by Bob Mayer
Moms already had a syringe in her hand and jabbed it into Lilith’s arm, knocking her out.
Roland’s voice came over the net. “I’m coming down the stairs. Uh, the set to the, uh, east.”
“Doc, I’ve got the Rift in—” She looked about. “I guess the dining room. Front of the house, to the right as you enter; the front left coming from the rear.”
Doc was breathing hard — he was always breathing hard after he jumped. “On my way.”
“I saw six Fireflies leave the house,” Roland reported, walking up next to Moms. He took up a position just behind her, covering her blind spot.
“Eagle?” Moms asked over the radio.
Eagle reported in. “Eighty-two percent secure.”
“We’ve got six Fireflies, people,” Moms announced on the net. “Let’s secure this house as a base of operations and get a Wall around it.”
* * *
Eagle shot the last probe into the ground and checked his display. A continuous flashing red light surrounded Senators Club: a Wall that the Fireflies could not breach. They never ventured that far from their entry point anyway, the record being just short of two miles, but the Wall was an extra measure, and the Nightstalkers excelled at extra measures.
* * *
Nada was peering out a front window, hidden by luxurious curtains. All the lights in the house had been turned off and Doc was at work with his laptop and transmitter, the FireWire having been preconnected this time. This Rift was stable so far, but he worked with an appropriate sense of urgency.
Mac had the rear of the house covered and Roland was still clearing the first floor, with Kirk’s assistance.
It was a damn big house.
There was no sign of anything possessed by a Firefly, but sometimes the little bastards were on the down low, waiting for the exact right moment to attack.
“No one else in here,” Roland finally reported.
Moms switched freqs to talk to Ms. Jones.
“We have containment. The community is Walled. One witness here with us. One scientist through the Rift. Six Fireflies out.”
“Support is six minutes out from a Forward Operating Base,” Ms. Jones replied. “They will take over the civilian security for Senators Club. Six hundred and forty-four people live in there. Six forty-three now. Let’s keep this quiet. Support will keep things looking normal.”
“I’ve got it,” Doc announced.
Moms looked over as the golden glow from the Rift snapped out of existence. Doc went to the laptop and shut the lid, wrapping it in a thermal blanket.
“Rift is closed,” she reported to Ms. Jones, thankful they weren’t having a repeat of the Fun Outside Tucson.
“Good luck and good hunting,” Ms. Jones said, then clicked off the net.
Moms joined Nada by the front window. “What do you think?”
“Clusterfuck,” Nada said. “There’re eyes everywhere in a place like this. Eagle or I walk down the street, they’d call security on us. We don’t fit in.”
“You think the rest of us fit in?” Moms indicated her camos, body armor, combat vest, and weapon.
“You got a point.” Nada frowned. He looked over his shoulder at Doc securing the Rift computer. “Even Doc don’t fit in here. We could use an Asset who understands a place like this.”
“I’ll ask Ms. Jones. This will be our base of operations for the duration. Have Doc Wall it off so we don’t have to worry about a Firefly coming in.”
“Unless one stayed,” Nada warned.
“That might be the case,” Moms said, “but I feel better with a Wall up. And Roland said he saw six going out of the house. Doc?”
“I’ll have it up in two minutes.”
“Good.”
Nada looked around. “I don’t like this house.”
The room was a mess from the dinner party. Moms took a whiff and wrinkled her nose. “We’re going to have to clean this up.”
She noticed that Nada was glancing around with more disgust than she would have preferred.
“It’s just a house, people,” Moms announced over the net. “I don’t care if there’s a baby grand by the front door or two grand staircases. It’s another close and burn. Just like the others. We’ve already accomplished the close.”
Nada shook his head slightly, indicating he thought otherwise, but he didn’t say anything.
There were indeed two huge staircases that twisted down and around into the foyer like parentheses and Nada didn’t understand the redundancy. They both got you to roughly the same place on the same floor. It just made either floor a bit harder to defend if the other floor were breached. In fact, the whole place was going to be a nightmare to secure against infiltration, although they would have the Wall in place to protect against the Fireflies.
“I don’t think the architect was thinking urban defense or room clearing when he drew up the plans,” Moms said, seeing him look about.
The huge, open windows made Nada nervous as he always envisioned a sniper was out there, tracking his every movement. Before they turned them off, the bulbs in the table lamps had been so dim they made tiny circles of feeble lights under their heavy shades while the overhead recessed lighting had been so bright that any sniper within a mile could have seen them scratch their asses.
Moms cocked her head, which meant Ms. Jones’s voice was in her ear. She was nodding, receiving new instructions.
While she was listening, Doc announced: “I’ve placed four probes on the corners. We’ve got a Wall extending five meters square from the house.”
As he was speaking, Doc walked over to the computer and pulled out his small set of instruments, much like a thief had lock picks.
After a minute, Moms turned on the team net. “Support has the Forward Operating Base being set up around ten miles from here in a secure location. They’ve got civilian vehicles for us and we can offload our gear from the Snake. Roland and Kirk and Doc will stay here and clean the place up and keep the house secure. Mac, Nada, and I will STABO out to the FOB and drive back in with the gear. Questions?”
