The Fall

by R. J. Pineiro

  Jack watched its silvery trail on the water before rising to his feet, blending with the surroundings, dashing around the back of the property, moving swiftly but measuring his strides, remaining within the obscure confines of the corridor-like path between the houses, scanning his narrow field of view but not in a single sweep.

  Aware that the human eye had surprisingly low acuity in any part of the visual field not at the very center, Jack shifted his eyes by just ten degrees every five seconds, allowing the center of his gaze, the fovea, to pierce the darkness, letting the high density of cones in the retina do the heavy lifting, letting the millions of receptive fields in the ganglion cells search for any shapes that didn’t belong, any movement that would telegraph the presence of more—

  There.

  At his ten o’clock.

  Protruding through a row of waist-high bushes across the street, under the shadow of a towering magnolia, protected from the glowing streetlights, Jack spotted two barrels, long, with bulky silencers screwed at the end.

  I see you.

  He dropped to the ground slowly, remaining in the shadowed recess by the front corner of the building, systematically probing his surroundings one narrow arc at a time, spotting a third operative on the roof across the street, his high-powered rifle trained on the garage doors.

  This time around Pete wasn’t bringing a boatload of soldiers but had chosen to take them covertly, to keep this from the authorities, to avoid another public Charlie Foxtrot, military-speak for a clusterfuck.

  And that played in Jack’s favor as he surveyed the street once more, finding only three marks, and looking up and down the street yielded no additional targets. He spotted no parked vehicles that suggested additional mercenaries.

  But this can’t be it, he thought, especially after the way he had disabled so many soldiers at the—

  The answer came a moment later, when a vehicle turned onto the street, headlights off, driving slowly toward them. A large black van with dark windows, followed by a second matching vehicle.

  That’s more like it.

  But it really didn’t matter.

  There was a reason why only a microscopic percentage of U.S. fighting forces made the cut to be a SEAL. It was a hard thing to explain, but somewhere along the way during those weeks of unparalleled training, during the inhumane drilling, the mental abuse, the unprecedented harsh treatment, and the even more brutal missions, the world suddenly seemed slower to a SEAL. Everyone else appeared to move in slow motion, in ways that made their actions predictable, easy to counterattack.

  And it was happening now. As Jack watched the incoming threat, as the vans made their way toward the house, everything suddenly slowed to a crawl.

  Except for Jack, who reached for his M32 grenade launcher, his eyes on the approaching vehicles, lining them up in the reflex scope, before releasing two armor-piercing rounds in rapid succession, one per vehicle.

  Switching targets, he popped one more at the shrubs with the barrels and a fourth one on the roof across the street.

  BOHICA, he thought, shrinking back in the recesses, the age-old acronym echoing in his mind: Bend Over Here It Comes Again.

  The first two ear-piercing blasts boomed in rapid succession, one after the other, deafening, lighting up the street, shaking the ground, shattering windows.

  The vans turned, crashing into trees, catching fire as the well-placed rounds punctured the frame before magnesium cores incinerated anything in a five-foot radius.

  Occupants screamed, some jumping out, their clothes on fire as they rolled on the grass as a third explosion tossed bodies in the air across the street along with rifles, just as a fourth detonation on the roof disintegrated the sniper in a ball of flames, and debris running down onto the pavement.

  Jack followed that with four smoke grenades, which he tossed at twenty-foot intervals starting right in front of the house and continuing down the street to cover their escape.

  “Now, Angie,” he spoke into his voice-activated throat mike as blue smoke filled the street, diffusing the pulsating flames, mixing with smoke boiling from the vans, from the charred corpses littering the street.

  He rose to his feet, the M32 in his hands housing his last two rounds, the smell of burnt flesh assaulting his nostrils, bringing him back to Afghanistan and Colombia, his fallen comrades, the death and destruction marking so much of his military career.

  The garage door opened and the truck leaped onto the driveway, fishtailing as she turned left, toward him, driving through the smoke like a black ghost.

  Jack took off, ignoring the screams, the flames, the smoke burning his eyes, jumping into the open bed, landing on his back, weapon ready on instinct, narrowed eyes peering through the haze, searching for any survivors.

  She accelerated, burning rubber, swerving around the wrecks, sending him tumbling inside the bed, banging his shoulders against the sides, whacking the side of his head.

  “Jack! Up in front!”

  He stood with difficulty, his head on fire, his eyes watering from the smoke, from the blow to his right temple, managing to run his left arm under the roll bar over the cabin to brace himself, to keep his footing as he spotted a third van at the end of the block, a couple hundred feet away.

  “Keep going,” he said, centering it on the reflex scope before loosing his fifth round, listening to it pop out of its housing, arcing toward the vehicle trying to block the way, its parabolic flight landing by the front bumper, skittering underneath.

  The explosion momentarily lifted the van off the pavement at a sharp angle, reminding Jack of the initial seconds of a launch, as tongues of fire swept across the street from under the van, flickering in the night, the magnesium flash spreading its incinerating wave toward the surrounding lawns, setting shrubs ablaze.

