Huang actually laughed.
“Our attention?” he asked.
“Well, mine, anyway,” she said, and concentrated on cutting up some sausage. She was enjoying her breakfast despite the food’s now tepid temperature.
“Okay,” Huang relented, “but don’t tell Rodriguez, else we might as well have just broadcast it over the ship’s tannoy.”
“He thinks they’re DARPA,” KT told him.
“They’re not. They’re a private concern with lots of high-level Pentagon links. They’re called Rising Spirit Technologies.”
KT stared at the pilot.
“You’re kidding me? Are they the leader in the field of new-age warfare?” she asked.
Huang laughed.
“Ellen said it’s generation-after-next warfare systems, advanced prosthetics, personal protection, augmentation, weapon systems—”
“Like man-portable railguns?” KT asked.
Huang studied her again. Now, he looked concerned.
“How’d you know that?” he finally asked.
KT shrugged.
“Abductive reasoning on the part of ordinance,” she told him.
“Jesus Christ, this ship,” Huang said shaking his head.
“Your friend like working for them?” KT asked.
“No. Look Ellen’s flown missions for SOFs all over the world, she’s been in some truly hairy situations and she doesn’t scare easy, but she does not like these guys. She thinks there’s something off about them. They’re supposed to be a tech company but they’re effectively running black ops with the Pentagon’s blessing. She’s out as soon as she rotates home, she’s not going to renew the contract.”
Suddenly it wasn’t so funny anymore.
“And the powers-that-be are throwing a lot of resources at them, classified resources,” KT said, thinking about the stealth Black Hawk. Huang was nodding.
“There’s something else. You saw them bring back the body bags, right?” he asked. KT nodded. “She thinks that they’re looking for someone.”
“Why?” KT asked.
Huang just shook his head. Clearly either Ellen didn’t know or hadn’t told him.
“I’m serious though, KT. Ellen does not spook easy. These guys aren’t your normal operators. You need to stay away from them.”
“Sure,” KT reassured him.
* * *
So, of course, she was on her way forward toward the armory fingering the extendable baton in her pocket. She had bought it when she had first been posted to the Twain. She had, at that time, been the only woman serving on board. She hadn’t carried it for a long time but somehow it had felt prudent to drop back to her bunk and pick it up.
I mean Huang hadn’t exactly phrased it as an order, she told herself, but she knew that was pretty much bullshit. Why are you doing this? She wasn’t sure she had a good answer beyond wanting to look the man who took the shot that probably saved their lives in the eyes and thank him. Then why are you packing the baton? she asked herself. That was simple. That was in case she met that blowhard contractor asshole again. She had learned to fight in the group home. When she’d got the swimming scholarship and gone to college she had added to her experience with knowledge by taking as many practical martial arts and self-defence classes as she could find. She had continued doing so after joining the navy. She did not trust easy. That was why she had the baton in her pocket.
The RST contingent were staying in the tool room next to the armory. She was a little surprised to find that they didn’t have an armed guard on the hatch. She extended the baton with a flick of her wrist, used it to tap on the door and quickly folded it away as she saw the locking wheel turn. The hatch was pushed open and a thickset man with a walrus mustache, wearing a watch hat, looked out at her.
“What do you want?” he asked but he’d left enough room for her to squeeze past. Which she did. It was a rookie error and she was too fast for him. “Hey!” he protested but it was too late, she was in.
Suddenly eight pairs of eyes turned to look at her. The Hispanic guy, the one she was pretty sure was the sniper, was covering something, which had the rough shape of a huge rifle up on its bipod, with a sheet. He turned to look at her. She saw herself reflected in his sunglasses. That was weird. His eyes wouldn’t need protecting beneath decks.
The cramped tool room had been strung with hammocks. Beneath, the floor was filled with packs, various hard plastic kit boxes and padded kit bags, and it smelled of boys.
She was aware of the mustachioed man who’d accidentally let her in shifting behind her. She glanced his way. His drop holster was empty and he had both hands behind his back. Next to the mustachioed man, his bulk squeezed into the corner of the room, was the big man with the prosthetic legs, the one that Mike had warned her about. Dalton. She could not make out his expression but it was intense. Anticipation, maybe.
“S’okay guys, I got this.” The ex-marine contractor, the one who’d gotten in her face on the flight deck, the one that had called her chica, slid off his hammock and stood before her. The sniper who liked to wear glasses below decks was just watching on impassively. “Honey, I knew you couldn’t stay away,” he said, laughing as though he expected everyone else to join in, but nobody did. “But this is no place for little girls, run along now.” He made a shooing gesture, laughing again, and again nobody else joined in.
“What do you want—” one of the other contractors started but fell silent as the sniper motioned for him to let this play out.
“How much jeopardy do you want your career to be in, chico?” KT asked.
“Huh?” the contractor said, grabbing her shoulder and then leaning over her in a bid to intimidate. KT looked at his hand and then back up at him.
“I mean the injury,” KT asked.
