“They’re all convicts?” the woman asked.
“Yes, ma’am. All of ’em serving life sentences without parole.”
“Then working for us is really their only chance to have a normal life again. Surely they’re smart enough to see that.”
“Maybe,” Bill said. “As a rule, criminals aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, if you know what I mean. And if they are smart, they’re liable to see that their odds of comin’ out of this alive are pretty damn slim. But when you don’t have anything to lose . . .”
The others didn’t say anything, so Bill took that as a sign to continue. He tapped computer keys again.
“Braden Cole,” he said as the image of a man in his forties appeared on the screen. Cole was pale, with a brush of dark hair that made the skin of his fox-like face seem even more washed out. So did the dark-framed glasses he wore. “Freelance killer. A hit man, as they say in books and movies. There’s no tellin’ how many jobs like that he’s carried out.”
The woman said, “And you want an animal like that working for us?”
“Cole can kill in lots of different ways,” Bill said, “but his method of choice is with explosives. He’s a demolitions man, and he’s mighty good at it. That’s a handy skill to have.”
“I suppose. Can you work with him?”
“We’ll find out.” Bill changed the screen. “This fella’s name is Nick Hatcher. Another professional thief, but unlike Megan, he didn’t work alone. He was part of a crew that robbed banks all over the West and Southwest. Wheelman for the gang. Supposed to be a great driver. That’s exactly what you need if you have to get out of a place in a hurry.”
“Was he sent away for bank robbery?” Clark asked.
“Murder,” Bill said. “His last job, two cops were killed. Hatcher didn’t do any of the shooting, but since he was involved in the commission of a felony, legally he was just as responsible as the ones who did. And since he was the only member of the gang who survived, the legal system came down on him just as hard as it could.”
“He doesn’t look like a criminal,” the woman said as she frowned at the image of a handsome, brown-haired young man. “He looks like he should be dating that Sinclair girl.”
“I don’t think they’ll have time for that.”
Bill changed the image again. This time, two pictures came up, side by side. He was watching from the corner of his eye, and the woman and the man from the White House both visibly recoiled. Not much, and they controlled the reaction instantly, but Bill caught it anyway.
“Now those two look like criminals,” the man from the White House muttered.
“That’s because they are,” Bill said. “The white guy is Ellis ‘Bronco’ Madigan. Ran a gang of bikers and skinheads that was tied in with organized crime all over the Midwest. He was convicted of twenty-two counts of murder and the cops are convinced his list is even longer than that. The black guy is Calvin Watson. His deal is similar to Madigan’s: he was in charge of an extensive gang with ties to organized crime, convicted of multiple murders but probably not as many as he’s actually guilty of. In a perfect world, they’d have both been executed by now, but the feds are keepin’ them alive to try to get information out of them. They’re in the same federal facility, where they’ve been tryin’ to kill each other ever since they met. Talk about hate at first sight.”
“Why haven’t they been separated?” the woman wanted to know.
“You’d have to ask somebody else about that, ma’am. I suspect the feds are keepin’ ’em together to keep the pressure on them to talk. It’s not workin’, though. Madigan and Watson have never said a useful word since they went into the system.”
“Why do you want a couple of animals like that on your team?” the general asked.
“Remember what I said about badasses? Those two are some of the baddest you’ll find.”
“You can’t work with them,” the woman declared. “If they’re the sort of men you say they are, they’ll never cooperate with you. They’ll have no reason to.”
Bill said, “They’ll have a reason, all right. New identities, new lives. Because you see, whatever happens on this mission, Madigan and Watson are going to die . . . the same as all the others.”
“What in the world do you mean by that?” the man from the White House asked.
Clark said, “Officially, they’ll be dead.”
“You mean like witness protection.”
“Witsec is different. What we’ll be offering goes beyond that. The new identities we give them will be as impenetrable as we can possibly make them, and we won’t have to keep them around to testify or anything like that, either. The federal government will be through with them. They can go off and live their lives however they please.”
The woman’s lips pursed in disapproval. She said, “In other words, you’ll be turning a pair of monsters loose on society.”
“Oh, there’ll be some safeguards in place,” Clark assured her. “Madigan and Watson won’t know it, but we’ll be keeping an eye on them. If they try to go back to their old lives, we’ll deal with the problem then.”
The general said, “If they try to kill each other, how can you expect them to function on the same team?”
“By dangling that carrot,” Clark said.
Bill added, “You might not think it to look at them, but Madigan and Watson aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t have lived this long if they were. They’ll cooperate as long as it’s in their own best interest.”
“If they get a chance, they’ll double-cross you,” the general warned.
“More than likely,” Bill agreed. “I don’t intend to give ’em that chance.”
“All right, let’s say we agree to those two,” the woman said. “Is that all?”
“Couple more.” Bill changed the image to that of a man in his thirties with big, scared eyes. “This is Jackie Thornton. Small-time criminal from South Dakota who wound up on death row because he murdered his ex-wife’s new husband and tried to kill her. He’s about as much of an all-around loser as you could find.”
