by Jason Kasper
Barring that possibility—and Ian guessed from the building’s lack of guard personnel that the odds were slim indeed—anything of value from tonight’s raid would come from the hard drives.
When the light on his device turned from blinking red to steady green, he pulled the USB cord and hastily moved to the second computer.
Reilly followed Cancer into the warehouse portion of the facility, seeing a two-story-high ceiling packed to capacity with giant machines, welding equipment, and parked forklifts.
As Cancer flowed left, Reilly proceeded toward a row of tall shelving in the opposite direction and tucked his body behind a stack of empty pallets. He saw a large sign on the wall proclaiming the original name of the business, DOMINION METALFAB, and briefly wondered if there was cause for suspicion in the new owners not immediately changing all branding to their own title.
No time to consider it, though—he was on a hunt first for any enemy in the facility, followed by any trace of the rockets—and he continued moving forward down the long axis of the warehouse, sweeping his barrel left and right to search for threats.
Then he heard a noise to his front.
It was immediately more terrifying than footsteps or even a gunshot, both of which might have at least come from his teammates.
But what he heard was someone calling out, “Jessie?”
He spun to the side and angled his rifle up, but it was too late—he was in the glare of a flashlight held by a man stepping out from behind a machine in the workshop, and Reilly’s night vision flared to a blinding shade of white-green.
Squinting through the glare, Reilly desperately tried to determine if the man held a weapon in his opposite hand.
He was unable to tell before another figure appeared, this one a shadow closing with the first man and driving his fist into his exposed side—it was Cancer, and Reilly didn’t need to register the choking gasp to know that his teammate had just plunged a blade into the man’s kidney.
The effect was devastating. A stab to the kidney caused such crippling pain that the victim was rendered incapable of crying out, and the man fell to his knees as the flashlight clattered and rolled sideways.
Reilly’s night vision focused on the view of Cancer finishing the job, thrusting his blade into the side of the man’s neck and ripping it out the front before flinging the body downward. There was a wet, suctioning noise as the man gasped his last dying breaths without so much as a scream, and Reilly raced forward amid an exploding sense of dread and horror.
Even as he moved toward the casualty, he knew he’d be too late. There was no treatment Reilly could administer that would delay this man’s death, even if he’d had a full complement of medical supplies on hand.
“Jesus,” he whispered as he stopped before the body. “What have you done?”
Cancer said, “Relax. Not a lot of security guards packing MAC-10s.”
Reilly glanced down to see the submachinegun lying on a sling at the man’s side.
When Reilly didn’t respond, Cancer said, “You’re welcome.” Then he patted down the man’s pockets, removing a cell phone and sliding it into a drop pouch as he transmitted, “Tango down, one EKIA in the warehouse.”
Ian heard David’s whispered response over his earpiece.
“Copy tango down. Any sign of the rockets or launch assembly?”
“Negative,” Cancer replied. “Continuing clearance.”
Pulling the USB cord from the second computer, Ian secured the cloning device in his pocket and moved out of the office with his senses aflame—Cancer had just transmitted a confirmed enemy kill in the warehouse, though David didn’t seem to mind at all.
Instead, at the sight of Ian he advanced further, entering an office as Ian pulled security down the corridor, waiting for David to reappear with the signal that everything was okay.
He did so a moment later, taking up a security position with his shoulder flush against a doorway to the left, his rifle aimed down the hall as his body remained behind cover.
Ian rushed inside to assess the contents of the office. There was only a single workstation here, and he moved to clone the hard drive as he considered the implications of a team kill on domestic soil.
At present, the magnitude of that particular event seemed lost to everyone but him.
Duchess would find out about this—how could she not? Surely she was casting an analytical eye to the goings-on in Charlottesville, particularly after she’d seen fit to personally follow and confront David in his hometown. And when that happened, she’d have them all carted off to a black site in the time it took them to realize what was happening.
The light on his device flared to a steady green, and he detached the USB cord.
With the third hard drive copied, Ian moved back to the door. He squeezed David’s shoulder, and his team leader moved forward once again, cutting into the next office as Ian covered down the hallway and waited for him to re-emerge.
Once again, David did, though this time under less voluntary circumstances.
He was flung against the far wall against the weight of a silverback of a man who pummeled him in a half-tackle. A single unsuppressed gunshot sounded from David’s barrel, the flash of light momentarily illuminating the hallway before everything went dark again. As Ian oriented himself through his night vision, he heard Cancer transmit over the net—“Status?”—before focusing on the dark mass of two bodies on the floor, the distinction between where the giant’s body ended and David’s began impossible to tell at this distance.
Ian reacted instinctively, a hundred shooting range lessons imparted from his teammates congealing into a single reflexive action that he performed with astonishing quickness.
Launching forward a step, he fell to his knees and slid forward, angling his handgun upward for a shot that would send the bullet through the attacker’s head and into the ceiling without injuring his team leader in the slightest.
The maneuver played out with impossible perfection, the 1911’s sights aligning with his opponent’s blocklike head in the time it took him to flick off the thumb safety.
