“Don’t assume,” Karl told her.
“I still can’t believe this,” she said. “We killed a Supreme Court Justice.”
“Don’t think. Perform and I’ll bring you up with me. I need people who can act under pressure.”
Susan glanced at him.
“What’s that?” Karl asked, pointing a thick finger at the screen. “The signal moved.”
Susan swore softly and her eyelids flickered as she studied the netbook. “Bannon survived the blast,” she said. “He’s alive.”
Karl snatched a microphone. “Max!”
“Not so loud,” Max complained. “I’m wearing an implant.”
“Bannon is alive. You have to reach him and kill him.”
“He’s alive?” Max asked.
“He’s definitely moving,” Susan said.
Karl stared at the screen. “Max.”
“Right here, boss.”
“He’s heading for you.”
“That’s impossible,” Max said. “He doesn’t know we’re out here.”
“Get ready,” Karl said. “Kill him before he can talk to anyone.”
“Roger,” Max said, sounding grim. “I’m taking care of this.”
-23-
Max Malone gripped his assault rifle. He wore night-vision goggles, Kevlar armor and an uplink to the scanner watching Bannon.
He checked his thermal scope, brushing a piece of dirt from it.
Max knew that he was elite of the elite and he was a survivor. One time before the Iraq War started, he’d air-inserted into the outskirts of Baghdad. It had been a bungled mess, as someone had spotted his team entering a warehouse. The Iraqi Army had sent trucks and troops with sirens blaring. The team had used ropes, secreting themselves in the rafters of the warehouse. For two hours, Iraqi soldiers had patrolled the cement floors beneath them in the dark. It had been the worst and tensest strain of Max’s life watching those dog-turds. Finally, some smart guy had shined his flashlight up into the rafters. Max and every member of his team had been in harness, roped to a rafter, with his machine gun trained on the suckers on the floor. That beam of light centering on Huss Schmidt up there—three-bullet bursts had chattered from their weapons. Mayhem ensued: death from above. When it was over, only Max and Huss Schmidt lived. The rest of the team hung like rotten fruit, dangling by their harnesses, dripping blood.
Max turned left on the hill near 17-Mile Drive. He motioned to Jim and he turned left too.
Escaping onto the Iraqi warehouse roof years ago, later using tunnels and a two-week trek through the desert, hiding by day and evading by night, Max had survived the bungle. Huss had ended his career as jackal food, too shot-up to finish what the U.S. military had started.
On a different mission, Max had humped up and down Afghani mountains to wait six hours for a single shot at some raghead chieftain. A year later a photo of the team pissing on the corpses of Taliban had made the Internet. Everything he’d worked for had been pissed away as American authorities locked him up in an Army prison stateside.
Max knelt, picking up a piece of splintered wood. That had been some explosion just now. Whew, they had blown the Justice’s house sky-high.
It had been hard for Max to imagine the Army could lock up their best soldier. He never had forgotten the grim injustice. He had a mile-long memory. It made every hit since then a pure middle-finger delight in the face of the PC homos who had screwed him. Working for ATS—it made Max grin whenever he thought about it. Even playing grandmother to Gemmell had been okay. Blowing the top of MacLean’s head off when he tried to warn Gemmell—
Max grinned in the darkness, remembering how Gemmell had flinched at the sight of MacLean toppling, doing a swan dive onto the parking lot blacktop. Finding Gemmell later at Turlock Lake, the man had hailed them by waving his green windbreaker. Could you believe that?
Now Gemmell was Bannon again and he was supposed to be some hydrogen bomb of an assassin. They said using Bannon was overkill because he slaughtered everyone and had never failed a mission. He was Superman on two legs. The man had to walk instead of fly, sure, but in the end, he was supposed to be as invincible as the Caped Crusader.
Max sneered as he signaled LeBron, motioning down the hill. What he was going to do tonight was to put a bullet in Superman’s brain. Then he was going to unzip his fly, pull out his cock and take a good long piss on Superman’s face. He would even shake his shlong, letting every drop dribble out so the hombres upstairs saw who was number one.