  Angela veered around it like a pro, steady, in control, even driving up on the sidewalk to miss a man jumping out, his back on fire.

  Jack took a good look at him, large, bulky, dressed in civilian clothing, like the operatives he had disabled at—

  A round pierced the back of the bed, like a hammer. Followed by another.

  Jack tried to drop from sight when a powerful force punched him in between his shoulder blades, like an invisible fist, tearing into him, shoving him against the back of the cabin with savage strength.

  Damn!

  Jack fell to his knees as Angela turned the corner, rolling to his side, heaving, trying to breathe, his back on fire, his hands trembling, branches and stars rushing overhead as she accelerated.

  “Jack, you okay back there?”

  He heard her through the earpiece while forcing his drifting mind into focus. He’d just been shot, but the battle dress had once again protected him, saved his life.

  He knew he’d been lucky, even if his aching spine and the near-paralyzing pain shooting down his limbs contradicted the thought.

  Breathe.

  He forced air into his lungs before exhaling through his mouth, slowly, and doing it again and again, imposing concentration, reaching for his weapon and sitting up, his back against the cabin, his eyes slowly regaining focus, looking at the street behind them.

  “Jack?”

  “Still … here,” he replied, hands clutching the MK11 sniper rifle, fingers automatically working the weapon, getting it ready but keeping it out of sight from any onlooker as Angela drove them toward the—

  And that’s when he spotted it, almost three blocks away, headlights piercing the darkness separating them.

  Jack considered switching to the grenade launcher again, but there were people in the streets, so he stuck with the MK11, trying to look through the Leupold rifle scope as the truck sped down the street.

  He was used to firing from moving platforms, from Chinook or Blackhawk helicopters to Combat Rubber Raiding Crafts and everything in between, but it was still a challenging task.

  The trick was to relax, to not force the alignment, to hold the crosshairs in the vicinity of the target and
wait for it to come to you instead of the other way around.

  Jack kept the heavy rifle trained on the vehicle, which he now recognized as a fourth van, black, like the others, gaining on them.

  He breathed in and out, the butt pressed against his right shoulder, ignoring the stabbing pain, pushing his body to deliver one more time, his shooting eye peering through the advanced optics, depicting his target clearly under the streetlights.

  But he still didn’t fire, biding his time, waiting for the right moment, which came as the vehicle closed the gap to just over half a block, the driver coming into view behind the windshield.

  Jack exhaled slowly and fired.

  The 7.62mm NATO round pierced through the windshield, but was off to the left, missing the driver’s head, nicking the shoulder.

  But it was enough for him to lose control. The van veered to the left, then the right as he struggled to center it, but ran into a light post, crashing through it and into the side of a building.

  Jack lowered the weapon as Angela continued driving, unaware of what had just transpired. But Jack was very much aware of everything, his senses on edge from the adrenaline rush, which he knew was dulling the pain streaking across his back.

  “Angie, the highway,” Jack said into his throat mike.

  “Got it. North or south?”

  “South,” he replied.

  Jack was sick of running, tired of dodging team after team, knowing that eventually one of them would get lucky. It was just the odds, and he hated playing them here as much as he did during his last mission in Colombia.

  But he hadn’t had a choice in that jungle. The gear had malfunctioned, telegraphing his position, killing his options.

  Not here, he thought, deciding to stop hiding and strike back like only a SEAL could. Jack needed to do the unexpected and regain the element of surprise, like he had done in so many missions, striking fear in the heart of the enemy, turning the hunter into the hunted.

  To do so, he would need to change tactics, do the unforeseen, and take the fight right back to its source.

  Right back to Pete.

  * * *

  They didn’t even put a chink in his armor.

  Angela and Art-Z sat back and just stared at their screens in a roadside motel in Vero Beach while waiting for Pete and Riggs to return from Atlanta. Dago was out getting food and drinks.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “We took forty-seven million dollars from his accounts—his own fucking accounts—and deposited them into Federal Reserve banks and there’s nothing there.”

  They’d read every scrap of news from dozens of outlets trying to see the effect of their work.

  At first they had expected a major story in Washington, but it soon became evident that Hastings had orchestrated amazing damage control, to the point that there wasn’t a single mention of anything even remotely related to General George Hastings or the money that suddenly appeared in government coffers.

  It simply didn’t make any damn sense, especially with the way the U.S. Government went after anyone screwing with its money, including public officials caught embezzling or misusing tax dollars. The list was even larger inside the Pentagon, where cases of selling military equipment in black markets resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of indictments.

  Yet, there was nothing in the news.

  Her only hope—and she knew it was a stretch—was that although publicly their plan had apparently not yielded any results, under the covers Hastings could be scrambling to cover his losses. After all, the money taken was meant to pay for shadowy jobs, secret services, and smuggling operations.

  You’re reaching, Angela.

  She shook her head, accepting the hard reality that their attempt to expose him had been fruitless. And the irony was that she was the one hiding in this flea motel, on the run instead of Hastings.

  And what made matters even worse was that she hadn’t heard from Pete or Riggs, who should have been back a couple of hours ago from their trip to Atlanta.

  Where are they?

