Antiballistic STF performs flawlessly against all calibers of ammunition . . . so long as it doesn’t get wet. Or maybe, Liquid body armor is positively impenetrable . . . provided the gel temperature stays below ninety-one degrees Fahrenheit.
He suddenly found himself wishing for his old rigid, heavy, uncomfortable-as-fuck body armor. He’d been shot plenty of times in that rig and had walked away every time.
Well . . . almost every time.
“Target is in the woods,” Munn reported, just as Dempsey reached the park entrance.
He hurdled the entry gate and ran a dogleg path left, slowing and looking for cover as he scanned the tree line. His spidey sense was tingling as the risk profile shifted. The Russian was in cover now, and Dempsey was exposed—especially while crossing the field.
“Do you have eyes on my tango?” Dempsey said, panting and dropping into a crouch.
“Hold,” came Baldwin’s reply. “The target is loitering just inside the tree line four hundred feet from your position.”
Dempsey took a knee and pulled a compact Sig Sauer from his underarm holster. Wishing he had night-vision goggles, he scanned the tree line over the new, low-profile SAS fiber-tritium sights. “Bearing?”
“Zero four five, true.”
“Check,” Dempsey said, verifying his watch compass heading and adjusting his aim right.
“The target is moving,” Baldwin said, his voice ripe with tension. “Moving north and east, through the trees.”
Dempsey popped up from his crouch and sprinted along the line he’d just been sighting. He crossed a walking path and wove his way into the trees and underbrush.
“Target is out of the woods, crossing what looks like a very large vegetable patch. He’s heading for one of the paddocks,” Baldwin said.
“I’m on it,” Dempsey said, pressing forward through the surprisingly dense undergrowth with a cringeworthy lack of stealth.
“Oh dear . . .”
“‘Oh dear’ what?” Dempsey said, his voice low and hushed.
“We lost him.”
“How is that even possible?”
“He must suspect we have him on satellite thermal, because he moved in among the animals—sheep, I suspect—and entered a barn-like structure. He must be on all fours, because we cannot identify which heat signature is his.”
“Are you telling me you can’t tell the difference between a man and a bunch of sheep?” Dempsey said through clenched teeth.
“Dude, he’s telling you straight,” Munn interjected. “It just looks like a bunch of yellow-orange blobs huddled together.”
“Ridiculous,” Dempsey murmured and couldn’t help but think how he’d gone from being a kitted-up Tier One SEAL, fast-roping with his unit out of Stealth Hawks behind enemy lines, to this . . . a dude stalking sheep in a petting zoo.
In the distance, sirens began to wail.
“There’s a police cruiser en route to the Ferry House Pub,” Wang reported, his voice all business.
“Time to wrap this up, Alpha,” Baldwin said. “You have five minutes to eliminate the target, or I’m terminating the op.”
Yeah, yeah, easy for you to say over your tea and biscuits, Dempsey thought as he grudgingly acknowledged Baldwin’s order with a double-click of his tongue.
He advanced silently and methodically toward the animal pen where the Russian operative was hiding. The perimeter was kept by a sturdy four-foot-tall slat-and-wire fence with two swing gates. Inside, the turf had been grazed down to bare dirt. A simple, twenty-foot-long windowless shelter with a flat metal roof occupied the south end of the pen. With his pistol trained on the building, he eased along the fence until the opening of the shelter—wide enough to permit free and easy movement in and out by the animals—came into view. The inside of the shelter was pitch black, but he could make out grayish blobs moving just inside the opening.
A second later, the smell hit him and one of the animals let out a throaty, prolonged bleat.
Yep, definitively sheep.
If this were Afghanistan, the tactical solution would be simple—toss a grenade in the barn and hose down everything that came out. But this wasn’t the ’Stan. In central London, lobbing grenades and shooting anything, even a bunch of sheep, was off the table. Which meant he had no choice but to go in after his target. And he could predict how that would play out. The minute he entered the barn, commotion would ensue. The animals would bleat and shit and scuttle, and while he milled about trying to find a crouching human in the chaos, his adversary would plink him with an easy headshot.
Dempsey cursed to himself, trying to decide what the hell to do.
“What is the problem, Alpha?” Baldwin said, his tone more annoyed than concerned.
“He’s trying to figure out how to get the sheep out of the barn without discharging his weapon,” Munn answered for Dempsey.
“Ah yes, do be careful not to kill any sheep, John,” Baldwin said. “This needs to look like a mugging gone bad, not a shoot-out.”
Dempsey clenched his jaw in irritation and stood there motionless, sighting over his Sig at the entrance. For the first time in his long and decorated career, he was experiencing tactical paralysis . . .
Tactical paralysis in a petting zoo, he thought. God, what have I become?
He crept back to a position with a perpendicular firing angle on the enclosure. The side walls didn’t have any windows, just a series of drilled ventilation holes that would be virtually impossible to sight and fire through.
I need a distraction, he decided.
He scanned the ground until he found a rock the size of his fist. He knelt and picked it up.
“Fuck it,” he murmured, looking at the rock, and then lobbed it in a high arc at the shelter.
The rock hit the metal roof dead center with a loud, metallic clang that echoed through the park. Terrified sheep poured out of the enclosure in a wooly, stinky stampede—bleating, stomping, and defecating en masse. At the same time, Dempsey jumped the perimeter fence and charged forward in a low crouch. A sheep screamed to his left. The animal’s cry was so uncannily human that he reflexively swiveled and sighted before dismissing the threat.
