His eyes locked onto the sexy sashay of her hips as she breezed past him.
She went through the door and disappeared in a flash.
“An amazing creature, isn’t she?” Blake asked his guest.
“Yes. Yes, she is,” Rawlings said with a stammer, swallowing hard as a fleshy bulge raced down his gullet. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them, swaying in the seat.
“It helps if you keep your eyes closed or stare at the end of your nose,” Blake said, waiting to see if the man’s color would improve. It didn’t.
“I’ll be fine,” the man said, taking in a long breath. “Let’s stay on point.”
Blake knew from experience when a commanding officer used that tone, he was about to either rip you a new asshole for a recent failure or ask the impossible. If the latter, it usually meant sending in a squad on a high-risk assignment.
“Director Wiggins said you needed to speak with me. What can I do for you today, General?”
“I understand you have a tactical unit stationed near Wilmington.”
“Yes, an Alpha-1 assault team. Bruce Tanner is the field commander. Recently promoted. Good man.”
Rawlings leaned forward slightly and let out a shallow burp, then narrowed his eyes as they found their way to Blake. “We need Nighthawk to bring in a former operator of ours from a farm in Lancaster County.”
“Who’s the target?”
“Simon Redfall.”
“As in Tessa Redfall? The convicted terrorist?”
“Let me assure you, she was no terrorist. And he’s no target. In fact, this is a simple meet–and-greet to determine if he’ll agree to come in and help us with another, more pressing matter.”
“I suppose we can handle that,” Blake said in a curious tone. He wondered why his company was being sent on such a mundane mission.
“Look, I know your company’s reputation, Anderchuck. I don’t need your men going in hot and escalating tensions. These are American civilians and I need them treated as such. They have rights and there’s to be no collateral damage. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, General. Perfectly. But I’m sure you realize my men are usually tasked with more specific missions. Those with a clear objective and authorization to engage. Don’t you have your own men for a simple recovery like this?”
“We do, but Director Wiggins and I want this handled off-book. This is a private matter and we need it done quietly and efficiently. Can I count on your complete discretion?”
“Certainly. Whatever you need. NSG stands at the ready to assist,” Blake answered, hearing the roar of a jet fly by.
The walls shook and so did the floor panels, indicating the plane was flying low.
CHAPTER THREE
Zeke Olsen sat forward in the desk chair of the safe house, leaning in to gaze at the wall-mounted view screen with a tighter focus. An ocean scene was playing on it, showing a boat in the distance.
His recluse of a boss, Vito Indigo, continued the discussion across the video line. “See that yacht?”
“Damn, it’s huge!” Zeke answered, marveling at the size of the vessel.
“That’s the Octopus. I sold it recently for 200 million.”
“Wow, it’s a beauty,” he answered, watching the video feed change, banking left as Indigo’s plane swung around for another pass above the white-capped seascape. When the jet flew closer, the screen zoomed in to show a swatch of topless girls lying on deck, their bodies tanned and breasts perfect.
“Damn,” he said, fumbling his thoughts and his words as his brain tried to process the stunning vision.
“Not how I chose to spend my days at sea when I owned her, but I guess to each their own,” Indigo said.
“Who owns it now, boss?”
“Blake Anderchuck. CEO of Nighthawk.”
“Seriously? He can afford 200 million?”
“That’s only a drop in the bucket when you’re the go-to guy for the DOD. Their contracts offer endless cash flow with little accountability.”
Zeke appreciated the history lesson but wasn’t sure where Vito was going with this expose. Indigo rarely spent time on frivolities, meaning there was a specific business purpose behind this conversation. “Can I ask why you’re showing me this?”
“Hold on,” Vito said as the display changed to show the rear of the boat. “Recognize that?”
“Yeah, looks like the Coast Guard. What is this, some kind of drug bust? Are they going to impound the boat?” Zeke asked, figuring Vito might be thinking about buying the boat back at government auction.
“No, actually it’s our government conspiring with a contractor.”
“To what end, sir?”
“Domestic security. Illegal domestic security, to be exact. Something that should never be allowed, under any circumstances. This country was founded on a set of core principles. Principles that America’s forefathers felt to be so damn important that they used them as the chief cornerstones of the budding nation. If the government chooses to ignore the Constitution’s core values and beliefs, then everything that makes this country great will slowly erode until it disappears into the sands of time. Americans will become no different than the Neanderthals who occupied this planet long before modern civilization rose to prominence.”
Zeke was impressed by Vito’s eloquence and sudden flush of patriotism.
Indigo continued with more power in his voice. “Mark my words, Zeke. Someday soon, historians will look back and point to a single man and his desire to be king. They’ll scour the actions taken by Obama during his two terms as president and ultimately declare that the barrage of executive orders he signed in 2016 was the tipping point. Not just for the United States, but for the world. Executive orders which, by their very nature, bypass Congress and the Constitution. His power-grabbing end run has led to everything we see happening today.”
It wasn’t Zeke’s nature to question his boss, but a string of words flew from his lips before he could stop them. “How do you know they’re conspiring with a contractor?”
