Against All Enemies

by John Gilstrap

  “Okay,” she said. For whatever reason, Venice never used military jargon, preferring okay to roger. Jonathan never asked because he didn’t much care, and she was so damn good at what she did that it didn’t matter. “You have the buildings, right?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Jonathan said.

  “Okay, numbers will be up as I get them.” In the worst case, Jonathan knew that that would be five minutes, max.

  “Break, break,” Jonathan said over the air. “This is Scorpion. Final check before we go hot. Boomer.”

  “Check.”

  “She Devil.”

  “Ready.”

  Jonathan turned to his drive du jour. “Madman.”

  “Check.”

  And, finally, “Big Guy.”

  “O Captain! my Captain!”

  Jonathan laughed in spite of himself. “You know that poem doesn’t end well for the captain, right?”

  “Color me ambitious,” Boxers said. “And quit thinking so hard.”

  The ambient light troubled Jonathan. Given that they were surrounded by two hundred armed men, they remained at a distinct disadvantage as long as they were visible. The silence of the night bothered him, too. The camp produced its share of mechanical noises, but for the residents here, they had a sense for what was normal and what was not. If they’d had any decent training at all, they would have learned that anything out of the ordinary is cause for alarm. Because of its weight and girth, the engine that propelled the Batmobile produced a grumble that Jonathan wagered was unique to the sounds of the camp.

  “That’s our access road right there,” Jonathan said, pointing to the barely discernable driveway that cut through the barely present grass. Ahead, on the far side of a short hill, a bright glow filled the sky, washing out his night vision. He flipped the switch on the four-tube array to transition to infrared. Because of the brightness of the background, the light-amplification technology of the standard NVG setting could miss objects or people hiding in the shadows. Because infrared (IR) worked off of the heat emitted by the objects he observed, even the best camouflage couldn’t conceal a healthy human being. There was a price to be paid, however—as there was always a price to be paid for any technology—and in this case, the price was detail. While night vision looked like green daylight, IR imagery looked like a moving X-ray.

  “Alpha, Scorpion,” Jonathan said into his radio. “Hold tight here at the intersection and give us cover. Big Guy and I are going to make things dark again.”

  “You know that’s going to create a panic, right?” Rollins said off the air.

  “I’m kind of counting on it. I’m betting it gets pretty damn dark out here,” Jonathan said. “If they shoot each other, we don’t have to worry about them shooting us.”

  “I really don’t feel comfortable out in the open like this,” Boxers said. “Can’t we move the vehicles under the trees over there?” He pointed to a copse of hardwoods a hundred yards away.

  “No,” Jonathan said. “I hate the noise. With the sentries dead, and out of sight of the second gate, I think noise is our greatest enemy.”

  Boxers laughed. “Well, give it a couple of minutes. We’ll have more enemy than we know what to do with.”

  “Madman, you stay put. Keep the engine running, but don’t give it any gas. Deploy outside to give us some measure of cover. I don’t know what it’s going to look like in there, exactly, but we’ll set the timers with enough to get us back before things go boom.” He let the words set for a moment. “You good?”

  “I don’t like being out in the open.”

  Jonathan slugged him playfully in the shoulder. “You don’t like not being in the middle of the shit,” he said. In the parlance of the Unit, he’d just bestowed a compliment—that Rollins wanted to be in the middle of the battle instead of on the outskirts—and it seemed to resonate as such.

  Rollins nodded once and opened his door. “Don’t take too long,” he said. “And remember to keep Big Guy between you and the explosion.”

  Even Boxers laughed at that as he climbed out the passenger side with Jonathan. “I hate that son of a bitch, but he’s not all bad.”

  Jonathan and Boxers moved in unison, Jonathan facing front, and Boxers keeping up step-for-step moving backward. Between the two of them, by sweeping continuously one hundred eighty degrees, they could keep an eye on every compass point. The fact that a very experienced, very capable team was covering their six o’clock, the most likely route of discovery and attack, made him feel more comfortable, but they still needed to move fast.

