Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  Jonathan spun the cylinder again to lock them in. “NVGs,” he said. In unison, the two burglars dropped to a knee, shrugged out of their day packs, and removed a four-tube night vision goggles array. They slipped them over their heads and as Jonathan flipped the switch, the darkness became green-tinted daytime.

  “Money order records and security camera recordings,” Jonathan said, reminding them both of the limits of their mission. “Other than those missing things, no sign that we were ever here.”

  “You know I was listening last time you said that, right?” Boxers said.

  Jonathan ignored him. More out of habit than necessity, he drew his .45, and led with it as he advanced into the empty shop. Yes, it was overkill, but he could never remember a single time in his many-year career when he’d said, “Dammit, I wish I hadn’t drawn my weapon.” The converse, however . . .

  The entire room became brighter as Boxers turned on an infrared flashlight and scanned the room with the beam, which would appear as invisible to anyone who was not equipped with night vision. The effect was to add less-green light to an otherwise green environment.

  They moved deeper into the store. The plan was for Boxers to search the area around the cash register and the gun display while Jonathan tossed the office in the back. Jonathan assumed that Bud had no reason to hide the materials they were looking for, so the whole mission couldn’t take more than—

  “Freeze,” Boxers said in a tone that Jonathan had heard too many times over the years.

  Once heard, it meant exactly what it stated. Freeze. As in, stop whatever you were doing in exactly the posture you were holding, and lock every muscle. That’s what Jonathan did. “What?”

  “Look down at your feet,” Big Guy said. “Three feet ahead and at shin level.”

  Boxers had illuminated the area with the beam of his IR flashlight, and Jonathan actually saw the shadow of the trip wire before he found the trip wire itself. He was still a step and a half away, but trip wires were always concerning. “What does it go to?” he asked.

  “Interesting question,” Boxers said. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  Frozen as he was, with the majority of his weight on his left foot, Jonathan felt particularly unbalanced as he watched Boxers’ light sweep the room.

  “I’m almost positive you can redistribute your weight,” Big Guy said.

  “Almost positive.”

  “Sixty percent, easy.” Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “But let me hide behind this shelf before you do it.”

  “I hate you,” Jonathan said. He understood Boxers-speak, though. All of that tranlated to you’re safe where you stand, but go no farther.

  A trip wire meant a booby trap, and the presence of a booby trap fundamentally changed the nature of the game. Bud was prepared to kill to protect that which he valued, and people who were willing to set one trap were more often than not willing to set several. The evening just got longer.

  “Found it,” Boxers said. “It’s a good old-fashioned shotgun trap. When was the last time you saw one of those?” To put tension on the trip wire was to pull the trigger on a shotgun. Nothing good came from that.

  Jonathan watched as the tension drooped out of the trip wire. He knew that Boxers had moved the gun and eliminated the threat. “Pretty aggressive move,” Jonathan said. “In my part of the world, that would get you sent away for life.”

  “I believe you could say that the same would be true for the intruder,” Boxers replied. Jonathan could see his smile even in the night vision. “He must have some pretty cool shit to hide. We’re clear.”

  Clear but on notice.

  They got to the sales counter first. “This is mine,” Boxers said.

  “I’ve got the office.”

  “Entry team, what is your sitrep?” Per the plan, Venice had called in for a situation report.

  “We’re inside and on schedule,” Jonathan said. She didn’t have to know about the booby trap.

  Even with night vision, the view inside the back office was dim. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see as much as it was he couldn’t make out the fine detail. Reading, for example, was difficult. Jonathan withdrew his own IR penlight from its pocket on his sleeve, and he pressed the button to bring it to life. That made all the difference in the world.

  Bud’s office looked exactly like what you would think something called “Bud’s office” would look like. Maybe ten by ten, the place looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. Papers lay upon papers, which had been stacked upon food wrappers placed upon papers. The desk itself was of hearty wooden construction—the kind of desk that hadn’t been made in seventy years. Bud had cleared out a one-foot-by-one-foot rectangle of space on the desk, directly in front of the old wooden desk chair. Jonathan figured that was the space he allowed himself for actually doing work.

