A Deeper Blue (ARC)

by John Ringo

  Another effective distributor could be seen every night in Orlando. Even in winter the mosquitoes in Florida could get bad. To keep them down, every county had pesticide trucks. They were converted pick-up trucks that simply sprayed clouds of pesticide out the back. They only ran at night, usually in the very early morning hours. But Mike's nightmares were starting to be seeing one of those driving through a neighborhood in the middle of the night. And in the morning, the clean-up crews coming through for the bodies.

  "Kildar, we have a problem," Greznya said. "Anastasia has disappeared."

  "And so the other shoe drops," Mike said, looking up from the report and taking off his glasses. "Any intel?" he asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  "Not so far," the Keldara said. "But Gonzales' ship put out shortly before she disappeared. She asked to be taken to Nassau so she could do some shopping. And she asked to go alone. Is it possible. . .?"

  Mike looked at her and blinked in confusion then shook his head.

  "She didn't turn if that's what you mean," Mike said. "She's afraid of the outdoors. She was probably just working on that. I should have made clear that she needed an outer perimeter."

  "Greznya," Olga said, walking in the room and handing the intel boss a note. "Jay."

  Greznya looked at the note and nodded.

  "A group of what looked like a DEA snatch team took Anastasia from the market," Greznya said. "Colonel Montcrief of the Constabulary has been informed that this was not one of our operations and is investigating. She won't be going out by plane, that he can confirm. Boats, helicopters?"

  "Get word to Jay that we need the take from the mikes Katya planted," Mike said, nodding and looking at the reports. "And keep me updated."

  "Yes, Kildar," Greznya said, frowning slightly.

  * * *

  "How's it going?" Britney asked, walking in and sitting down across from the Kildar. He had reports spread all over a coffee table and had put his hated glasses back on.

  "I'm trying to figure out probable method of attack," Mike said, taking off his glasses. "I don't mean direct method, how they're going to spray it, but. . . There are two major attack methods if you have lots of resources. And six barrels of VX, three useable units in other words, is a lot of resources. Do you go for simultaneous attack or ripple?"

  "One attack that either gathers people or emergency services, then another on the gathering?" Britney asked.

  "Bang on. I'm going to make a WAG that the main attacks are going to be simultaneous or near simultaneous. The terrorists saw our response to 9/11. When the first attack hits, we're going to go to DefConOne and shut everything down. People are going to get distributed, fast. But they're going to concentrate in certain spots during that distribution. . ."

  "What you were talking about with the tunnels," Britney said.

  "Give the girl a cigar," Mike said, leaning back and looking at the ceiling. "So figure that there are three near simultaneous attacks. What are the indicators that they are about to go down?"

  "If I knew that, I'd be in the intel business," Britney said. "Oh, wait. . .! Seriously, I have not the faintest clue."

  "Then use that noggin," Mike said. "What were the indicators of the 9/11 attacks?"

  "Guys with box cutters in their luggage?" Britney asked. "The hijackings."

  "Right," Mike said. "The terrorists don't make their own weapons; they use weapons that are already made by societies that can actually make stuff. Oh, sure, they use bombs and poison gas, but they're not going to make big distribution systems. One report I had the girls go over is sales of aircraft in Florida to men with Middle Eastern names. They got nine hits. I've got a standard request out there to find those nine planes. Five have been located and examined; none of them are in the process of conversion. But I also talked to Arensky about conversion methods and he said two guys could do it in a couple of hours."

  "So if a plane gets stolen. . .?" Britney said.

  "Or any other distribution method," Mike said with a sigh. "Which is why we've got all of Central Florida's dispatch system feeding back to the caravanserai. I mean, I've only got so many people here. But if anything odd comes up, they should catch it there."

  "And then?"

  "Well, then somebody's got to shoot down the planes."

  "You heard Anastasia's been kidnapped."

  "Yep."

  "You don't seem concerned."

  "You don't know Anastasia as well as I do."

  * * *

  "So, you're awake."