  Jonathan moved his NVGs up and out of the way as they crested the hill, and he stooped to a crouch. Boxers followed without looking. They’d done this enough as a twosome that they’d learned to think each other’s thoughts and anticipate and read each other’s moves. Keeping his right hand on the grip of his M27, he used his left to fish though a pocket on his vest to find the ten-power monocular that allowed him to assess the scene in close-up detail. At first glance, what he saw disturbed him.

  He pressed the transmit button that now resided atop the chest plate in his vest. “All teams, Scorpion,” he whispered. “I count two, three, four, five bad guys on the exterior of the power plant.”

  Behind him, he felt Boxers whirl around to get a look for himself.

  “Do you need backup?” Rollins asked.

  “Not yet,” Jonathan replied. “Stand by.”

  “Want me to take four of them and you can chase one of them down and beat him to death with your pistol?” Boxers whispered.

  “I really do hate you, you know.”

  “O Captain! my Captain!” Boxers said.

  “And sometimes I hate you more than others.” Jonathan didn’t like what he saw. Why, on a regular night just like any other night, would there be so many people guarding the power plant? Surely, that was not sustainable in the long term. “I think they’re on alert,” he said.

  “For good cause, as it turns out,” Boxers replied. “You want the three on the right or the two on the left?”

  Jonathan scanned some more with his monocular. If they were in fact on alert, they weren’t very disciplined about it. Rather than deploying in an arc around the building, they stood in a single cluster, engaged in conversation. Whatever alert might have been issued had not been taken seriously.

  “Kinda get the sense that this isn’t the first time they’ve been rousted?” Boxers whispered.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Jonathan said.

  “So, I take the right?” Big Guy asked.

  Jonathan hated this part. For every soldier—real, wannabe, or poser—there existed no more thankless job than that of sentry. You spent endless hours staring out into nothing, only to be the first poor bastard dropped by the enemy during an incursion. The best a sentry could hope for was to see the bad guys approaching and sound the alarm. If he lived that long, he’d done his job. There was no more random way to leave this mortal coil than what lay ahead for these poor souls.

  “Affirmative,” Jonathan whispered back. He flipped the selector switch with his thumb. The cluster of targets stood maybe eighty yards away, too far away for the IR lasers to be useful. With his NVGs tilted up out of the way, he would depend on the simple optics of his telescopic sight. He’d set it for ten-power, which allowed him to fill the sight picture with the images of the young men he would kill. Because he was at eighty yards instead of the fifty yards for which he’d zeroed in the scope, he settled the reticle slightly above the target’s head, anticipating impact just forward of the bad guy’s ear. His first target was about three inches taller than his second, so it would take some skill to get both shots right. He took five, maybe ten seconds to rehearse the necessary pivot.

  When he was set, he said, “I’m going full-auto in five, four, three, two . . .” When he got to the silent zero, his trigger broke, and bullets flew. His first target took two rounds essentially through the same hole behind his eye, and the second died in a millisecond as th
e first impact sheared off the top of his head.

  “Clear,” Boxers said. Jonathan thought he’d heard Big Guy’s shots, but was it really three rounds? They recorded as one.

  “Clear,” Jonathan said. Pleasant journey to the other side, boys.

  Thinking as one, they held their positions, unmoving, as they swept the area for additional targets. After thirty seconds, when none had shown themselves, Jonathan whispered, “Let’s go.”

  They advanced quickly yet carefully down the hill, their weapons at the ready. Jonathan ignored his sights and the tunnel vision they brought in favor of a panoramic view. Because it was nighttime and the area was well lit, it was disturbingly easy for a badguy to stay in the shadows if he knew what he has doing. It was the rare amateur who had that level of training, but Jonathan and Boxers had both lived as long as they had by assuming the best-trained enemy with the worst possible motivations. In these conditions, the most telling giveaway would be movement. The human eye had difficulty discerning forms in the dark, but it compensated by being hypersensitive to movement. Jonathan figured it had something to do with his great-great grandfather to the nth power who managed to survive by adapting to the fact that every living being he encountered was a potential predator.

