by Michael Todd
The half-hour ride felt like it would go on forever, but they finally lost altitude and dropped over the sand dunes to what was the tail end of the construction of the massive walls meant to keep the Zoo contained.
He returned every salute offered to him by the men waiting near the helicopter. One of them shouted details about the situation. Team Six had checked in when they left their vehicles and now approached the enemy camp on foot. They could have made it there without much hassle, and considering how outgunned the bounty hunters were, it only seemed fair to give them fair warning of the amount of shit that headed their way.
But no. The bigwigs back in Washington wanted to test the suits’ capabilities while used in a stealth operation too, and since all the other tests would involve killing the Zoo’s animals like fucking trophy hunters, this was the only chance that they would get.
Let’s get this over with. Amanda, his wife, had a nice roast waiting for him back home, which he could eat while he watched the game. Amanda was a bigger Eagles fan than he was, and she’d made sure to instill the fervor in their two sons too. That was something to look forward to. Run the op, make it look good so that the lobbyists had something to sell come next quarter, and get all his boys back home safely.
He could focus. For them, he could do this.
The colonel stepped out of the temporary landing platform and the soldiers led him through the site, the lieutenant assistant close behind him. Anderson’s keen eyes studied the area’s defenses. They weren’t set up to fend off a real attack by a coordinated team—heavy on the artillery, with a couple of what he could only describe as anti-aircraft guns aimed in the direction of the Zoo along with five machine gun nests. It was crowd control intended to deal with the masses of animals that he was told threw themselves at the fences on a daily basis.
The soldier in him protested and he shook his head. By comparison, the side facing away from the Zoo only had a guard tower which housed a single man with a sniper rifle. Granted, another wall was being built in that direction, but if anyone had a mind to sabotage the construction, it wouldn’t be difficult to infiltrate the sites. Maybe some explosives, a few mines set up near the actual construction, and that would stop the building for months.
He smirked. It wasn’t like anybody was stupid enough to actually do that. From what he’d been told, the whole world needed the Zoo to be contained within the Sahara, so maybe the crowd-centric defenses were the right way to go.
But old habits died hard, and his years conducting and operating in black sites had ingrained the need to study any fortified position and immediately identify weak spots. He couldn’t help it. It was almost a part of his DNA by this point.
The colonel entered one of the buildings near the wall itself, where the men who escorted him snapped salutes before they returned to their posts. He half-heartedly offered one of his own before he stepped into the building and closed the door behind him.
The darkness inside was almost as stark as the brightness outside. Anderson had to blink a few times to adjust to the situation. This was all off the books, of course, hence the cloak and dagger behavior, and it had to look like this place was merely another part of the construction site.
A handful of scientists were already inside with their eyes focused on over a dozen screens. There was one for each operative’s HUD, as well as a couple that monitored the status of each man and the power armor he wore. Anderson rubbed the bridge of his nose and already regretted the decision to wear his contacts today instead of glasses.
“Colonel Anderson,” the lead scientist said with a small, professional smile as he offered a pudgy hand. “I’m so glad you could join us.”
“The pleasure’s all mine, Dr. Bial,” Anderson lied and his gaze flickered over the screens. The scientist offered him a headset. He took it without a word and listened to the status checks that were required for this mission.
So much bullshit.
“Okay, Team Six,” he commanded over his comms as he folded his arms in front of his chest. “Let’s give these suits a stress test. Get a jog going and try to cut the arrival time down, over.”
“Roger that, Falcon,” came the voice of Red Leader. “Beginning stress tests, over.”
Chapter Six
His gaze remained fixed on the screens. The brightness of the desert glared in the shared HUDs in stark contrast to the clear darkness of the room. Little was said during the time it took for the men to trek through the desert. There were a couple of false alarms, but as Anderson neither heard nor saw anything himself, he wasn’t surprised when they kept moving.
Ever since he’d been given his wings, he’d been expected to run these operations rather than take part in them, and that felt wrong. He knew that he wasn’t psychologically cleared for active duty, which was why his superior had put him on the bench, as it were. The US government had put the better part of three million dollars into transforming him into an efficient killing machine, and even though he couldn’t perform in the same function, he knew that they wouldn’t allow his talent to go to waste.
Anderson smirked and watched the team’s progress. One of the screens showed the various GPS markers over a topographical map of the area. His specialty had always been colder climes involving mountains and snow for the most part, but from what he remembered from a conference over a decade ago that he’d attended on the subject, maps of deserts like the Sahara changed from day to day. That added to the fact that their intel on the location of this bounty hunter camp was three days old meant that they had sent out a group of highly trained men in top-of-the-line armor on intelligence that could be twelve hours out of date, for all he knew.
Fucking bullshit. What did these million-dollar-a-year CEOs know about running a real op? Didn’t they know that properly acquired intel was almost ninety percent of the job?
No, of course they didn’t. They’d played video games that told them that wherever a good guy showed up, bad guys would automatically spawn to stop them. Or try to, anyway.
He shook his head again.
