Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  “Oo-uh,” Rollins said. Apparently, some habits were hard to break.

  “Boomer, you drive the Batmobile,” Boxers said. “I don’t want Madman’s cooties on the spot where I have to plant my ass.”

  “Jesus,” Jonathan muttered.

  Big Guy rumbled a laugh.

  “Showtime,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go.”

  As the other three swarmed out toward the SUV, Jonathan stepped out of the alley into the street and waved to the cop car. The headlights came on, as did a floodlight, which nailed them in the eyes, effectively blinding them.

  “Halt,” said a voice over the siren speaker. “Come no closer.”

  “Let’s split,” Jonathan said. “You walk down the left sidewalk and I’ll go down the right.”

  “Split the target, split the fun,” Big Guy said. “You’re Whiskey Indigo-ing again, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Jonathan said, and they split their course. He was betting on two facts, both of which were pretty sure things. One, that the cop was alone on his patrol, and two, that he was scared fairly shitless. That would make him at once skittish and open to negotiation.

  “I’m telling you to stop!” the cop said. With only one floodlight, he had difficulty figuring out who to illuminate. The beam switched from one side to the other.

  “We mean you no harm, officer!” Jonathan shouted.

  “Stop them!” came a shrill voice from behind. It was Mary. Jonathan could only imagine how much counseling she was going to need. “They’re murderers!”

  “I’m not telling you again to stop!” the cop announced.

  Jonathan stopped behind a parked Chrysler to up his odds a little for the next part. Behind him, he heard the SUV that contained his team approaching up the street. As he calculated it, they had room to pass by the patrol car, but it would be tight. Jonathan beckoned for the truck to drive up on his edge of the sidewalk, and he pressed up tight against the parked Chrysler to let them pass.

  “I’m going to shoot!” the police officer said.

  “No, you’re not,” Jonathan shouted. Then he lowered his voice. “Can you hear me if I speak at this volume?”

  “Yes,” the cop said into the public address speaker.

  “And I can hear you just fine without that,” Jonathan said.

  “Stop them!” Mary yelled. “They killed Tommy Piper.”

  “I swear to God I will shoot you!” the cop shouted.

  “And I swear to God that the survivor will kill you!” Boxers shouted. “Turn off the friggin’ speaker!”

  “We mean no harm, Officer,” Jonathan said. He kept his tone modulated to be the essence of reason. “And as much as I wish my friend would keep his mouth shut!”—he shouted that part for Boxers to hear—“he raises a good point. Because we mean no harm, and because you cannot shoot two targets at opposite poles at the same time, you should avoid shooting either one.”

  “Who are you?” the cop asked. He shouted that time through his open window. Down the length of the street, lights were coming on. Less than three minutes had passed since the end of the gunfight, but it felt like much longer.

  “I’m a man with a mission,” Jonathan said.

  “He’s a murderer!”

  “Excuse me, officer,” Jonathan said. Then he turned to face back toward the diner and shouted, “Mary, please shut up!”

  Back to the officer. “I won’t deny that there’s been some unpleasantness here tonight, sir,” he said. “Truth be told, the coroner and undertakers are likely to be working overtime for a while, but I swear to you, sir, that I was not the aggressor. The late Tommy Piper who Mary refers to was in fact about to shoot my friend when I shot him. He chose to work for the bad guys. We, on the other hand, work on the side of the angels.”

  “Are you confessing to a crime?”

  “No. I’m confessing to a bad night. The rest is up to a jury.”

  The cop, who was faceless in the midst of all the bright lights, took his time for the next part. “I need to arrest you,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “Not tonight. I’ve got a lot of important things to do, and going to jail isn’t on the list.”

  “So you’re resisting arrest,” the cop said.

  “No. I’m refusing arrest. Is that a crime?”

