by Lee Doty
“Now, where is she?”
“You mean Jo, right?”
“I mean the woman you’ve been with tonight. The one you went to the movies with.”
“How did you…” Jackie started, then it clicked. “Hey, that’s my gun.”
The stranger’s smile contained no malice that Jackie could detect. “I would have probably carried appendix in that outfit… you’re in good enough shape. Even with a rudimentary holster, your reaction time would have been a lot better than trying to draw a subcompact from a purse. I’m not trying to be rude here, but that was a bit of a noob move for someone with access to custom assault rifles and nonstandard ammunition.” He flicked his eyes to indicate the rifle in Jackie’s still raised left hand.
“Tell me about it,” Jackie was happy to keep him talking, “Couldn’t carry properly… rules of engagement on this one. I only got to carry the Shield in my bag after a lot of argument. That was you in the stairwell.”
“Sure.”
“Can I have my gun back?”
“Would you care for one of the bullets?”
Jackie raised her hands a bit higher, dropped her gaze slightly in deference.
“Where is she?”
“I’m not giving her up… shoot if you have to.” Jackie kept most of the wince out of her voice.
“Loyalty. Admirable.” He said, considering. “Clearly, you’re not her BFF, so I’m assuming that your loyalty here is to the OSI.”
“BFF? I’d get sarcastic again if I wasn’t afraid you’d really shoot me this time.”
“Second strike is in the leg.” He said reasonably, “Third is in the head.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Jackie said, nodding. “but you’re wrong about Jo. Job or no, I’m not giving her up… and I’m as close to a friend as she’s got.”
“Choose then. If you’re really her friend, tell me where she is.”
“I don’t have to choose.” Jackie said, “The OSI is keeping her safe. If you care about her, you’ll help me find her.”
“The OSI is doing a fine job. Could you protect me too, please? I’d like to be left alone and unarmed in the city with two punk teams after me.”
“Punk teams?”
“Yeah,” he ticked his head casually to his left, back toward the train station entrance and the two dead dragons, “That was the end of Echo and the cooling remains of Panther are down on the platform… punks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, generally when eight operators get taken out by one, the one gets to call the eight punks.” He looked at Jackie as if she were stupid.
“You’re saying you knew these guys?” Jackie sputtered, this was big… they’d been working with Jo for eight months now without much progress, and she had been the department’s number one priority. If this stranger could be turned…
“Why didn’t you kill us in the stairwell?”
“I think I’m going to have to give you that second warning…” he let the gun drift toward her leg.
“Wait! I think we can work together. We’ve obviously got common enemies. Let’s not start our friendship with any unnecessary leg wounds…”
“I’ve got one friend in this world!” He cut her off, his voice husky with unexpected emotion, “And if your next words aren’t telling me everything you know about where she went, we’ll continue this conversation with you writhing on the ground!” The voice was strained, but the hand and gun were steady as a statue of an angry primitive God.
Jackie liked to pride herself on being cool under fire, but this stranger rattled her—hard. Maybe it was his bright, almost innocent eyes or that she felt like a defenseless toddler in his presence, but she was having a hard time keeping her knees under her and not generally swooning like a southern Belle in a civil war battlefield hospital. She risked the time to take a long, steadying breath before she spoke. She had to keep her wits about her… if she could turn this stranger… even form some tenuous alliance… what wouldn’t she risk?
Telling herself it was more tactics than terror, Jackie decided on the direct play. “Jo jumped out of the car right in front of the train station. Her breakfall was amazing… she came up uninjured as far as I could tell, then sprinted down into the train station. We continued around the corner and I jumped out, grabbed the rifle and came back to help. I came to help her, but I ended up helping you.” She cocked her head toward the burning van. “I think we can keep helping each other. I know I can help you, at least until we both know Jo’s safe.”
The stranger continued to consider her from the perspective of the sights of Jackie’s stolen gun. Jackie put all her focus into not holding her breath. Her breath went in, out, in… she was holding the wince at bay for now, keeping her legs reasonably twitch-free.
