At the back of the warehouse was a narrow, orange-yellow bus. On the side of the vehicle were the words Wayne County School District; again, they meant nothing to the young man. But he had seen vehicles like this one before, when the television had shown footage of American towns. He had the idea that they were commonplace here.
Khadir was speaking. “This is the beginning of your most important mission,” he told them. “And it requires a serious mind.” The commander held up one of the laminated cards. “This will protect you as we travel into the heart of the enemy’s territory.” The cards were a lie, telling others that the bus was from a school that taught only the deaf and the mute. If they did not speak, they could not accidentally reveal anything to their foes. “It is imperative you maintain this fiction. If you fail, you will be abandoned here to die.”
Khadir’s eyes fell on Halil and the youth’s blood ran cold. Tarki is dead. Meeting Khadir’s icy gaze was the catalyst for the sudden understanding of that truth, and Halil realized that he had known it from the moment he had seen his friend’s empty bed. Khadir, Jadeed, the teachers, they used him. Killed him. They’re going to do the same with the rest of us.
The commander walked away to talk to one of the mercenaries from the boat, and a teacher snapped at the young men, telling them to board the bus. The ragged group marched to the vehicle, but Halil’s panting breaths came in shorter and shorter bursts. He could feel a rising tide of panic welling up in him. Sweat beaded his forehead and his eyes darted around. His thoughts were slippery and hard to hold on to; Halil wanted to flee, to escape from these strangers who pretended they were his mentors. Khadir was coming back now, marching toward him.
Halil looked away, afraid the commander would read the doubt on his face, and caught sight of a door leading to the docks. But what is beyond it? He couldn’t answer his own question, visions of the strange America that existed in Halil’s thoughts like a patchwork thing. It terrified and enticed him at the same time. Didn’t they say that America was supposed to be a land of freedom? Was that a lie too?
In that moment, Halil understood that he would never be allowed to know the answers if he climbed aboard the bus. He was almost at the step, following the other youths inside.
The animal fear in him made Halil’s choice before his rational mind could process it. The burning pain jabbing at his chest, he suddenly burst into motion, shoving Adad out of his way, pushing the other teenager on to the bus. He broke into a run and scrambled toward the warehouse door, colliding with it in his haste. It juddered open, exposing Halil to the rainy air outside. Behind him, Khadir was shouting.
He ran; but as each footfall slapped hard against the concrete dock, it was like the echo of a bell striking, the pain cutting into him with every jarring motion. He slowed and staggered, eyes prickling with tears. Halil coughed and brought up a stream of thin, watery puke. He stumbled to a halt and retched, no more than a few hundred meters from the warehouse.
Blinking against the rain, Halil wheezed and looked up, seeing canyons of metal boxes ranging away in every direction. Towering light poles marked off the distance, making it seem vast and impossible to gauge. He felt terrified and utterly lost.
Then Khadir was suddenly at his side, dragging him up from his knees, shouting at him. The commander’s dark eyes were aflame, and he cocked back his hand to strike at the youth. Halil flailed, trying to deflect the blow he knew was coming, and missed. His hands snatched and caught the bill of Khadir’s cap, blindly pulling it away.
The punch hit the youth in the side of the head and it tore his footing out from under him. The world turned around Halil, and wet tarmac slapped him in the face. New pain bloomed, hot and red.
Khadir hauled Halil back up once again, grabbing back the cap and pulling it down low over his brow. “You disappoint me, boy,” he snarled, shoving Halil toward the warehouse. “I thought you had steel in you.”
Halil wanted to curse the man, to demand he tell the truth about Tarki and all the others who went missing, “sent back” into oblivion. But he was too weak, too afraid to do anything else than fight the tight agony contracting his chest. He waited for a death blow to come, for the whisper of a drawn knife. There was no such release.
Back inside the warehouse, Khadir forced him to climb into the bus, under the sullen gazes of the other youths. I am the lesson for today, Halil realized.
The commander drew the shape of a pistol from under his jacket and rested it on Halil’s forehead. “If every life were not vital to the work, I would end this one now and toss him into the ocean,” Khadir snarled. “Any more foolishness, and death will come early and without honor to the weak of spirit. Do I make myself clear?”
