‘Psycho, I . . .’
Something changed. It took a moment for Prophet to work out what. There was something different in the rhythm of the town. It had just got quieter. He cycled through various comm frequencies. Nothing. Even the company that handled the policing in Rovesky had gone quiet.
Dead lips smiled. A rictus grin. They were learning. Mainly about comms discipline, it would seem. He could hear engine noises now, the suit sorting, separating and analysing the sounds. Images of the vehicles making the noise started to appear in his Heads-Up Display, effectively playing across his vision.
‘What?’
‘Here’s your chance,’ Prophet all but whispered.
Both of them heard the fire door battered open with a sound-dampened pneumatic ram several floors below. They heard boots on the stairs.
Psycho picked up his gauss rifle, quickly checking it.
Time to send the message, Prophet thought. Every Macronet-connected comms device in Natasha’s House of Pleasure started chiming urgently as it received a priority text: You don’t know me, but I know you. Something very bad is about to happen. You all need to leave, now.
Even if they believed the message Prophet knew that there wasn’t going to be enough time for them to evac. It was going to go badly for the prostitutes, the regulars, the overseers and the door staff he’d been living vicariously through for the last days. CELL wanted their toys back and in his case they wanted what was left of the corpse in it out, regardless of who was driving the corpse’s head.
He stood up and started walking towards the skylight at the front of the building. It overlooked the junction of frozen muddy streets in front of the brothel. Cold blue light flooded the attic. The suit’s visor darkened to compensate. Prophet could hear the roar of the VTOL keeping pace with him as he walked, its searchlight shining through the other skylights.
He should stealth now, he knew, Psycho already had, but before it started he just wanted them to see what they were dealing with. He wanted to know how frightened they were.
‘Here, Prophet, ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’ Psycho asked over the suits’ comms.
He reached the skylight at the front of the building. He looked down onto the frozen streets. Perhaps he’d underestimated just how much CELL wanted the suit back, he thought. The street outside was full. APCs, Bulldogs, Armoured Security Vehicles, at least four VTOLs in the air, slowly circling him, and a lot of soldiers. The HUD was showing a ridiculously target-rich environment and all the weapons he could register, from SMGs to vehicle cannons to missiles, were pointed at the attic.
The glass broke as Prophet stepped through the skylight onto the ledge outside the attic. More searchlights stabbed up at him, fixing him in their glare as his visor darkened further. He could hear amplified voices shouting at them. He found it absurd that for some reason their instructions were repeated in Russian.
Prophet took a long, slow look at the CELL forces. Then he started to move . . .
The Cult
Department of Antioquia, Northern Columbia, 2019, Operation Scarface (Joint Columbian, US and UK anti-Drugs Operation)
There’s a first time for everything. He remembered his first gunfight. He had been frightened but he had got through it; his training had overcome the fear. What was he trying to prove here? The thought flew through his head. Along with: I should have used the .45.
Cutting a throat isn’t a smooth slice, Barnes knew, you really had to do some sawing. As he’d emerged from the undergrowth the mercenary had started to turn. In the old days the Medellin and Cali cartels had used British, US and Israeli ex-military to train their people. This new breed of cartel used Eastern European mercenaries, many of them ex-Spetsnaz, both to train their own gunmen and to augment their forces.
As Barnes wrapped himself around the man and took him to the ground to control his movement and started to saw at the throat he realised that the man really could fight. The mercenary knew what to do in this situation, how to counter it, and knew that he desperately wanted to live. In short, Barnes’ silent takedown was not going nearly as well as he’d hoped.
Artery, artery, starve the brain of blood, windpipe, stop him crying out. Clamp down tight, stop fingers from getting in the way of the blade. He was all but riding the man around the small clearing overlooking the Ferranto Valley and making enough noise to warn people in Bogotá that somebody was being murdered.