  The power plant building was bigger in reality than it looked in the satellite imagery. The footprint was the same—call it twenty feet by fifty feet—but it was much taller, every bit of fifteen feet of ceiling. Inside, the generator churned just as it was supposed to, but as they got closer, Jonathan worried about the noise drowning out the sound of approaching bad guys.

  “Moving,” Jonathan said. A walkway of sorts—a worn path, really—led from the access road to the left, or green, side of the building. Jonathan knew that the Unit had abandoned the old color-coded side designations in favor of compass points, but old habits died hard. Besides, in Security Solutions, Jonathan got to write the SOPs.

  With the exterior wall of the building now able to give them cover on one side, they shifted in what looked like a choreographed motion to press their shoulders to the wall—Jonathan’s right and Boxers’ left, because Big Guy was walking backward.

  “I feel like I’m on a damn stage,” Boxers said. The lights were that bright.

  “Yeah, well, we’re gonna fix that.” The closer Jonathan got to the building, the more impressed he was with the stoutness of its construction. This wasn’t some pole barn thrown up at the last minute. This was a solid building with corrugated steel walls, erected on a poured-concrete base. He wondered if it had been built for this purpose, or if Carrington and his crew had hijacked it for their own means. Not that it mattered.

  His heart sank as he arrived at the door. The steel panel had been set in a steel frame and the lock was a high-security job that had an old analog keypad entry. He’d been hoping for a padlock and hasp, or at the very least a pin tumbler lock like the one they’d found in Bud’s.

  “We’re gonna need to use a GPC to get in here,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of noise,” Boxers said.

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  They both stewed on the problem for a few seconds, and then Boxers finally said, “I’m on it.”

  Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Alpha, Scorpion. We’re going to have to do an explosive breach here. That’s going to wake some people up about five minutes before we want them awake. Get eyes on the sentries at the inner gate. Let me know if we can take them out before we shoot the GPC.”

  Dylan looked to Jolaine. “Is he serious?”

  “Scorpion is always serious once we’re hot.”

  In his ear, he heard Rollins ask, “Where do you want Madman?”

  “Right where you are,” Jonathan said. “When it’s time to go, it will be time to go right friggin’ now. Alpha, acknowledge my last, please.”

  Dylan said, “I copy that you want us to advance in the light. Is that correct?”

  “Affirmative,” Jonathan said. “Try not to be seen.”

  “Well, no shit,” Dylan said off the air. “Roger,” he said to Jonathan. “This is crazy,” he told Jolaine.

  “We don’t know that yet,” she said. She opened up her laptop, bringing up the detailed satellite image of the compound. Dylan watched over her shoulder as she clicked in the details and did the calculations. “That bunch of trees over there,” she said, pointing thirty yards distant, “looks to be part of a constant chain of cover. If we hang to that, we should be able to get pretty close to the sentry station. That will also put us pretty close to the first objective.”

  Dylan saw what she was describing, but didn’t like it. “We can’t bring the truck up there.”

  “Obviously. We’ll have to hoof it.”

  Dylan’s gut reaction was instant and emphatic. “What about the rest of the gear?”

  “We bring it with us.”

  “I don’t like this,” Dylan said. “If we kill the sentries in the light, then the entire plan gets knocked sideways.”

  “We have to adapt,” Jolaine said.

  “No,” Dylan countered. “We need a workable plan.”

  “There’s always a plan,” she said, shrugging into the straps. “Scorpion always has a plan. He adapts quickly.”

  “But we don’t have a plan,” Dylan objected.

  Jolaine gave him a hard look. “No, we don’t, but we have the next best thing. Orders. Everybody is counting on us to do what we’ve been told to do.”

