The Treadstone Resurrection

by Joshua Hood

  After stuffing the wire and two grenades into his assault pack, he went into the kitchen. Hayes swiped the Jeep keys from the drainboard, grabbed a dish towel from the sink, and glanced through the off-center peephole to make sure the landing was clear before stepping outside.

  Hayes closed the door behind him and licked his fingers before draping the dish towel over his hand. Even with the protection of the towel, the lightbulb was hot against his fingertips, but he managed to spin it free without burning his hand.

  He wrapped the bulb in the towel and left it on the ground next to the door before easing down the stairs and climbing behind the wheel of the Jeep.

  The size and disposition of the safe house, plus the fact that Boggs had been stone sober when he decided to leave the Jeep in front of it, had been nagging at Hayes since his arrival.

  Which was why he was outside, squaring things away, instead of working on tomorrow’s assault plan.

  Hayes threw the Jeep into gear and, leaving the lights off, drove to the end of the block. He took a right and eased down the street, straining to find the alley he’d seen from the balcony in the darkness. When he finally spotted it, Hayes cut the wheel to the left, shifted into reverse, and backed the Jeep down the alley, angling the back seat so that it was directly below the balcony. He engaged the parking brake, centered up the wheels, and cut the engine.

  With the Jeep in position, Hayes set to work making sure that it remained unmolested while he was upstairs.

  Unlike the round M67 fragmentation grenade, which was designed to be thrown, the canister-like white-phosphorus and CS grenades were meant to be emplaced. White phosphorus, or Willie Pete, was the OxiClean of military munitions, and in Hayes’s opinion, its versatility was limited only by a man’s imagination.

  Not only did it burn skin, clothes, metal, fuel, and ammunition, it was also great for starting brushfires and in a pinch could be used for an impromptu smoke screen. But Hayes’s love affair with Willie Pete came from how well it complemented other munitions.

  Hayes had come across positions in Iraq and Afghanistan manned by seriously dedicated insurgents. Men who’d stay in a firing position no matter what you shot at them. But no matter how dedicated they were to the cause, he’d never seen anyone stick around after calling in a shake-and-bake mission. A couple of rounds of high explosives intermixed with a liberal amount of white phosphorus and most insurgents were ready to call it a day.

  However, since Hayes didn’t want to blow up the Jeep, he decided on CS, the military’s version of tear gas. He carried the canisters five feet past the Jeep and secured them to the metal fence by running a zip tie beneath the spoons. Once he was sure they would not come loose, Hayes tied the galvanized wire through the metal rings, pulled the wire across the alleyway, and headed back upstairs.

  The entire process had taken five minutes, and by the time he got back up the stairs, the bulb was cool enough to handle. He left the bulb inside the towel, carried it to the edge of the steps, and crushed it beneath his feet. Careful not to cut his fingers with the slivers of glass inside the towel, Hayes walked back toward the door, sprinkling the shattered glass across the concrete.

  “That should do it,” he said, stepping inside.

  Hayes threw the lock and went back to the coffee table. He woke the Toughbook with a swipe of the trackpad, and when the screen blinked to life he double-clicked the FalconView icon. Hayes waited for the program to load and turned his attention back to the map.

  Hayes had always been fascinated by maps. It started in the fifth grade, during a visit to the Museum of Natural History. The exhibit was The Age of Exploration, and the proctor had stopped the class next to the eighteenth-century map of Africa.

  “Why is it blank in the middle?” he’d asked.

  “Back then, there were parts of the world that were still unexplored. Since no one had been there, the mapmakers left it blank.”

  Unexplored. For a ten-year-old boy stuck in a one-stoplight town, the idea of uncharted worlds—dark, shadow-draped forests that no one had ever seen—aroused an unquenchable curiosity. A curiosity that sent him to the local library for hours on end, flipping through atlases or reading back issues of National Geographic.

  It was the same feeling Hayes had now, reading the black embossed letters that identified the hunter-green sea in southern Venezuela.