Had Bannon walked out of Baghdad, the sole survivor of a Republican Guard desert hunt? Had he parachuted into Iran at night and given the nuclear scientists there a visit down in their underground bunker? That had been a riot. Iranian-squealing white-coated men scurrying around like rats. He recalled one bearded turd sobbing on his knees. Max prided himself on only using one bullet per Iranian that night. Others on the team had riddled bodies with bullets, chopping the scientists in half with their high-powered weapons as if they’d been Safeway butchers.
“He’s moving left!” Karl said in Max’s left-ear implant. “He’s coming for you.”
“Like a pig to slaughter,” Max whispered. “Let us work, boss. We’ll take care of this.”
“Don’t be overconfident,” Karl warned.
“Call me kryptonite. We got it. Okay. Jim, LeBron, Scorpion, you ready?”
Max heard the clicks in his ear, the three signals, the three “yeses”. He grinned and he could feel the tightness in his face. What had him so upset was Turlock Lake. He’d been scared tracking Bannon that day. Coming onto shore in the speedboat, he’d wondered if the superstar was going to pull one of his miracle plays. Karl had told him how important Bannon had been. The boss had wanted the assassin in one piece. On shore there toward the end, the look on Lawn Boy’s face had frightened Max for just a moment. It had made him drop his hand onto the butt of his gun. Lawn Boy had seen it and the Bannon inside had recognized the move for what it had been: a fear reaction.
Max lowered his rifle, peering slowly right and left, searching for the miracle man. He was going to wipe away the stain. A bullet in the brain and a golden shower afterward would go a long way toward restoring his self-image. Scorpion was better than Jim was, and LeBron surpassed them both. They were elite, but Max knew that he was the elite of the elite, the very best, the crème-de-la-crème.
Kryptonite, baby, with Grade A enrichment. Get ready, Superman, cause here comes Max.
***
Bannon crept through the underbrush. He strained, listening, watching, trying to feel the man with the silenced assault rifle coming down the hill for him.
Blake said ATS did this, a black ops branch of Homeland Security. That meant more than one came. Hmm, if the cleaner had worn armor and carried an assault rifle—
They’ll have night-vision equipment.
A crackle of sound, a snapping twig or an extraordinarily dry leaf, something broken by a boot came from his right. Bannon peered there.
The cough of the shot alerted Bannon a microsecond before a slug reached him. With enhanced reflexes, he dropped. The bullet whizzed in flight above him. More bullets flew. Some struck bark, thudding horribly close. Others slapped leaves. They were all using silencers, making it difficult to know where they were. At night, a sound suppressor was as important for hiding sound as the muzzle flash, which would have given away their positions.
Bannon slithered away from them nonetheless. The direction of the striking bullets told him their relative position.
As soon as he could, he climbed to his feet and ran through the dark forest. He sprinted downhill. His shoulder clipped against a tree and he tumbled, rolling head over heels. Then he was on his feet again as he strained to see better in the dark. He needed space and he needed a plan or he was a dead man.
***
“Cease fire,” Max whispered into his throat microphone.
“He’s getting way!” Karl shouted through the ear-implant. “Chase him down!”
> “In a minute, boss.”
“He’s moving! He’s getting away!”
“I think he’s hurt,” Max said. “And we’re tracking him through your scanner. We all know where he is. He won’t get far.”
“I order you—”
“Hey, boss. Lighten up. I have it under control. Or do you want to come down here and do it yourself?”
There was silence over the line.
Max nodded as he kept scanning the forest with his night-vision goggles. He’d hit Superman because he’d seen the man go down. It had surprised him to see the sucker crawl away, then get up and run. But he’d hit the man and likely Bannon was still shook up from the bomb-blast. The last thing Max was going to do was let Karl Sand bungle the ground operation. This was his call and he was going to do it his way.
“Fan out,” Max whispered into his throat microphone. “Advance at a walk and keep watch.”
“We have the scanner,” LeBron whispered. “Let’s just track him down and finish it.”