The cartel mercenary stopped moving. Lieutenant Laurence Barnes, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, did not stop sawing, not until he was positive that the mercenary was good and dead. He sagged, covered in sweat, fighting for breath, his right arm coated in blood up to the elbow. It was his second mistake of the day.
The second mercenary moved quietly out of the jungle, assault rifle at the ready. The expression on his face didn’t even change as he took in the scene. The barrel of the mercenary’s rifle swung towards Barnes as he frantically reached for his sidearm. Barnes knew he was not going to be quick enough. The cartel gunman had him cold. The mercenary’s face seemed to distort, crumple in on itself. Then again, as the second near-silent round took him in the face. The hydrostatic shock popped the top of the mercenary’s head off. His ruined face became red and he hit the ground.
Thank you Earl, Barnes thought. He heard what sounded like two coughs from the nearby trees as at least one other cartel gunman died due to suppressed gunfire. He’d told himself that he’d use the knife instead of the suppressed Heckler & Koch Mk 23 .45 automatic because of the chance of the muzzle flash warning other nearby elements of the Antioquia Cartel and their FARC allies’ military forces. If he was honest, an element of using the knife had been because he wanted to bust his knife-kill cherry, and that came from a new lieutenant in Delta Force wanting the respect of his people. Particularly as he’d come from 82nd Airborne and not Special Forces or the Rangers, as was more normal for Delta Force. It was a silly game to play at this level, he admonished himself.
He rolled the mercenary off and got back in the game. He wiped his blade on the corpse and sheathed it. Kneeling down he brought the M4 CQB carbine up, accidentally smearing the blood of his victim on the underslung 40mm M203 grenade launcher. He checked it quickly to make sure it hadn’t been damaged in the struggle, but as far as he could tell it hadn’t.
Chavez appeared out of the treeline. She had her Mk 23 held steady in both hands, the suppressor attached to the barrel. Judging from where she had emerged it had been her shots Barnes had heard. Chavez was probably average size for a woman but to Barnes she looked tiny. She looked too small for her load-out but she never seemed to have any problems keeping up. She was one of the few women in the special forces community. Barnes knew that she would have had to work hard for acceptance, both as a woman and as a USAF combat air-controller. Combat Air Controllers were attached to special forces units like Delta and the Navy’s SEALs to coordinate air support for their operations. In Afghanistan and Iraq there had been grouching from special forces units about whether or not the Combat Air Controllers were trained to their standards and could keep up. Chavez, from what Barnes had seen, was completely accepted by D Squadron’s recce/sniper troop, certainly more so than he was, judging by his current performance.
‘What’s up LT? I think you nearly cut his head off.’ T, short for Thomas, never Tom or Tommy, appeared next to Barnes. Barnes glanced at the sergeant, but there was no reproach or judgement in the SAW gunner/medic’s eyes. Maybe some concern. He was the oldest of the four operators, in theory Barnes’s 2IC, but Barnes was happy to defer to the senior NCO on operational matters whilst he played catch-up. Barnes had found the sergeant both friendly, which was sometimes unusual in the SF community, and a consummate professional. T had originally served with 1st Special Forces before transferring to Delta. He never talked about his mother, but Barnes knew his father still worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in Montana’s Oxbow Quadrangle near the Idaho/Canadian border.
T knelt down by the mercenary that Barnes had killed. He opened the man’s mouth with his gloved fingers and inspected his teeth.
‘Yep, definitely Eastern European, you can tell by the dental work.’ He glanced down at Barnes’s bloodstained arm. ‘You’ll need to wash that off or the flies’ll gather.’
They were on the edge of a steep cliff some four hundred feet up, overlooking the narrow, cliff-lined, Ferranto valley. The whole area was home to the Antioquia Cartel, the heirs of the Medellin Cartel’s territory and violent legacy. They operated in northern Columbia’s Antioquia Department, an area that was largely controlled by FARC guerrillas since their 2011 offensive. This made it difficult for the Columbian government to police the area.
