“Our bullets are full metal jackets,” he said. “The lead lining can’t be too thick because otherwise the trucks would be too heavy to move. So, yeah, our bullets could probably penetrate the lining.”
“Not good news.” Honor tapped them both on the arm. “Shoot at people, not at the truck cargo areas.”
Jacko cut the engine and rolled to a stop, smoothly and silently. They were alongside the wall surrounding the compound. The drones had mapped the system of security cameras and cones of vision and had even mapped them a route without security cams to a position along the wall that was a dead zone.
The system had also measured the height of the wall. Ten feet.
Doable.
Joe and Jacko got out, quietly. Jacko had cut the lights so they didn’t come on when the doors opened.
Matt exchanged glances with Honor, not knowing what to say. He was conflicted, something he’d never experienced when going into battle. He was always one with the mission, except for now.
Honor lay her hand on his, pressed her cheek against his and whispered, so lightly it couldn’t have been heard from a foot away. “Go make this right. Save my father.”
He pulled back. Her face with taut with tension but no trace of anything but strong purpose. He nodded, she nodded back, and with that his head was back in the game.
He was where he was comfortable being. Getting ready to stop something awful, with the best guys in the world by his side. If it could be done, they’d do it.
Outside, with all the street lights along the road killed, it was pitch black. In one coordinated movement, Matt, Joe and Jacko pulled down the night vision eyepiece affixed to their helmets and the world lit up in a soupy green.
Without a word exchanged, they lined up against the wall. Jacko pulled back the sleeve of his jacket and showed them the small wearable, flexible computer that was more advanced than the ones that had just rolled out in the SpecOps community. With a tap, it showed the bird’s eye view from the drones in that flat green watery light of night vision.
The ten trucks and the SUV pulled into the warehouse and the big doors closed. They could hear the faint clank of the doors closing. There was no one outside the building, everyone was inside.
Joe and Matt looked at Jacko and without a word exchanged, he tapped an icon and the screen showing the drone feed switched from night vision to infrared. Emptiness outside the warehouse, heat signatures inside. The back of the trucks showed as utterly black. One half of the warehouse showed as utterly black. Probably lead-lined.
An opening in the wall separating the two parts of the warehouse appeared. The trucks drove single file into the black back part of the warehouse and the opening disappeared. The drivers didn’t come back out.
Matt pointed at his eyes then at the small screen.
Cameras?
The drones were able to discern videocameras in the vicinity via RF detectors. On the screen, there were four security cams, all outward looking, two in front, two in back. Not good security, but then they obviously thought they didn’t need it. The cameras’ footprints were well away from where they were and where their SUV was.
Okay, there was nobody on the other side of the wall. Now was the time.
Matt allowed himself one brief look at the SUV, knowing Honor was in there, but not knowing if he’d ever see her again … a hard punch to his shoulder and he looked back at Jacko’s pissed-off face and one squinting eye.
He held his hands up — okay, okay. Head back in the game.
Joe had the mini grappling hook out from his backpack and tossed it up to the top of the wall. It held. He tugged and started climbing immediately. In a second, he’d disappeared over the top. If there had been any problems on the other side, he’d have tapped the comms unit twice. But there was silence.
Matt went up next, rolled over the top and dropped easily on the other side. Jacko dropped silently next to him. For a heavy guy, Jacko could be eerily quiet. His wife, Lauren, complained often about that. She’d turn around and there he’d be. Right next to her and she hadn’t heard a thing.
Jacko lifted his forearm and they looked at the flexible screen with the non-reflective surface. Okay, so the ten trucks had been driven into the back section of the warehouse that was dark to them. The four men in hazmat suits had disappeared into the back of the warehouse, too. When the internal doors closed, it was as if they had gone into another dimension. Disappeared.
Seven men milled around in the unshielded section of the warehouse. The others had all gone into the shielded and hidden portion.
Matt had no idea what was being done in the hidden part of the warehouse, but it couldn’t be anything good.
He pulled a small device from his backpack and, crouching to make the smallest target possible, made it to the side of the warehouse. The unshielded half. The device had a small suction cup and he attached it to the wall. One click and they were in. It was a sound amplifier. Matt programmed it to broadcast to the three of them. If it all went to shit he didn’t want Honor to know. She had to stay put, no matter what.
If he, Jacko and Joe died, there was still help on the way and they would find Honor, hunkered down but safe and alive, in their vehicle.
One voice was giving orders in Russian. All three of them had basic Russian, and anyway what was being said wasn’t a lesson in philosophy. The man was giving orders to prepare for when ‘the mixing’ was done.
The mixing?
He looked at Joe and Jacko. Both shrugged.
“Speak English, damn it,” another voice said and every cell in Matt’s body surged in loathing. The voice of the man he hated most in the world. Lee Chamness.
Joe and Jacko noticed his change in body language. “Chamness,” he whispered and both nodded. Everything was being recorded. Excellent. From this moment on, Lee Chamness was royally fucked. They might all three die, but there would be forensic evidence that Chamness had had a hand in smuggling radioactive material into the United States, was cooperating with Russian agents, was conspiring against the United States.
