by Mel Odom
Voices sounded out in the hallway.
She paused at the tear in the wall, signaled to Mac to let him know what was going on, and pressed the SeekNFire button on her jaw. Her nerves tingled as the programming took hold and made the connection through her palm. She nodded to Mac, received a quick nod in return, then wheeled around the corner into the hallway.
Her gun settled comfortably into a two-handed grip as she faced the pair of jackals trotting toward the hole in the wall left by the truck. They saw her at the same time, and turned with their guns blazing from fifteen feet away.
Without hesitation, Scuderi put a pair of 10mm rounds through one man’s knee. As he toppled, she threw herself forward, under the burst of submachine gun fire that rapped out a vicious tattoo on the wall behind her. She slid her hands forward like a baseball player stealing second, then rolled on her side. As she came over, she kicked out in a front snap-kick that caught the second man in the groin. She swung the pistol in a short arc that caught the man’s Uzi along the barrel and knocked it out of his hands.
The jackal stumbled backward, one hand going to his crotch while the other grabbed for the pistol holstered on his hip.
Pushing herself up with her free hand, she set herself as the jackal’s gun cleared leather. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mac taking control of the first jackal. The jackal snarled a curse in pain and anger. “You’re gonna die now.”
Scuderi launched a side kick that caught the man in the face and popped his head backward. His pistol crashed and sent a round into the ceiling. She spun, threw her hip against him as she took hold of his shirt, butted his bleeding face with the top of her head, then pulled him over her hip. He lost his gun as he came crashing down on his face. Scuderi kneeled and put a knee between his shoulder blades to hold him down. Fisting her pistol tightly, she screwed the barrel into his neck.
“Try one other smart move, and you won’t get to say hello to your buddies in the federal pen after the trial. I’m FBI. Now assume the position.”
The man spread his feet, groaned, and placed his hands behind his back.
Scuderi cuffed her man’s hands and feet as Mac finished up with his. She peered into the shifting dust clouds and shadows, then tried the T-jack again, wondering if Newkirk and Wilson were even still alive. She went forward, shocked at how much damage the explosions had done on the inside of the building.
*
Flames painted the insides of Slade Wilson’s eyelids, and heat seared his face. It wasn’t till he started to move that he realized Newkirk was lying on top of him and they were both covered with blood. He also realized Newkirk wasn’t breathing. Calming the sudden anxiety that triggered the fight-or-flight reaction, he leaned his head back and willed his lungs to take in air. When they did, the pain felt like a half-dozen steel fence posts had been driven through his back and chest.
He groaned with the effort, then carefully rolled Newkirk to one side. He’d lost the Atchisson somewhere in the confusion. When he looked at the rubble covering the floor and the huge smoking hole where the meat-locker door had been, he realized how lucky he’d been.
The same couldn’t be said for Newkirk. A handful of irregularly shaped shards of stainless steel jutted from the man’s back. His breathing was raspy and strained. Perspiration covered his face despite the chill air blowing from the meat locker, and knowledge of what was coming dawned dark and flat in his eyes.
“Emmett,” Wilson said as he eased his body out from under the other man’s, “just hang on. You’re going to be all right.”
Newkirk reached up and grabbed a fistful of Wilson’s jacket. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of Newkirk’s mouth. “Leave me here, kid. There isn’t anything you can do for me.”
A hard lump settled under Wilson’s breastbone. He kept his face impassive as he held Newkirk’s head in his hands on his thigh. “Can’t.”
More bloody spittle streaked the side of the man’s face. “You have to.” He coughed weakly and struggled for another breath. “Rawley and January are somewhere in this mess. If they need help, you have to be there to give it to them.”
“I can’t leave you like this.”
Newkirk’s grip slipped and he made an effort to tighten it, but Wilson could tell the man’s strength was going fast. Newkirk had trouble focusing his eyes, and his head lay more heavily in Wilson’s hands. “I’m not afraid of being alone, kid. I’ve been alone most of my life. That’s the nature of this kind of work. You know that. Your daddy told you that too. Now you get out there and do your job.”
