He looked around the world. “For what it’s worth, you all did well, but it can never be acknowledged. But then, you knew that when you joined up. Go have your liberty—and be grateful that the three murdering superhumans are behind bars.”
Jackson followed Ron and the others as they headed out of the building towards the parked van. Team Omega seemed to spend half of its time in unmarked vans, something that had puzzled him until he realised that there were so many vans on the street that one more wouldn't seem like anything out of the ordinary. None of the vans could stand up to a proper military vehicle, but none of them needed anything more than the ability to move unnoticed.
“Time to go,” Ron said. “You haven’t been to the Operator yet, have you?”
“No,” Jackson said.
“Then it’s time you started,” Ron said. He grinned at Chris, who had taken the driver’s seat. “Move out!”
Chapter Fifteen
Twenty minutes later, Ron tapped Jackson’s shoulder. “Welcome to the Operator. You see anything interesting here?”
Jackson saw a small house, no bigger than the one he’d grown up in, surrounded by a reasonably neat garden. It seemed just like any suburban neighbourhood in America. There was no sign of a bar or anything that might cater to soldiers on liberty.
“No,” he said, slowly. “What am I missing?”
“Follow me,” Ron said, as he climbed out of the van. “There’s a tradition that no one comes here unless they're an operator and completed their first mission. Even a major fuck-up like Desert One would count.”
He strode up towards the house’s door and knocked firmly, moving his hand in a pattern across the panelled wood. There was a pause and then the door opened automatically, letting out an echo of quiet music as the team filed into a small room that reminded Jackson of an airlock interior, just like the one in Camp Pendleton’s gas chamber. The music grew louder as the door closed and the second door opened, revealing that the house’s interior had been converted into a bar. Jackson stopped in surprise as he saw nearly thirty men grouped around a counter or reclining in soft chairs—and, in one case, a hammock.
“Every operator is welcome here—Delta, Force Recon, SEALs...everyone, as long as they’ve completed a mission.” Ron took him by the arm and guided him over to the counter. “The guy who runs this place used to be an operator himself, one of the very first Rangers...he was actually involved in the creation of Delta, believe it or not. He figured that every operator needed a place to get drunk and relax without his superiors breathing down his neck and accusing him of slacking off. So when he retired, he opened this place.”
Jackson stared around, feeling oddly intimidated in such company. He had intended to try out for Force Recon as soon as he could, but fate and Team Omega had intervened before he managed to get himself on the list of candidates. It hadn't occurred to him in several weeks just how far he’d jumped forward when he’d joined Team Omega—but then, he had killed a superhuman in single combat. If you weren't cheating, as an old Drill Instructor had once said, you weren't trying. Team Omega’s main recruitment criteria seemed to be someone who knew that superhumans weren't invincible.
He caught sight of a pair of women wearing professional suits, and blinked in surprise. There were no female operators, as far as he knew; women rarely had the ability to complete the rigorous selection process that was a requirement for joining any SOF. Outside of fiction, there were no female Force Recon Marines—and he doubted that the selection criteria were any less rigorous for any of the other teams.
“They worked with the Rangers from time to time and earned their scars,” Ron explained, when Jackson asked. “Maybe not formal operators, but they carried themselves well when they were tested—that chick over there is a better EOD officer than anyone else I’ve ever met. You don’t want to know what happened when she was tested to the limit and passed.”
The bartender placed two pints of beer in front of them and stuck out a hand. “Danny Boy,” he said, with a grin. “Welcome to the Operator.”
Jackson blinked at him. Danny Boy had been a legend among the early teams, right from the start. From what he’d heard—and he assumed that the tale had grown in the telling—Danny Boy’s first attempt to join Delta Force had been foiled when he’d been caught cheating by convincing a civilian motorcyclist to give him a lift to the next waypoint. He’d completed his second attempt well enough to convince the selectors to overlook his first—and last—offence.
“Thank you,” Jackson said. He found himself looking at the series of decorations on the wall. There were a handful of Viking shields, a giant broadsword and several Civil War-era rifles, all topped by a mounted tiger head, positioned on a shield of wood. “What the hell is that?”
“That’s a reminder of the thing with the tiger,” Danny Boy said. He winked. “It's something a British SAS officer brought over after he’d been booted out of the country. By now, there are so many rumours about it that the truth would probably be a disappointment.”
“I heard that he let a government official get eaten by a tiger,” Ron said. Jackson shook his head in disbelief. “Not the standard failure that gets someone kicked out of the teams.”
“The version I heard was that they shot the tiger on operations in India, but some complete fucker in the Department of Political Correctness ordered him to resign or face a court martial,” Danny Boy said. He twisted his voice into a snooty upper-class English accent. “Tigers are an endangered species, don’t you know? And now there’s one less to roam around the country and eat helpless peasants for tea.”
