by Mike Leon
“We need that kid up and talking.”
In the movies, the hidden base of the super secret commando agents always has a gauntlet of high tech scanner gadgets. The secret agents have to walk through it, or stand on a conveyor belt that carries them through while red lights and blue laser beams scan them, a guy watching an X-ray monitor looks at their skeleton, another guy watching a different screen looks at them naked, and a retinal scanner ensures they have the correct eyeballs. The Graveyard building has all these things at the top of the stairs, flanking the path to the elevator. All of them are turned off and sit unmanned and unused. A guy named Randy occasionally comes through with a feather duster to make sure all of it still looks nice.
They used to use that stuff, but it just became impractical. The building is crawling with guys in body armor carrying bombs and automatic weapons in and out at all times. What use is an x-ray viewer when everyone walking through it is supposed to have three or four guns on them anyway? At least one person/creature that visits the building has only black voids instead of eyes. There goes the whole reason for a retinal scanner. For a while all of this equipment was a daily nuisance to everyone in the building. Then, when Elkan Rothschild visited for the first time, he refused to walk through any of it, saying it was an invasion of his privacy. Walter said fuck it and from that day forth the extraneous scanning equipment was used no more. The guys at the fence turn away any occasional vagrant or conspiracy loon, sometimes with bullets, and it all works out.
It works because Graveyard is small. They aren’t fighting a full scale war here. They just do the odd dirty jobs that come up now and again. A political assassination here, a false flag attack there – these things don’t require a thousand men. They require five or ten at a time. The whole company only has a few hundred operators in total. Small operations stay under the radar easily. To play that advantage even further, steps are taken to ensure that the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing, so to speak. Contracting at Graveyard means being told nothing. Every mission is on a need to know basis. Operators are paid very well not to ask questions. Most of them don’t even know who pays them – only that it was twice as much as Blackwater would offer.
“Can I ask you something?” Frank says, not pausing to hear Walter’s preference. “It true the guy got bitten in half?
“He was in half,” Walter says. “I can’t really say how he got that way.”
“I bet he got chainsawed. I saw a body got chainsawed when I was a cop.”
“You were a cop?”
“On off when I was in the reserves. Anyway, I always thought that looked like a shark bite.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Frank.”
Walter pushes the up arrow to summon the right side elevator. The Graveyard building has two elevators and a stairwell between them, both accessible from the balcony overlooking the lobby. The lobby is occupied only by the two guards at the front desk and the rest of the first floor is used for nothing.
The second floor has a waiting area with a receptionist and a housing area where the on-site tactical team stays in three day long shifts prepared to gear up and invade the first floor lobby.
The third, fourth and fifth floors all are for temporary housing and include sixty dorm rooms with bunk beds. Most operators are so well compensated that they own several houses, but simple logistics demands a place for them to stay when conducting extended contracts and operations from the building.
Floors six, seven, and eight are administrative. Most of the fire team leaders have offices, or at least cubicles on those floors. The payroll department is on the sixth floor. The communications center is up there too.
The vault is on floor nine.
Walter’s office is on the tenth floor, along with roof access, offices belonging to Frank and a few other supervisors, conference rooms and a war room complete with one of those neat glass maps of the world you can look at from either side. That thing is useless. One day Walter is going to throw it off the roof.
“I want all priority two and lower assigned fire teams called back to the building,” Walter says. “We’re going to need a few more security details than usual.”
“Even the team in Libya?”
“Uh, no. Those guys can stay put.”
“Can I ask you something? Who was this guy?”
Walter pauses momentarily as he decides how to answer the question. He can’t tell the truth, but Frank deserves some sort of answer.
“He owns the company,” Walter says.
“Oh,” Frank says. His face shifts into a look of concern. “So who owns the company now?”
“His business partners,” Walter says. He winks at Frank, not sure what he means by that himself.
This is not a lie, but there is a significant omission: Eli Van Duyn’s business partners own a lot more than just Graveyard.