There were none. There rarely were.
“Eagle?” Moms asked. “Time to pick up?”
“I’m en route. Be on the roof, please. Three mikes out.”
“Here,” Doc said, holding out the hard drive. “Ms. Jones would want that.”
Moms stuffed it in one of the pockets on her combat vest.
Moms, Nada, and Mac took the stairs two at a time. Mac pulled on the rope leading to the attic, and the trap door opened and a set of wooden stairs unfolded. They went into the dark, hot space, night-vision goggles active. Mac searched about, then led them over to a window that looked over the backyard. He opened and leaned out. He reached into his butt pack and retrieved a short length of rope.
Moms and Nada checked the snap links on the front of their combat vests, because Protocol said they should check their snap links before a STABO. Mac looped the rope over a cornice on the roof and scooted out. He quickly climbed the rope to the roof.
“Two mikes,” Eagle reported over the net.
Moms followed, then Nada brought up the rear. They gathered on the top of the roof.
“Check your snap link, Mac,” Nada reminded.
Mac pressed the gate, made sure it was looped through the proper part of his vest and not a part that would tear off. “Roger.”
“One mike,” Eagle reported.
Nada was looking about. Huge houses in all directions, otherwise quiet. He could see quite a ways up here, two stories up plus being on top of the steeply peaked roof. He saw the rolling greens of the golf course not far away. Excellent fields of fire there. But overall: “This is gonna suck.”
“Yep,” Moms said.
“Gonna be hard to keep concealment.”
“We will,” Moms said.
“Yeah.” But Nada didn’t sound very confident. Then again, he never sounded very confident.
“Thirty seconds, from the east,” Eagle informed them
.
They turned in that direction. In their goggles they spotted the bulk of the Snake coming toward them, wings vertical. A single hundred-foot-long rope dangled from the belly of the beast. The rope had a series of small loops in it, each fifteen feet apart. Eagle brought the Snake to a hover overhead and the rope slid along the roof. Mac clipped in first to the third attachment point from the end. Moms went farther along the rope and clipped to the second attachment point. Nada was last on the final attachment point. As his snap link closed he radioed Eagle.
“We’re on.”
The Snake lifted straight up.
Mac was drawn up from the roof, followed by Moms, then Nada.
Looking down, Nada was startled. He could swear there was someone on the roof of the garage attached to the house across the street from their new base of operations. But then he was airborne, twisting and turning at the end of the rope as Eagle banked the Snake to head to the FOB, the three figures dangling below the craft.
Looking back, Nada could no longer see that roof.
* * *
Deep in her room, Ms. Jones watched the half-dozen computer displays on the ceiling above her hospital bed. The proximity of Fort Bragg to this latest incident was a fortunate thing. Only sixty miles away and the home of Special Operations, she was able to mass a superb Support Force of active duty personnel, which she preferred over contractors.
They already had an FOB set up, and more personnel and matériel were moving north in convoys and via helicopters and sling loads.
It was nice to have such high-caliber Support, but in the end it would just be the Nightstalkers versus the Fireflies.
It always was.
* * *
Eagle brought the Snake down slowly, allowing Nada to get boots on the ground first, then Moms and Mac. Once they were clear, he deployed the landing gear and settled down right on top of the blinking infrared strobe only visible through his night-vision goggles. The small clearing was set deep in a forest, over two miles from the closest house.
A cluster of Humvees, trucks, and two black SUVs were parked just inside the trees. Troops came out of the woods with camouflage nets and poles and set to work covering the Snake even before Eagle got the back ramp down.
Nada took charge, as Moms was once again listening to Ms. Jones. With Mac and Eagle’s assistance they broke the large team box down into smaller loads. The two SUVs were backed up and the cargo compartments loaded to the gills with the items Nada thought would be needed in their new Area of Operations.
Satisfied, Nada turned to Moms and waited.
She had her head cocked for another thirty seconds, then switched off. “Nothing new,” she reported. “Let’s go.”
A soldier came running up with something. Two stickers. For Senators Club. They applied them in the proper spot on the windshields. He also handed them a transmitter, one for each car.
“What’s this for?” Nada asked, seeing no buttons on it.
The soldier shrugged. “No idea. I was just told you’d need it.”
Mac got in one SUV with Eagle, and Nada took the wheel in the other while Moms took the passenger seat.
“Crap,” Nada said as they pulled out of the FOB, through a narrow dirt track in the woods, lit by chem lights set up by Support.
“What?” Moms asked.
“Civvies. We’re gonna need civvies to move around in that place.”
“We can forage. I’m sure there are a ton of clothes in the closets upstairs.”
Nada gave her a doubtful look but said nothing further. They came out of the forest and turned onto a paved, double-lane state road.
“Besides,” Moms said, “our personal civvies are as bad as wearing uniforms there. We need civvies that fit in.”
Nada repeated his dubious look.
They came to the sign indicating the turn into Senators Club, just as the GPS informed them to make the correct choice and turn. They left the state road onto a road flanked by well-manicured brick walls. There was no guard on the first gate. In fact there was no gate, just a massive, ornate sign. Another, less ornate sign informed them they were now in Senators Village. Behind the trees on either side they could see rows of townhouses.
