by Brian Nelson
The second and third men came in almost simultaneously. Green ghosts without eyes. He fired, but too late.
He felt their bullets this time. Three-round bursts. He felt them pass through, scrape off the concrete underneath him. He felt their heat, then cool air where you should never feel air. The muzzle flashes temporarily overloading his goggles. He fired up where he thought the doorway was. Only a few seconds left now. He fired until his clip was empty. Then the darkness consumed him.
* * *
Bill Eastman turned around in the dark basement, frantically trying to orient himself. Get a hold of yourself, he thought, but then another deafening gunshot made him jump and he was disoriented all over again. Don’t let it consume you. Don’t let it … He tried to think. He was out of his element, certainly. What did he know of guns and soldiers? Yet he had to do something. Jack was hurt, and Cloud couldn’t hold them much longer. It was him they were after. He had to stall them, slow them down. Help would surely come if he could just delay them long enough.
But what could he do?
He had converted the basement into a small laboratory. Perhaps there was something in the lab. But without a light … He dug into his pockets and found Cloud’s penlight. He remembered the night-vision goggles on Cloud’s head. The enemy would have them, too. Yes, of course. That was why the power had gone out. It was their advantage. Or so they thought. What if he could change that? What if he could …
He went to his bench and began pulling at chemicals, the penlight in his mouth, its pitiful circle of light dancing over the labels. He needed a metal oxidant—something that burned bright. There. Top shelf. Magnesium powder. Now for an oxidizer. He scanned the glass vials, then grabbed the ammonium perchlorate.
Mind racing, hands trembling, penlight shaking, he poured the ammonium perchlorate powder into a glass vial. Then he grabbed a rag, got it damp in the sink, and spread it out on the counter. He poured the magnesium powder on it and folded it tightly—the wet cloth would slow the reaction just enough to keep it from detonating too soon—then he shoved the rag into the vial and pressed the stopper in as hard as he could.
He heard more shots, then Cloud’s return fire. Then it grew quiet. The next sound he heard was footsteps slowly descending the stairs. He scrambled to the far end of the bench and ducked down. He held the vial in one hand and shook it. It grew warm in his hand almost immediately.
He listened in the darkness. One, two, three sets of boots. He heard a cool voice speaking Chinese, and the boots moving in different directions, spreading out across the room. He had only a few seconds. He had to throw it, but he couldn’t. He was too afraid.
Come on! He tried to will his body to act, but he couldn’t. His instincts—his stupid instincts—told him that if he remained perfectly still, like a child playing hide-and-seek, they might not see him. Do it! Do it now! Do it or they will kill you! At last, the spell broke. It was the vial that did it. It had become so hot, it was starting to burn his hand. He turned and threw it toward the doorway. He ducked down quickly, closed his eyes tight, clapped his fingers to his ears, and dropped his jaw open.
In the confined space, the explosion was staggeringly loud. It knocked over chairs and filing cabinets, and the flash was so bright that even through his closed eyelids, Eastman could see the room in photonegative.
The soldiers cried out and tore at their goggles. Even to the unaided eye, such a flash would cause blindness, but the night-vision goggles amplified the effect tenfold, ensuring that every photoreceptor in the eye was overloaded. Two of the three men stumbled around, the explosion having also ruptured their eardrums and destroyed their equilibrium.
* * *
In his command center, General Meng saw the flash of light through the soldiers’ head cams and heard them cursing.
“What’s happening?” he ordered. “Report!”
“Blinded,” the commander gasped.
“Stay calm,” he said. “It will wear off. Just wait.”
And then Meng saw the most incredible thing. There. Right there. Walking slowly in front of his video screen was Bill Eastman. Meng could see him clear as day, but his commander, who was right next to him, could not. How infuriating! To be so close, yet incapable of finishing the task.
“He’s there!” the general hissed. “He’s right there!”
“Where?” The man spun, and Eastman disappeared from Meng’s view.
“No, you fool, behind you.”
