American Dreams | Book 3 | End Game [Side Mission]

by Parker, Brian

  Rogan intentionally skipped the Congressional names and set the edge of the marker against the first of the agency director names. “These are all a good list, and believe me, I’d love nothing more than to personally skull fuck the National Director of the CEA—” The woman from Portland made a disgusted noise. “But, I don’t think these guys are big enough names to really make the NAR sit up and take notice. They’re just bureaucrats who can be replaced.” He drew a big X over the agency names.

  “For the same reason I mentioned before, the local politicians, law enforcement officials, and NAR thugs are not big enough. It probably wouldn’t even be a blip on the national news that some random person down in say, Austin, was taken out.” He drew a circle around Senator Bradley and the other congressional members’ names. “Now, these folks here? If something were to happen to them, that would make the NAR sit up and take notice.”

  Jackson cleared his throat and clapped his hands once, gripping them tightly together. “Ah, okay. Thank you for that perspective, Sergeant Rogan. What does everyone think about his suggestion?”

  The representative from the Atlanta area raised his hand. Oh Jesus, Rogan thought. Why the fuck was he raising his hand like a schoolboy?

  “So, I don’t think discounting the local NAR officials and loyalists is a bad idea. In fact, about six million people down in my neck of the woods would disagree with that statement. We can’t take on the entire federal government yet. That’s for sure. What we can do is nip at the edges, take out the local guys and destabilize their base.”

  “Then why are we here?” Rogan asked. “We could have done that shit back at our own individual area of operations. That’s what we’re doing in Austin.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “We’re ‘nipping at the edges’ and making the NAR flunkies reel from left to right as they try to figure out where we’re going to be next, but that’s not why we’re here, in this room.” He waved his finger in a circle to indicate all of the regional representatives. “We came here to the nation’s capital to make a point and strike the NAR at its heart, to show them that nobody is safe from justice or above the law.”

  “That’s a cute speech,” McKenzie stated. “What do you suggest that we do? Bradley is the legit founder of the NAR. He’s probably more heavily-guarded than the president at this point.”

  Rogan shrugged. “Is he? That’s what observation is for. We have a list of who the guys in power are. We spend a couple of days observing them and decide who’s an easier target, and then we go after that person or group of people.”

  “Okay, okay,” Jackson replied, seeming to warm up to the idea. “I like the way this is going. I think we can work with something like this. Where do we start, Sergeant?”

  Rogan’s head already hurt from interacting with the lady from Portland. He hadn’t meant to hijack the meeting, and he sure as hell wasn’t interested in being the leader of this little ragtag group. They had good intentions, but it was obvious that they didn’t have the experience necessary to pull off something like this. It would be an interesting experiment by the Resistance and they’d be lucky if half of them survived.

  But, he was a soldier and he did what he was told to do. Plummer had asked him to help this thing succeed, so it was up to him to try to make it work. “Is the objective to kill or capture the targets?” he asked.

  “Uh…”

  Rogan looked around the room. They hadn’t given much thought to what they wanted to do beyond remove certain individuals. “If our goal is to kill them, we can accomplish that a lot easier with sniper rifles or a quick ambush. If we want to capture them, then it gets a lot more risky.”

  “I think…” Jackson looked around the room. Nobody was giving him any help. “I think our initial goal should be to capture the individual—no, to arrest them and hold them until after the NAR is overthrown. Then they’d be brought to public trial and tried for treason against the United States.”

  “Okay, so that’s a good point that you didn’t mention, or at least that wasn’t mentioned when I got here.” Rogan flipped the page on the butcher block paper to a blank sheet. He wrote a quick objective on the paper and said it out loud as he wrote. “Our objective here is to arrest one or more high-ranking NAR officials from the federal government.”

  He turned back to the room. “Forces available?”

  “Do you mean, like our guys or theirs?”

  “We’ll get to enemy disposition in just a second—and it’s okay if we don’t know. That’s what the surveillance is for. I want to know how many shooters we can count on to carry out the operation, what kind of support we have, especially cyber support and transportation, what we plan on doing with the detainee once we have them, that sort of stuff.”

  Over the next several hours, the group’s collective gears began to turn and Rogan revised his initial assessment of their abilities. They were a competent collection of individuals; they’d just needed a little bit of time to get warmed up and to get their brains working on the task at hand.

  After the exhaustive planning session, they’d decided which targets to focus on, observation methods, and what type of information was needed before the operation could proceed. Then, it was time to get to work.

  THREE

  “Yeah, so this is where we’re gonna stay for the night.”

  Rogan looked at Chase, the conspirator from St. Louis, with a smirk. “Haven’t done much surveillance, have you?”

  The man shrugged. “I mean, no. Obviously. I owned a shoe store before it went out of business during the Crud quarantine and the NAR confiscated my house for one of their agents. I’ve never been on a stakeout before.”

  Rogan pointed to the house. “Well, for starters, we stick out like a sore thumb here in the neighborhood.”

  “I disagree,” Chase replied indignantly. “My Range Rover fits in perfectly with all the rich guy cars we’ve seen here.”

