by John Ringo
"She didn't look very bereaved," Mueller heard himself say, earning another thwack to the back of his head.
"Down, boy. You know as well as I do—doesn't matter." Mosovich looked entirely willing to keep hitting him on the head as long as it took.
"Who was the poor bastard?"
"Ned Mortinson. Who turns out to have been fifty-something."
"Really? I hadn't had him picked out as a juv."
"Apparently he didn't have himself picked out as one, either. She's about twenty. For real. It wasn't a match made in heaven."
"You know her life history?"
"The O'Neals gossip like hell, turns out. Once you get in past their obsessive opsec. I asked around for a few basics before writing letters," Jake said.
"Obsessive opsec. Sounds like a very good thing to me."
"Yup. But on the island here? The world's biggest gossips—and not just the women. You could run a wine cellar on their grapevine."
"You gotta admit she's got one hell of a nice ass. Nice every—" Mueller sighed and drew himself up straighter from his habitually straight posture. "Yes, sir. What's on the schedule today?"
Chapter Nine
George Schmidt didn't like leading patched-together teams. This one was a thrown-together extraction unit, seeing that Papa was off-planet, Tommy was generaling, and Cally was incommunicado in what Shari O'Neal assured him was a vital matter for Clan O'Neal. Since he wasn't an O'Neal, by the Bane Sidhe's unwritten operating rules, that pretty much required him to drop the matter. He didn't have to like it. So he had Harrison as a wheelman, but he also had three random guys. One from Kaleb, whom he trusted, and two guys from DAG who'd been sitting around on base cooling their heels. Landrum was a good enough guy—raised Bane Sidhe like Schmidt himself, experienced operating as part of DAG, but a total cherry on Bane Sidhe ops. Kerry and Michaels were unknown quantities, though not to Landrum, who vouched for his teammates.
The rationale for landing him with three cherries was an extra man to make up for inexperience. Yeah, right. One more guy to maybe make a bad mistake operating like someone with a nation state's government behind them and the general approval of the Darhel. These guys' knowledge that Toto and Dorothy weren't in Kansas anymore was only intellectual. He figured the real reason for three newbies was to use the opportunities to get new men broken in on fieldwork fast, and to stave off troop boredom. The first rule of managing these guys was that you did not want to let them get bored. A bored specwar operator was a bad specwar operator. Consummate professionals left too long without work would find themselves something to do—and whatever it was, nobody else would like it. Okay, a few female types might have a great time, but that was only a best case scenario.
DAG had no female operators. Bane Sidhe base had a good handful of upgraded juvs on hand at any given time. The Bane Sidhe guys knew the score, but the FNGs generally weren't going to believe these women were their superiors in strength and probably in training, too, until they were in a world of hurt. George himself had heard a pretty damned funny after-action report on Father O'Reilly's little talk with the women after the first incident. Unfortunately, she'd been incredibly gentle, and the guy had been shipped off right away to Island O'Neal. It wasn't that the guy had exactly refused to take no for an answer; he had more misunderstood the signals and the lady took offense. A broken jaw had a remarkably immediate sobering effect on a man. Anyway, the light damage and speed of his disappearance left the potential discipline problem intact. One of the problems with Nathan's more administrative and priestly background was that, good as he was with people, he didn't always get the ops types. Almost always, but there it was: almost.
This was a sucky assignment to take three DAG guys on, because it was going to punch all their damn buttons. Yeah, they were professionals; they'd get cold. They'd also be damned sure they already knew what to do because they'd click right into highly trained-in patterns. Change that: they were already in the zone. They knew this was Maise's wife and kids. They might as well have been born in the zone.
"All right people, listen up." He looked around at the four other men in the trailer that was the final staging location for the op. "You are not operating in DAG. You can't go in on reflex. You two," he pointed to Kerry and Michaels, who looked uncomfortable in the wigs that covered their military haircuts, and about as unhappy with the identical suits and ties.
