by Evan Currie
“Yes.”
“Good. Go. Now, before I do something drastic to improve the blood.” She glared at him, sneering as he stumbled and fled from her sight.
When he was gone, she sank back, her face drawn and tired.
“Is it truly possible? Could Robert lose to some random gene trash?” she asked of the empty room.
“Luck favors no man,” a voice said softly from behind her, as a young man appeared from the shadows. “Even the mightiest can be felled by the lowest. You’ve told me that many times, Matriarch.”
She sighed. “Indeed, I have. So, Michael, what would you have the Clan do in this case?”
“Sending Black was perhaps a bit presumptuous, if I may say. We don’t yet know what this man is doing for the navy. Karson is not one of ours, and he holds his secrets closely,” Michael said.
“Masters knows The Black,” the old woman replied testily, “which means he has information that cannot be given to the likes of the United States, nor any government. The time is not right. The time will, by the grace of the all power, never be right.”
“Yes, but what has he told Karson? Must we eliminate Karson too? Has Karson told others? If so, who?” the man offered logically. “Must we eliminate the joint chiefs next? The president himself? If it must be done, we can do it, but we need to know. Sending assassins after that many people would require a great many preparations.”
“So you think my order to eliminate Masters was premature?”
Michael hesitated just briefly, sensing the razor’s edge in the woman’s voice, then went on. “If it wasn’t then, it would be now. He’s had time to speak with the admiral, and we cannot silence him if he has already talked.”
She smiled thinly. “Very good, Michael. Confident, assured, decisive. That is what you need to be if you are to survive as a Clan patriarch. However, you made one mistake.”
Her eyes narrowed as she turned to look at him, and he paled.
“I…I did?”
“You should have given me this council before I gave the order,” she hissed. “Thinking you would make me look the fool, were you? That if I made an error you might be elevated early?”
“N-no, Matriarch I would never…I…,” he stammered out, losing his composure entirely as the woman got up and slowly advanced on him.
When she was within arm’s reach, her hand slashed out, blindingly fast, only to land on his cheek in a gentle caress.
“I know, Michael. You didn’t consider it at the time, nor did I.” She smiled; then that edge appeared in her eyes again. “In the future, however, I warn you to take care how you present your ideas. Not every matriarch would be as understanding, and almost none of the patriarchs would consider your inexperience as a reason or an excuse.”
“Y-yes, Matriarch.”
“You have much to learn, but don’t fret so much, child. I am far from ready to give you up as a cause lost.”
“Thank you, Matriarch.”
CHAPTER 8
BARROW, ALASKA
The Gulfstream banked as it circled the town below, lights shining up at them through the darkness.
“That place is lit up like a Christmas tree,” Alex said from his window seat. “You sure there’s anything wrong down there?”
“No contact from the guard unit, the troopers, or the air-traffic controllers,” Masters replied dryly. “Yeah, something’s wrong.”
“Are we putting this sucker down, or are we jumping?” Nathan Hale asked from farther back, not bothering to look out the window. Lights in the darkness or not, he just wanted to get boots on the ground.
“Jumping?” Alex snapped up. “Whoa. No one said anything about jumping.”
Eddie Rankin chuckled behind him. “Is the all powerful Oz afraid of heights?”
“No, the all powerful Oz is afraid of slamming into the ground at terminal velocity!” Alex hissed. “Do I look like The White to you?”
Masters watched as most of the others exchanged confused looks, but now wasn’t the time to delve into the meaning of that question.
“Calm down, Alex. Your little problem with heights aside, I’m afraid we are going to have to jump in.”
Alex paled, but collapsed back into his seat rather than making any further complaints.
“This is going to be a HAHO, high-altitude, high-opening jump. That means we’ll use breathing gear, and we need to exercise careful control coming in,” he told them. “Captain Andrews, are you jump qualified?”
“Yes, but not for HAHO,” she answered, grimacing.
“Fine, you’ll fly with me,” he told her. “Rankin, you take Alex. The rest of you know the drill. Nathan, I want you to pick your spot and stake it out. Make sure you have a good vantage point — you’ll be our overwatch on this.”
“Works better with a spotter,” the sniper replied, raising an eyebrow. “Not to mention at least one other team to cover blind spots.”
“I know, but we’ll work with what we have,” Masters told him. “Everyone else, stay together. We need to pick a landing zone we can clear and control in a hurry.”
“Water.”
Everyone looked over at Alex, who was still grumbling.
“Pardon?”
“If it’s from the other side,” he said, nodding his head to the side, “water is important. Running water is best, but any moving water is a defense.”
Captain Andrews blinked, shaking her head. “What in the name of God is he talking about?”
“Water, right.” Masters nodded, thinking about it. “Assuming it’s not, you know, waterborne.”
“Obviously,” Norton drawled.
“I don’t know, I don’t like it.…” Masters ignored the sarcasm and the distraction of Andrews demanding that he pay attention to her. “There aren’t any rivers down there. We could come down between the lagoons, but it’ll be a death trap if you’re wrong. With the narrow access, we’d be bottlenecked.”
“So would they.”
