Firepower

by John Cutter

  The celebrants cheered at that, and Vince marched with them through the gateway, where they handed in their flashlights and torches and headed for the tables set out to both sides.

  Vince got a paper plate of food and mingled. He stood there, toying with his food and listening, close to the beer barrels, hoping someone in the know would get drunk enough to talk about Operation Firepower in his hearing. As he ate, he heard the Brethren mostly talking about how big their four by four trucks were and what football teams to bet on. Then Gustafson was there, laying his hand on Vince’s arm.

  He drew Vince aside. “Vincent — your mission takes place tonight.”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Yes… In fact, I’m afraid we’ll have to cut your celebration short. Mac and Gunny Hansen will escort you to the roof of this complex — all the way on the top of the ridge. There is something you haven’t seen there. It’s quite well hidden. A helipad!”

  “Who’s flying it, General?”

  “Marco is a skilled heli pilot. He’s already up there. Your weapons and the briefing material on your target await you in the helicopter. Mac will go along.”

  “I don’t think I want anyone underfoot during the operation, sir.”

  “He’ll remain on the heli. And now…”

  Mac Colls and Gunny Hansen, both armed with Glocks, stepped grimly up to them.

  “Let’s go, Bellator,” Mac said brusquely.

  Glad he had his combat knife with him, Vince followed them into the bunker and up many flights of metal stairs to a steel door. Colls unlocked it and they went up another three flights to a steel ladder built into a concrete wall. It rose to an open trap door.

  Colls called out, “Sergeant Colls coming up with two!”

  “Come ahead!” called someone above.

  Colls climbed the ladder, and Vince followed.

  They emerged in an emplacement, a steel and concreted semi-cupola, overlooking the compound and the land beyond.

  Turning to look east, through the open back of the emplacement, Vince could see the silhouette of a twin-turbine H225 rotorcraft. It was one big chopper…

  “Get aboard, Bellator,” Colls said.

  *

  The big helicopter’s rotors hammered against the night sky as Vince gazed out the window at the moon-glimmed peaks of the southern Appalachian Mountains.

  Vince was buckled into a seat on the forward port-side of the heli. Colls was just across the aisle from him. Marco was flying. Mac Colls glowered straight ahead.

  No love there, Vince thought, amused. He’d like to see me fail in this mission. Or better yet — die.

  Vince opened the briefing folder again, rechecking the map and “mission estimates”.

  Estimated adversaries: four to six. Heavily armed. Uzis, assault rifles.

  Primary mission: eliminate Dex Stirner. A photo of Stirner was included. Secondary mission: eliminate his men.

  Gustafson’s got a lot of confidence in me, Vince thought ruefully.

  Stirner was apparently in a farmhouse atop a hill just half a mile west of the Oostanaula River. There were no houses close by.

  Vince’s loadout wasn’t bad. He had already inspected the FN-SCAR — light Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle — with six clips in a belt. Gustafson, as a civilian, wasn’t supposed to be able to have access to an FN-SCAR. Vince had used them extensively in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. There was a 9mm Glock, fully loaded, with extra clip. He’d already put on the chest armor: JPCs; a Jumpable Plate Carrier vest. There was a set of shortwave-infrared night-vision goggles.

  The rifle, however, had no suppressor, nor did the Glock. There was no infrared sighting on the FN-SCAR either.

  The loadout was in an unzipped, padded nylon bag on the deck beside him. The bag was not something he would normally carry into combat. It would tear too easily.

  He looked down at the bag again and said, “Mac — no sound suppressors? They’re not that hard to get. Easier than the rifle.”

  Colls gave him a look of cold hostility and shrugged.

  “That your idea, to leave off the suppressors?” Vince asked, in a genial tone — though loud enough to be heard over the rumbling engines.

  But there was nothing genial about the question.

  Colls scowled. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying it looks like you’d like me to get spotted and KIA on this mission. Or pulled in by the Georgia cops.”