“We’ll use the scanner,” Max said. “But we have to remember who we’re dealing with. Visuals are worth twice as much as what is on the scanner.”
Max rose, and he started moving down the hill as quietly as he could. To his left, he spied LeBron moving past the trees. The big black man was tough. To his right came Jim. There hadn’t been a meaner man on SEAL Team 3 than old Jim Barton, at least before the roadside bomb. Beyond Jim was Scorpion.
“We’re wolverines,” Max told them. “We don’t run after our prey, but we keep him moving, keep him running until he tires himself out. Just give it a little time, and we’ll have this putz dead on his back.”
***
Bannon reached his pack in the forest and dumped everything onto the ground. He took the Advil bottle, tore off the cap and sprinkled five gel capsules onto his tongue. The bomb-blast had shaken him and these would help take the edge off. He drank bottled water, washing the capsules down.
With his fingers, he began to touch his skin. How had they tracked him so effortlessly and known when to blow the house? The answer was simple. They had to have put a bug in him. Now he had to find it and use the tracking device against them.
Hello.
It was in his right hip, almost over his buttock. He pressed, but it didn’t hurt. It was small, a tiny bump under the skin.
He took out his knife, twisted around and sliced an X on his hip. He dropped the blade and blood oozed from the cut. Steeling himself, he drew back skin. It felt like fire. He squeezed out a tiny tracking device that Parker or someone had inserted in him.
Exhaling, Bannon blew sweat off his lips. He set the bug on a clean part of his pant leg. He broke out bandages, working fast. Cleanup men were coming. Now he was going to play the game on a more even footing. Now he was going to see how good these cheating bastards really were.
***
Scorpion moved silently through the woods. He was on loan tonight, joining Max’s team. Scorpion was the best tracker in ATS, in his humble opinion. He was lean, fast and half-Comanche. He could read trail sign like his ancestors. He had patience and nerves like steel. He understood what Max meant by chasing Bannon down like a wolverine.
Wolverines were slow moving as predators went, but they were relentless. They walked down prey by never giving up the chase, always sniffing out the animal. In time, terror caused the prey to make mistakes. The wolverine just kept on coming, sniffing and waddling after the fleeing meat.
Scorpion didn’t waddle. The image caused a slow smile to stretch his lips. He moved like a mantis, reaching out a long leg, carefully setting down his foot and bringing his body along. He swiveled his head, studying the terrain. Bannon was dangerous. He knew that, but Scorpion knew that a lone man made mistakes. It was unnerving realizing the cleaners came for you. The man would feel outnumbered and he must realize by now that they had technology on their side.
The others moved faster, pulling ahead through the forest. Let them. Scorpion believed in the old virtues. He was the hunter. Others often passed hidden prey, but not him. Yes, they had the scanner, but such technology often failed at the worst moment. Besides, Bannon was clever. He might realize they had bugged him. Scorpion would proceed on that assumption. Therefore, he moved—
Scorpion swiveled his head. Over there, leaves rustled and a branch moved contrary to the wind. Wait—there was no wind tonight. Scorpion brought up his assault rifle, sighted and in the darkness saw the fishing line tied to the moving branch. That meant—
A soft phut was the last sound Scorpion ever heard. A bullet tore into his throat and a second one smashed the middle of his face. He toppled backward, dead.
***
From his hiding spot, Bannon had watched the others pass. With the silenced pistol gripped in his shooting hand, he now crawled to the dead cleaner. Rustling a branch with a fishing line was an old trick, but still useful just the same.
He reached the dead man stretched out in the moonlight. No doubt each piece of equipment was computer tagged by ATS. He wouldn’t take anything, but he did pick up an uplink. He pried it apart, clicked on a tiny flashlight, holding it with his mouth. He moved wires and turned the uplink into an effective directional finder.
He waited and was rewarded a half minute later as a man told Max to move faster. The man said Bannon must have gone to ground.
Bannon studied his altered uplink. The operations officer is near. I bet he’s up that hill.
