by Lee French
Twenty minutes later, he found Stephen on the north end of the base, looking over the maps in the shade of a tent structure. Bobby passed the pack over because he wouldn’t be able to carry it himself, and they took to the air. They went up high and fast enough to not be a spectacle for people on the ground, then headed to the first site.
For the next two hours, Bobby had nothing to do but fly and think. The dragons hated it when he thought a lot. With no distractions, it happened anyway. Everything came back to Lily. She called him ‘Bas’ out of habit. She’d never kissed anyone but her late husband. Knowing that didn’t lessen the sting.
He genuinely liked her, and told her so, and she seemed to feel the same. Then she slipped and made it clear she considered him a stand-in for a dead man, allowed into her arms as a replacement. Sure, he’d more or less stepped into the Dad role for her son, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be Sebastian Thatcher, Sr., Part Two. He wanted to be a whole new movie.
He’d have to beg for her forgiveness. Often, probably. Why were they even out here, doing this? Was this what the suits were having the eleven they grabbed doing? Why did they torture him if they wanted supersoldiers? Maybe they were stupid and thought…something stupid.
What if he figured wrong? Those guys could’ve constructed the circumstances he woke up under. He imagined how it might have turned out if he woke up with someone ‘rescuing’ him from that. Until given a reason not to, he would’ve trusted that person implicitly.
Privek said “mistakes were made”. Bobby had assumed he meant the framing, the arrest, and that part. What if the ‘mistake’ had been more about not having everything ready when he woke up? They probably learned from that mistake. His thoughts turned to Jasmine and how that could be applied to her.
As much as he liked her, Jasmine wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box. A scenario took shape, where she woke up and found suits telling her things she believed, then showing her the footage from Hill. She’d nod along and agree that kind of destruction needed to be prevented in the future. They’d find a way to use Will’s unknown whereabouts to motivate her.
efore he managed to follow these ideas to more concrete suspicions and conclusions, Stephen angled downward. With the sun setting, they chose a spot in the craggy hills outside the small town they planned to assault first. The cluster of buildings surrounded on three sides by barren, rocky inclines would be rough to reach on foot or by vehicle. The fourth side must be what they used to actually come and go—it was open ground and the approach could be seen for miles.
“We’ll wait for true darkness, then drop in from above.”
Bobby re-formed and pulled out an MRE, leaning back against a rock. “Stephen, I’m starting to wonder if we’re actually working for the bad guys.”
Stephen kept his eyes on the village. He didn’t answer immediately. Bobby waited in silence, figuring he’d been thinking about other things for the past two hours. “I have a feeling that we’ll discover this isn’t about black and white so much as it is about methods and ideology. We’ve attacked and killed for our freedom. They’ve attacked and tried to kill for what seems to be a desire for control over us. It’s a pretty classic type of conflict, really—it happens over and over again throughout history. My guess is they generally see us as weapons, and the more we act like that, the more likely they are to assert we aren’t human, aren’t citizens, aren’t deserving of basic rights.”
If he wasn’t sure of it before, Bobby now knew without a doubt that Stephen had more brains than him. “I got the feeling when Privek said they made mistakes, he meant something different from what it sounded like.”
Stephen nodded. “That’s probably true. Some part of me wonders why they kept that list in that file cabinet. From what you described, it seemed like a serendipitous event, Ai finding it, but I just have to wonder if it was left there for a reason. Maybe you were supposed to find it. Maybe every file cabinet had several copies of that list distributed through the folders. Your escape could have been part of someone’s larger plan. To what end, I don’t know, but it’s a thing to consider.”
His mouth being full gave Bobby the chance to temper his initial reaction without saying something dumb. “I ain’t sure I’m up for tinfoil hat theories yet.”
Stephen grinned. “Yes, it does seem a little overly Machiavellian, doesn’t it?”
