacking Viper’s feet off the table as she did. The skinny man’s chair wobbled, but Sheila was disappointed to see that he didn’t tumble to the floor.
“No sir,” Breaker said. “I built the encryption on our communication system myself. There is no way any civilian cracked that shit. They must have been tipped off somehow, or Manus called them before he came out to meet us.”
“They were there too fast for that. His compound is at least half an hour from the nearest city, and some of those vans were from even further away. They had some kind of notice ahead of time,” Lone Star said.
“I agree, sir. That fits with something Manus said to me when I confronted him, before the grenade attack. He knew something was going on, and he was a step ahead of us the whole way.”
“At least one,” Viper said. “Now we look like assholes to the whole world.”
“Assholes and murderers,” Tank said. “I don’t mind looking like an asshole, but killing babies? That’s some bullshit, sir.”
“I agree, Tank,” Duke said. “But the genie is out of the bottle now. Between cell phone cameras from the wounded on the scene and the footage the news crews shot themselves, there’s plenty of footage of us on the ground in Albuquerque, and none of it looks good.”
“Did we get anything out of Manus, sir?” Raptor asked.
“Not yet, but Whisper is working on him. If he knows anything about the D.C. attacks, she’ll get it out of him.”
“Yeah, but how much will be left of him when she’s done?” Tank asked. “That chick is scary.”
“Thank you,” Whisper said, suddenly appearing right behind Tank’s chair. The big man jumped out of his chair, which then collapsed under his weight when he landed back in it.
“Goddammit, Whisper! I’m gonna put a friggin’ bell around your neck!” Tank yelled from the floor. He stood up and grabbed a reinforced metal chair from the wall, then slid it over to the table. “I liked that chair. It had a nice cushion for the ass.”
“It didn’t have a cushion, Tank,” Raptor said. “It was just slowly collapsing under your exoskeleton.”
“Let me dream, Raptor,” the big man protested. “I haven’t sat in a normal chair in years.”
“Yeah, but you can walk, you big oaf,” Lone Star said with a chuckle. “Everything’s got a price.”
“What did you get out of Manus?” Duke asked, motioning the others to be silent.
Whisper walked to the end of the conference table and took the lone empty chair by Duke. “He was emailed a script for his anti-government speech this week and sent a bank transfer for a quarter million dollars. He has no idea who sent it, and the money came from a numbered account in the Caymans. I have a few people looking into that, but I’m not very hopeful.”
“Well, you’d better be more than hopeful, young lady, or the second I take office, this program and every one of you metal murderers is going on the scrap heap!” Came a new voice from the doorway. Raptor turned to see a rotund man with a sweaty red face standing in the doorway, with a face full of fury. It looked like one of their protects had decided to join the festivities.