  The floor around the desk was likewise stacked with stuff. Much of it appeared to be incoming inventory. Jonathan cared about none of it. His mission here was to stay focused on the recorder deck. Somewhere in its files lay the picture of the man he needed to identify and take down. It took a couple of seconds to orient himself to the machine. It was a tiny thing, barely bigger than the disk that it recorded, and he had trouble finding the eject button. Finally, he found it and pressed it and was rewarded with a familiar electronic whir as the disk drawer opened up in the old cup-holder style and offered him the CD. Fortunately, Bud was an organized man and he had labeled the front of the disk with the start date. Three weeks ago.

  Jonathan thought about that. If Bud labeled them that meant that he kept them. That meant there were others. How on earth, amid all of this clutter was he ever going to find—

  The little file box sat next to the recorder. Made of what appeared in the night vision to be gray plastic, it looked like a repurposed recipe card file. Could it be that simple? Yes it could. As he lifted up the lid, he saw more disks. They were filed vertically, all in white sleeves with clear plastic windows. And each one was labeled with a start and end date. There had to be two years of files here. Jonathan took the last three months’ worth, slipped them into his pack, then put the file box where it belonged.

  Now it was time to find the receipts for the money orders.

  “Hey, Boss, I found the money order files,” Boxers said in his ear.

  Jonathan keyed his mike. “Roger, and I have what we need in here.” All that remained was for Big Guy to find the files from the appropriate date, shoot a picture of it, and then they could be on their way.

  Jonathan worked his way out of the office toward the front of the store.

  “Scorpion, She Devil,” said Jolaine’s voice over the air. “We have a big problem. Call it huge.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “I’m at gunpoint,” Jolaine explained. “It’s Mary. As in Mary’s Diner. And she’s not happy. Sorry to rat you out, but I told her about both you and Big Guy. She wants you back here right now.”

  “Well doesn’t that blow dead bears?” Boxers said.

  A bit of imagery that Jonathan didn’t need. He didn’t know how Jolaine had gotten herself caught, but he understood the subtext of her message. She hadn’t mentioned anything about Dylan and Rollins.

  Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Black team stand by. I’m opening the back door.” Just like that, being untraceable didn’t mean as much anymore. He moved to the reinforced metal door and pulled on the steel bracing bar. Clearly it had been in place for a long time. It didn’t want to move.

  “Outta the way, Boss,” Big Guy said. He nudged Jonathan aside and pulled on the bar. It resisted his efforts, too, but only for a couple of seconds. As it cleared its mounts, Boxers lifted it up and out of the way, setting it to the side of the doorjamb. By the time he had it stabilized, Jonathan had pushed the door open.

  Madman and Boomer stood side by side, just beyond the swing of the door. “You heard?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yeah, what happened?” Boomer asked.

  “Doesn’t mat
ter,” Jonathan said. “Jolaine didn’t mention you two, so we have time. Go back to the Batmobile, grab a couple of long guns, and radio me when you’re in position to take a shot.”

  “You’re going to shoot Mary?” Rollins asked.

  “I hope not,” Jonathan said, though he didn’t understand why the thought was more horrifying than shooting anyone else. “But if comes to a team member or Mary, Mary’s having a bad day. Questions or problems with that?” He focused his glare on the colonel. Roleplay Rollins had a history of putting his own men second.

  Jesus, old grudges die hard.

  “I’m on it,” Dylan said. He turned on his heel and was gone. It took Rollins a few seconds to get with the program and follow him, but he did.

  “Okay, Big Guy, we’re on.”

  Jonathan led the way back through the hardware store, toward the front door. Before they’d taken more than a few steps, Boxers reset the blocking bar. “I’d hate to see someone rip Bud off,” he said.

  “Scorpion, She Devil. I need you to expedite.”

