Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  “We’ve seen worse,” Boxers said. “Sometimes I really hate what we do for a living.”

  Jonathan made a waving motion with his hand. “No. I think that’s a step too far,” he said. “Wolfie told me a story that I haven’t passed on to you guys yet.”

  Boxers shot him an angry glare. “You keeping stuff from us, Boss? That’s not the way we do things. At least it never has been.”

  “It’s not like that,” Jonathan said. “At least, that’s not the way I’d intended it to be. It’s a pretty big deal, and she asked me to promise not to spread it around. Even to you guys.”

  “You could have said no,” Boxers said.

  “Yes, I could, but no, I didn’t. And I apologize. The gist of it was that over the years, our alphabet agencies have had to hide the identities of a lot of wet-work contractors in order to protect them from prosecution by the Justice Department’s witch hunt. That’s what happened to Stepahin. There’s no reason to think that the same thing didn’t happen with this guy—Deffenbaugh or whoever.” He looked to Venice. “So, what I’m saying is that government-level cover does not necessarily mean current government-level involvement.”

  Venice scowled deeply. “So, we just created these monsters and then unleashed them on the world?”

  “Wolverine assures me that it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “You know this is madness, right?” Venice said. “This is no way to run a world.”

  “Depends on where you sit in the equation,” Jonathan said. “We hired these guys to do a job that needed to be done, and we did it on good faith. You can’t change the rules after the deal is done. And if I sound a little defensive, it could be that I’m talking about myself.”

  “You’re not an assassin,” Venice said.

  “No, I’m not,” Jonathan said. “And I never would be. But the finer distinction would likely be lost on the families of the people I’ve killed in pursuit of the greater good.”

  “Can we please move on?” Boxers said.

  Jonathan nodded for Venice to continue with her presentation. “Forget about his true identity. How are we going to find him?”

  Another coy smile from Venice. “That’s my biggest get of all,” she said. “I mean, think about it. There’s only about a bazillion cars on the road, right? Finding the one out of the masses was a daunting task. I wasn’t sure how to tackle it until I remembered that Fairfax, Braddock, Prince William, and Loudoun Counties all photograph license plates.”

  “They do?” Jonathan said. “How?”

  “If you look around, you’ll see cameras on the back of police cars. There are pole-mounted cameras as well. They’re not supposed to keep the data, but the Virginia attorney general doesn’t enforce the rule, so the counties keep it anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “To track people,” Boxers said. “Big Brother is watching.” Deep inside Boxers’ body, there had long been a conspiracy theorist trying to break out.

  “He’s mostly right,” Venice said. “It’s part of a post-nine-eleven security package—the same one that gave Braddock County an armored personnel carrier. The idea is to be able to search back after a terrorist event to find the perpetrators.”

  “It worked pretty well after the Boston bombings a few years ago,” Jonathan said.

  “Different system, same idea,” Venice said.

  Jonathan thought about that for a few seconds, about the ramifications for him and his operations. “So, you mean that every time Box and I roll out with the Batmobile, there’s a photo record of it, and our license plates are tracked?”

  Venice chuckled. “Not a problem,” she said. “I went into the system back when I first found out about it. There’s a back door that allows national security assets to hide from Freedom of Information requests. It was a pretty easy hack. Every time the system registers your tag, it automatically erases it.”

  “So, is it safe to say that you put the system to work for you?”

  “Indeed it is,” she said. She stroked some more keys, and more data popped up on the screen.

  “Also not public information?” Jonathan asked.

  Another glare.

  “Do I want to know how you got the password information?”

  “Would you understand what I told you if I did?”

  “Probably not. Pardon me for interrupting.”

  “So, I searched the database and got a total of six hundred thirty-seven hits on his license plate.”

  “Holy crap,” Boxers said.

  “Not unexpected,” Venice said. “These are passive devices. They suck in everything, and once sucked, it gets categorized and it just sits there forever. But those six hundred-plus sightings go back quite a ways.” She tapped some more. “So I copied all those locations into mapping software, and I got a pattern.”

  The screen turned into a series of lines, squiggles and circles. “Here’s where your buddy in the Corvette has traveled over the course of the past four weeks,” she explained. She clicked again, and time and date stamps appeared, overlaying the image of the travel routes. “Like most of us, he’s something of a creature of habit. We all spend most of our lives within the same few-mile radius—well most of us, anyway. Our man nee Deffenbaugh has a few outliers, but not many. That line there”—she indicated with her mouse arrow—“that’s his trip to Brookfield, where you spotted him and beat him up. You can see the date stamp.”

  “Got it,” Jonathan said. The phrase beat him up rankled him a little because it seemed juvenile, but he let it go. “So, we know where he’s been. How does that help us—”

  “Just listen,” she said. “I’m getting to it. “So, let’s take that data and gray it all out.” More clicks, and the once-green lines faded and turned gray. “That there is his historical data. Now, if we lay in his travel for the past five days, this is what we get.” The lines around the park in Brookfield turned green again, and so did others.