Wilson remained silent, drawn into Newkirk’s fading world.
“You can’t come with me,” Newkirk said. “Not this time. You take care of your people.”
A helpless feeling surged over Wilson, followed by anger at the men ultimately responsible for the meat dump. He nodded and started to move away.
“Hold it, cop!”
The voice was less than ten feet away. Wilson turned his head slowly until he could see the jackal standing on a mound of rubble. The wicked snout of an Uzi was brandished in his hands.
“Don’t you move unless I tell you that you can.” The jackal shifted the machine pistol in a warning gesture. He was disheveled and looked as though he hadn’t weathered either the raid or the explosions well. “You’re my ticket out of here. You blow it, and you’re a dead man. If I kill you, that doesn’t make the years I’m looking at in prison any longer.” He grinned ferally, his long hair hanging down over red-rimmed eyes.
“Sure,” Wilson said. “Just let me help my buddy.” Newkirk tried to pull his pistol but had lost too much control over his body.
“Get up,” the jackal ordered.
“Give me a minute.” Wilson twisted his right hand and triggered the release on the Crain dagger. The hilt dropped into his palm.
“Now, or you’re going to be dying with him.”
Reaching forward, Wilson acted like he was pulling Newkirk’s jacket tighter. The Crain dagger came free of the unzipped sleeve of the motorcycle jacket. He kept it concealed from the jackal.
The shrill of approaching sirens cut through the thick, dusty air flooding the processing plant.
The jackal took a step forward. “You’re out of time.”
Whipping his arm backward in a powerful sideways motion, Wilson threw the dagger at the man’s face. It became a glittering steel dart, winked once as it covered the distance, then buried itself to the hilt in the jackal’s eye socket.
A muffled groan escaped the man’s lips as he crumpled to his knees, then fell forward. Bone crunched when the knife was driven deeper. A quiver ran through his body as life left him.
More sirens were outside now, and Wilson knew he had no choice. The unit was in Atlanta without local sanction. If he didn’t run interference, some of his people might get injured. He turned to face Newkirk and gave him a grim smile. “There’s help here, Emmett. You just hang on till I get some of it your way.”
Newkirk nodded. “Go.”
Wilson pushed himself to his feet reluctantly. He drew the Delta Elite from the drop holster. Pausing at the jackal’s corpse, he put his foot on the dead man’s face and yanked the dagger free.
He took a final look at Newkirk, then plunged into the whirling confusion filling the wrecked hallways of the building. Taking a firmer grip on the 10mm, he felt the SeekNFire circuitry acknowledge the pistol and tune his body to it. He jogged across broken rubble, almost lost his balance twice, and cut left around a corner.
Three jackals were scrambling toward him. The beams of their flashlights were small, uncertain cones in the smoky haze, darting quickly over the walls and ceiling.
Wilson stepped around the corner and let them see him. They came to a stop and raised their weapons.
“FBI!” Wilson shouted.
A moment of indecision held the three in thrall, then the man on the right cut loose with his pistol.
Autofire chased Wilson around the hallway corner. He took a two-handed
grip on the Delta Elite as he made his neural connection with the SeekNFire programming even more complete. Listening to the gunfire die away as the weapons ran empty, he placed the three men firmly in his mind, then wheeled around the corner.
They were more spread out than they had been, but the SeekNFire system had no problem picking them up. Wilson became a living gun sight as his pistol dropped into target acquisition. His shots came in groups of two. All of them took their targets above the neck where body armor wasn’t worn. He was moving again before the last dead man hit the ground.
“Slade.” It was Scuderi’s voice.
Blowing into the mike, he accessed the T-jack. “Go.” He jogged forward, pausing only to slam a fresh clip into the 10mm.
“Where are you?”
“Making my way forward from the meat lockers. Have you heard from Rawley or Darnell?”