The youths all nodded meekly, and Halil was allowed to find a seat toward the rear of the bus. He collapsed into it, his head falling forward.
“You are stupid,” hissed Adad from the seat in front. “Where did you think you were going?”
“Don’t know,” he managed. “Out there. Not here.”
Adad said something about doing as you were told and showing respect, but Halil wasn’t listening. For the first time since they had left Turkey, he heard voices speaking in English—he recognized Khadir’s clipped, educated diction and the monotone drawl of the dead-eyed American in the driver’s seat.
“You know the details?” Khadir was asking.
The American snorted. “Yeah, don’t sweat it. Willard and Pershing is the fall back, I got it.” The words registered with Halil. They seemed like names, but they meant nothing to him.
“Then drive,” said the commander. “I want us there by morning.”
The engine grunted to life, and the bus rolled away into the drizzle.
* * *
“We’re here,” said Malte, and Marc came out of a light doze with a start. They were the first words he had heard the driver say.
He looked up, blinking away the edges of the sleep he had fallen into, rocked into it by the swaying motion of the SUV as it rode down the New Jersey Turnpike. Marc rubbed his face and peered out of the window.
Thin rain streaked the glass, disrupting the radiance of passing streetlamps and the headlights of other cars on the road. The weather was turning, the drizzle just the leading edge of a glowering storm front that was already hitting Manhattan Island and would soon be here across the bay.
He stifled a yawn. Despite the amenities aboard Solomon’s private Airbus, Marc had found it difficult to snatch any rest on the flight. He skipped off the surface of sleep like a thrown stone skimming a lake, in the end having to make do with a vague simulacrum of it that now left him feeling strangely hollow. Delancort handed him a bottle of water and he drank from it, watching the French-Canadian set up a collapsible console that snapped into place against the back of the seat in front of him.
He recognized some of the systems—radio frequency and wi-fi sniffers, an encrypted cellular communications hub. It was a cut-down portable version of the kind of gear he had operated along with Leon and Owen in the back of Nomad’s forward operations vehicle. But this time, it was Delancort who would be running comms and digital, and it was Marc who would be getting out of the van. The thought made him shudder unexpectedly, and he tensed. In the opposite seat, Lucy caught the moment and gave him a curious look. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he lied. “Green for go.”
She didn’t say anything else, zipping up the black tactical vest over the rip-stop jumpsuit she wore beneath. Marc was dressed in identical fashion, although his vest differed from Lucy’s by the number and distribution of ammo pouches and gear packs.
“Are you sure you are ready to proceed?” Delancort cocked his head, watching Marc carefully. “Perhaps it would be better if Malte accompanied Lucy instead.”
Marc shot the other man an angry look. “It’s a bit bloody late to ask me now, don’t you think?” He turned away irritably, angry at Delancort’s question and the doubts it brought up, angry at himself for letting it get under his skin
.
Lucy carefully lifted a spindly gray battle rifle from a case at her feet and checked the weapon’s action before loading a twenty-round magazine of 7.62mm bullets. Marc recognized the gun as a Mark 14 EBR, a combination assault rifle and marksman’s long arm. Lucy seemed completely at home with it, adjusting the extendable shoulder stock by feel as she glanced out of the window. The SUV was turning as it maneuvered through an open gate.
For Marc’s part, he had a slab-like Vector K10 submachine gun lying across his lap, the weapon’s rhomboid shape broken up by a slim noise suppressor and a holographic peep sight.
In the driver’s seat, the blond-haired Scandinavian killed the lights and pulled the SUV in behind a cargo container. Black shadow swallowed the vehicle, and now Marc could only see by the soft glow cast by the displays on Delancort’s console.
“You know how to use these, right?” asked Lucy, pressing a set of Ortek night-vision goggles into his hand. Marc nodded and pulled the NVGs down to hang around his throat, next to the tab of an inductor microphone.
