Operation Assassination

by Anne Fox

  “Hope I’m ready for this,” Hank muttered. She took a look at her student pilot certificate once more just to be certain of the name she’d be using to take the test. Katie Hank. Sigh.

  Walking to the flight school office, she also made sure she had the fake driver’s license she’d been provided as proof of identity. The address given on the document was completely false, and in fact didn’t exist. But it would be flagged so that the FAA “gunny” working with the unit would know that “Katie Hank” was a member of the unit, and her test report would be printed at the testing center just the same. The same would hold true of her permanent pilot’s certificate once it was issued: it would be routed to the mailbox in the BEQ above the unit’s Quantico base.

  “Here goes,” she muttered, walking in and announcing that she was there to take her airman knowledge test. I’d rather be flying.

  “That gets your landings at a towered field done, as well as a portion of your test prep time,” Cloud told Hank as they shut down the Archer for the day. “We can get your night flying taken care of tomorrow. We’ll go from here to Carlsbad and back, which will knock out the night cross-country requirement. Maybe do some of the required landings there as well. Then back here and get in the rest of the landings you need.”

  “And after that?”

  “Your long cross-country. Here to Carlsbad to Hobbs and back. Then the only thing is make sure we have three hours of test prep, and then you get to meet our FAA gunny. Nervous?”

  Hank laughed. “Not yet.”

  Edge was sitting outside the FBO, a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “Looks like Edge is done with his knowledge test, too,” Cloud observed.

  “I’ll make him a bet on who got the higher score,” Hank said, grinning. She pulled out her airman test report and held it for Cloud to see. “Aced it.” She climbed off the wing walk and went over to Edge.

  “Got a quarter?”

  “Sure do,” he said, grinning. “And I can guess what the bet is that you want to make.”

  “Cloud, you want to take control of these two quarters?” Hank asked.

  Cloud held out his hand and the two student pilots dropped their quarters into it.

  Hank held up her test report, pointing at the “100” in the Test Result section.

  Edge was doing the same. Hank took a look.

  “You aced it, too?”

  “Damned tootin’.”

  Hank shrugged. “I guess this means we get our quarters back.” She turned to Cloud.

  Cloud tossed the two quarters in his hand and then stuck them in his pocket. “It’s about time you two paid me.”

  "Edge, Hank, meet our FAA gunny, Fred Parloy.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Hank said, shaking hands.

  “Same here,” Edge added, offering his hand as well.

  “Likewise. Who won the toss?” Fred asked.

  “The big man,” Hank replied.

  “Alright. Come with me,” Fred said, leading Edge off to the pilot’s lounge.

  “I wish to fuck he hadn’t won the toss,” Hank said, pacing.

  Cloud was leaned up against the wall in the refreshment area.

  “You’re going to drive yourself crazy,” Cloud observed. “And worse, you’re going to drive me crazy.”

  “What do you have to be worried about?” Hank demanded.

  “Little unknown secret. If you fail, it goes on my record.”

  “Oh, great. Now I’ve got that pressure to deal with as well.” Hank resumed pacing.

  “I’ve told everyone I’ve ever trained Hank: you don’t have to be nervous, because I’ll be nervous for you.” Cloud concentrated on his fingers, where he for all appearances was casually flipping a quarter across the back of his hand from between two fingers to between the next two, back and forth.

  “How can you do that so fast?” Hank asked. “I can’t hardly do it at all – never mind that quickly.”

  “You eat chocolate, Spud watches cartoons, I do this,” he said, watching the quarter flip back and forth. “While I was in the Army, I did a bit of flight instruction on the side. So I’ve had lots of practice.”

  “I don’t think I’ve been this nervous since waiting to see if I made the cut for the unit.”

  “That was iffier, if I recall correctly. Didn’t you throw something during the psych evaluation?”

  “A glass,” Hank said. “But fuck – they’d just told me my brother got himself stabbed to death in a drug deal gone bad.”

