Against All Enemies (39 page)

And then there were no targets.

“Clear on the right,” Jolaine said.

“Clear on the left,” Dylan agreed.

“Nice job,” Jonathan sad. “Now to phase two.” He considered combining the teams back into a single vehicle, but decided against it. This way, if they needed to split up for operational issues, they could. Also, the lighter SUV—the one without the armor plating and bulletproof windows—was more agile. He also decided against stashing the bodies. With the gate wide open, if anyone happened to drive up at this hour—and he thought that to be unlikely—the fact that the guards were gone would raise a loud enough alarm. Plus, speed mattered, and he didn’t want to take the time.

Before getting back in the car, he did, however, take the time to drop an infrared strobe at the gate, just in case the ride out was more intense than the ride in.

The camp designer had chosen to place the electrical generator building inside the first fence, but outside the interior ring, probably to allow for more secure servicing. If a repair truck was necessary, it could do what it needed to do without actually entering the main part of the compound. Getting to it, however, was going to be a tricky proposition.

While the outer ring fence was only dimly lit, the closer they got to the inner fence, which was quite some distance away, maybe half a mile or more, the night started looking more like day. Because of the steep terrain, there was no line-of-sight visibility to worry about yet, but that would come soon.

Jonathan looked to his GPS. He could see the generator building, but he cursed himself silently for not being more thorough in his markings. “Stop a second,” he said, and Boxers brought the vehicle to a halt. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said into his radio.

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have eyes on us?”

“Not a current one, no. The image won’t refresh for another two minutes.”

“Do me a favor, will you, and upload the specific coordinates of the generator building access road to my GPS.”

There was silence for a few seconds and then she came back with, “Did someone drop the ball on research?” There was a time, not too long ago, when Venice stayed away from light banter and focused exclusively on the mission. Jonathan missed those days. “Okay,” Venice said. “The numbers are on the way. Need any others?”

This was the problem of planning an op on the fly. You forgot important stuff that you didn’t realize you needed until you needed it. “Affirm,” Jonathan said. “Give me every intersection on the map.”

“Okay,” she said. For whatever reason, Venice never used military jargon, preferring
okay
to
roger.
Jonathan never asked because he didn’t much care, and she was so damn good at what she did that it didn’t matter. “You have the buildings, right?”

“That’s affirmative,” Jonathan said.

“Okay, numbers will be up as I get them.” In the worst case, Jonathan knew that that would be five minutes, max.

“Break, break,” Jonathan said over the air. “This is Scorpion. Final check before we go hot. Boomer.”

“Check.”

“She Devil.”

“Ready.”

Jonathan turned to his drive du jour. “Madman.”

“Check.”

And, finally, “Big Guy.”

“O Captain! my Captain!”

Jonathan laughed in spite of himself. “You know that poem doesn’t end well for the captain, right?”

“Color me ambitious,” Boxers said. “And quit thinking so hard.”

The ambient light troubled Jonathan. Given that they were surrounded by two hundred armed men, they remained at a distinct disadvantage as long as they were visible. The silence of the night bothered him, too. The camp produced its share of mechanical noises, but for the residents here, they had a sense for what was normal and what was not. If they’d had any decent training at all, they would have learned that anything out of the ordinary is cause for alarm. Because of its weight and girth, the engine that propelled the Batmobile produced a grumble that Jonathan wagered was unique to the sounds of the camp.

“That’s our access road right there,” Jonathan said, pointing to the barely discernable driveway that cut through the barely present grass. Ahead, on the far side of a short hill, a bright glow filled the sky, washing out his night vision. He flipped the switch on the four-tube array to transition to infrared. Because of the brightness of the background, the light-amplification technology of the standard NVG setting could miss objects or people hiding in the shadows. Because infrared (IR) worked off of the heat emitted by the objects he observed, even the best camouflage couldn’t conceal a healthy human being. There was a price to be paid, however—as there was always a price to be paid for any technology—and in this case, the price was detail. While night vision looked like green daylight, IR imagery looked like a moving X-ray.