“You would slow me down.” He said, but it seemed more like a poorly phrased question than a statement.
“If it’s a shooting competition or a sprint, yeah.” She let just a bit of a hopeful smile twist the corners of her mouth, “But I’ve got things I’m pretty sure you don’t have.” She paused, hoping to set the hook.
“Like what?” He said, bringing the gun back to high, compressed ready position, not really pointing it at her anymore.
“Resources. Intel. Friends.” She said, lowering her hands slowly, keeping her right hand far away from the rifle as she let it settle back onto its harness.
“I’m not sure your friends would be my friends.” He hedged.
“We’ve got trackers on her… There’s an app on my phone to locate her, if you still have it.”
“Is this your tracker?” He fished in his jacket pocket and then held out his palm. There was a small device, about the size and general shape of a small flu-relief capsule in the center of his palm.
Jackie stared at it for a moment, mind not able to wrap around what he meant, then it hit her: “You cut out her governor!” She said, eyes wide, “That explains the breakfall, I guess… no. That’s not the tracker. There’s one in every piece of clothing she owns and one in each shoe… do you have my phone?”
“First,” he transferred the gun to his left hand, then held up his right hand, pinky extended, “We pinky swear.”
“Uhhh… sure?” She gave her head a slight, incredulous shake, then grabbed his pinky with hers.
“You swear to help me find her. You swear to not try anything until after we find her, then you can take your best shot.”
Shocked to the point of numb, she nodded. “I swear not to try anything. Not even after we find her. If you don’t cross me or try to hurt Jo, I won’t cross you, won’t hurt you or Jo, won’t even give away any info about you or Jo to my own organization without your agreement… okay?”
He looked confused, “Really?”
“Really.”
“Why?” he said it slowly, brow furrowed with skepticism.
“When you stole my pistol and cut out Jo’s governor… I wasn’t holding Jo prisoner, I was taking her to a movie.”
“You were armed.”
“And if I was a lot faster, you would have gotten shot… I was there to protect her in case someone tried to hurt her.”
“You really aren’t very good at it—no offense.” The priest said with a boyish grin.
Jackie spared a quick glance at the two dead dragons lying in the street. “None taken.”
“My point,” she continued, “is that my only two concerns are protecting Jo and destroying whoever it is that makes… them.” She waved a hand in the direction of the fallen dragons. “I believe that you want the same thing. I am willing to bet my life on it, I’m willing to trust you in the hope that you will come to trust me too. In the hope that you might come to think of me—of us—as your friends.”
He nodded, “We’ll see.” He held out the pistol, butt first. It took her a few seconds of the deepest confusion before she realized that he wanted her to take it.
“I’m glad I didn’t shoot you.”
“That, uh, ma
kes two of us.” She said, taking the pistol slowly.
***
Dr. Therese Smith sat in the back of the black Cadillac Escalade Diplomat, wondering how it had all gone so wrong so fast. Eight months of steady but unacceptably slow progress, and then it all fell apart within the space of three hours. “Where is she now?”
Dr. Leo Hawkins sat on the seat to her left. He was handsome in a nondescript way; his even features and an air of physical fitness lent an easy authority to his efficient movements, but there were no traits that would make him stand out in a crowd, except for his hard, clear eyes that would have vaulted him to primary consideration in any police lineup, or casting call for head of emergency medicine in a television drama. His close-cropped kinky hair was more a shadow than a definable hairstyle. His dark symmetrical face was roughened by childhood acne and hardened by an easy discipline. His suit, though dark and simple, had cost him a few paychecks, which was saying something for the OSI’s Director of External Operations.
He checked his hardened laptop quickly, “She’s finally gone to ground. A few blocks south of the Loop, upscale residential neighborhood.”
“Well, at least the trackers are still working. How many teams do we have in the city?”
