by Nick Thacker
Alaska, he knew, would eventually feel like home to him as well, for better or worse. The plan Mr. E had put in place involved Reggie living in one of the rooms on the new addition that was being added, allowing Reggie to have a comfortable place to crash after away missions and globe-trotting. He was looking forward to the arrangement, but he wondered how Ben and Julie felt about opening their home to a semi-permanent guest.
The next few months were going to be wild, with development on the cabin ramping up to a feverish pace and the news of the team’s first assignment. Reggie had beat Joshua to the cabin, but Mr. E wanted both of them to be there to deliver the news to Ben and Julie.
Reggie figured that meant it was a perfect time for a bourbon.
“Come on, Ben. Let’s get down to brass tacks. You got anything worth drinking in here, or have you not been into town since I left?”
“I haven’t been into town since you left, but I do still have some decent stuff.”
Chapter Nine
TWO DAYS AGO
THE HAWK stretched his back, feeling it pop lightly in some spots. The tension of crouching, knees bent, for three hours had worn on him. Before that he had been lying prone, watching with one eye through the scope, for four hours.
And still before that he had hiked, alone and isolated, a circuitous route for recon through the back country near the small city toward the park where he now stood, perched on a rock at the edge of the municipal recreation center.
No one would see him; no one could see him. He wore black, covered in it from head to toe, a black ski cap and black boots, black garments in between. His face was black, his dark skin painted an even darker shade.
Still, he didn’t like feeling exposed. He thrived on stealth, basked in it. He was The Hawk, after all. Standing on a rock in a city park was far from the battlefields he’d known in the years prior, but for now it was his battlefield.
The battle, however, was far simpler than the real battles he’d fought in. This one was nothing but a reconnaissance mission. His team would move in tomorrow morning, just before daybreak, and do the job. He would ensure the target was at home, tucked away in bed like everyone else on that street.
He’d discovered from experience that most of the ‘thieving hours’ — the time from about 2300 hours to about 0300 the next day, at least in residential neighborhoods, were best left to the thieves. Petty crime that flourished during the moon’s highest hours were hours The Hawk didn’t want to be around. During those hours there were more police patrols, midnight-snackers watching out downstairs windows, and geriatric insomniacs moving around inside.
No, he preferred the time when most people were actually sleeping — about 0300 to 0500. Sure, there were early birds and a few corporate types who like to get in an early-morning jog, but statistically speaking there were far more people during that time doing what he needed them to be doing: sleeping .
It was going to be that way now, as well. He’d had someone on his team watch the street for the past few days. There was an odd-day jogger who arose and got started at 0515 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and there was one executive-looking fellow who drove to work at 0530, but other than that, the street was quiet. Even quieter the hour before.
Tomorrow morning — a few hours from now — would be one of those quiet mornings. The Hawk wanted to surveil the street from this spot himself, to verify the details and begin to formulate a plan. It was simple, but simplicity rarely meant easy. He knew that from experience, as well.
His team was good, the best he’d ever had, in fact, but he still preferred running the final check-through himself, personally. Their reports had so far been nothing but accurate, but The Hawk felt calmer about missions if he himself could lay eyes on the battlefield. He also liked to visualize the space as he planned, just to be sure there weren’t unforeseen obstacles, like a broken-down vehicle that wasn’t apparent on maps and satellite imagery.
Everything checked out so far, and he was happy about that. This would be a simple smash-and-grab, but they wouldn’t even need to do any grabbing and hardly any smashing. He should have called the mission a ‘sneak-and-place.’
He slid back down to the top of the rock. He’d watch for a few more minutes from here, then slide to the left off the side of the boulder and back onto the ground, and into the cover offered by the rock and the tree it sat next to. His rear was uncovered, as he was backed up to a sidewalk that ran the circumference of the park, but at this hour no one was likely to come by, and there were no direct lights illuminating this section of the park anyway.
The Hawk reached for the pack he’d slung at his feet and grabbed a protein bar from the front pouch. He’d already removed the loud, crackling wrapper before he left, so he simply reached into the plastic storage bag he’d placed them in and retrieved one. He had two more, one he planned to eat at 0200 and an extra, just in case.
There was a bottle of water on his hip, a canteen-style jug fastened to his belt using a custom carabiner assembly. He hated straps — they always found the worst possible times to get tangled — and he hated anything that fastened to him too tightly, for fear he wouldn’t be able to get it removed quickly enough. The canteen was the perfect size and shape for holding enough drinking water for the mission, so he figured out a way to make it work.
Aside from the scope, his bag, the canteen, and a sidearm, he carried nothing other than the clothes on his back. This wasn’t an away-mission, so there was little need for overdoing it. Still, his precaution and care with any work was part of what had given him the reputation and moniker ‘The Hawk’ in the first place, and it was a fitting title. His vehicle was parked at the other end of the municipal square and was loaded down with mission gear, including a small arsenal of weaponry. He wouldn’t need it, but he hated the idea of being caught somewhere without it.