  The Amazon was the last of the earth’s great mysteries, and three hundred miles southwest of Hayes’s current location, buried deep in the eighteen million hectares, a penciled X marked Pendare.

  But the map didn’t have the level of detail he needed to plan the op, and once the imagery loaded, he turned his attention to the Toughbook.

  Hayes typed the grid coordinates copied from Ford’s pictures into the search bar, and the satellite imagery of the area popped up on the screen. For the average user, there was no way to differentiate FalconView from a program like Google Earth. Both systems provided the same satellite-based imagery of a map. But where FalconView had a clear advantage was in the Combat Weapons Delivery overlay.

  The first time he used the CWD’s topographical overlay was in Afghanistan, when his team was planning a combat operation in the Tora Bora mountains. Usually, they would have sent in a recon team, but to get a team on the ground required helicopter support, which would have alerted his quarry. FalconView’s 3-D interface was the next best thing, and allowed his team to get a feel of the area without having to physically put eyes on it.

  Once again, Hayes was going into unknown enemy terrain, and he hoped that Falcon View would help him find an advantage. But the moment he zoomed in on Ford’s last-known grid coordinates objective, Hayes knew there wasn’t any technology in the world that would help him see what was beneath the thick triple-canopy jungle.

  The only thing Hayes knew for sure was that whatever the enemy was doing in Pendare, they didn’t want anyone to see it.

  He spent another ten minutes looking at the area from every angle possible, before giving up.

  That shit is thicker than seventies shag carpet, he thought, closing the Toughbook and stuffing it back in his assault pack. Might as well try and get some sleep.

  He set the assault pack next to the balcony door and then went to the drop bag, knowing that if anyone came, he was going to need more than the Glock 19 on his waist. Hayes pulled out a London Bridge low-visibility plate carrier and stuffed two extra pistol magazines into the mag holders. From the pouch on the front, he pulled out the pair of AN/PSQ-36 Fusion Goggles Enhanced.

  Besides the forty-thousand-dollar price difference between the FGE’s and a regular set of night-vision goggles, the most noticeable delineating feature was the presence of a third lens centered above the dual night-vision tubes.

  The extra lens gave Hayes the ability to toggle between the traditional Heineken-green view of night vision or shift to thermal with a twist of a knob. When he was sure they were functioning, Hayes returned the goggles to the case and set the plate carrier beside the couch.

  For a long gun, he deliberated over a short-barreled Knights Armament PDW, but in the end, he went with a Benelli M4 automatic shotgun, knowing that if the shit hit the fan, he wanted whoever was coming after him to stay down.

  Hayes shoved the tube full of 12-gauge buckshot, stuffed an extra box of shells into the plate carrier, and secured the drop bag. Once he was sure everything was packed up and he could roll out at a moment’s notice, Hayes turned off the light and lay down on the couch.

  He was exhausted, but instead of falling asleep, he found himself staring at the ceiling. Something was hovering at the edge of his mind—that did-I-remember-to-turn-off-the-stove feeling that kept his mind from powering down.

  He ran through the mental checklist of everything he’d done, trying to see if he had forgotten something.

  Set up security, did the mission prep, packed up my shit. That’s everything.r />
  Once he was sure that he’d taken care of everything, he closed his eyes, blocked everything out, and finally drifted off to sleep.

  The first few minutes of sleep were filled with a chaotic jumble of images and sounds that came from a mind trying to purge itself of the adrenaline-filled day. There was a snapshot of Hayes in the back of the CASA, followed by the hot-air rush of the prop blast on his face when he jumped from the door. Then he was falling, fighting the chute and the tug of the canopy filling with air.

  Eventually, the chemicals in his brain leveled off, and Hayes settled into REM sleep, the choppy images drifting into the more linear dream state, and he found himself sitting in the safe house, listening to Boggs talk about Ford.

  “I used to tell him that he was the toughest son of a bitch that I’d ever met. You know what he’d say?”

