by Sean Ellis
A voice, crackling with static, issued from the radio handset clipped to the man’s collar, demanding an update on the situation. It was only a matter of time before someone came to investigate the silence, so Mira hastily unclipped the guard’s chest rig and slung it bandolier style over her own shoulder. The rig, which looked a little like a backpack worn the wrong way, was equipped with half a dozen pouches containing several spare magazines for the carbine, three grenades—two spherical fragmentation grenades and one “flash-bang”—and a large combat knife. The last pouch she opened revealed a silver and blue aluminum container, which she instantly recognized as a six-ounce can of Red Bull energy drink. She cracked the seal and gulped down the tepid contents. She didn’t know if the fizzy soda would give her “wings”, but the citrusy-tasting caffeinated concoction of sugar water was a welcome break from the bland fare her captors served up twice a day. She lingered there a moment longer to search the pockets of the guard’s charcoal gray uniform for the keys that would, she hoped, grant her access to the stairwell doors.
The radio crackled again, the voice more insistent, and Mira knew it was time to move. She replaced the nearly-spent magazine in her weapon with a full one and took off at a jog, following the inexorable siren song of the Trinity.
4.
By the time the drop zone came into view below him, the initial chill of high-altitude exposure had worn off. Collier was actually sweating underneath his insulated jump suit, though he suspected this condition had nothing to do with his core temperature. From about five thousand feet up and at least two miles out over the Mediterranean, he had witnessed the scattered night lights of the Atlas compound go dark. Second squad had reached their objective and accomplished their part of the mission. Now it was up to his group to finish the job. He took a few more hits from his O2 mask and then shoved the apparatus into his stuff bag.
The roof of the target building gradually came into focus in the display of his night-vision, but he was taking his cues from a GPS unit that would, he trusted, guide him unerringly to his objective. According to the handheld device, he was right on course and about ten seconds from touchdown. He counted to five and then pulled the brakes, flaring his ram-air chute to soften the impact of landing.
The rooftop appeared as a bright roiling mass in the display of his night-vision, suggesting a covering of gravel or coarse sand—the former as it turned out. His landing was textbook perfect, probably the best he’d ever made, and for some reason that filled him with foreboding. It was axiomatic that nothing ever went as planned; Mr. Murphy always showed up. He would have preferred to save some of his good luck for contact with the enemy.
As soon as he was down he gathered his chute, hastily deflating the cells of the canopy in order to shove it into a stuff sack, while at the same time seeking a place of cover and keeping one hand on his M-4. When the chute was stowed, he brought the weapon up into firing position and began scanning in every direction for a possible target, even as his teammates began dropping down all around him. He heard more than a dozen soft crunches, and a few muttered curses, as they came down, but at no time did a hostile presence manifest.
A hoarse whisper sounded in the still air: “Last man. Ruiz.”
Immediately, the roll call began, with each man sounding off, reversing the order in which they had left the plane. Collier held his breath, dreading the moment that a gap would appear, but once more their luck held. The entire squad had made it down safely, right on top of the objective.
“Outstanding,” Collier muttered. “Stow your gear and cover your swim buddy.”
In a matter of seconds, the air breathers, chutes and jumpsuits were jammed into stuff bags and heaped in a corner of the roof. Markley, the squad’s demo, booby-trapped the cache with an incendiary grenade while Collier and Ball did a quick survey of the rooftop. “What’s our best approach, Chief?”
“We’re going to have to clear this sucker room by room, top down.” He gestured toward the central raised structure in the middle of the rooftop that presumably afforded access to the stairs. “No sense pussy-footing around; might as well use the door.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He waved the squad over and relayed his final instructions. The squad functioned with near-mechanical precision, peeling off into buddy teams and stacking along the door. One man from the first team—designated alpha team—examined the door, and then with an ordinary pry-bar, forced the latch. He pulled the door open and got out of the way as two of his comrades did a high-low scan of the area beyond. Confident that the area immediately beyond the door was clear, the first team moved in and started down the stairs, with the second team following about five seconds behind them.
In less than a minute, the entire squad had moved from the rooftop, down the uppermost flight of stairs, to the top floor of the target building where another door barred their way. The alpha team breach man again moved up to examine the door, this time with more consternation. His voice crackled in Collier’s ear.
“Got some high-security electronics here, probably keyed to proximity tags. There’s a fail-safe bolt in the event of power outage. We’re gonna have to blow this one, but I’d say it’s a good bet that there are doors like this all through the building.”
He shook his head ruefully. As quiet and precise as their breaching charges were, there would be no hiding their presence once they blew through this door. “Do it.”
A small custom-made explosive package was affixed to the door near the latch plate, after which the breach man gave a thumb’s up signal. “Fire in the hole.”
Given the stealthiness of their presence thus far, the thump that followed sounded like the end of the world. Collier had, like every other man in the group, muted his tactical comm and covered both his night vision ocular and his good eye in the moment before detonation. Before the door could even rebound from the wall, alpha team was in.