  Rogan grunted in acknowledgement. “Okay, sure. But what I mean is that people in these types of neighborhoods tend to watch out for unknown vehicles and people doing weird shit, like sitting in a car for a few hours. More so if they have private security, which I believe the Inner Council members probably do.”

  “That’s why we’re here observing, right? To find out if there’s security and stuff?”

  “Yeah. But, we’re going to draw attention to ourselves out here. Stopping alongside the road and parallel parking almost directly across from a senator’s house isn’t smart. Especially with the out of state plates on this car. It seems like something out of a cop movie from the 80s. We need to drive by, first one way, wait an hour or so somewhere out of the way, then drive back the opposite direction. Drive down the street behind this one to see what we can see from the back side of the house. We can each walk by the house—too bad we don’t have a dog.”

  “How are we gonna see everything we need to see?”

  “You’d be surprised,” he answered. They needed to get as much information as they could about the house and site security. The last time he’d gone into a mission without having full details on the location had been a near disaster. Rowan Haskins had been shot and killed trying to enter the South Austin Police Precinct’s offices because they hadn’t done sufficient surveillance on the location. Rogan was determined to not let that happen again.

  Through the gate, Rogan saw a door on the outbuilding beside the senator’s house open and a man wearing a suit emerged. He looked to be in his early thirties, but it was hard to tell from this distance. What was not hard to see was the long gun he carried on a sling across his chest.

  “Start the car,” Rogan ordered. “Don’t panic, just pull out of the spot and drive away slowly.”

  “Shit,” Chase said, punching at the button on the car’s console. The vehicle turned on, even though it didn’t sound like the car started. Rogan had been a little freaked out by the electric start engine when he’d first gotten into the small SUV, but it was still strange as hell to hear the engine start
when Chase put it into gear and took his foot off the brake.

  They backed out and the car pulled smoothly onto the vacant street. Rogan was surprised to see that the security had already advanced to the wall surrounding the property and opened the walking gate. The Range Rover almost made it past the house, but the gunman was too fast. He stepped in front of the car, forcing Chase to slam on the brakes.

  Rogan’s body was pushed forward, the seatbelt cutting into his shoulder. “Prick,” he grumbled, picking up his pistol from the floorboard where it had slid off the seat. He hid it under his thigh beside the door in easy reach if shit went south.

  The man outside walked around the car to the driver’s side and tapped on the glass with the barrel of his rifle. Rogan shifted his body slightly, angling his chest toward Chase and the potential threat as the window slid downward.

  “What’s up, man?” Chase asked.

  “I’m a member of Senator Bradley’s security detail. What are you doing in this neighborhood?”

  “I— We were—”

  “We were driving down the highway,” Rogan interrupted. Chase was going to screw up, so he took over. “And I got horny. I wanted a blow job and Bobby here gives the best head. So, we pulled off somewhere safe--somewhere we thought was safe,” he amended. “You know, someplace where we wouldn’t get rear-ended.” He chuckled. “I mean, not until we get home at least.”

  “Uh… What?” the guard said, taken aback at the statement.

  Rogan smiled and shrugged. “Boys will be boys. Sorry. When I saw you coming, I realized that we were in the wrong neighborhood and I zipped up real quick. We’ll just be on our way, sir.”

  “You guys are out here in front of the house of one of the most powerful men in the New American Republic doing that? What is wrong with you two? This is a nice, family neighborhood. You can’t be having sex in public.”

  “We realize that now,” Rogan said as another guard emerged from the fence and began to saunter over to the car. “Terrible judgment on our part.” He pointed at the man’s rifle and tried to smile disarmingly. “I mean really bad judgment.”

  “Yeah.” The guard stepped back away from the car and waved them on. “Get out of here and don’t come back to this neighborhood.”

  “Oh, we won’t,” Rogan assured him. “We’re headed home right now, sir.”

  Chased eased his foot off the brake and stepped on the gas pedal slightly. Rogan hoped he’d keep it together long enough to not cause any more concern. He turned in the seat to look out the back window. The two guards were standing together, laughing.

  “Homos? Really?” Chase finally said when they were a block away.

  “You’re welcome,” Rogan replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because the NAR’s stance on homosexuality is clear. It is a protected class under the law and because of that, it threw him off guard, allowing us to get the fuck out of there before he started asking any more questions.”

  “Oh,” Chase said breathlessly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Rogan smirked. “Now do you believe me about mobile surveillance? Sitting in front of someone’s house is a surefire way to get noticed.”

  “Yeah,” Chase replied. “But I’m pretty sure they know what we drive now.”

  “Yup,” Rogan agreed. “We need to steal a car.”

  “Steal a car?” the driver squealed.

  “Relax, we’re planning on either capturing or killing a high-ranking NAR dignitary. Stealing a car will be the least of our charges if we get caught.”

  “Why the hell did I get stuck on this stakeout with you?” Chase lamented as he turned right at a stop sign.

  “I guess you’re just lucky. Head over to the mall. Let’s see who’s working the day shift.”

