“Sure, but why us?”
“I want fresh eyes out on the ground. Need everyone familiar with the city. Want to mix up the search teams somewhat. In case we have to bug out and I need people who know how to move through the landscape here.”
“Seattle’s relatively calm.”
“For now.” He glanced in Kilo’s direction. “While you two were sleeping, there was an outbreak of violence over in Redmond. About a hundred people arrested for looting, rioting. Started out as a protest at the city hall there and turned really ugly, really fast. Bubba says Kite doesn’t seem to be on the rise here yet, even through what he’s found out via backchannels at the CDC. But the fear level is through the roof. A couple more large companies in Redmond closed down this week, putting about a thousand people out of work, total.”
Kilo stared at his coffee. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Exactly,” Papa said. “Don’t know if the violence will spread or not, or how quickly. But we need to step up our searches, and be ready to bug out if it gets bad. I don’t want us getting trapped here. I never intended for us to be here long enough for the upper passes to get snowed in and leave us stuck here, either. So you and Foxtrot are off night watch tonight and tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, I want you and Foxtrot to take a vehicle and go talk to that friend of yours down at McChord.”
“Sure, but might I ask why now?” They’d lain low ever since arriving in Seattle nearly three weeks ago with no one but Bubba knowing their exact whereabouts. Canuck was working with her friend at the lab, but even she didn’t know about the entire group. She also thought Canuck was staying over near Squire Park.
“Time to put out some feelers and plan our options.”
Kilo set his mug on the table. “What do you want me to feel out my friend about, exactly? Do you want me to see if I can finagle us an Exhart?”
“Ideally, we want something big enough to haul all of us, all of our gear, and the RV. An Exhart isn’t big enough for that.”
“We don’t have a pilot qualified to fly a fixed-wing that big.”
“I know. See what’s what, and report back to me. I’ll get with Bubba and he’ll arrange something through Arliss, if there’s anything we can arrange. We might have to hoof it overland to Rapid City otherwise.”
“Ugh, not Ellsworth.”
Papa grinned. “Hey, it’s not winter…yet.”
“I’d rather be in Alaska,” Kilo muttered as he reached for his coffee mug again. “The scenery’s better, at least.”
“Then see what you can come up with for us at McChord and maybe we won’t have to make a trek to Hellsworth.” He grinned.
“Can I get an idea, at least? Of where we’re going from here? So I can wing it. No pun intended.”
Papa straightened. “Southeast. I’d give you a better clue than that if I could, but we don’t have a firm plan yet. Our goal is here.” He zoomed in on Atlanta.
“Okay. I’d rather go to Ellsworth.”
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Alpha told him. “The CDC headquarters is located there.”
“So we don’t need to actually be in Atlanta?” Kilo asked.
Papa smiled. “See? Something can make Rapid City look good.” His smile faded. “Within a couple of hours by general aviation or helo,” he said. “Or closer. Not too close.”
“Florida?” Kilo asked, hoping he didn’t sound too…hopeful.
“What are you thinking?”
He grabbed an empty chair at the table and settled into it. After motioning for the tablet and Papa handed it over, Kilo zoomed in on the southwestern coast, between Tampa and Naples. “Lot of nooks and crannies in this area. Lots of landing strips, commercial, general, and private. Lots of roads, even, if we had to, that are straight, flat, and paved.”
Papa slowly nodded. “I’m tracking. Keep talking.”
“I’m not going to lie and say I don’t have a special attachment to my home state,” Kilo said, “but there’s a lot to be said about Florida. Lots of islands off the coast there we might be able to take over. Solar and wind backups are easy to run, and cold won’t be much of an issue come winter if we’re far enough south. SSTs are low and it’s been a really quiet tropical storm season. Not to mention, there’s enough infrastructure, between Tampa, Miami, and Orlando, that we could make large supply runs for medical equipment. Helo or small plane can make it to Atlanta in under two hours from there. Hell, you can drive to Atlanta in six hours from Tampa, if the main roads are clear.”