“Open space, open space,” the team leader’s sub-vocalization was urgent in spite of the fact that it would barely have been audible up close. “It looks secure, but we’ve got all kinds of doors in here. And lights...battery powered.”
“Take those lights out,” Collier ordered.
The crack of rifle fire was an order of magnitude louder than the breaching charge, but there was little need for subtlety now. Total darkness would give them their advantage. “Lights out!”
“Everyone in.” Collier, with his weapon at a low ready, followed behind bravo team, scanning the room as he moved through the doorway. Despite the monochrome display of the night-vision, it was plainly evident that this floor held executive offices. The floor was carpeted, the dark wood paneled walls decorated with framed paintings. Plush sofas lined an open area that appeared to be some kind of reception lobby.
The commander muttered a curse that was, unfortunately, broadcast to the entire squad. “We’ve got to clear every room,” he continued. “Two at a time, two teams on each door. Chief, you and I will cover the stairwell.”
“Jackpot!” The outburst was almost audible without the comms, and Collier almost groaned aloud when he recognized Booker’s voice.
Always the renegade. “What’ya got Del?”
Booker was standing at the receptionist’s desk, holding up a sheet of paper. “Building directory. It says the research labs are on the second and third floors.”
Collier was grudgingly impressed. He jogged over to the desk and examined the directory page, which included floor plans for each level of the building, under the red glow of a small tactical flashlight.
“I say we skip the door to door and head straight to the labs.”
From his position near the door, Team Chief Ball growled his dissent. “That would mean leaving two uncleared floors above us. I don’t like it.”
Collier weighed his choices. The floor plan showed executive offices on the top floor and administrative workstations on the fourth. If they did things by the book the way his Chief wanted, it would take at least thirty minutes to clear
the building, thirty minutes their enemies would inevitably use to supplement whatever forces were already present in the building. Not to mention the fact that the B2 bomber was probably already inbound.
“If anyone was here, they bugged out when the power went offline,” Booker persisted. “They might have even taken the objective with them. We can’t afford to wait.”
Every man in the team had an equal voice in the planning phase of an op, but Booker was, as he often did, pushing the limits of discipline. Still, it was a persuasive argument. Collier stuffed the building directory into the zippered map pocket of his chest rig. “Del’s right. We need to focus on the objective. If we lose it here, then this is all for nothing.
Ball however was not about to reward Booker’s impertinence. “Charlie team, hold the stairwell, a man on each floor, just in case.”
Booker was in Charlie team. A faint, disappointed grunt was audible over the comms, or maybe Collier just imagined it. He didn’t interfere; it was Ball’s call to make.
“Let’s move.”
With Booker on the fifth floor, and his swim buddy guarding the still-locked fourth floor entrance, the rest of the squad descended to the third floor, where Alpha and Bravo teams stacked to either side of the door. Delta team continued down the stairs, just far enough to cover that avenue of approach. Ball and another SEAL knelt on the landing behind Bravo team while Collier reviewed the floor plan a final time.
“The schematic shows a hallway about twenty meters long, with two doors left, one door right and an elevator on the right at the end. Beyond that, it shows an open area, but it’s a research lab, so expect there to be a lot of mobile equipment.”
“Anything we should be careful about shooting at?” asked Ball.
It was a fair question. A research lab could contain any number of toxic chemicals, radioactive isotopes, and dangerously explosive compounds. “Assume the worst. PID, gentlemen; Positive target identification. We’re SEALs, right? We don’t spray and pray.”
A nervous chuckle rolled through the group as Collier gave the go-ahead signal. The Alpha team breach man set his charge and sounded the warning. The shaped charge gave a mighty thump that, despite the relative lack of pyrotechnics, thundered up and down the stairwell, and the team moved smoothly through the doorway like the well-rehearsed professionals they were.
Then everything went to hell.
The unmistakable crack of rifle fire began even before the last man was in. The voices Collier heard in his earpiece were not the calm, professional exchanges of a SEAL team vanquishing their opponents and securing the target, they were the cries of men being cut to pieces.
“Status!” There was a squeal of feedback—the tactical comms were designed to amplify whispers, not shouts—but Collier suddenly felt very lost, and kept repeating “Status! Status!”
Ball clapped the Bravo team leader on the back, but before the second team could move in, two objects the size and shape of tennis balls, painted a dull gray-green bounced through the doorway.
Ball reacted first, with the kind of calm intensity that had made him the team’s most valuable non-commissioned officer. “Frag out!” he called, loud enough for everyone to hear, even over the still-ringing echoes of gunfire. And then, like some unbelievable romantic hero from a war movie, he threw himself bodily onto the grenades.
In the millisecond that followed, Collier inexplicably thought, I’m gonna buy that man a beer when we get back.
Then Chief Petty Officer Warren Ball ceased to exist, and a wall of darkness slammed down on Collier.
5.