  “What’s that?” Hayes asked.

  “He’d tell me that I only thought that because I’d never met you.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” Hayes said.

  “Ford did, and here’s the deal—he was my friend, too. Man, we had some good times in this place.”

  Hayes’s eyes flashed open, and he was immediately awake, the tail end of the dream echoing in his head.

  “We had some good times in this place.” If they’d used this apartment before, the location could be blown.

  He sat up and glanced at his watch. It was midnight, or the witching hour, as they called it in Iraq. The best time to hit a target house.

  They are coming, the voice in his head warned.

  Hayes lifted the plate carrier over his head and snugged the straps tight around his waist. He pulled on the FGEs and grabbed the Glock and the holster from the coffee table and stuffed it into his waistband and was reaching for the Benelli when he heard the gentle crack of glass crushed against a boot.

  They’re here.

  Hayes eased to the front door and glanced out the peephole. There were three of them in sterile BDUs, carrying suppressed AK-47s, eyes glowing green from the night-vision goggles.

  A kill team.

  The point man was already up on the landing, his left arm up, fist closed. The universal sign for halt. He was looking down at the ground, trying to figure out what he’d stepped on, while the second man in the stack had his rifle trained on the door.

  These boys have skills, Hayes thought, thumbing the safety to fire. Then he remembered Boggs. Damn it.

  Hayes eased himself away from the door and into the bedroom.

  “Boggs, Izzy, wake up,” he hissed.

  Izzy sat up immediately, her hand snaking under the pillow and emerging with a pistol.

  “What is it?” she asked in Spanish.

  “We have to go, now,” Hayes said, grabbing Boggs by the shoulder and giving it a shake. “Boggs, wake the fuck up.”

  “F-five more min . . .” the man mumbled, his breath heavy with booze.

  What the hell?

  Hayes bumped the light mounted to the end of the shotgun, a quick flash that illuminated the room and the three-quarters-full bottle of Wild Turkey that sat on the nightstand. Any question about whether the bottle was new or old was answered when Hayes saw the shine of the shrink-wrap seal on the floor.

  Izzy was already on her feet, pulling on her pants. When she saw the bottle illuminated by Hayes’s light, she cursed, leaned over the bed, and slapped Boggs on the back of the head. “Wake up, you drunk shit,” she snapped.

  Leave him, the voice ordered.

  Hayes was tempted, but then he saw the thin foam-filled mattress Boggs was lying on and had a better idea.

  “I’ll handle him, you go watch the door,” he said, walking out of the room.

  He went to the balcony, slung the Benelli, and unzipped the assault pack.

  “If he thinks I’m carrying his drunk ass out of here,” he muttered, tugging a length of black rappel rope and a metal carabiner from the bag, “then he has another thought coming.”

  Back in the room, Hayes uncoiled the rope and stuck the free end in his mouth. He reached across Boggs, grabbed the far edge of the mattress, and folded it over, tacoing the passed-out DEA agent in the middle.

  You need to hurry up.

  “Yeah, you think?” Hayes said, leaning across the bundle.

  Using his weight to hold the mattress closed, he looped the rope around the center four times, and when Hayes was sure there was no way for Boggs to fall out, he tied it off.

  It’s a pig in a blanket. He grinned, tying the carabiner into the rope with an overhand knot on his way back to the balcony. Hayes snapped the D ring into the assault pack’s carrying handle, leaned over the low wall, and dropped it into the back of the Jeep.

  “Look,” Izzy said, pointing down the alley.

  Hayes followed her gaze and saw the spray of headlights across the alleyway. “Get down,” he ordered, dragging her into a crouch behind the wall. A moment later a white panel van pulled into view and the sliding door cracked open, revealing a second team.

  Shit.

  “Izzy, I need you to listen to me,” Hayes said, looking over the edge of the balcony, knowing that he was running out of time. He grabbed the rope and pulled Izzy close. “Can you climb down?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She was scared. He could see the fear in her eyes, hear the quiver in her voice.

