by Sean McFate
“Me?!” I exclaimed, breathless.
“Correct. Also, Winters probably knows you are here, in the city. He will be coming for you,” said Lava, and I felt the blood drain from my face. Lava nodded, as if reading my mind and affirming my dread.
“Pretty impressive for a guy who’s only been on the ground for seventy-two hours,” said Tye with a smirk. “That’s gotta be a record. We should create a new category for you called the FUMTU Awards.”
“FUMTU?” I asked.
“Fucked Up More Than Usual.”
I ignored his grin and turned to Lava. “How did they find me so fast? How could they possibly get my file? Know where I would be? I’ve gone over it a million times in my mind, Lava, and I don’t get it.”
“You should have stayed put, Tom, and let me run the traps at Apollo first,” said Lava, kicking my dead bumper. It fell off.
“Yeah, I know. But I—”
Lava held up a hand to silence my excuses. Tye rolled his eyes. I felt like a butter bar again.
“Let’s go inside,” said Lava, and we followed him into the trailer.
“Real shithole of a place you got here, Locke,” said Tye as he entered.
“Yeah, Lava said the same exact thing two nights ago.”
“The man ain’t wrong.”
“Suit up, Locke. We need to get you out of here,” said Lava.
I was already packed to go, hoping he would say that. Nonetheless, I went over my equipment one last time. Old habit.
“Learn anything at Apollo?” I asked, as I put on my Apollo armor.
“Nada. They think you’re off the board.”
“KIA,” added Tye. “In Syria, a year ago by Jase Campbell’s team. Curiously, he’s MIA as of today. Go figure.”
Winters had sent Campbell’s team after me in Iraq. He was good, too. “If Apollo didn’t ambush me, then maybe it was Winters,” I said.
“Negative,” said Tye. “You’d be dead if it was Winters’s guys.”
“Agreed,” said Lava. “Unless they’re framing terrorists, they don’t operate in daylight. Neither do we, for that matter. You were definitely hit by govvies.” Govvies referred to government actors such as the military, intelligence, and law enforcement. It was a term of derision at Apollo.
“How is that possible?” I asked, slipping my Mark 23s into thigh holsters. Now wasn’t the time for subtlety. “I just landed and no one knows I’m here but you. The CIA is good, but not that good. I have no digital signature, so the NSA can’t track me. Anyway, they’re not even looking for me. Everyone thinks I’m dead.” I assumed Lava and Tye didn’t give up my position to the govvies, although I was beginning to wonder. Trust no one.
“I don’t understand it either, Tom. Until I do, we’re all at risk,” said Lava in an unsettling voice, looking at Tye, who nodded. His smirk had vanished. “I got a place in Virginia, in the Shenandoah. It’s real primitive but you’ll get used to it. I’m taking you there until I figure this out.” Lava turned to me, holding up an index finger in my face. “And stay put this time!”
“Yes sir,” I said automatically. We began loading my equipment into the back of Lava’s armored SUV. “How goes the war with Winters?”
“It’s a draw at the moment. It seems the turncoats are always one step ahead of us,” said Tye as we carried a ballistic chest to the vehicle. “For now.”
“Maybe you have a leak in your organization. Someone with divided loyalties,” I said as we heaved the chest into the vehicle’s back.
“A few months back, we launched a mole hunt and it almost tore the organization apart,” said Lava, tossing the grenade launcher on the backseat. “It led nowhere. I believe our opsec is tight.” Opsec, or operational security, is a religion at Apollo. It meant keeping a secret.
“I don’t know how they’re tailing us, but they are,” said Tye.
The time had come to ask the most important question. If I couldn’t trust Lava now, then I was already a dead man. “Do you think Winters blew the bridge?”
Both stopped what they were doing and turned to me. Before Lava could answer, he received a text. “We need to leave now! A renegade Apollo assault team is inbound.”
Tye sprinted to the driver’s seat and cranked the engine.
“Leave the rest!” commanded Lava, and I dove into the back, SCAR in hand.
“Go, go, go!” shouted Lava as we crashed down the garage door and fishtailed around the corner, accelerating down the abandoned street. In seconds, we cleared six blocks.