“Okay. I’m on it,” Frank says. He steps off the elevator and walks down the hallway. Walter turns the opposite direction toward his office.
Judy is waiting for him at her desk outside his office door. A chunky mess of frump, Judy has been Walter’s secretary for many years.
“Mr. Stedman, there’s a message from Kill Team One. He says Sid is ready to be assigned to Kill Team Three.”
“That’s just peachy,” Walter says. Truthfully, Van Hansen’s scary kids freak him the fuck out. He met the last one when Van showed up insisting the boy be assigned to one of the kill teams. There wasn’t much of an argument. Nobody says no to Kill Team One.
“And someone from the Rothschild estate called inviting you to a funeral visitation tomorrow.”
“At the estate?”
“Yes.”
Walter was afraid of that. He had hoped that the remaining members of the group would be smart enough to keep a low profile. They still have no idea who killed Eli Van Duyn, and there’s a decent possibility that same person wants more of them dead. Rothschild opening up that palace he calls a house for a lavish send-off is a terrible plan. Unfortunately, Walter isn’t in a position to tell these people what to do. They run most of the western world.
KILL TEAM THREE
The chopper doesn’t even touch down all the way before Sid’s feet are on the ground. Behind him, Kill Team One slides himself into position on the chopper skid. He has trouble with things like this because of his bad leg. Sid holds an M4 rifle at ready even though there is no threat here. He wants badly to impress the old man.
Dust blows across the helipad in thick sheets from the chopper blades. Kill Team One steps off the chopper and surveys the helipad around them. They’re in an encampment somewhere in the Rigestan Desert. Sid knows the place only as a dot in the middle of a lot of nothing on a map the old man showed him. American soldiers stand guard in front of tents and temporary structures built with thin steel and aluminum. His father puts his hand on Sid’s shoulder, which makes Sid uneasy. He doesn’t like anyone touching him.
“Ready?” the old man says.
“Ready,” Sid replies dryly.
“Better be. We got work to do,” a tall man with silvery hair growls as he approaches, cutting his way through a small group of soldiers milling about. He wears a gray hoodie and cargo pants. In his right hand, he carries a small black satellite phone with a long cylindrical antenna. Several handguns are strapped to his thighs with plastic and nylon military issue holsters. His stubby little Punch Rothschild cigar burns like a hot coal in the blue hour of twilight.
“Long time, Ashley,” his father says, poorly masking disdain for the Kill Team leader.
“A year,” Ashley responds. “Felt like a week. You know what they say. Time flies when you’re killing sand niggers.” Ashley crouches down to Sid’s eye level.
“The old man bring you here to work with my team?”
Sid nods.
“You know what our mission is?”
“The Twelfth Imam,” Sid answers.
“Damn straight. And you know what I’m gonna do when I find him?”
“Terminate.”
“Yeah. What else?”
Sid has no idea. Everyone knows the Imam has been assigned priority-one target status since Sid was in diapers. Priority-one is a standing order to kill on sight. There is no higher status. What else is there to do but kill him? He delays a response. Ashley answers the question for him.
“I’m gonna run his dick through a grinder. Then I’m gonna roll it up and smoke it,” he says, holding out his cigar for Sid to see.
Ashley has a calm sincerity that says he means it. He’s going to do it. Not because he wants a dick in his mouth. Not because a dick will smoke well. No. He’ll do it just because it’s the most sickening idea he had at the time and he wants to make people sick.
“Come on, kid,” Ashley motions with his cigar. “You can meet the team.”
He begins to walk back the way he came, intentionally going through the group of gawkers again. Sid turns back to look for his father and spots the old man already sitting onboard the chopper as it lifts off. Sid thinks he sees the old man nod at him slightly, but he isn’t sure.
