by Maden, Mike
“Go away, porcs feixistes!”—fascist pigs!—a man’s voice shouted from inside, hiding behind a second-story wall. “We are assembling peacefully, as is our right under the Spanish constitution!”
“You are all suspects in a mass murder,” Asensio replied. “I have a warrant for your arrests. You have two minutes to comply.”
“That is a lie! We are innocent!” the man shouted.
Asensio whispered a command in his comms, and the four heavy machine guns racked in unison.
He cast a sidelong glance at Brossa. “You’ll see. They’ll come right out, the cowards.”
Brossa checked her Casio G-Shock. The second hand swept the dial twice.
Nothing.
“It’s been two minutes—”
Asensio cut her off with a chop of his hand in the air. He put the bullhorn to his mouth.
“Time’s up! We’re coming in! If you resist, we will shoot.”
A young man with long hair and a full beard appeared at one of the second-story windows, waving a white pillowcase in his hand. From here, he didn’t look to be more than twenty years old, Brossa thought.
“Hey, feixisto! We called our lawyer. She is on her way from Vic. She will be here in thirty minutes. Let her see the warrant. If it is legal, we will comply.”
Brossa let out a sigh of relief. “Excellent.”
The captain ignored her. He whispered a command. “Vázquez, we will advance on my order in thirty seconds. Get ready to—”
Brossa yanked his arm. “Stop! What are you doing?”
“Hold!” Asensio ordered before whipping around. “What the hell are you doing? This is my operation!”
“Our orders are to take them all alive, for questioning.”
“And that is my intention.”
“But they just said they would comply. All we have to do is wait for their lawyer.”
The captain shook his head, his eyes raking over her smaller form in a derisive inventory. He could barely hide his disdain.
“You damn desk jockeys don’t have the first idea about field operations. ‘Wait for their lawyer’? How do you know they called a lawyer? Do you know if they even have a lawyer?”
“I don’t. But thirty minutes won’t cost us anything.”
“Really? What if instead of calling a lawyer they called in for armed reinforcements? Have you thought of that, Agent Brossa?”
“I say we wait and see what happens.”
He shoved a thick finger in her face. “And I say, if you interrupt this operation again, I’ll zip-cuff your pretty little ass and put you facedown in the dirt, and then I’ll report you to Peña for endangering this mission and my men. ¿Me entiendes?”
Brossa jabbed her thin finger into his tac vest. “You and I are going to have a little talk when this operation is over, cabrón. Go ahead and do your thing. But once we’re inside, I’m the boss, and if you dick around with me in there, you’ll be the one up for court-martial.” Her eyes narrowed, and she added in her native tongue, “M’entens?”
Asensio grinned, admiring her sand. “Agreed.” His face hardened. He pointed at the ground. “Stay here until I call you in. That’s an order.”
He turned around to face the farmhouse. “Vázquez. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Smoke. Now.”
A half-dozen smoke grenades arced through the sky, thudding in the dirt in front of the house. They each popped, belching out billowing clouds of reactive granular aluminum and perchloroethane, completely blocking the view between the house and the assault team.
“Wait for it,” Asensio growled in his comms. “On my count. Five, four, three . . .”
* * *
—
The farmhouse and its outbuildings sat in the middle of a small open field, its grasses fed by a burbling creek that ran the length of the property behind the house. Three hundred meters behind the house was a steep, tree-studded hill where the sniper team lay in hiding.
The front of the house faced the winding asphalt road with no obstructions from the front door up the dirt track all the way to the road.
The asphalt road had been cut out of the side of the mountain, which was why its far side was bounded by a steep wall of granite, the top of which was heavily treed. The straight-line distance from the top of the granite wall to the ragged row of VAMTACs down below was less than forty meters.
Well hidden and in camouflage, Bykov—a combat veteran on four continents—followed the captain’s attack with a veteran’s eye and listened in on Asensio’s tapped comms through an earpiece. He hardly needed the latter. Popping smoke was textbook, and completely predictable.
So was the sound of the helicopter rotors beating the air, approaching right on time. Peña was as good as his word.
Forty meters from that height was an easy throw.
Bykov pulled the pin and let fly.
* * *
—
“Wait for it,” Asensio growled in his comms. “On my count. Five, four, three . . .”
He glanced up as he counted, shocked by the sudden appearance of the bright yellow news helicopter overhead.
“. . . two, one . . .”
The small, round green M67 grenade thudded in the dirt twenty meters from Asensio. He recognized the sound immediately—he’d thrown plenty of them himself in the Sand Box. Six and a half ounces of Comp B explosive would shred its steel casing into deadly white-hot shards in a matter of seconds.
“GRENADE!”
The M67 exploded, throwing shrapnel in a lethality radius of five meters. A private standing thirteen meters from it went down, his left calf cut to ribbons. Other shards spanged against the nearby VAMTAC.
“Go!”