Less than an hour into the operation, Red Leader raised his hand and closed it slowly into a fist. Anderson narrowed his eyes and made a note to ask if there was a problem with coordination while wearing the suits. Power armor was reactionary and acted in a split second to augment any movement made by the wearer. No matter how advanced—until some egghead figured out how to make an AI that could read minds or predict the future—there would always be lag. Sure, it had been shaved down to milliseconds, but when bullets flew at over a thousand meters per second, milliseconds counted.
Besides, you had to train your body to coordinate with half-ton armor that moved a fraction of a second after you wanted it to.
Anderson made a note to bring up the coordination issue with the developers. He wasn’t sure if it was a software or hardware problem, but it was a problem, even if the boys out there handled it admirably. That was what they were trained for, above all else. Adapt to adverse situations and constantly push forward.
The colonel scratched his chin as the troop split into the three four-man teams. Each would conduct the three stages of the operation, and for it to go right, they’d need to run those stages within seconds of each other. Otherwise, they would handle almost a hundred occupants of the bounty hunter camp without back-up.
Green Team stayed behind, and their long-range programs picked up and connected to their specialized rifles. No conversation issued over the comms. None was needed. The men with the long-range scopes highlighted the men in the watchtowers that surrounded the camp. There were crowd-control measures in place that told Anderson that they had problems with the animals from the Zoo, but they were a lot more careful with their security.
Apparently, a place that dealt with most of the lowlifes and bottom-feeders that seemed to gravitate to Africa had left them paranoid. There were at least a dozen guard towers and all sported snipers and machine gun nests. Anderson scratched his chin again as the snipers marked off th
e various guardsmen.
His gaze traced the members of Blue Team as they headed toward the encampment. They moved smoothly and the camouflage programs worked well enough, but these new suits were too big and too heavy to be effective covert tools. They were…heavy armor, at best.
“Green Team in position,” came the call.
“Blue Team in position,” came the second call.
“Roger that,” came the call from Red Team leader. “Awaiting your countdown, Green Team.”
“Roger that. Countdown commencing,” Green Team leader said and kept his voice soft even though the helmets they wore were supposed to isolate their voices from the outside world. Three targets were highlighted, the pair of snipers and the machine gunner on the southernmost tower. A fourth guard who patrolled the area was also picked up.
“Clear to engage, Green Team,” Anderson confirmed.
“Roger that, Falcon,” Green Team leader responded. Four pops sounded in succession. They followed one another so quickly that they might have been the same shot but, like puppets who’d had their strings cut, all four men dropped.
Anderson knew that CEOs would try to claim that there was a coordination system in the suits, but that was stone-cold training and nothing in the world would convince him otherwise.
The other two teams didn’t need his word to follow up. They breached the barbed-wire fence in seconds and quickly infiltrated the camp.
He smirked. This was bullshit but when he watched the work of men he trusted to do what they did best, it brought a smile to his face every damn time.
The bar was open at all hours and it was business as usual when they arrived there mid-morning on the following day. Sal wondered how they managed that. He’d never worked in a service job before, all things considered. Still, he knew people who did, and they were adamant that twenty-four-hour places were the worst to work in. No closing hours meant having to deal with customers at all hours and at all times.
He shook his head, sure that these people had figured the schedule out. It wasn’t like this was a seven-eleven outside a campus. This was a bar in the middle of a military base. They had to be better at people and time management than those places.
That simple assumption made sense. He knew that enough money was dropped on this place to allow the owner to hire enough staff for all hours of the day or night.
It was good business management. Men and women who put their lives on the line on a daily basis did need liquid courage to go out there and face it again. It was the cost when the cutting edge of science was this sharp.
“Or rather, when the cutting edge of science is on you,” Sal remembered saying to Kennedy one time when they’d been alone at his apartment. It hadn’t been a popular joke, especially when he did it with a Russian accent. It had been even less popular when he tried explaining the joke to her and she told him that she got it. She’d rolled her eyes and he’d simply stopped and moved on. Take the loss, learn, and don’t repeat.
It wasn’t a great joke. He had a weird sense of humor so he’d liked it, and each time his mind went back to it, he always ended up with a private chuckle.
Which was exactly what happened this time, and Kennedy narrowed her eyes at him as she took a sip from her lager.
“Are you thinking about that joke again?” she asked.
“You know it,” Sal said with a grin and toyed with his own pint glass. He still wasn’t that much of a drinker. His mind worked at odd hours, and he was always careful not to hinder that. He had good ideas all the time and was usually smart enough to put them down with pen and paper. If he was drunk, he was more likely to forget. And since his income was essentially based on what his brain was capable of, he had to take good care of it.
“I know, I know,” he said as she fixed him with an unrelenting stare. “It’s a stupid joke. I think it’s funny, okay?”
Kennedy chuckled. “It’s not stupid. Well, it is, but that doesn’t make you stupid for liking it. You have a special kind of brain is all.” Sal opened his mouth with a retort but she stopped him when she raised her hand. “The good kind of special. Like…think of it as a higher kind of funny that requires someone with a higher understanding to get?”