“I never heard that word before, but if it means complicated and creepy, sure.” Taking the canteen from where Stephen set it for him, he downed a few swallows of water to wash the food down. His garbage went back into the pocket he pulled the thing from in the first place. “I’m good, and it’s pretty close to dark.”
Still grinning, Stephen pointed vaguely towards the village. “How do you want to do this?”
“Well,” Bobby shrugged, “I figure I can dragon through and see what there is to see. If’n we find anything, I tell you and we go blow it all up.”
“Seems reasonable to me. I’ll see if I can come up with anything more detailed for the ‘blow it all up’ part. Given that neither of us is really exceptional at that sort of mayhem.”
“Yeah, we’re kinda more people mayhem than stuff mayhem.”
“Agreed. A shame we couldn’t bring Matthew. But, c’est la vie. I’ll come hang out over the village and wait for you there.”
“La vee.” Bobby blew into the swarm and flew with Stephen to the village. The vampire stayed a few hundred yards up while the dragons dove into the buildings, flying through in whatever way seemed least likely to get them noticed. He couldn’t micromanage them all, so he had to rely on them understanding his demand to avoid being seen.
This was the first time he’d ever dispersed the swarm so much that no central glob of dragons remained. To his surprise, his ‘mind’ didn’t automatically hitch a ride with any particular one or grouping so much as float in the center of them all.
Pushing that oddity aside, Bobby watched through their eyes, able to handle getting all of it at once. They dove in through windows and zoomed under doors, all on the lookout for any of the things Bobby considered ‘a pile of weapons’. Room after room of house after house, they kept going and going, sometimes stopping to peer at things. Half an hour later, the swarm came together around Stephen and urged him back to where they initially landed. He reformed and immediately shrugged.
“‘Less they got a different definition of ‘weapon’ than I do, there ain’t nothing here. I mean, every house’s got at least one military looking gun, but ain’t none of ‘em with more’n two or three. That don’t seem like a ‘stockpile’ to me.”
“You sure there aren’t any caves or tunnels where they might be stashed?”
“If’n they got anything like that, it’s hid pretty good. Didn’t see nothing weird, neither. These folks don’t even got ‘lectricity and running water, let alone stuff to make chemicals and stuff.”
Putting his hand up to his earpiece, Stephen said, “Cant and Mitchell reporting in at the suspected weapons depot.” He paused for a moment and rolled his eyes. “If you wanted to have some sort of code, you should have set it up before we left. … These people have personal arms, but no stockpiles or armory. They’ve actually got goats they’re actually herding. …
“That seems a bit extreme. What they do have wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in Texas. In fact, some of them might be accused of being pussies for having so few firearms.” Stephen’s face slowly went annoyed, until he looked more or less like he’d swallowed a lemon. “I believe I have a duty under the Geneva Convention to tell you to go fuck yourself, Klein. Unless you can give me some actual reason why we should attack an obviously non-military target posing no apparent threat, you can farm that job out to someone else. We don’t murder civilians for no reason.”
Bobby glanced back towards the village, able to guess what Klein wanted them to do. “I could take another look, to make sure. Or we could let them capture us.” The idea of allowing himself be taken prisoner to work the place from the
inside while he was in the middle of doing the same thing with the suits gave him a humorless smirk.
Stephen sighed. “We’ll go back in and take another look around to see if we missed anything. I’ll contact you when we’ve finished that.” He pulled the earpiece out and stuck it in his pocket. “Did either of us say something to suggest we were interested in spree killings?”
“Nope. You wanna just stay here?”
“Nah, let’s go see if there’s a welcome wagon for visitors new to town.”
“Here’s hoping they got somebody what speaks English.”
He was already halfway into the swarm as Stephen said, “Anything is possible.” They flew together to the nearest edge of the village, where Bobby reformed next to Stephen as he landed. From there, they walked among the buildings, looking around like anyone in a new place would. From his earlier foray, Bobby knew the layout and guided Stephen to the center. There, a ring of rocks marked the edge of a round hole in the ground filled with water.