“Wait! Slow down,” said Lava, and Tye looked at him quizzically. “We need to observe this. Maybe it will tell us how they’re tracking us.”
“That’s suicide,” warned Tye. “They’ll nab us for sure.”
Lava didn’t speak but shot him a command glance. I knew that look, and it always made me feel lower than whale shit.
“Wilco,” responded Tye, soldier speak for I understand and will comply. We donned our full-face Apollo helmets with night vision, and Tye switched to blackout drive. The street became day in the vehicle’s infrared headlights. Lava pointed two fingers to the left, and we drove down a side alley.
“This should be good,” he said over the earpiece. “Pull in here.”
Tye took a right and we bumbled over rotting train tracks to a decrepit brick warehouse, much bigger than my safe house. It looked 1890s, with smashed-out windowpanes and a multistory coal smokestack. A rusty corrugated-steel sheet covered an antiquated truck entrance.
“Hold on,” said Tye. He put the SUV in reverse and rammed through the corrugated-steel sheet. Tye was about to turn off the engine when Lava’s hand blocked him.
“Leave it running,” said Lava. “Grab your shit.”
Tye grabbed his sniper rifle, a highly modified Finnish SAKO TRG 42. “They can run, but they’ll just die tired,” he joked, sort of.
I flipped on my night vision gunsight and could see everything my barrel saw, plus what was behind and ahead of me. Apollo fabricated custom equipment for its operatives, no expense spared, and it was always better than what the SEALs or Delta had. Always. It was a great recruitment tool, too.
We climbed up flights of broken stairs and then a rusty iron ladder to the roof. The place smelled like rotting machines. Once on the roof, I could see the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, and the National Airport across the Potomac River. A chilling winter breeze cut across us.
“Hear them?” asked Lava. Tye nodded, but I heard nothing.
“There,” said Tye, pointing down the river. I strained my eyes and then saw them. Four black helicopters flew in perfect formation and stealth, skimming the Potomac. They were unlike any aircraft I had seen before: double rotors on top and a pusher propeller in the back. There were weapons pods on each flank and a 20 mm chain gun.
“Here they come,” said Lava. “Move!” We slid down the rusty ladder, evading the choppers’ thermal cameras. They flew directly over us, as quiet as golf carts and no thwop-thwop-thwop sound. I always thought “stealth helicopter” was an oxymoron, but apparently not.
“Follow me,” commanded Lava, and we walked to the edge of the roof. Through my night vision, I saw the four helicopters hovering above my safe house. Ropes dropped from their sides and men fast-roped down. Sixteen in all. The choppers disappeared into the night while the men breached the roof and dropped into the warehouse, followed by flashes and loud explosions from within the building. The attack was withering, even from our distance, and took less than a minute.
There was no way I could have survived that, I realized.
“Show’s over, let’s go,” said Lava. A powerful spotlight shown down on us, and then another and another and another. Rotor downdraft beat the air around us, but all I could hear was a steady whine, like a high-speed train engine, and not chopper blades. The stealth helicopters’ 20 mm antitank cannons were leveled at our chests.
“Move and die,” came a voice over a loudspeaker. We were surrounded. Lava and Tye slowly p
ut their weapons down and raised their hands. I followed their lead; we had no options beyond death. Armed men wearing the same body armor as those in the skyscraper streamed up the ladder and pushed us hard to the ground. In seconds, we were flex-cuffed and searched, removing all weapons. They even found my handcuff keys, both handcuff shims (belt buckle and rear beltloop), and the ceramic razor blade sewn into my tactical pants. In the distance, I saw the sixteen commandos evacuate my former safe house, now ablaze with a fire plume fifty feet high. Fire trucks wailed in the distance.
They yanked us to our knees and the leader removed our helmets one by one. Lava stared straight ahead, face revealing nothing. However, Tye’s faced revealed everything: rage, murder, death. When they got to me, I heard the leader snort in contempt, then look up and wave.