Sal chuckled and shook his head before he sipped his drink. “Look at you, making up bullshit to make me feel better. Nah, I’ll concede. It’s a bad joke. Like bad puns. They still make me chuckle. It’s like there’s a little kid inside me—the one that still laughs when a stuffy professor talks about the gasses in Uranus.”
Kennedy grinned, and when he narrowed his eyes, she laughed and covered her mouth since she’d just taken a sip from her beer.
“Oh, my God,” he said with a smirk. “Did you think that was funny? Did I say something stupid that you thought was funny?”
She shook her head but still laughed and tried to keep the beer in her mouth.
“Aw, you have that little kid who likes silly jokes too,” Sal said and brushed some of her brown hair behind her ear. “I’ll be sure to exploit that later.”
Kennedy finally recovered her composure and drew in a deep breath. Even in the darker lighting of the bar, Sal could see that her face was flushed.
“Oh, God,” she gasped, still trying to contain herself. “Please don’t do that to me again.”
“Deal,” he said. “So long as I get to make you say, ‘Oh God,’ for other reasons later.”
She grinned and tilted her head with a challenge in her eyes. They had been at the bar for the past couple of hours, but Sal had spent most of it getting connected with the teams that would head out into the Zoo in the near future. Over the past couple of months since they’d broken away and started to work on their own, they’d had to rely on running the jobs with others. It meant a profit split with them too, but when the alternative was to go in with only the two of them, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. The Zoo grew more and more dangerous the larger it became.
Sal realized that the flush in Kennedy’s cheeks wasn’t only from her attempt not to snort beer out her nose. She’d actually been drinking all this time.
He didn’t blame her. Despite all his personal rules, he wished he’d been drinking too.
“Look,” he said finally and glanced at his own beer, which was only half empty despite the fact that he’d nursed it over the past few hours. “I need to get back to my place. There is paperwork to do, and I think I need a nap. So…unless you call me earlier, I’ll meet up with you at three, okay?”
Kennedy nodded. “Sweet dreams. And…paperwork, I guess.”
Sal chuckled and moved to the bar where he indicated for the bartender not to serve her anything else. The man nodded and tapped his nose as Sal made his way outside.
Chapter Seven
Madigan tilted her head as she watched Sal leave. He was…different. She’d had other boyfriends before. There had been a couple of military guys, but she found that they got really defensive with her very quickly. Either that or they felt slightly emasculated by a girlfriend who was in the special forces. Actually, when she thought about it, there were a couple who hadn’t even been in the military who had felt that way. Men either reacted like that or had some sort of fetish that involved domination by a warrior woman or something along those lines.
It creeped her out. None of them saw her as Madigan. She always meant something else to them.
Sal was different. And she thought that in the best way possible. He was wrapped up in that quick-working little mind of his, and while there was sexual chemistry between them, he seemed more willing than most to let that be an isolated part of their relationship. When the sex came up, it was fun and it was good, but it never invaded the rest of what she’d come to regard as a really great friendship.
Until now. She tilted her head and stared at her glass. He’d made a sexual innuendo, and she hadn’t given him any shit for it. Maybe she had drunk too much. It was barely a quarter past midday, and she had already downed three beers. No, it took a lot more than that to get
her drunk.
Maybe she had merely adjusted to that side of their relationship. Nope, it couldn’t be that. It might be that the beers had landed in an empty stomach. She chuckled and took another long sip from the glass. Whatever the reason, she was comfortable around Sal—and more importantly, he seemed to be comfortable around her. Now that she’d come to know him and all his little oddities, that was probably the most impressive thing she’d seen all year.
Considering the year that she’d had, that was saying something. Between her visits into the Zoo and… No, that was pretty much it, but that still set the bar high. Madigan smiled as she leaned back in her seat. He was comfortable being his weird, odd self with her. For some reason, thinking that made her feel a gentle tingle in her body. Not necessarily sexual, but not necessarily…not.
She finished her drink and turned toward the bar. As she raised her hand to ask for another one, she noticed someone she recognized on one of the stools. The woman sat alone, and her short blonde hair was pulled into a tight bun. She had the look of someone just out of the Zoo, too. Madigan wasn’t sure what it was—relief mixed with exhaustion, maybe.
“Dr. Monroe?” she asked and leaned closer to her. The woman looked around, seemingly uncertain as to who might be talking to her as she nursed what Kennedy assumed was a Jack and Diet Coke. It took a few attempts before Monroe realized who was speaking and turned to look at her.
“Sergeant Kennedy,” she said with a smile and pushed off her stool. “So nice to see you again. It’s been a while.”
“It’s just Kennedy now,” Madigan said and gestured for Monroe to join her at her table. “Well, Madigan Kennedy.”
“Oh, right,” the specialist said with a chuckle as she took the seat Sal had vacated. “I heard that you had struck out solo. And doing a pretty good job of it too, if the rumors around the base are to be believed.”