by Brian Parker
That meant the assault element was down by three shooters and the drone’s model of the complex had indicated a minimum of twenty rooms or side chambers and there was no telling how many more there were deeper into the complex. Intel said they’d been here for thousands of years, that was a long time to dig out new rooms. They’d seen forty-three people on the drone’s camera, of those seventeen were men.
Yet another unknown was the children. They hadn’t seen any children like you normally saw in these types of multi-family complexes. Sure, they’d seen several young boys, but those were probably sex slaves like the kid they found who led them here. Were there a bunch of children further back in the cave complex? Were there more people, including combatants, living inside that hadn’t been present during the recon and would pose a problem later on? Kestrel just didn’t know and it bothered him.
The team’s infil and exfil plan was by foot to a point about five miles from the target, as the crow flies, but when they were humping up and down the mountains and through the valleys it ended up being more like eleven total miles. All that climbing and descending carrying a sixty pound pack full of water and ammo had made his knees, quads and lower back scream in protest, but he’d been in similar situations before during Green Team[25] so he would get over it.
He scratched idly at his beard while he lay prone in the team’s assault position. There was too much gray in it for his liking. Given his age and the reconstructive surgery to both his ACL and MCL in his right knee last year, the Company would probably end up pulling him from the field within five years. He didn’t know what he’d do in the rear and he certainly knew he wouldn’t adapt to a desk job. Maybe he could train the next generation of SOG operators or consult for some nation state that would pay him in cigarettes and pussy.
His personal life was a disaster. He’d been married twice, once while he was in the Navy and once right after he joined the Agency. Both had ended badly, but he hadn’t given enough of a shit to appear in court, so each time he’d been wiped clean. He chain smoked to ease his nerves and drank more whiskey than most would believe humanly possible. He could barely stomach the everyday civilian population that he protected, so he tended to minimize his contact with them and on his days off he usually spent a few hours rolling on the mats with other off-duty operators and then the remainder of the day at the range burning through Uncle Sam’s ammunition.
His second wife had called him an egomaniac and the term “asshole” was a daily occurrence. One of the Company’s shrinks had diagnosed him with Antisocial Personality Disorder. Great, I’m a sociopath, tell me something I don’t know Doc, he’d told the psychologist after his prognosis. But the man had only chuckled and stamped “Cleared for Covert Operations” across his file. Apparently, not caring about how others feel, having a propensity for violence and then being able to compartmentalize it all away is what the Company desires in their field agents.
He went through the mission checklist one more time in his head. As second in command of the team, he had a lot of tasks to keep track of. The mission was a clean sweep so all but the five men who lived beyond the tapestries in the final chamber would be dispatched. It was a highly unusual order, but they were directed to leave no one alive, even the women and kids, if they found any. Not a single witness was allowed to escape and the five prisoners would be transported to a Company cell. They’d probably never see the light of day again, if they survived the interrogations. He didn’t want to think about his next Agency-mandated therapy session when he’d have to unload the memories of shooting kids from wherever his brain packed things away while he was on a mission.
After they’d neutralized the enemy, they were to collect all the intel they could carry, then permanently alter the geography of this mountain. The plan was to blow the place from the inside and then the MQ-9 would fire a couple rounds from above to finish the job. The terrorist networks that the Brotherhood controlled would never know what happened except that the Americans had used a cruise missile to bomb the complex and no one survived. Happened all the time here in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we’d refuse to even acknowledge that it was us who launched the missile.
Wraith reached across and tapped Kestrel twice on his calf. That was the signal. “Let’s get everybody up and moving,” the team’s commander told him. “And camera’s on this time dammit. Everybody back at the big house wants to see the show.”
“Assault element, we’re moving. Cams on,” Kestrel whispered into his mike and groaned internally as he turned on his helmet camera. All the bigwigs back in D.C., shit! Denver, he corrected himself, wanted to see the action, but very few people were willing to be the cameraman. “Skyscraper, you’re a go. Nothing in, nothing out.”
“Roger, Skyscraper acknowledges,” the leader of the three-man overwatch and sniper element replied.
“Coach, the game has started,” Wraith broadcast to his superiors monitoring from thousands of miles away in the interim capital of Denver, Colorado.
The eleven men moved silently towards the mouth of the cave complex. They’d each conducted similar insertions hundreds of times over their careers with the military and the various other three-letter organizations that ultimately fed them into the CIA’s Special Activities Division. As they trotted across the open ground in a half crouch, each man was in the zone, totally locked on to the objective.
There had been studies conducted over the years about the operators’ physical reactions to combat. The normally stressed-out, hypertension-prone, non-conforming individual that made up the teams entered into an almost Zen-like state of calm. Their breathing became slower, their pupils dilated, even their heart rate dropped and evened out. The operators’ bodies became perfectly efficient machines which fed on adrenaline during a mission. The Company’s shrink had told Kestrel that was yet another reason why his personal life was so fucked up: he was literally addicted to adrenaline and craved the rush that it gave him. In normal, everyday life, hardcore adrenaline spikes were hard to come by, so he created all this drama around himself that was simply too much for the women who’d passed in and out of his life.