"You're Mormon missionaries," he said. "You get the front door. When you get out of the car, think earnest and carry that book like you revere it, not like you don't want it. One of you pretends to knock on the door while the other one unlocks it. Just listen to your earbug for the beeps."
They hated the risk of not being able to communicate in event of surprises. Yeah. He was no way in hell going to tolerate anything other than tiny blips out of radio silence. He had a PDA, Harrison had a PDA. Relative risk.
"Landrum goes into the house area first as a meter reader, and waits at the meter until we go through the doors. Then you Mormons go in. Kerry, you look older, you're earnestly explaining to Michaels how this door knocking thing works for the little time it takes Duchess and me to come up the sidewalk."
He'd be riding a Vespa reproduction, with a little weenie dog in a carrier behind him. Harrison had dressed him carefully; with the bagged bottle of wine, he looked for all the world like a friend coming over for a little holiday cheer.
"I look at you curiously as I walk by to the kitchen door. Two beeps and we ready, three beeps and we go in."
This was probably the first entry the new guys had done where they had keys to the doors and were not allowed to do a complete room take-down. They hated it. Truth to tell, so did he. Their way was safer for the operatives. They weren't used to being a bit more expendable here. This mission was counter to all their training and experience. They never operated in CONUS, and their primary mission was putting down pirates and terrorists in city states, whether resource colonies or the handful of old pre-war cities that had been repopulated in various world locations. Terrorism was, unfortunately, alive and well. As in pre-war times, frequently it was a figleaf for good old-fashioned crime, kidnapping, extortion. That was DAG's experience. A black-bag entry on a private house in a quiet residential area, if not in broad daylight at least in twilight, was outside all their training.
"If you encounter hostiles, shock, don't shoot. If you even draw your firearm without damn good reason I will have your ass. Use your judgment on turning on lights." Their expressions said clearly that they appreciated having at least something where their judgment would be trusted. It was hard for pros to be cherries on anything.
"We get the survivors, the Mormons are out on point and stop at the car to chat with each other, then Duchess and I escort the survivors out to see my bike, Harrison pulls up and gets the survivors. Landrum covers our tail. The Vespa stays, the rest of us proceed independently to the rendezvous."
"And the bike?" Kerry asked.
"Oh. Cleanup gets it if possible." Of course the FNGs wouldn't know SOP yet.
"That leaves the survivors exposed in transit, sir," Michaels observed.
"Yes, it does. Cleanup will be coming in as we leave, along our exit route." He gestured to his brother. "They'll be listening in in case we need backup. Yes, there's exposure. This is a resistance organization. In the extreme, we're more expendable than DAG was. We hate to lose operatives, we can't afford it, but losses hurt less than exposure." These guys were in no way shy about exposing themselves to risk in a professional capacity. They'd done it time and again and would do it more. They were also professional enough not to take unnecessary risks.
"Tramp" Michaels, so named for an incident in a Burmese whorehouse he'd rather forget, wasn't real keen on their team leader. A thrown-together team of guys who never worked together, never even worked in the same organizations, no training, on a live op was asking for a goatfuck. Yeah, that was bad enough, but even for a juv this guy looked like a kid. Like barely fourteen. And now he
was dressed in a cheap civilian suit like a weenie missionary carrying the Book of Mormon. At least it was something to do, but it wasn't what he was trained to do. It wasn't making it any easier to dump the volcanic rage he was feeling and click into the zone. Dead civilians he could deal with. Dead dependents of teammates—he really wanted to kill the guys who did this. Which was bad. Target identification could slow you down, get you or your teammates killed. And what about the surviving kid? No way this wasn't going to fuck him up bad. Really wanted these guys.
He had memorized the map of the neighborhood, as a matter of course. As had Kerry beside him. "You okay, man?" he asked.
"Cocked, locked, and ready to rock," his buddy affirmed. His left hand was closed into a fist so tight the knuckles stood out whitely, thumb grating across the index finger. His voice was tight with leashed anger.
