Coalition of the Damned - 03 (24 page)

Maria continued to admire the sword and slowly pulled the blade from the scabbard and studied the blade. Then she turned and smiled at him. “Hey…wait a minute. You said your ‘best student’! I’m your
only
student!” she laughed.

Hank chuckled and nodded. “Touché.”

Maria fought back a sniffle. “Thank you, Padre.” She slid the blade back into its scabbard. “It’s beautiful.”

As the plane’s engines whined and began to rise in tempo and the craft slowly gained speed along the runway, Spanky nudged Apollo and asked, “Don’t tell me the Padre is moving in on your woman, buddy.”

Apollo had been watching the presentation of the blade with more than just a little interest. He tried not to let it bother him, but if the truth were known, he was more than just a little jealous of the time the two had been spending together. It seemed that Sanchez had less time for him because she was too busy knocking swords with Hank in the practice room. Apollo gritted his teeth and tried again to shake it off. “Naw, man, they been practicing hard lately. Padre just hookin’ her up with a solid blade, man…that’s all.” He peered at the two again and watched Maria run her hands along the long black scabbard, the awe in her eyes and the pride on Hank’s face as he observed her caressing the damned thing. Apollo closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the bulkhead of the plane. “Naw, he’s just hooking her up so if she ever run out of ammo again she can still protect herself. It’s all good.”

Spanky watched Maria and Hank as they continued to talk and discuss the sword and he gritted his teeth. He looked at Apollo and his easy demeanor. Darren shook his head and let out a sigh. “If you say so, bro. But if it were me, I wouldn’t be so comfortable with another man getting all sweaty with my gal.”

Apollo laughed without opening his eyes. “If they was knocking boots, I might be jealous brother, but they be knocking wooden swords.”

Darren continued to watch the two and blanched when M
aria reached over and took Hank’s hand in her own and squeezed it. He quickly turned and looked at Apollo who still had his head leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed. He breathed another sigh and shook his head. He sincerely hoped it was platonic. The squads didn’t need any kind of romantic drama, especially now.

14

It took a little creative work on Jack’s part to explain where they needed to go, but once the Greater Elves figured it out, they opened the Doorway to Anywhere to an area just outside the base proper at Groom Lake. First Squad went through first in case anybody from the Groom Lake command were nearby, but the place they exited was nearly three hundred yards away from the largest building. As the warriors began filing out, so did the fog. But once the fog cleared, the warriors were gone, camo
uflaged into their surroundings to the point that unless you were using heat vision, you probably couldn’t see them. As Jack looked around, he wasn’t even sure if they’d show up with IR. He shook his head as he and his team worked their way toward the facility.

They didn’t get far before two Jeeps rushed up on them, contracted security closing on them rapidly, weapons drawn. First Squad started to take a defensive stance but Jack ordered them to stand down. He showed his hands as the security pe
rsonnel advanced on them.

“We’re with the new command,” Jack tried to explain, but the security contractors didn’t want to hear it. They ordered the men on the ground, their weapons tossed to the side.

Jack smiled and told them that simply wasn’t going to happen. As the point man with the security force brought his weapon to bear and was preparing to fire, it was knocked from his hand by an arrow out of nowhere, his backup security forces suddenly wrestled to the ground, their weapons taken from them from unseen intruders.

Horith seemed to appear from a shimmer of heat above one of the security personnel. He looked toward Jack and asked, “What do you want done with them?”

“Just bind them for now.” Jack noticed the disappointment in the elf’s eyes. “We’ll need every man that can fire a weapon later.” He turned back to his team and directed them onward. They worked their way toward the buildings in front of them and lurked in the shadows. “It may be a while longer before the others show up and until they do, we may not be very welcome,” he said in a low voice.

Ing pointed back toward the security forces. “Won’t they be missed?”

“I’m sure they will, but there’s not much we can do about that right now.” He turned to Lamb, “Monitor all the frequencies you can and see if you can pick up the one they use. If we can listen in, it will give us a heads-up.”

“On it.” Lamb broke out his scanning radio gear and plugged in his ear bud. He turned to Jacobs, “Bring me one of their radios. Maybe I can narrow this down.” Ing turned back to where the elves had the contract security personnel hogtied and pulled a portable radio from one of their belts. It looked like a walkie-talkie, but he knew better. This unit was a state of the art Motorola with rotating frequencies and built in scramblers. He hustled back to Lamb and handed the unit over. Lamb took one look at the radio and shook his head.