“Alpha, Scorpion,” Jonathan said into his radio. “Hold tight here at the intersection and give us cover. Big Guy and I are going to make things dark again.”

“You know that’s going to create a panic, right?” Rollins said off the air.

“I’m kind of counting on it. I’m betting it gets pretty damn dark out here,” Jonathan said. “If they shoot each other, we don’t have to worry about them shooting us.”

“I really don’t feel comfortable out in the open like this,” Boxers said. “Can’t we move the vehicles under the trees over there?” He pointed to a copse of hardwoods a hundred yards away.

“No,” Jonathan said. “I hate the noise. With the sentries dead, and out of sight of the second gate, I think noise is our greatest enemy.”

Boxers laughed. “Well, give it a couple of minutes. We’ll have more enemy than we know what to do with.”

“Madman, you stay put. Keep the engine running, but don’t give it any gas. Deploy outside to give us some measure of cover. I don’t know what it’s going to look like in there, exactly, but we’ll set the timers with enough to get us back before things go boom.” He let the words set for a moment. “You good?”

“I don’t like being out in the open.”

Jonathan slugged him playfully in the shoulder. “You don’t like not being in the middle of the shit,” he said. In the parlance of the Unit, he’d just bestowed a compliment—that Rollins wanted to be in the middle of the battle instead of on the outskirts—and it seemed to resonate as such.

Rollins nodded once and opened his door. “Don’t take too long,” he said. “And remember to keep Big Guy between you and the explosion.”

Even Boxers laughed at that as he climbed out the passenger side with Jonathan. “I hate that son of a bitch, but he’s not all bad.”

Jonathan and Boxers moved in unison, Jonathan facing front, and Boxers keeping up step-for-step moving backward. Between the two of them, by sweeping continuously one hundred eighty degrees, they could keep an eye on every compass point. The fact that a very experienced, very capable team was covering their six o’clock, the most likely route of discovery and attack, made him feel more comfortable, but they still needed to move fast.

Jonathan moved his NVGs up and out of the way as they crested the hill, and he stooped to a crouch. Boxers followed without looking. They’d done this enough as a twosome that they’d learned to think each other’s thoughts and anticipate and read each other’s moves. Keeping his right hand on the grip of his M27, he used his left to fish though a pocket on his vest to find the ten-power monocular that allowed him to assess the scene in close-up detail. At first glance, what he saw disturbed him.

He pressed the transmit button that now resided atop the chest plate in his vest. “All teams, Scorpion,” he whispered. “I count two, three, four,
five
bad guys on the exterior of the power plant.”

Behind him, he felt Boxers whirl around to get a look for himself.

“Do you need backup?” Rollins asked.

“Not yet,” Jonathan replied. “Stand by.”

“Want me to take four of them and you can chase one of them down and beat him to death with your pistol?” Boxers whispered.

“I really do hate you, you know.”

“O Captain! my Captain!” Boxers said.

“And sometimes I hate you more than others.” Jonathan didn’t like what he saw. Why, on a regular night just like any other night, would there be so many people guarding the power plant? Surely, that was not sustainable in the long term. “I think they’re on alert,” he said.

“For good cause, as it turns out,” Boxers replied. “You want the three on the right or the two on the left?”

Jonathan scanned some more with his monocular. If they were in fact on alert, they weren’t very disciplined about it. Rather than deploying in an arc around the building, they stood in a single cluster, engaged in conversation. Whatever alert might have been issued had not been taken seriously.

“Kinda get the sense that this isn’t the first time they’ve been rousted?” Boxers whispered.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Jonathan said.

“So, I take the right?” Big Guy asked.

Jonathan hated this part. For every soldier—real, wannabe, or poser—there existed no more thankless job than that of sentry. You spent endless hours staring out into nothing, only to be the first poor bastard dropped by the enemy during an incursion. The best a sentry could hope for was to see the bad guys approaching and sound the alarm. If he lived that long, he’d done his job. There was no more random way to leave this mortal coil than what lay ahead for these poor souls.