But when the man turned again, Eastman was gone.
Meng wanted to scream with rage, but he had to keep calm. Eastman was still close. There was still a chance.
“As soon as you can see again, I want you to finish off Behrmann.”
“Yes sir.”
It took only another few seconds before the commander began to make out the room around him. He went over to Behrmann. Meng watched as the big man looked into the darkness, searching but unable to see the rifle muzzle pointed at his nose.
* * *
Admiral Curtiss and his men rushed into the woods toward Eastman’s bungalow. All around him, guns were coming out. He heard the sharp metal clank of rounds being chambered, the click of safeties thumbed off. And one by one, the men donned their goggles and entered the watery green world of night vision, where the trees where white with heat and the night sky was filled with suns.
They moved through the trees like a hunting pride. Shifting, surging, covering; each man aware of the rest of his team, doing his part so that no one was too exposed, no one caught off guard. Curtiss ran at the center of their diamond formation, his Five-seveN up and ready. After only two hundred yards, his lungs began to burn and his heart began slapping against his ribs. God, he felt like an old man, but he wouldn’t show it, not for a second. You are in command here. Reminding himself of that simple fact gave him strength. He felt it coming on, like a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation: the hardness. They were soldiers going to protect … to protect and to kill …
Curtiss began to spot things in the grass: a mouthpiece from a respirator, a pile of gray parachute silk, a pressure suit. And he began to piece together how Meng had done it: a HALO drop—high altitude, low opening—likely from a stealth aircraft. Teams could be dropped from as high as twenty miles above the earth and would be undetectable to radar.
It was then that he heard a deep boom, like a car bomb going off, from the direction of Eastman’s house. He had to resist the urge to rush in. Hold on, Johnny.
* * *
General Meng looked at Behrmann’s face on the monitor: the big ugly beard and the glassy eyes. The image reminded him of a big dog that is about to be put out of its misery. Time to end this and find Eastman. He must be hiding somewhere in the house. But finding him with only one fully functioning soldier—that could take an hour, which he didn’t have.
“Wait!” he shouted, and the gun muzzle lifted from in front of Behrmann’s nose. “I have a better idea.”
* * *
Forty yards from the fence line Curtiss spotted the sniper perched in an oak tree just outside the back fence. He gave a hand signal, and Patel knelt on one knee and fired two silenced rounds. The body pitched forward and fell to the ground. The sniper was dressed completely in black. Even his face was covered with a black mesh, his eyes covered by goggles.
A moment later, Curtiss and the SEALs were over the white picket fence, their infrared sights bobbing toward the back entrance of the house. There in the doorway were the bodies of four enemy soldiers that Cloud had killed, still warm in the infrared.
Cautiously, Curtiss and his men entered and descended the steps. He found Cloud’s body, riddled with bullets, the eyes open and vacant. Curtiss’s mind raced ahead to the repercussions of this. Steph would never forgive him. He had brought this man through three tours in the bloodiest wars of the past decade, and now he had died on US soil. There’s another one you let
get killed.
But he forced the thoughts aside and channeled the emotion, as he had been trained to do, into more hardness. Keep leading your men. Your job is to save Eastman and Behrmann.
They entered the basement lab. A soldier in black was there, trying to stand up. He fell, tried to pick himself up, and fell again. He still clutched his rifle and seemed to see them, but only vacantly. Patel shot him in the head with another silenced round, then approached the body and put two more rounds into the chest. Curtiss motioned for the men to search the basement. It was empty except for a strange splash of light on the floor. Eastman or Behrmann must have concocted some sort of bomb.
Then they heard a voice from upstairs. “Bill, it’s me, Jack. You can come out now.”
Curtiss listened. It was Behrmann’s voice, all right, but it sounded fatigued and somehow hollow.
“Bill, come on out. It’s safe. I need your help.”
Curtiss thought he knew what was going on. Up until now they had been totally silent. The remaining attackers had no idea his team was in the house.