Hawkins didn’t need to check the laptop before responding. “Of course, we’ve got the spike team we’ve held in reserve here in the city, plus two more rapid response teams. Further reinforcements will either have to come from local Law Enforcement or from more remote specialists… closest is three hours out. We could draw on military spec ops, but their lag time is even worse, not to mention the political… complexities.”
“Any idea what took the CAP down?”
“None… no registered air traffic close enough, and no other signals on radar. Our whispercraft sent no distress call, looks like whatever downed it took them by surprise.”
“Do we think it was surface-to-air?” Smith asked.
“Unlikely.” Hawkins pinched his chin, “I don’t think they would have been seen from the ground in an urban environment like that… too much elevation… buildings in the way. Also, there aren’t many shoulder-fired rigs that could have locked onto the craft without a lot of noisy active radar, which would have alerted our bird. I guess it’s possible, but my guess is that another craft got the drop on them and knocked them out with short-range air-to-air.”
“How long until we can lock down the airspace?” Smith frowned, shaking her head in what she wished was disbelief.
“We’ve got two more whispercraft in the air,” he checked his screen again, “ETA six minutes.”
“I didn’t ask how long until we could put more targets up for them!” Smith said with more heat than she intended. She took a steadying breath and continued in more measured tones, “How long to achieve complete air superiority? I’m talking full military coverage.”
“Over Chicago?” Hawkins raised his eyebrows, blinking in surprise. “That’s not going to come easy or quiet…”
Smith gave him a hard look, waiting until he’d sputtered into silence, “I didn’t ask how quiet or how easy… I asked how long.” He opened his mouth to protest again, but she raised a finger, silencing him. “We can’t work with them controlling the air. I’m not going to lose another craft because I was worried about press scrutiny or political cover! They’ve escalated this into an air war over a major U.S. city and I’m not going to yield air superiority to these people because my director of wetworks pussied out over the politics.”
He rocked back a bit, but raised his hands fractionally in surrender. “I’ll make the call.”
After a hurried call and two minutes on the laptop, he turned back to her. “We’ve diverted four FA-24s out of Scott, and a pair of Apaches out of Grissom. They’re our quickest presence… about 20 minutes. We’ve also scrambled a full squadron of 24s out of Wright-Patterson and have a compliment of off-book whispercraft coming in from Virginia.” He blew out a breath, “…and General Hildebrandt has both of his substantial eyebrows raised in our direction. They’re jumping, but this is going to cost us.”
“Leave that to me, Leo.” Smith said. “Get Captain Miller coordinating the ops with the stand-up military assets. I don’t want our craft to come on post until we’re sure we can dominate anyone who has a problem with that. Keep the ground teams out of the light until they’re covered from above.”
“You’re actually willing to fill the Chicago skies with missiles?” Hawkins asked.
“My bet is we’ve already crossed that line. I doubt that our CAP went down with mechanical problems. Anyway, I’m hoping a show of overwhelming force will end the air fight. I’m hoping they’ll try to stealth their way out and who knows, we might get lucky and follow them home. Where is the spike team now?”
“I scrambled them when we lost contact with the cab and the CAP.” His look was grave as he regarded his watch, “They’ll be on-site in eight minutes. They’ll be dealing with locals on scene, so we’re rolling in as FBI. Lightest armament, except for the caches in their vehicles. They are our very best, but I’m not hopeful if we come upon the Dragons in anything but a complete surprise situation.” He turned the laptop so that the doctor could more easily see, “I’ve got the other two teams suited up. The trucks are already at rally points south—here and here,” he tapped twice on the city map on his screen, indicating twin markers to the south and to the west of the incident. “ETA for full teams on site is less than ten minutes. Currently, we’re at sixty percent strength.”
“How much visibility do we have into the incident?” Smith asked, massaging her temples, eyes closed.
