by Cherry Adair
Daklin had been updated prior to landing, but hadn't been on comm since. When he'd inserted his earpiece before leaving the hacienda, all he'd gotten was dead air.
Turley shrugged. "Our communications are sporadic, so we have only been able to get shit in small windows since we've been boots on the ground. Whatever is going down is still scheduled for the twelfth, three days from now. But we got some new intel an hour ago. The numbers 333 started popping up in the chatter. Location? Time? Part of a coordinate? Control's working on it."
Gibbs turned. "We're checking every lead, every scrap of cyber chatter. Of more immediate interest is that they uncovered a highly encrypted black net cloud site about an hour ago. One of the 333 chatter sources, in an extremely roundabout way, might be linked to this new cloud.”
“Extremely sophisticated. Never-before-seen. Hopefully, whatever's stored there will give us all the answers we need. Control will clue us in as soon as they have something."
"Excellent. Meantime, we'd better figure out this jamming shit before they have relevant and actionable intel for us. We need to be able to receive any whatever they figure out. If we don't get it, we'll be flying blind."
Flying blind was par for the course. Operatives rarely had all the pieces necessary to thwart the bad guys, or prevent an act of terror. Yet they were still more than capable of doing the job. It was harder, but not impossible. Even so, it sure as hell would help to have the majority of the information that T-FLAC could develop.
Aiza dug out a beer from the cooler, then slid down the wall to sit on the dirty tiled floor, extending his legs as he pulled the ring top. The sound made Daklin lick his lips. Vodka was his drug of choice, but he'd drink pretty much anything.
Last chance, dickhead. Last fucking chance. For him, this was a booze free op by necessity. He'd pop the cap on the vodka soon enough. Until then, he'd stay clean and fucking sober. Even if it killed him. Daklin let out a hoarse laugh.
"You okay?" Ram shot him a puzzled glance.
"We have forty-eight hours to figure this out, people. Every minute counts." Daklin waved the plastic bottle to indicate everyone return their attention to the monitor.
"Fortunately, the feed is recorded on site as well, so we might not see shit in real time. But with Ram inside the hacienda, we at least have something," Gibbs offered, still nursing his first beer as he leaned back, legs extended, in one of the old webbed lawn chairs. "We had comms for six minutes yesterday, and ten minutes about half an hour ago. That's it."
Daklin rubbed the bottle over his sweaty chest again, considering a hunch that seemed logical. "Someone on the ground must have needed to make contact outside the valley."
"The video feed from the house doesn't seem to be affected by the jam, so we're trying to feed off that signal for the rest of the comms. So far it hasn't worked, but we'll keep trying," Gibbs said. "We have sporadic eyes and ears on the majority of the rooms."
Daklin's gaze roamed Xavier's private quarters on the screen, picking out details he'd been too busy to notice at the time, like the dust-free spot on the altar next to Mary.
"Hold it right there," Daklin ordered. "Zoom in on the top of the altar on the left. See that? No dust. Something was there. A picture frame? See the mark of the easel? Same as the fancy silver frames on every flat surface in the house. That's prime real estate. His inner sanctum is where he keeps his most valued and prized religious relics. Go back to earlier feeds and see what sat there. Who was it a photograph of?" Daklin glanced at the others.
"His wife, maybe?" Ryan Gibbs suggested. "There's been nothing in that spot since we've been monitoring the house."
"Well, something was there. Who, and why was it removed? And when? Let's talk to whoever cleans his rooms."
"I'll talk to Juanita, the girl who served your dinner. She's my cousin," Ram offered, using the bottom of his shirt to wipe sweat off his forehead, exposing a jagged scar across his belly. "Man, I forgot how hot it gets in the valley. Temp doesn't even drop at night."
Turley, pilot, explosives engineer, and a veteran operative who'd been with T-FLAC about the same dozen years as Daklin, shook his head. His dark skin gleamed with perspiration in the flickering light from the screen. He kept watching the play by play from a few hours earlier. He balanced his open beer can precariously on his up-drawn knee, but had yet to drink. "No A/C at the hacienda. It was built in the 1800's and the wiring doesn't support it. Ceiling fans don't cut it."
Gibbs ran his hand over his short-cropped, light brown hair. "You're going up to the plant with him, right, Daklin?"