  “I guess if there’s an excuse for throwing something, that’s a good one,” Cloud said.

  “If I recall, Doc Andy said something about it being an appropriate response to some devastating news. For me, it was the worst damned thing to hear. Here I am, I find out my brother got himself stabbed over drugs. And I was trying to get into the drug cartel taskforce while I was still in the FBI.” She walked over to the vending machines. Pulling a dollar bill from her pocket, she said, “There’s got to be a chocolate bar in here somewhere.” Finding one, she inserted the dollar into the machine and watched as the candy moved along to the edge of its track, and hung.

  “Fuck you, you fucking machine! Give me my chocolate!” She made a fist and rapped it over where the candy perched on the edge of the track, causing it to drop into the tray beneath.

  “Didn’t hurt your hand, did you?”

  “No, but if I had, it would have been worth it,” she mumphed through a mouthful of chocolate.

  “I’d love to know how you got that unwrapped that fast.”

  “The same way you can flip that stupid quarter back and forth so damned fast.”

  They sat, he flipping the quarter across the backs of his fingers and she breaking off bits of chocolate and letting them melt in her mouth.

  “Key.”

  They both jumped. Edge was holding out his hand to Cloud, who took the key to the Archer’s door and handed it over.

  “Don’t break it. I still have to do my checkride, you know,” Hank admonished Edge.

  “Eat shit, Hank.”

  She laughed, and Edge grinned at her.

  “Now that they’re out of the pilot’s lounge, I think I’m going to go off and find myself a chair that’s a bit more comfortable.”

  Cloud couldn’t help but notice that before she did so, she bought three more chocolate bars.

  When Fred and Edge returned, Edge stopped at the refreshment area where Cloud was still sitting, quarter coursing its way over the backs of his fingers. He dropped a small sheet of white paper in front of Cloud, who sighed a sigh of relief. “One down, one to go,” Cloud said.

  After about an hour, Hank reappeared in the refreshment area, Fred on her heels.

  “My turn,” she said, holding her hand out for the key.

  Cloud dropped it into her hand, then resumed passing the quarter back and forth across his fingers.

  “Good...”

  “Don’t say it, Edge. You’ll jinx me,” Hank admonished.

  Edge raised his hands in surrender and casually watched as Hank headed out the door, the examiner on her heels.

  “You don’t go watch?”

  “Nope.” Cloud passed the quarter over the back of his hand again.

  Edge shrugged. “I think I’ll go chill in the pilot’s lounge.”

  “You do that,” Cloud muttered, continuing to flip the quarter back and forth.

  A little over an hour later, Hank walked back into the refreshment area. She dropped an identically-sized piece of white paper in front of Cloud. On the top it read, “Temporary Airman Certificate.”

  “Now I can put this back in my pocket,” he said, a smile finally forming on his face as he dropped the quarter he’d been nervously playing with in his pants pocket.

  “You turned out a couple of good ones this time, Cloud,” Fred said. “Just how far are you and Crow going to take them?”

  “Want to see?” Cloud asked.

  “Sure.”

  As Cloud led the way out to
the hangar to show off the unit’s new aircraft, Hank headed off to the pilot’s lounge, folding the airman certificate and sticking it in a billfold in her pocket.

  “Well?” Edge asked as she walked in.

  “My little piece of paper looks just like yours. Except it has ‘Katie Hank’ on it.”

  “Where’s Cloud?”

  “Showing off the Seneca and the Latitude, I think,” Hank said.

  “Did he sit there the whole time I was flying, messing with that quarter?” Hank asked. “Because that’s all he did while you were flying.”

  “I don’t know. I came back here to relax,” Edge said, “But I’m guessing the answer is yes.”

  6

  “I thought this would be a good place to start,” Amigo said. “I came out and put a few targets throughout the area, so we can run up the arroyo and engage targets when we encounter them. You’ll need to find the targets, given I set them and know where they are. The first ones will be easy. Then I started making them a little harder to spot.”