* * *
—
The four machine guns mounted on the VAMTACs opened up, hitting the windows, keeping tight fire lanes so that the troopers could advance without getting hit by them. Blue-on-blue “friendly fire” casualties were a soldier’s worst nightmare.
“Go, go, go!” Asensio commanded, charging forward, taking the lead, eight of his men advancing behind him toward the front of the house. Six more charged in from the other three directions. Another eight of his troopers took up covering positions, weapons pointed at the house, still shrouded in white smoke.
Brossa fought the urge to follow—until she couldn’t. She pulled her pistol and charged forward toward the house through the haze.
She heard Asensio bark another order in her comms but her ears picked up the distinctive sound of spoons popping on flash-bangs. Tossed through windows, each of the devices blew in half a second, blasting an ear-busting 175 decibels of noise and a blinding two million candlepower of light.
Brossa broke through the last of the dissipating smoke toward the open space on the wall next to Asensio. He saw her approaching, and barked an angry order at her, waving her away.
“Get back!”
The house erupted.
White light blinded her, and the world went dark.
* * *
—
It happened so fast, Brossa didn’t really know what hit her. All she knew was her ears rang and her head hurt like she’d been on a three-day drunk. She was propped up against a tire of one of the VAMTACs, and one of the troopers, the assigned medic, was blotting a minor cut on her face with an antibacterial swab.
There were other troopers around her, more badly wounded than she, but none critically, and already bandaged. They smoked and laughed.
She blinked her eyes to clear them, only to see Asensio towering over her, his dark eyes glaring at her.
“You disobeyed my orders and nearly got yourself killed.”
Brossa pushed the medic away and climbed to her feet.
“How many dead?” she asked.
“None of my men, thank God.” He
crossed himself.
“Inside?” she asked hopefully.
He shrugged. “All of them. The cowards.”
“Show me.”
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t recommend it.”
“I’m not your little sister, Captain. Show me.”
* * *
—
Captain Asensio led the way, his boots crunching on the shattered glass and wood splinters in the dirt. They reached what was left of the porch. The door had been blasted off its ancient iron hinges, fragments of it still clinging to the thumb-width nails.
The stone walls still stood, mostly. The heavy granite had done its work. The thick walls had contained the explosion, much like a firecracker tossed into a coffee can—or more accurately, a coffee can full of grasshoppers. Even from here Brossa could see the blood and hair and brain matter embedded into the ancient gray stones.
It was the wooden structures inside that had given way. The ceilings, support beams, and staircases collapsed in on themselves or, in the case of the roof and window casings, blew outward in large, jagged shards, scattered around the meadow like trash after a rock concert.
Body parts, too. A foot still inside of a shoe lay near the creek. A bloody bone fragment was wedged in the front grille of one of the VAMTACs.
The smell of burnt wood couldn’t hide the stench of the shattered torsos inside. She knew that beneath the rubble lay buried thirteen broken bodies, entrails spilling out onto the rough-cut boards, blood and waste seeping into the cracks.
Once the rubble was cleared away, the mangled remains could be removed. It would be dirty work putting them all back together again. But it had to be done in order to identify them.
The yellow helicopter circled high overhead, no doubt shooting more camera footage, perhaps even live, Brossa worried. Its blades beat out a dark tattoo that rang off the mountaintops.
“Can’t you get rid of it?” Brossa asked.
“I called it in to my commanding officer. He’s working on it.”
“How did they find out?”
He shrugged. “They’re vultures. They can smell death a kilometer away in parts per billion.” He motioned toward the smoldering wreckage inside. “There’s nothing you can do here. I’ve already called in my crime scene people. Let them handle this.”
“I have a job to do, Captain. So do you. Get out of my way.”
36
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
Ted had the good sense to leave without a word, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Forty-two years old, with short red hair and dark green eyes, Kate Parsons was as hard and efficient as the Peloton bike she rode every morning. She was in the middle of her live forty-five-minute HIIT ride when he approached her, his eyes warm and welcoming. But a single icy glance from her sent him slinking back to the bedroom to grab his stuff and leave without a shower or even a cup of coffee.
Parsons didn’t care. She’d met Ted—or was it Tad?—on a run yesterday afternoon on the dirt service road in the rolling hills just beyond the Spallation Neutron Source facility. He was testing titanium jet engine parts at the SNS, the head of his own company, the name of which escaped her. Their eyes locked as she ran by. That was enough for the shirtless man to turn around. He finally caught up to her, his six-pack abs glistening with sweat and his eyes full of longing. Thirty minutes later they were in her bed, where she taught him her favorite form of high-intensity interval training.
Finally spent, he passed out.
This morning, she left him sleeping and got up to ride. The RAPTURE project was on her mind as it had been constantly for the last three years. It was her baby, and the only one she would ever have. Perhaps it was even her only true love. She didn’t need a husband or an infant to care for; her ambitions were loftier than dirty diapers and forgotten anniversaries.
When loneliness struck, men like Ted always appeared. Her momentary despair seemingly exuded musky pheromones in her wake, drawing the nearest stallion to her loins when she most needed him.