"Yeah." Xavier and Chirpy Barbie. Should be fun. Not. Daklin, watching Xavier's expressions and hand gestures as he talked on the screen, said, "Tomorrow, during the day, I'll check out the area with Xavier. Tomorrow night we'll recon. The night after that, we set the charges. Talk to me about security."
"He has an army up there," Aiza told him. "Private contractors. We guesstimate upwards of a hundred. Mostly Russian, military-trained."
"Ruskies don't fuckin' sleep," Nyhuis added before slugging back a mouthful of beer. "They're like robots."
Daklin rotated a kink out of his neck, wished for his icy vodka, and chugged warm water. "They've gotta sleep. Where and when?"
"Barracks off the mine road," Ram responded. "Eighty percent of the men on duty at all times. He keeps security outside. No one allowed inside either the mine or the building. Guard towers. Heavy muscle, well armed, well organized. Twelve man patrols. Doberman pinchers. LED stadium lights. Soldiers sleep on the property most nights. The bunks there beat this shithole, but not by much. We're given our assignments every night, and our locations are random until we report for duty on the property, then the guy in charge, Vadim, no other name, tells us where to patrol.
"Facial rec on this guy?"
"Nothing."
"Why aren't you guys in the barracks?" Daklin asked. It wasn't just curiosity. They had less than seventy-two hours to learn how everything ticked, how everything fit together. How everything could be broken apart. Getting that intel on the premises beat hanging out miles away.
"Yeah, that came as an unwelcome surprise," Ram admitted. "New hires aren't allowed to be up there at night. It takes six months to prove loyalty or some such. We're fortunate Xavier agreed to hire so many of us at one time. My dad's word was good, and he's worked for el jefe for thirty years. He's well trusted." Ram looked at each man in turn, his expression grim. "I'm trusting you guys to keep my village safe and not fucking get my father killed in the crossfire."
“We’re blowing a mountain riddled with raw E-1x. There will be no controlling the blast. Zip. Zero. There will be collateral damage, and a shit ton of it. Charlie team will evacuate villagers starting tomorrow, well before the fireworks. Ram, make sure your dad gets the hell out." Daklin ran his hand around the back of his sweaty neck. "What else do we know?"
"Security has plenty of weapons, enough ammo to take down a decent sized army, and the skills to make good use of both,” Gibbs answered. “They train daily. They're machines. They know what they're doing, and have orders to kill all intruders."
"Who are they expecting?" Daklin asked, not taking his eye off Xavier on screen as he expounded on a rosary he'd been given at St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. Each religious artifact had a story, and Xavier was determined to tell Bishop Daklin every one in an effort to cement his Godliness.
Not getting any answer, Daklin continued. "Both the ALNF and Escobar Maza's Sangre Y Puño were taken out by operative Riva Rimaldi last year. We didn't even know that he mined E-1x here until a week ago."
Daklin drank deeply, then went on. "This army of his was hired sometime in the last year, right? What precipitated the massive hire? The war between the ALNF and SYP's? Something else? We need answers, guys. Now. I repeat: who the fuck are they expecting? Do they anticipate tangos looking to score his emeralds after the guerillas are driven out?"
"He's sitting on an estimated twenty-trillion dollars in Nuts up there. Processed and ready t
o ship," Turley offered. "If anyone other than us figures out what he has, and how much, you can bet they'll crawl out of the woodwork and right up his ass."
"We'd better be quick and damned efficient," Daklin told his men. "If any tangos hear the same chatter we did, they'll know that he's planning Armageddon. They'll want in on the action. That’s not gonna happen on our watch."
Aiza crossed himself. "Amen."
They all paused to listen as their comms went live with a sudden buzz. They had a date. Now they had the numbers 333.
What the numbers meant was anybody's guess.
"Why don't we just go up the fucking mountain right now and blow it to hell? Why the fuck wait?" Nyhuis demanded, shooting Turley a belligerent look as he rubbed both hands over his bald head. His smile brought to mind a serial killer. Records indicated the guy was a proponent of hand-to-hand combat, that he'd killed five heavily armed tangos one morning before breakfast with nothing but his bare hands. "We could get it done, go the fuck back home for our next assignment?"
