Operation Chaos

by Watkins, Richter

  “Little love squabble,” Keegan said. “Let’s give them some time to settle.”

  Everyone checked weapons, shook them, blew out whatever moisture remained, reseated clips, prepared for whatever awaited behind the walls of the Vereen compound.

  49

  The small commando team hunkered down in the trees and waited. Half an hour went by and then finally one car left.

  Keegan traced the occupants, with both the night goggles and his ability to intercept communication. He said it wasn’t their guy.

  “How does his prosthetic eye handle the night glasses?” Mora wondered in a low voice.

  “I don’t know,” Rainee said. “But I do know that it gives him a great advantage, much like the owl has. He can see normal distance and long distance at the same time.”

  “That’s cool,” Mora said. “Getting used to it must be something.”

  The interaction of various technologies was one of the great issues all neuroscientists dealt with. “The human brain is incredibly malleable,” she said.

  “I’m not too sure about mine,” Mora said.

  The compound grew quiet, a steady roll of party sounds in the distance.

  Rainee felt like some alien from another planet looking at earthlings. She thought maybe she should have taken a half dose, because now she was seeing and hearing and sensing at a weird level.

  Lights circled the top floor, the house growing dark seemed ominous, the silence here suddenly foreboding.

  Rainee took some deep, lingering breaths and ordered herself to get relaxed, get back down to earth.

  Below, a heavyset guy emerged and yelled something in Spanish. A second guy emerged, this one tall, thin. They split up and circled opposite one another to check the perimeter.

  A second car pulled out and the fat guy gave a little salute, then started back in.

  The compound went quiet and still.

  Keegan turned to Rainee and said, “You need to hang back near the entrance, make sure nobody is coming in from the road. Wait until we have secured the compound and grabbed the target.”

  Rainee followed the men to the entrance. She held back as instructed.

  Keegan and Metzler moved to the wrought-iron gate and went up and over so fast it was like an illusion. The gate opened.

  Mora and Duran followed, splitting off and disappearing among the planters and the fountains to either side of the house.

  Rainee stopped near the entrance near a pond, flower gardens, and Roman statues.

  She watched her enhanced soldiers slide across the grounds through the thin moonlight like shadows, wolves on the hunt.

  The heavyset security guy emerged from behind some huge flowerpots at the entrance to the atrium and Keegan came up suddenly behind the man, like a phantom, and hit him with such force the guy went down without much of a sound. She didn’t know if he was out cold or dead.

  Calm again prevailed for a short time.

  She saw Keegan signaling from inside the atrium.

  He turned and it looked like he was giving a hand signal to Mora, who was moving back around the front.

  Rainee stayed near the base of the fountain, close to the entrance, where she could watch for any cars coming toward the compound.

  In the world around this compound, music went on, making the partiers oblivious of what was happening inside their neighbor’s estate.

  The momentary calm ended with the crack and flash of the shot that came from behind the fountain. Then, without warning, everything went wrong in an instant.

  Duran fired, the silencer’s sound a dull punch.

  She saw Mora duck for cover while returning fire.

  Then a man appeared from behind the lattice of a garden, staggering like he was drunk. He fired again and again and yelled in Spanish, then fell.

  On the second floor of the villa, lights came on, then quickly went dark, as if who turned them on realized that wasn’t a good move.

  A vicious firefight ensued. Exactly the opposite of what they had wanted.

  50

  Rainee caught a glimpse of Keegan moving around the side of the gardens at about the same time a man came out on the balcony and fired in the direction of Duran.

  Keegan spun and shot the man. He stumbled against the balcony railing and collapsed.

  Then another man popped up near a fishpond and Duran brought him down with a single shot.

  The man staggered once and then collapsed into the pool with a splash.

  Metzler entered the atrium followed by Keegan. Duran headed around the side of the house. Mora started to go around the other side when he was shot from above. A man coming around the balcony now turned toward Rainee.

  Rainee fired the Glock three times. The man went down.

  In spite of the amount of time she’d spent in war zones, it was the first time in her life she’d actually fired a weapon at someone.

  She ran in a low crouch to Mora, whispering as she dropped to her knees, “Mora, where are you hit? Mora?”

  Gunfire again came from a second floor balcony but from the far corner.

  She grabbed Mora under his left arm and pulled him back into the cover of giant flowerpots. She leaned over him. “Hey, hey, look at me. C’mon, Mora, damn you.”

  “I’m . . . good,” he muttered, his hand on his left side.

  She pulled Mora’s hand away, his shirt up, and looked at the wound. She knew immediately it wasn’t minor, but when she rolled him over on his backpack a little, she found the exit. There was a chance given the location of entrance and exit that the bullet had gone through cleanly, and on a path that missed vital organs.

  Interior bleeding was another big concern.

  She heard a shot from inside the house, then saw two girls run out the door, both in white dresses, fleeing, with dresses flaring, like angels escaping hell.

  “Get down! Abajo! ” Rainee ordered, standing up. The girls, shocked to see her, did as she ordered.

