by Alex Howell
He was going to be on the other side of the country. She was going to be, at best, a four-hour flight from home.
And he could barely contain himself.
Clara, for her part, either didn’t notice it or was effectively pushing it away, which didn’t bother Mason in the least. He wanted her to focus on the present, to focus on making friends, and to not focus on him at all.
But when he came around and opened her door to officially begin the move-in, something unexpected happened.
She squeezed him tight with just the faintest of sobs.
“I love you, dad,” she said.
Instead of going inside to the dorms, she gave him a big hug, holding on tight. Mason had not expected the hug—not after all of the grief he had gotten about driving a vehicle made before she was born—but he found himself having to suppress his emotions as she did.
“What did I do to deserve all that?” Mason said, his voice wavering.
“Nothing,” Clara said. “Just wanted to thank you—for being you.”
He gave up trying to hold his emotions in. The tears came pouring down.
I’m going to miss her so much.
But I’ve never been prouder of my little girl in my life.
Let’s just make sure we both handle ourselves well in the coming years.
1
September 4th, 2028
8:00 a.m. EST
Washington, D.C.
In a briefing room near Onyx’s headquarters, Mason sat with the rest of the Onyx team as one of the Army’s most senior officers, General Mack Thomson, stood before them for their latest assignment.
In the days before, Mason had somehow driven back from Palo Alto to Baltimore in record time. The truck had made several alarmingly distressed sounds along the way, but even with over 200 thousand miles on it, it did not break down.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Mason. Several times, it hit him that home life was never going to be the same again. While he was still a father and forever would be, his work had largely ended. Now, instead of working to raise his daughter, he could simply have a mature relationship with her. Instead of punishing and disciplining her, he would just advise her.
It was the culmination of too many years as a single father. It was the proudest he’d ever been to say “Mission Accomplished.”
But it was also the one that left him the most emotionally drained.
And, for perhaps the first time in his life, the idea that work was going to be something that fulfilled him and gave him the chance to be connected to life was just downright laughable. What was another damn mission to some faraway, flung place when he didn’t have a family to come back home to?
And just because the general started didn’t mean that things were going to get easier.
“All right, Onyx, I’m going to need your full attention,” General Thomson said.
Yep, Mason’s mind was elsewhere. It was hard to take yet another secret mission involving yet another critical task seriously—or, at least, give his full attention—when he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to give himself his full attention. He really wasn’t sure he wanted to know what was in his mind now that he didn’t have his daughter to keep him focused.
“Hey! Earth to Mason!”
Aw, damnit. Speaking of firsts…
General Thomson jabbed Mason in the chest with the corner of a manila envelope, letting the file drop to the conference table.
“What the hell, Mace? Did you come here to complete a mission or to day dream? Get your head in the game, damnit!”
I should not have come. I should have just given myself a couple of weeks off to decompress. I should have known something like this would happen.
But Mason had learned in the past few months that he didn’t know how to take time off. Even when he had left the SEALs and gone to the world of insurance sales, he’d never been able to leave it behind. Two weeks at home mindlessly watching sports would’ve been impossible—his head would have raced too quickly and he would have gotten too anxious.
Mason cleared his throat and opened up the folder. He knew that he had looked bad, especially in front of his Onyx teammates. Though the Kansas mission had more or less ingratiated himself with the rest of the team, this was still a bad look.
It didn’t really help that the only two people who knew that he had just come from California were Luke Simon, his boss, and Raina Martin, his… something undefinable. Friend, for now.
“Sorry, General. I guess I’ve just got a lot on my mind. No excuses, though.”
General Thomson was not the kind to be too considerate of the life pressures of others—which was to be expected from a military general. Mason wasn’t about to dig into what was going on, either, lest he get more gruff from the general. He just wanted to get through the briefing, figure out his duty, and then move on.
“That’s just as well, because I don’t want to hear excuses, Mason—just read the report.”
Mason sat up straight, ignoring the glares of the other Onyx members—staring at the “student” in trouble with the “teacher” seemed to be a timeless thing—and leafed through the various documents. It was the usual—terrorists with an objective that showed how insane they were, a threat to America, Middle Eastern background, a—
Wait.
He saw something then he had never seen before, something that most certainly got his mind focused in the moment. It wasn’t a financial war like General Jones had thrown, and it wasn’t the cliche threat of nuclear bombs that Warrior had sought to proliferate.
It was something much more sinister and disturbing to think about.
“What?” he said, stunned. “These guys have weaponized Ebola?”
“Yes, they sure did,” General Thomson said nonchalantly. “The Ebola virus is now practically being sold for pennies on the dollar in Iran. And this guy is the local dealer you’re going to intercept—Khalif Hatim.”
Mason looked at Hatim’s thick glasses, boyish face and happy grin. In comparison to General Jones and Warrior, the guy looked… well, he certainly didn’t look like the kind of guy who could stand up to Onyx without wetting himself.