But before he could squeeze the trigger, the giant’s fist sailed out of the darkness, cracking against the side of Ian’s head and flipping his night vision device sideways.
He fell backward, involuntarily firing a second round into the wall, the ricochet sending the bullet careening down the hallway as Ian’s head exploded into ringing flashes of color.
Cancer moved at a sprint with Reilly at his rear, both racing to back up their teammates by the time the second shot fired. Worthy transmitted, “Do you need support?”
“Standby,” Cancer replied, slowing as he approached the doorway leading into the office hallway.
The doorway was open, lacking even a closable panel, and Cancer stopped in front of it before stepping sideways to clear the space beyond.
Once he’d come parallel with the opposite wall, he dropped his barrel as Reilly cut past him into the hallway, and Cancer moved forward to clear in the opposite direction.
Seeing an empty corridor, he spun in place to view the scene before him: Ian on the ground, David being choked to death by a monstrous figure, and Reilly standing motionless, momentarily stunned.
“What are you waiting for?” Cancer asked. “Hit him.”
It was easy for Cancer to say, and he knew it.
Reilly was the biggest guy on the team by a long shot, and he looked like a child beside this hulking monster trying to choke the life out of their team leader. The man was an absolute beast, and he was too close to David for anyone to risk firing a shot.
Undaunted, Reilly flung his massive body atop the figure, trying to choke the man before being flung sideways, his hoolie tool flying off his side upon impact and clattering against the floor.
Shaking his head, Cancer slung his weapon and drew his fighting knife for the second time in the space of three minutes. He knelt beside the mass of human bodies before him, driving his blade into the stomach
of the barbarian currently manhandling his teammates with savage ferocity.
The giant was unfazed by the effort, knocking Cancer backward as he spun sideways with Reilly atop his back.
No matter, he thought. The knife was still firmly within his grasp.
What most people didn’t know about knife kills, save the police who investigated the aftermath, was that the blade frequently lodged on bone, causing the attacker’s hand to slide onto the exposed blade and leave a smattering of DNA residue in the form of blood.
It was for this reason that Cancer used a fighting knife with a hilt, ensuring that his stabs left him uncut. He delivered another two blows to the man’s belly, knowing that they would cause an astonishing amount of pain while leaving the man to die a slow, agonizing death with plenty of time left over for tactical questioning.
But the immense man was fighting his way to a standing position, struggling mightily against the best efforts of three men trying to stop him—Ian was still semi-motionless on the floor, struggling to regain his senses.
Cancer was pushing himself to his feet in preparation for the next attack when a sixth figure appeared.
A moment’s analysis proved it to be Worthy, summoned either by the audible gunshots or the sporadic radio transmissions that had continued without resolution—and Cancer saw him pick up Reilly’s hoolie tool from its resting place on the ground.
Bracing his feet for the effort, Worthy raised the chiseled end over his head and brought it down with a sickening thump atop the man’s head.
The giant figure jolted violently and then dropped to the floor like a stone, David and Reilly collapsing atop him in a pile of human bodies.
Sheathing his bloodied knife, Cancer knelt, feeling for a pulse through his gloved fingertips and then looking up at the murderer before him.
“Why’d you have to kill him? Can’t get information from a dead body.”
Worthy was panting for breath, holding his hoolie tool like a fireman with an ax.
“I couldn’t...he was...aw, shit.”
David rose from the ground, giving Worthy a pat on his shoulder.
“It’s all right, buddy. You don’t know your own strength. Thanks for the save.”
Before anyone could respond, they heard the shrill wail of police sirens, as loud and piercing as if they were inside the building.
David called out, “You guys are on your own. Get that intel back to the team house, find out where BK is headed.”
And then David was gone—sprinting toward the warehouse in what seemed to be a determined attempt for suicide by cop.
Without alternatives to intervene, the team scattered out of the building and raced toward their vehicles.
I burst into the warehouse facility, momentarily overwhelmed by the sight before me—shelving and equipment, machines and forklifts as far as the eye could see—before focusing my night vision on a dark panel of doorway to the front of the building.
This was stupid, I realized even as I completed the action.
But as with every time that thought had occurred to me, I proceeded nonetheless, charging through the door’s push bar into the outdoors.
With team vehicles parked to the north, east, and south, there was only one direction I could move to direct police attention away from my team as they escaped the facility—west, directly out the front door.
I did so at a run, emerging outside to the swirling red and blue lights of multiple police cruisers and the sounds of men shouting, “Police! Stay where you are!”
Both statements seemed redundant given the circumstances, and I cut left to break into a dead sprint along the front of the building toward the far tree line.
This was pitting my speed against police marksmanship, pure and simple—the odds of me falling in a hail of gunfire were too high for this to make any rational sense whatsoever.
But the cops didn’t shoot, instead relocating to give chase as evidenced by the sound of car doors slamming and engines revving from the main parking lot.
Then came running footfalls and shouted commands behind me as an unknown number of officers pursued me on foot. It was hard to tell which side held an advantage in physical fitness, and we both certainly had adrenaline on our side.
