Northern Sun: Book Four in The Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  There was a white steel cabinet with a red cross on the front, which he assumed held medical supplies. When he tried to open it, the door was locked. Open shelves beside it held unopened cases of over-the-counter medical supplies. There were full boxes of pain relievers, antacids, cold medicines, and remedies for stomach ailments. Another section of high shelving held plastic totes with neat computer-printed labels. They held linens, towels, and extra clothing.

  Everything was tidy and organized. The painted concrete floor was clean and nearly immaculate. Someone had thought of everything the compound might need and spent a considerable amount of time getting those items in place.

  At the very front of the building was a propane-fueled forklift. Conor circled down another row and his light hit a welded steel cage. It was bolted to the floor and the wall, locked with a high-security padlock that made it difficult to cut. Conor moved his light around the interior of the cage and saw that it was a weapons locker.

  This was interesting on several levels. The group apparently felt comfortable enough here at their compound that they didn’t feel it necessary to keep these weapons in their quarters, where they’d have easy access to them. That didn’t mean they were unarmed, of course, but these people must assume that if they needed these weapons for some reason, they’d have time to come to this building and retrieve them.

  It raised another question in Conor’s mind. He wondered if Mumin wanted these weapons under his control. Maybe he didn’t want the men staying at his compound to have access to them. That was completely logical. Even if Mumin had been part of the terror attacks, even if he had a senior role within whatever cabal had pulled them off, it didn’t mean that he trusted his guests. Perhaps he had a better understanding than anyone of just what they were capable of.

  The weapons themselves were in a high-end rack system designed especially for guns. The selection told him something too. This wasn’t the type of collection a person built over time. This was the array of weapons you’d get if you walked into a gun shop and said, “Hey, I’ve got fifteen thousand dollars to spend. Hook me up.”

  There were a dozen matching AR-15s, a dozen matching Mossberg shotguns, four bolt-action Remington deer rifles with scopes, and four Ruger 10/22 rifles. There were spare mags for everything stacked neatly on a shelf above the rack of weapons. Several compact racks held ten handguns each. Though he wasn’t close enough to see calibers and models, he recognized that one held Glocks, one held Rugers, and one held Smith & Wessons. As with the rifles, spare mags were neatly stacked alongside of them.

  The weapons each had a mag inserted but Conor couldn’t tell if they were loaded or not. The weapons certainly weren’t set up for rapid deployment as most of the magazines were still in their plastic packaging. The rifles had price tags and retail stickers on them, as well as the chamber flags they shipped with. He wondered if any of it had ever been fired.

  They did have a decent supply of ammo. A heavy steel shelving unit was loaded with five hundred round boxes. Conor spotted Federal, Remington, and CCI. A little math told him there were around five thousand rounds per caliber. Again, none of the boxes appeared to have been opened. He noted that all of the rifle and pistol ammo was full metal jacket. There were no duty loads or no self-defense loads.

  If these men found themselves needing any of this gear, there was going to be a steep learning curve. Should it come to that, he and Shani would have a definite advantage. They weren’t just skilled with their weapons, they kept them loaded and at-hand.

  Before leaving the building, Conor shot some photos with his sPAD. He tried to get several angles, showing the weapons, the food, and the supplies. When he was done he killed his light and dropped his goggles back into place. He powered them up, raised his rifle, and reached for the doorknob.

  After opening it, he stood there for a while and took the pulse of his surroundings. All quiet, just as he expected. Just as he liked it. He closed the door behind him and disappeared into the night.

  12

  Conor had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shani to let him watch the men’s building. He argued that she was making those men her personal mission. That was completely true and exactly the reason she wouldn’t switch with him. She hated societies where men felt they could do anything they wanted to women. She hated men who felt entitled to take what they wanted, regardless of the woman’s feelings on the matter. Whenever she had the opportunity, she relished killing men like that. She looked them in the eye when she did it, enjoying that last glimmer of awareness, the understanding that it was a woman taking their life.

  So whether the mission was becoming personal or not was inconsequential to her. She had personal feelings about many of the people she’d been sent to kill or bring down over the years. Just because she had personal feelings didn’t mean her judgment was clouded. She could be effective. She could be professional. She could very effectively separate that part of her that acted from that part of her that felt.

  She navigated her way through the darkness, her nightvision monocular dropped in front of one eye. Like Conor, she chose to travel through the open fields of the compound rather than the sheltered woods of the surrounding swamp. It was nearly impossible to move in that underbrush without sounding like a foraging moose. On these cold nights, among mostly leafless trees, a twig cracking underfoot could carry for long distances. All she’d need was a smoking man to become curious about a sound he heard and come looking for her.

  The fields were a much quieter route, except for those moments where she had to cross gravel paths or roads. She did those one step at a time, concentrating on placing her foot down as carefully as possible. The frost was beginning to settle on the grass, giving it a different sound underfoot. Not quite a crunch, but denser. More substantial.