  The hood was yanked off and Anastasia blinked at the strong light in her eyes. But she was spun away from it to look at the room she was in. There were shackles hanging from the ceiling, whips lining the far wall and a set of nasty metal tools displayed in a case. At the sight, she almost fainted, but not from fear.

  "Your boyfriend has been causing me trouble," Gonzales said, walking around to stand just at the edge of her view. She was naked and strapped solidly into the chair, gagged and the gag was attached to the headrest. She could barely move a muscle.

  It was wonderful.

  "And you're going to tell me everything I need to know to kill him," Gonzales continued, walking across her field of view. "I know that right now, you'd love to tell me everything I want to know. But since I'm mad at your boyfriend, and he's not here, I'm going to take that mad out on you."

  He returned holding two clips attached to cords. One he reached down and clipped to her labia and the other he clipped to her nipple. Then he held up a red plunger.

  "Let us see how much I enjoy this. . ." Gonzales said, pressing the button.

  As the electricity coursed through her body, Anastasia screamed in near orgasm. But it sounded enough like pain and fear.

  * * *

  "Anastasia was brought on board about three hours ago," Greznya said. "We got a flash of conversation in the main salon. We have a pretty good layout of Gonzales' boat from Katya's travels through it and we are pretty sure what room she's in. Katya's been informed that she is onboard. Vil's team is ready with the boats, Dragon and Valkyrie are prepared and Pad. . .Dmitri's team and Yosif's are working on an entry plan with Chief Adams."

  "Uh, huh," Mike said, nodding. "Good. Great. Glad everybody's dialed in. What's this I hear about Schwenke?"

  "Ritter was apparently Schwenke in disguise," Greznya said. "We don't know when Katya spotted him, or vice versa. But they had a very pleasant conversation just before he left. This was well prior to Anastasia being snatched, but it might have been. . ."

  "Nah," Mike replied. "This is Gonzalez. Kurt would know better."

  Greznya leaned to the side, touching the earbud she had in.

  "Julia says that something's happening with Katya that may have relevance," Greznya said, frowning. "We have the take in the. . ."

  "Yep," Mike said, nodding. "Let's check it out."

  He followed the girl to the interior room of the suite where the intel team had set up shop. It was technically a maid's bedroom, windowless and surrounded by the rest of the suite. It wasn't entirely, or even mostly, secure, but was the best they could do under the circumstances.

  The intel team had changed locales so much they had it down to something of a science and the room was ringed with monitors. One of them was showing the jerky shots of Katya walking down a hallway. From the occasional harder jerk, she was apparently being shoved from time to time.

  "I gotta give that girl a raise," Mike said. "She never seems to catch a break."

  A door opened and Mike shook his head. Anastasia was naked and tied up, spread-eagle. Gonzales, sweating, was standing in front of her holding a whip. From the looks of it he'd been working her front and Mike shook his head when he saw the marks on her breasts.

  "Never whip breasts, you idiot," he said, sighing. "When will they ever learn?"

  Anastasia had a ring gag in and as Gonzales struck her again she screamed, hoarsely. Clearly they'd been at this for a while.

  "Do you see this, bitch?" Gonzales
said. A hand came up past the pickup and her head jerked to the side. It looked as if he was pointing her head to look at Anastasia but Katya's eyes were jerking around taking in details of the room. "This is what happens to bitches that displease me. Are you going to please me?"

  "Oh, yes, please," Katya whined.

  "Yes, Katya, you can have him when we're done," Mike said, pressing the transmit button on the desk mike. "Do me two favors. Wink at Anastasia and gimme a good view of the interior of the door."

  The view of the wink was weird; it turned the room surreal for a moment as the processors suddenly had to shift to just one eye then back.

  "I'm sorry," Katya whined, sliding down and huddling on the ground. "I won't talk, I promise!" She'd turned her head away, apparently to keep from looking at the girl and focused on the door.

  "Yeah, one bolt," Mike said, touching the transmit key again. "Good girl. Remind me when you get back I need to give you a raise or something."

  Gonzales apparently didn't care for her turning her head away and dragged her over to the tortured woman. There was a brief flash of muff then it was pretty apparent where he'd shoved her head. Greznya leaned down and put the sound on "record" then cut off the exterior speakers.

