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Chapter 15
Raptor paced the briefing room, readying herself for her second ass-chewing in as many days. She snapped to attention when Duke strode in and slammed the door. “What the literal fuck is going on here, Raptor?” Her boss asked.
“I have no idea who shot that man, sir. We were working to defuse the situation when—“
“I know about that,” he cut her off. “I’m talking about you drawing down on a bunch of unarmed civilians inside the mall. What the hell was that about?”
Sheila took a deep breath. “It was fucked, sir. We took down the targets, but there were two civilian casualties. The people in the mall were working themselves into a frenzy, and I thought that I could…” Her words trailed off, and she shook her head. “I fucked up, sir. I didn’t want anyone else to die in that place, and I thought that I could snap them out of it. I was wrong.”
“No shit,” Duke growled. He walked to the head of the dark oak conference table and sat down. He waved a hand at one of the other chairs, and Raptor sat. “Sheila, you’re a good soldier. A damn good soldier, and most of the time, you’re a good leader. But sometimes…sometimes I wonder if you’re not a little head-fucked from what happened in Korea. You’ve got a temper on you, and according to your file that’s always been an issue.”
“Yes, sir,” Sheila said, thinking back to a DI at Parris Island that ended up with a broken nose after a disagreement about training methods.
“You cannot lose your shit in the field. You have to keep cool, do you understand? Not only are you and every member of your team too valuable as far as training, but you’re worth tens of millions of dollars in tech. We literally can’t afford to lose you because of a stupid error. And that’s what this was – a stupid error.”
Sheila studied the grain of the table. “Yes, sir.”
“But we suffered no losses, and you stopped what could have been a major terrorist attack with minimal civilian casualties. So good job there.”
Raptor didn’t respond, thinking back to the blood flowers all over the shirts of the two teenagers who died in the attack. Minimal wasn’t none, and those dead faces were on her just as much as the deaths of the terrorists. “Are we calling them that, sir? Are they terrorists?”
“That’s what I’m calling them, and I don’t give a good goddamn what the jackasses on TV call them,” Duke said. “They attacked a place with nothing but innocent civilians, for no reason the than it was a relatively easy target. That sounds like a terrorist to me.”
“Yes, sir. Do we have anything on the sniper?”
“Not yet, but Whisper is tracking the frequency that your friend with the mustache was broadcasting on. Maybe that will turn up something.”
“Do we really think so? I mean, if he was in league with the sniper, why would they kill him?”
“I don’t try to figure out their motivations or their mommy issues, Raptor. I just hunt them down and send the assholes home in body bags. Now get checked out by TECH AGENT and clean your weapons. I have a feeling this shit isn’t over by a long shot.” Duke stood up, saluted, and walked out of the room. Sheila sat back down in her chair, staring down at her fingers tracing the whorls in the table. Maybe she did need to get checked out, but whatever was going on with her, she didn’t think TECH GUY was going to be able to fix it with a screwdriver and a soldering iron.
She didn’t have long to sit and contemplate her future, as Whisper’s voice came over the base-wide intercom. “Raptor, report to the Comm Center. Now.”
Raptor smiled as she stood. Whisper didn’t mince words, and didn’t give a damn about protocol, but she got shit done. Sheila would like to have a dozen of her on the team, but there was only one Whisper. She stepped out into the hall and broke into a run. Whatever the stealthy operator wanted in Comm, Raptor wasn’t going to keep her waiting.
“What is it, Whisper?” Raptor asked moments later as she pushed through the door into a crowded Comm Center. Duke, Whisper, Lone Star, and Blackout all hovered over a very nervous-looking tech sitting behind a wall of computer monitors.
“Bishop here has traced your mustached friend’s broadcast back to a repeater in Alexandria. We should have drone imagery in a few seconds,” Whisper replied.
“It’s up now, ma’am,” the tech Whisper called Bishop said. His voice had that tremulous quality people got around Whisper, around most of the TECH team, if Raptor was being honest with herself. She tried to be as normal as possible around the unaugmented personnel, but her gleaming silver arm was impossible to disguise.
Sheila turned her attention to a large monitor mounted above the tech’s desk. On the screen an aerial view of a suburban neighborhood came into view, with tree-lined streets and a minivan or hybrid in every driveway. It looked like an idealized version of middle America, a modern-day Normal Rockwell pastoral scene with prosperity and wholesomeness oozing from every pore. Except this picture had a shadow lurking somewhere beneath the surface.
“What are we looking for, Whisper?” Duke asked.
“Just a second, chief,” the trim woman replied. The drone paused its flight, switched to hover, and zoomed in from a hundred feet or so down onto one house. “That’s it. That’s where the signal was coming from.”
The house was almost offensive in its plainness. It was a mid-sized brick ranch, with white aluminum gutters and a rectangle of solar panels on the eastward slope of the roof. Nothing about the place looked out of the ordinary, not even the small satellite dish on the roof. There was a boxy German station wagon sitting in the driveway, outside a set of garage doors that no doubt led into a space used more for storage of junk and Christmas decorations than vehicles. Nothing about the house screamed “domestic terrorist,” Raptor thought. But then they wouldn’t be very good domestic terrorists if they advertised, would they?
“What’s the deal with the windows?” Duke said, leaning closer to the monitor.