Delancort reached for the handle of the double doors at the rear of the vehicle. “Malte is going to stay close, keep the entry point safe. You two…” He trailed off. “Well. You know what to do.”
“Usual rules,” said Lucy, her tone turning business-like. “We’re caught, we’re burned. Rubicon will deny having anything to do with us.”
“I don’t even work for Solomon,” Marc muttered.
“Then you’re halfway there already,” Delancort smiled, a little unkindly. “Bon chance.” He twisted the handle and Marc followed Lucy out into the rain, their boots clattering against the wet concrete of the dockside.
Lucy stayed near the metal wall of the cargo container and Marc walked where she walked, feeling the familiar adrenaline tingle in the tips of his fingers. He held the Vector tighter, trying to stop himself from drumming out a mindless rhythm on the grip of the gun.
It was all moving fast now. It seemed like just a moment ago they had been coming in to land at Newark, then discreetly ushered off to a private hangar where equipment and a vehicle were already waiting. The setup might have been very different, but the vibe was exactly the same; the moment Marc had stepped off the plane, he had felt it—that identical tension in the air, the same razor’s edge sense of a mission about to launch.
And I’m in it, he told himself. All the way.
He heard Delancort’s voice buzz over the bone-induction radio and saw Lucy nod. “Copy. Berth nineteen. The Santa Cruz.” She looked over her shoulder at Marc. “We’re moving. Stay out of the floods.”
Rounding a line of containers, there, rising like the wall of some ancient fortress, was the hull of the freighter. Rubicon’s intelligence team had narrowed down the probabilities and made the informed guess that the Santa Cruz was the vessel Al Sayf were using. Marc wanted to see the data himself, but Delancort had dismissed the idea. It came hard to Marc, accepting the fact that not every element of what was going on around him was his to manage. Back when he had been a part of Nomad, he would never have balked at the notion of taking a risk based on someone else’s tradecraft—but his days on the run had burned that away. He dug deep and tried to find trust, but it was running thin. Once again, he told himself that he would only work with Rubicon until he had what he needed, until he could find a way to get to the Combine.
The Santa Cruz was lit by a halo of orange work lamps, giving it a hellish cast. Looking up at the ship, he slipped into cover behind the support leg of a massive crane and took a long breath. His mind couldn’t help but slip back to a different night on a Dunkirk dockside.
“We need to get aboard,” Lucy whispered. “Can’t go up the gangway.” She pointed out men on the ship where the walkway met the weather deck, all of them trying to hide the fact they were armed with rifles. “I got an idea.”
“Right,” said Marc.
“Hey.” She came closer and tapped him on the shoulder. “Focus, Dane. You wanted to come with, I need you in the moment.”
“I’m here,” he insisted, mentally shaking off images of a burning ship. “What’s the plan?”
Lucy pointed up at the great angular frame of the cargo crane rising above their heads. “Up and over.”
* * *
Breaking the lock that kept the crane’s upper tiers secure, Marc pulled open a safety gate and let Lucy take the lead. They climbed the steel staircase that zigzagged up the leg of the massive crane, and to Marc the ascent seemed to go on forever, his boots ringing on the metal as the rain spattered his face. Then abruptly the stairs ran out and they had reached the very top of the gantry, twin booms extending out from the dock and over the black waters of the bay. Up here, the wind wasn’t cut by the bulk of the ships or the walls of cargo containers, and steady gusts buffeted the two of them as they advanced along a narrow service catwalk.
Marc chanced a look down and saw the distance back to the concrete far below. A strong burst of wind could easily make one of them lose their footing and go over, into a fall just long enough to let you realize exactly how dead you would be on impact. He hung the Vector on its sling and made his way forward using both hands to slide along the guide rails.
A red beacon blazed bloody red light across the end of the gantry, pulsing to warn off any low-flying aircraft that might venture too close to the harbor. The beacon gave Lucy’s dark skin a strangely dead look. She shouldered the Mark 14 and fished two rectangular pods out of a pack on her belt. She peered at the drop, gauging distance, then used a thumb-wheel on each of the boxes to make an adjustment. “Here, take one.”
