It wasn’t until he stumbled across Santa’s little shooting range that a plan began to form in his mind. The day he’d gone and spent about a thousand rounds on the range, then went back and tinkered with the All-Seeing Eye, everything changed. He knew that with Santa’s tools, he could do more good in a week than he could do in a lifetime as a Ranger. The hard part would be getting the US government to play along. Now, here he was, the power of the United States at his back, and an entirely unbelievable set of abilities in front of him.
The last six months of his time at the NP had been spent getting ready for that very day. And after a year of lost time, he was ready to get back into action.
“This—this can’t be real,” Brooke said. Her eyes still full of wonder.
The sleigh coasted down onto a long pillow of snow, right in the middle of the village. The buildings that surrounded them were all of traditional Nordic architecture. The criss-crossing timber framing ran along the outer walls, giving you the feeling you were in a quaint Danish town. Each of the buildings was covered in tiny yellow lights, the glow of which gave the entire village a warm feeling, even though temperatures were always below zero in the winter.
The reindeer pulled to a stop, right at the feet of a large woman and a crowd of little people. The woman walked over and greeted Brooke with a bear hug.
“Brooke, this is Mrs. Claus,” Nick said as he stepped off the sleigh behind her.
As soon as Mrs. Claus said hello, she immediately moved to Nick. “Where have you been? I was so worried.”
Nick could feel the motherly presence. In one way it was nice to have someone care about him. He had grown close to her over the past year. On the other hand, he was a forty-year-old man. He didn’t need to check in with Santa Claus’s wife.
Before Nick could answer, someone was shouting his name.
“Nick, come quick!”
A little man dressed mostly like an elf came running around the corner of Workshop A (yep, there was really a Santa’s workshop––many of them). Zeke was only mostly dressed like an elf because he only halfway followed their dress protocol. He wore the green elf pants and shirt, but he had on a pair of vintage Air Jordans instead of elf boots, and instead of a clean shaven face and groomed hair, he sported a Fu Manchu mustache, and his long, flowing hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Zeke had been banned from the assembly lines because all he wanted to do was make every toy into a weapon. He was so good at it that he blew up Workshop D back in March. Ever since then, Nick had taken him under his wing. Since they both were outcasts, and Zeke loved weapons, Nick found a lot in common with him. The other side of Zeke—the completely batshit crazy side—Nick just decided he would deal with. Because the little dude was seriously a genius when it came to weaponry, and he was fearless. Nick had kept him busy for a while now, and some of the things he’d built were downright astonishing.
Zeke ran up to Nick, his chest was heaving, and he could hardly form words. “You have to follow me, boss. Like, right now.”
This wasn’t the first time Zeke had come running in a panic. The first time was at three in the morning. He’d busted into Nick’s room and came an arm hair from eating a bullet. All to find out he had simply doubled the power of a hand grenade without having to change the size. Great info, but it could have waited till morning. Ever since then Nick has been trying to talk him down from several bouts of overexcitement. Apparently it still hadn’t sunk in.
“I’m busy right now, Z,” Nick said. “I need to show Brooke around.”
“No! You have to come now!”
Mrs. Claus rolled her eyes and mumbled something as she stepped away.
“Z, seriously, you have got to—”
“It’s an American agent! He’s about to walk into an ambush!”
Nick had no idea what Zeke was talking about. He had been pretty preoccupied the past week putting on a show for the CIA. But, it didn’t really matter, because however Zeke had come across this information about an American agent in trouble—if it was actually true—Nick wasn’t going to let something happen to an American agent if he could do something to stop it.
5
After the four-block run, Zeke threw the door open to Workshop Z. Z was where the misfits did their work. Far away from the toymakers, so Zeke couldn’t blow anyone else up if he made a misstep with one of his weapons. Zeke liked it because his name started with a Z. Nick liked it because it was a safe distance from that god-awful Christmas music all the other workshops had on loop. All year round.
Nick flipped on the light. The workshop lit up, and what looked like Iron Man’s basement appeared. Brooke had come along with Zeke and Nick, and he heard her gasp when she saw Zeke’s creations. It was probably the two armor-plated Santa suits right in front of them that made her take pause. They were the part of the warehouse that made it look like Iron Man’s basement, because the suits were made of Nitinol, just like the one Iron Man wore in the movies. It didn’t have rocket boosters that could help Nick fly, but don’t think Zeke wasn’t working on it. The other difference was that it didn’t have a helmet. But the suit itself was a shimmering crimson, formed for Nick’s body, and had a few gadgets that, so far, had tested well. The idea for it had come from one of Nick and Zeke’s first nights together after Zeke blew up the workshop. Nick brought out some bourbon, and after quite a few, Iron Man came on television and Zeke swore he could replicate the suit. Nick dared him to try, and a few months later there was actually a working prototype. People had no idea the capacity of these elves. Wooden horses and baby-dolls were things of the past. They could almost build a rocket ship at this point.