A cable lowered from one of the black helicopters, and two men wound it around my chest and under the armpits. The leader looked up at the pilot and gave him a thumbs-up. The helicopter shot straight up, yanking me off my feet and sucking the air out of my lungs. I began rotating clockwise in midair but could see men putting hoods over Lava and Tye. They were not nice about it, either.
“Lava! Tye!” I shouted, but my voice was drowned out by distance. Ten-story buildings passed beneath my boots as we zoomed over the waterfront and then descended to the river, where they dunked me at high speed, which was like being waterboarded by a hydrofoil. My body skimmed the surface, each body blow knocking the wind out of me.
Dicks, I thought, knowing the pilots were having fun. I was still coughing water out of my lungs when we climbed sharply, and the Potomac looked black in the moonless night. I spun in wild arcs as the chopper banked, all the while attempting to loosen my wrists behind my back, but it was no use. We crossed the far bank, passing over Route 50, and I could see the lights of the Pentagon.
The helicopter slowed to a hover above six black Chevy Suburbans, arranged in a circle with their headlights on and facing inward, making a perfect LZ. The pilots lowered me down into the middle of the circle, lined with more commandos in black, all guns on me. The towline went slack, and I hit the ground hard. The chopper accelerated back into the night. The commandos slowly walked toward me in unison as I struggled to stand up, my hands tied behind my back.
“Go ahead, assholes! It’s the only chance you’ll get!” I shouted, but they came to a halt, weapons trained on my head. A vehicle door opened, and an ornate cane emerged, followed by a tall man with a limp.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“Winters,” I hissed as he hobbled toward me. He looked different. Meaner, ghastlier, more evil.
“Did you really think I would let you get away a second time, Locke?” he rasped.
“I’m going to strangle you with my own hands!” I screamed, and two commandos rushed to restrain me, forcing me to my knees before him. “I’ll beat you to death with that cane!”
Winters laughed as they placed the hood over my head.
Chapter 35
Lin was trapped. She heard men speaking Russian on the floor above her, but the accents were strange. A few spoke like it was their second language. It sounded like there were six of them, and they were definitely military, and not FSB. I need backup, she thought, and tried her mobile phone, but her signal was dead inside the hidden bunker. The hacker smiled despite his broken nose. He knew she was trapped, too.
She looked around, desperately. The secret room took up half the McMansion’s basement and was part armory and part electronics workbench. It had its own filtrated ventilation system and was lined with paneling that blocked electronic signals. Ballistic chests were stacked against the walls, alongside homemade weapons racks and shelves full of spy equipment. Everything except a landline.
“Do you have a phone down here?” she whispered in Russian to her prisoner, but he laughed through his duct tape gag. Furiously she scoured the armory for a way to communicate to the outside world. There were satellite phones and military-grade radios, but nothing usable. Then she found a stack of laptops under a ballistic jacket, flipped one open. It whirred to life but had a lock screen. Maybe I can make a call using the laptop, she thought. Although it was electronically locked, it did have a camera and fingerprint reader.
“Can you unlock this?” she asked the imprisoned hacker. He looked blank, as if he had never seen a computer before. She grabbed his right hand and he fought her, yelping through his gag. Both his hands were flex-cuffed around a vertical pipe, giving him little room to resist.
“Mmmmmm!! Mmmmmm!!!!!” he grunted in protest as she pried open his right index finger with pliers and pressed it against the finger pad. The screen went blue with acceptance and then prompted a face shot. She held up the computer camera up to his face, hoping it would see him and unlock itself. The hacker dodged and looked away, as she chased him around the pipe.
Screw this, she thought, and gut-punched him. The hacker slumped over, facing the floor, coughing through the gag. She grabbed the back of his head and yanked up while holding the computer in the other hand, so it could see him. The screen came alive. Bingo! she thought, and he groaned with defeat.
“How do I make a call out with this thing?” she said, working the keyboard. Everything was in Cyrillic, slowing her down. Upstairs, the Russians started shouting and running around. They must have discovered the other hacker, she thought. I don’t have much time.
A metallic crash hit the floor next to her, causing her to jump in alarm. A utility shelf full of loaded magazines and equipment lay on the floor, with a smiling hacker lying next to it. He had kicked it over, so his comrades above would hear it. Then he started screaming through his gag.