  She had thought about calling them but resisted the temptation. If somehow they had walked into a trap and got caught, calling them wouldn’t accomplish anything but risk giving away her location.

  She exhaled heavily, starting to get a bad feeling but deciding to stick to her own plan. Pete and Riggs would call when they returned to the Orlando area, where the FBI agent would pay cash for a motel room like this one and leave his family there, before Angela would tell them how to get here.

  She returned her focus to the screen, pointing at the passwords they had gathered, at the back door she had installed. “It looks like they haven’t found our little gadget yet.”

  “For now,” he said. “Do you want to go after more banks? Maybe crash his network again? Slow down production?”

  She shook her head. Art-Z was thinking too much like a traditional hacker, and Angela wasn’t so sure that would be the best way to move forward. “Perhaps we need a different approach.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Angela stood. For the first time since Jack vanished, she began to wonder if she was in way over her head.

  But what choice did she have?

  She had to continue, had to keep pushing, learning, dissecting Hastings’s web of deception. But she needed a new tactic. The definition of insanity was doing things the same way and expecting better results.

  “You heard Riggs,” she finally said. “The general has too many buffers, too many layers of protection. There’s a reason why even the FBI can’t touch him. Bastard owns too many people in too many damn places to come at him indirectly, like we just did. As brilliant and gutsy as that move was, all we accomplished was letting him know that we’re on to him. But if we really want to hurt him, we need a new strategy.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Angela walked over to the windows overlooking a parking lot. Nowhere near as glamorous as that lovely FBI safe house in the woods—but certainly a hell of a lot safer.

  Once more she tried to think like Jack would. How do you stop someone who seems unstoppable, who didn’t even blink when they stole tens of millions of his blood money and deposited them into the Federal Reserve system? How do you go up against a network that had its tentacles everywhere, who even the mighty FBI couldn’t bring down?

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes.

  Hastings had created the perfect machine, controlling all of the angles, striking the perfect balance in his operation, not only owning apparently enough people in the government but also forging allegiances with criminal networks. And he had also devised an internal security apparatus straight out of the Third Reich, governing his operation with an iron fist, preventing anyone from gaining too much power, from ever becoming a threat to him.

  Angela crossed her arms, staring into the distance. Strengths always had the potential to become weaknesses when overused. This was a fundamental truth everywhere, from science and religion to politics—and even criminal networks.

  By becoming overly zealous in controlling every aspect of his operation, in his obsession for security, for a Gestapo-like internal police, for refusing to let anyone know the entire picture, Hastings had unknowingly created a huge weakness.

  She turned around and looked at the master hacker. “We go for the head, Art.”

  “The head?”

  She ran the tip of her thumb across her neck. “We need to chop it off.”

  “Literally?”

  “That’s the only way to bring down his massive house of cards. That’s the weakness in his operation: it can’t survive without him. There’s no number two in his scheme. No one’s ready to take his place because he’s set it up precisely to keep anyone else from gaining power over him. That’s the reason Riggs couldn’t get close enough to make a difference.”

  Art-Z considered that before saying, “That’s … brilliant, Bonnie … except…”

  “Except?”

>   “How are we going to get close enough to take him out?”

  She crossed her arms and smiled. “We won’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we’re not going to try to get to him.”

  Art-Z made a face. “I’m not following.”

  “We’re going to make him come to us.”

  * * *

  They reached his street and drove up and down twice, making sure it was clean, before pulling up his driveway, which went around the side of the house, leading to a four-car garage. They parked the truck there, out of sight from the street.

  Dago needed a little help getting out but was able to walk on his own, the field dressing having worked its magic, plus he had been fortunate that the bullet hadn’t only gone through clean, it had also missed major arteries or bones.

  “You sure about this place, Angie?”

  “He’s a workaholic. He’s never here when things are normal. Now who knows when he’ll be back. Plus I have a way to keep tabs on him.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll see,” she replied, as they approached the front.

  Angela reached under a rock beneath knee-high shrubs framing the entrance, producing a key.

  “And you know his alarm code?”

  “Unless he changed it in the last few days, which I doubt. Like I said, the man’s never here.”

  The key worked and they stepped into a foyer leading to a large open area that combined the living room, dining room, and a massive gourmet kitchen. It all overlooked a beautiful swimming pool backdropped by the Indian River and what Jack recognized as a fifty-eight-foot Sundancer, a Sea Ray sports yacht moored by a dock next to a couple of WaveRunners perched on their individual lifts.

  “I guess it pays to be a bad guy. Your boyfriend ever cooked for you in there?” Jack asked, pointing his chin at the kitchen.

  She punched him lightly on the shoulder before stabbing the alarm keypad with an index finger. “He can’t even boil an egg.”

  Jack inspected the entire house, going through every room followed by Angela, stopping to inspect his workout area, looking at the heavy punching bag hanging from the ceiling on a chain as well as another one in the shape of the upper body of a flesh-colored rubberized sparring mannequin atop a heavy black base. Both looked quite worn out, signaling heavy usage. He also eyed the free weights, bag gloves, and even some trophies.