  The two girls huddled nearby. One of them was older now that Rainee could see her up close. Maybe in her forties. The other looked like she was about twenty. They stared wide-eyed at Rainee and Mora, their faces looking very much those of Afghan girls she’d seen in similar bad situations.

  She turned to Mora and said, “We’ll get you out of here.”

  “I’m good. Don’t worry about me.”

  Rainee didn’t listen to him. She had to stop the bleeding and get his wound wrapped.

  She carefully removed his backpack, opened it, and took out the waterproof medical kit that Troy had given him.

  As she cleaned and wrapped the wound, the two women helped her without being asked. She heard in her earpiece some short exchanges between Keegan and Metzler.

  More gunshots, mixes of silencers and the boom of un-silenced weapons. The battle wasn’t over, but Rainee was pretty sure the mission was.

  “Tenemos que movelo.” We need to move him, Rainee told the girls.

  “Yes, my English good,” the woman said.

  In spite of Mora’s protests, Rainee, with the girls’ help, drug him further out of harm’s way, easing him down behind a Roman statue.

  She heard Keegan’s gravelly voice come over her earpiece. “Duran?”

  “Clearing the west sector.”

  “Metzler?”

  “No sight of anyone here.”

  “Mora.”

  Rainee put a finger on her earpiece. “He’s been hit. I’m with him by the fountain. Two females from the house are helping me. The shooter is down on the balcony.”

  “Watch for any traffic heading this way while we clear the house,” Keegan said.

  She glanced at Mora, at this crumpled, wounded body of a young soldier who suddenly looked so young and innocent lying there. He was looking at her. He smiled at her. “I’m not hit all that bad,” he said. “Take care of business.”

  “Be quiet,” Rainee said. She turned to the two girls huddled against the fountain. “Is anyone coming back here tonight that y
ou know of?”

  “I no think so,” the older woman said.

  Rainee got up and went to the entrance gate to watch.

  In the distance, she saw more fireworks streak into the sky.

  She turned and spotted Keegan up on the balcony, joined by Metzler from the other end.

  They disappeared and moments later they came out of the main entrance and ran over to her.

  Rainee said, “Doctor Vereen?”

  “Dead,” Keegan said. He looked over at the two girls, then he saw Mora. “How bad?”

  “He’s not going anywhere on his own. If we can get him some water, that would help.”

  With Mora wounded, and the man they’d come for dead, that, in Rainee’s mind, put the final nail in the coffin of the plan.

  They couldn’t leave Mora behind even if the decision was to try and get into Tijuana, where Duran had friends and relatives.

  Duran told one of the girls to go in the house and get water.

  Keegan left them. He walked off and seemed to be listening to traffic from somewhere.

  Duran turned to Rainee. “How bad is he?”

  “I don’t know. I think he might be lucky. No sign of something vital offline. Pulse rate holding. What are we going to do now?”

  “We have to go to the Facility and do what we came to do. How we’re going to do that is up to Keegan. We’ll leave Mora here, go do what we came for—”

  “We can’t leave him here.”

  “We have no choice. We’ll come back and pick him up.”

  He said it like it was a done deal. She had no idea how it could possibly be anything but a continued disaster.

  The only good thing to come out of this was all the party noise flowing up from the valley and hillside.

  51

  Duran returned from around the side of the villa, quickstepped over to Mora, and knelt down. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”

  “You do what we came for,” Mora said. “I can wait. And if you’re right about Keegan, kill the bastard. If you’re wrong, he’s a hero. I hope that’s the case.”

  Rainee saw Keegan talking to Metzler as they hustled back toward the fountain from the house. She said to Mora, “If he does betray us, I’ll shoot him myself.”

  “I like your attitude,” Mora said. “You’re not married, are you?”

  Rainee smiled. “Never had time. You?”

  “Never could convince a woman I would be the catch of her life.”

  Metzler ripped some poles from the ground that were holding up newly planted small trees.

  He and Duran made a makeshift stretcher and then lifted Mora onto it and carried him toward the house.

  Rainee remained where she was to watch the road.

  When they returned, Duran said, “He’s as comfortable as we can make him.”

  “There’s a Land Rover out back,” Metzler said. “Let’s find keys.”

  “Too late,” Keegan said.

  They watched him as he focused on whatever he was picking up, took out a small device, and tapped in some code. He stared off to the west, from where they’d come. Then he said, “There’s a car coming up the main road a mile or so back.” He hesitated, one of those devices in his hand. “It’s heading for the Facility. We need to intercept it. The head of security is in that car. We need to highjack him. We still have a shot at this. He can get us in past segmentation and binary matching codes without having to shoot our way in. We grab the target, get the chopper, drop in here, and pick up Mora. Let’s move.”

  She loved and feared Keegan’s aggressive attitude, and she was very conflicted about leaving Mora, but getting him out meant succeeding at what they’d come to do.

  They moved at a fast clip across the grounds, out the front gate, and headed up the hill, the night air heavy, damp.

  They slowed as the climb steepened.

  Keegan, dropping beside her now as they slanted across the hillside along the tree line, asked, “How you doin’, Doc?’’