His thick neck swiveled so he faced Daklin over his heavy shoulder. “You've been here one fucking day. We've been here almost a sodding week." Crossing his feet at the ankle, he rested his beer can on his chest.
"There's fuck-all to do in this Halcion-sucking hick village. No chicks worth porking, gotta drive all the way to hell-and-gone and into Abad to buy our booze. This could be over before anyone wakes up for fucking breakfast, right?” Nyhuis glanced from man to man.
"This isn't a tropical vacation, Nyhuis. No more booze, no women. Recon tomorrow night. Evacuate villagers." Daklin checked his temper. "Set charges the night after. Anyone got a problem with that?"
Nobody voiced a problem.
"Anything on Dr. Sullivan?"
"No." Nyhuis shrugged. "People around here don't talk about him. Like at all."
"No one talked about him at MIT, either. He was ahead of me by several years. He's the epitome of an antisocial nerd. Kept his head down, barely communicated. See if you can find out where he went. His sister seems like she’ll be a dog with a bone until she gets some answers."
"I'll ask around tomorrow," Ram told him.
"Do that. Let Control know we're looking." T-FLAC wanted the product, they wanted the buyers, they wanted Xavier, and they needed Sullivan to tell them how the raw material was manufactured into the Nuts for easy distribution. And they had to find out how to diffuse the bombs made from said product. Sullivan was the only person who could tell them how to defuse any future bombs.
In the meantime, they'd light up the fucking mountain and get rid of E-1x once and for all.
I’ll have peace. Peace and redemption.
Daklin thought of Sullivan's sister. She’d had a long flight and a stressful day. He wondered how she slept. Curled in a ball, or sprawled out across the bed? Nude, or in some of the lingerie she designed? He could find out easily enough. There was a camera in her room, put there in anticipation of an appearance from Sullivan.
On the screen, he and Xavier circumvented his massive, carved mahogany bed, draped in dark blue velvet and mounded with shiny gold pillows that took center stage. "You see the apparition, not next door in the church, but here in your personal chapel?" Daklin was asking Franco.
He knew exactly where Xavier saw his apparition. The T-FLAC operatives had set up the state-of-the-art projection equipment to make it happen. Every night at eleven, they were projecting videos, produced in Montana through multi-media streaming into Xavier's private chapel off his bedroom.
A microscopic lens, hidden in the eye of the painting of the Virgin Mary hanging above the altar, relayed in real time footage to the operatives across town and also to HQ back in Montana, when the comms worked.
At HQ, Xavier's every word and micro expression were analyzed so that they could tailor the next apparition specifically to extract more precise and specific intel.
"The Madonna comes to me here, Your Excellency." The pious look on Xavier's face was more proud than humble. He was about bursting out of his suit, showing off to the bishop.
"Other than yourself and Father Marcus, has anyone else seen it?" Daklin asked.
Watching the replay, Angel Aiza laughed. "Yeah, only about fifty of us so far."
While they kept the apparitions going, Daklin's Alpha team--the crew with him in Los Santos--was to eliminate the only known source of the compound E-1x, eliminate Xavier, and capture Oliver Sullivan.
Bravo team had been tasked to chase down the location of a truck suspected to be carrying a payload containing the finished explosives on its way to fuck-knew-where. A couple of ounces of E-1x was enough to turn all of Manhattan into a desolate, burned out crater. HQ scientists had determined that with enough material, E-1x could blow a hole deep enough to fracture the earth’s crust, or blow a small country off the map completely. Carrying a horrific amount of E-1x to unleash on the world in one go, Bravo had tracked the vehicle from Los Santos to half way over the mountain range, and then it had disappeared. Could've made it through Peru or Venezuela to the coast and be in a container on its way to Anywhereistan.
Charlie team had been tasked with evacuation. They were waiting over the pass to transport the villagers out of the valley before Daklin and his team blew the mountain. Delta team waited at the pass for orders to back up the Alpha team.
"Fast forward to the apparition," Daklin ordered. The pain in his leg from sitting in a plane for hours, driving to the valley, and the half-assed attempt at jogging earlier was almost down to a dull roar. With any luck, he'd be able to get some shuteye and be ready for morning.