The cartel, however, had overextended itself when it blew up an airliner to kill the new Columbian Minister for Defence. The Minister had been in the pocket of the Norte del Valle cartel and their right-wing AUC guerrilla allies further to the south. The airliner had been American and had been in British airspace, en route to London from Bogotá, when it had exploded. The US and UK governments had exerted pressure on the Columbian government to allow boots on the ground in Northern Columbia to “assist” the Columbian Military’s efforts to deal with the cartel and FARC. Conspiracy theorists were already blaming the CIA for the bombing of the airliner, claiming that they wanted to use it as an excuse to eliminate a left-wing threat on America’s doorstep. Barnes had heard the theory, and felt that the theorists vastly underestimated how much the US government didn’t want to be involved in a South American Vietnam-style fiasco.
Barnes moved towards a small stream on the edge of the clearing to wash the blood off. T grabbed his arm.
‘Someone might see the blood in the water downstream. Use the water in your canteen and then refill it in the stream.’
Barnes nodded and followed T’s suggestion, adding a couple of water purification tablets to his canteen. He also decided that he’d made his last mistake of the day and, if he had his way, the last mistake on Operation Scarface.
Barnes crawled to the cliff edge. Chavez had established contact with the USAF liaison at Joint Special Operations Command in Medellin City. T was watching their back.
‘Do you want to lase and I’ll call it in, LT?’ Chavez asked during a lull in her radio conversation. Barnes nodded. He used the scope on the M4 to look down into the valley at their target. Their target had once been a ranch house. Now it was a heavily fortified compound belonging to Diego Ramiraz, the Antioquia Cartel’s chief enforcer and thought to be the mastermind behind the airliner bombing. He was also believed to be directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of over five thousand people in gang violence, bombings and assassinations worldwide.
‘This is going to be fun. Just like fucking Afghanistan.’ Chavez was always angry and pretty foul-mouthed. She talked street but Barnes knew that she came from a respectable middle-class family who lived in Harlem. He could, however, see her problem. When Barnes had first looked at maps and satellite imagery of the area he had thought that the Ferranto Valley was a suicidal place for Ramiraz to use as a base. He thought that the cartel enforcer and his people had basically trapped themselves in there. However, the compound was all but built under a rocky outcrop in the valley’s opposite cliff wall. That and the narrowness of the valley meant that it was going to very difficult to hit with airstrikes. It would be even more difficult if the rumours that intel had picked up on, about a bunker complex within the cliff side itself, were true.
Barnes removed the boxy laser designator from his webbing and got ready to “paint” the compound. The compound itself was a hive of activity, with trucks and four-by-fours laden with heavily armed mercenaries coming and going. The Ferranto Valley might have seemed like a trap for Ramiraz but if this didn’t work then the American, British and Columbian forces would have to go in there the hard way, and then it was going to be a vicious fight.
‘Two fast movers inbound,’ Chavez told him. Barnes just nodded. ‘This is Venom two-four to Vulture leader: okay stud, listen to me carefully,’ She was talking to the pilot of the lead FB-22 Wyvern fighter-bombers. New in service, they were derived from F22 Raptor air superiority fighters. ‘You got to come in low and slow, you hear me? Get tight in on the deck or this shit just isn’t going to work, over.’ Barnes couldn’t hear the response but he had heard that a lot of the alpha-male jet jockeys didn’t appreciate Chavez’s style of forward observation. Chavez couldn’t care less. After all, they weren’t down here in the shit with them.
They heard the fighter-bombers before they saw them. The thunder of their approach echoed down the valley. Barnes caught a glimpse of them banking hard and then dropping altitude as they headed down into the valley. He turned his attention back to lasing the compound. The beam from the designator was mostly invisible except for where it touched the compound’s main building
‘Too fast,’ Chavez muttered under her breath. ‘Attack run aborted.’
Barnes turned to look up the valley. He could see the missile contrail against the blue of the sky. Both Wyverns were climbing at ninety degrees. Burning hard, outdistancing the missile easily. It looked like it was raining chaff and countermeasures as the missile detonated far from the two fighters.
