Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  It was possible that they’d missed their precious cargo completely, but thoughts like that were self-defeating, so he pushed them away. If they’d blown the mission, they’d blown it. For the time being, until he had data to the contrary, this was their plan.

  As the sun dropped, it took the temperature with it, and under a new moon without a cloud anywhere, they were staring down the maw of double awfulness: frigid temperatures and a bright starlit sky.

  He’d switched to night vision about fifteen minutes ago, and the view was like green daylight. Once Venice had the coverage she needed and she’d successfully overridden the video feed, they would move into the house and liberate their precious cargo.

  “Cars coming,” Boxers said into his earbud. The sudden noise startled him.

  “A bunch of cars,” Venice corrected. “I thought nothing was supposed to happen till seven.”

  “Damn bad guys didn’t read the playbook,” Boxers mocked. “What’re you thinking, Scorpion?”

  Jonathan answered with a question. “Mother Hen, do you have enough to cover an entry now?”

  “I could use more,” she said.

  “With all this activity out in the front yard, we’re missing the perfect opportunity to enter through the back,” Boxers said. “Distracted guards are my favorite kind.”

  “Understood,” Jonathan said. “We wait till Mother says it’s okay to go.” He shared Boxers’ urge to move, but he stifled it. You had to take a longer view of these things. The video loop was as much about their escape as their entry, and he was rolling the dice that five minutes wouldn’t make a lot of difference one way or the other.

  Jonathan counted seven cars in total. Most were pickup trucks or SUVs, but there were a couple of beat-up sedans in the mix as well. The headlights flared his night vision, so he flipped the goggles out of the way. In the starlight, though, while he could see people moving, he couldn’t get enough detail for a hard count.

  “Big Guy, how many people do you see?”

  “I don’t have the angle for that,” he said.

  “I want you to know that I’m feeling very left out back here,” Gail said.

  “We’ll be there soon enough,” Jonathan promised. “How are we coming, Mother?”

  When she didn’t bother to reply, he knew that she was lost in concentration. A minute later, she said, “Okay, team. Go.”

  Three minutes later, they’d all gathered in the rear of the mansion. They reviewed the plan one more time, and when Jonathan was satisfied that everyone knew what to do, they moved toward the house. Having studied the architectural plans, they’d decided to make their entry through a door that led to a back hallway near the kitchen. Stealth mattered tonight, and that meant subtlety.

  For now.

  The first order of business, then, was to find the electrical service and wire it with explosives. If the moment came when they wanted darkness, they would want it right by-God now, and detonating cord with a wireless initiator would do the trick.

  They found the meter on the black side, in the corner nearest the red side. Gail and Jonathan took defensive positions, their backs to the building, rifles at the ready, while Boxers set the charges.

  When the Big Guy was done, he turned and gave a thumbs-up. “Let’s go in,” he said.

  The three of them moved in a deep crouch to stay below the level of the windows as they made their way along the back of the house to the door they’d selected as the point of entry.

  “How sure are we that there are no alarms?” Boxers asked into the radio.

  Venice answered, “I’ve deactivated all the alarms for now. Windows, doors, the whole nine yards. Besides, who keeps the intruder alarm on when people are arriving for a meeting?”

  That was good enough for Jonathan. He stooped to his haunches and unslung his ruck. While he and Boxers were cross-trained in everything-except for flying aircraft, which was the Big Guy’s exclusive purview-their job functions broke down roughly along the levels of violence required. Boxers was the breaker of things and the blaster of holes.

  Jonathan found the fiber-optic cable he’d been looking for in its designated pocket in his ruck. Just to make sure there wasn’t a crowd of people waiting on the other side of the door, he used the point of his KA-BAR to dimple the weather stripping at the base of the door and threaded the spaghetti-size cable into the space beyond.

  Turning his head, he noted that both members of his team were watching him work. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Look out for bad guys.”

  “And if we see them?” Gail asked.

  “Try not to shoot.”

  The cable he threaded under the door contained both a camera and a transmitter, tuned to his PDA. He flipped his NVGs out of the way, cupped his hands around the screen to shield the light wash, and took a tour of the room beyond. It took the better part of a minute for him to fuss with the exposure enough to get a clear picture of the dark space.

  “Looks empty to me,” he said. “All I see is a lot of closed doors. There’s light at the far end of the hallway, but I don’t see any people.”

  Now for the burglar stuff. Jonathan kept his lock set in a leather pouch about the size of a very thin pack of cigarettes. He thumbed the cover flap out of the way and found the Y-shaped tension bar and the rake, a three-inch steel rod with a serpentine squiggle at the end. He put rotation pressure on the keyway of the dead bolt, and then dragged the rake along the top and the bottom to dislodge the pin tumblers. In short order, all of the pins moved, and the lock turned. It took even less time to pick the knob lock.

  The door floated inward.

  “Peeping Tom and burglar,” Gail whispered with an admiring smile. She adjusted her M4 in its sling. “Let’s go.”

  Jonathan put a hand on her chest. “You’re out here for external security,” he said. “We need eyes outside, and Big Guy and I have done this together a lot of times.” He sensed that he’d just hurt her feelings, but he didn’t care. Not now. If there was fallout, they could deal with it later.