  A pause. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jonathan said. “It’s a confusing situation. And it’s a situation that—and I mean no offense here—you have no control over.” Beyond the police car, at the far end of the street, Jonathan saw approaching headlights. One big vehicle and one bigger vehicle. That had to be the cavalry.

  “You can’t just shoot up my town and get away with it,” the cop said.

  “I didn’t do that,” Jonathan said. “People tried to shoot up my friends and me, and we shot back. That’s a different proposition.”

  Another pause. Longer this time. “I can’t just let you go.”

  Tommy’s SUV and the Batmobile pulled in behind the cop car. “I understand where you’re coming from,” Jonathan said, “but sometimes principle finds itself at odds with reality. In this case, the reality is that you can’t possibly stop us.”

  On the far side of the cop car, Boxers was already moving toward the driver’s side of the Batmobile. “Are we cool, Officer?” Jonathan asked.

  “No,” the cop said. “Of course we’re not cool.”

  Jonathan considered that. Admired it, even. Who cannot admire honesty in the face of overwhelming firepower? “I’ll tell you what,” Jonathan said. “Remember I told you that we were on a mission?”

  He actually waited for a response. Finally, the cop said, “Yes, I remember.”

  “Good. Well, our mission is at the compound that you know about, but I’m guessing you ignore, up there on the top of the mountain. If you want to come and arrest me, that’s where I’ll be. When you get your reinforcements, come on up and we’ll talk.” He shielded his eyes from the blinding light and saw a twelve-year-old behind the wheel. Okay, maybe twenty-five, but he looked twelve. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Who are you?” the cop asked again. “Are you FBI or something?”

  “Go with something,” Jonathan said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Boxers was already in the driver’s seat of the Batmobile, and he tapped the horn. Jonathan regarded the kid with the badge who sat behind the wheel of the police cruiser. He considered how much life he had in front of him, and how terrified he must be, not just of this confrontation, but of the activities that swirled around him every day that required him to pretend to be ignorant.

  “We’re going to end it,” Jonathan said at last. “I can’t promise that all the danger will be gone by tomorrow morning, but a lot of it will. In two weeks, there’ll be nothing left.”

  “Then you have to be FBI,” the cop said. His tone was significantly lighter than before.

  “I’ll stick to my guns,” Jonathan said. “We’re something. And we’re on the side of the angels.”

  “But you killed people tonight.”

  Jonathan inhaled deeply and noisily through his nose and let it out as a silent whistle. “You and your buds are going to do an investigation,” he said, “and that investigation will show what it shows. One of those things will be that Mary of Mary’s Diner lost someone close to her. She lost him because I shot him through the head, but I shot him through the head because he, Tommy, the friend, was going to kill my friend, code named Madman, because Madman was an idiot and let Tommy get his gun. All of this happened because we lured Tommy off the mountain to give us information on what’s going on up there, and the shitheads in charge launched a hit team to keep us from doing that.”

  The cop said nothing.

  “Are you still there?” Jonathan asked.

  “You don’t have enough people,” the cop said.

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that,” Jonathan repl
ied. He stepped out from behind the car and started walking toward the Batmobile. His path took him directly past the driver’s window of the cop car. As he passed, he stopped and offered his hand. “My name is Scorpion,” he said.

  “That’s not your real name.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Officer Parks,” the cop said. He shook Jonathan’s hand.

  “I really am sorry for the mess,” Jonathan said. “That’s a lot of bodies and a lot of blood, and I’ll tell you up front that no matter what fingerprints or physical evidence you or the crime scene guys find, you’ll never find us.”

  “Because you’re somebody,” Parks said.

  Jonathan smiled. “But of course, in this case, being somebody is tantamount to being nobody.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The two-vehicle caravan traveled blacked out, navigating via night vision goggles. At this hour—just shy of four in the morning—there was no oncoming traffic to be concerned with. Boxers led behind the wheel of the Batmobile with Jonathan riding shotgun and Jolaine in the backseat. Rollins and Dylan followed in the other vehicle and stayed close to their rear bumper.