“Yeah, and I’d consider that if we had the slightest idea who they are,” Masters conceded, “but we don’t. So we’re going to come down west of town, right here.”
He pointed to a location on the map he was looking at, near the beach that faced out over the Beaufort Sea. “This is far enough out of town that we shouldn’t be spotted, unless they’ve got enough men to post guards literally all over the place.”
“And if they do?” Rankin asked from over his shoulder.
“We’re fucked anyway.”
“Just checking.” The master chief sighed.
“All right,” Masters said, “suit up. I’ll tell the pilot to climb and bring us to the south. We’ll ride the prevailing wind right into town.”
“I just want to go on record as not liking this plan,” Norton said, sounding resigned.
“Tough.”
“Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re all talking about now, please?” Andrews demanded, finally finding a lull in the planning.
“Yes, actually, I would. Get your kit on. Oxygen and cold-weather gear, now,” he told her, his voice grave. “Or stay behind. Personally, I’d prefer it if you stayed behind.”
She scowled at him, but finally broke the staring match and turned to grab her kit bag.
I always wondered what it would be like to tell my superior officers to go to hell, he thought, smiling to himself as he made his way up to the pilot, and it’s even better than I imagined.
* * *
A HAHO (high altitude, high opening) jump was the counterpart of the more commonly known HALO (high altitude, low opening) jump. Requiring more skill with the parafoil and certain favorable conditions, the HAHO offered operatives several key advantages over the HALO.
Primarily, and crucially, a high opening of the parachute would completely mask the pop of the airfoil deploying, therefore allowing for an almost completely silent approach. The main drawback was that the control needed to maintain an accurate flight path over the kinds of distances involved in a HA
HO required a degree of skill that surpassed the requirements for normal precision jumps.
Additionally, if you were jumping into an enemy-controlled region, HAHO offered a way to evade surface-to-air missiles since jump rigs had extremely low radar profiles compared to aircrafts, and you could glide in from a significant distance. In this case, however, Masters was simply more concerned about his team being spotted.
When the team poured out of the Gulfstream, almost instantly losing sight of the blacked-out aircraft as they plummeted through the cold northern air toward an equally black void below them, Masters found himself thinking about how much he’d actually missed doing things like this in the years since he’d been pushed out of the SEALs.
Of course, I would have preferred not to have an extra couple hundred pounds strapped to my chest, even if a good portion of that does happen to belong to a rather good-looking female captain.
Captain Andrews was surprisingly controlled as they fell, obviously experienced enough not to throw off his balance. He knew then that she was certainly jump qualified, even if she wasn’t proficient enough to trust her skills for this sort of exercise.
After they jumped, fifteen seconds passed before he pulled the chord on his chute, the force snapping them upright. Masters checked his compass, and then guided the parafoil around to the right. Behind him he could hear the pop of someone’s chute opening, but he couldn’t be certain if it belonged to Rankin, who was right behind him, or one of the others, since he could have missed the noise if Eddie had been close enough behind his own deployment.
The lights of the town became visible again as they leveled out — a blob of familiarity against the abyss of blackness all around them — but he wasn’t aiming for the lights. He steered west of it, gliding silently through the night over the last thirty miles to the prearranged touchdown point. As they drifted lower, the ground became visible, appearing out of the abyss in a dark blur that rushed past at decidedly unhealthy speeds.
“Hang on,” he said over the rushing wind, “here comes the landing.”
Andrews tensed against his body, but otherwise didn’t say a word as he hit the risers at the last second to bleed off horizontal motion into a brief vertical climb. His stomach plummeted as they swooped low over the half-frozen mud and dirt, barely missing a chemical pool, which he could only assume was related to the nearby oil wells.
Andrews’s feet hit the dirt first, preceded by the heavy duffel bag hanging below them, and he was pleased when she took more than her fair share of the impact with flexed legs. He planted himself an instant later and hit the release on the chute so that he could twist around and start reeling the silks in. He felt Andrews unlatch herself from the harness as he did, and in moments he’d rolled up the chute and was digging a rough hole in the ground to bury it in.
He could see the shadows of the others around him as they did the same. When he was done, he rose from his knees and briefly clapped the dirt from his hands and clothes while looking around.
“What is this place?” Captain Andrews asked, breaking the silence.
“Chemical pools and a dirt quarry for the oil wells, I expect,” he said, reaching down to pick up the duffel. “Keep an eye and an ear out. Normally this place probably runs twenty-four hours a day, though I don’t know how busy it would be.”
“Doesn’t sound like there’s anyone here right now.”
“Yeah, and that worries me a little,” he admitted. “If there’s anything that would keep running, no matter what hits it, it’s a drilling operation. Time is money, and they don’t tend to care about much else. Come on, let’s round up the others.”
“Right.” She nodded, gripping her HK417 reflexively as she fell into step behind him.
The others, save for Hale, had landed within six hundred and fifty feet, so getting the team together only took a couple of minutes. They gathered together, perching on a dirt berm that had been piled up by construction equipment, and looked toward the town to the east of them with some interest.
“Damn. Nothing. I’ve got nothing,” Masters said finally. “You guys?”