He ate the protein bar and took a few swigs of the water, then rolled his neck side to side to work out the kinks there. He was in great shape for his age, not young anymore but certainly far from old. He felt like he had the perfect balance between youthful energy and strength and the wisdom that only comes from experience.
He was good at what he did. The best, even. It was a small niche, but for that reason it paid well.
He would be paid well for this job, like he had been paid well for all of his jobs. His team liked him for that — he was able to find the best-paying jobs, and most were low-risk. He had plans to expand this year, to bring in a second team that would be able to provide more specific services to his clients.
All in good time, he told himself. The Hawk was a man of patience. Patience when it came to planning and executing a mission, patience when it came to running his business, and patience in life. Good things come to those who wait.
He had waited, all his life he had waited. This was an opportunity he had built for himself, and he had worked nonstop to create the network he’d needed to lay the foundation. Now, the client had found him, and he was ready. They’d come to him pleading — begging, even — for his help, and he was only too happy to oblige.
The payoff was the largest he’d ever had, and it was likely the largest he would ever have. It was a massive amount of money, and even if he failed the mission — he wouldn’t fail the mission — his team had already been paid a quarter-million each, half a million for himself. It was enough to live on for years, in the right corner of the globe, but he had no plans to settle down and start spending money.
He had plans on making more money.
Chapter Ten
JULIETTE RICHARDSON STEPPED BACK FROM the range top and wiped her brow. She looked down, smiled, and shook her head.
I’m literally standing in a kitchen, wearing an apron, cooking dinner for men. It was a hilarious thought to her mainly because her role in the cabin rarely involved cooking.
She and Ben had a great partnership. Neither of them bought into antiquated expectations of typical gender roles, so for each chore there was to do around the cab
in — chopping wood, cleaning, dishes, laundry — one of them would tackle it when it became too annoying for them to bear.
For Julie, she hated piles of laundry stacked to the ceiling, so she did loads of it when it got out of hand. Ben enjoyed the catharsis of chopping wood, the rhythmic pounding at a chunk of log until it was split and sized, so that became his chore.
And Ben loved to cook — or rather, he loved to try to cook. Julie had to get used to his awkward choices of seasonings and over-salted dishes. He’d gotten better, especially after he began cooking for two, but she liked to joke that he had a ways to go before he was ready to open his own restaurant.
Still, he wasn’t terrible. He could make a mean chili, and his way with fish and game was second to none, in her opinion. He enjoyed grilling most, but the winter months typically proved too unbelievably cold to do any grilling outside, so he had developed a proficiency with baked fish. Most nights they ate a meat and a vegetable or two, and they had recently begun to cut out their bread intake per Reggie’s request.
She had lost weight as well, but not as much as Ben. Their workout regimens were different, designed personally for them, and hers was more of a diet change than an exercise change. She had always been active, running most mornings and sometimes hitting a yoga class after work at the CDC when she was there. She tried to eat well, but she had never really had a problem with her weight. Reggie — their assigned nutritionist — wanted her to focus on her food intake, specifically what she was eating and drinking, rather than try to burn more calories by exercising.
Ben, he’d told them, had the exact opposite problem. He ate well for a man in his mid-thirties, and even though he ate a lot it was a healthy balance of mostly protein and fat. He wasn’t one to snack or go for ice cream after dinner, so Reggie turned his attention to burning more calories by building stamina and physique through a sort of home gym system he’d built.
Ben and Reggie, when they were both at the cabin, would spend an hour each morning running, working through bodyweight exercises, and rolling a huge tractor tire around on the open area behind the cabin. Julie knew Ben enjoyed the exertion and the rapidly increasing size of his biceps, but he never let Reggie know it. He would complain at every turn, whine about the next session, and tell Reggie to take his time before he came back for more training.
Julie watched all of it with a smirk. She knew Ben better than anyone now, and his games and feigned apathy at the workout regimen was a ploy. Ben had a knack for not letting anyone get too close, and this little form of acting out, she believed, was birthed from that same desire. Reggie had become a close friend to both of them, and they spent a lot of time together, so Ben had to make sure he didn’t express his gratitude or act too friendly too often.
Reggie, for his part, seemed to love heckling Ben about it. Reggie, it turned out, seemed to have a bigger heart even than Ben’s, and he had surprised Julie by just how much he cared for them. He took every opportunity to stay with them at the cabin when he wasn’t on a mission or working elsewhere, and he always knew the right questions to ask to get them talking.
He loved to listen, and he was good at it. Julie hoped that Ben would pick up on some of that during their engagement.
She looked down at the ring he’d given her and twisted it around on her finger, a beautiful round cut diamond his mother had kept and passed along to him in her will. She’d died less than two years ago, and Julie and Ben had been the last people she’d seen on this planet. It was heartbreaking to watch Ben go through that, but she felt a special appreciation for the memory now that she was about to share the rest of her life with the man.
When he’d asked her to marry him, they had been on the floor of a secret research facility in the Antarctic, bullets flying above their heads. She remembered not knowing whether to smack him or smile at him.
She might have done both.
