Northern Sun: Book Four in The Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  “I’ve never exactly enjoyed working with you, Shani, but I didn’t have any doubts about your judgment until that last mission. That boy you killed couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.”

  “That boy had an AK in his hands and he was ready to use it.”

  “You were close enough to disarm him.” Conor sounded bitter. “I’ve seen you do it dozens of times. You made the choice to kill him.”

  “Because thirteen-year-olds become Jihadis when you make a martyr of their fathers,” Shani said. “We’d have seen him on the battlefield later.”

  “I can’t argue with that. And while you may be right it left a sour taste in my mouth.”

  “I figured as much,” Shani said. “I tried to bring you in on a job right after that and Ricardo said you weren’t interested. He said you didn’t want to work with me at the moment.”

  “I did tell him that,” Conor admitted. “But I never told him why. That shit stays on the job.”

  “I wish you had told him the reason.”

  “Why?”

  Shani pulled herself from the spotting scope and looked at him. “Because it left me thinking you didn’t want to work with me for another reason. Because of the other thing that happened all those years ago.”

  Conor didn’t respond to that comment and Shani let it die. Conor settled down onto his stomach and scanned the property. The cold lay on him like a bad memory. Neither of them spoke for a long time.

  7

  They shared a sleeping bag that night, spread across the two of them as they alternated watches. At daybreak, they packed their gear and receded into the forest. With the ground level of Mumin’s compound so much higher than that of the surrounding forest they couldn’t find a forest-level hide that allowed them to observe the property. They needed an elevated position, like a hunter’s deer stand, but had nothing like that at their disposal. Although they could have cobbled something together they were afraid it might draw attention if someone got close.

  “Let’s split up,” Shani said. “We’ll cover more ground that way. I want to work my way around to different observation points and see what I can pick up.”

  “I’m good with that. Can we communicate with each other through these little gizmos Ricardo gave us?”

  “Yeah. There’s a messaging app in there. The contact info for my device is already set up in yours. It’s just like texting. You know how to do that, right?”

  Conor scowled at her. “Yes, I know how to send a text and use emojis and all that bullshit.”

  “Just checking.”

  They split up and Conor grumbled as he walked away. Shani could be frustrating to work with. Of course, she also had a razor-sharp mind and mad fighting skills. She was like Barb on steroids and with twenty more years of experience under her belt. Thinking of his daughter reminded him that he’d once thought the Mossad might be a good fit for her. If he and Shani didn’t kill each other on this mission he might ask her about it.

  Conor slipped deeper into the forest, not wanting to take the chance that someone randomly moving about the property might see him. He went north, closer to the compound’s main entrance. That area was fenced for cattle. The structure they’d determined was a barn loomed closer. In daylight he could see that all of the buildings on the property were built of the same agricultural steel panels, and everything was red with white trim.

  Conor dropped to his knees and dumped his pack, taking out a few snacks. Without Shani staring over his shoulder he could replenish his depleted fuel in peace. He shoved the food into a cargo pocket and stashed the pack by a downed tree. A couple of handfuls of grass scattered on top of it helped to camouflage it.

  He scrambled up the bank and paused at the top. He didn’t hear anyone at work on the farm. It was human nature that on a cold day like this, unless there was work pressing, people would linger by the fire or over their breakfast. No one was ever anxious to get out into temperatures like these. The barn stood twenty feet or so in from the edge of the embankment, just enough to get a tractor or a vehicle through. To his right was a fenced pasture of several acres. Black cattle wandered about, tugging at tufts of grass, and chewing loudly. A dozen or more goats wandered among them.

  Conor got to his feet and sprinted to the barn. He flattened himself against the cold steel siding and listened for several minutes. He heard no vehicles, no voices, and no sounds of anyone working. The cattle fencing started at the north end of the barn, making it impossible to access the barn from that end without climbing the woven wire fence. Conor headed south, to the open end of the barn, and paused again.

  Nothing.

  He peered around the corner. It was a relatively new facility, maybe two years old, so the barn didn’t look like the barns Conor was used to seeing. There were no piles of old rusty crap, no stacks of rotting wood or used roofing tin. There were no coils of old wire waiting to snag and no stacks of five-gallon buckets. The place was fairly clean and tidy, which likely fit into Mumin’s plan of presenting it as a retreat or training facility for casino employees.

  Conor held his rifle at high ready and slipped around the corner. He was in a large gravel parking lot with several vehicles scattered around, both cars and flatbed farm trucks. There was a new aluminum cattle trailer with a heavy equipment trailer parked beside it. Conor threw a glance at the eaves of the barn, looking for cameras. He expected that even if the place had them, they wouldn’t be running them right now. Running primarily off solar power meant turning off all the gadgets that weren’t absolutely essential and the cameras were probably in that category. These people weren’t expecting company, which was evident from the lack of active security. They’d seen no guards, no patrols, and no dogs thus far.

  This end of the barn had two massive rolling doors. Conor estimated them to be sixteen feet high and about the same width. That was high enough for the highest vehicle, trailer, or farm equipment to get inside. The doors were pushed together with a gap of about two feet remaining between them. Conor paused at the gap between the doors and listened again. When he heard nothing, he eased inside.