“Kill Team Three is an eight man crew,” Ashley coughs out as he leads Sid to a giant airplane with four propellers and a collection of cannons pointing out the port side of the fuselage. It is black and unmarked, like all the equipment Graveyard uses. The presence of the guns leads Sid to classify the plane as an AC-130, rather than a C-130, which would be an unarmed cargo plane of the same type. Beyond that, this plane defies his designation. It looks old and the weapons load, consisting of just two rotary miniguns linked together, is not quite like any of the modern configurations he knows. He had to study hundreds of common military vehicles as part of his training – but he spent far more time learning rifles and sidearms. “We’ve been out in the desert since nine-eleven. We don’t like it here, but we’re soldiers. The best place for a soldier to be is someplace he hates.”
As they walk around to the back of the plane, Sid looks up the open ramp. Inside, the members of Kill Team Three are waiting. They are not what he expected. The first he sees is a tall, wiry black skinned man with a thick and bushy beard, bald-headed, his eyes dark and the whites of them brown tinted with blood. He wears only some tattered brown shorts and an assortment of knives hang around his neck on a rope. His face is smeared with a few lines of red tribal war paint and his right hand is gloved by an odd looking mitt with an antenna running along the length of his forearm. Across his lap sits a device unlike any Sid has ever seen. It is a thick metal sliver the length of a man, but bent nearly into an L shape at the middle. The edges are sharp and in at least one spot Sid can make out a panel of copper circuitry. It is a giant boomerang.
The next is a burly white man with a handlebar mustache and wearing a monocle over his right eye. The monocle man rests his head against the inside of the fuselage and snores loudly. His elephant gun is propped against his shoulder.
Sitting across from them is a man who looks like a man. When Sid looks at him, he finds that he is unable to define any details of his face or his person. He is dark brownish blond haired and plain. His eyes are not quite blue, but not quite green or brown. His clothes are nondescript and neutral in color.
“These three are Abo, Safari and John Q,” Ashley tells him. “Safari can track anybody through anything. Jungle. Desert. Sewage. You name it. John Q is the ultimate nobody. Born with a rare combination of features that makes him impossible to describe, difficult to recognize and easy to forget, he’s the ultimate mole. He’s also a master of disguise.”
“Understatement of the century,” John Q says, standing up from his seat on the floor of the plane. “You might actually be me right now, and you don’t even know it.”
Ashley rolls his eyes. He stops and puffs his cigar as he sits down on the edge of the ramp looking out. Sid waits for him to say more, but he doesn’t. So Sid asks.
“What does Abo do?”
Ashley looks at him with a raised eyebrow of disbelief.
“He’s holding a giant fucking boomerang. What do you think?”
Ashley is still chuckling at him when three others approach from around the side of the plane. The first is the most peculiar in Sid’s reckoning. He wears his dyed black hair in a shaggy Mohawk that hangs to one side and covers either of his eyes depending on which way he happens to be tilting his head that moment. He tilts his head from side to side a lot and sticks out his tongue to lick his pointy teeth. He wears no shirt and his skin is pale yellow. He is scrawny by comparison to the professional soldiers around him. His pants are skin tight black leather and have slices cut out of them horizontally to give the impression of many straps or belts wrapped around his legs. He has not one, but two, 240-Bravo machine guns slung over his shoulders and a hefty set of studio headphones much too big for his head hangs loosely around his neck. Bracelets of wolf teeth dangle from his wrists. He wears lipstick and eyeliner, and this is something Sid finds unnerving. Men do not wear lipstick. Warriors do not have long hair. Of this he is certain.
The second is short and has his blond hair buzzed down to a length Sid considers appropriate. He has a collection of throwing knives clipped, strapped, and velcroed all over his body armor and combat fatigues. His eyes are hidden behind expensive sunglasses.
The third is his brother. Victor Hansen is a tall and impressive specimen. Two years older than Sid, he is already almost a foot taller. His frame is thin but muscular. His hair is dark like Sid’s, but other than that, he bears little resemblance. His face is alive with a rictus grin that Sid knows all too well. He wears a green duster that stretches down to his black combat boots. Like Sid, he wears no jewelry and keeps his hair buzzed short. These things could only serve to impede him in a fight.
“They sent the runt here already?” Victor says with obvious disdain.