  She said, “Keep in close contact, okay?”

  “Deal,” Jonathan said. He turned to Boxers. “You ready?”

  “Oh, my, yes,” he said.

  Because of their relative sizes, it always made sense for Jonathan to lead on any entry. He pushed the door open, took two steps inside, and dropped to a deep crouch, his M4 trained on the hallway ahead. The last thing he wanted at this point was a gun battle-that would almost surely cause the Nasbes to be killed. Two seconds later, Boxers was in and the door was pushed closed again.

  This was where it got tough. Absent any useful intel, Jonathan and Boxers had become little more than well-armed burglars. They would have to feel their way into this new environment, using the ancient floor plans as a template, but anticipating that everything about them was wrong. They didn’t know where the bad guys were, and, even more critically, they didn’t know where the good guys were-assuming that they were here at all.

  Their advantage had been whittled to nothing more than superior marksmanship.

  For the better part of a minute, they stayed frozen in the hallway, listening and watching. With buds in both ears-the right one for the radio traffic and the left to monitor any audio feeds they might get-it could be difficult sometimes to pick up distant conversations. You had to adjust to the ambient noise, and then react as much to background anomalies as to actual sounds themselves.

  In this case, he heard the people arriving in the front of the house, but their conversations were an indiscernible rumble.

  “Can we at least get some cover?” Boxers whispered over the radio. In superquiet environments like this, the radio was the most efficient way to communicate. The mikes they used could pick up the faintest whispers, yet still be decipherable in the middle of a firefight.

  “I think we need to split up,” Jonathan whispered.

  “And I think one of us just had an aneurism,” Boxers replied, “because I could have sworn that I just heard my boss
suggest that we split up. That ain’t happening.”

  “We’ve got to. We’ve got to search the house, and we need to find out what’s going on at this meeting. Together we make too big a footprint. Separately, we can stay out of sight easier.”

  Boxers made the growling noise that usually meant surrender. “Promise no shooting without me,” he said.

  “Not if I can avoid it. You stay on this level with the guests. I’m searching for the basement.”

  Boxers didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue. “Shout if you need me, hear?” he said.

  Jonathan crossed his heart. “Got it. And no killing people just because you’re bored.”

  The second door on the left led to the basement. Boxers was with him step-for-step until that moment, and then, after they parted with a knuckle knock for luck, Jonathan was on his own.

  The stairs were finished with lush carpets, and the walls on either side were decorated with artwork that Jonathan could not have cared less about. He noted with interest what appeared to be drops of blood on the walls. When he touched one, it smeared, and he became even more convinced that he was in the right place.

  He descended along the side of the risers for the same reason every teenager who ever returned home after curfew did: the farther you stay from the center of any board, the less likely it is for it to squeak. He chose the left side so that his right hand-his preferred shooting hand-could remain on the grip of his M4.

  He moved slowly, taking one step at a time, pausing between each to listen for any noise that might indicate trouble.

  Patience was a great asset to soldiers and burglars alike, and perhaps the single most distinguishing trait that separated professionals from amateurs. The slowness was agonizing; the temptation to just get it over with overwhelming.

  It took every bit of five minutes for Jonathan to reach the carpeted floor. Now he knew that the floor plans were a waste of paper and electrons. The place was fully furnished down here, complete with a pool table, a bar, and a big-screen television. A man cave. And it was entirely unoccupied.

  It also took up only about a quarter of the total footprint of the house, maybe less. That meant that there was more to the place than what he could see.

  A vertical seam of light on the far side of the room solved the riddle. As he closed to within a few feet, he clearly saw the outline of a double door in the wall. Lowering himself to his knees, he once again used fiber optics to peer into his future.

  The image on his PDA showed a brightly lit area of utilitarian construction. An unremarkable off-white hallway rose from an unremarkable tile floor. Distances were difficult to judge, but every ten feet or so, the walls gave way to closed doors. He’d seen this sort of unimaginative decor in countless office spaces throughout the world.

  The good news was that he didn’t see any people in the camera’s field of view. But someone had left the lights on.

  Hoping to find the means to open the door, he used the flat of his palms and rubbed the door from knee to shoulder height. Sooner or later he’d find a knob. When he couldn’t find it after a minute or so, he flipped his NVGs out of the way and opted to use the muzzle light from his M4. Within seconds, the bright white disk of light revealed not a knob but a D-ring that had been recessed into the wall. If there was an alarm system, he couldn’t see it.

  Didn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. He winced in anticipation as he turned the ring. While Venice could easily disable even a sophisticated system from sounding the alarm at the off-site headquarters, she was powerless to silence local alarms that were tied directly to the sensors.

  Holding his breath, he pressed the door open, and…

  Nothing. The mission gremlins remained on his side. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He pressed his transmit button and whispered, “Radio check.” He would have been inaudible to someone standing two feet away.

  Venice answered, “A little crinkly, but I’ve got you.”

  “I’m in the basement.”

  “Copy. Take care of yourself.”