  “This is crazy.” The key to survival in the SpecOps world was to plan the shit out of everything. Every contingency had a countercontingency. Superior planning, superior firepower, and overwhelming force. Those were the secrets to living long enough to retire.

  Jolaine started walking. “Are you coming with me, or am I going alone?”

  He had to hustle to keep from getting left behind as he donned his ruck. He was still getting it settled on his shoulders as he started across the field. Jolaine had to wait for him after she’d reached the tree line. Like him, she had rocked her NVGs out of the way, and it wasn’t till he got very close that he saw the anger in her eyes.

  “Listen to me, Boomer,” she said. “I don’t know about your past—other than the bad stuff—and I don’t much care. I know that you served in the Unit with Scorpion and Big Guy right before everything went bad, and I know that Madman had a big role in what did go bad.”

  Dylan recoiled from the words. How much had Digger shared with his new civilian friends?

  “All of that is past now,” she went on, “and because you’re on my team, I choose to trust you and your judgment.” She thrust a finger at his face. “But don’t ever second-guess the command structure of this team in my presence again.”

  Dylan scoffed and held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I didn’t say I wasn’t—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “I don’t care what you were or weren’t. I saw hesitation, and hesitation scares the crap out of me. These are the best operators I’ve ever worked with. If they say green is red and that shit smells like roses, then my first assumption is that they are correct. If you have a problem with any of that, then we need to part company right now.”

  This was officially new territory for Dylan. He’d never gone into combat with a civilian before—or a woman for that matter—and the only times that he’d ever played fast and loose with well-established, heavily tested and toned rules, it had always been on his own terms. It was also a new experience to encounter Jolaine’s intense level of personal loyalty to the boss. He wondered where that came from.

  It took less than ten minutes to walk the distance along the tree line. As they approached the road, the trees thinned to the point of barely being visible. In the distance, maybe fifty yards away, and uphill, he could see where the road met the fence and presumed that to be the location of the gate. This area was very brightly lit from lights atop twelve-foot poles. Dylan thought he saw four people milling about, so he brought his rifle up to verify through his scope. He d
ialed in ten-power magnification and confirmed what he’d thought.

  “Mother Hen, She Devil,” Jolaine whispered over the air. “Can you confirm four sentries at the inner gate?”

  A moment passed. “Mother Hen counts six. Plus two in the woods south of the tree line, unless that’s you.”

  “That is us,” Jolaine confirmed.

  “When you pull out, do you see any others?” Dylan asked. His question drew another glare from Jolaine, as if she considered herself the only one qualified to talk on the radio.

  Venice took awhile with her answer for this one. “Negative, Boomer. Those at the gate are the only humans I see out in the open. There’s a small herd of deer, though, directly to your east.”

  “Can you take two from here?” Dylan asked. As soon as the words were out, he knew he’d made a mistake. He’d accidentally emphasized the word you, making it sound as if he’d questioned her marksmanship as a function of his own.

  “Anything you can do, asshole,” she said.

  He considered apologizing, but realized that it wouldn’t matter. Therefore it could wait. Standing to his full height, Dylan pressed his weapon against the trunk of a stout hardwood and settled the stock into the soft part of his shoulder. He achieved his desired cheek weld against the pad on the 417’s stock, and without looking, he verified that the selector switch was clicked to full-auto. Taking out two men with automatic weapons fire was tricky, but it wasn’t as hard as most people thought, provided you knew what you were doing. The first target would be dead well before the sound of the gunshot arrived, and by the time the second target realized there was a problem, he’d be dead, too. “On your count, She Devil,” he whispered.

  “You’re taking right, I’m taking left, correct?”

  “If that’s the way you like it,” he replied. Actually, because he was standing to Jolaine’s right, it was the only solution that made sense, but for some reason it felt good to be a little shitty.

  “Targets acquired?” she asked.