Predator One (3 page)

In my ear, Bug said, “Go.”

I took a blank keycard from my pocket and ran it through the slot. The little red lights turned green, and I heard a faint click.

Easy as pie. I pulled the door open very carefully and eased inside smoother than a greased weasel.

“Inside,” I said. “Wait for my word.”

“Hooah,”
said Top and Bunny quietly.

The entrance foyer was short, and there was a second keycard reader inside. I didn’t trust that it would use the same keycode, so I repeated the process and used a second blank card. Green says go.

Beyond that door was a hallway with half of the lights turned off. Four doors on the right, three on the left, all closed. None of them had card readers. I drew my sidearm,
a Snellig gas pistol. It was a weapon originally designed by some very bad people, the Jakobys, but since they’re dead and we swiped all of their technology, we’ve started using these guns. Like Sam’s rifle, it uses compressed gas to fire a dart with a thin shell of a material that structurally acted like glass but that was really a kind of cellulose. Nontoxic and biodegradable. We are nothing
if not environmentally conscious here at the DM of S.

The only downside of the guns is range. Handguns as a rule are short-range weapons, but the gas pistols have an effective range of thirty feet. Beyond that it’s better to throw the actual gun at your target. Inside that range, though, even a flesh wound will drop your bad guy. Each shell was loaded with horsey.

I ghosted along the hall, stopping
at each door, opening it slowly, peering in, finding no one, moving on.

Until door number 5.

Two people sitting at a table, coffee cups nearby, their faces lit from the glow of a pair of computer monitors. I stepped into the room.

“Hi,” I said, and shot them both.

A man and a woman. He was in a lab coat; she was in a uniform with lieutenants’ bars. The gas darts whispered through the air,
and in nine one-thousandths of a second after impact they were out.

Horsey does not horse around.

Bad joke, real assessment.

The woman fell sideways out of her chair. The man did a face plant on his keyboard. As I hurried over, I pulled two uplink drives from my pocket. I pushed the lab guy off his chair and quickly plugged the uplink drives into USB ports on each computer. MindReader stepped
right in and began copying everything. Every file, every e-mail, every instant message, every URL. The uplinks had microcharges of thermite buried inside. As soon as the uploads were complete, they’d pop, killing the computers and melting their own innards. No one could trace slag, and no one could duplicate our tech.

We’re stingy like that.

I took wallets and ID cases from both sleeping beauties
and shoved the stuff into an empty canvas bag clipped to my belt. For later. For after-mission follow-up. Maybe for federal prosecution, if we found what we were looking for. And maybe for quietly disposing of if we didn’t.

Then I moved through the rest of the building. In various rooms, I encountered one more soldier and the other eight technicians.

Horsey, horsey, horsey.

Everything was rinse
and repeat. Hacking computers, slagging them, taking IDs.

Until I got to the security room.

The room was locked, and I had just begun the process of placing another scanner on the card reader when the door opened and a burly guy with sergeant stripes stepped out. He looked almost exactly like Mr. T, except for the Mohawk. Same face, same muscles. Same attitude.

Sergeant T looked at me in my
black BDUs, camouflage greasepaint, and weapons. He did two things at once. He went for his sidearm and he started to yell.

Balls.

Chapter Six

The Resort

208 Nautical Miles West of Chile

October 13, 12:21
A.M.

My pistol was still in its holster, so all I had in my hands was a tiny scanning device.

So, I hit him with that.

Hard.

On the nose.

Small or not, the scanner was metal. Sergeant T’s nose was cartilage. No competition.

He reeled back, blood exploding from both nostrils. I followed him, hitting him with a
palm shot under the chin and a big front kick to the belly. His gut was rock-hard, which was fine because it gave me more to kick against. Sergeant T flew backward into the room and slammed into a second noncom who was rising from his chair, hand already closing on the butt of the Sig Sauer at his hip.

