ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  “Lord knows I wouldn’t trust anyone else to believe a word of it,” the hunter replied. “And thank you. We owe you our lives.”

  #

  With the quiet conversation over, David waved Donnelly and Freeman over to him. To his surprise, the sheriff walked over to Levinson and embraced the veteran fiercely. Levinson looked shocked for a moment but then returned the hug tightly.

  “You okay, Harold?” Donnelly demanded after a moment, releasing his friend.

  “No,” the freed prisoner admitted. “But I think these folk”—he gestured at David—“have a pretty good idea of how to put it all back together.” Levinson shook his head. “Won’t be the first time I’ve been put back together by shrinks, Will.”

  “I’ll let Sarah know you’re all right,” Donnelly promised. “You’ll be in touch soon?”

  “It’ll be a few days,” David warned. “There’s a degree of quarantine, both physical and, sadly, informational, to go through. But we’ll have everyone in touch with their family soon enough.”

  “We owe these folks our lives,” Levinson told Donnelly, echoing what he’d told the other prisoners. “And we… Yeah.” He swallowed, glancing at the mix of tourists already on the chopper. “It was bad for me, Will,” he whispered. “These poor people…will need all the help they can get.”

  “And they’ll get it,” David promised.

  “And sooner if I get on the chopper,” Levinson agreed. “I’ll be in touch, Will.”

  The two men exchanged a firm handshake and the ex-Army man got onto the helicopter.

  “There were more missing,” Donnelly said after the aircraft lifted off. “At least twenty more. Did you find them?”

  David sighed and shook his head.

  “We have a forensics team inbound,” he told the sheriff gently. “They’re…going to have to excavate the biomass pit. That’s probably where we’ll find the rest.”

  Both Donnelly and Freeman winced as they followed that conclusion.

  “I didn’t know,” the ATF agent told the sheriff. “If I did…”

  “There was nothing to tie our missing tourists and hunters to the Stallions,” Donnelly objected harshly.

  “What the fuck was going on in that place?” Freeman demanded, the massive black man looking terrified.

  “I can’t tell you that,” David said quietly. “The answer’s classified. At this point, gentlemen, we’re taking full control of the site. We have more personnel on their way”—he hoped—“and we’ll need you to turn over any prisoners you took on the perimeter.

  “This entire area is now a secure site under Federal jurisdiction. Your assistance has been, quite literally, a life-saver. Some of those prisoners might not have lasted a few more days while we pulled together our resources for this operation.”

  “So that’s it, huh?” Freeman asked. “We help, and now we just…leave?”

  “Not my preference, Agent Freeman,” David replied. “Not my choice, either.”

  With the current lockdown on information and recruiting, he suspected just using the ATF and local police to back his team up was going to get him in trouble. Briefing them would be majorly problematic.

  “I get that, I suppose,” he allowed. “Apologies, Commander White. It just grates.”

  “I understand.”

  “My boys have the prisoners back at our trucks,” Donnelly told him. “And there’s one you definitely want to talk to.”

  “Oh?”

  “Pretty sure he’s at least half-full of shit, but Casey Reynolds has been talking up what a big deal he is in the Stallions for years,” the sheriff said with a cold smile. “If he’s half as important as he thinks he is, he might be of use to you.”

  #

  “What’s our status on interrogators and forensics?” David asked Leitz as he followed Donnelly through the trees. “The six of us aren’t going to be able to get enough answers out of this lot to convince the Conclave by tomorrow.”

  He was all-too-vividly aware of how short he was running on time. The Conclave would resume in Portland the following afternoon. They were less than twenty-four hours away from needing to have something to give the Elfin Lords.

  Something more than “the vampires did it,” at least.

  “De Bergen and her people hit the road just after you started taking prisoners,” his analyst told him. “She wants you to touch base with her once things are something resembling quiet, but she’s got her full interrogation team about forty-five minutes out.”

  “She moves fast,” David noted. “I’ll touch base with her shortly.”

  “Alston and her team are also in the air,” Leitz continued. “She should be there shortly after de Bergen. Lieutenant Zelenko from AP Six and her platoon are en route as well; they should be there first. They’re…mostly intact.

  “The rest of AP Six is being stood down for the moment.”

  “Give how badly they got kicked by the Romanovs, I’m glad to have any support from that quarter,” David admitted. “Any word on further troops?”

  “They’re not happening,” Leitz said apologetically. “There’s just nothing to spare. Warner combed up two platoons’ worth of security personnel from the Campus and then had to send them to Idaho after Mason and ONSET Fifteen ran into a chimera infestation.”

  David winced. It was rare for an outbreak of chimerism to actually produce something as large and dangerous as the mythical three-headed winged lion, but the weird magical hybrids were vicious and reproduced by ripping apart anything living they got their claws on and putting the bits back together in strange combinations.

  They were limited to what was present in the area the infestation started, but a cow with the heads of a wolf and a bear only sounded funny.

  Thankfully, they were still only animals, so firepower was just as effective as supernatural power. But since an infestation spread quickly, numbers were more important than individual destructiveness.