A woman in a blue dress with a black headscarf, carrying a jug likely intended to hold water, stopped at the edge of the small empty space around the well and took in a surprised breath. She said something that sounded alarmed and confused.
“Ma’am, any chance you speak English?” Bobby figured he might as well try. He pronounced the words slowly and carefully.
Instead of answering, she shouted, her intent clear enough: calling for help. Within seconds, doors all around slammed open and out came men with those assault rifles Bobby saw earlier. Both he and Stephen put their hands up, but that didn’t stop some of them interposing themselves between the two men and the woman. She scurried off. The men stayed.
“Good evening,” Stephen said, sounding friendly and polite. “Do any of you speak English?”
“I do, some.” One man nodded to call attention to himself. He had a thick accent. “What you want, Americans?”
Bobby looked at Stephen, who returned it, they both shrugged, and Stephen indicated him with a jerk of his chin. Bobby sighed—elected spokesperson again. “We’re lost. Our boss thinks there’s a bunch of weapons lying around somewhere near here, but we can’t find ‘em.”
Stephen almost managed to stifle down a chuckle. “We have no intention of harming anyone here, so long as you don’t shoot first.”
The man stared at them skeptically. “You come to poison well, to murder women and children? ”
“No, sir. Ain’t got no reason to hurt folk what’re just doing what you can to survive out here. Must be tough, on account you all got weapons like that in easy reach. Folks come out here all the time just to harass y’all?”
“You are here.”
Man had a point. Bobby grinned. “Ain’t that the truth. We ain’t here to cause no trouble, though.”
“This is silly.” Stephen put his hands down. “Are you aware of any reason why anyone might want to destroy your village? Because we were sent here to look for weapons you obviously don’t have, and when we reported back that fact, we were ordered to kill you all anyway, something we don’t particularly want to do.”
The man took a few seconds to think about that, then he spoke rapidly with the other men. Bobby followed Stephen’s example and put his hands down while the locals chatted. After a few minutes, during which Bobby wondered if they’d made a mistake, the lead man said, “Come, we show.”
Bobby and Stephen shared a surprised look, then both shrugged and followed the man. Only three of the men escorted them, plus their interpreter, and all kept guns handy. They went to the edge of the village, the same one they arrived through. “Taliban come here,” the man explained as they walked. “We give them one girl and metal, or they kill two men. Americans come to war, Taliban want more, but we have no more girls to give. They take goats, food, cloth, and metal. Americans give us weapons for metal, we fight back. Taliban not come anymore.”
He pulled up what was apparently a fake shrub anchored by some kind of plaster brick and scraped dirt away from a wooden trap door. It had an iron ring he grabbed and yanked on to open the door. “You go down, look, see.”
Not expecting anything like this, Bobby blinked a few times, then realized he was supposed to be delving down into that hole. He pulled out his little flashlight and clicked it on, then crouched down beside the hole and shone the beam around in there. “I reckon somebody done mixed some papers up or something.” It had no ladder or stairs. They’d have no problems getting in and out. “That sounds kinda familiar.”
He jumped down and stumbled at the bottom. Looking up, he guessed the ceiling had to be about ten feet high. “It’s fair sized, come on down,” he called up for Stephen.
“Thank you for showing us this,” he heard Stephen say, then the vampire also jumped in, making it look like gravity actually affected him.
“Ain’t this a surprise.” Bobby swept his light around, revealing wooden shelves and large metal cases, the dull green type that always had rocket launchers and that sort of thing in the movies. The yellow letters stamped on the sides in English indicated they held ammunition, grenades, and similar things. Several of the shelves had large silvery lumps of irregular material. They looked like mined ingots of raw metal. A tunnel led out of the chamber, running under the village. Shining the light down that way, it resembled an old mine shaft, the kind in abandoned gold mines in the movies.
Shining his light back on the metal cases, Bobby shrugged, “Reckon we oughta look through them all? ”
“Yes. That seems like a very good idea.” Stephen paced over and helped Bobby open them all, checking each one and finding most still had at least some of what the outside indicated they should. One was still completely full of explosives.