  Chase muttered something under his breath and Rogan turned on the radio. It was nothing but twenty-four-seven NAR propaganda, so he pushed the button to turn it off.

  “I don’t know how they expect to keep the masses in line without entertainment,” Chase grumbled. “Hell, support for the Revolution would dry up if they’d just give the people their music and mindless entertainment once again.”

  “Yeah. Thankfully, they’re not too smart in that department.” Rogan banged his hand on the window sill and sang out, “Breakin’ the law. Breakin’ the law.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Lord, please help me,” Chase lamented as he accelerated and headed toward the nearest mall parking lot.

  FOUR

  Rogan looked around at the group of men and women who’d reassembled in the factory and spoke quietly to convey the seriousness of the situation. “Alright, we have to assume that we’re compromised. We need to sanitize this room and move to a new location. Fast. Any ideas?”

  “Um, there’s an old hotel about twenty miles from here,” one of the locals said. Rogan wasn’t entirely sure, but he thought it was the same man who’d stopped him on the road coming in a couple of nights before.

  “Is it still in use?”

  “Naw, man. It’s been abandoned for years.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Nope. Just—Wait. I bet there’s an address on the web,” the local stated.

  “Okay, find it,” Rogan directed. “I need to know if anyone else had any interactions with security elements at their target. Chase and I were approached by two guards outside of Senator Bradley’s home. That’s not surprising considering he is the titular head of the NAR. We expected him to be more heavily guarded than the others.”

  “What happened with that?” McKenzie asked. “You’re grilling us, but you said you got caught. How do we know that you didn’t give us up to save your own skin?”

  “We defused the situation rapidly and the guards didn’t even have time to question us before we left.” Rogan sighed. “If you don’t believe me, you can have the cyber team pull up camera footage.”

  “That… That won’t be necessary,” Jackson, the Florida Man, said, holding up his hands. “We can’t do this. This is exactly what the NAR wants. By pitting us against one another, we fail and they win. We have to be united. If Sergeant Rogan says they got away without being interrogated, then we have to believe him.” He dropped his left hand, and raised the index finger on his right. “But, we know that Terry and Colton got rolled up outside of Senator Clifton’s house. They were here for the entire planning session, so it’s a good bet that they’ll give up our location and our plans.”

  “So, are you saying we cancel and just go home?” someone asked.

  “No. I’m not saying that. First things first, though. We need to relocate away from here. If they bag us all in a raid, then, well…”

  “Okay, I got the address,” the local said. He read out a series of directions that everyone wrote down on a scrap of paper torn from the butcher block.

  “Good. Thanks, Mike,” Jackson said. “Let’s get everything cleaned up and head over to the new site.”

  “Two or three cars should leave now,” Rogan suggested. “And then in a few minutes, another car, and so on.”

  Jackson nodded. “Yeah. Um, can you guys go ahead and make your way to the hotel?” he asked two people standing near him.

  The two nodded and left the office space together. Rogan hoped they had the good sense to not follow right on one another’s tails. That would be a dead giveaway to a casual aerial observer that something was going on. The group spent several minutes grabbing gear and loading everything into their cars as one or two more people left every few minutes.

  Once everything was packed, Rogan went back to his car. He sat, waiting for his turn to leave. He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that they were running out of time. Two of their team had been captured trying to surveil the house of one of the Inner Council members. One team out of fourteen had been caught. Those weren’t terrible odds, considering the magnitude of the task, but if either one of them talked, the operation was done for.

  He drummed his fingers on the old Buick’s steering wheel. H
e didn’t know the two who’d been captured. Hell, he wasn’t even entirely sure who they were. If he saw them in a line-up, he’d probably be able to pick them out, but just trying to remember what they looked like without any type of visual reference was useless. He just didn’t know any of these people well enough to do that. It was shitty. They’d die as martyrs for the Revolution, even if no one knew their names.

  Finally, his turn to go came and he eased the car out of the overhead door. He was the third-to-last to leave, so he was hopeful that they’d all clear the site before the NAR had time to organize a raid.

  The directions were straight forward and easy to follow. There were only about seven turns over the course of the twenty-one mile drive in the darkness. Rogan wasn’t sure if the night helped them, though. Back in Austin, there was a curfew and anyone spotted out driving was subject to stop. Was it the same out here on the outskirts of DC? They were in the sticks right now, but only about eight or nine miles away was the beginning of the DC Metro area. Surely the cops would have this area under lock as well, right?

  He kept one eye on the sky and the other on the road as he drove the unfamiliar back roads. There was no one out, reinforcing his belief that the countryside was under a curfew as well as the city. The only advantage of being away from the cities was that there simply were not enough officers to cover such a large area.

  Luck was on the side of the Resistance. The trip took about thirty minutes, total. When he pulled up, there were cars parked at most of the spots at the old hotel. From the air, he hoped it just looked like any other roadside motel with a bunch of guests, but if anyone familiar with the area saw it and knew that the hotel was closed down, all of the cars would be a dead giveaway that something was up.