“Yes. They’re clear and doing the liaison work with the state police and sheriff’s department.”
Wilson considered that and knew that Scuderi was somewhere inside the building. “Where are you?”
“Just ahead of you. Mac and I are making our way from the killing floor.”
“Where’s the truck?”
“We brought it with us. It’s okay.”
Wilson decided to drop the issue. Scuderi had stayed within the parameters of his orders even though she knew she was straying past what he’d intended.
The Omega Blue unit wasn’t made up of hard-liners who lived for the rule books. To do their jobs effectively, they had to be just as creative and ruthless as the enemies they hunted down.
“Where’s Emmett?” Scuderi became visible around the next corner. Mac was a half-step behind her.
“He’s down near the meat lockers.”
January broke into the frequency. “There’s an EMT team out here.”
“Can you get them inside?”
“For one of ours, sure. I found an old running buddy of mine in the Staties. We’re okay here. The sheriff’s ticked, but he’ll have to get over it.” Before joining the FBI, January had spent seven years with the Savannah Police Department.
Wilson gave them directions to Newkirk, then turned and went back toward the meat lockers. “Did we get any of the files?”
Scuderi was at his side while Mac returned to keep the truck sealed from any other prying agencies. The case was the Bureau’s, and Wilson wasn’t going to let anyone screw it up. With Newkirk on the ground, it had cost too much to chance letting anyone foul the evidence.
“Rawley couldn’t get to the admin room,” Scuderi replied. “A firebomb took the place out and destroyed everything inside.”
“Prisoners?”
“Some. We got the driving team, a few more along the way. Darnell and Rawley found five of the doctors waiting to handle the merchandise and make sure it was properly stored.”
Wilson rounded the final corner and saw the four white-jacketed EMTs already at work on Newkirk. The Bureau man accessed the T-jack. “Rawley.”
“Go.”
“Anything you can tell me about the meat-dump medtechs?”
“They had a buy set up.” The man’s voice was flat and uninflected as always. “There was a road locker already fueled up and ready to fly behind the admin offices. My guess is they had a special order waiting somewhere.”
“We’ll check into that.” Wilson cleared the frequency and stood back out of the way as the EMTs worked quickly, talking to each other in the abbreviated code words he understood well enough to know that things weren’t hopeful. He blew into the mike. “Darnell.”
“Go.”
“See if you can arrange us some working space at the Staties’ county office.”
“Sheriff’s already offered.”
“What kind of working relationship can we expect from them?”
“My friend tells me Sheriff Dawes is a hands-on kind of guy.”
“He’d be underfoot.”
“Yeah, to put it bluntly.”
“If you have to, put it bluntly. What can we expect from the Staties?”
“Cooperation. They’d want to observe. And they’d want a share in the limelight.”
“They can have the limelight. We don’t need it. Vache isn’t going to be happy when he finds out about this.” Wilson holstered his Delta Elite and crossed his arms over his chest. Newkirk’s face looked more pale than a full moon. “Get us the space. Access to computer hardware. Cells to hold these guys in. And two interrogation rooms.”
“Can do.” January cleared the frequency.
One of the EMTs stood up with Newkirk’s blood staining his blouse. His face looked grim and frustrated. “I’m sorry.” Behind him, two of the group unfurled a white latex sheet and spread it over the dead agent.
Wilson listened to the silence of the room that underscored the small movements of the EMT men as they finished up. His throat felt tighten and he didn’t trust himself to speak. He went forward and dropped on his knees beside Newkirk as the EMT unit spread out to make room for him.
“Give us a few minutes,” Scuderi said brusquely.
“Sure. Just let us know when you want us back.”
Wilson uncovered Newkirk’s face and worked at sealing the emotions away so they wouldn’t influence the job he still had to do with the jackals. Scuderi sat silently at his side. Her hand moved in the sign of the cross. With a hand that trembled only slightly, Wilson reached up and gently closed his friend’s eyelids.