  He touched a pressure switch mounted near the trigger guard of his rifle and the weapon light sprang to life. He played it around the interior of the structure. The barn was nice on the inside, one Conor would be more than happy to have on his own property. It was more like an upscale equestrian barn than the sagging poplar cattle barns of his neighborhood. There were unlit light fixtures strung in a neat row down the center. The horse stalls had heavy wooden doors with wrought iron bars over the window openings. Each stall had matching iron hardware and blackstrap hinges with a hammered look that made them appear antique.

  A hayloft ran the entire length of the barn. Massive wooden beams supported an entire winter’s worth of bales. They must have purchased most of it. There certainly wasn’t enough land at this compound to produce such a bounty. A shiny orange Kubota tractor with a cab was parked near the back door, which was closed to keep the cattle from wandering into the barn. There were also two Kubota UTVs with cabs and four Suzuki ATVs parked alongside them.

  Conor knew lots of farmers and understood that daily use of equipment on the farm meant it was always dirty and a little banged up. This stuff was too clean. It clearly saw very little use, which went along with the notion of this facility being designed to appear one thing when it was actually another thing entirely. On the surface, it was a retreat center housed on a working farm. Below that surface, this was the bugout location for a man who knew what was coming to the country well before it happened.

  A sound froze Conor his tracks. Gravel crunching? It was. Not with the rhythmic pattern of steps but steadily, beneath tires. Conor sprinted back to the open door. He considered bolting, disappearing around the hidden side of the barn and slipping back over the embankment, but there was not enough time. The sound was getting louder. He’d be seen.

  Instead, he calmly retreated into the shadowed interior of the barn where he could still see t
hrough the gap in the door but should be hidden from anyone outside. In seconds, a long white transit van pulled into the driveway and parked in front of the barn. The driver killed the engine, got out, and went around to the sliding passenger door. He rolled it open and a dozen Native American women began climbing out in warm winter coats.

  Conor assumed they must be employees of the facility. That made sense for a number of reasons. Hiring some locals would look good in the community. Due to cultural norms, these women were not likely to gossip off the reservation about anything they saw at the facility. A man like Mumin could probably help control the gossip by paying well and threatening to cut off the gravy train if word reached him that the women were talking.

  Then things got weird.

  The driver headed toward the barn door. Conor retreated in the shadows, stepping into an open stall just as the driver hooked a hand around one of the doors and began rolling it open. Morning light filled the front of the barn. Conor squinted against it, watching through a gap between two boards.

  The driver entered the barn, followed by the line of women. He walked to a tall steel locker and opened the latch, swinging the double doors open. He removed hangers, each holding a black garment, and handed them out to the women. Conor was confused until the first woman removed her coat and slipped the item of clothing over her head.

  It was an abaya, the traditional black robe worn by women in Arab parts of the Muslim world. Each hanger also held a niqab, a black hood with a slit for exposing the eyes. The hood was often mistakenly called a burqa but Conor had spent enough time in the Middle East on work trips that he understood the difference. The burqa covered the entire body from head to toe and the wearer’s entire face, including the eyes, was concealed by a screen. The burqa was also more common in Afghanistan.

  When the women were wearing their robes, they hung their coats up in the metal locker and followed the man toward the house. Conor waited until he was certain the coast was clear then crept out of the stall, rifle at the ready. He went to the locker and carefully opened the door with one hand. Inside were dozens more abayas, all crisp and clean.

  Conor shut the door and turned to leave. Shani was waiting directly behind him. Conor jerked and nearly pissed on himself. She’d approached him with total silence over the gravel floor of the barn. It was the kind of spooky, ghost-like shit that made her utterly terrifying as an operator. If you were on the wrong side of her, that sensation of surprise was the last thing you’d experience before you died.

  “Bloody hell, woman,” he hissed.

  She held a finger to her lips. Silence.

  Conor nodded but rolled his eyes. He wasn’t done expressing his frustration at the way she’d snuck up on him.

  She turned the finger from her lips to point at the metal locker, her eyebrow raised in a question. Conor knew exactly what she was thinking. It was the same thing he’d thought as soon as he saw the locker of abayas. It would make perfect camouflage for a person wanting to get a better look at the inside of the buildings. He nodded.

  8

  Shani had lost track of the number of times in her career she’d gone undercover to kill someone. Some of the operations stuck out more than others. She’d spent weeks in a harem once and months in a brothel. She’d impersonated security guards, palace guards, and bodyguards. She’d been a nanny and a maid, a seamstress, and a masseuse. Each of those roles ended with a target dead and a roomful of confused folks trying to figure out how it had happened.

  Those killings happened because she was exceptional at what she did. As a younger woman, her exotic beauty made her perfect for the roles where seduction and manipulation were required. Now in her forties, she was still beautiful but she was also deadlier than ever. She was a woman at the height of her powers. For Shani, the human body was a machine with dozens of little switches that could instantly turn it off for good, and she knew exactly how to flip each of those switches. It was a simple, mechanical process for her. Flip the switch, kill the target.