Kestrel rotated the switch for the thermal sights on his PNVGs[26] and instantly everything change from the normal green night vision to varying degrees of reds, whites, yellows and blue. Each of his teammates wore a large square of thermal IR tape on their helmet, back, front and on each arm in order to avoid fratricide. The man just slightly in front of him was a blazing white heat source except for the dark blue, almost black of the tape, which he’d apparently gotten artistic with since the dark blue spot was in the shape of a fist giving him the finger.
Further ahead, he saw two men raise their suppressed carbines and fire several times into the mouth of the cave. An intense burst of heat registered from the end of their weapons with each trigger squeeze. By the time he arrived, the puddles of blood from the three exterior guards were already cooling in his thermals. He imagined all the politicians in Denver creaming in their pants at the sight of the dead terrorists. They’d get their fill tonight and more since he’d be sure to get a close up of any children he was forced to shoot. U.S. foreign policy carried out, up close and to the extreme.
He scanned the area. Nothing appeared to be different or out of place from when they’d sent in the drone two days ago. The team’s demo expert moved up to the disguised entrance and switched his PNVGs from thermal to night vision while others took up positions on either side of the door. He ran his hand around the seam in the rock until he felt the hidden latch that they’d seen the guards trigger on the video feed from the drone. The stone door opened outward on well-oiled and well-concealed hinges and four men immediately entered the tunnel, and began firing at targets who were asleep on the couches in the entryway.
Kestrel breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t have to blow the hatch so they still had the element of surprise on their side. He stepped through the entryway and saw six KIAs, women mostly, sprawled across lavish cushions. None of t
hem had even woken up. Systematically, the team worked its way down the long hallway, entering each room while others pulled security. Everyone was earning their paychecks this night but they wouldn’t allow themselves think of the price until they were done.
***
Kestrel and Wraith reached the end of the complex that they’d seen from the drone’s video. They knew from their interrogation the other day that behind the tapestry hanging on the wall were the sleeping chambers and meeting rooms of the men in charge of the Brotherhood. Capturing these men was the final objective. If they didn’t get them, then everyone who’d died here tonight would have been for nothing.
It was clear that the courier had only been in the meeting room, so he was useless for other information about what further tunnels and rooms were beyond that. Once they were satisfied that there was only one passageway behind the large tapestry, Wraith signaled for the men to stack up.
They cleared the first room behind the tapestry by shooting the two guards who were stationed, stupidly, in direct line of sight from the doorway. This must be the meeting chamber that the courier described. It was huge, literally the size of a large convenience store, an underground convenience store where a secret fundamentalist terrorist organization lived, planned attacks and fucked little boys until they died. Along the wall there were six doorways. Presumably, five of them led to the private chambers of the Brotherhood’s leadership, but they had no information about the sixth door.
Wraith pointed to the door on the far left and signaled for a stack. Then he pointed to Kestrel and four other men to each watch one of the other doors. The first group stacked up and entered the room. Kestrel flinched as shouting erupted from inside. So far, the entire operation had been carried out in near-complete silence. There was a loud thud from inside the open room and the offending terrorist was silent.
The next two rooms were cleared simultaneously before any further noise was made. As the group entered the fourth and fifth rooms, gunfire erupted and one of the lead men took a bullet through the face. Everyone pulled back and they threw flash bangs into the room, then entered and cleared. Kestrel knelt on the back of a very large Middle Easterner and violently jerked his arms backward, dislocating the prisoner’s shoulder in the process. The man was so large that he had to link three flex cuffs together in order to bring his hands together. Apparently, he took offense to laying in his bedmate’s blood, but Kestrel didn’t speak Jawa, so he wasn’t sure what he was blabbering about.
The sixth room was the communal bathroom, a hole in the ground with shit all over the floor where they’d missed as they straddled and crouched, then been too disgusting to clean up. One of the operators dropped two grenades down the hole just in case.
They pushed and prodded their captives into the main room and kicked their knees out from under them. The team medic came over to Kestrel and informed him that he was in charge. Wraith was the man who’d been shot entering the last set of rooms. The round had punched through his face, severed his spine and then ricocheted off of his helmet into the back of his head.
Kestrel cursed loudly and checked his watch. It had been nineteen minutes since they’d entered the compound. He keyed his mike and said, “Coach, our quarterback is down. Field of play is clear. The entire defensive line is secured.”
His radio cackled the response, “Acknowledged.”
“Alright, let’s get everything we can,” he said out loud to the group. Into his headset he said, “Skyscraper, Kestrel. How does it look out there?”
“Clear for now. There is a goatherd about two thousand meters from your location, moving North.”
“Roger. Keep up the good work.”
They left one man to guard the prisoners and the other nine searched the complex. Amazingly, there were zero computers, cell phones, disks or thumb drives. They did find about forty large handwritten ledgers which Kestrel assumed were important and stacked them up to take with them. Other than that, there was nothing else beside fifty-six dead terrorists, five handcuffed bad guys and Wraith’s body.