He tapped the chief on the shoulder and gave him a no-go signal. “This isn’t going to work, boss. Even if we could pick up their frequency, we couldn’t hear them. This thing has a hundred and twenty-eight bit encoder. Without the code to input, we’re dead in the water.”

Jack sighed and had him secure his gear. “Fine. We lay low until the planes start arriving. Scout us a building.” Donovan started forward when Kalen stepped in front of him. He too seemed to appear out of a heat shimmer and stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Allow us, Chief Jack.”

Horith appeared next to him, his jaw set. “We can move more freely about. We will find you a building to hide in and let you know.” Then both elves fell back into the shimmer and blended with the environment before stepping into the shadows.

“What I wouldn’t give to be able to do that…” Donnie muttered.

“Me too,” Jack added. He turned back to the rest of the squad, “We hold tight until they return.”

The squad laid low in the shadows for a while, counting the minutes until more security personnel showed up to engage them when Kalen reappeared at their rear. He gave a low whistle and waved them back behind the hangar. Crouched low and staying in the dwindling shadows, the squad moved with him and down three buildings to an open rear door where Horith stood, holding it open. Once inside the coolness of the building, the squad spread out in two-by-two fashion ensuring the building was indeed empty, many of the Elven warriors closing the rear.

They converged back at the rear, reporting the building clear. Jack had them stand down and secured the doors. The building appeared fairly empty, large crates stacked toward the rear and nearly to the ceiling. The men hunkered down and wai
ted for something…anything to happen. Always alert but taking rest when they could, simply happy to be out of sight of any passersby.

“Any idea how long we’ll have to wait?” Tufo asked.

Jack shook his head. “They were bugging out when I radioed in. It could be hours before they actually start landing, or they could start landing any minute. I don’t know exactly when they began.” He glanced around the large hangar and noticed there were no windows. “We’ll just have to keep an ear out for any planes landing and new activity.”

“Did you notice the place looked like a friggin’ ghost town out there?”

Jack nodded. “They were supposed to evacuate all non-essential personnel. I guess they did.”

“Gives me the creeps,” Tufo said as he pulled a chunk of beef jerky from his breast pocket. He offered Jack a piece and tore off a piece to give his mouth something to do.

“At least we know security is still active,” Jack responded.

Tufo snorted. “Unless those clowns were all that’s left.” He said hooking a thumb toward the contracted security forces tied up along the wall. They did not appear happy.

Jack shook his head. “Somehow, I doubt it. This place is too high-dollar black budget to just leave a handful of rent-a-cops left to protect it.” His comment left the security forces faces turning red with anger but at the moment, Jack didn’t care. He motioned Tufo to follow him with a hook of his jaw. They approached the security forces and Jack eyed the men sitting along the side wall of the more or less empty building. “Which of you is ‘in charge’ of this group?” he asked.

They all sat silently, the gags still in their mouths, veno
mous gazes turned toward him. “I don’t think they like you, Chief,” Tufo chuckled.

“They don’t pay me to win popularity contests, Gunny,” Jack said through the side of his mouth. He turned back to the men on the floor. He gave an exaggerated sigh and said, “Look, guys, you might think we’re the bad guys, but we aren’t. We are a forward scout party for the new temporary command. Surely your base CO told you about the new command that was coming here?” He looked to each man for some kind of recognition in their eyes and found nothing but more anger. He shook his head. “Fucking officers.” He turned to Tufo, “Can you believe that they didn’t even tell their security people that the base is being handed over to a new command?”

Tufo shot him a sardonic grin. “Sounds about right. Bastard is probably polishing his big fat brass.”

Jack smiled. “Probably.” He turned back to the men again. “Look, fellas, this can go easy or this can go rough. Which would you prefer?”

One of the tied men mumbled an epithet that even through the gag was recognizable. Jack simply nodded and glanced at Tufo who shrugged. “Fuck ‘em, Chief. They’re Alpo.”

Jack casually reached down and grabbed the man who cur
sed him and the man next to him. He lifted both men completely off their feet and held them, one in each hand. Their expressions changed from anger to shock as the man before them displayed amazing strength. He pulled them each to his face and growled at them, “I want to be
real
fucking clear about something,
gentlemen
. We
are
taking command of this base, and when we do, you
will be
working for us.” He said in a deep, low voice. “I don’t give two shits if you believe me now, but once the change of command takes place, if
any
of you fuckers give me shit and try to get revenge because we got the drop on you today…I’ll rip your heads off and shit down your windpipe.” The look in his eyes was absolutely feral and both men knew true fear. “Do you understand me?”

