“Now that we’re done harassing the man who hip-fires a heavy machine gun about said gun’s name,” he said dryly, “it’s time. Let’s go kick ass.”
#
The individual briefing files for Operation Sun Net had stayed on the data keys given to the unit Commanders, except for being loaded onto the computers used for displays. Most of those computers had no internet connection.
What Majestic found in ONSET’s core database was the complete operation plan. She’d gone digging for details of whatever it was that was causing so much activity across the country, and eventually found it.
She searched for David White in the file, and found a briefing list for “ONSET Strike Team Thirteen”. It laid out the details of the building they were moving against and the shell corp—this Solis Niger—that some cult was using to own it.
The name of the cult meant nothing to her, but Solis Niger rang a bell. It had turned up in something she’d handled recently. Majestic was a hacker, and a lot of information crossed her computer screen in a given period of time, but she was a paid hacker because she could make the connections.
She was curious now. With a practiced hand, she reached across her desk and turned on a computer tower that had been silent till now. It popped up as a link on her computer, as a program confirmed for her that the direct link to it was blocked from all internet access.
This spare tower was her data store, the archive of information that a lot of her employers and most of her targets would have had apoplexy if they realized existed. With a few keystrokes, Majestic loaded up a search program and gave it the company number and name of Solis Niger Corporation.
Then she began setting up audio gear and a direct data feed so she could listen in on this Operation Sun Net.
It looked like it was going to be one hell of a show.
Chapter 41
With a man at the controls who could make the machine do whatever he wanted regardless of its physical limitations, the Pendragon flight was even quieter and smoother than David was used to.
The trip was still nerve-wracking, and the joking atmosphere of the armory had slowly faded back to silence. It went unbroken for most of the flight, enforced by the tiny digital clock in everyone’s helmet display, ticking down toward zero hour.
Everyone on the chopper, even David now, had flown on a Pendragon into action as an ONSET team member multiple times. No one had ever been involved in this widespread and coordinated an operation. Even the Montana Incursion two of the team members had served in as members of OPSI’s High Threat Response teams hadn’t been on this large a geographic scale.
“We’re here,” Pell said softly over the team network. “Salinas River is to the north, our left.”
A shudder ran through the helicopter as he touched the gunship down on the soft California loam. David checked the time as he unstrapped himself from his seat. Forty-five minutes left.
“How close are we?” Commander McDermott asked; his voice quiet even in the radio.
“We are two miles inland along the river from the target,” the pilot replied.
“All right,” the Commander breathed. “All right, people, get your boots on the ground and get moving. We don’t have much time.”
David finished unstrapping himself and followed the ex-SEAL Commander out of the helicopter into the fading autumn light. His clock informed him it was now ten to six Pacific Standard Time.
“You ready for this, David?” McDermott asked softly, standing next to the former cop. “We can still rearrange things if you don’t think you’re ready to lead independently.”
“We have forty minutes and two miles to travel quietly and on foot,” David told his superior crisply. “We don’t have time to fix what isn’t broken, and in the worst case, the Techno-Mages tell me no power on Earth can break our encryption. Go get wet, sir; we’ll see you on the other end.”
The Selkie held David’s gaze for a long moment, then turned without a word and gestured for Mary to follow him. The pair headed off north toward the river, vanishing surprisingly quickly in the gloom and shadows of twilight.
David looked at his own team. Walsh and Hellet both looked ready but nervous. Stone was running his hand down Becky’s crystalline barrel sleeve.
“We good?” he asked them sharply.
“Yup,” Stone confirmed, slinging the heavy machine gun out of the way and speaking in a tone that dared the two women to disagree with him.
“Target is on your GPS units,” David reminded them. “We’ve got two miles and barely thirty minutes to be in position. Let’s move.”
Determined not to show his own discomfort with what was coming, his fear of failure, or his nervousness at being in command, David White set off west, toward the ocean and the Solis Niger building.
#
Majestic’s archive search pinged shortly after the helicopters across the country disgorged their troops. With an eye and an ear on the tactical feed she was hijacking, the hacker turned to her results.
A customer list? That was all. A customer list and a bunch of invoices made out to Solis Niger Corporation from the multinational conglomerate she’d been paid to steal the results from. Shipping addresses given across the country, most of them matching up with locations her stolen feed told her teams were at.
Big invoices…tens of thousands of dollars. Majestic was about to dismiss the find as irrelevant, only coming to mind as the place she’d seen the name, and then she saw which division the invoices were from.
It was the conglomerate’s arms division’s customer list she’d stolen—and the invoices were for hundreds of heavy machine guns normally only sold to armies and governments!
Majestic looked back at her tactical feed. The purchases had been mere weeks before. The delivery dates were all in the past. At least a third of the sites Omicron was moving against had between thirty and forty Browning M2 machine guns there.
They had to know. Didn’t they? Nothing in the plan had said anything about that level of resistance. She needed more information
The woman who was probably the best hacker in the world warmed up her programs and went digging. If there was anything to find, she had less than an hour to find it.