Papa looked at the other men assembled around the table. “Thoughts?”
Most of them shrugged. Alpha turned the tablet around again so he could look at it right side up. “I’m not fond of Hellsworth, either,” he muttered. “Froze my balls off there my first year in.”
“Anyone against Florida?” Papa asked.
No one responded.
“Then I’d say let’s make this our next goal. Right now, I want to be able to report that we swept every inch of this damn city for that missing woman before we’re forced to bug out of here.”
* * * *
Kilo also knew that when Foxtrot awoke and found out, he likely wouldn’t be happy with him or their commanding officer.
Although Kilo would be the only one Foxtrot would grouse at. The Minnesota native hated hot and humid and had relished the temperate climate of Seattle.
In fact, it was the least amount of bitching he’d heard roll from his partner’s mouth in the four years they’d been together. Foxtrot wasn’t a prima donna by any stretch of the imagination. Prima donnas wouldn’t survive the brutal, grueling washout process to make it onto a SOTIF team in the first place.
Foxtrot could, however, be…fixated.
And usually over something that irritated him.
It wasn’t the worst annoying habit a guy could have.
Kilo still sat at a table in the dining area, eating a sandwich, when he heard Foxtrot’s voice as he spoke to someone in the upstairs hallway. The building had an elevator, but they rarely used it unless they had to move equipment that was too bulky for the stairs. The Los Angeles quake was too fresh on everyone’s minds.
Lima, their unit’s resident geek, leaned in and smacked his shoulder. “Have fun breaking the news to him,” he said with an evilly playful grin.
“Gee, thanks.”
A couple of minutes later, Foxtrot emerged from the stairwell.
“Hey,” Foxtrot said as he headed straight for the coffee machine in the kitchen. When Kilo fixed his sandwich, he’d noticed the machine was empty and had made sure to put a fresh pot on, strong, and from his partner’s favorite grind.
Let’s start off on a good note, at least.
He hoped.
“Hey,” Kilo called out to him. “Change of plans. No night watch for us.”
They had the area to themselves. Everyone else had suddenly made themselves scarce.
Chickenshits.
He watched as in the kitchen, Foxtrot poured his coffee and turned, blowing over the top of the mug. “Why not?”
“Papa wants us to go on sweep tonight.”
“Man.” He sipped his coffee. “He’s not going to stick us back on day watch, is he?”
“No, but tomorrow we’re going to take a run down to McChord so I can talk to Mal. Start planning our next move.”
Foxtrot froze.
Here we go…
“Yeah? Where?” Foxtrot finally asked in a wary tone.
Ease him in a toe at a time, or cannonball that bitch right smack into the deep end?
Finally, Kilo decided it would be best treated like ripping a bandage off a wound, quick and in one motion. It’d sting like a motherfucker, but would be over a lot faster.
“Florida.”
Foxtrot stared at him for a moment before throwing his head back and practically howling. Somewhere in one of the other downstairs rooms, Kilo heard snickering.
“Nooo! Goddammit, why there?”
Kilo shoved the last bite of his sandwich into h
is mouth and stood to go wash his plate. “Suck it up, buttercup. We’re all in this together.” He shoved past Foxtrot to get to the sink.
“But…Florida? Really? There’s a whole, big country out there we can hide out in. Why for fuck’s sake there? Wait, did you do this? You’ve been bitching every time we go somewhere the weather gets below seventy—”
“I’ve been bitching? Hello, dude, fucking seriously? Unbefuckinglievable.” He washed his plate and stuck it in the drainer to dry. Then he turned and jabbed a finger at Kilo. “Be ready to move out at 20:00 hours. We have our orders.” He headed for the stairwell.
* * * *
Fuck. Foxtrot didn’t bother trying to follow his partner upstairs to kvetch at him. Orders were orders.
Ugh. He stared at his perfectly good cup of coffee.
What had been a perfectly good cup of coffee, until the bad news ruined it.