Quiet as cats, he guided his men up to the first floor. First, they entered the kitchen, Patel on point, then Loc, then Curtiss, then Adams and Sawyer. At home in the darkness, checking corners, covering. Curtiss now hungry for revenge.
They moved into the dining room.
There was another Chinese soldier. This one, too, was disoriented. They came up behind him silently; only when they were about five feet away did he turn. Patel shot him in the head, and the body landed with a hard thump.
They heard a voice call out in Chinese, then Behrmann’s voice again. “Bill, is that you?”
Curtiss gave a signal, and Adams and Sawyer separated from the group and eased up the staircase while he and Patel and Loc moved toward the voice.
There in the study, standing in front of the fireplace, was the last assassin, the surviving commander. He stood behind the kneeling Jack Behrmann, the long thin barrel of his Steyr AUG A3 assault rifle pointing at the scientist’s neck. Behrmann’s eyes were glassy and his eyelids flickered spasmodically, from either pain or loss of blood. He held both hands over his gut and seemed to be making a great effort not to double over.
Through his goggles, Curtiss studied the commander’s rifle. The barrel still glowed with heat, and its translucent magazine showed that more than half the forty-two rounds had been fired. Curtiss wondered how many of those rounds had gone into Johnny Cloud. He had to check an impulse to take the shot then and there.
The soldier was hiding behind Behrmann, using him as a shield, fully aware that one of them might try to snipe him. He had reason to be afraid. A few minutes ago, he had been one of many. Now he was the sole survivor. He was so nervous that he had begun shifting back and forth behind Behrmann, one of his goggled eyes appearing to the right of the big man’s head, then a moment later, to the left. Curtiss noticed that he had fallen into a steady rhythm. One … and two … and right side. One … and two … and left side.
“Eastman!” the soldier said. “Bring me Eastman.”
Curtiss lowered his pistol and put it in its holster. He raised both hands to show he meant no harm.
“Take it easy, son. We don’t want any more violence.” He had to play this just right. “You want to talk to Dr. Eastman? We’ll bring him to you just as soon as we find him. I’ve got two men upstairs looking right now.”
At that, the commander seemed to relax a bit. He was getting his way. But then he suddenly stiffened and slid further behind Behrmann’s massive frame. Curtiss realized that someone was talking to him. He saw the thin camera on the soldier’s helmet. Meng.
Curtiss looked into the soldier’s eyes, into Meng’s eyes. Their plan had been to kill Eastman, but maybe Meng was tempted to take him instead. Meng might order the soldier to take the shot—bag the admiral. It would never work, of course; with Patel’s rifle trained on him, he’d never have time to shift the barrel off Behrmann’s neck. So perhaps Meng would just settle for Behrmann. Neither scenario would do. Curtiss had to keep both the soldier and Meng believing he would deliver Eastman.
“I’ll get Eastman for you. I swear.”
Just then Curtiss’s radio came back to life. It was Sawyer. “Alpha Dog, we have Prophet. I say again, Prophet is secure.” Curtiss touched his finger to his ear theatrically. “Okay, son, we found him,” he smiled at the soldier. Then into his mike, “Bring him down.”
The soldier continued to shift. One … and two … and right side. One … and two … and left side. Curtiss took a step back and raised his left hand in a soothing gesture. “Just relax, son. He’ll be right down.” But even as the left side of Curtiss’s body was capitulating—One …—even as his mouth was uttering words to sooth and reassure—and two …—his right hand moved in a blur of motion, and the Five-seveN came up and out of the holster—and left side.
Jack Behrmann felt the hot ball of compressed air blow past his cheek as the bullet whizzed by him and into the lens of the soldier’s night-vision goggles. Then he heard the crack of the gunshot. The soldier gave only the slightest jerk, teetered for a moment, then pitched backward, knocking over the fireplace tool set before settling on the floor.
Behrmann collapsed forward in pain.
Curtiss was there in an instant, shoving the Steyr aside with his foot, easing Behrmann into a comfortable position.