  “On our way,” Jonathan said over the air. The he added, “Mother Hen, channel three.” While Jolaine wore a custom earpiece for her radio, sometimes transmissions could be heard by others as a distant buzzing. He didn’t want to raise suspicions. “Big Guy stay on channel one.” If something went wrong with Jolaine, Boxers would know about it.

  “Mother Hen on channel three,” Venice said.

  “Mother Hen are you caught up with the recent traffic?”

  “Affirmative. And I am monitoring local emergency frequencies to advise if someone calls nine-one-one.”

  Amazing. He had gone to channel three to tell Venice to monitor the local emergency frequencies and advise if someone had called nine-one-one. “Okay, good work,” he said into the radio. “Return to channel one.”

  “So what’s our play?” Boxers asked as they walked out of Bud’s front door.

  “Plan Whiskey Indigo,” Jonathan said.

  Boxers laughed. “Wing it,” he said, translating the acronym. “This is why I’ve always admired your skills as a tactician.”

  The reality was that there was no plan to plan. Clearly, Mary had gotten the drop on Jolaine. Beyond that, they knew nothing, and therefore, the possibilities were endless. Most of them unpleasant. On the plus side, if Mary’s intent had been to kill Jolaine, she would have done it by now. He drew his Colt.

  “Keep your weapon low, but do not disarm,” Jonathan said. “I’m not sure what the game is here, but Mary needs to know that the one guarantee in life if she pulls that trigger is that she will die.”

  “Works for me. How do you want to enter?”

  “Good question.” Jonathan keyed his mike. “She Devil, Scorpion. We’re approaching the diner. How do you want us to enter?”

  A few seconds passed. “Through the back door,” Jolaine said. “Be sure you’re unarmed and your hands are up.”

  “Tell your hostess that we’re coming in armed, but that we have no desire to shoot,” Jonathan said. He had no idea if Jolaine would deliver that message—it was a tough thing to do while staring down the bore of a gun—and he didn’t care. The subtext was meant for her anyway.

  “And I’ll be the one to kill her,” Boxers said over the air.

  Jonathan recognized the attitude as Boyfriend Boxers, but he still found the new sensibility to be unsettling. “Go get ’em, tiger,” he said off the air.

  They crossed the street, and button-hooked around the edge of the diner. “We enter with purpose,” Jonathan said. “No fear.”

  “I’ll try to manage my terror.”

  No one had yet to turn on the lights in the diner, though the glow of the emergency exit sign was surprisingly bright. Even more light spilled in through the long front window. Jonathan led, as he usually did—if things went south, Boxers could shoot over his head, but the opposite was a nonstarter. Keeping his Colt at a low-ready, he visually swept the kitchen for threats. Finding none, he never broke stride as he crossed into the dining room.

  Their waitress from this afternoon—a harried forty-something who could have been pretty if she didn’t look so exhausted—sat in a booth ahead and to the right, facing the kitchen door. Opposite, with her back turned, he recognized Jolaine. Between them lay a 12-gauge coach gun whose barrels had been trimmed all the way back to the foregrip, its business end pointed at Jolaine’s chest. The pistol grip appeared from this angle to be homemade, and the waitress’s hand was wrapped around it, her fingers on the triggers. Both hammers were pulled back, and the weapon was ready to go.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Mary. This is my place, and I want to know why you think you belong here. She Devil here doesn’t want to tell me. So why don’t you boys put your guns down so I don’t have to repaint the place and we can have a nice chat.”

  “Why don’t we shoot you instead?” Boxers growled.

  “Because I think you care about this young lady,” Mary said. In the dim light, Jonathan could see the serious set of her face. “If I’d wanted to shoot, this one would be dead already, and I could’ve reloaded to take out both of you. I’d rather just have a peaceful chat.”

  Jonathan had long prided himself in his ability to judge people, and he liked this lady. He liked folks who spoke their mind plainly. He also imagined that someone who could appear so calm under circumstances like this possessed a toughness that he’d rather not get crosswise with.

  “Holster up, Big Guy,” he said. Holding out one hand to Mary in a be cool gesture, he slowly slid his Colt back into the holster on his hip.