I planted one hand on Sergeant T’s chest, used it to launch myself into the air, and delivered
a flying punch to the second sergeant’s face that broke a whole lot of important stuff. He crashed, bleeding and dazed, into his security console as I landed hard atop the man who was atop him. I hit the sergeant with palm shots to the temple. Again and again. Hard as I could.

He had a head like a bucket and a neck like an oak tree.

It took four palm shots to knock the lights out of his eyes.
He began to slump down, dragging the groaning Sergeant T with him.

I staggered back, drew my Snellig, and darted them both.

I was breathing hard. Even a short fight can take the wind out of you. My pulse was jumping all over the place, and I could feel that old familiar adrenaline rush. The room became brighter. Sounds became sharper.

The two security guys were out, but they were hurt. I wasted
three seconds repositioning them so they wouldn’t choke to death on blood. They were here, and that made them part of something very naughty, but killing them was not on my day planner. There was no way to tell if they were bad guys or merely following orders from bad guys. That was for people above my pay grade to sort out.

Mr. Church would be part of that process, so this was going to get all
the attention it deserved. Nobody’s going to be putting this on their r
é
sum
é
.

I stopped to listen and assess.

No alarms sounding, no one coming that I could see. There were twelve security cameras in operation around the compound, and each had a dedicated screen there in the security office. I studied them. Most showed nothing except stillness.

One showed the mess hall filled with people.

I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock. All quiet on the western front,” I said. “Go.”

Something small and metallic suddenly flew in a slow arc over the main table of the mess hall. Several of the soldiers looked up in surprise. Their faces were just registering shock and fear when the gas grenade exploded.

Horsey, horsey.

All fall down.

“Clear,” said Top. “Nap time here.”

“Shutting
down the power to the fence,” I said, hitting some switches. “All security systems are now down. Meet me outside the detention building.”

I ran down the hall and out through the front door just in time to see Top and Bunny come pelting across the lawn. In a small pack we jogged over to the detention building.

“What have we got, Bug?” I asked.

“Thermals indicate nine people. Two guards in the
outer room, one person in each of four cells, and then three signatures in cell six.”

“Is that the one with our boy?”

“No way to tell.”

Mr. Church’s quiet voice said, “Echo Team, proceed with caution.”

Bunny knelt by the front door and used the same kind of scanner I’d used earlier to create a keycard.

“Ready, Boss,” he said.

I finger-counted down and emphasized the go order with a clenched
fist. Bunny swiped the card, and Top pulled open the door.

I stepped inside. “Hey, guys,” I said, and shot the closest soldier in the chest. Bunny was right behind me and took the other one.

Everything was going like clockwork. No alarms sounded, no fatalities. Not a single shot fired in response.

We approached the door to the cellblock, once more bypassed the keycard reader, and walked inside,
moving on quick, silent feet, guns up and out. There were several prisoners sleeping on cots. The first two were too young. The third was a woman. The fourth was a very fat man.

We found who we were looking for in the last cell. The one where Bug had said there were two other thermal signatures.

And that’s when the whole thing went to shit.

The man we were looking for was secured to a sturdy
wooden chair with zip ties. He was naked except for a soiled pair of boxers. His body was lean and long-limbed, with graying hair and a whole lot of bruises and cuts. Some of them old, some of them so recent they glistened with blood. The chair was tilted so that the back of the man’s head hung over the lip of a big industrial metal sink. There was a towel bunched over his face. There were pails
of water on the floor, and a lot of puddles. There were two men, sweaty and angry, standing on either side of him.

It was clear what had been going on.

The spin doctors like to call it enhanced interrogation.

The press calls it what it is. Torture. In this case, waterboarding. Where they pour water over the towel that covers nose and mouth. You can’t breath, but you don’t drown right away,
either. You drown by inches, slow. With great pain and terror.

I know. I’ve had it done to me. Twice during training, three times by guys who were as ruthless and dedicated to my discomfort as these guys were. I survived it, but I can tell you, when you’re bound and brutalized and gargling like that, you take serious stock of what you’d do or say in order to make it all stop. If it goes on long
enough, you think about selling out your family, your honor, your values, and your country.