“Loc here is a first-rate medic,” he said. “He’ll look after you until the ambulance gets here.”
Loc went to work quickly, pulling away the saturated shirt to inspect the wound. “I think you’re gonna be just fine, sir,” he said. “Can you do me a favor and try to roll on your side?” With a grunt, Behrmann complied. “Take a look at this, Admiral.” Loc pointed to the small exit wound on Behrmann’s back.
“Armor piercing,” Curtiss said. “Went right in and right out. You’re a lucky man, Dr. Behrmann. One of the drawbacks of armor-piercing rounds is that if you don’t have armor on, they can pass right through you without tumbling around inside.”
Behrmann gave a pained nod and exhaled with relief.
Curtiss stood and looked around at the wreckage. He thought of Johnny Cloud, as well as the wounded—Behrmann, Hill, Lee, Hunter—and, of course, the body he knew he would find on the front porch: Tommy Evans, another exceptional man. He wanted to scream. But more than that, he wanted revenge. He wanted Meng.
He went over to the assassin’s body and stared down at the camera.
“General,” he said, “Eastman is safe.” He paused for a moment, choosing his words. “I’ll be coming for you, General—you and everyone who works for you. I’m going to kill all of you. No one will be spared. Not one soul.” Then he ground the heel of his boot into the camera.
* * *
Curtiss was out on the front porch, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. Tommy Evans’s body was beside him, and Curtiss was holding his hand. His skin was still warm—not as warm as it should be, but warm.
“I’m sorry you had to die alone,” he said aloud. “I’m sorry we weren’t here.” They placed such an emphasis on teamwork in all their training—you never left a man behind—that it felt wrong, almost criminal, that one of them should die alone. Yet both Evans and Cloud had done exactly that.
Evans had been a great kid, the youngest of Curtiss’s SEALs, enlisting at seventeen and finishing basic underwater demolition training at eighteen. Patriotic to the point of naïveté, he drove a red, white, and blue Ford F-250 with two bald eagles custom painted on the hood. He was the type of guy who would tear up every time he heard the national anthem. He was in the navy to fight for liberty, justice, and the American way. The other men teased him incessantly, but to him it wasn’t corny—he believed it. It gave him purpose, and it made him a great SEAL.
Curtiss dropped his head, a great sadness coming over him. He didn’t want to let go of Tommy’s hand, and
he decided he wouldn’t until the hand was truly cold.
The aluminum screen door creaked open, and Curtiss heard Bill Eastman walk out on the wooden porch. Curtiss couldn’t look at him. He wasn’t angry at him; he just didn’t want to deal with him. Eastman waited there for a long time. Jesus, Curtiss thought, what did he want, a fucking debriefing? Curtiss felt like reminding Eastman that the dead man on the ground had just given his life for him. The words were on his lips, ready to hurl at Eastman, but when Curtiss raised his head, he saw the white tears streaming down Eastman’s face. Curtiss said nothing.
Chapter Thirteen
The Souvenir
July 6, 2025
Bethesda Naval Hospital, MD
“It’s about time you woke up,” Ryan said.
“Eric!” That was Jane’s voice. Such a sound—the emotion in it, the relief. It brought up Eric’s emotions, too. Before he could even open his eyes, tears started to well up.
They were huddled around his hospital bed. He had an IV in his arm. A heart monitor beeped.
Jane spoke again, but she was already back to her normal self, a note of irritation in her voice. “Finally! We’ve been waiting forever. Can you hear us? The doctor said your hearing might still be gone.”
He could hear, but everything was muffled, like being underwater.
He tried to move his head, but pain shot through his whole body. It was as if his brain was surrounded by shards of glass. Any movement caused stabbing pain.
“Take it easy, now. You’ve had a tough couple of days,” said another voice. A nurse came into view. She was older, with sandy-blond hair and a kind, weathered face. As she checked his IV drip, she gave him a smile that, by itself, made him relax. He was going to be okay. “You’ve been out for about thirty hours. It’s July sixth.”