“I have ears and eyes everywhere. So does the NSA. Never forget that, Zeke. Someone is always watching—always. Never take your eye off the ball for a second. It can cost you everything.”
Zeke nodded, filing away his boss’ warning while the maritime visuals played on the screen in front of him. The plane screamed past the boat again before banking around for yet another pass.
“Are you planning to expose the conspiracy, boss?”
Before Vito could answer, a horrific noise came through the video link. He saw a momentary flash of red on the screen, before the camera view of the yacht changed, showing a rapid descent toward the ocean. Then the connection dropped.
“Vito!” Zeke screamed, realizing his boss’ plane had just exploded and crashed into the ocean.
* * *
General Rawlings ignored the seasickness swelling in his gut as he followed Blake Anderchuck up the stairs to the main deck, then forward to the bow. They’d just heard what sounded like an explosion, and then the girls on deck started screaming.
“Make a hole,” Anderchuck said, weaving his way through the gaggle of whimpering eye candy who were huddling together at the front of the boat, all of them still topless after their leisure time on deck was violently interrupted.
“Oh my God!” one of the girls said, crying a river of tears into the shoulder of another.
“We have to do something!” a second one said as Nate pushed his way through the herd. He found Anderchuck with his hands gripping the upper arms of the tallest blonde.
“What happened, Stacy?” Blake asked the hysterical woman, whose hands and legs were shaking.
“The jet . . . it turned and then just exploded,” she said with quivering lips and a face covered in tears. “Those poor people. What’s happening, Blake? Did someone shoot it down? Why did it explode?”
“I don’t know, Stace,” Blake answered, standing tall as she flew into his arms, pressing her bare c
hest into his, wrapping herself in his arms.
Rawlings stood next to Anderchuck, both of them gazing out at the open water.
The Coast Guard boat Reliance roared past the Octopus on the port side, powering its way through the uneven seas. Dead ahead of it, maybe a mile away, was a trail of lingering black smoke. It showed a descent trajectory that ran from the upper right part of the sky to the lower left, ending where an intense fireball was burning across the water. There were also three smaller offshoots of smoke in the sky, angling down toward the sea in random directions.
Some of the wreckage was still visible: the tip of a wing, the middle section of the fuselage, and the entire tail assembly with its aircraft registration number still visible above water. Each piece was bobbing like an abandoned buoy.
“Do you think anyone survived?” Stacey asked Blake.
He didn’t answer and Rawlings knew why. The answer was clearly no. Not with the sea on fire and the shredded remains of the jet disappearing into the depths below.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Just under eleven clicks remaining to Old Mill Road,” Bruce Tanner told his second–in-command, Larry Fritz, watching the man’s hands work the command vehicle’s steering wheel. The Nighthawk team was well into their unauthorized mission to recover the missing weapons and ammo, closing in on the rural address where the shipment had been delivered by UPS.
“Let’s hope we don’t run into any more accidents like the last one. We’re fortunate emergency crews weren’t on scene yet. Otherwise, someone would’ve started asking a lot of questions about our little convoy,” Fritz said, decreasing the speed of the SUV.
Tanner agreed but didn’t answer. He looked at the road ahead. It was clear. He shot his driver a firm look. “Why are we slowing?”
“Shouldn’t we stop to apply the ATF signs on our side panels?”
“Not yet, we’ll take care of that a mile out. I don’t want anyone to know an ATF assault team, albeit a fake one, is in the area. There are militia camps sprinkled all around this area and I don’t want to raise the alert level. They may not get along with each other, but I’m sure if they knew we were coming, they’d band together against a common foe—us. We need the element of surprise on our side.”
“Roger that,” the driver said, pressing on the accelerator.
Tanner’s RAC headset crackled, and a voice spoke to him in the earpiece.
It was HQ’s senior communications officer, Derek Prescott, calling on a secure frequency. “Eagle-1. Eagle-1. Eagle-1. This is Liberty Base. Eagle-1, this is Liberty Base. Over.”
“Eagle-1 here. Go ahead, Liberty Base,” Tanner answered, wondering if HQ had discovered the missing shipment as well. If so, he was screwed for not calling it in immediately.
“Tracking shows your present location in Western PA. Confirm?” Prescott asked in a terse voice.
“Affirmative. Unscheduled training op. Showing initiative. Over.”
“Need you to deploy. Immediate. Over.”
“10-4. What’s the target? Over.”
“Farmhouse on Bell Tower Lane. Sending coordinates and mission specs now. Verify.”
“Roger, stand by,” Tanner said, waiting for the vehicle’s Encrypted Action System to display the destination and orders. It did, showing the name and photo of one Simon Redfall—the disgraced CEO of their former rival, Ghost Works, LLC. He took a minute to read the mission specs and rules of engagement as they scrolled into view.
“Received and verified, Liberty Base,” Tanner said in his radio voice. “Eagle-1 is Oscar Mike. Over.”
“Copy that. Liberty Base out.”
* * *
Simon Redfall stood next to Tally Wickie, aka Wicks, as they both watched the young genius, G, work the virtual keyboard like a magician. The hands of the computer whiz were moving so quickly Simon couldn’t follow the entries—not that he had the technical expertise to understand what the kid was doing anyway.