Marc examined the object. About the size of a house brick and just as heavy, it was made of matte black plastic with a bone-white wheel at one end. A karabiner spring hook dangled from it, at the end of a length of fine wire. “What am I looking at here?”
Lucy dropped and looked over the edge of the crane gantry, out into empty space. Hundreds of meters below her lay the weather deck of the Santa Cruz, the big hatches open to reveal the first and third cargo bays to the air. Bay three, directly below them, was already empty, while unloading was still taking place at bay one. Floodlights lit the working bay, revealing the cavernous space inside the freighter, but Marc caught sight of the bay two hatch still firmly shut, and wondered why it wasn’t also in operation.
“The box is something from Rubicon’s engineering division,” she told him, drawing back to press hers against part of the crane’s superstructure. It clanked into place, powerful magnets holding it firmly. Lucy pulled on the D-ring and secured it to a load-bearing hook on the back of her gear vest, just below the shoulders. Marc suddenly had a very clear idea of what the device was for. “Don’t touch the bare wire,” she told him. “Some kinda graphene super-cable, or something. Take your fingers clean off.”
Marc nodded and copied her actions, securing his own unit far enough away that their wires wouldn’t get snarled together. “Maybe climbing up the anchor chain is a better idea?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Lucy asked, and rolled over the edge of the gantry like a swimmer dropping off the back of a boat. The box emitted a waspish buzz as it played out the wire, and Marc watched her fall toward the open cargo bay, the motion almost graceful.
“Ah, bollocks,” he said to the rain, and leaped, slipping back into the attitude he had learned during parachute training.
The ride was faster than he expected, and it happened in an odd kind of stillness. The open maw of bay three yawned beneath him as the Santa Cruz rose. As he descended, he glimpsed what seemed to be a figure, a guard on patrol walking around the ship’s flying bridge—but he went unseen. The armed man was looking out toward the sea, watching for boats. Dropping from the sky on silent spider-wires, Lucy and Marc were almost invisible.
They fell past the level of the deck and into the rusty cavern of the cargo bay. Marc saw the bottom of the compartment coming up fast and swung his legs out, bending his knees to take the shock of the landing. Somewhere far abo
ve, the inertia reel mechanism in the box was tightening as the cable reached its limit, slowing his fall. Marc bobbed to a halt a meter over the deck and reached up to disconnect. He fell the rest of the distance, and caught a flicker of silver as the karabiner, now without his weight upon it, shot away as the box retracted it back.
Lucy crossed to him, her NVGs already set across her face. “Enjoy the ride?”
“Yeah…” He managed. “I did, kinda. Just give me a second, though. I have to wait for my balls to drop back out.”
She chuckled and tapped the goggles around his neck. “Eyes on, Dane.”
He nodded and activated his NVGs. The full expanse of the cargo bay was suddenly revealed to him in lunar hues of gray and green.
“Entry complete,” Lucy was saying, pressing a finger to her throat mike. “Where to first, over?”
Delancort’s voice sounded in Marc’s earpiece. “The number two cargo bay. According to the Port Authority’s logs, the ship’s manifest says the loader hatches can’t open because of a mechanical issue, but the captain has turned down the offer of a maintenance crew to help fix it.”
“If anything is being hidden on this tub, that’s where it’ll be,” Marc concluded. He raised the Vector and checked the safety.
Lucy’s head bobbed and she unlimbered her rifle. “Okay. You’re the ex-sailor. Which way?”
“Over there,” he said, indicating a hatchway on a raised gantry. “That should take us through the companionway between the hull frames.”
“I got point,” she told him, and set off, climbing the stairs to the gantry two at a time. Marc came after, panning the Vector. She put her shoulder to the hatch and it creaked as it came open. Marc winced at the sound, convinced that the noise would be heard throughout the ship, but no alarms brayed.
His lips thinned. The monochrome world seen through the NVGs was unpleasantly close to the similar view he had watched via a remote feed from the members of OpTeam Nomad, only here and now, Marc was experiencing it first-hand, embedded in the danger instead of removed from it. He pushed away those thoughts and moved on.
Nomad Page 33