Was a fucking traitor and a terrorist.
Not matter what, Matt won. He might lose his life but Chamness would never draw a free breath again.
A strong hot surge of strength swelled through him. He realized in one lightning bolt of awareness how much Chamness had cost him. How much the Other Than Honorable discharge had cost him. It had cost him his honor, but more than that, it had cost Matt his faith in how the world worked.
The world was fucked up, no one knew that better than Matt. But in the end, justice prevailed because it had to prevail, like the second part of a fucking equation. The second part of that equation had been missing, but here it was.
Chamness and whoever he was working with were going down.
He sent Felicity a text. This is Lee Chamness. She’d understand. He opened a satellite link between their comms and HQ. From now on everything was going to be recorded centrally, too.
They might die. He might die. But justice would move forward.
It was all he’d ever wanted. That his life serve for something good. Of course it was ironic that he was walking into a situation where if a bullet didn’t catch him, radiation might, just as he’d found the woman of his dreams.
Shitty luck. But it was what it was.
So, Chamness said, read this out. On the screen, a figure limned in red with trailing wisps when it moved handed something to another figure limned in red. The red was the heat they gave off.
One of the red figures bowed his head. “I, Simon Thomas, owner and CEO of Quest Line Shipping —”
Holy shit! That was Honor’s father! He was being forced to read out something.
Thomas lowered whatever he was holding in his hand. “I’m not reading this crap. No way.”
“Remember we have your daughter, Thomas. Lovely woman. As they say, be a shame if anything happened to her.”
Thomas threw something that fluttered to the floor. It lost the heat from hi
s hand as it fell to the ground and disappeared from the screen. “My daughter is dead and you know it! There’s no way —”
“Chamness.” One of the red figures standing against the wall stepped forward. He was tall, taller even than Lee Chamness, who was as tall as Matt himself. “They are ready with the agitators.”
Matt looked at Joe and Jacko. The agitators?
“Proceed.” They heard a buzz and Chamness picked up a cell. “Yeah. Yeah? Let me see.” He looked at what was in his hand, stared at it. “Excellent. Perfect. Bring it in.”
Don’t break comms silence, Matt had said, and Joe and Jacko had nodded. Military speak for don’t interrupt us, don’t say anything at all. Made sense. They had to operate with split-second timing if they were to prevail and any kind of distraction could mean the difference between life or death.
So Honor kept her hand well away from her ear, didn’t tap on anything, just waited. It was awful, exactly like when the team at the hospital was waiting for the victims of the school shootings to arrive. Knowing something horrible was coming but there was nothing you could do about it until it arrived.
This was just like that. Matt and Joe and Jacko knew what they were doing but she had no idea how many men were in the warehouse. What kind of enemy forces they were facing. And the men in the warehouse were all surely armed, and surely ready for violence. Never a good combo.
The vehicle was a cozy cocoon, completely soundproofed. She could have been on a comfortable desert island for all she knew about what was happening in the outside world.
God, waiting and hoping for the best was just not in her nature. She was designed by nature to act. To help. And she’d worked long and hard to have the tools and the knowledge to do it. But how could she help those brave men? Just climbing up that wall was daunting. She couldn’t even see the thin rope they had used, though she knew it was there.
She’d watched as they’d climbed up that rope as easily as you walk up a slight incline. Right there, that was something she didn’t know if she could do. And even if she made it to the top, with a lot of grunting and groaning, she couldn’t do what they’d done. They’d just easily rolled over the top and disappeared. God. What did they do — jump? That wall was high. If she tried to jump it, it was entirely possible she’d sprain or break an ankle and then where would they be?
No. Much as she’d like to help, much as she longed to help, this wasn’t her wheelhouse, these weren’t her skills. Though she hoped with all her heart that her particular skills wouldn’t be needed. It would mean that one of them, or all of them, were broken.
God, she was so tired of fixing broken people. Patching wounds, preparing broken limbs for surgery, tying off tourniquets. And those were the good cases. The ones that were caused by life, though a lot of accidents were results of sheer stupidity.
The emergency room was filled with contenders for the Darwin Awards. The man who’d driven a golf cart right onto the interstate, on a drunken bet. The bungee jumper who hadn’t checked the bungee cord. The kid who’d drunk bleach to make his teeth whiter.
Those were bad but bearable.
It was the other cases — the drug overdoses, the victims of abuse, the suicide attempts … those were just sad and hopeless and broke her heart, over and over again.
She’d become a doctor to save lives and she did, every day. But more and more she was thinking that she’d like to save lives upstream, not at the very last minute. Keep people alive and healthy rather than catch them when they were broken and almost dead.
She’d been asked a number of times if she wanted to join a family practice with colleagues she liked and respected. She’d been to the small-scale clinic a number of times and loved the calm, friendly, healing atmosphere there. Very tempting …
She shot to attention. What was that? A shadow moving in the shadows …
Suddenly, there was a pop on the SUV’s bodywork, right beside her, the door was wrenched open and before she could fall to the ground a big hand grabbed her by the throat and pulled her out of the vehicle. Her legs tangled over the high threshold, cracking her ankle and knee painfully. She thrashed, trying to hit out at the dark form that loomed in the night, but she didn’t even reach him. He loosened the straps of her helmet and then the Velcro tabs of the body armor.