  “Listen to me,” he said, pulling her to her feet. “I am going to lower you down to the Jeep. You need to run toward the road—I will take care of Boggs. We will meet up at the square, do you understand?”

  Izzy’s hands shook on the rope, but she nodded that she understood.

  Hayes helped her over the edge, and lowered her down to the Jeep. “Go,” he hissed, pointing to the road.

  Hayes waited until she was out of sight before turning his attention back to the alley. The arrival of the van explained why the kill team hadn’t crashed the door yet. But more important than that, it made Hayes realize he needed a bigger hammer.

  He opened the drop bag, grabbed an M79 grenade launcher and a 40-millimeter HE grenade. “Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like high explosives,” he said, cracking the breach.

  43

  EL NULA, VENEZUELA

  Hayes ducked out of the Benelli’s sling and leaned the shotgun against the wall. He held the M79 grenade launcher in his right hand and the 40-millimeter M381 in his left.

  The M381 was an area weapon, with a killing radius of sixteen feet. It was designed to be used in the open, against troops in hardened positions—not fired at a door ten feet from the shooter’s position.

  Back home they called this a “hold-my-beer moment,” and in Hayes’s experience any action that began with that ominous phrase usually ended up with a trip to the emergency room.

  Fuck it, he thought, shoving the grenade into the breach and snapping it shut.

  The only thing left to do was close his eyes and wait.

  Hayes pressed his back against the wall, took a deep breath, and cleared his mind of everything but the moment at hand. The self-imposed darkness forced the rest of his senses into overdrive and sent them straining to compensate for the sudden loss of sight. When Hayes heard the men crunch over the broken lightbulb he’d scattered in front of the door, he knew the entry team had resumed its approach on the breach point.

  His eyes snapped open and locked on the dim band of light at the bottom of the door. A normal person wouldn’t have noticed the flitter of the shadow across the threshold, and if they had seen it, they would have quickly dismissed it as a casual nothing.

  But not Hayes.

  He studied the threshold in the same manner that an ancient mariner studied the sea before a storm. Divining meaning from every subtle shift in his environment, realizing that every change in sight, smell, or sound offered a tiny preview of the violence building on t
he other side of the door.

  The shadow across the threshold told him that instead of stacking up on the door and hitting the room with the Israeli rush—a tactic perfected by the Israeli Defense Forces, which relied on getting as many shooters into the room as quickly as possible—the team leader had sent a man to the other side. Setting them up for either a buttonhook or a crisscross.

  Splitting the team meant no explosives. They were going to come in quietly, using a pick or a bump key on the lock.

  A breath of a breeze carried a hiss of muted static up from the alley below, followed by a voice whispering in Spanish, “We’re set. It is on you.”

  Hayes watched the knob jiggle and heard the scrape of a bump key followed by the snick of the deadbolt being defeated. He leveled the M79 at the door, the thump . . . thump . . . thump of his heart in his chest deafening in the dark room.

  He thought he saw the knob turn, but couldn’t be sure, and realized his finger had slipped to the trigger.

  Wait for it . . . Wait for it.

  The seconds stretched into what seemed like hours, until time felt as if it had stopped, and then the door swung inward, the creak of the rusted hinges as loud as a howitzer in the confines of the room.

  Hayes lifted the grenade launcher and leveled the muzzle at the center of the open door. Steady, now. Wait for it. He watched the dark black outline of a muzzle break the threshold, followed by the green glow of the night-vision reflection off skin. Hayes closed his left eye, the launcher rock-steady in his right hand.

  He waited for the first shooter to step through the door, and the moment he squared his front plate on the room, Hayes pulled the trigger.

  The distinctive thooomp of the M79 caught the assaulter off guard, and like a deer caught in headlights, he froze in the fatal funnel. Behind him, the number-two man was already moving, and he collided with his teammates just as the grenade slammed into the man’s front plate.