#
It took the ground team, with David in the lead, twenty-seven minutes to cross the forest and reach the edge of the hotel property. At T-minus thirteen minutes, David turned on his radio.
“Thirteen Actual, this is Thirteen Deuce,” he reported. “We’re at the target, beginning surveillance and preparing to move in.”
A small paved parking lot, almost entirely full of midrange cars in the darkening evening, stood between them and the former hotel itself. The hotel was a three-story Victorian-style building, and lights gleamed behind most of its windows. A large set of double doors was directly across the lot from David, and he could see what looked like a side door on the east side of the building along the river.
On the other side of the door, a boxy boathouse was attached to the old hotel building. Dark-stained wood blended into the ground, silhouetted against the light reflected from the river behind the boathouse.
“Roger, Deuce,” McDermott replied over the radio. “We are still at least six or seven minutes out. Will infiltrate through boathouse and the back door; you move in through the main entrance, as per the plan. Good luck.”
“Luck, sir,” David said softly into the radio before allowing it to fall into silence. He looked at his team. “Let’s move in,” he ordered. “Slowly—use the cars for cover. We have time.”
A cold shiver ran down his spine, and David looked back at the building. At this distance, he couldn’t See auras or make out heat signatures with his IR goggles, so he couldn’t tell how many people were inside or where they were.
Everything looked right for what should be happening. Lights were on; people were there. All the indicators suggested that it was exactly what OSPI’s intelligence people had said it would be.
Yet, somehow, as David
joined his team in crouching behind the first line of cars, he felt a deep foreboding. He kept looking for what was causing it, as part of him knew that something was wrong. With McDermott in seal-shape, though, the only person who could prepare for that something…was him.
#
Majestic stared at her search results in horror. It wasn’t much—not much at all—but it was enough to paint an ugly picture.
First, the invoices for hundreds of machine guns. She was sure now that similar invoices existed for the rest of Omicron’s target sites, under other front companies.
Second, she had an esoteric collection of blog entries, mostly by truck drivers but some by commodity distributors, about an odd cult purchasing vast quantities of silver—tons upon tons of the stuff. None of the truckers were so blind to confidentiality to say where the cult was, but they dropped enough details.
Third was a similar note by an agent from a California firm specializing in bullet reloading gear. The agent called the cult “rich loonies” and said they’d purchased enough reloading gear to equip a good-sized ammunition factory—cleaning his firm out, in fact. They’d also specifically asked if the equipment could handle making silver bullets. The agent had found the whole thing laughable. Majestic did not.
Equipment to manufacture bullets, vast quantities of silver, and hundreds of heavy machine guns had been delivered to a small number of sites. A pathetically easy hack into the reloading gear company’s computers gave Majestic the destination of the gear.
The Solis Niger building. The Cult of the Black Sun had turned the building into a munitions factory and shipped tons of silver into it, and probably hundreds of thousands of silver bullets out.
None of this was hard to find, and Majestic couldn’t believe that Omicron, with their analysts and experts, hadn’t found it. She doubted they were as good as she, but they had more people, more time…and a government sanction to access people’s files.
This meant that someone, somewhere along the line, had either messed up or betrayed everyone. If there were traitors in OSPI, then they’d told the Black Sun what was coming. That meant that David White and the rest of the Omicron strike teams weren’t walking into churches full of unsuspecting cultists to arrest.
They were walking into fortresses guarded by fanatics with heavy weapons loaded with the ammunition needed to kill even Omicron’s best. Majestic’s research in ONSET’s files left her with no illusion what those Brownings, loaded with the silver bullets all of that reloading gear would have made, could do to ONSET’s supernaturals.
In slightly under two minutes, all hell was going to break loose unless she, Majestic, did something. Majestic was not the kind of person who did things. She’d built a life of secrecy, theft, crime, and absolutely no loyalty to anything beyond a contract.
She’d hacked into this whole organization out of curiosity and dug into the Black Sun’s operation for the same reason. Now she found herself holding information those men and women out there needed to have. Information she knew had a price, and she’d never not asked for a price before.
Majestic looked at the tactical feed and knew her curiosity had driven her into a choice. She’d never had information this immediately relevant—this life-threatening to so many—before. Till this whole mess, she’d rarely put a thought into another’s well-being.
She realized she’d already made the decision. It wasn’t the one she’d expected, and it was surprisingly easy, considering the life she’d lived and all the things she’d done.
With less than sixty seconds to go, Vanessa Loring dove for her microphone.
#
David took another quick glance toward the double doors into the hotel, then ran, still crouched, to conceal himself beside another big SUV. Stone kept pace with him, moving slowly but surely through the parking lot. They were hiding behind the last line of cars; Walsh and Hellet back a row.
Now only a fifteen-foot space of concrete, obstructed only by bushes too low to serve as cover, separated the quartet from their target. David checked the time. Forty seconds.
“Four-oh seconds, people,” he breathed into the radio. There was no response, but he saw Stone checking his grip and the safety on his modified M60. The dimming twilight reflected off of the crystal of the gun’s enchanted cooling sleeve. David checked his own weapon.