3
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
Wilson looked up from pouring a stale cup of coffee as Earl Vache slammed the office door shut behind him. He finished filling his Styrofoam cup, then reached for another from the short stack beside the microwave that was used to heat the instant coffee. It was two A.M. It had only taken Vache three hours to shake free from Quantico and jet down. He handed the cup over and Vache took it.
“Yeah, I know what I’m doing,” Wilson replied. “Tonight my team took down a jackal team that left thirty-one husked corpses in Miami, Florida, a couple days ago. And I lost a member of my team that was one of the few close friends I have these days. That pretty much sum it up in your book?”
The Omega Blue liaison to the FBI was a heavyset man with thinning hair streaked with gray. He had a gruff voice that went with a physique that showed a lot of hard usage. He wore a pressed suit and an olive-colored trench coat, allowing him to blend in whenever it suited him. He stabbed a blunt finger in Wilson’s direction. “You were told to lay off the jackal operations.”
“Somebody forgot to tell them they were supposed to lay off too.”
“You’re supposed to clear operations through me.”
“You wouldn’t have cleared this one.”
“You’re right I wouldn’t have. We’re dealing with political hot potatoes here.”
“Wrong, Earl,” Wilson replied. “I’m dealing with whatever heat comes down the pike on this one. Just like every other one the Omega unit has handled. You’re liaison for the unit, not the director. And Omega clears whatever it damn well wants to clear. You know that. Even the Bureau isn’t above having people on the payroll that tip off the various organizations we target. Our autonomy is what makes us dangerous to those people.”
“That autonomy is also what’s drawing fire from the House subcommittee that holds the purse strings on you people.”
Wilson walked behind his borrowed desk and rummaged through the stack of files that was piled up there. Finding the micro-drive he was searching for, he inserted it into the feed slot on the office computer and stroked the keyboard. He bypassed the monitor mounted on the desk and put the display up on the sixty-inch screen built into the wall behind the desk. As it came on, he flicked off the office lights and dropped the room into darkness except for the glow given off by the microwave’s ready light and the wall monitor.
Videotape footage stored on the micro-drive played across the big screen. The setting was an alley. Miami PD patrol cars were in clea
r evidence surrounding a site marked off by yellow POLICE-DO NOT CROSS tape affixed to the walls of the abandoned buildings circling the alley. A uniformed policeman intercepted whoever was carrying the minicam and shoved the photographer back. For a moment half of the uniform’s arm covered the lens, then a whirl of sky and low buildings filled the screen. A moment later, the photographer was stationary, obviously standing atop a parked car. The zoom lens moved in with dizzying speed.
Wilson’s stomach tightened as he sipped the foul-tasting coffee and drank it down. The contents of that alley were a nightmare that wouldn’t leave him for a long time.
Blood covered the alley floor in puddles. Uniformed officers moved gingerly through the passageway, and clotted blood stuck to their shoes and clothing. They wore protective suits over their clothes, with latex gloves and surgical masks and goggles as defense against possible AIDS infection. Ambulance workers joined them seconds later.
“Thirty-one people,” Wilson said quietly. “All of them dead.”
“I know,” Vache said. “I saw the reports. I can empathize with those people, but-”
“Can you?” Wilson demanded. “I told you about the new jackal network three weeks ago. Even then it had been operating for almost two months that we know of. You advised me against pursuing it.”
“There are underlying political factors regarding jackal networks.”
“You’re right. There are.” Wilson tapped the keyboard and froze the images on the wall monitor. “For one, most of the victims are homeless, who many politicians don’t even want to admit exist in this nation. Maybe it’s more convenient to think of those people as recyclable. Since those people don’t vote and don’t have recourse to legal protection, they’re write-offs. And, some of those congressmen on the Hill are involved in the jackal network for a profit interest.”
“Slade, you can’t go around saying that.” Vache’s face colored. “You don’t know if that’s even true.”
“The rumors are there,” Wilson said. “We’ve confirmed them in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Every place that we suspect these people of operating in.”