  “Here’s where we got lucky,” Venice said. “We’ve got seven hits since your fight. If we put them together from oldest to newest, we get a travel path. So, let’s isolate that.” All but one line faded back to gray. “That’s where he’s heading.”

  Jonathan scowled and leaned into the table for a better view. “I don’t get what I’m looking at,” he said. “It looks like it ends in the middle of nowhere.”

  “But nowhere has an address,” Venice said. She tapped some more. “Look. There’s a picture of him turning into what turns out to be a former Moose lodge.”

  “How did you get that photo?” Boxers asked. He, too, was leaning in to see better detail.

  “From a pole-mounted camera,” she said. “And if I bring back the historical data, look what we get.” The image on the screen changed again. “He goes out here with fair frequency.”

  Jonathan exchanged looks with Boxers. Impressive work.

  “Is he still there?” Big Guy asked.

  “I’ll keep checking, but as of about fifteen minutes ago when I finished putting together this presentation, he had not left.”

  Jonathan stewed over the data. “What is that, about an hour’s drive from here?”

  “Maybe if you’re driving,” Boxers said. “I can get us there in forty-five minutes.”

  * * *

  They took the Batmobile because it had the tools and toys. Boxers drove, as always, and bravado and bluster aside, it took every bit of an hour to make the trip. The Moose lodge sat by itself on what must have been an acre of parking lot, maybe fifty yards down the road from a strip mall that featured a barber shop, a UPS store, and a Sheetz gas complex, and seventy-five yards up the road from a Methodist church. Surrounded by a locked chain-link fence, the place looked abandoned. They drove past the front, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  It was nearly five o’clock, and the sun had begun to sink toward the horizon, taking the temperatures with it. As they pulled into the church parking lot, Jonathan lifted his portable radio from its mount in the cent
er console and keyed the mike. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Are you on the net?”

  Five seconds later, squelch broke and Venice’s voice said, “Present and accounted for.”

  “Run your records again, will you? Tell me if our boy has left yet.”

  “Stand by.”

  “What’s the plan?” Boxers asked, looking at Jonathan across the center console.

  “I don’t have one yet,” he said. “If he’s still here, we’ll wait and watch, I guess.”

  “Want to try and take them here?”

  “No, not yet. Correlation and causation are two different things. We don’t know what they’re up to yet—if they’re up to anything at all.”

  “We could always go in and ask them.”

  “Oh, that couldn’t possibly end badly,” Jonathan said with a laugh.

  “Worst case, they shoot and we shoot back. We might not know what they were up to, but they’d be dead and I don’t think the world would care that much.”

  Jonathan suspected that Boxers was just pulling his chain, but sometimes it was hard to tell. “Think like a professional, Big Guy,” he said.

  “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  Jonathan keyed the mike. “Go ahead.”

  “There’s no record of them moving.”

  Jonathan scowled. “I hear a hedge in your voice. No record of them moving is different than still here.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” she said. “And that’s the best I can do.”

  It really wasn’t good enough. “Okay, I copy,” he said. “Stay close.” He turned to Boxers. “What do you think?”

  “I think we don’t know anything,” Big Guy said. “And we need to know more.”

  Jonathan knew immediately what they should do. “Want to play with the drone?”

  Boxers replied with a grin and started his climb over and past the seats to get to the cargo bay. It was a comical thing to behold, but Big Guy showed impressive flexibility as he navigated the tight spaces.

  Not that long ago, Jonathan had to use stolen military technology to get a decent set of eyes in the sky. Jonathan’s favorite had been a Raven UAV. It looked like a sleek model airplane and performed with state-of-the-art capability. Unfortunately, they’d had to leave it behind after an op in Detroit, but even if he still had it, he’d be embarrassed to use it. Like so much other technology, what used to be cool was now big and clunky. For a tenth of the cost, he’d been able to pick up a replacement drone that looked more like a flying saucer than an airplane. Roughly hexagonal in shape, it got its lift and control corrections via six powerful little rotors that together made the sound of an angry bee.

  Boxers had named the drone Roxie, presumably after an old girlfriend, and he’d gotten pretty damned proficient with it. It had a stout lifting capacity, easily capable of hoisting a camera and the electronics necessary to transmit images real time to a laptop.

  After fifteen minutes of prep time, Roxie was ready to go.

  “Need me to do anything?” Jonathan asked.

  “Just stay out of the way,” Boxers said. “Actually, you can take her outside and lay her on the ground. Then stay out of the way.”

  All that separates men from boys is the size of their toys. Jonathan had heard Mama Alexander say that a thousand times when he was growing up.

  Jonathan exited the Batmobile through the back, and when he had his feet on the ground, he turned back for the drone. Almost four feet in diameter, it was made of composite material that made it lighter than its size would suggest. Jonathan carried it carefully, keeping it in front, and taking special care not to damage the camera equipment that dangled underneath. While not the best one to run equipment such as this, he was the only one qualified to buy it, and he knew all too well how expensive the internal optics were for a lightweight camera such as this. He carried it thirty feet into the vacant parking lot and set it on the pavement.