“Hey K, this guy ain’t gonna be able to make that hike back with us,” one of the men said pointing at the fat man that Kestrel had handcuffed.
“Dave, go ask him if he can walk,” Kestrel told the team’s interpreter.
A few minutes later, he came back and said, “The fat guy says ‘You fuck goats’ and that he’s not walking anywhere. Apparently, ‘Masters’ do not perform any acts of labor.”
Kestrel stormed over to the man and placed the barrel of his pistol against his head. “Ask him again if he is willing to walk out of here Dave.”
A few seconds longer than Kestrel thought was necessary of back and forth between the two resulted in the interpreter saying, “Nope, he isn’t coming. He said that he knows about the Geneva Convention and that we have to take care of him now that he’s a prisoner. He demanded a bottle of water.”
Kestrel jerked the trigger and the man’s brains splattered across one of the other terrorists. “Tell the rest of them that either they walk or they die.”
Dave relayed this and was answered quickly by the four remaining men. “They say ok, they’re walking.”
“Good,” he replied. “Alright people, we need to rig this place to blow, we’re leaving in ten minutes,” he said into his mike.
In response, his earphones buzzed, “Kestrel, the referees are scoring the game, don’t get a penalty. Given the difficulty of the second half, it was acceptable to get rid of the Center, but we need the rest of Guards and Tackles to stay in the game.”
“Roger Coach,” he answered. He hated these stupid football references, but you never knew who was listening and this was supposed to remain a secret op. Recent past had shown that those sneaky Chinese were able to break even the most advanced communications signals that we had.
They slid Wraith’s body into a bag and carried him with them as they forced their prisoners out of the cave. The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon, so they’d actually busted their timetable by a few minutes. They were 1,500 meters away from the complex when Skyscraper and his team rejoined Kestrel’s assault element. After shaking hands, Kestrel ordered his demo man to blow the C4 they’d placed everywhere inside.
He released the safety and pushed the detonate button on the key fob-sized transmitter. It sent a message to the receiver, which was sitting in the entrance to the cave where it could receive a clear signal and relay back inside to the charges placed throughout the complex. That initiated a series of explosions deep within the mountain. Several seconds later they saw the exhaust flame of twin missiles fired from the Reaper drone overhead, followed by an even louder explosion as the top of the mountain was leveled and created an avalanche into the opposite valley.
“Let’s go back to base. We’ve got beers to drink, Wraith to eulogize and terrorists to fuck up and interrogate. Good job everybody,” Kestrel said as he turned towards their exfil point, roughly four miles away… as the crow flies.
FOURTEEN
04 September, 0923 hrs local
Shelbyville Municipal Airport
Shelbyville, Indiana
Grayson Donnelly and Bill Downs pulled up to the parking lot of the small municipal airport’s terminal. They had to leave their men about a mile back, the damn Brits wouldn’t let the armed “vigilante” force near their headquarters. While the two of them didn’t like it, they were resigned to it. This was their fourth meeting with the British commander since their Army had moved in a little over three months ago.
There still wasn’t any power, so Grayson had been told that in May, President Holmes made the announcement that the Indianapolis area would be quarantined and the Brits and Canadians were responsible for enforcing the quarantine. Apparently, he’d relented to international pressure and allowed forces from outside the U.S. to operate on American soil. There were even rumors that there were German troops on the East Coast, but those weren’t confirmed.
The two communities of Three Pillars
Estates and Pecan Valley Village had joined forces against the zombie threat sometime around the same time as the decision was made to abandon the city. Since they were inside the quarantine zone, they weren’t allowed to leave. Everyone knew by now that direct contact with broken skin was a 100% infection rate, but no one knew how else the virus was transmitted so they weren’t taking any risks and those unlucky enough to be inside the quarantine zone were stuck.
The crop system that Jamie had helped create was nearing harvest and everyone was looking forward to fresh food instead of whatever canned food they could scavenge and the boxed meals the Brits had been dropping in for months now. Even though their lives were hard, the men and women of the two communities were surviving and hoped one day to be authorized to leave the quarantined area.
Out of necessity, Grayson had teamed up with the strike force from Pecan Valley and they conducted regular sweeps into the city to kill as many zombies as they could. It helped keep the areas immediately around the communities more free of the menace so the families could maintain some semblance of pre-outbreak life, such as taking walks and allowing the children to visit the playground.
The system that Carrie Downs developed to withdraw a minimal distance and engage the zombies until they got too close and then repeat the move over and over worked brilliantly. The zombies they had in Indianapolis were just your run of the mill shamblers who were pretty stupid, they didn’t have the advanced zombies, the ones who’d been in the primary infection wave, like D.C. did.
When he’d first learned of the different types from Major General Clarke, the British commander of the quarantine zone, he’d been shocked. He’d dealt with hundreds, maybe thousands of zombies by that time, but this was something new entirely. The general told them that was why he was there. The U.S. military was on the ropes because of these “super zombies,” they were rebounding he’d assured them, but they needed help and all of their forces were committed to the DelMarVa area.