“That sounds depressingly plausible,” Ron admitted. “It isn't quite that bad over here, but did you hear of the SEAL who got in trouble for refusing to write out an environmental impact statement for an antipiracy operation near the Horn of Africa?”
Jackson shook his head and started to listen as other operators gravitated to the bar, each one putting forward a different story of operations against the enemies of the United States—and their own version of the thing with the tiger. It had never occurred to him that the operator community would want to brag to one another about their successes, successes that were either classified or too unbelievable for the civilians to understand. All of them were cleared for such discussions, Ron informed him after he asked, and it provided a neat backchannel for sharing information that senior officers might prefer to keep to themselves.
“If you ever meet a Major York, don’t let him handle the tactical planning,” one of the operators put in. “He must have watched a few bad movies, because he had a plan that involved us rappelling into the sea and then swimming four miles to the nearest cliff face, whereupon we would climb up and travel cross-country another five miles before we found the enemy, kidnapped him and dragged the bastard back with us until we were picked up by a navy boat. It had so many things wrong with it that the only way I agreed to carry it out was if he came with us.”
Ron laughed. “And did he?”
“Of course not,” the operator said. “It turned out that he had orders not to risk his precious skin. So we decided that we would use one of the quieter helicopters, drop down on his headquarters from high overhead and then carry him out the same way. Worked like a dream—he had plenty of defences around his house, but he didn't think that we could come in from high overhead.”
He shook his head. “A week later, someone had taken over his territory and ordered a truck bombing of the nearest American base,” he added. “The bastards in that shithole of a country would keep carrying on until they were all dead, or until everyone else was dead. We should have just nuked it from orbit.”
“There's always innocents caught up in a combat zone,” Ron said, dryly. “How many of them deserved to die?”
The talk moved to other operations, including some that had been carried out behind the Iron Curtain. Jackson listened, unsure if half of the stories were true or if the operators were just messing with him. A story about a group
of SEALs who travelled overland into Russia hoping to find Americans who had been captured in Vietnam sounded unbelievable, as did the barely-masked suggestions that someone high up in the CIA or State Department had quietly foiled similar operations so that they could certify that there were no remaining American prisoners in enemy hands. They’d started to loathe and mistrust the CIA long before the Slaughter Incident.
He poked Ron during a lull in the conversation and asked him. “It's hard to tell,” Ron admitted. “One thing that you won’t really understand until you see it for yourself is that pretty much any government consists of multiple factions with different objectives and priorities. Washington is so large and unfocused that it’s quite possible for the Pentagon to be concentrating on winning the war while the State Department undercuts them by dealing with the enemy leadership as equals. And the CIA...it feels, not without justification, that all of its successes go unremarked and its failures get blown out of proportion. Any CIA officer in the field will be considering how best to cover his ass as well as how to make the CIA look good.
“They say that shit runs downhill,” he added. “Believe me, the handful of CIA operatives on the ground are the ones who get the blame for any fuck-ups, often because their superiors didn't allocate enough resources or refused to listen to the people with their fingers on the local pulse. So they refuse to expose themselves, with the net result that the operators are often held up or have their operations cancelled...”
He picked up Jackson’s glass and waved to the bartender. “More beer over here,” he called, loudly. “This rookie isn't drunk yet.”
The evening wore on slowly, with more tales and some covert exchanges of information that seemed to centre mainly on superior officers. Team Omega seemed to enjoy almost no turnover since it had been founded, at least among the civilians who provided the upper levels of direction, but that was unusual. Many of the teams had stories about losing good commanders, while the bad ones stayed around long enough to stink up the building with their shit before they left, just because they wanted their careers to include a mention of special operations. Jackson quietly memorised the names of a dozen senior officers who should be watched carefully, and a handful who meant well, but didn't really know what they were doing. At least most of the latter had the sense to listen to their NCOs.
He glanced at his watch and was surprised to find out they’d spent upwards of five hours in the strange bar. Night was falling, and they hadn't even had dinner yet.
Ron laughed when he pointed it out and led the way into a separate room, where there were a handful of tables and a young barmaid ready to take their order. Jackson had to smile when he saw the menu; there were no politically correct choices for any of the operatives. He could order anything from a massive burger to a T-bone steak. There were no prices marked at all.
“Everything is free to an operator,” Ron explained quietly. “This place is funded out of various unit budgets; everyone makes a small contribution and it gets lost in the accounting. Some clever unit accountant noted that the bar was actually a net gain—or had it pointed out to him—and helped to cover it up. Or that’s what I was told, at least. I wouldn't have put it past some of the sneakier officers to push for the bar and pretend they know nothing about it.”
Jackson blinked. “Does Captain Lane know about this place?”