“Huh.” Bobby straightened from the last case and shone his light down the tunnel again.
“You can say that again.” Shutting and latching the last case again, Stephen also stood up. “At a guess, they found this ore and started mining it. When they sold it, someone decided it would be easier to just take it from them. Then our guys come in and find out they’re using this metal and don’t like the bad guys, so they trade for the metal and give them weapons to help them fight the good fight. Now someone wants to go back on that deal and just blast the town out of existence to take the metal.”
“Yeah. You think telling Klein we found the stash on the second pass and destroyed it would work? ”
“No, they’ll just send troops in or do an air strike or something. Because it’s got to be all about the metal ore.”
This was a tough nut to crack, for sure. Metal would probably survive a bombing, so they had no incentive not to do it. Unless— “We could tell ‘em we destroyed the weapons and found one little ingot of metal.” He pointed to the smallest rock on the shelves, one only about the size of his fist. “They done got a tunnel and we followed it to the end and it’s all exhausted of the metal, there ain’t nothing here.”
Stephen rubbed his chin thoughtfully, picked up the small rock. “It’s heavy.” It didn’t burden him in any way. “Or we could tell Klein the truth, that they have this metal and are willing to sell it.”
Bobby paced back to the hole. “Gimme a boost, we’ll figure it out there. No reason to completely wreck these folks’ evening.”
Chuckling, Stephen paced over, rock securely in hand, and pretended to give Bobby a boost while actually tossing him up. In return, Bobby turned around and reached down to give Stephen an unnecessary hand to get out. “We’ll do what we can to prevent other Americans from coming here and being unreasonable,” Stephen told the one man. “No one deserves to die over this.” He lifted the one rock. “This may help us do that, is it alright if we take it?”
“Yes. Good.” The interpreter shook hands with both of them. “Allah watch you.”
Chapter 5
Stephen cracked his neck and pulled the headset out of his ear again. “I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to torch the site.” He stared at the rock, still in his hand. “I’ll have to h
and this over as proof. Klein seems like a decent guy who wants to get it right.”
Bobby spent those five minutes chewing mechanically through another protein bar. “Seemed to me like a guy what’s got overseers breathing down his neck, looking for results with not enough time to provide.”
Nodding his agreement, Stephen pocketed the rock. “Let’s move on to the second site. What do we need to do there?”
“Warlord,” Bobby said with his mouth still half full. He swallowed the last bite before elaborating. “We’re s’posed to scout his compound well enough to draw a map, check the security, and generally provide enough intel for a team to go in and take the guy out.”
“Listen to you,” Stephen smirked, “using grown-up military words like ‘intel’.”
Bobby snorted and stuffed his garbage away in a pocket. “Klein done said that if we got a good chance, and are okay doing it, we should just take the guy out, but I done told him to stuff that.”
“Well,” Stephen said thoughtfully, staring off into the darkness, “we’ll see. If we catch him raping a twelve year old or something, I won’t have a problem killing him.”
One short hop later, they reached a city more modern in appearance than Bobby had expected to find in a constantly war-torn region. “What d’ya think?” They crouched behind some juniper bushes a block away from the compound, in the shadows of a smaller house. Neither of them was hidden terribly well, but anyone walking by would have to specifically look to see them.
“It’s too easy.”
“‘Course it’s easy. Nobody expects the Vampire-Dragon Inquisition.”
Stephen blinked once and stared at Bobby. “I never would have figured you for a Monty Python fan.”
“I got no idea what that’s got to do with snakes, but I ain’t ‘specially keen on ‘em.”
“Okay.” Stephen blinked again, shook that off, then went back to the matter at hand. “But, I what mean is, there isn’t enough security for it to be what they said it is. They can’t possibly think we’re stupid enough to just go in, poke around, and hand over everything needed to kill a man.”