  “A torture test,” Hank said, smiling. “This should be fun.”

  She unpacked her AR10 and readied magazines with ammunition. Then she put on her bullet-proof tactical vest and began to load the pockets with her gear: 30-round magazines, magazines for her 1911, and the handgun itself. Amigo watched with a bit of amusement. Dressed in tactical gear, it was easy to see how Hank could fool the Marines she encountered around Quantico into believing she was a man. Ordinarily, no hundred and twenty-pound woman would be expected to be able to carry that much equipment.

  He noticed that she didn’t sling her rifle, but held it in her hand. “Are you going to be able to run with that in your hand like that?”

  “Sure. Beats not being able to see what it’s snagging on.”

  “And your hand won’t give out?”

  “Mike has pretty much insisted that I meet male standards that would make me capable of being a SEAL. Or any other elite military unit’s standards, for that matter. Right now, my grip strength is around 50 kilograms. I’ll manage. But I figure running with it in my hand will also allow me to place it ahead of me if I decide to climb on something. I can always sling it if I find the need to do so.”

  “You sure don’t look like you should have that kind of strength,” Amigo remarked.

  “That’s what everyone says.” She looked at the terrain in front of her. “So, we’re going up this arroyo and engaging targets as I see them?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  She took off at a lope up the arroyo. “Oh, really, Amigo? You painted it white? Way too fucking easy.” Pop!

  “Hit,” Amigo said. “Go go go.”

  She ran on, hitting targets as they showed themselves to her, some out in the open, others partially hidden by the desert Southwest’s ubiquitous creosote bushes and mesquites. She noticed that the targets were getting harder to spot. Amigo had gradually made them blend more and more into the terrain.

  She hunkered down in the arroyo, scanning the area. “I know you’ve got more of them out here,” she said.

  “Si, señora.”

  She began to proceed more cautiously, her mind playing the game that ‘if I miss him, he won’t necessarily miss me.’ Look for the inconsistencies, her little voices cautioned. She kept her head lowered, peering above the brim of earth formed when water coursed down the arroyo during a rain, then hunkering down again, then moving a bit, then another look.

  “I’ve missed one. I’m sure of it,” she muttered. She crouched and ran back in the direction she’d come, then turned and resumed her crouch-and-peek movement upstream once again.

  “There.” Pop!

  Amigo smiled and nodded his head in appreciation.

  She continued more cautiously up the arroyo. It could be anywhere, her little voice whispered. Don’t just look far away. Sure enough, the next time she went to take a peek, the target was practically right next to her. She pulled out her 1911 and shot it.

  Sitting on her haunches in the middle of the arroyo, she remarked to Amigo, “If that had been a real person, I’d be dead right now.”

  “In all likelihood.”

  “You know what I’m thinking, Amigo? This is a fine little exercise, but we need to get Voice to make some gadgets for us.

  “In the first training exercise I was involved with, we went out to Combat Town there at Quantico and ran Crow and Cloud as perps and the rest of us in two teams to apprehend them. It was standard weaponry, but fitted with lasers, and we all wore laser hit clothing and helmets. You could hear a near-miss as a tone, and if you were hit you got a different one. Hal monitored the whole thing and would inform you,” tapping the ear her earpiece was in, “if you had a fatal hit, if you were incapacitated, or if you could continue.

  “If we had a laser device that could be mounted near the targets and that was motion-activated, or perhaps better would be activated by our bum tickers when we came in proximity to it, then we could get a third member of the team to set up the course. Then you and I could run it together. It would be a bit more realistic if we actually got shot at.

  “Did Border Patrol ever train in a shoot house with the simunition guns?”

  “Simunitions?” Amigo asked.

  “Yeah. You’d go through the shoot house, and there were guns that would shoot what they call simunitions at you: guns with plastic bullets. In those, a computer would recognize that it could see a human image, or a portion of one. Say, you let your leg poke out while you’re trying to clear a room. It would see your leg, and the computer would aim and fire a simunitions round at it. And those suckers smart. It didn’t take long to recognize you had to be careful about how you concealed yourself.”