“Then why in the world do you want him? At least those other two are big and tough.”
“Jackie’s got something they don’t.” Bill tapped a key on the computer, and the screen went dark. “What’s he look like?”
“What do you mean?” Clark asked.
“Describe Jackie Thornton to me.”
The four of them glanced at each other. Clark said, “His hair . . .” and then stopped.
The general said, “He’s got . . .”
A frown creased his forehead as he tried to think of what to say next. The woman and the man from the White House didn’t even attempt it.
“That’s right,” Bill said. “You all looked at him, but you can’t describe him. You probably couldn’t even pick him out of a lineup. Jackie Thornton’s just about the most forgettable son of a gun you’d ever want to meet.”
“That’s not fair,” the woman protested. “His picture was up there less than a minute.”
“But if I’d shown you the pictures of Madigan and Watson for the same amount of time, you’d remember what they looked like, I’ll bet.”
“Well, probably. But they’re so big and . . . and brutal-looking. That other man . . . why, he looked more like a scared rabbit.”
“Exactly. So if I need to send a man into a situation where nobody’s gonna pay any attention to him, Thornton’s the man for the job.”
“You said he killed a man. He’s a vicious criminal, too.”
“He’s a sad sack who worked himself up into a killin’ state,” Bill said. “I talked to the chief of police in the little town where Thornton’s from. He told me that Thornton never hurt anybody until his wife left him and that pushed him over the edge. Even that took a couple of years to fester before it came out. Thornton held up a grocery store at gunpoint one time, but it came out later that the gun he used was unloaded. He said he just intended to scare people with it and wante
d to make sure he didn’t hurt anybody by accident. He’s not really dangerous.”
“So despite being a murderer, he’s not much of a badass,” Clark said.
“That’s right. But with Madigan, Watson, Bailey, and Stillman, we got plenty of badasses. We got a demolitions man in Cole, we got an intelligence team in Sinclair and Thornton, and we got a transportation guy in Hatcher.”
“What else do you need?” the woman asked.
“A shooter,” Bill said. “And that one’s non-negotiable. I have this man on my team, or I don’t go.”
“Well, show us his picture,” the man from the White House said with a tone of impatience creeping into his voice.
“I’ll do better than that,” Bill said. “I’ll introduce him to you.”
As Bill got up and went over to a door at the side of the room, Clark said with a worried frown, “Bill, you really shouldn’t have brought anybody here—”
“It’s all right,” Bill told him. “This fella’s been here before.”
He opened the door. A middle-aged black man with close-cropped hair walked slowly into the room. He gave Clark a faint smile and nodded, then said, “Good to see you again, Clark.”
“Henry,” Clark said. “I thought you were retired.”
“And I thought I was retired,” Bill said, “but here I am, puttin’ a team together again.”
Clark glanced down at the legs of Henry Dixon’s slacks and said, “But I thought . . .”
His voice trailed off as if he didn’t know what else to say.
“You thought right,” Dixon told him. “They’re prosthetics, both of them. I spent more than a year in a wheelchair after that mess you pulled me out of in Africa, but then I decided I’d had enough of it. I asked Bill for help, and he convinced his boss to pay for it.”
Clark looked at Bill and said, “I thought I was your boss, but I never heard anything about this.”
“You’re my associate,” Bill drawled. “As far as the government’s concerned I’m a freelancer, remember? The boss Henry’s talkin’ about is Hiram Stackhouse.”
The man from the White House made a face at the mention of Stackhouse’s name.
“That man’s a damn menace. Always questioning the administration—”
“And we all know how questionin’ the administration these days gets you on a list of suspected terrorists and traitors,” Bill said. “This country used to elect a president, not a damn king.” He snorted. “But that was before the news media became just another arm of the government.”
“You’re distorting everything—”
“Gentlemen,” Dixon broke in, and his deep, powerful voice made everyone else in the room look at him. “If our enemies succeed, we won’t have to worry about elections anymore. And they already have a strong foothold for their goals in Mexico. We can’t allow any more plots like the New Sun to come out of there.”
Clark shook his head and said to Bill, “Boy, you just told him everything, didn’t you?”
“What can I say? I trust the man. He’s saved my life a few times in the past. Yours, too, as I recall.”
Clark shrugged and said, “Yeah, well . . .”
“Let me understand this,” the woman said. “This man has no legs.”
Dixon smiled faintly again as he told her, “I have artificial legs, ma’am. State of the art. I can’t get around as fast as the Six Million Dollar Man, but I do all right.”
“And once he’s where he needs to be, there’s not a better long-range shot in the world,” Bill said. “Anybody who’s about to waltz into hell needs an angel lookin’ over his shoulder.” He nodded toward Dixon. “Henry’s my angel.”
“A tarnished angel, to be sure,” Dixon said with a chuckle.
“Good enough for me.”
Clark looked like he was counting in his head. He confirmed that by saying, “You’re going to take on a whole training camp full of Mexican drug smugglers and Arab terrorists with eight men and one woman? Those are pretty stiff odds, Bill.”