“What the hell is that?” Brooke pointed to some more sets of Nitinol armor with four legs instead of two.
Nick was getting ready to tell her they were Iron Man suits for the reindeer, but Zeke interrupted.
“We don’t have time for this, boss! Come look!”
On the far right side of the warehouse, there was what Zeke called his war room. A dozen screens wired into a whole lot of things that Nick didn’t understand without a PhD in electrical engineering. Most importantly, the main screen in the middle was wired into one thing he would never understand: The All-Seeing Eye. Or the ASE as the elves unimaginatively called it. Zeke ran up to it, plopped down in his chair, and began banging away on the keyboard. A few seconds later, images of a man in a black trench coat sidling up to a wall came into view. It was dark where the man was, but the ASE showed him almost as if the sun was out. A slight green hue was the only difference between night and day.
“What am I looking at, Zeke?”
“Special Agent Justin Kimber. He’s just outside of London.”
“How do you know this?” Nick said.
“Earlier today, I was doing what you said and was just playing around with the list of trade keywords that your Agent Andrews sent us. I tried the first combination of words he had listed, agent, target, and eliminate, and set up an alert if that combination was used in one conversation. As I was working on the hand rockets for your suit just a few minutes ago, I got a ping on those keywords and the ASE took me here.”
“What the hell am I looking at?” Brooke said.
“This is the ASE. It’s how Santa knows if you’ve been naughty or nice,” Nick said.
Nick looked over and Brooke looked dumbfounded.
“You’re serious?” Brooke said.
“As a heart attack.”
Zeke cringed and looked back over his shoulder. “Poor choice of words, boss.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Everyone in the village was still stinging over the way Santa had died.
“So you can really see anyone at any time?” Brooke said.
“Yes. It’s easiest when you know who you want to watch—”
“Like me and Jim?” Brooke interrupted.
Nick nodded and gave her a cheeky grin. “Yeah, like that. But when you don’t know who you want to hone in on, you can use a keyword system, kind of like you would on Go
ogle.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I still don’t either,” Nick said. “The first time Jack showed this to me, he had it find me by typing in my name. The picture came up behind me, of me. I obviously thought it was just a camera in the room that he had tapped into. No big technology revelations there. But when he handed me a mobile screen to watch the ASE on, and I took it all around the village and it never lost sight of me, I was a believer. That, and I typed in the president’s name when everyone went to bed. Dude has some weird nighttime habits.”
“You watched the president?”
“Yeah, and Jennifer Lopez. But I swear to god I turned it off when she got in the shower.”
Brooke raised her eyebrow. “This is . . . How does it work?”
Zeke chimed in. “It works a lot like a radio. Only it works off of every type of wave that runs through Earth’s atmosphere. It seamlessly converts all of those waves into realtime video and audio. Thus why we can watch this agent walk into an ambush.”
Answering Brooke’s questions had made Nick forget why they were standing there. It was still hard to compute that it wasn’t a movie, or past video surveillance that they were watching.
“We can talk more about this later, Brooke.” Nick gave Zeke a pat on the shoulder. “Show me why it’s an ambush.”
Zeke put his hand on a ball that was sitting in a pod. It reminded Nick of the ball in socket controller used on the arcade game, Golden Tee. He moved it forward and the view moved on the screen, away from the agent, and toward the house he was approaching.
“When I keyed in on the agent’s conversation, his handler was telling him that it was confirmed that the target was alone in the house.”
Zeke moved the ball some more, until the feed was inside the house. There were armed men at every entrance. A cold chill ran down Nick’s spine. He’d been in many ambush situations in his time with the Army and had lost a lot of men to such faulty intel.
Zeke continued. “So I moved forward like this and when I saw the armed men, I came running to get you. If he goes in there, he’s a dead man.”
Zeke’s words hung in the air as they watched him move the feed back outside to the agent. All three of them watched as he checked the magazine in his pistol, then fitted the end of the gun with a suppressor.
“I’ve gotta get down there. He’s going to get himself killed!” Nick moved over to a table on his right and began filling his utility belt with weapons. First, he holstered a Beretta M9—Army standard issue—the pistol he’d been using for more than two decades, then added two spare magazines, a Chris Reeve Yarborough knife, and of course the double-powered hand grenade that Zeke built. Because, why not? Finally, he pressed a button in the middle of the buckle, and the color of the belt changed from bright white to the green and black camouflage on his pants.
“What are you doing? You can’t go down there alone,” Brooke said.
“What choice do I have? CIA has a man getting ready to walk into an ambush. I can’t leave him hanging.”
“Nick, you’ll be killed. There were seven men inside there waiting.”
“Brooke, this is what I do.”
Brooke stepped in front of Nick as he went for the door. “But it’s not necessary, Nick. Let me call Agent Andrews and tell him to get word to this agent. We can stop him without you putting yourself in danger.”