  The first order of business was to establish a forward operating base for himself here in the bowels of enemy headquarters. If the conversations they’d monitored were still operative, he had more than an hour to kill before anything interesting happened, and standing in the middle of the hallway for that amount of time was a nonstarter.

  He decided to start in one of the offices. First, though, he owed his team some intel. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.

  “Right here.”

  “I’ve got a total of eight rooms on either side of the first hall, directly inside the doorway. They’re pretty heavy construction, and they’ve got some heavy locks.” In Jonathan’s experience, people used big locks to secure against big fears-the kind of fears that posed big threats to people like him. In his mind, he could see Venice back in Fisherman’s Cove typing like crazy to document what he was telling her.

  “More in a minute,” he said.

  Neither of the first rooms on the right or the left bore padlocks, so he targeted those first. The one on the left was locked at the knob; the one on the right was not, so he chose the locked one. There was no way in the world he was going to hang out in an unlocked room, and if the room on the right was supposed to remain unlocked, so be it.

  Using his picks, he gained entry in seconds. He was in somebody’s office. The computer and the file cabinets were a dead giveaway. He locked the door behind him and keyed his mike. “Radio check.”

  “Not as strong as before,” Venice said, “but I’ve got you.”

  “Continuing, then,” Jonathan said. “The hallway on my side terminates in a right-angle turn to the north. I can’t see around the corners, but it looks to me as if this area is designed either as secure office space or secure storage. I’m about to step out to surveil the area now.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. Stepping back into the hallway, he turned left and eased quietly down the hall. He moved at a crouch, his M4 up to his shoulder and ready.

  The bright light was his greatest immediate hazard. At least they were overhead fluorescents. The shadows thrown by fluorescents were far less prominent than their incandescent cousins.

  Jonathan heard voices as he approached the turn, and stopped. If they were approaching him, he was screwed; the mission would come to a violent end right now. As it was, the voices seemed stationary, neither getting closer nor farther away.

  With his M4 dangling parallel to his body via its sling, Jonathan moved at an excruciatingly slow pace to the end of the hallway at the turn. He pulled a rubber-handled dental mirror from a pocket in his sleeve-the analog equivalent of fiber optics-and used it to take a look down the perpendicular hallway. He advanced it with the lens pointing toward the floor to guard against an unintentional flash of light, or an errant reflection fairy on the wall.

  What he saw made his stomach flip. Two young people, late teens, early twenties-a boy and a girl-stood about halfway down the hall, flanking a heavy door. They both wore holstered sidearms and appeared heavily engaged in a whispered argument, the text of which he couldn’t hear. The girl was the one standing farthest from him, and she was turned so he could see her face.

  When he realized that he recognized her, he nearly gasped. That was the shooter from the bridge.

  In his ear, Boxers whispered, “Okay, we’re pegging the weird-o-meter up here. They’re changing into robes. Think Klansmen without the hoods.”

  Jonathan withdrew his mirror, replaced it in his pocket, and quietly unslung his ruck and placed it on the floor. They needed to be able to watch what was happening in that hallway.

  “This is a trial,” Boxers whispered. “But the defendants aren’t present, and there’s not a lot of doubt how it’s going to go.”

  “You’re talking a lot,” Venice said. “Are you under enough cover?”

  There was a pause. Then Boxers tapped his microphone to say yes.

  Jonathan found the wireless camera and transmi
tter he was looking for in the left-side pocket. He splayed the flexible wire legs that served as a tripod, and he placed it on the floor, using the point of his finger to move it past the angle of the turn. About the size of his thumbnail and black, it would be visible to anyone who looked at it, but if you didn’t know what you were looking at, it could easily be written off as an insect. In fact, he’d had a few of these babies stomped on over the years.

  “I’ve got your signal,” Venice said in his ear without him asking. “I see two people standing in a hallway. They’ve made no indication that they’ve seen you.”

  Jonathan acknowledged with a tap to his transmit button. What he needed was a way to peek inside that room they were guarding. If the Nasbes were there, and they were together, he’d pull Boxers in, snatch them both, and make a running getaway. But he couldn’t do that with the guards there.

  With nothing better to do, he headed back to his makeshift FOB to wait out the next event, whatever that might be.

  While he did that, Venice polled them for situation reports. Boxers replied by breaking squelch, and Gail said that she was bored.

  Boring was good, Jonathan thought. But he doubted that it would stay that way for long.

  CHAPTER TWENTY – FIVE

  The pain in Ryan’s arm had dulled to a low, constant throb, punctuated by occasional jolts of agony when he gave in to the urge to test if it still hurt to move his fingers or wrist. It was a stupid thing to do-it always hurt, and why wouldn’t it since the bones were broken?-but he couldn’t resist. It was like testing the wet-paint sign, only with high-voltage paint.

  The splint and the sling definitely helped. He supposed that he should feel more grateful to Sister Colleen than he did. She showed him kindness that no one else showed, after all, and she liked his muscles. But even if she blew him, there’d be no getting around the fact that she was a flaming nut job.

  He refused to believe that they were really going to kill him. That thing with Brother Stephen had been an accident, after all. Wasn’t a broken arm punishment enough? Besides, why go through all the effort to splint his arm if they were just going to murder him anyway?