“Is this where the help lives?” Nada asked.
“No,” Moms said. “They probably live in that trailer park we passed about a mile back. This is where the younger people who aspire to move farther in live.”
Another brick wall and a slightly better sign indicated they were now entering Senators Park. The single-family houses were close together, a smattering of trees giving a moderate sense of privacy. They were mostly one story and small. The next level was Senators Forest, where there were more trees and the houses were larger and held claim to bigger lots. The whole place was like a canal with locks and dams, and you could only enter if you could rise to the level.
“At least they make the class structure formal here,” Nada said.
Moms shrugged. “We got a pass to the inner sanctum and we have a job to do.”
They went through a two-hundred-yard belt of trees, the outer buffer for the inner sanctum of Senators Club. The guard on the gate waved them through, only focused on the sticker and not able to see the occupants through the tinted windshield. “Ms. Jones will have Support take over the security,” Moms added.
“Just have to make sure they don’t get curious and poke into our mission.”
“Ms. Jones will ensure that.”
“Won’t the locals notice they got new security?” Nada wondered.
“People who live in places like this don’t focus much on the hired help,” Moms said, “even the ones with guns.”
Despite the fact they were now in Senators Club proper, it turned out Doctor Winslow had purchased a house that required another passage. A metal gate blocked the way and there was no guard to wave them through, just a sign that said Senators Ridge. Nada slowed down, trying to figure this out, when the transmitter they’d been given beeped and the thing swung ponderously open.
“They got more gates here than Bragg,” Nada said.
There were twenty-four houses along the ridge in four rows of six. It was the highest point around, allowing the occupants to look down on all the others who were scrambling to try and reach this status. The houses also had great views of the surrounding forests and artificial lakes dotted here and there, and the golf course.
“Who lives there?” Nada asked as he drove through, nodding toward a large structure in the middle of a field surrounded by a white fence that stretched for half a mile.
“Horses,” Moms said, spying one of the beasts. “It’s a stable.”
“Geez,” Nada muttered. “The horses live better than the people in Senators Village.”
Thus Nada and Moms and Mac returned, with Eagle, to Senators Club in the late hours of the night, the time when people skipping out on the mortgage usually drove off in the opposite direction. The SUVs screamed government anywhere else, but not here, where SUVs were the vehicle of choice, the bigger the better. Except these vehicles weren’t carrying soccer balls or traveling baseball bags and a half-dozen screaming kids.
The smug voice of the GPS wound them through a warren of curving streets. Each one looked almost exactly the same: hulking houses with square footage in five figures.
“Didn’t the architect of this place know how to draw a straight line?” Eagle wondered over the team net. “And what’s with the lights pointed in, not out?”
The amount of brick and stone and stucco and wood and granite and slate was staggering, and Eagle was correct: exterior lights, unlike at a firebase pointing out to highlight the enemy, were all pointed inward to display each house in case someone was blind and could miss the monstrosities.
“Landscaping is all too close to the houses,” Nada observed. “Good cover for anyone trying to break in.”
“They all have security systems,” Moms said.
Mac snorted. “The cheapest rent-a-cops you can buy and the ch
eapest system, I bet.”
“They did put a lot of money into the gates and fence,” Nada admitted.
As they pulled up into the driveway of the Winslow place, two of the four garage doors opened, indicating Roland was on his game, as expected. As they stopped, the doors slid down behind them.
Roland was standing in the doorway leading to the house.
Everyone got out and opened the cargo doors on the SUVs. Mac, Eagle, and Roland started unloading. Kirk was upstairs providing over-watch.
“There’s stuff in the kitchen,” Roland was saying, “that I don’t even know what they’re for.”
“They’re called appliances,” Moms said.
“There’s drawers with wires and weird machines,” Roland continued, giving his account like he would after having pulled recon on a high-priority high-tech target he needed an Acme to decipher for him.
“Dishwashers, warming ovens, trash compactors, and stuff like that,” Moms said as she started helping the others as Nada stood on top of the stairs leading into the mudroom, taking over-watch just in case they got attacked by a weed whacker. “Might be a good place to stash some weapons. Just don’t push any buttons,” Moms warned.
“I didn’t see any buttons,” Roland said.
“Just stay away from them then,” Moms said. The last thing they needed was for their weapons to get a rinse and hold.
They trooped inside carrying a bunch of gear they might need sooner rather than later. Mac went off to check the security system and Roland went back upstairs to pull over-watch with Kirk. A few minutes later they heard a crash of something and Roland cursing. He came over the net.
“There’s a room full of just dolls and clowns and dollhouses and stuff like that. It’s freaking me out.”
Moms and Nada exchanged a glance. Roland never got freaked out on a mission. But this was different. The house represented something so foreign to her team that she could see dismissal was turning to intimidation, and that wasn’t too far from uneasiness. And, ultimately, fear, although she couldn’t see anyone on this team going there. But then again, Burns had lost it in the Fun Outside Tucson because of a cactus. Everyone had something buried deep from some childhood trauma that could get to them, a reality Moms knew very well. For Roland, apparently it was dolls and clowns.