“You’re forgettin’ that I’m goin’ along. There’ll be ten of us.”
“Oh, well, that makes all the difference in the world,” Clark said. “Ten against three or four hundred is much better than nine against three or four hundred.”
“You said you didn’t want an international incident—”
“Absolutely not,” the man from the White House interrupted. “We can’t have that. It would make us look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world.”
“And every day that givin’ a rat’s ass what the rest of the world thinks of us takes precedence is a day that a little more of what this country used to be just ups and dies,” Bill said.
The man from the White House sneered and said, “This isn’t the twentieth century anymore. It’s all about globalism now.”
“I’m an American, by God. Globalism can pucker up and kiss my—”
Dixon put a hand on Bill’s shoulder and said, “An argument for another day, perhaps.”
“You’re right, Henry.” Bill looked at the others in the room. “Right now, we’ve got to decide whether we’re doin’ this or not.”
The general cleared his throat.
“I say it’s a go, and I’m willing to go along with your choices for your team, Mr. Elliott. I think some of them are pretty risky, but no war was ever won without running some risks.”
The woman sighed and said, “I’m willing to sign off on it, too, although not without some serious reservations that I want noted.”
“That’s going to be hard to do,” Clark told her, “since this meeting never took place and none of us are even here right now.”
“Well, the five of you heard what I said,” the woman snapped. “Just remember it, that’s all.”
“Then consider it duly noted, ma’am,” Bill said. He looked at the man from the White House. “How about you?”
“I can’t speak for the president—”
“Sure you can. Good Lord, we all know the man’s an empty suit and he’s takin’ his marchin’ orders from somebody else.”
The man ignored that and said, “I have some definite concerns, but . . . I suppose this threat is too big to be ignored. I’ll advise the president that we should turn a blind eye to your activities.”
That sort of tacit, cover-our-own-asses response was the best they could hope for from this administration, Bill knew, so he nodded.
“I guess it’s settled, then. We go in and knock out the camp at Barranca de la Serpiente, whatever it takes.”
“And no one outside of this room, other than the members of your team, ever know about it, is that understood, Mr. Elliott?” the woman cautioned.
“Yes, ma’am,” Bill said.
He could have told her that she didn’t need to worry about the team ever revealing anything. The odds of any of them coming back were almost too small to be reckoned. Two words described this job better than any others.
Suicide mission.
BOOK THREE
THE MISSION
CHAPTER 26
Somewhere in West Texas
The staging area was part of what had once been an Air Force base until it was closed down years earlier when a previous administration had decided that it couldn’t afford to both defend the country and buy reelection votes by giving away millions of free cell phones like prizes in cereal boxes.
After that the neighboring city had bought part of the property and tried to turn it into an industrial park, only to have that effort fail. Since then the old base had sat moldering in the elements, used only for occasional training by reserve units in the area.
As far as all but a few people knew, that was what was going on now. Just some routine training. That accounted for the occasional truck going out to the old base, or helicopters landing and taking off every now and then.
Bill Elliott met the first of those helicopters. He was standing on the tarmac as the bird touched down. A couple of armed guards climbed out first, followed by a t
all, heavily muscled man with a rugged face and hair clipped close to his head. His hands were cuffed in front of him, but his legs were free so he could walk unhindered. Two more guards disembarked from the chopper behind him, and the whole group walked toward Bill.
After nodding to the guards, Bill addressed the prisoner, saying, “Hello, Specialist Bailey. It’s been a while.”
John Bailey frowned at Bill and asked, “Do I know you, sir?”
“Think back,” Bill told him. “About a dozen years ago, in a place where it was hot and sandy.”
“Good Lord,” Bailey breathed. “You’re that spook.”
“Private contractor,” Bill corrected with a smile.
“I never did know what it was you were up to.”
“You weren’t supposed to. You got me where I was goin’, and that was your only job, Bailey.”
“No offense, sir, but in your line of work I’d have thought you’d be dead a long time ago.”
“I’m stubborn about stayin’ alive. The same seems to hold true for you. You’ve survived some bad times.”
An unreadable hardness settled over Bailey’s blunt face as he said, “My problems are my own fault, sir.”
“Most of ’em, more than likely. But we’re gonna talk about it.” Bill turned and motioned for the guards to follow him. “Bring the prisoner.”
A few minutes later, the two of them were seated across from each other at a table in one of the buildings. Bill said to the guards, “You can leave us alone.”
“Our orders are to remain with the prisoner, sir,” one of the men said.
“Well, I’m countermandin’ those orders, son. I’m going to talk to Specialist Bailey in private.”
Bailey said, “You shouldn’t use my rank. I’ve been a civilian for a long time.”
“Man goes through what you went through over there, he’s never completely a civilian again,” Bill said.
Bailey’s massive shoulders rose and fell in acknowledgment of that point.
The guard who had objected said, “You don’t want to be left alone with this animal, sir.”
“The prisoner has no reason to harm me,” Bill snapped, “and I still want to speak with him in private.”
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