“Affirmative,” Jonathan whispered back. He flipped the selector switch with his thumb. The cluster of targets stood maybe eighty yards away, too far away for the IR lasers to be useful. With his NVGs tilted up out of the way, he would depend on the simple optics of his telescopic sight. He’d set it for ten-power, which allowed him to fill the sight picture with the images of the young men he would kill. Because he was at eighty yards instead of the fifty yards for which he’d zeroed in the scope, he settled the reticle slightly above the target’s head, anticipating impact just forward of the bad guy’s ear. His first target was about three inches taller than his second, so it would take some skill to get both shots right. He took five, maybe ten seconds to rehearse the necessary pivot.

When he was set, he said, “I’m going full-auto in five, four, three, two . . .” When he got to the silent
zero,
his trigger broke, and bullets flew. His first target took two rounds essentially through the same hole behind his eye, and the second died in a millisecond as the first impact sheared off the top of his head.

“Clear,” Boxers said. Jonathan thought he’d heard Big Guy’s shots, but was it really three rounds? They recorded as one.

“Clear,” Jonathan said.
Pleasant journey to the other side, boys.

Thinking as one, they held their positions, unmoving, as they swept the area for additional targets. After thirty seconds, when none had shown themselves, Jonathan whispered, “Let’s go.”

They advanced quickly yet carefully down the hill, their weapons at the ready. Jonathan ignored his sights and the tunnel vision they brought in favor of a panoramic view. Because it was nighttime and the area was well lit, it was disturbingly easy for a badguy to stay in the shadows if he knew what he has doing. It was the rare amateur who had that level of training, but Jonathan and Boxers had both lived as long as they had by assuming the best-trained enemy with the worst possible motivations. In these conditions, the most telling giveaway would be movement. The human eye had difficulty discerning forms in the dark, but it compensated by being hypersensitive to movement. Jonathan figured it had something to do with his great-great grandfather to the
n
th power who managed to survive by adapting to the fact that every living being he encountered was a potential predator.

The power plant building was bigger in reality than it looked in the satellite imagery. The footprint was the same—call it twenty feet by fifty feet—but it was much taller, every bit of fifteen feet of ceiling. Inside, the generator churned just as it was supposed to, but as they got closer, Jonathan worried about the noise drowning out the sound of approaching bad guys.

“Moving,” Jonathan said. A walkway of sorts—a worn path, really—led from the access road to the left, or green, side of the building. Jonathan knew that the Unit had abandoned the old color-coded side designations in favor of compass points, but old habits died hard. Besides, in Security Solutions, Jonathan got to write the SOPs.

With the exterior wall of the building now able to give them cover on one side, they shifted in what looked like a choreographed motion to press their shoulders to the wall—Jonathan’s right and Boxers’ left, because Big Guy was walking backward.

“I feel like I’m on a damn stage,” Boxers said. The lights were that bright.

“Yeah, well, we’re gonna fix that.” The closer Jonathan got to the building, the more impressed he was with the stoutness of its construction. This wasn’t some pole barn thrown up at the last minute. This was a solid building with corrugated steel walls, erected on a poured-concrete base. He wondered if it had been built for this purpose, or if Carrington and his crew had hijacked it for their own means. Not that it mattered.

His heart sank as he arrived at the door. The steel panel had been set in a steel frame and the lock was a high-security job that had an old analog keypad entry. He’d been hoping for a padlock and hasp, or at the very least a pin tumbler lock like the one they’d found in Bud’s.

“We’re gonna need to use a GPC to get in here,” he said.

“That’s a lot of noise,” Boxers said.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

They both stewed on the problem for a few seconds, and then Boxers finally said, “I’m on it.”

Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Alpha, Scorpion. We’re going to have to do an explosive breach here. That’s going to wake some people up about five minutes before we want them awake. Get eyes on the sentries at the inner gate. Let me know if we can take them out before we shoot the GPC.”

Dylan looked to Jolaine. “Is he serious?”

“Scorpion is always serious once we’re hot.”

In his ear, he heard Rollins ask, “Where do you want Madman?”