He took another sip. He knew his rep in the unit. He pulled his weight, but he didn’t see any harm in bitching if he wasn’t happy about something, and there was something that could be done about the situation.
He took another sip.
Well, okay, so sometimes he bitched even when nothing could be done about the situation, but didn’t everyone?
Oscar walked in and snorted.
“Ha-ha,” Foxtrot said.
“I take it you’ve heard.”
“Yes.” He hoped he wasn’t sulking.
“Learn to speak Spanish, for chrissake,” Oscar said.
“Just because my name’s Carlos Romero and I look Hispanic doesn’t mean I automatically speak Spanish.”
“My point exactly.”
“Fuck you.”
Oscar laughed and smacked him on the shoulder. “You’ll survive. We all will.”
Foxtrot set his mug of coffee on the counter and went to get fixings from the fridge to put a sandwich together. “Didn’t say I wouldn’t survive. I just won’t enjoy it,” he muttered.
He’d grown up in Minnesota, of all places. The only reason he spoke Vietnamese as well as he did was because of his best friend next door growing up. The guy’s family all spoke it, and he’d sort of picked it up by osmosis. The French he’d learned in school.
How was he supposed to know the military would snap him up as a translator as a result? He always knew the military would be in his future, because he couldn’t afford college and didn’t have the grades for a scholarship. He just didn’t know he’d end up being as good as he was at his job, good enough to make him want to stick with it. See the world.
Get his ass shot at.
Well, he hadn’t counted on that part, but it wasn’t so bad. Wasn’t boring, that was for sure.
And he hated being bored almost as much as he hated damned hot weather.
“Fucking Florida,” he muttered again.
* * * *
Foxtrot had gotten his grousing out of his system and was ready to move out ten minutes ahead of Kilo, a fact for which he felt silently smug.
Kilo noticed. “Don’t start with me.”
Foxtrot shrugged. “Didn’t say a word.”
Nine of them loaded up into two different vans down in the ground-level garage under the building. Foxtrot and Kilo ended up riding with Roscoe and Niner. In the other van, Uncle, Zed, Alpha, and Delta were leading the way, with Lima navigating off maps he pulled up on his tablet.
The area they were searching tonight was a few miles south of their safe house, in the Rainier Valley district. But they didn’t want to call any attention to themselves, nine armed men running double-time down the streets of Seattle.
Even in that historically eclectic town, that would likely draw attention.
Their two matching vans, which Omega had procured for them not long after their arrival in the city, were dark blue and bore matching seals on the sides that declared them Federal Utilities Commission vehicles. Along with a numbered decal on the back door, they appeared official.
Officially bullshit. They also had valid fleet tags registered to the FUC, acquired with a little help from Bubba, and resulting in a private giggle for the whole team when Omega told them.
But the average citizen, and, more importantly, law enforcement officers, likely wouldn’t pay them a second’s worth of attention.
They were all dressed in black pants and navy blue T’s, and once they arrived at their search location under the cover of darkness, they shouldn’t garner any attention.
Two of them would stay with the vehicles and watch their six, ready to move and meet up with them as needed. Rainier Valley had been a middle-income residential neighborhood up until about thirty years earlier, when an earthquake and fire swept through the area. Many houses were never rebuilt, and trees and underbrush had reclaimed much of the area.
Leaving plenty of hiding spaces for someone.
“Do we really think she’s out here?” Foxtrot quietly asked in as non-grousing a tone as he could muster while they walked through one section of burned-out husks. They all wore face masks, and goggles with both night vision and FLIR capabilities. So far, all Foxtrot was picking up were rats, cats, and the occasional raccoon or stray dog that crossed through their field of vision. The only humans they’d seen so far were the ones who still made this their home, and the occasional homeless person.
But since Korey wasn’t male, nor was she a middle-aged woman, they’d safely ruled out the contacts they’d had in that area so far. They also hadn’t come across any bodies, either.