“Brooke, I’ll be there before you even get Andrews on the phone. You’re not in the reality that governed how you have always handled threats anymore. That’s why I’m choosing to use this . . . thing that the old jolly guy passed along to me. Please, just help Zeke find out why someone is sending this agent into an ambush. Let me worry about stopping it.”
Nick stepped around Brooke and shouted back to Zeke as he walked out. “I’ll have you in my ear, Zeke. And I have the mobile ASE on my phone in case we still have to go in.”
“But you need clearance to get involved in a CIA mission!”
Nick didn’t wait to hear what more Brooke had to say about protocol. It was time to get back to Nick Campos—Army Ranger. The man that would never wait around when there was an ally in danger. And he wasn’t about to wait around now.
6
“My agent is right outside the house. Make sure your men kill him. I believe he accessed the information about tomorrow night.”
Nasir Samara sat quietly in his bedroom, his heart pounding in anger. It had taken him years to find a way in with someone high enough in the CIA to get information he needed. Now, as he sat there seething, stroking his salt and pepper beard, a sweat building beneath his clothing, he couldn’t help but worry it was all for nothing.
Nasir was only about a mile from where Justin Kimber, the American agent, was being led. He’d played this game of cat and mouse with the US government for more than a decade. So far he had been able to out maneuver the “world’s greatest military minds”. He’d been doing it since the day a few years ago US special operatives invaded his village. Nasir’s men had killed more than half of the twelve-man team. All these years later, here he was again, outwitting, and outplaying the War Machine’s “intelligence community”. But it wouldn’t matter if he outplayed the CIA tonight, if it meant tomorrow’s festivities would still be ruined.
He also didn’t have time to worry about this one measly agent and what he knew. Even if it did stop the attack he’d been planning for Christmas Eve. The information that the CIA agent he had in his pocket had been feeding him over the last couple of months was the real prize. Nasir still wasn’t sure if he believed the outlandish tale entirely. In fact, when the agent first brought it to Nasir, he almost killed him on the spot. If it wasn’t for what had been happening in the US to some of their FBI’s most wanted over the last couple of weeks, he might have ended up disregarding it anyway, despite the hours he’d spent researching a way to steal the supposed technology. But now that he’d seen proof of this—almost alien—cloaking device this so-call Santa Claus character had, he would do anything to get his hands on it. Including all of the smoke and mirrors with this Agent Kimber, to lure Santa and his cloaking technology.
“Reckoning?” the agent said in his annoying nasally voice. Reckoning was the name Nasir had chosen to use for himself during communications with the American. Just in case someone else happened to be listening.
“I don’t care about this agent,” Nasir finally spoke. “I only care if this man from the North Pole your agency has been dealing with takes the bait for the trap we’ve set. Is he coming?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Nasir said.
“I mean, I said the words they are supposed to be looking out for, but that doesn’t mean they are. Nick said the guy he was working with at the North Pole was sort of a nutcase. He said it was in a good way, but that may mean he didn’t follow orders to check for the keywords.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Nasir said. “I just want this cloaking device.”
“The cloaking device is something spectacular, Reckoning. But I’m telling you, this device he’s using to literally see everything? That’s the technology you really want.”
Nasir scooted to the edge of the bed and burrowed his feet into his slippers. He wasn’t going to get much sleep tonight, so he thought it best to work off some of his nervous energy by pacing the floor.
“If I’ve learned anything, it’s to take things one matter at a time,” Nasir said. “Let’s concentrate on the cloaking device. Then we can worry about this witchcraft you are speaking of.”
“Okay. Well, there’s no sign of Nick in London yet. But we may not see him at all. The cloak is that good,” the agent said.
Nasir walked in a circle around his bedroom. “You said he mentioned something about the cloaking device manipulating radio waves?”
“Yeah. Said it works the same as this all-seeing device. Only instead of using radio frequencies and other things in the atmosphere to see things, the cloaki
ng device simply reverses it so you can’t see him.”
Nasir was floored that such a thing could actually exist.
“Listen,” the agent said. “I know because he is calling himself Santa Claus that he seems like he’s going to be some weird and kooky guy. And maybe he is. But he’s also an Army Ranger. So you’d better hope if he does show up that your men are good. Because he sure as hell is. Cloaking device or not.”
Nasir didn’t really know what to think of someone who said they were actually Santa Claus. But he had faith in his men. Even though the seven he had waiting for agent Kimber in the house just down the road weren’t his best men, there were still seven of them, and they had the element of surprise.
“Just get this Nick to come to your agent’s aid. My men will take care of the rest.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Nasir ended the call with Agent Andrews. He was confident that Andrews would keep their arrangement quiet. Not just because of the money he was paying him for his cooperation, but because Nasir had made it very clear that if he did ever reveal anything, Nasir would disappear and make sure it looked like Andrews was the only one plotting against the Americans.
Nasir walked over to the nightstand, picked up the handheld radio, and pressed the talk button. “The agent is just outside your house. Keep him alive until the man with the cloaking device arrives. When you capture him, call me back. No communication until then.”
Saint Nick Page 4