  Jonathan had entered the coordinates of the camp’s key components into his handheld GPS. The first milestone they needed to reach was the outer gate, which was still eight miles away. He keyed his mike. “First chance we get, we’re going to pull off on a side road and plan.” The truth of the matter was that the team hadn’t spoken as a group since they’d left Officer Parks wondering what had just happened, and there were issues that needed to be discussed.

  Boxers found a dirt road off to the left—might have been a driveway—and pulled in far enough to leave room for the other vehicle behind them. Jonathan had long ago disabled the interior light, but when the follow vehicle opened a door, the splash of illumination washed out his NVGs for a second and ruined his night vision.

  Without waiting to be told, Rollins hit the dome light with the muzzle of his pistol, bathing them in manageable darkness again. They gathered around the hood of the Batmobile. “Now is it time to tell us what that shit was all about in town?” Rollins asked.

  “How about you start with what happened in the apartment, Stanley,” Boxers said.

  “The kid knocked me off balance and got my gun,” Rollins said. “Shit happens.”

  “The kid weighed a hundred thirty pounds soaking wet,” Big Guy said. “How does someone that size knock a professional soldier off balance?”

  “Look here, Lurch, I’m not going to stand here—”

  “Shut up, Madman,” Jonathan snapped. “Excuses don’t count, and you know it. They never have. You jeopardized the mission and got that boy killed. Own it.”

  “You’re the one who shot him.”

  “So he wouldn’t shoot you,” Jolaine said.

  “And what was going on with you in the hallway afterward?” Boxers pressed. “You looked like you had a stroke. Maybe pissed yourself.”

  Rollins peeled his NVGs off his head and donned an aggressive posture. “What are you implying, Lurch?”

  “I’m implying that you locked up,” Boxers said. “And if you want to continue to breathe through any natural orifice, you’ll remember my name.”

  Rollins turned to Jonathan. “Are you going to let this go on? Is this the way the famous, vaunted Scorpion preserves unit cohesion?”

  “Those are officer words, Madman,” Jonathan said. “Desk words. Out here, cohesion is organic. It’s earned or it’s not. You froze in there, and you owe us an explanation.” He removed his own NVGs so he could look his former commander in the eye. Jonathan had no doubt that this was new territory for Stanley Rollins. Somehow, he’d been one of the few to earn his way up through the ranks of the Unit by kissing asses along the way. Out here, though, there was no rank to pull.

  “Let’s not forget that I was the one to eliminate those final bad guys,” Rollins said.

  “From a sniper’s nest,” Boxers reminded.

  “You took them out,” Jonathan said. Then, to Boxers, “He took them out, no doubt. That’s good. Well done. Thanks for that. But you also froze in the apartment. You can talk around it all night or you can explain what happened.”

  It had long been a tradition in the Unit for operators to confess their errors, to own up to them, and to institute a plan that would keep them from happening again. It was never a comfortable moment—and some operators never regained trust after a mistake—but it was essential. There was no slot for an operator who put his own ego above the safety of the team.

  Rollins took his time. Jonathan would have waited all night. “He startled me, okay?” he said. His tone was combative, but it was an important first step. “I let my guard down, and then he was on me. I didn’t expect it, and then I was looking down the barrel of my own pistol. I guess I peeked at the face of God and realized that I wasn’t ready to meet him.”

  “So, you were startled,” Dylan said. Jonathan read his comment as a peace offering.

  “Exactly.”

  But they weren’t done. “What about in the doorway?” Jonathan asked. “After the initial burst of gunfire, Big Guy and I charged the hallway, but you were still standing there.”

  “What is this, Scorpion? A chance to settle scores? A chance to make me look bad?”

  Jonathan answered from the heart. “God’s honest truth, Madman. You’ve already made yourself look bad. I’m giving you a chance to redeem yourself. Ain’t none of us hasn’t already been where you were, but to function with the team, you have to own up to it.” He waited. “That was your cue.”