"Then let's go straight to dessert." Nyhuis smacked his lips as he rubbed his crotch
Daklin ignored him. The crew who'd put together the short film of the apparition had found a fresh-faced young woman who looked eerily like the two-foot high, carved and painted Madonna statue on Xavier's altar. "If I didn't know this was movie magic I would’ve bought into it myself." The images of the actress, dressed in identical blue robes, had been superimposed over the statue, and looked unnervingly authentic. He'd been standing a mere three feet away in the chapel, and still Daklin had found the hair on the back of his neck lifting as she silently reached out to Xavier.
Faux blood tears welled in her blue eyes as she soundlessly whispered Xavier’s name. Then she disappeared, making it look as though she'd gone from statue to live woman and back to an inanimate figurine again.
He rubbed a hand around the back of his neck as he pushed away from the wall. "Damn good job. Ramp it up tomorrow night. Add 333 and twelfth to what she’s saying. Hopefully we'll get some answers."
On the screen, the 'bishop' had just told Xavier it would take his witnessing more than one apparition to substantiate the claim. Xavier had had a fucking meltdown.
"Man, he did not like hearing that the good bishop wasn't going to put in a call to the High See Rome immediately." Turley sat forward, his teeth a flash of white in the dimness.
"Okay, that show’s over, dickheads." Nyhuis grabbed the keyboard and clicked to another view of one of the rooms in the house. "I'm ready for some sweetness."
Daklin, having just tossed his empty bottle into an overflowing trash can, turned and got a full frontal view of River Sullivan strolling bare-assed naked out of her bathroom, her sleek body beaded with droplets of water.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Nyhuis said.
"Fuck me," someone else said with real feeling.
"Holy shit, is that a-"
The others commented, too, but the melded voices muted to the faint buzz of bees.
Jesus H. Christ. Instantly rock hard, Daklin felt sucker punched. His tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth. She was all sleek curves and glistening skin. Slicked back wet hair exposed the oval perfection of her face. She was so pretty, she made his balls ache. Heartbeat tripping unevenly, his gaze travelled to her small, perky breasts and hard pale pink nipples. His gaze lingered on the smooth skin of her belly, then traveled slowl
y lower. A pale, bikini bottom outline indicated the lady not only tanned topless, but she was also a natural blonde. The pale fluff between her lightly tanned legs was trimmed into a neat heart shape.
Kill me now.
He wanted to taste her. Everywhere, but especially there at the apex where dewy, golden curls covered her mound. Dozens of ways to react to the visual feast filled his mind: lunge and lick the image on the monitor, get a cockstand, rein it in. Son of a fucking bitch. This op was already a test. Adding her to the mix was like throwing gasoline on the flame.
Hell. With any other op, he would’ve failed. Gladly, with a fucking-aye-hoorah to the genetic wonder of a natural blonde, her perky breasts, and drops of water sluicing slowly over skin calling for his touch.
"Turn it off," Daklin managed to say in a calm and authoritative tone he didn't feel, making the only correct choice. Correct, not for himself, but for T-FLAC. "Delete all the footage, and turn off the surveillance camera in the lady's bedroom. Immediately. She's not a tango, and we're not voyeurs. Turn. It. The. Fuck. Off. Permanently."
His racing heartbeat sounded like a drumbeat in his ears. The bigger, much bigger, problem was he was so fucking hard; he could pole vault back to the hacienda.
Dear God.
Behind him, Nyhuis grumbled. Daklin felt the exact same way. The screen returned to the room-by-room grid, with one black square. Good enough. "Let's take a look at that topographic map."
After a dose of the naked splendor that was River Sullivan, topographic maps weren’t what he felt like looking at, but for this job, the stakes were too high to do anything but work. He couldn’t fail. It wasn’t an option. He’d seen maps, aerial surveillance footage, satellite infrared, and ground penetrating X-rays. Now that he was boots on the ground, he wanted to see everything for himself in real time.
A real time image of Miss Sullivan’s naked body was now imprinted on the back of his throbbing eyeballs. Fuck.
Turley retrieved a roll of maps and spread them out on the locked gun vault they were using as a coffee table. He punched a finger on the map as he spoke. "Here's the mine entrance. Excavated shafts go into the mountain, approximately fifteen thousand feet."