by Peter Nealen
It had turned into more than that. We’d thrown ourselves into a shadowy, shifting war across the globe, trying to hold off the wolves that were circling what we increasingly saw as a struggling, fading society. But even while we got paid, and bent the rules we didn’t outright break, we’d all remembered the oaths we’d taken to the Constitution long before. Everything we’d done, we’d ultimately done for our country. We’d hired out to fight our nation’s enemies when our nation didn’t have the wherewithal or the guts to do it.
And now we were being asked to effectively overthrow the government of our own country. It was a bitter pill to swallow, even as we thought back and saw how we’d come to this pass.
“I wish that I could say that if any of you wasn’t feeling up to it, that you could walk, no hard feelings,” Stahl said. “But it ain’t that easy. The security of the op aside, they’ll come for you, especially if you’re on your own. It’s hang together or hang separately time, gents. We need an answer.”
He was right. The die had already been cast. It had been cast months ago. We had to follow through, or die. Especially with half the global underworld knowing our names and faces, and with some serious grudges attached to those names and faces, there was a decided shortage of places to run and hide. If we were outlaws in our own home, the list of hiding places would go from short to nonexistent.
I looked around at the rest of the team. It was a mix of four or five teams, now, whittled down to about a platoon’s worth of shooters. A lot of old faces were gone. A lot of new ones had quickly become as old and drawn as the rest. But while I could see few without the same misgivings behind their eyes, there was an acceptance of reality in all its harshness there, too. Any kind of wishful thinking about how the world should be had been burned out in the gunfire, smoke, and blood of the last few years.
“Give me the list,” I said, “and tell me the whole plan.”
Chapter 37
It was a hell of a planning cycle. There were a couple of dozen targets, and under the circumstances, they were going to be well-protected. While Congresscritters and Senators were usually protected by DC Police while they were in Washington, most of them would have hired private security to keep them safe during the violence and unrest that had been wracking the nation, not least of all in DC itself. The PMSCs would have been hired on the taxpayers’ dime, of course.
To make matters worse, we had a limited amount of time to put the plan together and move on it. We’d gotten a bit more info on the “special task force” that was coming after us. FBI, DHS, ATF, and a few other alphabet-soup agencies that I’d never even heard of were involved, and we were presently at the top of the “most wanted” list. As near as Bates knew, they didn’t have our location locked down yet; they were surveilling The Ranch, but knew that most of the hitters weren’t there.
Somehow it didn’t surprise me that The Broker had DOJ as infiltrated as he did the global criminal underworld.
Slowly, as we worked alongside a few of Bates’ people and the Cicero Group’s minions to nail down our targets’ movements, Larry, Tom, Alek, Nick, Bryan, and I drifted together until we were reasonably sure we had some privacy.
“I don’t like this,” Larry said grimly, folding his massive arms across his equally massive chest. His normally cheerful face was creased with a thunderous frown.
“There ain’t much to like,” I said flatly.
“Even if we do pull this off,” he continued, “you do know what usually happens to the vanguard of revolutions, right?”
There were nods all around. “Even if Stahl wouldn’t stand for it—and I believe he wouldn’t—we still don’t know for sure who all was involved in selling us out in Mexico,” I said, glancing toward the Group’s people, on the other side of the warehouse. “That bunch that came with him and Renton? They’d see us taken out as a threat to the regime, quietly, without troubling The General with such details.”
“None of those fucksticks have the balls,” Bryan growled.
“To do it themselves?” I replied. “Of course not. They’re ‘idea men,’ they’re the intellectual core, the smart people. Look at that little shit Remington. He’s been preaching for every intervention and power projection project for years, but he’s never laced up a pair of combat boots and picked up a rifle in his life. He’s too important to the cause to put his delicate hide on the line for his ideas.” I was suddenly sorely tempted to spit on the floor. “At least the old Roman senatorial class had to spend time with the legions before they went into politics.
“But they wouldn’t get their hands dirty, oh no. It’d be a quiet word to somebody, an exchange of cash, evidence would be found, and we’d be imprisoned or killed one by one. They already know the cost of trying to take us out all at once. And Stahl would either be too busy with other matters, or he’d be shown incontrovertible evidence that there was no other choice.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Nick asked.
“Believe it or not,” Tom said, taking a long drag on what had to be his fifteenth cigarette of the day, “I’ve already gotten some contingencies in place. After The Ranch got hit, I knew we might need some bolt-holes to lay low for a while, if not permanently. I’ve secured a few of them, mostly in remote areas. The locals think they’re prepper retreats, which isn’t all that far off the mark. If worst comes to worst, we vanish and scatter to those bolt-holes. They’re well-stocked, and I’m sure all of us have the skillsets to live reasonably comfortably in any of them.”
“Why not just go now?” Bryan asked.
“Because Stahl still made a good point,” Alek said. He’d had little to say since getting back from Kurdistan; there had been too much going on, and I’d been the primary ground commander, with more direct familiarity with the situation as it was than he had. But Alek had been one of the driving forces of Praetorian from the beginning, and we listened to him. “Our heads are on the chopping block right now. We’ve got too many people hunting us, and if the whole fucking country goes in the shitter, there really won’t be any place to hide. As bad as this is, I think it really is the only shot we’ve got to preserve something. Otherwise, the Russians and all their little cronies are going to see this country torn apart, and we’ll go down along with everybody else.”