  “So, we’re getting the folks already on this file and that’s it,” he concluded.

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you link me to Charles?” David asked. “Going to need him on the ball for this mess.”

  “Can do. Hold one.”

  The dragon’s brogue came on the channel a few moments later.

  “What can Ai do fer ye, Commander?”

  “Is anything in this hole the vampires built themselves sufficiently connected to the Internet for you to start breaking in?” David asked.

  “We blocked the cable and phone lines when you went in. We’ve been checking the signal, but it looks like they’ve been very careful on security,” Charles admitted. “Ai’m finding a few personal tablets and PCs, but nae anything with real data. Might be a VPN in place, but we’ll need hard access to the machines to be sure.”

  “Alston’s people have the link-ups you’ll need?”

  “O’ course,” Charles confirmed. “We’ll have them sucked dry by morning, David. If there’s anything of use to ye, ye’ll know ’fore the Conclave.”

  “All right. Appreciate it.”

  “Doing mai job, Commander. Just like ye.”

  The conversation had carried David through most of the forest, and he could now see the cluster of vehicles where he’d first met Freeman and Donnelly.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 34

  Casey Reynolds was an extremely unprepossessing man. He was of average height, barely taller than David himself, with a heavy build starting to go to seed. Despite powerfully muscled arms, he had a visible potbelly under his camouflage fatigues and streaks of gray through his bushy brown bread and long hair.

  Handcuffed and leaning against one of the county sheriff trucks, he looked scared out of his wits, searching from side to side as if he was expecting a miracle to appear out of nowhere.

  As David and his companions approached the truck, Reynolds’s searching gaze locked onto Sheriff Donnelly like a drowning man spotting a rope.

  “Sh
eriff Donnelly!” he shouted. “Help! There’s been some kind of misunderstanding here.”

  “You want to field this?” David murmured. “Or do I drop a ton of bricks on him to start?”

  “Give me a moment,” the lanky sheriff replied. He walked up to Reynolds and stopped next to the man.

  “What misunderstanding do you mean?” he asked. “It turns out that the Night Stallions were up to their necks in a lot of ugly shit, and you were always telling everyone in town how big a deal you were with them. You want to tell me you didn’t know about the guns? The drugs? The kidnappings? The terrorism?”

  Reynolds winced as if he’d been struck.

  “You know I was talking shit,” he said desperately. “We weren’t doing any of that!”

  “Having been through the compound,” David said quietly as he stepped up next to Donnelly, “the Stallions were doing all of that. Manufacturing drugs. Smuggling illegal firearms. Kidnapping people and hiding them in the underground complex.”

  He held Reynolds’s eyes. The militiaman clearly wanted to look away, but David held him in place. His Sight had more uses than one, and right now he stared clean into the other man’s grubby little soul.

  Broadman’s power had left its mark on Casey Reynolds’s soul, but the petty shriveled thing hadn’t needed much urging to lure it into evil. Reynolds wasn’t the kind of man who sought to be cruel; he was simply the kind who would follow a leader no matter where they led.

  “You knew exactly what was going on,” he told Reynolds. He could see it in the man’s eyes, and he barely needed Sight for that. “You weren’t as big a deal as you said you were, but you knew what was going on.

  “How many tourists and kids did you feed to the monsters in the basement, Casey Reynolds?” he asked. “How much blood is on the hands of the men who delivered weapons for the Romanov Family? And you know what they were doing with blood in that lab, don’t you?”

  The man wilted under David’s glare.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Now, I know that part of the attack in Seattle was staged through here,” David said softly. “Right now, that’s what I care about.

  “Anything you can tell me about that will be taken into account when you come in front of a judge for kidnapping and accessory to murder and terrorism. So, if I were you, Mr. Reynolds, I would spend the next few hours scraping through my memories for anything of value I could think of.

  “Because if you don’t find me a reason to be merciful, the bodies in the Stallions’ basement are going to weigh a lot heavier on my mind than your protestations of innocence. Am I understood, Mr. Reynolds?”

  The Night Stallion wilted into the truck, nodding wordlessly.

  David turned away and looked back at Donnelly.

  “Move all of the prisoners back into their compound,” he ordered. “We should have boots on the ground in under an hour; we’ll take over full responsibility then.” He glanced back at Reynolds. “Hopefully, some of them will have something useful to say.”

  “I will,” Donnelly said grimly. “Promise me one thing, Commander?”

  “What do you need?”

  “Throw the damn book at these people. I don’t know what was in their basement, but my best guess is that it ate at least twenty people from my county—and they helped it.”

  “You have my word, Sheriff,” David promised. There’d be some leniency for Broadman’s control and the fact that some of the Night Stallions were almost certainly thralls, but there could never be enough leniency to allow for what had been done there.

  #

  “De Bergen,” the Chief Inspector answered when David called her.

  “Inspector, it’s Commander White. Leitz said I should get in touch with you.”

  “Good girl; she’s learning the ropes already,” de Bergen said. “I’m in the back of a black SUV rattling around with my entire interrogation team. My phone says we’re still almost thirty minutes out, but from the sounds of it, you’ve got a good-sized crowd for us to work through.”