  "It's late," Mike said, walking to the door of the intel room. "I'm gonna get some sleep."

  "Kildar," Greznya said, exasperated. "That's Anastasia! You can't just leave her there!"

  Mike turned back and walked to the controls, hunting around until he found the recording feature. Using one of the other monitors he backed up the recording to where Gonzales laid the whip on his harem manager and froze the playback. Then he zoomed on her face.

  "See that expression?" Mike asked.

  "Oh," Greznya said, biting her lip. In freeze frame it was pretty apparent that what looked like a scream of pain had been anything but.

  "She's having the time of her life," Mike said, turning back to the door. "Gimme a call if it looks as if they're gonna kill her. I think Gonzales is having too much fun to do that any time soon. God knows Stasia is."

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mike stood in front of the glass doors of his room, sipping a cup of coffee and watching the sun come up. It was going to be another glorious Central Florida winter day: fleecy clouds were spotted hither and yon and the sky was, otherwise clear. It was supposed to get to nearly eighty today which was a bit much even for Orlando in winter.

  He didn't turn as the door opened, just took another sip of coffee.

  "You want the update on Anastasia?" Britney asked.

  "I hope you weren't watching any of that," Mike said, seriously.

  "A bit," Britney admitted. "And, yeah, it was hard. You know the question that gets me? How many of the girls in the bunker. . .?"

  "About twelve at a guess," Mike said, still not turning around. "Sort of. If they knew it was a game, twelve would enjoy it. And, hell, probably one was ready to hit the table knowing it wasn't a game; there are some masochists who can't wait to die under the blade. But Stasia's not that far gone. On the other hand, she knows that at a certain level it's a game. She knows there's a strike team ready to go if it looks as if she's going to be killed. Intentionally, mind you. You play at that level and it's not real safe."

  "Do you guys ever. . ." Britney asked, trailing off.

  "Pretty close," Mike said, taking another sip. "The real bitch about it is that he's going to scar hell out of her. Bastard. No matter what you do you can't get rid of them entirely. How's she doing?"

  "Oh, she's spilling all sorts of stuff," Britney said. "All total bullshit. He's a lousy interrogator. She started in on DEA and he started naming names of people he suspected were agents. She 'burned' about half of them. I checked the DEA database. None of them are agents and a bunch of them are people close to him. It's going to nuke his network if he tries to off all of them."

  "She's very good," Mike admitted. "But getting her to actually break? That's tough."

  "Do you. . ."

  "It's her favorite game," Mike said. "She has a secret and she won't share it. I. . . encourage her to share. The last time it was a cookie recipe. Never did get it out of her."

  "With whips and. . .?"

  "I told you in the bunker I'm not a nice guy," Mike said, turning around. "And you didn't believe me."

  "I kinda figured that out after the freighter crew," Britney said, frowning. "You know, most of those guys were. . ."

  "Innocent?" Mike asked, taking another sip. "Define innocent. Sure, they were just sailors doing their job. In this case, supporting the mujaheddin. You think the crew didn't dance when the Towers fell? You think they don't want you wearing a burkha, honey? Maybe there were one or two who weren't complete jackals. Let God sort them out. I don't have the time or the interest."

  "You really are a bastard, aren't you?" Britney asked, unhappily.

  "Glad you finally got that through your pretty little head," Mike said. "Ready to go drive around in a hot car with a complete bastard?"

  "Any particular reason?" Britney asked.

  "It's today," Mike replied. "I can feel it in the wind, in the water. I can feel it in the depths of my bastardness. It's gonna be a hot one."

  * * *

  "Great security," Mike said as they cruised past Wet and Wild again. An Orange County deputy's car was parked on the concrete expanse in front of the attraction. The deputy was chatting with two striking brunettes in bikinis.

  As he turned onto Universal Boulevard Mike looked over at the tourists. Despite the increasing temperatures, the water was clearly freezing. But the northerners were playing in it for all they were worth.

  "Americanus Arcticus," Mike muttered.

  "Say again?" Britney asked.