Sid only glares back at him. He learned a long time ago that to escalate any sort of fight with his brother is a suicidal mistake. It is likely that everyone stationed here knows that by now.
“This is Úlfhednar,” Ashley says of the man in the leather pants, wisely ignoring Victor. “He’s our heavy weapons specialist. The guy’s a world class expert on anything that goes bang. And he’s a werewolf.”
Sid disregards that last bit as some sort of inside joke.
“The one in the shades is,” Ashley pauses. He can’t remember. “The knife guy.”
“My name’s Jim,” the knife guy interjects, annoyed.
“I don’t care,” Ashley blows smoke in the knife guy’s face. “Who’s ready to go for a ride?”
“I want to shoot the twenties,” Victor eagerly demands, referring to the aft pair of twin M61 Vulcan cannons mounted on the port side of the plane – rotary cannons that each fire seventy-two-hundred rounds per minute. These guns can put a bullet in every square yard of a football field in three seconds. They are primarily used as anti-personnel weapons.
“We don’t have a hundred grand to spend on shells again,” Ashley answers.
Sid has never used money for anything before, but he infers that a hundred grand must be a lot of it. He holds to his earlier resolution to keep his mouth shut and doesn’t ask about it. He follows the rest of them up the ramp into the plane. It is unfurnished, spartan and mechanical inside. There is no place to sit but the floor.
“Welcome aboard The Apocalypse, kid,” John Q says as he sits back down on the floor. He pats the wall behind him. “We call it that because if you see it coming, it’s gonna be the end of your world.”
“Is that why?” the knife guy interjects. “I thought it was because the damn thing is falling apart.”
“No. It’s the world ending thing.”
“Huh. I guess that works.”
“But it is fucking old. Seriously, though. They were still using cubits when they built this shit.”
But it still flies. In an hour they are in the air over the target site. Only the green glow of targeting instruments illuminates the cabin. Sid watches as Victor huddles over on
e of them, occasionally looking up to glare at his brother in the darkness.
The target is a water treatment facility which they believe to be somewhat heavily guarded. Ashley explains it rather tersely on the ride.
“We got some intel the Imam might have been spotted here,” he says, shouting over the plane’s engine. “We’re going to hit the place hard, and if we see the cocksucker, we’re gonna fill him with bullets.”
“Yeah,” John laughs. “That’ll happen.”
Sid doesn’t understand what he means.
In a few minutes, they are diving out of the back of the plane. Sid hits the ground behind Úlfhednar and Abo. The two of them approach the target with almost no discretion. Sid tries to stay low behind them. There is hardly any cover at all in the flat sands that surround the facility. Up ahead, Sid can see the treatment plant through the darkness; a grouping of sixteen vats about the size of an above-ground pool stand surrounded by a simple chain-link fence. They are guarded by a dozen men.
Sid stops to wait for Ashley’s orders. He turns to check for the rest of the team behind him and that is when he sees Victor sauntering forward with John Q behind him packing an old M60 machine gun. His brother continues past him as if he isn’t even there.
“What’s on the iPod now?” John Q asks the Norwegian. “ABBA?”
“Ke$ha,” Úlfhednar says as he pulls his gigantic headphones up onto his head.
“Jesus Christ. You gotta be kidding me…”
“Let’s rock,” Victor says as he raises a Squad Automatic Weapon.
The skinny Norwegian’s body gains bulk quickly and, at first, Sid thinks something is terribly wrong. Then he sees the fur, the claws, and the teeth – long canine fangs that jut out along a wolfish maw. Long and pointy ears stick out from under the black foam cups of the headphones. Yellow eyes glow in the darkness a full four feet higher than Sid stands. It is less like a wolf and more like a giant man with a wolf’s head. Úlfhednar lifts the two machine guns that now look like mere pistols in his giant talon-hands and opens fire on the facility. It is a sight that is terrifying to behold and it nearly freezes Sid, but he shakes it off and does the only thing that makes sense – he starts shooting. All of them do.