Keyz shook his head. “From what I saw on the way down, the whole place looks dead, ’cept for the lights. Thing is, boss, it’s a small town, and it’s nighttime, right? That could be normal?”
“Normal?” Norton scoffed. “Am I the only one who sees that fire burning over there? Someone should be putting it out.”
“Good point,” the explosives expert conceded.
“No one sees any sort of guards, patrols, whatever?” Masters asked, overriding the conversation.
“Negative.”
He nodded, accepting the consensus before thumbing his throat mic. “Hale. Report.”
* * *
Nathan finished cutting himself loose, roughly folding the silks up into a pad that he unceremoniously wrestled his kit bag onto. The school rooftop he’d chosen to land on wasn’t the best spot he could have hoped for, but unfortunately the area didn’t have many high-ground spots with decent cover, so he’d chosen the best of a bad lot.
He unpacked his Barrett M82-A1, special-application scoped rifle (SASR), which he fondly called Sassy, smoothly unfolding the bipod and settling it down along the building’s peak as he lay prone on his chute. He flipped open the caps protecting his scope optics, and when he peered through it and into the apparently deserted small town, the darkness was transformed to a grainy green daylight.
“Hale. Report.”
Nathan casually reached up and flicked open his comm, speaking softly but clearly into the throat mic.
“I’m down and in position. Town’s deserted,” he said. Then he rested his rifle on the roof as he pulled a pair of light-intensifier binoculars from his kit, using them to scan the area. “Guard C-130 is still on the strip. Looks intact. No movement.”
“Roger. We’re coming your way. Maintain position and take overwatch.”
“Wilco,” Hale said. “Overwatch is mine.”
* * *
Trudging through the half-frozen muck, the team kept their pace deliberately slow as they listened for any sign of movement or machines. The massive earth berms and creepily shimmering chemical pools did nothing to set any of them at ease, but that was just fine by Masters as he led them around the tracks made by the oil company’s earth-moving machines. Nothing about this mission put him at ease, so what was one more thing on the list?
The town of Barrow was northeast of their position, and they could see the lights between the berms of earth as they moved. Like everything else about this mission, however, the silence was beginning to unnerve them.
“I’ll take any guesses you have as soon as you have them, Alex,” Masters spoke softly.
“Haven’t seen anything to change what I already said, Hawk.” Alex shook his head. “Give me something more to work with.”
“In a few more minutes, I expect you’ll have that.”
Judith Andrews frowned, her eyes darting over to Alex as they continued to move through the slushy muck. “Just what is your specialty, anyway?”
He smiled at her. “Let’s just say that I’m a real wiz in more fields than one.”
She rolled her eyes at the complete lack of information, though she didn’t miss Rankin and Masters’s carefully suppressed laughter.
They paused behind the last berm that separated them from the town, Masters checking the map under a shielded and red-filtered light.
“All right, that’s Apayauk Street there.” He nodded in the direction of a dirt-and-gravel road that had obviously seen better times — most of the team had seen better-looking cart roads in third-world countries. “There are some small houses and buildings right on the coast, just ahead. I don’t see their lights, but we’ll head there first. Clear?”
“Clear,” the others answered, save for Alex and Judith, who merely nodded.
“Let’s go.”
They broke cover and sprinted across the road, sinking past their boots in places where the freeze-
and-thaw cycles had completely chowdered the road, continuing over the embankment and onto the frozen beach, where they crossed a secondary winter road. From there, they turned toward the town again and slogged along the coast another three hundred feet until they were behind the houses that had been identified by Masters.
Resting briefly after climbing back up to the level of the town from the beach, they scanned their surroundings again, but still couldn’t find anything moving.
This time, however, a thermal scan of the closest buildings did turn up something new for them to consider.
“Heat signs in the closest building, boss,” Mack Turner pointed. “It’s well insulated, but there’s leakage around the windows.”
Masters took the thermal scope and checked the scene for himself. Mack had been right, of course, but it could just mean that the heat hadn’t been turned off. It probably did mean that, actually. Unfortunately, unlike in the movies, thermal scopes didn’t look through walls unless they were pretty much stripped of insulating properties.
Still, they’d have to clear the buildings, one by one if need be, before moving on.
“Mack, you and Derek take point,” he ordered. “Eddie, Keyz, and Andrews, you follow them in. I’ll take drag position.”
“Right.”
“Roger.”
They climbed the rest of the way up and sprinted for the building, sliding into low crouches under the closest window as the two on point kept their HK417 rifles raised to their shoulders and aimed at the window.
Rankin, Keyz, and Andrews covered the corner of the building while Masters dropped into a crouch beside Alex, who was looking rather annoyed, marginally miserable, and more than a little wet and cold.
“You okay?” Masters asked.
“I’ll live,” Alex replied in a quiet voice. “I don’t want to show off until we know what the hell is going on here.”
Masters nodded. “Right. Hang here while we clear the building.”
“I won’t argue with you on that.”
Masters crawled forward, nodded to the two point men, and gestured around the corner. They nodded in response and broke from the window as Masters took up their position, then went around the corner, ducking low as they took up positions on either side of the door.