“Shut up!” she commanded, holding her hand against his gag. The man yelped louder, and she heard heavy footsteps above, moving toward the basement stairs. No time for a phone call. I gotta get ready! she thought, and ripped the place apart for anything useful. Shedding her coat, she grabbed the ballistic vest that covered the laptops and put it on, even though it was two sizes too large. Next, she found night-vision goggles in a foot locker and slipped them over her head. The dim room became bright gray with good three-dimensionality. The muffled footsteps above grew louder, as did the Russian expletives. Lin resumed her mad search.
“That’ll do nicely,” she says, discovering a steel box of hand grenades secured in cut-out foam. She grabbed four and stuffed them into her vest pockets, praying no bullets hit them. Not smart, she knew, but in her mind grenades were like condoms: better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. And when it came to crazed Russians, she preferred grenades over condoms.
The basement door slammed open above her, and footsteps started down the stairs. The hacker screamed louder.
“Faster!” she told herself, opening a wall locker and finding MP5s leaning upright. “Good,” she said, picking one up and cycling the charging handle. Then she dropped the MP5, spotting her weapon of choice.
“Sweetness,” she whispered, picking up the Saiga-12 fully automatic shotgun with folding stock and collimator sight. Next to it were six banana clips, each holding twelve rounds of twelve-gauge shells, enough to obliterate a flock of ducks. Lin had only heard of this mythical weapon from her mafia informants. The thing looked like a black and bloated AK-47, and it was the wet dream of every Russian mobster to possess one. However, only Spetznatz had the military-grade version, and now so did Lin. “Sweetness,” she repeated.
Lin heard the man on the other side of the wall, and she fumbled to get the clip into the Saiga. The bound hacker began shouting ecstatically. The deadbolt inside the door released and a man heaved it against the wall, swinging it open. Lin’s hands shook, and she couldn’t get the ammo clip to sit properly in the weapon. She crouched in a corner, behind a footlocker, so she was not visible to the gigantic Russian across the room.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, she reminded herself again, focusing on the clip and ignoring the man across the room. It clicked into place, and t
he man spun around. Lin charged the bolt and they both heard the round slide into the chamber. He raised his pistol and she the Saiga, followed by a pistol shot and an explosion of shotgun rounds. The man blew backward off his feet, and the hacker shit himself.
Lin turned off the lights and used her night vision as she prowled through the basement, covering her corners as she moved. The Russian voices above her were frenetic now, and two heavy men came charging down the stairs. Lin was waiting and pulled the trigger, full auto. A ruuurrrppp sound shook the room, as the weapon walked upward and knocked her back. Gunsmoke clung to the air and two dead men lay facedown on the stairs, their bodies shredded by the wall of lead pellets. Hundreds of small holes peppered the dry wall in the stairwell, except for where the men had stood.
Lin loaded a fresh magazine and leapt up the stairs to the main hallway on the ground floor. No use sneaking around at this point. To the left was the kitchen and back door, but the passageway had two blind corners. When she worked on the FBI Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, the shoot house taught her never to trust blind corners, especially when heavily armed Russians were lurking about. Lin glanced right, seeing the open atrium and front door. It was her best chance, even though she could take fire from the second-floor balcony.
All footsteps stopped and the house fell silent. Bad sign, she thought, not knowing where the enemy was. Slowly, she crept toward the atrium until she got to a bend in the hallway. Using a compact mirror, she peered around the corner. Nothing. She leapt up and the space around her exploded in automatic gunfire. Lin screamed involuntarily as she dove under a narrow hallway table, its marble top adding the minimum of protection.
“Come out and we won’t hurt you!” yelled a man in bad English.
“Fuck off, dickless!” she yelled back, in Russian. One thing her time on the Slavic mafia beat taught her: never trust a Rusky with a gun. Another burst of rounds blew into the tabletop, splintering wood and marble around her. She was trapped.
“No need for such foul talk, little lady,” said the man gently from around a corner. “Put down the gun and I promise not to hurt you.”