“I don’t know,” Kilo said, “but I’m not returning to base until I’ve searched our assigned area. I’m not phoning it in.” He glanced at Foxtrot. “That easily could have been me or you that got sick instead of Doc. I think we owe it to him, if nothing else, to keep looking. For what he went through.”
Foxtrot snapped his jaw shut on the next round of kvetching he’d already been planning.
Kilo was right.
They’d been lucky. Damned lucky. They’d been exposed back in Vietnam, before they were scrambled to Australia. Them, and Roscoe and Niner. They’d had to sit there and wait, getting stuck every hour until Doc cleared them.
Shoving his resignation out a mental window, Foxtrot screwed his head on straight and threw himself into the search. He’d never let down one of his unit, and he damn sure wasn’t about to start now.
Chapter Eight
The next morning, Kilo and Foxtrot grabbed showers early and made it down into the kitchen where Pandora was scrambling several dozen eggs for breakfast. It looked like she’d already cooked up a pan full of sausage links.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“Duty calls, snowflake,” Kilo playfully teased. The feisty redhead had been the first woman added to their unit. The Chicago native had been their lead to find Q, the first doctor they’d brought in. Even though Pandora was her official code name, they still sometimes called her snowflake, after a heated exchange she and Tango, one of her men, had in the very beginning.
Pandora turned, hands planted on her hips. “Better watch out I don’t spit in your eggs.” Her teasing smile told him otherwise.
While she was paired with Doc and Tango, she was like a sister to the rest of them. All the women had settled in like that, actually. Any of the men would fight or die for them the way they would their fellow men, but they’d never dream of being inappropriate with another team’s woman.
And considering most of the women in their unit had a fondness for castration—or in Clara’s case, practical experience in it—it wasn’t a line any of the men were willing to cross even if they wanted to.
Which they didn’t.
“Aw, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you, snowflake?” Kilo asked.
“She flung a pancake at Roscoe that time,” Foxtrot reminded him.
“Yeah, well, Roscoe’s an asshole,” he said.
“Hey,” Roscoe said as he walked in. “I resemble that remark.” Roscoe admitted he wasn’t always the easiest guy to get along with when it came t
o women. That Annie had settled down with him and Niner still came as a complete surprise to everyone else.
“How come you don’t spit in his food?” Kilo asked. “I’m not an asshole.”
She smiled. “Who says I don’t?”
Roscoe had started to reach for a plate and hesitated. “You’re just yanking my chain, right?” Roscoe had a thick Brooklyn accent that made him sound like he’d just walked out of the borough.
“Maaaybe,” Pandora teased. “Go ahead. Have some eggs. I dare ya.”
Roscoe stood there, the epitome of indecision as Kilo and Foxtrot tried not to laugh at him.
At least Foxtrot had settled down and not bitched anymore about Florida.
In a blatantly transparent attempt to buy himself some time to decide if the food was spit-free, Roscoe turned to the other men. “You two off to McChord today?”
“Yeah. Bubba confirmed the guy I know is still there.”
“Have fun with that.”
“Great day for a drive,” Foxtrot said as he dove in and spooned himself some eggs, and sausage, onto his plate. He grinned at Roscoe and waved his plate under the man’s nose before he headed for a table.
Kilo struggled not to laugh at their friend’s consternated expression. Poor Roscoe, he really didn’t mean to come off as an asshole to women. And in all fairness, the past few weeks with Annie had been good for him. He was far more sensitive than he had been.
Still…
Kilo grabbed his own plate of food. Roscoe started to reach toward the plates again, when Pandora brightly grinned at him, making him step back as if she were a cat who’d just hissed.
Foxtrot laughed. “Dude, she was teasing. Eat.”
Niner, Roscoe’s partner, chose that moment to walk in. “You pissin’ off our cook again? Jeez Louise, remind me to get down here first, for fuck’s sake. I don’t want her pissed off at me, too.”
It was after eight when Kilo and Foxtrot finally grabbed a truck and started out. In khakis and T-shirts, but with concealed handguns, they headed south with Kilo behind the wheel.
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