  It was hard. Jonathan could see it weighing on the colonel as a near-literal, physical weight on his shoulders. Maybe a first in Stanley’s ass-sucking, miserable life.

  Rollins scanned the faces of his colleagues. Jonathan thought he was looking for some kind of reprieve, and was relieved that he apparently found none.

  “I’d never seen someone killed who looked so much like us,” he said, finally. Both the content of the statement and the honesty it represented shocked Jonathan. And he was hard to shock. “I’ve killed skinnies and I’ve killed Hadjis, and I’ve killed my share of . . . Central Americans. But blond, blue-eyed, and so young. Never been there before.” When he spoke that last sentence, he drilled Jonathan with his glare.

  “You’re welcome,” Jonathan said.

  “I confess it took me a while to recover,” Rollins said. “Are we square now?”

  “There’s likely to be a lot more of that,” Jonathan said. “I don’t expect to find a lot of Somalis at an abandoned coal mine in West Virginia.”

  “I’m not a racist,” Rollins said. “I understand the mission. Yes, I had a moment of hesitation, but let’s get back to the fact that I was the one who eliminated the threat of the other shooters in the alley.”

  “Duly noted,” Jonathan said. Beyond the frustration, he read the colonel’s explanation as sincere. People who shoot other people for a living often find refuge in the clichés about differences. It’s a difficult transition to do the job that needed doing in full knowledge that in the eyes of the law, you were committing murder.

  “The police are going to come after us,” Dylan said. “Why aren’t you worried about that?”

  Again, Jonathan gave it him straight. “Because that’s a concern for later. I don’t think they’re going to be a big problem for us, given the target we’re going for, but if they are, we’ll deal with it. I think it’s significant that even though I told them where we were going, I don’t hear a parade of emergency vehicles coming this way.”

  “You think they’re on our side, don’t you?” Jolaine asked.

  “I’m kind of betting on it,” Jonathan said.

  “Why would they be on our side?” Dylan asked.

  “Because they’re frightened of what they know is going on in their backyard, and they’re equally frightened by their powerlessness to stop it.”

  “Did you discover a crystal ball I’m not aware of?” Rollins a
sked.

  “The boss has good instincts,” Boxers said. “Otherwise, he’d have gotten me killed a dozen times by now.”

  “So, we assume we don’t have to fight to the front and the rear,” Dylan said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Stand by one,” Jonathan said. He moved back to the shotgun seat of the Batmobile, opened the door, and removed a nylon bag from which he removed his laptop. As he did, he keyed the mike on his radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Are you still awake?”

  Fifteen seconds passed. “I’m right here.”

  “Has anything come from your talks with my special friend in Florida?”

  Lee Burns, a former Unit operator, had invested millions and made hundreds of millions from a geosynchronous satellite imaging system he called SkysEye. Marketed for use by petroleum companies who wanted to scour the globe for better oil fields, Lee also made a decent living from others who were willing to pay for a high-tech peek into specific places. Because he had known Lee personally, Jonathan told himself that the man only provided real-time satellite imagery for the good guys, but when he thought about it really hard, he worried that the math didn’t work.

  “If you had booted up first, you wouldn’t have to ask,” Venice said. “Turns out he had birds watching the oil fields in Pennsylvania anyway. You’re just a sideward glance.”

  He typed in the appropriate information and an image appeared on his screen. It looked much like the static satellite shot that Venice had provided earlier, but this one showed images of people on the ground. “These images are perfect,” Jonathan said. He oriented the laptop so the rest of the team could see it. He clicked a few keys and the image switched from visual to infrared. “SkysEye is persnickety,” he said to the team. “The images are clean, but they only refresh every four or five minutes. That means we’re largely looking into the past. Still, it’s instructive. Look here.” He pointed to a cluster of white human-shaped forms against a black background.