"You too, huh? Into the zone buddy, into the zone," Michaels, as always, found it easier to support Ketch than himself.
"Roger that."
And that simply, the fury went from fire to ice for both of them, the ice at the familiar distance that allowed clean operation and got the mission done. It felt good, the familiarity. First, extract the kid. And the safe-house guy who had probably fucked up and let it all happen. Then find these other fucks and correct their breathing problem.
None of these thoughts stopped him from tracking the details of everything they passed as they moved in on the objective. As always, those details were preternaturally clear, and the world slow, as his thoughts clicked over miles in instants. He had become the machine, and there was the house.
"Mormons," Kerry said.
"We don't have to talk the talk, dude, we've just gotta walk the walk," Tramp pulled up to the curb and parked smoothly.
Under other circumstances, since it was a mission necessity, it would have been an interesting way to get in close to the house and an interesting problem. At the moment, there was nothing but the now. Under the guise of saying a few words to each other, ostensibly about missionary stuff, he and Ketch got a good three-sixty look over each other's shoulder after getting out of the car. He could see, way down at the end of the street, Schmidt on his bike. Time to move.
Despite their roles, when the two men turned to walk up the sidewalk to the front door, it was with the lithe coordination of wolves from the same pack, on the hunt.
Tramp was glad to see the door had a knocker. He mimed pushing the doorbell and stood, facing the door with his buddy in what they hoped was the sincere, angelic attention of men of God on a mission. Which they were, just not in the sense they were feigning. After all, God had a thing for wrath and vengeance against scumbags, too, didn't he? Extraction first, but in the process observe all the details for the tracks and sign necessary to hunt some very bad people down. Bad people who had very much messed with the wrong pack.
"This is gonna suck for Landrum," Kerry said. "Used to date Kerrie."
"Ouch. What fuckhead assigned him to this team?" Tramp scowled in the general direction of the Schmidt shrimp, who was off his scooter and walking up the driveway with his paper-bagged wine bottle, looking credibly like some "friend" of the family.
"I don't think it was Schmidt. Don't even know if he knows."
"Oh, great. Fucking brilliant." Michaels stuck the key in the doorknob and turned as he heard the telltale clatter of the kitchen storm door opening. Acting, for a moment, nothing like Mormon missionaries, he and Kerry rushed in the front door, looking to both sides as he kicked the door shut behind them. Unhappily restrained by the order not to draw, each of them had a hand under his suit jacket, which was as close to drawing as they could get without breaking their shitty ROE.
The black fist spray-painted on the wall suggested that the tangos were indeed gone, which was great for the survivors, if true. If. Tramp followed his buddy down the hall to the left of the empty living room, backwards, guarding his six.
"This is the one to keep Landrum out of," Kerry announced grimly as they turned into the first room, a bedroom that sat on the front side of the house.
Michaels glanced over his shoulder into the bedroom. The bastards had rather thoughtfully left the closet door flung open, giving a plain view of one of the best bits of cover in the room. Kerrie Maise sprawled across the bed, sloppily shot in four or five random places, other than the head shot at close range that had obviously killed her. The streaks of blood on the floor suggested that she had staggered backwards with the first couple of shots and fallen onto the bed.
With no time to feel, they cleared the room and sent the relevant click code. The grey and white splatter, some still stuck to the wall behind the bed, was one of those sights a guy really didn't want in his head as the last memory of any woman he'd fucked. Despite his professionalism, the boil of rage threatened to swamp him.
He clamped a lid on it as they left the corpse behind to proceed on to the next room, which was evidently one of the kids' bedrooms. Mercifully, it was empty, though tainted by a strong smell of puke. They sent the code and moved on to the master bedroom. A pair of clicks, the tone said Schmidt's, indicated the non-survivor boy had been found. Clearing the last room on their list, they moved farther back to the holo/rec room, where Landrum waited, white-faced.
"Basement," he said.