  Amigo pondered a moment. “We’re supposed to do a hound and hare, right?”

  “That’s the game plan.”

  “Did we bring the laser gear with us?”

  “I think so.” A grin formed on Hank’s face. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I might be thinking what you’re thinking,” Amigo said, grinning broadly.

  “Instead of hound and hare, snipers versus snoopers?”

  Amigo laughed. “That’s a fun way of putting it. Let’s retrieve the targets and head in. We’ll bounce this idea off the rest of the guys over dinner tonight.”

  Edge landed the Archer at Roswell, taxied into the ramp, and shut down. Climbing out, he was greeted by Crow.

  “I suppose I’ve got to take you back to the complex,” Crow said with a grin.

  “All depends on if you’re going to get lost. Let me see your flight plan,” Edge retorted. Crow just laughed.

  They climbed into the van and Crow headed out on the route back to the converted missile silo north of the city.

  “How was the flight?”

  “A little bumpy right here, but it smoothed out once I got a little further east.”

  “Sounds like you had a pretty good flight,” Crow said. “How much flight time did you get?”

  “Two point four hours on the Hobbs,” Edge replied.

  “Add that to what you had from bringing the Archer here to Roswell plus your long cross-country for the private pilot and that will tell you how far along you are toward the fifty hours of cross-country flight you need for the instrument rating.”

  “Cool. And right now, I’m ahead of Hank.”

  “Don’t count your chickens,” Crow said. “She told me she plans to take Spud up and go to El Paso. In her words, ‘For some real Tex-Mex.’ Though why she didn’t warn me and Cloud about Taco Chick is beyond me. That stuff went right through me – and without changing much consistency, either.”

  Edge laughed heartily. “I don’t think any of us have learned how to watch out for her yet. And she’s corrupted Spud as well, so now we’ve got to watch our backs around him, too.”

  “What was that you told Doc Andy? Something about the two most dysfunctional members of
a seven-member dysfunctional family?”

  Edge laughed again. “Do you dispute that?”

  “Hell no.” He laughed himself. “You forget: Cloud and I got to pin Mile High wings on them.”

  “How’d you know? Both in the lav at the same time?”

  Crow laughed hard enough to weave on the road as he was driving. “Nope. One of the back seats. You kind-a know something’s going on when all you can see is the back of Spud’s head and he’s in a seat that faces forward. Plus, Hank can be a little... loud.”

  “Really!”

  “Cloud and I can hear her across the hall with all the doors closed at the BEQ in Quantico.” Crow reflected. “Good thing there’s a big slab of concrete between us and them when we’re at one of the Atlas bases. That way, we can get some sleep.”

  Edge was laughing again. “I guess you two guys don’t need to see a biometric readout to know when they’re having fun.”

  “At least not when Hank is having fun. And, on occasion, when Spud is having fun as well.”

  “Ah, to be young and in love,” Edge said, a touch of syrup in his voice.

  “See? That’s the problem. Spud’s the oldest guy in the team. It just doesn’t seem fair,” Crow said, the humor in his voice unmistakable. “Seriously, though, the two of them are impossibly in love. But you know what’s funny? The whole time we were in Nebraska with the Camp Chaos case, they never touched each other. We did have the ability to see each other’s biometrics there, and I swear: they just went to bed and slept. No hanky-panky.”

  Edge laughed uproariously. “I guess they take that ‘mission first’ stuff really seriously.”

  Hank placed food on the table for the team and medical personnel.

  “What did you make?” Spud asked.

  “Barbecue ribs, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, and you know I’ve always got to have a salad.” She grinned. “I thought about making enchiladas, but I figured none of you would eat them besides me.”

  “Damned right,” Voice muttered. “There’d be a mass exodus down to Level 8 to raid the storeroom for microwave popcorn.”