She began toweling off in the cooldown part of the ride, still turning the crank on her Peloton. She was deeply satisfied that she had ranked number one on the leaderboard of 2,948 other riders who had finished the same harrowing workout. Not unusual. She almost always finished on top. She flipped through her history screen. She ranked number one in a dozen other recent rides, and never lower than number three in five more. Not bad for a woman who worked an average of eighty hours per week.
Number one was important in Parsons’s world. Always had been, in everything, including physics as she clawed her way up in what was largely a man’s world. She took after her late father, also a physicist, and was less like her mother, also dead and gone. The dowdy homemaker, mother of seven, and church organist had given up a full ride to Berklee College of Music to marry her dad.
Parsons’s kitchen was white marble and stainless steel, spotless and organized like the rest of her house and her life. No art hung on the walls because the only beauty she cared about was the invisible quantum particles she manipulated, or the chiseled obliques she’d carved out of her own torso. She had no pets and no friends ever came to call, nor had she any need to visit or be visited by her siblings or their children.
Still only a quarter to six, Parsons fired up her Vitamix with her premeasured containers of organic coconut milk, protein powder, and micronutrient supplements. The machine roared and whirred like a particle accelerator. She didn’t hear her phone vibrate on the snow-white Carrara marble countertop but the light from the text window caught her eye. The contact info read “RHODES,” her boss at ORNL. EMERGENCY MEETING MY OFFICE AT 8AM TOMORROW. PLEASE CONFIRM.
She did. It wasn’t like it was a request. But that didn’t matter to her at all. There was an emergency and she was needed. There was no one else who could fix it because that’s what she did. There were a lot of emergencies and a lot of emergency meetings, especially of late. This was nothing new. That was the nature of government projects with evolving mandates, shortened deadlines, and oversight committees chaired by people who thought quarks were the sounds that ducks made while they were fucking.
Just another emergency that really wasn’t an emergency, unless you were Dr. David Rhodes, the RAPTURE project manager, a position she’d once held in function if not title before he arrived on the scene.
She’d fix this emergency, too.
The Vitamix stopped roaring and whirring and she poured her protein shake. Food was only fuel to her. She was a machine, a well-conditioned, efficient, and, she daresay, an attractive one.
She picked up her phone again to text Tad, asking if he was free tonight.
Or was it Ted?
37
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THE WHITE HOUSE
President Ryan stood in front of the Oval Office fireplace with a portrait of an austere George Washington hanging over the mantel.
Ryan had a smile plastered on his face, a look his wife, Cathy, characterized as “sincerely phony.” It was the smile he flashed with practiced perfection at every important state function including this one, the receiving of Ambassador Christyakov’s credentials.
The two men both stood facing the flashing cameras, right hands held in a firm handshake, left hands holding the exchanged documents, putting the official and historical act on digital record. The official White House press photographer had already taken several good shots, then quit the room. It was the Russian state photographers that were still grinding away.
The event was a bit of a coup for the new ambassador. Maksim Christyakov was only thirty-nine years old and stood half a head taller than Ryan, with thick blond hair and dark blue eyes. He looked more like a Viking than the squat Soviet diplomats Ryan had known as a young analyst. But of course, Christyakov was Nordic. The Rus people were formally known as the Viking Rus, Scandinavians who raided the Black
and Baltic Seas during the Middle Ages, settling along the Volga. Russians and Belarussians derived their very name from them.
It was quite a physical contrast. Such optics mattered these days, unfortunately. Perhaps they always did. But Ryan knew the Russian state Internet bots would push this image out into the ether with relentless enthusiasm. Score one for the Russians in the beauty department, Ryan supposed.
In truth, Christyakov’s appointment to the position was a remarkable achievement for a man without prior diplomatic experience. The well-connected Russian was part of the New Wave reforms that President Nikita Yermilov had recently instituted in his pro-democracy and anti-corruption drive. A joke, if there ever was one, Ryan thought, as the LED flashes fired.
“I think that should do it,” Scott Adler said gently, as he stepped between the two camera operators and the President.
Ryan scanned the room. It was crowded with Christyakov’s fawning retinue, along with a few of the SecState’s senior executives and staff. The President flashed a look at Adler he knew all too well.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending our brief ceremony.” Adler pointed at the door. “There are refreshments waiting for you in the Diplomatic Reception Room, if you’ll follow me.”
Ryan watched the parade of people file out behind Adler and waited for the Secret Service agent to close the door behind them before he spoke with the ambassador.
Today’s meeting was a real challenge.
Buck Logan thought the Russians were behind the piracy crisis, and right now, that was the best hypothesis. Admiral Pike’s carrier strike group would arrive on scene in a few days and put eyes on the situation. Ryan wanted answers sooner, if possible.
There was nothing Ryan wouldn’t do to protect the nation and to serve its best interests, including war, if it came to that. Too often it had come to war for other men who sat behind his desk and even for him in the recent past.