Everyone thinks that.

Not everyone cracks, though.

I didn’t.

A lot of guys don’t. Waterboarding doesn’t work as well as the torturers want. But they keep trying it, because it doesn’t leave a mark. And it’s a reusable torture. Tearing out fingernails isn’t.

These guys looked like they’d been at it
for a while. They were stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat. The room was awash.

They heard the door open and turned to us. One in irritation at the intrusion, the other in surprise.

But there was fear in the eyes of both men.

The guy in the chair, though …

Yeah. Well, that was the problem.

He wasn’t breathing.

“Take ’em,” I said, “but keep ’em awake.”

Top took the guy on the left,
kicking him in the nuts and then clubbing him to the ground with the stock of his M4. Bunny grabbed the guy on the right and literally picked him up and slammed him against the wall. It shook the whole place.

I rushed to the guy on the chair.

I checked his pulse. Nothing.

I turned him and cleared his airway, then I slashed the flex-cuffs and lowered him to the floor. And began CPR.

Breathing.
Doing the chest compression. Doing it right.

Doing it for a long time.

Wasting my goddamn time.

The guy Bunny slammed into the wall groaned and shook his head. “We didn’t mean to,” he whined. “He just … stopped breathing. We didn’t mean to.”

They hadn’t meant to.

But they had.

I sagged back, gasping, sweating. Defeated.

The man was dead.

I looked down at him. Late fifties. Six four. Wasted
down to a skeleton. Head and beard forcibly shaved. Beaky nose. Dark eyes that looked up at me, and through me, and into the big black.

Dead.

There was a little bit of irony to it. Just about everyone else in the world already thought he was dead. I’d have been A-OK with that being the truth, too. I’d believed the fiction along with everyone else. I’d celebrated it. Bought a round of Kentucky
bourbon for everyone at a military bar. Cheered with the news reports.

Right now, though, I didn’t want him dead.

He had information I wanted. Needed.

He had been a link to something so big that a lot of people might now die because this source was dry, this door was closed.

Because this man was dead.

We stood there, Bunny, Top, and I. Looking down at him. At that face.

Helpless and defeated.

Staring at the slack, dead features of Osama bin Laden.

Interlude One

The
Astrid

Gulf of Saint Lawrence

32 Nautical Miles from Gaspé

New Brunswick, Canada

Six Years Ago

Jean-Luc Belmont was a mediocre sailor and he knew it. He’d taken the courses, passed the tests, obtained his license, but in anything except a calm sea on a mild day, he was hopeless. Luckily for him, he had clients
who loved to fish, and many of them seemed eager to take the helm and pilot the
Astrid,
a lush Cabo 44HTX.

The boat had a hardtop enclosure—no pesky canvas—that provided climate-controlled comfort, nice ventilation, and a lovely hull profile. The
Astrid
could pave a smooth road through five-foot waves and do so in excess of thirty knots. All of which made for an impressive outing with clients
who brought their checkbooks along with their Abu rods and Gander reels.

What Jean-Luc lacked in understanding of boats he more than made up for in his understanding of clients. He worked for Belasco Arms, an up-and-coming weapons manufacturer that was making a dedicated run at becoming a real threat to Colt Canada. The Belasco B9C assault rifle was outselling Colt’s C8A1 carbine and their C8FTHB
special forces weapon in several key markets. Jean-Luc found that a day on the water hauling in northern pike and other sport fish, combined with lots of very good alcohol, was a great way to do business. Once they were back and showered, there would be steaks and more drinks, as well as some female entertainment for those guys who wanted to leave their wedding rings in their hotel safes.

The
four men aboard the
Astrid
with Jean-Luc were all experienced fishermen and boat handlers, and they seemed to accept as a gift his willingness to turn the boat over to them. They worked the mouth of the Saint Lawrence, and one of the men pulled in an astounding forty-one-inch pike that weighed twenty-six pounds. It wasn’t one for the record books, but it was the biggest of the species any of them
had pulled in. They were all jazzed about it, and that amped up the general air of holiday.