  He hadn’t taken five steps back when the electric rotors spun up and Roxie shot into the air. The speed of it startled him and he jumped. In the distance, he heard the rumble of Boxers’ deep-throated laugh through the open door to the Hummer.

  “Sorry about that, Boss,” Big Guy said as Jonathan climbed back inside. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Got that right.” He laughed again. “Hey, before you get back in, check again for overhead power lines, will you?”

  Jonathan had already looked, but he did it again anyway, confirming that no one had built power poles in the past three minutes. “Still good,” he said, and he climbed back inside and closed the door. He slid in behind Big Guy and watched the show unfold on the computer screen.

  “I’m going to go in high and use the optics,” Boxers said. “Less chance of someone noticing it.”

  “How high is high?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’ll start at three hundred feet and see what we can see.”

  He took Roxie straight up to altitude, and then moved her forward. Of all the arsenal improvements over the years, this drone technology was in Jonathan’s mind the most dramatic. In days past, he had to rely on eyeballs for this kind of intel, and that meant getting in close, which in turn meant greater risk, planning, and expense. And with the high-quality optics that were available even to hobbyists, much of what used to require satellite imagery he could now see on his own, through Roxie’s eyes. The only limitations now were control distance and power supply. Roxie was a particularly advanced version of UAV, capable of being sent to a position in the air and remaining in place without human intervention, beaming continuing pictures to the ground. As it ran low on power, it would, on its own, return to the precise map grid from which it was launched.

  It was also possible to attach a tracking locator to a target, which would allow Roxie to follow the target automatically. It was a feature designed primarily for extreme athletes who couldn’t afford a camera crew to record their suicidal antics on whitewater rapids or insane ski runs, but the possible application in Jonathan’s line of work were both obvious and exciting.

  As the world fell away on the screen, Jonathan saw the Batmobile diminish in size, and then come back closer into view. “Are you landing?” he asked.

  “Zooming,” Boxers said. “I want to establish the focal length over friendly territory.” As Big Guy worked the controls on his keyboard and mouse, the picture blurred, then cleared, and Roxie was ready to go.

  In the computer monitor, the parking lot became the road, and then they saw woods. The woods gave way to another parking lot, this one crumbly and neglected. Alongside the image on the monitor, a series of electronic dials and gauges showed Roxie’s altitude, airspeed, compass direction, her orientation to the horizon and her geospatial location. Jonathan found all of it fascinating. And Boxers’ skill with the controls rivaled his skills with all other forms of flying machines.

  Boxers zoomed the image out a bit, and the flat roof line of the Moose lodge came into view. He tapped keys, and the image changed to infrared, revealing that heat was emanating from the structure. “At least we know somebody’s home,” he said, and the image switched back to standard.

  The roofline fell away again, and in the back of the building, they could see a bunch of cars parked, angled in such a way as to be invisible from the front road.

  “I count eighteen,” Jonathan said.

  “And there’s your buddy’s ’Vette,” Boxers said, pointing to the screen. “Now watch this.” He maneuvered the controls to zoom in tight on the Corvette’s license plate. “The numbers match,” he said.

  “Are you recording this video?” Jonathan asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then get a look at all of the tags and beam them to Venice. Get her to see what she can get on identities.”

  “Do you think any of them will be legit?”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Probably not, but it’s worth checking.”

  The request wasn’t a big deal, just a quick pass over the back lot to capture
license plate images that could later be digitally enhanced for a clear view of the numbers. They could get all but two, because those two were parked in a way that blocked the view.

  “Sixteen’s better than nothing,” Jonathan said.

  As the image was zooming out again, a shadow crossed the frame, so close that it gave Jonathan a chill—so clear was the imagery. And then there were more shadows. “Pull out, pull out,” Jonathan said, hammering Boxers’ shoulders.

  Big Guy zipped the image all the way out gaining hundreds of feet of altitude in just a second or two. “Almost makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” he said.

  Below, the back door of the Moose lodge had opened, and people were streaming out of the building and heading to five different vehicles, all of them vans and SUVs. To a man—and there appeared to be only men—they carried duffel bags of varying sizes, along with other equipment cases. They appeared to be leaving their individual vehicles in the parking lot. For later, perhaps?

  “This doesn’t look good, Boss,” Boxers said.

  “Looks like they’re mobilizing, doesn’t it? Do you think those are weapons cases?”

  “I can’t say they’re not, so that means I think they are.”

  “Copy that,” Jonathan said. “Come on in a little closer.”

  The image zoomed down another hundred feet or so, to a level where they could make out faces.

  “Do you see your guy?” Boxers asked.

  It was a good question. The angle was so much different than it had been before, and, truth be told, Jonathan saw much more of the man’s knife than he did of his face. He did notice, however, that there were commonalities to each of the faces he did see. There were far more broad shoulders than broad bellies, and that Special Forces bearded look appeared to be a meme.

  “I think we just found al-Amin,” Jonathan said. “I think this is the nest of bad guys we’ve been looking for.”

  “You know, it might be that they just had a meeting,” Boxers said. “This doesn’t have to be the launch.” He looked at his watch. “Christ, it’s after eight o’clock. A little late for doing lots of damage, don’t you think?”