  “You don’t question your gear,” Colls growled. “And you don’t question me. We have rank in the Brethren. We have chain of command. You’re a newbie, a private and not even First Class.”

  Vince bit his tongue to keep from saying You wouldn’t know what good military order is if it bit you in the ass. Neither would “the General”.

  He had the skinny from Deirdre about Mac Colls getting a dishonorable discharge from the Marines for white supremacy activity and other misdeeds. The guy was a blot on the escutcheon of the US Armed Forces.

  But he only nodded and said, “Sure thing, Sarge.” Vince looked at his watch. “We should be approaching infil.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Colls said.

  Vince removed his seat belt and reached down into the bag, drew out a black balaclava face mask. He pulled it over his head. He preferred face and hands blacking but they hadn’t given him any. He pulled on the tight-fitting black gloves — he had no desire to leave fingerprints and his hands needed darkening. He hung the SWIR NVD goggles around his neck on a strap. His combat knife was in its steel sheath on his hip. He buckled on the ammo belt, with its clips and the two flashbangs, and then holstered the Glock. Then he picked up the rifle and slung it over a shoulder and went to stand by the door, one hand gripping a stanchion, boots braced.

  He felt a certain comfort in the routine.

  Marco reduced altitude till they were just over the treetops and switched off all the heli’s lights. It was now flying illegally, unlit and in an unauthorized airspace. Since it was a civilian helicopter, there were big numbers painted on the fuselage. If they weren’t false markings, then it was taking a chance to fly into a kill-space with those numbers. Someone could spot them and write them down if the moon was bright enough. If he’d been running the mission, he’d have blocked them off somehow — maybe stopped along the way to do it.

  “Two minutes out from the LZ,” Marco called.

  The mission folder — which would shortly be destroyed — had designated a plowed-under tobacco field for the landing zone. It was a quarter mile from the farmhouse the field was associated with, screened by a windbreak, and it was almost half a mile from the target. He had a compass on his watch, but he didn’t need to look at it. The plan was for the heli to wait on the field, engines and lights shut down. Zipped into a pants pocket, Vince had a burner cell phone he’d been given for the mission, in case the H225 had to take off and a Plan B was needed.

  The deck tilted; the big twin engines changed their tone to something lower as the heli dropped. A gut-plunging feeling — and then a double thump, fore and aft.

  Colls was up, hitting a switch, and the big steel door hummed aside.

  “Hit the ground,” Colls said. “Twenty degrees northwest, gravel road, straight up the hill. You’ve got four hours max. Make it less. Now get moving.”

  “Yeah, good luck to you too,” Vince said. He jumped down, boots sinking a little in the turned soil. The engines shut off, whining down to silence, the rotors slowing, chuff-chuffing to a stop, as Vince took the FN-SCAR in his hands and started across the plowed field.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Vince didn’t expect to use the rifle. It was mostly in the way, for a job like this. But it was easier to run with it in his hands.

  If he had to fire the FN-SCAR or the Glock, the shot would give away the game. Which might be okay and might not. He still didn’t know how many men were up there — they might hear a shot and rush him from all directions. Too bad Colls hadn’t given him a chance to choose his ow
n armament. He’d have asked for a crossbow.

  He slogged out of the field, climbed over a barbed-wire fence — easy if you have climbed over a few hundred of them before — and moved up through an overgrown apple orchard. The trees were silhouettes now, barely lit in the filtered moonlight. The air had the spicy smell of decaying apples.

  Vince passed through the orchard and reached a steeper part of the hill. He climbed, soon coming to thick brush, and angled right, stopping now and then to listen for voices or footfalls. He heard nothing but an owl hooting and the breeze rustling the trees.