“Bio-weapons dealer, huh? He looks more like a scout leader.”
Mason had meant to say it not because looks mattered, because they sure as hell didn’t. Rather, he hoped that such a comment might put him back in the good standing of the general, a way of showing his bravado to a man who seemed to reek of it.
“Because when we check out terrorists, we make decisions based on how they look,” General Thomson said with a snort.
Jesus. OK, time to get serious. I guess that strategy did not work very well.
“Something you should know, this guy is doing his business in a local community center of all places.”
Mason’s stomach turned at the thought. This guy was churning out deadly biological agents in a place where kids interacted and played, adults watched with a smile, and families got away from the madness? Mason might as well have learned that a domestic terrorist threat was using a nearby church to produce anthrax.
Though he had never taken Clara to the local community center, there were certainly many equals—her school, her soccer team, her debate team—and the idea that someone would use the meeting grounds to build biological terrorist weapons offended every sensibility he had.
Whoever this Khalif Hatim was, he was going to suffer severely for what he had done.
“And if you think normal batches of the virus are bad, which they sure as hell are… this is a highly-concentrated serum. If dispersed over a heavily populated area, we are talking absolute chaos, death and destruction in the making, unlike any biological attack in the history of mankind.”
That goes without saying.
“But why?”
The rest of the Onyx team, perhaps cognizant of General Thomson’s quick temper, had remained quiet to this point. But Raina, maybe to deflect some of the attention from Mason or just out of normal curios
ity, had spoken. It was a bold move, but given that her role was typically to negotiate with terrorists and try and bring them down, Mason supposed that the threat of a screaming match from an ally was nothing.
“Why?” General Thomson asked. “What kind of question is that Raina? Why did 9/11 happen? Why does ISIS cut people’s heads off? Why does anyone do anything? I don’t care about the why, Raina, I care about stopping it.”
Wow. He’s really not in the mood today, huh.
Wonder if President Morgan came down on her in some fashion.
Mason turned to Raina, who seemed remarkably even-keeled about having just gotten blitzed by the general. She had been the one to “negotiate” with Warrior, after all, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that she kept her cool, but it was still impressive all the same. Unlike Mason, she seemed like she would not get internally rattled.
“What I meant, and what I don’t understand, is why they would go to so much trouble with such a dangerous pathogen—dangerous even to those who carry it—when it would be more effective to just cobble together a dirty bomb and detonate it. I trust Iran still has plenty of uranium, doesn’t it?”
Thomson—who had sat in on the notorious Iran nuclear deal—visibly blanched. Perhaps Raina had a point yet.
“Yeah, you could say that—sure.”
It was a fair point, and, briefly, the general seemed a little stunned that someone had made him look bad. But then he quickly gathered himself and resumed his semi-blustery approach.
“Regardless, it’s because Ebola would inflict the maximum amount of pain and suffering. These guys want nothing short of customized pestilence, fine tuning the exact kind of trauma they inflict. They can bomb us to hell and get us there in a snap of a finger, or they can make us crawl to our death.”
Sounds about right, Mason thought. Then I guess we’ll have to take them out and make them crawl to their death before they do anything to us.
“We may not know a whole lot about these guys, but I would certainly wager that someone willing to unleash a flesh-eating virus on an entire population has a sadism that knows no bounds.”
Whatever appearance they may have given by working at the community center, it was certainly eradicated by this means of causing mayhem and destruction. Not that they had any “appearances” to begin with, since all of Onyx’s intel laid it all out.
But if they had meant to fool the locals, there wouldn’t be anyone else to fool right now.
“Then let’s get to it,” Marshal Oliver, the Onyx team lead, said.
Weapons specialist Chris Bradley reached for something under his seat and placed a brief case on top of the conference table. Pulling the latches and popping the briefcase open, he revealed a small treasure trove of state-of-the-art hand-held weaponry. Quietly picking up a small, but menacing hand gun. He loaded a clip, then stared around the room.
“Well, if suffering is what these scumbags want—suffering is what they will get. But it’s not what they think—because they’re the ones who are going to suffer!”
The display from Chris was very much in character for him, a hothead who seemed to relish the idea of blowing up everything in sight.
But it also seemed to be just the thing the team needed to get on the general’s good side.
“Now that’s more like it!” General Thomson roared.
Indeed, Mason thought. That’s the Onyx I know.
“You all will head out shortly,” the general said. “I suggest you take the time to review the mission briefing until you know it so well you dream about it on your flight nap.”
With that, he headed out.
Admittedly, it seemed like a pretty straightforward mission. Go to Tehran, Iran; take out the evil scientist and any of his associates; procure the Ebola; get back on the plane, and quarantine the hell out of it. Granted, such missions rarely went so smoothly, but it was a promising start.