G and the rest of the younger generation called the new virtual interface “twipping,” but the movements looked like something else entirely to Simon. They blended together into a visual blur, reminding him of a hummingbird’s wings in midflight, not the jerky finger motions of a teenage human being.
Yet the tech maestro wasn’t the most impressive thing Simon had seen since Wicks led him into the basement of her prepper camp in rural Pennsylvania, which she affectionately called Pandora. The cramped, poorly-lit room was the size of single car garage and was stacked with racks of blinking servers and whirring cooling fans. The equipment housed an almost endless amount of high-value intelligence data that had been stored on rugged solid state drives. G’s revolutionary software program, nicknamed Digger, had done all of the collecting.
Digger, the autonomous infiltrator-bot, had been quietly combing systems all over the planet, mostly targeting big corporate server farms, government intelligence databases and archives, and scientific research firms. Digger was busy crawling in and around their database files to sift out data related to the global conspiracy that Wicks had first mentioned in the van when they’d met. The same day Simon’s wife was executed and the same day the red rain started falling.
Simon knew that somewhere in this bank of equipment was information on his wife. A big part of him wanted to know whether Tessa was truly guilty or not, but the other part, the part filled with suffocating regret, wasn’t going to allow it.
Knowing or not knowing wasn’t going to change anything, other than to justify his own boiling hatred toward himself. She would still be dead and he would still be the asshole who did nothing to save her from a brutal murder witnessed by the entire planet on PPV.
He changed focus, wanting to drive the pain from his heart and offer something of value to the living, something he could control and something that would allow him to begin repairing the damage within his own heart.
Simon tapped G on the shoulder and waited until the kid stopped his finger twipping before he spoke.
“How long has Digger been running?” Simon asked him.
“Ever since we brought this server farm online. It’s fully automated and I’ve built in some really cool voodoo. It learns as it crawls, discovering and defeating new security protocols using a multi-block, heuristic look-ahead algorithm that I developed when I was twelve.”
“What does mean in English? You know, for those of us without a PhD in geek.”
G smiled. “It’s simple, really. Digger launches a swarm of ghost penetrator attacks from all over the planet using a host of proxy servers that Digger has already compromised. And trust me, there are millions of them—easy pickings for those with the right voodoo. Digger’s gotten into all kinds of things, even a few of the IRS’s systems. Wanna know how much money the President’s mistress made last year?”
“Not really.”
“Geez, some people are such a buzz kill.”
“You were saying?”
“I was saying . . . While the target system is busy reacting and defending with its sentry programs, Digger watches and learns, then maps the response times and defense mechanisms used, finding the weakest entry point for subsequent penetration. I call it Optimal Breach Analysis, or OBA for short.”
“That’s the English version?” Simon asked.
G rolled his eyes. “Think of it this way, Red. If a man, such as yourself, is surrounded by a gang of vigilantes in an alley and has to fight them all off at once, his back will always be turned to at least one of them, right? He can’t defend all the angles, no matter how good he is.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” he told the kid, remembering the painful beating in the alley by the NEC after his wife’s execution.
“When his back is turned, he can’t see what’s happening behind him and that makes him extremely vulnerable to blindside attacks. The same thing can be said for any firewall appliance or sentry program. It’s all about swarm intelligence and the vectoring algorithms used. That’s what Digger launches, then studies the responses for weak
ness.”
“Isn’t he amazing?” Tally asked, looking like a proud mother.
“That’s one word you could use,” Simon said with a smirk.
“Got it!” G reported. “Wyatt’s gun shipment was sent by a company called Devil Dogs Supply. Some LLC based in Prescott Valley, Arizona.”
“The United States of Arizona, my grandpa used to say. Where they still have all their gun rights,” Wicks added. “Everybody conceals and carries in the desert.”
G continued. “And the shipments were supposed to be delivered to a warehouse address in Willington.”
“How’d you find all this?” Simon asked, wanting to be sure he could rely on the young genius and the accuracy of his voodoo.
“Well, I started by jacking into the UPS shipping database to find the records that matched the tracking numbers that Wyatt gave us. All it took was a simple SQL query. That was the easy part. But after closer inspection, I noticed the last update timestamps were off on each record. They weren’t in the same numerical order like the tracking numbers, and they should’ve been. The only way that can happen is when someone changes the records after the fact, giving the changed record a newer timestamp. So, I pulled up the previous week’s database from cloud storage where UPS dumps all their backups. Inside the backup copies were the original unchanged records. Once I had them, it was easy to compare the two and spot what happened.”
“Which was?” Simon asked.
“Someone with Super User access went in and changed the shipping records to redirect the shipment to Wyatt’s compound. It never ceases to amaze me . . . hackers always forget about the backups. Gotta change both sets of copies to fully cover your tracks. Stupid dumbasses.”
“Nice work, G.”
“But that’s not all. The same Super User also changed a bunch of other shipments from Devil Dogs, routing them to locations all around the country, including our friends in York County.”
“Which friends?” Wicks asked.
“The ones you hate the most,” G said.
Redfall: Freedom Fighters (American Prepper Series Book 2) Page 2