‘Stinger?’ Barnes asked. Chavez nodded.
‘Venom two-four to Vulture two. That wasn’t a fucking SAM emplacement, it was a peasant with a tube. Now get fucking back here and finish the fucking job, over.’ Barnes knew that she would get reprimanded for that. He’d do what he could to shield her. ‘Pindago asshole, how fucking difficult is it to deliver smart munitions?’
‘Take it easy, Chavez,’ T said quietly from behind them.
‘I’m going to find this puta and beat his bitch-ass to death with his own joystick.’ She went quiet, listening to incoming comms. She handed Barnes the handset for the sat-uplink. ‘They want to speak to you.’
Barnes took the handset and listened.
‘Venom leader to Broadsword Actual, received and understood.’ He passed the handset back to Chavez and then depressed the send button on his tac radio so that Earl would hear what he had to say as well. ‘Okay, the mission’s scrubbed . . .’
‘Pussies . . .’ Chavez muttered. Barnes gave her a look to let her know that was enough. He knew she felt that the air force had let them down but she was going to have to deal quietly.
‘We’ve been re-tasked. We’re exposed here, so we’re heading five klicks in country and I’ll brief you there. Earl, you’re leading the way.’
Barnes took a moment to check the map whilst Chavez and T kept a lookout. He gave Earl a grid reference and the three of them headed into the rainforest. Somewhere ahead of them Earl was leading the way.
Joint Special Operations Command for Operation Scarface, Medellin.
Major Harold Winterman was staring at the newcomer like he’d just tracked dog shit into his command post. He turned back to look at the order he had just received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and looked at that like he was holding dog shit.
Winterman’s people knew him to be a consummate professional. He had to be, to be entrusted with command of all special operations on Operation Scarface. They had never seen their commanding officer so close to losing his temper. They also had the feeling that his temper would be something to behold.
The focus of Winterman’s ire was stood in front of him in some crisply-pressed, new-looking jungle fatigues, but the man carried himself like he was more than capable of handling himself, and the way he’d spoken to Major Winterman suggested he’d better be.<
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‘Who or what the fuck is CELL?’ Winterman demanded.
‘Crynet Enforcement and Local Logistics,’ the tall, brown-haired, well-built man told him, ‘part of Hargreave Rasch.’
‘You’re military contractors?’ Winterman asked, barely containing himself. The man in the new fatigues nodded. ‘Then what. The. Fuck. Are you doing? Coming into my CP and giving me orders?’ Winterman was thinking about having this person shot. Actually, he was thinking about shooting him himself and then having the guards that had let him into his CP shot.
‘I’m not. The Joint Chiefs, that would be your employers, are. They are also commanding you to extend me every possible courtesy. In effect, I am in command here.’
‘I’m not sure that’s my reading of the orders . . .’ Winterman started angrily.
‘I don’t give a fuck.’ The newcomer snapped. There was a sharp intake of breath from Winterman’s people. Winterman actually took a step forward, as did the Delta operator who had been assigned to him as close protection. ‘You don’t like your orders, remove yourself from the CP and go and have a cry somewhere. We’ve measured cocks, mine’s bigger. Now, are we getting on with the matter at hand or do I have you arrested for disobeying a direct order?’
Winterman was shaking with fury. He badly wanted to hurt this man. Nobody had spoken to him like that since he’d been a junior officer. The vein on his forehead was pulsing with barely controlled rage.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ Winterman managed. He had definitely seen the man somewhere before, probably Iraq at a guess.
‘I’ve got no time for you special forces cowboys, but you’re the best I’ve got for the job in hand. My name is Commander Lockhart. You can call me “Sir’.’ He turned and gestured to a group of civilians who had been standing by the entrance to the CP and gestured for them to enter. The Rangers on guard halted them and then turned to look at Winterman. Reluctantly, the Major nodded and they were allowed in.
Crysis: Escalation Page 2