“Tin foil,” Whisper replied. “The conspiracy theorists think lining the windows with aluminum foil blocks infrared. The really crazy ones think it blocks any kind of electronic surveillance.”
“Like from the aliens,” Bishop chimed in. He looked around, grinning, but refocused on his screen at a glare from Whisper.
“Does it do anything?” Lone Star asked. “I mean, blacking out the windows shits all over my sniper shots, but I can’t think of anything else it does.”
“The rattle of the foil against the glass does screw up some directional mics, but it doesn’t do shit against IR or any kind of wiretaps,” Blackout said.
Raptor gave the big sniper a raised eyebrow and he shrugged. “What? I do more than just shoot things from a mile away.” Sheila nodded at the man and gave him a little grin.
“What else can we see, Whisper?” Duke pressed.
“Not much. The drone doesn’t have IR capability, or any kind of audio, so all we can do is circle and keep an eye on it. If we want any real intel, we’re going to have to get in there. It’s close, though. We can be inside the building in less than an hour.”
“Do it. But subtle.” Duke turned to Raptor. “No Tank, no Viper. We need to keep this under the radar, and I want you focused on the mission, not on keeping Viper from killing civilians.”
Raptor was surprised to find herself defending Viper. “He held himself in check at the mall, sir, and that was a pretty heavy situation.”
“This is a residential neighborhood, and we don’t have good angles for extraction. I only want trained operators on this one. No time for amateurs, even ones as solid as Tank. Viper’s out. Now roll.” Duke turned away from Raptor and pulled a chair up next to the comm tech.
Sheila nodded, then turned her attention to Lone Star and Whisper. “You heard the man. Motor pool in five. Let’s go lay a smack down on these assholes.”
*****
Four minutes later the trio rolled out of HQ in a modified H3 Hummer. Raptor drove while Whisper sat in the back seat with headphones on surrounded by monitors, monitoring the drone and the chatter from base. Traffic was light, and the big vehicle rumbled into a cul-de-sac a block away from the target twenty minutes after they left base. Whisper slid out of the backseat and started moving toward the house at a slow jog, while Raptor slipped on a helmet and took to the air.
Lone Star moved into the back seat to run comm on the operation. “Check in, ladies,” he said, settling into his seat and slipping on a headset with a microphone.
“Raptor, check,” Sheila said into her mic.
“Check,” Whisper replied, her voice barely above her namesake. “I’ll slip in through a side door or window and clear the building. Raptor, you can follow once I give the all-clear.”
“I’m ready to roll in if you need backup,” Lone Star replied. The Hummer was outfitted with rear-seat joystick drive capability, in case the surveillance operative needed to make a quick getaway or insert themselves into the action.
“Sounds good,” Raptor said. “Star, can you patch Whisper’s body cam into my HUD?”
“Will do,” the man said, pressing a few buttons on the console in front of him. Seconds later, video images overlaid Sheila’s vision as the smoked screen of her flight helmet flashed to life with streaming images from Whisper’s body cam. The tiny wireless camera on a shoulder harness let the rest of the team stay abreast of the stealth operator’s progress without forcing her to respond over comm in a delicate insertion. Sheila circled eighty feet above the house as she watched in double vision as Whisper, little more than a liquid shadow on the ground, slipped to the side of the house and vanished inside. On her screen, Raptor saw the interior of the house as Whisper slipped from room to room.
The house was almost bizarre in its normalcy. There were no bomb-making components lying on tables, no anti-government banners hanging on the walls, no Anarchist’s Cookbooks tossed on the sofa. The house looked like a deserted suburban home, with no furniture and just a flickering light coming from under a doorway at the end of a long hallway.
“Something isn’t right about this,” Lone Star muttered over comm.
“Yeah, this doesn’t feel right,” Raptor concurred. “Whisper, get out of there. This is starting to feel a lot like a…son of a bitch.”
Her words trailed off as Whisper opened the door. The only things in the room were a giant video display and a stack of electronics, what looked at a glance to be routers and servers. On the display was a looping video of the team’s recent activities, cut and edited to display them in the worst possible light. Everything from the massacre at the debate, to the assault on the compound, to the image of two teen boys dropping to the floor of the shopping mall, blood pouring from multiple gunshot wounds. The last frame of the video before it started over was just an image of a mushroom cloud and the word BOOM! on the screen in huge letters.
“Whisper, get out of there!” Raptor shouted. “This is a trap. I’m on my way!” She tucked her arms into her sides and dove for the house, wind rushing against her face.
“I’m rolling,” Lone Star said as the Hummer’s engine roared to life.
“What the hell is that?” Whisper said, turning to point the camera at a stack of electronic devices all blinking in unison. The lights sped up until they were almost a constant light, and Raptor watched through her heads-up display as Whisper turned and ran down the hall. The slender woman crashed through a door and into another empty room, her video wobbling as she sprinted for a window to dive through. Then the display went white, and Sheila pulled out of her dive as the house erupted into a ball of fire. The shock wave knocked Raptor head over heels in the air, and when she managed to right herself and turn back to the target, there was nothing left of the house but a hole in the ground and a foundation. The surrounding homes were beginning to catch fire from the burning wreckage strewn dozens of yards in every direction, and Raptor dove through a huge cloud of smoke as she streaked to the last spot she saw Whisper.