  Fifty yards more, and he came to the gravel road wending up the hill. He’d be too exposed on the road; he’d move alongside it in the brush. Flanking the road were stands of hornbeam and turkey oak, and the occasional pine, all crowded by scrubby beargrass, witch hazel and buckeye. The trees were still partially leaved but the ground was swathed in the first fall of southern autumn. There was just enough room in there to move and Vince plunged in, slipping as quietly as he could between the shrubs and trees, his eyes adjusting to the deeper darkness. A night bird called plaintively. The scents of pungent plants and, somewhere, a dead animal, were musty on the humid air. He trudged on up the hill, sometimes having to force his way between small trees. Starting to breathe hard, he lifted the balaclava from the lower part of his face to give him more air. To his right, the gravel road was a dark-blue slash between the shrubs.

  When he thought he was two-thirds of the way up the hill, he stopped under a pine to catch his breath and listen. Nothing but the owl, the night bird, and something rustling lightly overhead. He glanced up and saw two eyes glowing golden-brown at him. Then the thing shifted, and he could make out the silhouette of a racoon climbing up the pine bole.

  He waited another minute, listening, thinking about the FBI agents who were in the area and the parts of his plan Gustafson and Colls knew nothing about.

  Sweat itched its way down his back. He heard no sound of alarm and no one coming.

  Vince started out again, and in a few minutes saw the road was curving sharply to the left. The moon had slipped out of the clouds and he could see the blackened remains of the lightning-burnt oak at the curve.

  The brief had said follow the road up to a lightning-blasted oak at a sharp left turn. Around the curve, the road would quickly reach the gated compound. At that point there would be security cameras.

  He wasn’t within the observation radius of the cameras now, but he would be when he got closer to the target. He would have to look for a blind spot. If he didn’t find one, he’d have to rush past the cams and trust to luck — and probably simply shoot some white supremacist knuckleheads who thought they were more badass than they were.

  Vince lowered the black balaclava to cover the rest of his face, then moved forward in a crouch till he got to the blasted oak. He laid the assault rifle across two knobby roots, in the shadows, where he could easily find it later. Then he slipped around the side of the oak within view of the gate to his right. It was a red-painted metal-pipe gate under a strong light. There was a small gatehouse; little more than a metal and glass box resembling an old-style phone booth. The guard sat in the gatehouse looking at his cellphone — a thin guy with his head pig-shaved, blurry, overlapping tattoos on his cheeks, his mouth slackly open. He wore a brown leather jacket with some kind of vintage military insignia on its shoulders.

  Beyond the gate, at the crown of the hill, was a large barnlike house with a silo attached. It was one of those houses literally converted from a barn. Windows and a front door had been neatly built into the old, refurbished barn structure. Two floors of rooms had been added inside. The silo was now a sort of tower, with little windows going up its side. There was a light atop it, and lights in the windows, and one over the front porch. There were supposedly no women or children in the place, but Vince was making no assumptions about that. His uncertainty was another reason he didn’t want to use his firearms unless he had to.

  There was a camera on the light pole at the gate and another one visible above the front door. Just standard home security stuff. The side of the house nearest him was dark, deeply shadowed, the silo blocking the moon. He doubted there were cameras on that side, unless they had infrared. Not impossible.

  An ordinary barbed-wire fence enclosed the property, running up to the gate on both sides. Vince slipped through the underbrush into the darker area near the fence, crouched by the bole of a pine, and put on his night-seeing goggles. The view sprang out in shades of green, gray, and black. He touched zoom and looked closely at that side of the house. No cameras. But when he looked left, he saw a sentry coming down the fence line about sixty strides away. He was a stocky guy with a pig-shaved round head. He was carrying an Uzi on a strap over his shoulder, his body language conveying boredom. He wore a sleeveless Levi jacket with vintage Nazi SS patches on its breast pockets.

  Vince wasn’t sure, yet, if he was going to have to kill the guy in the gatehouse. But the patrol sentry was in the way. He was going to have to die.

  Deirdre’s report on the place left Vince confident every man here was a domestic terrorist or would soon be. He had no concern about killing them. Of course, since it was all extra-judicial, he hadn’t run that part of his plans by FBI Agent Corlin. Nor did she ask. She didn’t want to know.

  Vince took off the SWIR goggles, drew the combat knife, slipped back a little from the fence so that he was hidden by the tree trunk, and waited.