"Don't go into the front of the house, dude," Tramp told the other man firmly. Probably he would have been smart enough not to, but some things were worth making sure. You couldn't un-see shit.
When Landrum's face turned a rockier shade of pissed, he knew he'd been right to insist.
"No." The word came out of his and Kerry's mouths simultaneously, communicating that they would restrain the man physically if necessary.
Landrum spun on his heel and stalked off to the kitchen, followed by Kerry. Michaels, again, brought up the rear.
The entire process of clearing the upper floor of the house had taken less than thirty seconds.
In the kitchen, he and Kerry watched the top of the stairs while Landrum and Schmidt made the descent to the basement, returning momentarily with the civilian man and the boy. Pinky, Tramp reminded himself. This wasn't just any civilian child. This was the son of one of the guys in his unit.
"They killed Jenny," the boy said, face pinched with fear and fatigue. The safe house—and wasn't that a sick joke—guy didn't look so hot either, and no wonder.
Tramp raised an eyebrow at Landrum, who was again firmly seated in "professional" mode.
"Kid next door. Thought it was him." He nodded at the small boy.
A little surprising, but if the body was messy, obviously possible.
"We're out of here." Schmidt said. "You two with me. Just keep your mouths shut and walk with me, ignore my talking, get in the car that pulls up."
The civilians with their team lead, Kerry, Michaels, and Landrum proceeded along their own exit paths, keeping alert for any attempt on the survivors between house and cars. Tramp hated this exit plan. It left the survivors too out in the open, the brief passage down the driveway being an eternity if a competent shot was watching the house. He'd been overruled. Broad daylight; suburbia. Sometimes mission requirements put you in a sub-optimal situation.
He was still relieved when the car with the two Schmidts and the civilians got off, while equally apprehensive about the exposure of the car.
As he and Kerry pulled into the post-extraction rendezvous, he was damned glad to see the car with the dependent had made it, and reflected that compared to the more open work of DAG, this resistance shit sucked. But they got the surviving dependent out, and the safe house dude, which was a win to take home.
Boarding the van to make the final leg of the trip back to base, Kerry caught his eye. Both men were thinking the same thing. Fucked up resistance ROEs or not, they wanted in on the op when these Bane Sidhe found the bastards that did the wife and other son.
They were real good guys. Finding Maise's wife and older son in large pools of congealed blood, finding the "message" symbol left
on the wall—George didn't know if they recognized it as a mafia symbol or not. It didn't matter. They all knew who'd really sent it. The third body turned out to be that of a little girl from next door. He didn't envy the clean-up crew's job in dealing with that. A "disappearance" of a child was often worse than having the police find the body. Ten to one, the crew would have her buried in a shallow grave somewhere and get the police an anonymous tip. Some time after that, after business had been taken care of, the family would probably get a cryptic notification hinting at the destruction of the perpetrators. Nothing was without risk. In this case, the kid had gotten caught in the crossfire of their war. That it was all of humanity's war would mean nothing to Jenny Sorenson's parents. Arranging for them to get the body back, along with a small sense of justice, was the least the organization could do. The Sorensons would probably interpret the justice notification as coming from a rival organized crime faction. The Bane Sidhe would do their best to subtly encourage that assumption.
"I'd like the things in the trunk if at all possible. Family mementos," Andreotti said.
The assassin kept a neutral face and told the middle-aged man that he'd inform the clean-up crew. The crew would know to go over every damned thing in the box and catalog it, tagging any suspect items for restriction to base. "Family mementos" of one sort or another gave nightmares to internal security staff as they managed a highly multigenerational conspiracy. The pre-recontact human Bane Sidhe numbers had been small. Mostly, it was a very few interconnected families who tended to have multigenerational relationships with certain factions in certain organizations—as, say, the sub-faction in the Society of Jesus. Contrary to the broadest and longest standing conspiracy theories, the generations of Bane Sidhe sleepers had rarely been Freemasons.