  She removed her gear in the barn. She’d found Conor’s pack stashed in the woods and had left hers there too, but she handed over the web gear and her Tavor. She retained a short fixed-blade knife she wore in her boot. That wasn’t normally where she carried it, but the abaya wasn’t exactly designed for combat. It was bulky and snagged on everything. It would suck to fight in it.

  She also kept a .38 revolver that she wore in an ankle holster. Everyone gave her shit about the wheel-gun, pointing out the proliferation of excellent .380 autos on the market. Conor didn’t; he understood. If the purpose of the gun was to be that last lifeline when you were staring death in the face, you wanted that piece of hardware to be stupid simple. You didn’t want magazines and slides, mag releases, ejectors, and complicated integral safeties. You wanted “I pull the trigger and someone dies.” The revolver offered that.

  Conor was to stash her gear with the packs and maintain surveillance on the property while Shani did her thing. She’d missed the line of robed women who’d entered the property earlier, which had both good and bad aspects to it. Had she attempted to tag along with that group of women, they might have immediately tagged her as an outsider. The driver might have noticed he suddenly had more women than he’d driven to the facility. The downside was that she was now walking across the field by herself, totally out of place, and with no idea where she was going. She also needed to come up with a cover story.

  She took a deep breath, smoothed her clothing, and walked out of the barn. Heading in the direction that the other women had gone, she noticed one black-clad woman with a broom sweeping porches and sidewalks in front of a building. It was the only one of the women visible to her. She worked alone and without supervision. That was perfect. Shani headed in her direction.

  The woman stopped sweeping as Shani approached, trying to figure out who the approaching figure was. With only the eyes exposed, shape, height, and posture were all that physically distinguished one figure from another.

  “I am new,” Shani said in broken English. Having been born in Israel and having operated throughout the Middle East, she had no trouble adopting the accented speech of that region. She figured it was safer to pretend she was foreign than to try and blend in as one of the Native American women. She pointed at the front door of the building. “I’m sorry I’m late. Is this the building where I’m supposed to be working?”

  Through the slit in the niqab, Shani saw the other woman’s eyes grow wide and she shook her head adamantly.

  “No! We don’t go in there,” the woman replied. “The men.”

  Shani cocked her head as if she didn’t understand. “The men?”

  “It’s dangerous,” she said. “A woman can’t go in there alone. We go as a group and it’s only once a week. Not today.”

  Shani nodded. “I supposed to clean...owner house...that’s what they say. Help with that. Learn how.”

  “That’s over there,” the woman replied uncertainly. She used her broom to point at another of the nondescript buildings. “The girls are already working in there. You don’t have to knock. Just go in the back door and tell the other girls why you’re there. They’ll show you the ropes.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Shani gushed, hurrying off.

  She walked as quickly as she could, gathering her robes. She paid attention to not raise them so high that her boots or cargo pants were exposed. That might raise a few questions, even in this rugged country.

  Her mind went back to the woman’s warning about “the men” and to not go in the building alone. What did that mean? They didn’t have any intelligence on there being men at the complex, other than Mumin and a few permanent caretakers. Most of the employees were locals from the reservation, older men, familiar with cattle and carpentry. It was unlikely they’d live here on the complex when they had their own homes and families nearby.

  As she neared the structure she’d been directed to, Shani could see the little details that made it different than some of
the others. The entry door had a few glass panes in it to allow natural light inside, though she and Conor had seen no light coming from it last night. There must be a curtain over it or something. There were some toys piled to the side of the porch, including some kind of ride-on toy.

  A sidewalk led to the back of the structure and Shani hurried along it. The building was tall enough to contain two stories inside, but the glass panes in the door were the only allowance for natural light Shani had seen thus far. There were no other windows. Counting as she walked, she estimated the structure to be approximately eighteen hundred square feet. If there were indeed two stories inside, that would give them about thirty-six hundred square feet of living space. That was a decent-sized home, though perhaps not big enough for a man trying to keep two families under the same roof. That still made her scratch her head.

  The sidewalk led her to the back door. At the rear of the house, the grade was sloped just enough to assist with water runoff. Shani wouldn’t have even noticed this if it were not for the fact that she had to climb a single step to reach the concrete back porch. The door had a tiny arched window at the top.

  Shani stood on her tiptoes and peered through the window. Inside she saw another woman in an abaya washing dishes. She tapped on the window with her finger. The woman turned and looked at her, then waved her inside. Shani twisted the knob and the heavy steel door yielded.

  Shani closed the door behind her and stood there. The woman at the sink was still looking at her.

  “Debra?” the woman asked.

  Shani shook her head. Returning to the accent she’d adopted with the other woman, she replied, “My name is Saffi. I am new. Here to learn how.”

  Though Shani could see nothing but the woman’s eyes, she detected uncertainty. This was unusual to her. This was not part of their routine and she was uncertain how to respond. Should she ask someone about this new girl? A flicker in the woman’s eyes gave away her concession even before she spoke. She didn’t want to bother the family. There were clear instructions about that.