“What injury, bitch?” he turned to look at one of his “buddies.” It was three mistakes in a very short period of time. He had to be punished. “I mean look at the size—”
Her arm was already moving even as she flicked her wrist. The baton hadn’t fully extended when it caught him on the bridge of his nose, breaking it. She knew from cold hard experience that getting hit like that knocks all the fight out of you. Blood and snot squirts down your face, you feel sick.
The mustachioed man started to move behind her.
“Leave it,” Dalton said and she was aware of the mustachioed man becoming still again.
“You had enough?” KT asked the contractor.
“Fuggin’ broke my nose!” he cried.
“Yes, I did,” KT agreed.
“With a fuggin’ baton, that’s not fair!” he complained.
She wondered what fair had to do with it.
“You’re bigger than me, I’m not stupid.” This time the contractors did laugh, at their friend. Though she was suddenly very aware that she was in tight confines with a lot of well-trained, well-armed and quite big guys. “Now my question is, are you done calling me names?”
He took his hands away from his bloodied face. He looked furious, because of course he was. The way he spoke, this was a deeply insecure guy looking for validation in all the wrong ways and she had just humiliated him in front of peers. Because violence is never the answer. But sometimes she got fed up having to be the adult, having to back down. Admittedly she suspected that she could have chosen a better place to make this particular stand.
“I’m gonna fug—” he managed before she threw a low, powerful side kick at his knee, all but stamping on the joint. She heard the crack, felt it break under her boot. At the back of her mind she was screaming at herself to stop, that this wasn’t her, but somehow she couldn’t. She didn’t want to. He didn’t even have time to scream before she brought the baton down on his head, driving him to the ground. He tried to protect his head with his arms and she broke them both with the baton, pulling them away so she could hammer-blow his head. The tension from the rescue yesterday, the years of putting up with the comments, with being patronized by halfwits, all of it
pouring out of her in a murderous rage as she beat this fool to a pulp.
A hand caught her wrist. She looked up. It was the sniper. Something in her expression made him let go and step back, hands open.
“You don’t want to kill him,” he told her.
She looked around the room. Dalton had a restraining hand on the mustachioed contractor, who had a sidearm in his hand, and another restraining hand on one of the other operators. The other four were all looking to the sniper. She looked down at her victim. He was sobbing and shaking on the floor. He had wet himself. He would never work again. Suddenly she felt wretched. His career was over. Hers probably was as well. For a moment of anger.
“What do you want?” the sniper asked.
Somewhere through the guilt KT managed to notice that the sniper had what looked like a cop’s bodycam clipped to the front of his T-shirt. A wire ran from the bodycam around his neck. It was a weird setup but it meant that her assault would have been recorded for posterity and prosecution.
What did she want? She still didn’t know. She hoped she hadn’t come here just to take out her frustrations on this poor asshole.
“I wanted to look the guy who saved our lives yesterday in the eye, and say thank you,” she told him. She felt a little like she was clutching at straws.
The sniper smiled. Looked down at the sobbing bloodied contractor on the floor and then back up at her.
“Okay,” he said. Then he took off his glasses. He was blind.
KT tried not to gape. She failed miserably.
The amber alert sounded.
“All flight crew report to the flight briefing area immediately,” the executive officer told them over the tannoy.
“I think you should go, now,” Dalton said from behind her.
* * *
She didn’t understand how the sniper could be blind. It didn’t make any sense to her. Perhaps if her head hadn’t been roaring with the thought of the serious assault she had just committed. She could justify breaking the contractor’s nose. He had laid his hands on her. Even breaking his knee. He had threatened her. The rest of it, though? The knee injury alone was probably career destroying, let alone his reputation when it got out that someone approximately half his body weight had handed his ass to him.
“You idiot!” Great, now she was shouting at herself as she moved quickly through the ship’s passageways toward the briefing area. What had she been thinking? She had just lost it. She hadn’t lost it like that in many years. She would be lucky if she was only dishonorably discharged. There was the real possibility that she could do time for a beating that severe.
How was he blind? It had to be something to do with this RST they worked for. Could they make prosthetics for the eye? Did that explain the bodycam, was the wire somehow connected to the brain feeding him the information that the camera saw? It sounded so ridiculous, but then how much different was it from Dalton’s sophisticated leg prosthetics? She suspected a lot but she was no expert.
* * *
Rodriguez turned to look at her as she slid into a seat next to him in the briefing area. All the flight crews were there. It had to be something big. Rodriguez was staring at her.
“What?” It sounded harsher than KT had meant it.
“You got blood on your face,” he told her.
KT closed her eyes and then wiped the spattered flecks off her face.
Rodriguez had turned away from her and crossed his arms. He looked pissed. She suspected they were going to have a very frank and somewhat one-sided discussion a little later. Huang, Sandeman and Thorrason came and joined them. Thorrason managed a shy smile in her direction. KT didn’t mean to but she was pretty sure she scowled back and he turned away, reddening.
Commander Reddy, the Twain’s executive officer, strode into the briefing area. His adjutant brought up the image of a town situated in a coastal valley that lead down to the crystal-blue Mediterranean Sea. There were many different types of building but KT was left with a very strong sense of white crumbling tenement buildings and palm trees. There was something about it that suggested a once-prosperous town had fallen on hard times.