  “I’m good.”

  “Mora going to make it?”

  “If he gets medical attention in a reasonable time, I think so.”

  “Good,” Keegan said. “We’ll get him out of there.” He moved on ahead up toward where it looked like the road was. When he stopped, Metzler went and talked to him for a moment.

  On the top of the hill, they could see headlights in the distance, pinpricks dancing in the trees.

  Metzler dropped back to Duran and Rainee as they moved up to the road. “We grab this security guy, we’re good to go. But we need to do it quietly and quickly.”

  Then he went on to join Keegan, leaving her with Duran, who gave her a look but said nothing.

  They reached the top of the knoll and there lay the road. In the distance, a compound she assumed was the Facility was tucked into a remote confluence of hills.

  The shock of all that had happened settled on Rainee Hall as she stood with Duran and waited. She thought about Raab in his headquarters less than a mile away. He and his disgruntled military and intel connections seemed so short a time ago to be just a handful of angry men. Now, facing the full reality of who they were and what they wanted, she believed Raab and his colleagues had chosen the right moment in history. She, like so many others, just didn’t think things would fall apart so fast.

  “We have to get Raab,” she said.

  “We will,” Duran said. “Like the song says, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. We’re just getting started.”

  52

  The four of them, Keegan leading the way at point, moved like a small wolf pack through the trees to the road that ran in the direction of the Facility.

  They stopped where the road swung across the shoulder of the hillock, a line across the high semi-desert.

  Duran came up beside Rainee. “Be honest with me, how bad is Mora? He going to die?”

  “No. I think he’ll make it.”

  “You think?”

  “It looked like a clean wound. But we’ll need to get him to a hospital as soon as we can. We need to get that chopper, get what we came for, and get out.”

  Duran accepted that with a grimace. He looked very tense. Rainee said, “We all hated leaving him, but we don’t have a choice. We have to do this if he’s going to have any chance. We need that chopper of Raab’s. Everything, including Mora’s life, depends on our success.”

  Duran nodded. “I know. But we don’t get back to him, somebody comes there, sees him and those dead . . .”

  She said, “The faster we do this, the more chance we have of getting Mora out of here and to a hospital.”

  “That depends on Keegan and whether he is in fact with us.”

  “He better be,” she said.

  From the ridge, they could see across the narrow valley in both directions.

  The car’s lights had disappeared and she feared maybe it had turned off, heading somewhere else.

  They stood waiting, hanging in limbo; the night had only three or four hours left. They needed some luck.

  Duran said, “Like I said back at camp—if all fails, we grab Mora and head into Tijuana, where I can make contact with relatives of mine.”

  Rainee nodded. That would be next to impossible, but they’d have to try. If they couldn’t get a chopper, and had to rely on a car or SUV to bring Mora, that meant taking roads that would probably be blocked. And there was no other way for someone with his wound. They couldn’t carry him.

  Rainee felt tight, claustrophobic. The operation had been something of a disaster right from the start, but did they still have a chance?

  Keegan, fifteen yards ahead of them and, as usual, listening intently to some communication no one else was privy to, turned and motioned to Metzler.

  They talked for a time, and then Metzler walked back to Rainee and Duran. “Our entrance key is coming. He’s the head of Facility security.”

  “How we going to do this?” Duran asked.

  Rainee saw car lights in the distance, pinpricks
of light that disappeared, than reappeared again as the car moved through the undulating hills.

  Keegan came back and the three of them began detailing some sort of plan. They discussed getting the car to stop without causing a firefight. There was some debate about how to do that.

  Metzler wanted to drag a tree out on the road, but Keegan thought that would be too obvious. “They’ll know something is up. Short of a major lightening strike, nothing could kick one of these trees out across that road.”

  Duran suggested maybe they could go to where the road turned. “When the car slows, maybe we can just pull a fast ambush. Get guns on them before they can react. Put something in the road to make running not much of an option. A couple big rocks. They won’t see them in time and we’ll be up on the car.”

  Keegan didn’t think people familiar with the road, and this late at night, would bother to slow all that much at the curve. And who knows how much they’d had to drink. He said, “We need to force the car to slow. Put something in the road that won’t spook them but will force them to slow at the turn.”

  The three soldiers discussed the tactics of the ambush—who was on what side, how they’d get up on the car as it slowed for some branches on the curve.

  It went from a theoretical problem to a real one. Their attention went to headlights a half mile back across the valley heading their way pretty fast.

  They watched the car pass feeder roads to the other compounds.

  They’re thinking all wrong, Rainee thought. Any obstacles in the road that look like an ambush setup will trigger another gunfight. They couldn’t afford that.

  “I have an idea,” she said. She knew exactly what had to be done. She said, “Obviously we don’t want a big firefight to develop, and you don’t want to kill the goose with the golden egg, which is what happened back at Vereen’s. There’s a better way to stop some guys. Especially if they’ve been partying.”

  They turned and looked at her.

  Keegan said, “What do you have in mind, Doc?”

  “You have an asset that’s perfect for this tactical problem. Why not use it?”