  The fencing along the road that split the complex was intended to be decorative as well as functional. It was made of wide boards that crossed in an “X” and were stained white. It would have looked perfectly at home on a Kentucky horse farm. Shani liked it because it was perfect for breaking up the profile of someone skulking about the property. Even in the daylight it provided some level of concealment to a trespasser.

  The fence took a sharp left as she neared the men’s building. The corner where the two long lines of wooden fence met gave her a nice concealed position, where she could sit for a moment and scan the area more thoroughly. She squatted until she could see through the gap between the boards. Her rifle was in her way so she unclipped it from the sling, propped it between her legs, and let the barrel rest against her shoulder. Like Conor, she watched and listened, a finger on the pulse of their environment.

  Now that she was closer to the building, she could hear sounds coming from the interior. From a distance, muffled through layers of insulation and metal siding, the noises were indistinct and abstract. If she wanted to hear better, she would have to get closer. She sat motionless for several minutes, wanting to make sure that there wasn’t a man outside smoking or peeing in the yard. She never understood that whole thing about men marking their territory like dogs, but for some of them, it was fitting.

  When she was comfortable she was the only one outside, she vaulted the fence, then sprinted across the open ground. Though she’d left her large pack hidden in the woods, she still carried some gear on her person. She’d become very accomplished at keeping that gear silent when she moved. All of it went into compartments where it would not clank against something else. Everything loose was secured with duct tape or rubber “ranger bands” that she cut from bicycle inner tubes.

  She was nearly at the building when she heard the front door opening. There was nowhere close she could take cover so she made the split-second decision she’d have to maintain speed, hoping she was out of sight before the man-made it completely out the door.

  The man was engaged in some banter with his roommates. She heard laughing and rapid Punjabi being spoken. It was the sound of men giving each other shit. At the corner of the ho
use, she quickly put on the brakes, planning on flattening out against the structure until the man went inside. The ground was too frosty for her sudden change of speed. The foot bearing all her weight slipped and she went down hard. An oof sound involuntarily escaped her lips.

  While she wasn’t injured, hadn’t twisted her ankle or knocked the breath out of herself, she felt like an idiot, and there was no time to dwell on it. She had to assume he had heard either her fall or the sound she made when she landed and would come investigating. On all fours, Shani scrambled around the corner of the building, putting one more turn between her and the man.

  She got to her feet and steadied her bump helmet. It had gone crooked in the fall, knocking her nightvision out of alignment with her eye. She focused on calming her breathing. She needed to listen for footsteps but all she could hear at the moment was the pounding of her own heart. Flattened against the building, the back of the structure was to her right, the front porch to her left. After a moment, she decided to see if the man was still on the porch.

  She crept forward and peered around the corner. He was standing at the far edge of the concrete porch, his back to her, looking toward the back of the house. He appeared to have heard the sound of her wipeout but wasn’t bold enough to go looking for the source of the noise. She knew she was fortunate that this was probably a Pakistani man used to a crowded urban environment and not an Afghan from the remote desert. The Afghan would not have hesitated to charge off into the darkness. This man, though, was reluctant to leave the safety of the porch.

  Just as he seemed to be working up his nerve to step off the porch, a wolf howled in the darkness. It was the first Shani had heard since arriving in these woods and the sound cut through the night, raising the hair on the back of her neck. It must have had the same effect on the man. He flipped his burning cigarette into the darkness and hurried back to the front door. She suspected he wouldn’t say anything about what he’d heard outside. It would be hard to tell the story without sounding like a coward for failing to investigate.

  Shani relaxed a little. She took a deep breath and pushed oxygen back to her extremities, feeling her adrenaline begin to dissipate. Even against the side of the house it was hard to decipher the noises coming from within. She unbuckled her bump helmet and removed it, placing it on the ground at her feet, then pressed an ear against the cold metal siding.

  She could hear a little better now. It sounded like more of what she’d heard when the man opened the door a few minutes ago. Laughter, banter, and an occasional shout. These men were either watching a DVD of a sporting event or they were playing video games. A flurry of jabbering sounded like men shouting instructions to another man. It had to be video games, she decided.

  She came to the conclusion that spending the evening with her ear glued to cold steel was not going to give her the intelligence she needed. She decided to fall back to the position where the wooden fences met. She could flatten out, get a spotting scope on the front door, and see if she could get any photos through the open door as the men stepped outside over the course of the evening.

  13

  After their individual recon missions were complete, Conor and Shani rendezvoused at the location where they’d stored their packs. Conor was the first to get back, having thoroughly explored and documented the storage facility. While he waited for Shani, he sent Ricardo a report and attached the pictures he’d taken of Mumin’s supplies. He spent a good two hours huddled beneath his sleeping bag while he waited on her. It was too cold to sit there unmoving in the night air. He’d have loved nothing more than to build a warm fire but the smell would travel for miles on this cold, windless night. It was too risky.

  The sound of her footsteps gave Shani away before she reached him. She whispered his name as she walked, knowing that he was waiting out there in the darkness, a rifle at the ready. She didn’t want any misunderstandings of a terminal nature.