He pivoted back toward the enclosure doorway and felt the shift he’d been waiting for— into the combat slipstream where all anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt evaporated. His mind and body unified into a state of hyperawareness and fluidity. With his weapon up in a two-handed grip and index finger tension on the trigger, he closed on the doorway. Then something happened he did not expect . . .
The sheep recoalesced into a compact herd and charged back toward the enclosure—apparently collectively deciding it was safer back inside than out here with him. On instinct, he went with them. Ducking as low as possible, he grabbed a fistful of wool on the back of a fat ewe and went in behind her like she was his blocking fullback. As he broke the plane of the doorway, he pulled the sheep tight to his chest, dug in his heels, and revectored her momentum radially. As they rotated in place, he scanned over her back for anything human-shaped in the shadows.
A crack of gunfire exploded inside the metal structure, three deafening bangs along with three brilliant muzzle flashes from the back right corner. His sheep-shield bleated and shuddered—a fat wooly bullet cushion—as it took all three of the rounds. Dempsey returned fire, two rounds of his own into the corner, but the Russian was already rolling right and the slugs punched two holes harmlessly in the wall. Dempsey’s ovine bodyguard suddenly became dead weight as the sheep’s legs buckled. Its decision to die in that instant was unfortunate for Dempsey, because the Russian squeezed off another round. This one hit Dempsey center mass, square between his pecs. Instead of the familiar impact jab he was accustomed to when taking a round in Kevlar, he felt a sharp rippling tension across the breadth of his chest and then nothing.
The bullet had gone through his vest like a knife through butter.
Motherfucker, he thought as he returned fire at the Russian shadow. I knew this shit wa
s too good to be true.
He scrambled right in the chaos—the gunfire having sent the sheep into blind pandemonium. Any second now, his breath would grow wet and raspy as his chest filled with blood. His blood pressure would drop, his arms would grow impossibly heavy, and his legs would turn to jelly. But none of those things happened. Was it possible that Baldwin’s vest full of magic slime had actually friggin’ worked?
Still strong and in the fight, Dempsey grabbed a fleeing ewe—smaller than the last—and ducked down behind her. Instead of firing over her back, he sighted around her ass. Muzzle flashes lit up the inside the shelter as the Russian emptied his magazine. Multiple rounds slammed into Dempsey’s sheep, and it sprayed the side of his face with shit pellets. He returned fire, aiming just below the muzzle flashes.
Crack, crack, crack . . .
A human-shaped shadow dropped, hitting the dirt with a thud.
Dempsey released his grip on his second sheep, and the ewe collapsed beside him. He shifted from a crouch to a tactical knee, his Sig trained on his target, with whom he was finally alone in the barn. The Russian groaned and wheezed as he made a futile belly crawl toward the pistol he’d dropped, now a meter away.
“Stop,” Dempsey said in Russian, surprised how the word came to him automatically. He’d been taking lessons from Buz—who claimed Dempsey had the worst language skills of anyone he’d ever taught. This was the first time the language had come to him without trying.
The Russian stopped and strained a backward look at him.
Dempsey pressed to his feet and walked over to the man, keeping a proper standoff in case the Russian operator wasn’t quite as wounded as he was letting on. The two men locked eyes, victor and vanquished.
The spy said something to him, but the only word he caught was “Zhukov.” It didn’t matter, though, because he knew his enemy well enough to infer the question. Dempsey was hunting Zetas—the Russian Federation’s most secret and lethal black ops task force—taking them out one by one until he’d worked his way to the top.
“No, Zhukov didn’t send me,” Dempsey said, answering in English this time. “Shane Smith did.”
Confusion washed over the other man’s face, the murdered Ember Director’s name clearly unknown to him. Dempsey wasn’t surprised; only one Zeta had survived the horrific attack ordered by Russian spymaster Arkady Zhukov on Ember’s secret compound in Virginia three months ago. Apparently, this dude wasn’t that guy.
“De oppresso liber, comrade,” he said and squeezed the trigger, completing the mission and ending the life of yet another Zeta.
“Well, that certainly didn’t go as planned,” Baldwin said in his ear as the last wisp of smoke from Dempsey’s muzzle faded into the ether.
Where there had been only one siren wailing before, now a chorus screamed in the night.
“What do you want me to do with the body?” Dempsey asked.
“Leave it,” Baldwin said through a defeated sigh. “And you can explain to the DNI why you violated the OPORD.”
“Roger that,” he said, holstering his weapon as he ducked out of the barn.
“Exfil north,” Grimes said in his ear. “I’ll pick you up in the Asda superstore parking lot.”
“Check.”
“Hurry, they’re coming,” she said.
“I know,” he said, a surge of fresh adrenaline helping get his sluggish legs moving. And as he ran, thoughts of the next mission began to take shape. “Hey, Omega?”
“What is it, Alpha?” Baldwin answered, still irritated.
A maligned smile curled Dempsey’s lips.
“I’m ready for the next target.”
About the Authors
Brian Andrews is a US Navy veteran, Park Leadership Fellow, and former submarine officer with degrees from Vanderbilt and Cornell Universities. He is the author of three critically acclaimed high-tech thrillers: Reset, The Infiltration Game, and The Calypso Directive.
Jeffrey Wilson has worked as an actor, firefighter, paramedic, jet pilot, and diving instructor, as well as a vascular and trauma surgeon. He served in the US Navy for fourteen years and made multiple deployments as a combat surgeon with an East Coast–based SEAL Team. The author of the faith-based inspirational war novel War Torn and three award-winning supernatural thrillers, The Traiteur’s Ring, The Donors, and Fade to Black, he and his wife, Wendy, live in Southwest Florida with their four children.
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