However, I had one thing going for me over the members of law enforcement currently chasing after a shadowy figure in the night. They were, as a rule, consummate professionals dedicated to public safety and their own duty.
I, by contrast, was a reckless amateur, and reckless amateurs got lucky.
My thought process was questionable, but in my mind there seemed no other way. If I hadn’t distracted the police, they would have quickly surrounded the building and captured one or more of my teammates.
And while I didn’t doubt my colleagues’ ability to serve time in jail—they’d been to arguably worse destinations around the world, with Syria a prime candidate among them—there was a larger consideration at play.
In providing security for Ian, I definitively knew that I had no discernable intelligence that would stop Bari Khan’s attempt at, well, whatever it was he was attempting. Now that Monticello had been ruled out, the sky was the limit for a well-equipped terrorist like him.
But I couldn’t say the same for any of my teammates. Not Ian, who carried an assault pack full of data from cloned hard drives, nor Reilly and Cancer, who had seen the bowels of the warehouse and could have a clue that possessed the missing link we sought.
If any of them were rolled up by the cops, then Bari Khan could very feasibly succeed in slaughtering hundreds of our countrymen in the time it took for the captured member to explain their situation, probably without much assistance from Duchess, who had her own legal and political justifications to consider.
I ran west, armed with a basic orientation of my surroundings from analysis of overhead imagery. In the industrial park, I was a sitting duck: the paved expanses and large parking lots lent themselves to easy police vehicle access, to say nothing of the fact that I had four team members who needed to slip out of there as discreetly as possible.
My shadow was cast as a long and distorted phantom before me, the police flashlights lighting my back as I took surging breaths like a sprinter on the hundred-yard dash. Which, for the moment, I was—a short stretch of woods was visible to my front, and I desperately needed to reach it. For one, it would provide concealment to block cops’ view, allowing me to disappear if only for a short time.
And second, I desperately needed a reprieve from the all-out sprint that was setting my muscles and lungs aflame.
Plunging into the trees, I transitioned from a straight-line sprint to an erratic, zigzagging course to dodge the trees. Grateful for the necessary reduction in speed, I relied on the swirling glow of police flashlights casting nightmarish shadows through the branches as I moved. I emerged into an open stretch, landing a single step on a paved walking trail before launching through the trees beyond, pumping my legs up a steep incline that made my hamstrings and calves cramp with effort.
Then I was over the top and descending, scrambling down the wooded embankment. I lost my footing, tumbling sideways through brambles and leaf litter before rolling into the open. Struggling to my feet, I found myself on a short expanse of grass between houses.
I’d made it to the neighborhood beside the industrial park, a critical step in my escape. Next I’d have to cross the subdivision, a process that began with launching into a run onto the paved cul-de-sac before me. Racing down the street with a row of houses on either side, I entered a surreal suburban reality, risking the exposure of streetlights for the sake of gaining distance from my pursuers. My lungs were screaming for air, legs on the tremulous brink of giving out as I exploited every milligram of adrenaline in my system.
Closing with the main road, I caught a glimpse of a street sign—Running Fox Lane—and thought, how appropriate to my current situation. The only thing my hunters were missing at present were the dogs to follow my scent, and those were sure
ly on the way. And while I could temporarily outpace the officers currently swarming into the neighborhood, my running abilities wouldn’t count for much the second a seventy-pound German Shepherd was let off the leash.
I dashed across the street, seeing the red flickers of a patrol car screaming toward me from the left. They’d moved to surround me with astonishing speed, reacting to my direction of movement and trying to cut me off at every possible junction.
Now that I’d been spotted, their search radius was immediately narrowed to a single point in the neighborhood, and as I reached the far side of the street, I cut left between houses, feet pounding across a manicured lawn as the patrol car followed my progress.
I cut right, tucking myself behind the backside of a house as a blazing white spotlight illuminated the space I’d just departed.
Then I continued moving west, toward the final yard separating me from a large span of woods bordering I-64 to the south. At present I was merely an armed suspect in a B&E—but once the first officers searched the metalworking factory, that would immediately escalate to murder and my odds of getting shot would rise by a factor of ten.
As I made it to the woods and began racing uphill, I took a fleeting glance behind me—the night sky above the housetops was lit by the ethereal blue and red glow of flashing police lights, the barking of every dog in the neighborhood punctuated by the slamming of car doors and shouts of officers.
This entire raid had turned into a disaster in record time, and for a moment I wondered if my team had made it out of the industrial park undetected.
No time to consider it now. I turned and continued moving uphill, staying on a westerly course. When the K9 units arrived, they’d hopefully suspect I was proceeding to the next neighborhood, or north toward I-64. After a hundred meters I cut left instead, then turned south to follow the woods that presented multiple link-up points on the roads adjoining either side.
I pushed onward, struggling to cover ground and fighting the overwhelming impulse to stop and rest. Everything hit me at once then—the failed attempts to kill Bari Khan, the moment we’d lost the rockets in Syria, the state of my relationship with Laila and Langley.