Stationed on the landing outside the fifth floor executive offices, Del Booker was still smarting from his platoon chief’s obvious snub when the world fell out from beneath his feet. He had heard the radio traffic as the breach team blew the third floor door and made their insertion, had even heard the subsequent rifle fire, but until the grenades exploded, the full impact of events transpiring about thirty feet below had not really hit home. They were SEALs, highly trained commandos; breaching doors and clearing rooms was business as usual, and for the sin of outsmarting the chief and expediting the mission goal, he had been punished with guard duty.
It was only when the entire stairwell shook underfoot, the shock wave of the explosion slamming through his body like a pile-driver, that he realized he had hastened his swim buddies to their death. That thought flashed through his head, even as the concrete beneath his feet crumbled away.
He leapt for the open door, but was already too late. His fingers glanced from the threshold and he plummeted ten feet before crashing onto the remains of the fourth story landing. The impact drove the wind from his sails, but even as he struggled to draw a breath, he felt the rubble beneath him move; he was sliding toward the edge of the broken landing. Huge chunks of concrete shifted beneath him as he scrambled for a stable handhold and managed to arrest his slide. Still gasping for breath, he rolled over and fumbled for his weapon.
He was disoriented, but as his ability to breathe returned, so did his grasp of the situation. He was alive, and relatively unhurt, but for some reason was having difficulty seeing. It finally occurred to him that, in the course of his fall, his night-vision monocular had gone dark. The PVS-7 came equipped with a mercury switch and shut off automatically if tilted to a vertical position. He fumbled with the knob and managed to reset the device, and as the green mist resolved, he got his first look at the aftermath of the explosions.
His gaze was drawn to the bright outline of the third story door just below where he was perched. The portal was unnaturally brilliant because the vision device amplified relatively the dim emergency lights to near solar intensity. Eclipsing some of that illumination however were two human silhouettes.
“Holy shit!” breathed one of the men standing in the doorway. “That’s coming out of your check.”
“Hey, we were supposed to blow the place anyway. I just got a head start.”
Blow the place? Booker wrestled with this information. How had Atlas been able to move so quickly? Had their objective already been moved?
Then it occurred to him that none of that mattered. The entire squad had been wiped out. A quick glance around revealed none of his teammates, at least, none that were moving; several bodies wearing the same uniform he wore lay unmoving on the wreckage of third floor landing. There was no sign of his swim buddy; as far as he knew, he was the only survivor from first squad.
Screw it. Time for payback.
He hoisted the M-4 to his shoulder and drew a bead on one of the two figures below. It was a difficult shot because he was practically right above the men, but his weapon was equipped with a PAQ4 infrared laser sighting device. The laser beam was invisible to the naked eye but radiant in the night-vision optics. He didn’t even need to peer down the barrel; the bullets would go wherever the laser pointed, and right now it was lined up on the head of the man on the right.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he squeezed the trigger twice. The carbine bucked slightly, but the second bullet hit within an inch of the first, a discrepancy explained more by the man’s head snapping back from the impact than from Booker’s handling of the weapon. He shifted the laser onto the other man, firing another controlled pair before the man could comprehend that his partner had just gone down.
Booker kept his M-4 at the ready, watching and listening for other targets, but there was no movement from beyond the doorway. When he was certain that no other enemies were present, he shifted from his precarious position and lowered himself onto the third floor.
He paused there, kneeling to check his fallen comrades. The first man was unrecognizable, savaged by the explosive force and the rain of deadly shrapnel. The next man was still alive, but bleeding from copious wounds. Booker started to dig into the man’s first aid kit, but a surprisingly firm grip stopped him.
“Del?”
The voice, an agonized groan, was barely audible, but the grip compelled him to look the man in the eye. It was Collier.
“Go,” the SEAL commander urged. “The mission.”
Booker nodded solemnly and squeezed Collier’s hand. “Godspeed, sir.”
The knowledge that Collier was still living, if only for a few moments longer, filled Booker with conflicting emotions and he had to squeeze the pistol grip of his carbine to focus himself on following his commander’s final order. He fumbled with his free hand to remove the PVS-7 and then in a fit of frustration, simply tore off his Kevlar helmet and cast it away.
His innate sense of wariness began to return as he moved deeper into the lab, further away from the shattered remains of his comrades. He didn’t think there were any more hostiles left, at least not here on this floor, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice the mission by being overeager.
At the end of the hallway, he saw the equipment described in the floor plan he had discovered at the reception desk, and there, in the center of the room, resting unceremoniously on a paper blotter atop a stainless steel table, was the object designated NLAL 770. The Trinity.
He glanced around one final time, half-expecting that some unseen enemy had placed the relic here as bait for a trap that would be sprung upon him the moment he tried to take it. He saw no trap, no threat, but of course, that was the point of a baited snare.
Gathering his courage, focusing on the sacrifices that had brought him here and the importance of accomplishing the mission, he turned his full attention to the Trinity. With his right fist balled around the grip of his M-4, he reached out with his left.