  “Shani,” he whispered when she was close enough to hear him.

  They gathered their gear and retreated further back into the woods, where they made their camp for the night on a section of elevated, dry ground. Shani was tired, cold, and hungry. Huddled in her sleeping bag, she sent the few pictures she’d collected to Ricardo, along with a brief summary of her findings. When she was done, she added water to a flameless ration heater and warmed an MRE. A warm meal was just what she needed, though it didn’t stay warm long in the cold air.

  They didn’t keep a watch that night. They were both light sleepers and out of sight of the compound, in a dense forest. Neither was interested in trying to stay awake for a watch. Fighting the cold all day had sucked the energy from them. They’d burned a ton of calories just trying to stay warm.

  They slept well considering the conditions. In the morning, Conor awoke burrowed in his sleeping bag like a gopher in a hole. His bladder was cursing him but he didn’t want to get out of the warm bag. His bivvy sack crinkled with a layer of frost. The slightest movement created gaps around his body that let cold air creep in. The sun was up now. He was going to have to force himself out of the bag and get on with his day.

  He slithered an arm out into the cold air, dug into his pack, and located the black stuff sack that contained his food. He removed a folded piece of tinfoil and opened it up on the ground beside him, placed an Esbit solid fuel tablet on the foil, then stuck a lighter to it. The chemical cube burned with a steady flame. Conor dumped a packet of freeze-dried coffee into a steel cup and added water. He used a couple of small rocks to support his cup over the flame.

  While his coffee heated, he sank back into the warm confines of his bag. He looked over in Shani’s direction and saw her moving around inside her bag, though nothing was exposed. She was entirely retracted into the interior of her thick mummy bag. A drawstring around the opening at the top had pinched the entrance closed.

  “You awake over there?” Conor asked.

  “Yeah, Ricardo replied to our reports,” came her muffled voice. “Facial recognition isn’t turning up a match. He doesn’t know if it’s the quality of the photographs or if these guys might be unknown subjects.”

  “What does he want us to do?”

  Shani wriggled to the top of her bag, opened the drawstring closure, and poked her head out. Despite a watch cap, she shivered as the cold air settled around her head. “Watch and wait. He wants us to hold off killing Mumin until we know more.”

  “Waiting ain’t my specialty,” Conor growled. “Especially here in the frigid north. Bring in the 10th Mountain Division and send me home.”

  Shani shot him a knowing look. “What about your whole ‘man of action’ spiel yesterday? You not up for this?”

  “If there was any activity at this compound, we could pick up more from surveillance. Under these circumstances, with hardly anyone poking their heads outside because of the cold, we could be here for weeks and learn no more than we have already.”

  “I know,” Shani agreed. “I’m not prepared to spend weeks babysitting these guys either.”

  “What’s your gut tell you, Shani?”

  She unzipped her bag further, letting more cold air inside. They had to get up some time so she was trying to acclimate herself. “I think Mumin is providing safe harbor to terrorists. My gut says these men were either active participants in the attacks or played some support role. The initial intel was that he was a facilitator but I think we understand now that it goes beyond that.”

  “Agreed. So do we wipe them out and go home?” Conor asked.

  “I’d feel better about the whole thing if we could get clarification on our suspicions. I’d feel bad if he was simply providing shelter to some employees and we took them out.”

  “Under the circumstances, with what we’ve seen already, I think the odds of that are pretty low.”

  “But they’re not zero. I’m going to have to go in.”

  Conor sat up. He shivered and cursed the cold. “Go in where?”

  “The men’s building. I need to
lay eyes on these men and hear the way they talk among themselves, see what their rooms look like. What kind of things do they have with them?”

  “I’m not comfortable with that.”

  Shani raised an eyebrow at Conor. “Your comfort is not my concern, Conor Maguire.”

  14

  After a cup of coffee and an energy bar each, they packed their camp and headed back toward the compound. The ladies Shani had cleaned with the previous day had said that they only cleaned the men’s building once a week and only as a group. Today would be that day and Shani wanted to be embedded within that cleaning crew.

  When they reached the compound grounds, Shani and Conor lay in the frosty grass, high on the embankment near the barn. The van was gone so they figured the security man was out running his route, picking up the women who’d be working on the compound that day. The sun emerged from the clouds at some point, melting the frost off the ground, but it did little to add any warmth to the air.

  “I hear the van coming,” Shani whispered.

  Conor strained his shot-out ears and picked up the crunch of gravel beneath tires. Shani began stripping out of her gear. She handed her rifle over to Conor and tugged her plate carrier over her head. Confirming her backup revolver was loaded and ready to go, she moved her knife from her belt to her boot. Lastly, she stripped off her coat. There would be no room for it under the abaya and she didn’t want to leave a strange coat in the barn.

  “I’ll stash all this gear with the packs,” Conor said. “If you need it and can’t find me, that’s where it will be.”

  Shani nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll be fine. I’m just going to wait until the women get changed and start across the property. Once they’re out of here, I’ll change and join them.”