  “The hell are you doin’?” Boxers asked.

  “Mary wants to talk, we’re going to talk. Sometimes, you have to acknowledge when the other guy—excuse me, the other gal—has the upper hand.” Then he shifted the tone of his voice. “Besides, as she already noted, with three targets and only two barrels, if she goes rogue, she’s guaranteed to be one-third of the casualties. More likely one-half.”

  Boxers hesitated. He didn’t like this, but in the end, he followed his orders and slipped his M9 back into its holster.

  Jonathan pointed to the shotgun. “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  Mary shook her head. “Not yet it’s not.”

  “At least take your fingers off the triggers,” Jonathan said. “Right now, a sneeze can end in disaster.”

  She considered that. “Okay.” Her first two fingers formed into a wide V outside of the trigger guard. “That make you happy?”

  “Happier,” he said. He flashed the grin that historically had worked wonderful things for him. “So, what do you want to talk about?”

  “Have a seat there at the counter,” Mary said, nodding to the padded round stools. “Take a load off, but keep facing me.”

  Jonathan complied, lifting a butt cheek high enough to hook the edge of the stool. Boxers sort of squatted to end up at the same level. Something about the awkwardness of his movement made Jonathan chuckle.

  “You’re quite the tall fellow, aren’t you?” Mary asked.

  “You okay, She Devil?” Boxers asked.

  Jolaine nodded.

  “Say something,” Boxers said.

  “I’m fine. I just feel stupid. She came right up behind me. Could’ve cut my throat if she’d wanted to.”

  “Well, Mary, thank you for not cutting my colleague’s throat,” Jonathan said. He wanted to keep things as light as they could for as long as they could. “Now, about that conversation.”

  “You can start with why you’re in my diner in the middle of the night.”

  Jonathan winced. “You know, if I were in your position, that’s exactly the question I would want to know the answer to. But try another one, because that’s one I can’t answer.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “A little bit of both,” Jonathan said.

  His earbud popped. “Scorpion, Boomer. We’re in position, eyes on target.”

  Jolaine and Boxers looked to him simultaneously.

&nb
sp; Mary caught the motion, and clearly sensed something significant. “What is it?”

  Jonathan scratched the back of his head. “Okay, Mary, here’s the thing. I really need you to raise both of your hands and move them away from your gun.”

  She gave him a look. “Why in the world would—”

  “There’s a very talented shooter out there, probably across the street, who has you in the crosshairs of his sniper scope. He just told me over the radio that he’s ready to kill you.”

  Mary’s features sagged, and she pivoted her head to look out through the window into the night. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Look at me, Mary,” Jonathan coached.

  She turned.

  “I’m going to spin a little on this stool to show you that when I reach around my back, I will not be reaching for a firearm, but rather for a two-way radio.” As he spoke, he did exactly what he described. “Okay, now I’m going to press a button.”

  He twisted back to face Mary and said, “Boomer, Scorpion. Don’t shoot yet, but light up our hostess with a visible laser.”

  “Rog.” Two seconds later a luminous red dot appeared on Mary’s chest. It moved in tiny circles as Boomer struggled to hold stationary.

  Mary froze in place as she saw it. It’s a terrible feeling to know that someone could make you die in a millisecond.

  “Like I said, Mary,” Jonathan coached, “I need you to slowly raise your hands straight over your head, like you want to touch the ceiling.”

  She did just that, and when Mary’s arms were stretched as far as they could go, Jolaine reached out and spun the shotgun back around toward her captor. For an instant, Jonathan feared that she was going to shoot her in retaliation. He was relieved when Jolaine pulled the stubby weapon close to her and stood. She hurried back to Boxers and stood next to him. Neither showed a public display of affection, thank God. Not that Jonathan had anything against romance, he just didn’t want that kind of emotion to gum things up.

  “Okay, Boomer,” Jonathan said into the radio. “Continue to monitor, but don’t take any shots unless I tell you.”