  "Americanus Arcticus," Mike said, pointing at one little girl who was climbing out of the pool and shivering nearly to death. "Pseudo-human beings from north of the Mason-Dixon line. They're evolutionarily adjusted to arctic temperatures. The young are more poorly adjusted but by the time they reach adulthood they are impervious to cold." He pointed to an immensely hirsute man with a gigantic beer belly and beard wearing only a Speedo. The sasquatchoid was jumping off a diving board in a "cannonball" position and when he hit the water the spray reached nearly as high as the rides. "It's the layers of subdural adipose tissue. Year by year, layer by layer, they build up their resistance even as the rings of trees. As the walrus developed whiskers to find clams in the Stygian depths, and tusks with which to dig them, even thus doth the Yankee evolve blubber."

  Britney was giggling so hard she nearly didn't notice her cell-phone was going off. She pulled it out of her back pocket and listened for a moment.

  "Mike, Orange County Services is missing a spray truck," she said, sobering instantly.

  "It's going down."

  * * *

  Gabrel Amani had been an employee of Orange County Services for four years. He had started cutting lawns with Mexicans but had managed, over time, to work his way into the sprayer trucks. The hours were bad but the pay was much better and it was sitting down work.

  Gabrel could not be called a sleeper agent because he had not entered the US with the intent of performing acts of terrorism, sabotage or espionage. On the other hand, he had entered the US as a good Muslim who supported the Great Jihad. It was the will of Allah that all the earth be in submission to Allah and the duty of every Muslim to support that goal. If that meant that infidels must die, then infidels would die. If they would simply realize that it was their destiny to be in submission to Allah, they would not have to die. It was their own fault that they had to be killed. The will of Allah was paramount.

  Frankly, though, while he didn't want to kill infidels per se - some of them were quite nice if misguided people - this mission gave him no qualms. The actions of the people in the area they were going to hit, especially the way that women dressed, were simply sinful. There was no other way to describe it. Wiping these sluts from the face of the earth would be
a glorious sacrifice unto God. And if he was lucky, he wouldn't die himself.

  He backed the truck up to the loading dock of the Circuit City on Universal Boulevard and parked it. Two fedayeen were already rolling blue barrels up the slope of the dock. It should take no more than ten minutes to load the truck. And then he could go kill infidels and show them that Allah was too magnificent to be defeated. . .

  * * *

  "Dunn."

  Bob Dunn was having a bad week. Among a billion other things, convincing the FBI to act like adults, making sure that the Guardsmen didn't go power-mad and "coordinating transportation" for a group of congressmen, and their families, who had decided that they needed to "check out the nature of the threat" at Disney, he'd had to explain to his bosses that there was a group of heavily armed mercenaries running around Central Florida and that, no, they could not be arrested.

  So the one fucking person he did not want to talk to was the fucking Kildar.

  "Jenkins. You heard about the spray truck?"

  "I heard," Dunn said, sighing. "What about it?"

  "It's, like, missing? And it's one of the best distribution systems they could use."

  "It was being transferred by its driver to the maintenance facility," Dunn said. "It's just overdue. The maintenance manager panicked; they'd gotten the word, too. But it was driven by its regular driver. It's probably just broken down somewhere. It's only been missing thirty minutes."

  "Tell me you don't really believe that? We're talking about a Pakistani who is a known worshipper at one of the most fundamentalist mosques in your area. He goes missing with a spray truck when we've got VX in play and you're. . .what? You're sitting on it?"

  "We put out a general call," Dunn said. "What the fuck else do you want us to do?"

  "I saw the call. It was a very low priority, no possible terrorism code, no threat code at all, in fact. It's fucking nuts! One of your deputies pulls the thing over and he's fucking dead, you know that?"

  "You telling me my job?" Dunn asked, snarling. "Okay, no, I don't believe that. Yeah, I think that we have a serious situation here. My boss doesn't. The fucking No-Go colonel we got saddled with couldn't lift his nose out of day before yesterday's reports to even notice. Why? Because it's just the regular driver. The fact that the guy is from Pakistan doesn't fucking matter, okay? That is not part of the decision-making process, okay? Nor is his house of worship, okay?"