He was met with frantic nods, sweat having popped out on their foreheads and the stink of fear emanating from both of them. He let go and let them both fall to the floor then turned to the others whose looks of astonishment had replaced their anger as well. “Are you going to give me grief?”

He was met with a choreographed shaking of heads, eyes wide from each of them. “Good.” Jack turned and went back to his group, Tufo on his heels.

“A little heavy handed, don’tcha think?” he whispered.

“If it gets the message across, so be it,” Jack muttered. “I don’t want to risk any of them taking pot shots at us when the chips are down because they got their feathers ruffled this morning and their egos bruised.”

Tufo bounced the idea around and nodded. “Makes sense, but wouldn’t it make more sense to just give them a lower prior
ity assignment once we’re closer to zero hour?”

Jack stopped and turned to face Mark. “Right now, we don’t know for sure what assets we’re going to have or how thin we’re going to have to spread ourselves.” He pointed back to the men being held along the wall. “We may very well need each and every one of them at a high value position and for the life of me I don’t want to worry about whether or not I can trust that they won’t try to put a bullet in the back of one of my operator’s heads.”

Tufo rubbed at his chin and stole a glance back at the men. “Give me a second with them, would ya?”

Jack studied him a moment. “What are you thinking?”

Tufo grinned at him wickedly. “Classic good cop-bad cop.”

Jack shook his head. “Mark, we can’t afford—”

“Trust me, Chief.” He turned his back to the men along the wall. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

Jack thought a moment and sighed. “Carry on, Gunny. Just be smart about it.”

“Aye-aye, Chief.” Gunnery Sergeant Mark Tufo strolled over to the men along the wall and hunkered down in front of them. He eyeballed the men and shook his head. “Sorry about the boss. He tends to lose his temper pretty easily.” He reached over and pulled the gag out of one of the men’s mouths. He pulled his canteen out and offered the man a drink of water. The man eyed him warily and took a small sip. “Don’t worry, bud. It’s only water.” The man took a second small drink and nodded at him. Mark recapped the canteen and nodded to him. “You in charge of these guys?”

The guy eyed him a moment and shook his head. “No. I’m just a security officer.”

Mark nodded. “Well, I apologize for having to do this. We just don’t want to get our asses shot off by people who are supposed to be on the same team.” He noticed the security officer giving him a disbelieving look. “Yeah, I know. I can only imagine what you fellas must be thinking. A group of armed military bust in and tell you that they’re taking over, but nobody said anything to you.” He sighed and sat down on the concrete floor in front of him. “It doesn’t make sense right now, but I promise you, what he said…” he indicated with a thumb over his shoulder, “it’s all true.”

“Right,” the guy deadpanned.

“Yeah,” Tufo agreed. “Well, you’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.” He glanced over at the other security officers. “Any of you guys want a drink?” He shook the canteen and they all either ignored him or shook their heads. “Okay, well, if you change your minds, just let me know.”

“What do you plan to do with us?” the ungagged man asked.

“Do?” Tufo responded. “Nothing. We’re just waiting on the rest of our command to show up and then you’ll be free to go.”

The bound men shot him disbelieving looks. “So you break in to one of the most secure facilities in the world, overtake our security team and then declare that you’ll let us go as soon as your backup arrives?” the man asked.

Tufo snorted. “It’s not back-up. This base is being…borrowed for a short time,” he said.

He glanced at Jack who was directing Jacobs and Lamb in low tones across the hangar. Tufo didn’t want to let too much out of the bag right off, but he didn’t want to appear to be kee
ping secrets from the men that they may well end up counting on when the chips were down.

“Look, it’s complicated, okay? But let’s just say that there’s a huge fight coming and logistically, this base was necessary to fight it. Our bosses pulled some mighty big strings to procure it and…well, here we are. The rest are on their way.” Mark shook his head when he thought about it. “To be honest, I think it’s a pretty chicken shit way of doing things if your base commander didn’t already fill you in about it.”

“Well, he didn’t,” the man spat, shooting Tufo an angry stare.

Mark simply nodded. “I understand. And I’d be just as pissed as you are if I were in your shoes.” He smiled apologet
ically at him. “Actually, I’d be even more pissed.”

“Somehow, I doubt that,” the security officer said.

“Trust me on one thing though, once you get the full story, you’ll probably understand,” Tufo said as he started to get up. He glanced back at the shimmering figures moving about the hangar. “Then again…you might not.”