I looked around at all that was left of Praetorian’s founding team. There was more weariness in the eyes, more gray in hair and beards. We’d aged what felt like a half a century just in the last few years. “So, we follow through, put Stahl and his people quietly in charge, and then break off and go dark. Sound like a plan?”
“Sounds like a plan that can go pear-shaped in about fifty different ways,” Nick muttered.
“And since when have we ever had any op go according to plan?” Bryan countered. “A plan is just…”
“A list of shit that ain’t gonna happen, I know,” Nick answered. “You’ve been repeating that old saw for years.”
“Just because it’s an old saying don’t mean it ain’t true,” Bryan retorted, in his best “Kirk Lazarus playing a black guy” voice.
“All right, knock it off,” I said, glancing back toward the rest who were still planning the op. “Tom, do what you need to so we can disappear fast if we have to. Everybody else, keep your teeth together and get back to work. We’ve still got a lot of politicians to kidnap.”
There were so many targets, and such a short timeframe, that Ventner’s guys had been brought in to help. Joe had commented, “It’s about damned time. You sons a bitches have made it damned hard to be anything but second fiddle when it comes to getting missions.”
I’d stared at him coldly. “I wouldn’t bitch too hard about that if I were you, Joe,” I said bleakly. “Or haven’t you noticed how many of the old guard are missing?”
He’d looked around at that, and there was a new look, a mix of shame and a little horror, in his eyes when he looked back at me. “Holy shit. That bad?”
“It’s been a rough few months,” was all I said. It was a
somewhat more subdued Joe Ventner who threw himself into the planning process.
Joe and I were discussing changing up a set of targets, since the most recent information on one of them put a Senator who was on Joe’s list closer to a Congressman we were slated to grab. It was going to be easier to go from one target to the next, and let Joe have the third Congresswoman, who was staying another four miles away.
“Stone?” I looked up to see Stewart walking over to us. He’d become Stahl’s go-to liaison with us, since the general had found out about our time together in Libya. “Mars wants to see you,” he said.
I nodded to him, got the nod from Joe that he was satisfied with the plan as we’d just laid it out, and turned to follow Stewart.
Stewart didn’t have much to say on the way out of the warehouse and down to the abandoned office building that Stahl had commandeered for his temporary headquarters there in Maine. Since I wasn’t feeling all that talkative, myself, I didn’t complain.
Stahl was lighting up a fresh cigar as I walked into the office. There was enough of a background smell to the place to suggest that he’d been chain-smoking the things in there for the last couple of days. It wasn’t a fine tobacco smell, either. Those stogies were some of the cheapest money could buy; he smoked too many of them for the fancy ones.
He looked up at me through a blue cloud of smoke as I walked in. “Change of plans,” he announced, blowing another cloud toward the ceiling.
“Ah, fuck,” I said. “Now what?”
He held up a hand. “It’s not a bad thing, this time. It’s actually going to make your life far, far easier.” He took another puff and continued. “Congresswoman Sparrow, whose ass you pulled out of the fire down in Arizona, has been doing work for us for a while, though not necessarily for us, in her mind. She just contacted me, asking for a meeting. She’s got a proposal, and has about half our target list on board with it, along with the other half at least willing to listen. She wants us…me, specifically, to have a hand in it. So, there’s going to be a meeting at Camp David in two days.”
I frowned. “Has she explained what this proposal is?” I asked.
“She hasn’t,” he replied, “but one of her aides has.” He pointed to the laptop in front of him. “It boils down to essentially what we already had planned, only without having to actually snatch any of the players involved. They’ll come to us, instead.”
“So, basically, putting the strings into your hands, declaring you the Grand Puppeteer of the US government,” I said. I was tired; bluntness was all I had left.
He didn’t upbraid me for the comment, though. He peered at me through the haze of cigar smoke for a moment, then nodded. “Basically,” he agreed. “They’re scared, and they’re unprepared. Most of these clowns have played the same games that have brought us to this pass for years, never anticipating the unintended consequences of turning their countrymen against each other for their own advantage. Now they’re looking for a grown-up to fix the problem, and Sparrow’s offering them one. They’ll posture and shout for the media and the social networks, but in the background, they just want Daddy to fix things.”
“So, is the op off?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not all of it. There’s one person I still need you to grab.” He handed me a packet of papers. I took it and flipped through it.
It was a target package, as I’d expected. The middle aged, immaculately groomed man looking up at me from the target photo wasn’t exactly who I’d expected, though. I looked up at Stahl. “Varren?” I asked.
He nodded. “Fred Varren, media mogul, billionaire, and the President’s golf buddy. Also far more of a policymaker than he’s ever supposed to be, given that he’s never been elected to anything in his life, or even appointed to a cabinet position. He hasn’t let that stop him from calling a lot of the shots, even the ones the President has publicly taken credit for. And I have it on good authority that the special task force was his doing.” He took a deep drag on the cigar, making the ember glow bright orange, and blew the smoke toward the ceiling again. “I want him secured. Not gently. The full instructions are in there.”