“This is the town of Al-Darshan, on the coast of Syria close to the Lebanese border,” the XO told them. “At oh-eight-hundred hours this morning it was hit by a chemical attack.”
Everything suddenly got very quiet and still in the room. “Chemical attack” were two words that nobody wanted to hear.
“Needless to say the Syrian government have denied responsibility, but SigInt intercepts suggest that the attack happened for two reasons. The first is that the town was harboring a large cell of anti-government insurgents. The second, and possibly more crucial, is that a number of prominent officers in the Free Syrian Army, renegade officers who defected from the Syrian Armed Forces, are from this town. This was a punishment attack. Assad wants FSA command to know that he will go after their families.” Reddy had a flair for the dramatic. He let what he had said sink in. Let them each imagine that it was their families that were being attacked while they were serving.
KT heard someone enter the room behind her. Thinking that everyone who needed to be there was already there, she turned around to see who it was. She saw Lieutenant Commander Bedford, Dalton and the blind sniper entering the room. She felt Rodriguez dig his elbow into her ribs and she turned back. If Commander Reddy had noticed the RST contractors entering late then he gave no sign of it.
The next image on the monitor showed barrels falling out of a Russian MI-8 transport helicopter.
“The attack followed the pattern of the majority of other attacks in the Syrian theatre. So-called ‘barrel bombs’ dropped from a helo. The evidence points to chlorine gas, however we have seen evidence of sarin in other attacks, so make sure you’re all carrying your atropine with you. This has been the largest single attack we’ve seen.” He paused again. Took off his glasses and rubbed his nose between thumb and forefinger. “This is a humanitarian disaster,” he told them.
It was only seeing the emotion etched into XO’s face that the true horror of the situation hit home. KT forgot about everything else. Now she was focusing on the job. What needed to be done.
“This is a monstrous thing to do to your own population,” the XO continued. It was clear that this wasn’t part of the “official” briefing. Nobody in the room would hold it against him. The XO seemed to collect himself. “The Syrian army have two battalions of mechanized infantry bearing down on Al-Darshan—”
“Get some!” someone shouted. It was an almost inevitable part of a briefing but KT’s own irritation mirrored the irritation she saw on the XO’s face.
“Our job is to facilitate the evacuation of the civilian population of Al-Darshan, many of whom will be casualties of this attack, to a refugee camp in the Lebanon, just south of the border.” There was silence in the room as everyone stared at the XO. “The casualties will be supported by our corpsmen and women, and we will be coordinating with both the Lebanese authorities and NGOs at the camp. The civilian authorities in Al-Darshan will be setting up LZ pickup points on the beach, and organizing the transport of the civilians to the pickup points. We will be prioritizing the casualties and patients from the hospital.”
The XO paused again, looking hard around the room.
“Let me make this perfectly clear. We are providing transport and medical support, and you’re going to see some things. Marines from the 11th Expeditionary Unit will be providing us with extra air assets and security for the operation. All of you will be drawing weapons, but you are not, under any circumstances, to engage with the Syrian forces in the unlikely event you see any.”
“We’re letting them get away with it?” KT was quite surprised that it was Thorrason who’d spoken up. Glancing at the teenager, Thorrason himself looked quite surprised that he had said anything, particularly to the second most senior officer on the ship. He was turning red even as Rodriguez turned to glare at the door gunner.
“No, son,” Commander
Reddy said. He didn’t even sound that annoyed by the interruption. “We drew a line in the sand. They’ve crossed it but that’s someone else’s job. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir, sorry sir,” Thorrason said, now the color of a beetroot.
“There are, however, some complications,” Reddy continued.
KT heard the sighs, people shifting in the seats.
Another picture came up on the monitor. It was a black-and-white photograph of a wiry leather-skinned man in his forties or fifties. He was wearing desert camo and carrying an AK pattern assault rifle.
“This is Lieutenant Andre Vasilov, previously, in theory, of the GRU Spetsnaz. Russian special forces. His unit had a reputation for brutality when they were hunting insurgents in Chechnya. He was one of Putin’s ‘little green men’ during the invasion of the Ukraine, and we have unsubstantiated reports of his presence in the area, perhaps operating with the Syrian Special Mission Forces. We don’t know why they’re in this area, so far away from the other Russian forces. The Kremlin have claimed that he and his men are no longer serving members of the Russian armed forces. Now it could be that he’s doing mercenary work, but it’s just as likely that he’s running off-book deniable ops for the Russians. There is a chance he is working with this man...”
The picture changed to show a well-built man with slicked-back hair, a perfectly groomed beard and the coldest eyes that KT had ever seen. “Nicholai Baris. Ex-FSB and now all-round tech and weapons black marketer. It is rumored that he has been providing the Assad regime with a new nerve agent.”
There was more uncomfortable shifting from the pilots and their crews. She heard a low muttered conversation behind her. She glanced around to see Dalton leaning over to whisper something to the blind sniper. The sniper was nodding in agreement. She all but wanted to ask Reddy what the two contractors and their pilot were doing there. Somehow she couldn’t see them helping with the humanitarian effort.
Reddy pointed at the picture of Baris.
Bloodshot--The Official Movie Novelization Page 24