His foreboding had only grown stronger, and David turned on his infrared goggles and swept the building. It was strange. He knew there were people in there, but he couldn’t see them. The ground-floor windows were all closed and shuttered, and it didn’t help his mood.
He was reaching for his Sight, to search again for auras now he was closer, when an unauthorized transmission broke into his radio channel.
“It’s a trap!” an unidentified semi-panicked female voice snapped on the channel. It wasn’t ONSET Thirteen’s channel, though—it was the ops-wide channel, the one they were supposed to use to report mission completion. The channel everyone would get.
“They have machine guns and silver rounds,” the voice continued, less panicked and firming as she continued to speak. “They’re waiting for you.”
David turned his Sight on the building, but his prescience clicked with the voice. He knew it was true. Dozens of auras were waiting, just the other side of the wall. They weren’t listening to a service. He’d seen auras like that before—men waiting for action. Waiting for the signal to do violence. If he couldn’t see them on infrared, it was because the building was shielded against it.
Which meant the stranger on the radio was right. It was a trap.
“Thirteen-Deuce—trap confirmed!” he barked into the ops-wide channel himself. “They’re all traps. Abort!”
“Abort,” confirmed Warner immediately. “Abort and extract if possible. Maximum force authorized!”
It was too late. He knew it was too late. With seconds to spare before dozens of simultaneous attacks went in, most would go in regardless. In his own case…if Thirteen tried to pull back, the gunners would open fire across the open concrete.
“Stone,” David snapped, unslinging his weapon. “Hose the building. Now,” he barked, as the big man hesitated.
It was enough. Stone’s face turned grim and he lifted the massive weapon. David could See the other man’s power flaring as his shoulder and other recoil-absorbing areas turned to granite.
Then the machine gun opened fire with a terrifying crescendo. Bullets smashed into the walls of the hotel as Stone walked his fire across the front of the former hotel. The façade pitted and holes blew through the stucco. For a full twelve seconds, the only sound in the world was the crashing thunder of the modified M60.
Then Stone had to reload, and the Church of the Black Sun unleashed its surprise the moment he stopped shooting. The shuttered windows swung open, and explosives blasted out pre-marked gun ports in the hotel wall. As the debris drove David and Stone back behind the cars and the thunder of explosions rang through the air, David and his half-team found themselves facing the black muzzles of over a dozen heavy machine guns in a fortified position.
Before they fired, though, David heard the sound of other guns firing and knew even his warning had failed. A terrifying deep sound like a repeated hammerblow echoed across the parking lot, and only David’s Empowered hearing allowed him to pinpoint it. The gunfire came from the boathouse and lasted only a few seconds.
David knew, with the certainty that came with being a perceiver, that McDermott and Lynch were dead, cut to pieces by the heavy silver bullets they’d probably never even seen coming. In seal form, McDermott probably had never even got the warning about the trap.
The same repeating hammer sound came again, only much closer. David dived away from the SUV he was hiding behind as four streams of silver ripped it to pieces, the igniting fuel tank serving merely to illuminate the shattered debris. Other streams of silver bullets ripped apart the rest of the front row, the gasoline flares and explosions only the punctuation to the violence ripping open the Cali
fornia twilight.
“Stone,” David bellowed across the radio. He could see the machine gunner taking cover behind a Hummer. The ex-cop didn’t think even the military version could stand up to .50 caliber bullets, let alone the civilian version.
“Right,” the gunner replied. “Long, wildly uncontrolled bursts, sah!”
David barely had time to realize that the younger man thought he was calling for suppressive fire before the big Empowered left his flimsy cover with a new drum in his M60 and began firing. Stone loosed neat, controlled bursts at gun slits. Most of the guns he fired at stopped shooting, at least for a moment.
The unexpectedly promoted team Commander looked back at his other two squad mates. Walsh was showing the use of her talents as a massive weaving web of what appeared to be weeds broke through the concrete with a CRACK that echoed even through the gunfire. The weeds grabbed up cars and concrete and bound them into a shield around the two women. Hellet, apparently relying on Walsh to protect her, was throwing bolts of fire from her right hand. Like Stone, the guns she aimed at stopped shooting.
As he thought that, though, one of the guns Stone had silenced opened up again. His people were killing the crews, but the weapons themselves were too sturdy to be damaged indirectly. They couldn’t see the guns to damage them, and there didn’t seem to be any shortage of gunners in the ex-hotel.
And they were focusing on Stone. David watched in horror as the big man intentionally walked forward, out of the burning inferno of the parking lot. His neat bursts kept hitting gun slits, but the silver streams of bullets now swept toward him. Bullets slammed into him, sparking off flesh turned to stone and driving the big man back and then to the ground as they unbalanced him.
They were out of time. Out of options. Fear flashed through David, and he felt the fire in his stomach again. It was familiar this time, and he reached for it. He forgot his fear of becoming inhuman. He forgot his fear of exposure. He forgot his fear of what he might do. All of it was nothing against his fear for the people he was responsible for.
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 33