Bannon dropped the uplink and comm-gear onto the dead man’s chest and glided away from the cleaners. It was faster and more economical to shoot a man in the head than to beat him to death. Likewise, it made more sense to hunt higher up the chain of command if one wished to paralyze the enemy and discover exactly what was going on. The cleaners weren’t the issue, but rather the one giving them orders.
-24-
For the third time in as many minutes Karl adjusted the knot of his tie. Together with Susan, he watched the netbook screen. It showed a simulation of the surrounding terrain. Red images showed the advancing commandos, among the deadliest killers Karl knew. They closed like a net on the yellow image that hadn’t moved for the past few minutes.
It was like a violent video game, the kind parents kept trying to outlaw their kids from buying. They’d passed a law in 2005 here in California, banning the sale of certain video games to minors. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Supreme Court had struck down the law in the same year by 7-2. The justices ruled that video games were protected speech under the First Amendment.
Karl had learned that tidbit from Parker, who had fed case law to Bannon. He now checked his watch. The seconds hand ticked away, each moment eating up their margin for error. Soon the first civilians would nose onto the set, seeing what had happened to the Justice’s house. Fire trucks would come and with them, police. The complications could quickly grow.
“Tell him—” Karl said, and he cut himself off. Max was good. No, Max was the best cleanup man ATS possessed. He needed to let the man on the ground make the combat decisions. It was just so hard having this intelligence and seeing Max dither in his approach.
Susan looked up at him.
Karl checked his watch. Ninety-seven seconds had passed since the last time he looked.
This was like a wrestling match. He’d gone to state in high school in his sophomore, junior and senior years. Wrestlers had strutted around his high school with their shoulders back, heads up and forcing everyone else to step out of their path. At least, that’s how Karl had acted in the crowded walkways. He’d been the big man on campus. Kids hadn’t messed with Karl Sand. On the mat, however, when he faced good opponents, then sweat had pooled under his armpits. Then unease crept into his gut. The wrestler everyone else feared on campus, who had shown a stoic mask to the world, knew doubt and worry on the mat. Fortunately, the moment he latched onto his enemy’s flesh the fear, doubt and worry vanished. It was the unknown—the waiting—that had eaten at him.
Trust y
our cleanup men. Bannon hasn’t moved for several minutes and Max is closing in.
Karl gave Susan a wintry grin, showing her he had strong nerves. Soon this would be over and they could pack up and leave, mission accomplished.
***
Max winced as a twig snapped under his boot.
In Kevlar armor, with an assault rifle made longer due to the sound suppressor and with night-vision goggles and combat boots, it was hard to move like a panther of the jungle. He knelt on his right knee, lowered the rifle, lifted the goggles so they rested on his forehead and checked the locator. Bannon hadn’t moved, hadn’t been moving for several minutes. The yellow dot was in the exact spot it had been before.
“We’ve run him to ground,” Max whispered.
“Roger,” Jim whispered.
“Do you think he’s unconscious?” LeBron whispered.
“Negative,” Max whispered, using his throat microphone to communicate with the others. Scorpion, like always, kept quiet—damn Comanche. “Bannon has set up the best ambush he could under the circumstances. He has a gun and he’s a murderously good shot.”
“I’ll flank him,” Jim whispered.
Max gnawed his lower lip. As he considered options, he heard the distant wail of a siren.
“Max,” Karl said too loudly in the ear-implant.
“I hear the siren, boss.”
“You have to finish this, now,” Karl said.
Max nodded in the darkness. Karl Sand was a tough guy, and he looked and acted the part most of the time. Karl could also make the hard decisions. The only trouble was that under pressure the man got nervous. That was normal, of course. Unfortunately for Karl, ATS wanted perfection, especially in these critical moments. Max grinned. It meant Karl needed him. It was time to show the boss the truth of that.
“We have time,” Max whispered. “The firemen and police are going to concentrate on the fire, not worry about what’s going on in the brush.”
“Bannon is right there in front of you,” Karl said. “Go in and finish it.”
I, Weapon Page 14