“Sending a message?” I ventured, with a raised eyebrow.
“This won’t work unless we can put the fear of God into a pack of people who’ve lived most of their lives thinking they’re untouchable,” he said grimly. “They have to see that there will be consequences for going off the reservation.”
I didn’t think that he was entirely aware of just how ominous those words sounded. At least, not until he took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
“Holy hell,” he muttered. “That sounds awfully Bolshevik, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” I replied heavily. “But I get it. This is what lawlessness leads to, and most of these fuckers have pissed all over the law for decades, made it meaningless. And when the force of the law goes away, then force becomes the law.”
He looked at me from beneath a quirked eyebrow. A small, grim smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “And guys like you are why I always detested the academics and think-tank strategists, Stone,” he said. “They think that just because you kick doors and pull triggers for a living, that you can’t be a thinker. I know better.”
I only nodded, looking back down at the target package in my hand. I had little to say to that. I had no doubt that he was sincere; this was Mars, after all. But knowing what we were about to do, as much as I respected the man, I still recognized that he was playing the game, trying to cement my loyalty.
Or was he? I thought of my doubts about Mia, which still lingered in the dark recesses of my mind, as hard as I tried to shut them up. Had I come to suspect everyone of hiding sinister, ulterior motives? I need to get the hell out of this game, while I’ve still got anything left of my soul, I thought.
But first, to deal with Fred Varren. I looked at that smug, superior face in the photo. That smirk’s not gonna last, bud, I thought.
Varren’s home, such as it was, was in New York. He owned several media conglomerates, and was said to own half a dozen penthouse apartments in that city alone. He also had a place in Alexandria, which brought us back to where Chu had been murdered, though we were blocks away from that incident, which had been all but forgotten in the chaos that had followed, anyway.
There weren’t many penthouses in Alexandria, though prices were still high enough that there may as well have been. Even so, someone like Fred Varren couldn’t stay in just any suburban house, no matter how expensive. So, he’d bought and moved into an old Civil War mansion in the middle of downtown Alexandria. I was sure the locals were fucking thrilled.
Of course, being situated where it was would make going in there to get him difficult. And by “difficult,” I mean “a stone bitch.”
Being in the middle of town as it was, there was zero screening. We’d potentially be under surveillance as soon as we pulled up. Which meant we had to go in fast. Stealth was effectively off the table.
I didn’t like it in planning, and I didn’t like it any more sitting in the dark in the back of the windowless cargo van that Joe Ventner himself was driving. In the middle of town, within spitting distance of DC itself, too far from any of the sporadic riots that were still going on in DC proper for them to provide any sort of smokescreen, we were more likely to run into law enforcement interference. Alexandria was big money, and with the indiscriminate and chaotic nature of the violence that was once again sweeping the nation, the rich were getting nervous.
If we’d proceeded with the rash of snatch-and-grabs that we’d initially planned for, there would have been too much chaos for the cops to zero in on any particular team. We’d stand a better chance of getting in and out before they got their shit together. Now, with only the one target, police response time was going to be a lot shorter.
It wasn’t that we weren’t capable of shooting our way out, and laying waste to any SWAT team that came after us.
I just didn’t want to. The cops weren’t the bad guys.
Joe was driving because he and his boys were going to handle the transpo and outer cordon. That would leave as many of the dwindling Praetorian shooters as possible to flood the house and grounds and hopefully overwhelm whatever private security Varren had hired before anyone could get shot.
“Two minutes, Jeff!” Joe called over his shoulder.
“Roger,” I answered. There was nothing else to do, really. We were packed into the back of the van, already in full kit, helmets on, rifles slung and pointed at the floor.
Two minutes later, the van lurched to a stop, and I reached out and threw the back doors open before spilling out onto the street.
“Spilling” was damned near the right word, too. Joe had parked facing uphill, so getting out the back was a bit of a drop.
We weren’t on the back of the property; there was only a fence there that we’d have to climb over, wasting time and exposing ourselves for too long. But there were two gates through the brick and wrought iron fence on the north side of the property. And Joe had parked us right in front of them.
Larry was lugging the battering ram, a three-foot black pipe filled with cement with two handles on it. He hit the ground running, between me and Alek, who were similarly sprinting to either side of the gate to cover up and down the street, while the rest of the stack ran to get behind Larry.
All three hundred seventy-five pounds of man, gear, and ram hit the gate behind the six-inch head of the breaching tool. Needless to say, the gate latch had not been designed to withstand that. The gate nearly came apart under the assault, the splintered remains flapping aside as Nick led the way in.
Nick and the rest of the stack didn’t even slow down. Neither did Larry; he wasn’t done with that ram yet, and he fell in behind Bryan, huffing and puffing a little. Running never would be Larry’s favorite thing to do, even if he got to smash a door open at the end of it. Alek and I swung in behind him as the Ventner shooters took up the outer cordon on the street.