“Tech should have the satellite tasked any moment. We’ve tapped into traffic cams and other official surveillance, such as it is.” He made a few gestures on the laptop’s screen, “Here’s what we’ve been able to cobble together so far… we don’t have the beginning of the incident on video as the dragons hacked the intersection’s traffic signal and camera.”
The screen filled with green-tinted high contrast / low color images from the city’s surveillance net. In a quick montage, amounting to maybe thirty seconds of video, Smith saw a series of scenes: a dark panel van pulled to a stop at the side of an empty street. Flicker: an empty intersection that dissolved into static as the camera was compromised. Flicker: Marko’s cab pulled around a corner. Flicker: the van pursuing the cab through several intersections at speed. Flicker: a dragon in full armor firing from the passenger side of the van at the swerving cab. Flicker: a placid scene on a parking garage rooftop was shattered as their CAP fell, burning from the sky and destroyed a rather sharp-looking Lexus before continuing its roll off the side of the elevated parking garage.
The montage ended with a split view from four surveillance cameras that covered the long stairwell from the street down into an underground subway station. The subscript at the bottom right of each camera indicated it was the east entrance to the Clark/Lake Blue Line station. After a few seconds, a woman leapt out of the night and down the first few stairs, running flat out. At another tap from Hawkins, the video paused, then he splayed his fingers out from the woman’s face and the frozen image expanded until only the woman’s upper body filled the screen.
“You will notice that this is your pet dragon.” Hawkins commented.
Smith nodded, the familiar clothes, face and scars didn’t identify her as definitively as the smile. Jo’s face looked like she was skipping to recess after a particularly stressful day of the third grade; dreams of dodgeball seemed to fill her wide eyes. Where Smith would have expected wild-eyed terror, she could see only a playful exuberance.
“That’s not the look I was expecting.” Smith shook her head, disbelieving.
Hawkins grunted, “The next part, you’re only going to appreciate in slow motion.” He tapped the screen twice and the full four-perspective playback resumed at quarter speed.
At this frame rate, the motion came in a partially blurred, lurching cadence. Jo took another leaping step forwa
rd as two fully armored dragons appeared in the entranceway above and behind her. Their hands were empty and their submachine guns hung and jumped on their slings behind them. They were on Jo by the second leap, the first grabbing the collar and arm of her jacket and dragging her back and sideways in the air, while his partner came around his left, grabbing for Jo’s left shoulder.
Like an acrobat after long practice with a particular maneuver, Jo threw her head and arms up and to the right side, curling her body as she dropped her left shoulder, brought her knees up in a leftward arc that caught the second dragon on the helmet, shattering the armored faceplate with her right shin. The dragon crumpled in mid leap tangling with his companion’s legs. Jo continued her crouched arc, scissoring her left leg into position on the remaining dragon’s shoulders. She grabbed the armored collar of his jacket and pulled herself on top of him until her knees were on his back, both hands in his collar. She rode him like a pony amidst the tangle of bodies down until he landed hard on the stairs, with her knees still on his back. She used the armored dragon to cushion her fall, then rolled gracefully over him and down three steps and regained her feet. Without slowing, she continued her sprint like nothing had happened.
Hawkins tapped the screen and the image paused just as two more armored dragons leapt into view above. “I have no words.”
“That was not real.” Smith blinked.
“Well, now we begin to understand how these teams have been taking us apart.” Hawkins shook his head, “…and how much fire we’ve been playing with these last few months. If this little adventure doesn’t end our lives, it likely will end our careers.”
“The time to think about politics is after-action.” Smith’s reproach was sharper because it was delivered softly. “Now our concern is how we retrieve her.”
“Retrieve?!” Hawkins sputtered, “Retrieve? You can’t be serious! You’re not really thinking about getting her back on your couch, back into that preschool!? Not after we’ve seen…”
“Calm yourself.” Smith said, giving him her full attention, “You are not twelve and this is not a slasher movie you snuck into at the multiplex. We are not about to split up and investigate that spooky sound.”