He had told her that he didn’t have a ring, and that he would get her one. He had wanted to get her a traditional engagement ring, and then surprise her with the wedding band at their wedding — at a date still to be determined — but she’d told him to save his money. She wasn’t much for jewelry, anyway. Any little thing would do, she’d told him.
His ‘any little thing’ had been a gorgeous, high-clarity, and expensive diamond wedding ring that his own mother had worn. Julie wasn’t able to keep the tears from falling when he’d presented it to her in the cabin, shortly after their return from the southern hemisphere. He’d worked up a whole evening, too. His ‘famous’ chili on the stove, a cinnamon candle lit in the bedroom, and all the laundry cleared from the floors and dumped into the tiny laundry and washroom attached to the back of the cabin — she was always nervous that he’d ruin her clothes if he washed them, so having them piled in front of the washing machine, to her, was as good as having it completely done.
For all his stubbornness, all his imperfections, she loved him. He was brutish in some ways, large and bullish, but the most caring and sweet man she’d ever met in others. He always knew what to cook for dinner, it seemed, and he always was in tune to what she wanted to watch on television. He didn’t always agree that they should watch it, but he knew.
He was kind, generous, and passionate for justice, which is how they’d met in the first place. He couldn’t bear to see any wrongdoing go unpunished, even if that meant he’d get them both involved in something over their heads.
In a way, that’s what he’d done again, but Julie had been every bit as responsible for it as he had. This new endeavor they were all embarking on together, the Civilian Special Operations, was just a formalized way of allowing Ben to fight injustice wherever they found it. Sure, they’d have to plan for it better than they were used to, and they’d have to communicate those plans with the rest of the team, including a representative member from each of the armed services, but it was still a perfect fit for them.
Or so she hoped.
In truth, she didn’t really know what to think about it all. It seemed to be a great fit for their fledgling team, a group of people who had barely known one another but had come together to fight and overthrow an organization. They’d succeeded, and their new leader, Mr. E, had encouraged them all to join the new band of heroes he wanted to form. It had all happened so quickly, and Mr. E and his wife had jumped into renovating and expanding their tiny cabin in the backcountry of Alaska, and they still had yet to receive their first orders.
Tonight, she knew, that would change.
Reggie had returned from some sort of work he had been assigned to, somewhere, and the talk was — between her and Ben, at least — that he had their orders from Mr. E. They were just waiting for Joshua, who would be arriving at some point that evening.
Her smile turned slightly, a manifestation of the uncertainty she suddenly felt, but she continued cooking and cleaning the kitchen as the boys in the other room laughed and joked with one another.
Chapter Eleven
“JOSHUA!” REGGIE YELLED.
BEN HADN’T heard anything, but he knew Reggie’s hearing — and just about all his other senses — were profoundly adept. Better than Ben’s for sure, except for perhaps Ben’s taste.
When Ben had made his chili for Reggie and asked Reggie if he could tell what was in it, the best the man could pick out was ‘some kind of chili spices?’ between gargantuan bites of meat and beans.
Reggie and Ben started toward the front door, and Ben could now see the handle turning. He set his bourbon down on the end table near the couch, in preparation for a handshake.
The door opened fully and Ben saw Joshua’s thin frame silhouetted in front of the fading afternoon light. Short-cropped hair in the style of most military grunts, yet a pair of eyes that spoke volumes more about his experiences than a haircut ever could. The man was close to Ben’s age, but he had lived a hard life as a military man and then as the leader of a private mercenary force that provided security for the very company that Ben and Julie had taken down.
&
nbsp; Draconis Industries had been Joshua’s employer long before Ben had ever heard of the organization, yet their paths crossed in the Amazon rainforest earlier that year when Joshua had been ordered to seek out — and kill — Ben and his team. He’d ended up defecting from his own organization and joining the crew with Ben and the others, and together they’d gone to Antarctica to chase the last remaining leader and his final project.
Like Reggie, Ben had grown to admire Joshua, even though the man was quieter and more reserved. Ben himself was somewhat of a recluse, so it had taken the men awhile to get to know each other. He wasn’t the personable, charismatic jokester that Reggie was, but Joshua had a strong will to be on the side of the good guys — a trait Ben required in his friends.
They’d all gotten along in Antarctica, and Joshua had even stepped into a role of the group’s leader by the end of the trip, so Mr. E bestowed upon Joshua the official title. He was to lead the missions they were — apparently soon — going to be embarking on.
Joshua stepped up and into the cabin, glancing left and right to get a feel for the place. He’d been there a few times, but Ben assumed it was an old habit of careful reconnaissance for him to examine his surroundings thoroughly before entering a room. Ben smiled, and Joshua walked up to him.
They shook hands, Joshua grinning a bit from one side of his mouth. Reggie, next to Ben and next in line, was grinning from ear to ear and already laughing.
“You look like you need a drink, buddy,” Reggie said.
“I’m good, but thank you,” Joshua responded.
“Yeah, I figured,” Reggie replied immediately. “But I’ll get you one of these days.”
Joshua nodded, then stepped into the kitchen to say hello to Julie. Reggie turned to Ben and brought his voice — and his smile — down. “He seems excited about something.”