  As a young soldier, Vince had sometimes seen a man he knew he would have to kill and had let himself think about what kind of man the tango might be; about the guy’s possible wife and family, about who had misled him to become the enemy. Vince would think about how this guy had been born, lived his life, and come all the way to that spot — just for Vince to kill him.

  Unsettling thoughts. He’d eventually learned not to think them. Now, once he was sure his target would be a “good kill”, he did the job with ruthless, methodical efficiency and put the kill behind him.

  He was aware he might have lost touch with something in getting to that point. But he was… who he was.

  The sentry got closer, humming tunelessly under his breath. Vince waited till he was past him, then he went over the barbed-wire fence in one smooth motion — knowing the sound would make the sentry turn around.

  The man turned, frowning, probably expecting to see a possum.

  Instead, the Neo-Nazi saw a knife flashing, two dark eyes in a black mask… as Vince brought the knife out in a tantojutsu side-slash, flashing it out tightly, arcing into the guy’s throat — cutting through his larynx. The sentry couldn’t even get a gurgle out. The target flailed as Vince jerked the knife free and instantly drove it back into the man’s temples, the razor-sharp knife and Vince’s practiced thrust punching through skull bones and into brain.

  The sentry slumped, already dead when Vince pulled the knife free. Vince wiped the blade on the man’s Nazi memorabilia, sheathed it, and — careful to avoid the gushing blood — rolled the body under the lowest strand of wire. He reached under, gave it an extra push so it started rolling down the slope into the brush. He put the goggles back on and looked around, half expecting to see another sentry. No one so far.

  Vince moved through the shadows across the weedy lot to the side of the house.

  He looked toward the guy in the gatehouse. Still staring at his phone.

  Maybe being a dumbass will save your life, Nazi boy, Vince thought.

  He turned toward the back of the house, moved to crouch under a curtained window, listened, heard unintelligible male voices. One of them laughed.

  Still crouching, Vince moved on to the back corner of the house. He listened, then looked — and saw no one. He slipped up to the back door, drew the Glock, and quietly tried the knob. The door was unlocked.

  He opened the door a crack and looked through onto a well-lit hallway with polished oak walls. The corridor led to a door into a room where a brawny man in a t-shirt stood with his
back turned, his hands in his pockets, talking to someone Vince couldn’t see. On the back of the t-shirt were the words White Lives Matter. A swastika was tattooed — clumsy blue jailhouse tattooing — around the man’s right forearm.

  “Yeah I don’t know, if they are going to bitch about us on the Whitesite, then we got to stand up for Ragnar and call ’em out for it,” said the big man down the hall. “Anyway, I gotta go up and talk to Dex…”

  So Dex Stirner is upstairs, Vince thought.

  To Vince’s left were a landing and a stairway to the second floor. He slipped through the door, closed it quietly, and stepped close to the stairwell, around the corner from the corridor.

  He heard the big t-shirted man’s approaching footsteps and moved quietly two steps up the stairs, drew his knife and flattened against the wall. But his boots made the floorboards squeak, and the man called out, “Boss, that you?”

  The guy stalked up to the stairs — as Vince swung the knife underhand so that it came up and caught the big man in the throat, cutting through his larynx. The big guy — square-jawed, flattop hair — clutched at Vince’s hands.

  Vince yanked the knife loose and within a tenth of a second had buried it in the big guy’s left eye, all the way to the hilt, so that the blade was deep in his brain.

  White Lives Matter guy went down. Vince cleaned the knife on him, thinking, So far so good. He turned to climb the stairs — and saw a bald, heavy-set older man on the landing above, glaring down at him.

  He was wearing a flak jacket, swinging a Smith & Wesson .44 toward Vince’s center-mass. Dex Stirner.

  The feds hadn’t gotten the message through.

  Vince hissed, “I’m with the Bureau!”

  Not exactly true, but close enough.

  Stirner hesitated. “What?” He had a deeply lined face, and his teeth were bared and his forehead sweaty as he stared down at Vince.