  “You brought the lawyer?”

  “Mulroney?” de Bergen laughed. “Yeah, her and about half a dozen other Omicron Defenders. They’re in another SUV.”

  “Good. Every single member of the Night Stallions is up for accessory charges on vampire feeding, aside from everything else. They’re entirely under our authority,” David told her. “I need them talking tonight.”

  “This whole mess has been hurry, hurry, hurry,” she acknowledged. “We’ll do what we can.”

  “Did you get anything useful out of the Talon employees?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she replied. “We went through them all over the last couple of days. None of them know shit of use to us. Stripped their local hard drives, compiled the testimony. Van der Watt’s being cooperative, but he’s the only one left who knows anything of use.”

  “Any chance at getting the actual shooters extradited?” he asked.

  “Yeah, about a hundred percent. Assuming you’ve got a year.”

  “We don’t.” David sighed. “If you don’t think they’ve anything of value, feel free to tell your people to let them loose. Other than van der Watt, that is.”

  “Oh, he’s on his way to ONSET Campus,” she said with an audible smile. “I’ve passed the files and testimony, excised of…odd questions, on to the FBI. There are forty-three of the employees they’ve asked us to hold until they can take custody.”

  “Talon was in that deep?”

  “Oh, yeah,” de Bergen confirmed. “The FBI Agent I was talking to was almost drooling, I think we just broke several of the Organized Crimes unit’s longest-standing cases for them. They are very happy with us right now.”

  “That might come in handy when we need to start poaching their staff. The rest are cleared, though?”

  “They are. They won’t have jobs—Talon Security is going to go down hard for this—but if you’re okay with it, my people’ll have them back on the street by morning.”

  “Do it,” he ordered. “We’ve got enough irons in this fire; I don’t need a stack of civilians with excessive detention lawsuits. They’d lose, but it’s a headache I don’t want.”

  “Can do. What do you have waiting for us?”

  “Not sure how many are on their feet, but between fifty and a hundred militiamen who were knowingly working for vampires. I need to know what they know about the attack on the Elfin—and most importantly, if they have enough data for us to link it back to any of the Elfin.”

  She whistled softly.

  “You think the Conclave has a traitor?”

  “The vampires tell me they do,” he said grimly. “Don’t know how far I trust them, but…my enemy’s enemy, and all that.”

  “And you need an answer by morning?”

  “If possible.”

  “Gonna be a long night.”

  #

  As the new wave of helicopters came sweeping in, David found himself both relieved and bitterly amused at the availability of a high-quality helipad and the refueling infrastructure necessary to turn around the heavy Super Stallion transport helicopters.

  A second Pendragon swung into an overwatch position above everyone, relieving his original gunship transport to return to the Washington ONSET facility to rearm. While the machine guns would probably have been enough to deal with any immediate threat, it was reassuring to have missiles available again.

  Under the gunship’s careful watch, two Super Stallion helicopters stooped in to land on the concrete pad the Night Stallions had installed for the vampire masters. Black-armored AP troopers were dropping out of the big helicopters the moment they touched down, moving quickly to take over security positions from David’s handful of ONSET agents.

  A fair-haired woman with a Lieutenant’s insignia approached David and saluted crisply. He recognized her from AP Six and returned the salute.

  “Lieutenant Maria Zelenko, sir,” she reported. “I pulled together a perimeter pl
an based on the aerial footage and the known damage. My people will be in position in a few moments, though it’ll take a bit to get the heavy gear from the choppers.

  “Is there anything specific we need to be watching?”

  “We’ve secured the prisoners inside their dormitory,” David told her. “I’ll want at least ten men securing the main floor. We didn’t find any access to the underground, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t miss something.”

  “Can do!” she said confidently, then paused. “Are we expecting another vampire attack here, sir?”

  “The last one came from here and we killed them all,” David pointed out. “We should be safe. If we’re not, there’s no storm this time. We have air support, and we have two ONSET teams on the ground.”

  Zelenko nodded, seemingly reassured. The arrival of a fourth helicopter, a third transport bird, cut off any further communication. The Anti-Paranormal Lieutenant threw him a thumbs-up and moved away to corral her troops.

  David waited as the helicopter landed, shading his eyes against the dust and wind as the rotors slowed and the muscular, lab-coated form of Dr. Michelle Alston jumped from the chopper before it even touched the ground.

  “They told me you had an intact vampire computer net,” she said abruptly. “Did they manage to wipe anything?”

  “Um. No idea,” he admitted. “They had the opportunity; they knew we were in the—”

  “Never mind, it won’t matter; we can retrieve anything that was on the hard drives,” she snapped. “Show me.”

  “We’re also going to need you to dredge a biomass pool for bodies,” he warned, making sure Alston knew that literally going through shit was going to be part of this one.

  She made a dismissive gesture.

  “I have minions for that,” she told him. “Plus, that isn’t going to give us the immediate answers we want. If you want truth, computer files and journals are where it’s at. Show me,” she repeated.