There were two of them. In desperation, she tried to reach the comms unit in her ear, but the other man saw what she was aiming for. Digging into her ear with a gloved forefinger, he pulled out the unit, inspected it, then tossed it to the ground where he stomped on it with his boot heel.
Honor was on her own with two armed men, no body armor and no way to contact Matt.
Ten mikes out, a voice said and Matt looked at his teammates in relief.
God. The cavalry, ten minutes out. Metal and someone from Black Inc were coordinating. Though there wasn’t a NEST team coming, the FBI HRT out of the LA office, the LAPD Special Operations Support Division and a SWAT team would be here in ten minutes. They would surround the building and negotiate a surrender.
Whatever else he was, Lee Chamness wasn’t a wild-eyed crazy terrorist. Matt knew that Chamness was cool and greedy. He wasn’t about to lose his life in a hail of gunfire. He’d lawyer up and try to weasel his way out of it.
Maybe he could get away with life.
Matt didn’t give a fuck what happened to him as long as he got put away. And as long as Honor’s father lived through this. They’d try to use him as a bargaining chip so they wouldn’t smoke the guy. He hoped.
“Remember we’ve got a civilian in there. We’re sending you a photo so you don’t shoot him. Everyone else is fair game,” he whispered, nodding at Jacko to send a photo of Honor’s dad.
“Roger that,” said a dry voice, the sound of the whap-whap of a helo rotor in the background. “But we try not to get anyone dead. We try to get the bad guys into court, not into the ground.”
Eight minutes.
“Roger, out.” Matt switched comms from the link with the FBI and LAPD to the link with the sound amplifier.
The Russian dude was giving orders to hurry something along and Chamness was trying to get Honor’s father to read out a confession.
Oh, man, it was going to be fun watching the FBI arrest Chamness. Smuggling radioactive material with an intent to poison the water system of Los Angeles was about as big a federal crime as there was. None bigger. You’d probably have to kill a Senator to match it. And people didn’t love Senators the way they loved Hollywood.
And when the FBI agents discovered that Chamness was former CIA … there was no love lost between the two agencies. They’d handle Chamness worse than the head of a drug cartel. They would throw the book at him and they wouldn’t be gentle.
That warmed Matt’s heart. That would be something to celebrate.
Oh fuck yeah. Honor was going to want to make sure her dad was okay, and there would be a lot of depositions to give, and it would take all day but afterward, tomorrow night — no tonight, since it was already tomorrow — he was going to book them both into the Chateau Marmont and they were going to have a romantic dinner and then —
And then Matt’s evening went to shit.
“See, Simon,” Chamness said. “Your daughter’s not dead, after all. But she will be if you don’t read that confession into the camera.”
“Daddy?” Honor said, her voice shaking.
Honor reached her hand out to her father, but the iron hand clamping down on her shoulder stopped her from moving an inch.
“Honor!” Simon Thomas’s voice quavered. He’d aged twenty years since she’d last seen him. His face was paper white, the skin falling off his jowls, eyes red-rimmed and hollow. “Baby girl! Are you all right?”
If she could have, she’d have smiled. Her father hadn’t called her baby girl for twenty years.
She nodded. No, of course she wasn’t all right, but she was alive, and so was he, and that was something.
She looked around. They were in a hangar of some kind, o
ne wall completely blocked off. There was highly radioactive material behind that wall.
A cold metal circle touched her temple. Another strong male hand clamping her shoulder. This one belonged to Lee Chamness, her father’s erstwhile partner. He bent down to nuzzle her cheek in a horrible parody of affection.
“She’s not dead, Simon, as you can see. But she will be if you don’t finish reading that confession into the camera. And sell it, because it takes four pounds of pressure to pull this trigger. Less than it takes to pop open a beer can. And we’re in a little bit of a time crunch, here.”
Her father was sitting on a stool, looking dazed. A small camera on a tripod was situated
Her father bent slowly to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and scanned it. The paper shook in his hands.
Honor couldn’t tell if he was faking the whole body tremors or not. It didn’t matter because he was buying them time.
Where was Matt? Matt and Joe and Jacko?
Lee Chamness lifted the gun from her head and pointed it downwards. Honor glanced up and saw the man as he really was. A monster. Cold and cruel, not the affable businessman her father had described. The skin was stretched tautly over his cheekbones and his voice when he spoke was icy and emotionless.
“Simon, I’m not going to ask again. And I won’t kill Honor right away. I will shoot her in the knee and then I will shoot her hand off. She’s a doctor. She can’t function as a one-handed cripple. But if you make me shoot her in the knee and shoot her hand off, the next bullet will end her life. Not without her suffering a great deal. We can manage without your confession, but it would make our life easier. So you have five seconds to decide whether to end your daughter’s life. Five … four … three …”
Honor knew exactly what a blown-out knee looked like. What it would be like to have a bullet take off her hand. She was shaking and sweating and terrified.
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 24