“He was an operator, too,” Ron reminded him. Jackson flushed at his own mistake. The Sergeant might have led the team into action in most of their exercises, and the operation against the Young Stars, but there was no question about Lane carrying his own weight. From the records, Jackson suspected that Lane had been lucky; he hadn't taken any serious injuries on any of their operations. “Of course the Captain knows about this place. He’s even been a visitor here after he got promoted.”
He pointed to a sign along one of the walls, reading NO RANK IN THIS BUILDING. “He spends too much of his time dealing with the politics of our operation, which is why we see less of him than we might prefer, but he keeps his finger on the pulse,” he added. “You can trust him to go to bat for you if you get into trouble—and to flay the skin off your bones of you managed to fuck up too dramatically. I remember a time when he convinced the Highway Patrol to back off...”
Jackson listened as he launched into a long story involving Team One, a handful of female swimming champions from Sweden and a bunch of thugs who had catcalled at the women when their vehicle broke down, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it would have gotten nastier if Team One hadn't arrived, just in time to subdue the half-drunk thugs and leave them bound and gagged on the side of the road. Jackson wasn't sure that he believed half of it, particularly Ron’s claim that one of the women had sucked him off while he drove to the nearest town.
“In all the excitement, we forgot to call the police or someone to go pick the bastards up,” Ron concluded. “The next we heard about it was a phone call from the Highway Patrol demanding that we explain ourselves. It turned out that the bastards had been found by a passer-by, who called the police... Who would have thought that they would manage to notice the plate number on the van?”
“Right,” Jackson said. A team of highly-trained operatives had forgotten their prisoners? It wouldn't have been likely even if they hadn't been trained to deal with prisoners who possessed superhuman abilities. “And what did the Captain have to say about it?”
“No liberty for the next month,” Ron said, ruefully. “You could just tell that he was trying not to laugh as he pronounced sentence.”
The food arrived, along with a different waitress wearing a tight outfit. “Don’t look too closely,” Ron advised, as soon as the waitress had gone. “Her father has more friends in the teams than anyone else, and they’d be happy to help him thump anyone who looked at his daughter sideways. Apparently she’s safer here than in college.”
He shrugged. “I once saw a woman who had been brought up by an operative and his bunch of friends,” he added. “Deadliest woman I ever saw, but pretty—just like a black widow spider. I think she went to work for the CIA as a covert operative. Rumour has it that she killed a terrorist leader after inveigling her way into his bed.”
“Compared to some of the tales I heard tonight,” Jackson said as he took a bite of his burger, “that one sounds almost believable.”
Ron tapped the side of his nose. “The stories are all true,” he said. “Well, apart from the lies. And the ones where they changed a few details to protect the guilty. And the ones they just made up to explain why they’d spent several months sitting on their butts in a far-off country. And the ones...”
“I get it,” Jackson said, quickly. “I notice you didn't tell many stories...”
“I wanted you to listen,” Ron said. “You’re one of us now—an operator. Whatever you were before you joined, you’re Team Omega now. You get much more latitude, but you also get to handle the consequences if you fuck up. It would be far too easy to get someone killed on this job.”
He shook his head. “Eat, drink and be merry,” he added. “Do you want to go find a brothel?”
Jackson stared at him. “You're kidding me,” he said. There were brothels near all military bases, whatever the law said, but he’d never had someone just up and offer to take him to one. “Seriously?”
“Only sometimes,” Ron said. He used a knife to cut open part of his steak and then drenched it in sauce. Jackson took a sniff and made a face. “Like the Sergeant said, we can do whatever we like on liberty as long as we come home reasonably sober—and without the police chasing us.”
Jackson was still mulling it over as he finished his burger and fries. It had been the best he’d tasted, certainly better than any of the fast food chains he’d visited, but then he had been eating base food for the past six weeks. The food wasn’t too bad, he had to admit, yet it didn't compare to real food.
Ron was right, he realised. The entire team knew that it could be their last day on Earth; tomorrow, they might fin
d themselves facing a deadly superhuman. They could do everything right and still lose. Even the other teams, the ones who carried out missions that were never officially acknowledged, didn't operate on such terms. Their enemies were normal humans, flesh and blood.
A stranger approached Ron’s table and nodded. “We may be going to Africa in the next few days,” he said. Jackson looked at him, but couldn't identify his unit. “Do you have any tips?”
“Yeah,” Ron said, thoughtfully. He winked at Jackson, and then looked back at the visitor. “Don’t annoy the ones running the Congo right now.”
Jackson frowned. The media had been full of the reports from the Congo, with opinions ranging from relief and gratitude to outright hostility. He could see their point; if a bunch of superhumans could take over one nation, what was to stop them taking over another? Team Omega might have to fight those guys...even with the new weapons and some gadgets that he’d been briefed upon, it wouldn't be easy. The Saviours were practically a superpower in their own right.
Shaking his head, he called for another beer. It wasn't something he wanted to think about sober. Eat, drink and be merry indeed...for tomorrow they might die.
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