The most important thing, however, was that Mason now had something to distract him from his thoughts about Clara. He had something that would allow him to focus on work before forcing him to figure out life without her. It would take time, yes, but time was now given to him, ironically, in a mission that probably didn’t have much time itself.
He hoped. That was the idea, at least.
And I think we’ve seen more than enough times how “the idea” rarely translates into “the reality.”
2
September 4th, 2028
11:57 p.m.
Tehran, Iran
I never had to do this.
Wearing the clothing of a civilian, both Mason and Raina entered the targeted local community center just minutes before it closed. While Mason had done many missions under stealth and with the objective of avoiding attention, he had never had to literally blend in with the crowds. Despite the novelty of the situation, in stealing a glance at Raina, Mason couldn’t help but admire the handiwork of their handlers back at their base just outside Iran.
Raina’s perfectly coiffed hijab was raised just above the crown of her head and held in place with a pair of sunglasses, allowing much of her shoulder length, auburn hair to still be on display. This was the typical stylings of a Persian woman, showing just enough hijab to claim modesty, yet displaying full fashion sense the rest of the way. Mason himself was dressed in a simple business suit, looking like some common salesman. But it wasn’t business cards and brochures that he carried in the traveling briefcase slung over his shoulder—it was a mini arsenal of high-tech weaponry that this solicitor had in his bag.
It was the kind of surprise that had been sprung on the two soldiers only after they had gotten on the plane to Tehran, which had come literally minutes after General Thomson had given his orders and left the room. Luke had entered, announced that the team was rolling out, and escorted them to an automatic bus that would drive itself to the plane. The only member of the team who was sitting out was Case, who had some of his own personal matters to attend to; sadly, “taking my daughter to college” did not qualify.
The flight was smooth for the most part, although it took far longer than Mason would have liked. Anything longer than a couple hours was always too long. It felt like there had to be a faster way to fly, especially in this era, but Mason was a soldier, not an engineer. He had tried to pass the time by talking to everyone onboard—Chris, Raina, Marshal, and Kyle—but eventually, he ran out of people.
Which was a problem, because in the absence of action or active conversation, his mind seemed to actively switch back to Clara. It wondered how she was doing; had she had a good orientation week? Had she made any friends?
Had she drank too much any one night? Was she missing her father?
Did she go through these same crazy thoughts too?
Ironically, Mason cycled through these thoughts so fast that before he knew it, the plane was in descent in preparation for his mission. And as soon as the bird touched down, a force was waiting for Mason and the rest of Onyx to take them to the local community center. Getting right to it, huh.
That’s how I like it, I suppose.
And now, just an hour later, Mason and Raina had exited a van driven by Marshal—who made several under-the-breath comments about having to drive a real ride now—looking like two locals, perhaps of mixed ethnicity, casually strolling through their community center on a weekday evening.
That was the hope, at least, as an actual local awaited Mason and Raina. It wasn’t the first time Mason had had to blend in with those who actually lived there, but he’d never seen Raina in action and had to hope she knew what she was doing. She’s Onyx.
I trust her.
“Can I help you?” an elderly man said from behind a reception desk.
Mason cleared his throat, remembered his training in the local tongue, Farsi, and spoke. He’d practiced this too many times to sound like a typical American; it was impossible to think that he would sound like a local, but, even if he did, his white skin would have exposed him as someone to be suspected.
“We’re here to see Khalif Hatim.”
The old man’s face darkened with fear at the mention of the name. That’s not good.
“He just left.”
Mason knew the man was lying. But he had to decide between diplomacy or instilling the fear of God into the man. Diplomacy might get the man to eventually crack, but it might also lead to wasted time. Fear, on the other hand, could get the man to talk, but there was no guarantee it would be accurate information.
Perhaps a bit tense from everything back home, Mason chose the latter.
“I don’t believe you.”
The man was immediately taken aback.
“Excuse me?”
Raina’s hawkish eyes caught the man looking toward a panic button just under his desk, followed by the almost imperceptible movement of his arm muscle tightening as he was just getting ready to push it. Raina—careful to keep her back to the lobby’s security camera—whipped a small hand gun out of her bag and pointed it squarely at the man’s chest. Mason hadn’t even noticed it until after the fact. I have got to get my head in it better.
“Don’t even think about it.” Raina said. “I know you have us on camera here, so don’t be stupid. Don’t make any sudden moves and you won’t get hurt.”
Admittedly, Mason found their actions here a bit drastic, but with closing time approaching, the urgency of the situation, and the fact that they still weren’t known to the greater local authorities—he hoped—it wasn’t a worst case scenario.
The line between avoiding it and triggering it, however, seemed to be narrowing with each passing second. And given that they were absolutely on camera—hopefully not one the local authorities could see—they had to get it right this time.
“Now, please give my partner the pass key for Khalif Hatim’s room in the rec center and nothing else will happen.”
So simple, yet still polite. I’d probably be a lot gruffer.
