And, yes, that still means we knew that things could, and often did, go wrong. If you do this kind of thing for a living, you accept that as part of the mission planning. You’re never locked into one way of doing things. Reaction and response is every bit as important as intelligence and planning.
Like four ghosts, we left the grassy field and moved into the foothills of broken volcanic rock, following a path picked for us by a geodetic-survey software program. The easiest safe path. The path that wouldn’t burn us out. Safety takes time, so we moved only as quickly as common sense allowed.
I saw an armadillo waddle into a hole, and I stepped around it, not wanting to disturb the animal. A few minutes later a chinchilla shot out from in front of Top, and he very nearly put a hot round into it.
“Fucking thing wants to be dead,” he muttered.
Farther up the mountain slope a vicuña raised its ugly head and watched us go past, munching on a midnight snack of green leaves. Bunny stopped for a moment and stared eye to eye with it. The animal didn’t move except to continue its slow mastication of tamarugo leaves.
Bunny blew it a kiss, and we moved on.
It took an hour to go one mile inland. Serious rocks. A lot of caution.
We fanned out to preselected spots and considered the compound.
There was a fence, which was no problem. There were guards on patrol. That was problematic. We weren’t here to kill anyone.
Absolutely no one.
Let me tell you why.
We were here to break one of the world’s worst terrorists out of a secret prison.
But it was a prison run by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Chapter Five
The Resort
208 Nautical Miles West of Chile
October 12, 10:17 P.M.
Sam Imura faded off to the north and vanished. He had two rifles slung over his back. Aside from his usual sniper rifle, he had one retrofitted to fire tranquilizer darts at ultrahigh rates of speed. The tranqs would drop anyone in their tracks. The darts could do some damage, but nothing that wouldn’t heal. They were filled with an amped-up version of the veterinary drug ketamine mixed with a mild psychotropic. No one who wakes up from it is a reliable witness for anything within a couple of hours before or after being juiced. It has a long technical name. We call it “horsey.” So, whoever got darted with horsey would waft off to la-la land and probably dream of sexy rainbow-striped unicorns. Something like that. Haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard stories.
I nodded to Top and Bunny, and they peeled off to the south, then split up to go over the fence at two different points. I went more or less straight in.
As I ran low and fast toward the fence, I removed a device approximately the size of a deck of playing cards. One of the wonderful little gadgets developed by Doctor Hu’s science supernerds. Just as Bug inserted a video loop into the cameras, this more or less did the same thing for the juice in the electrified fence. Bunny and Top each had one, and on my word we simultaneously held them toward the metal chain links. Strong magnets jumped them from our rubber-tipped gloves and attached them to the metal. There was a microsecond of static and then a meter display on our glasses told us that we had a controlled gap in the electricity. The delay lasted thirty seconds. We were up and over in ten. Then the units overheated and fell off. Dead. The electricity on the fence resumed its normal flow.
Nice.
Inside the compound, in the security room, all that would show would be a single, momentary blip. The kind that happens if a small bird gets fried. Happens all the time.
The three big birds were already inside.
That was phase 1.
Sam was high up a tree with his rifle ready, cold eyes searching for targets through a nightscope.
“Talk to me, Bug,” I said very quietly. When you don’t want to be heard, you speak quietly. If you whisper, the sibilant S sounds carry.
“Cowboy,” he responded, “there’s a two-man patrol sixty-two feet to your … no, wait—they’re down.”
And almost as an after-echo, I heard Sam quietly say, “Got ’em.”
“Another one on your two o’clock,” Bug advised. “He’s walking the inside of the fence.”
“Mine,” said Bunny.
On the small display inside the glasses, I saw one white dot moving at a slow walk and then a yellow dot coming at him from behind. After a moment, the yellow dot moved off and the white dot did not. I hoped Bunny hadn’t dented the guy too badly. Bunny is six and a half feet tall and can bench-press one or both of the Dakotas depending on whether he’s really trying.
“Got movement by the first building,” said Top.
I moved quickly across the trimmed lawn toward a vantage point beside a parked jeep. From there I could see the buildings. I switched from night vision to my own eyes because there was a row of lights mounted just below the roof level. I kept the glasses on, though, because they still fed the intel and data to me. The compound had three structures on it. The first building was a combination barracks, mess hall, and rec room for the sixteen soldiers and nine technical staff members here on the island. To the right and slightly behind that was the main building, which was a two-story blockhouse that we figured for labs and administration. Then to the right of that, set apart and surrounded by a second electrified fence, was a ten-cell miniprison. Because the wall of an extinct volcano backed up against the compound, there was only a need for two guard towers, and we’d chosen angles of approach that kept us off their menu.
I couldn’t see the target Top was closing in on, but then I saw a white dot detach itself from the tracery that gave us the floor plan of the buildings. Must have been someone leaning against a wall. He moved out into the lawn, and I saw that his pace went from slow hesitation to a quick walk.
“Careful, Sergeant Rock,” I warned, “he may have spotted you.”
There was a moment of silence before Top answered. “Yeah, he did,” he said. “But I noticed him first.”
On my screen his yellow dot moved smoothly away from another unmoving white one.
Four down.
That still left twelve soldiers and the nine techs.
“Ronin,” I said, “what about those towers.”
“Gimme a sec,” he murmured. There was no sound, no crack of a rifle. His weapon was a highly specialized, max-pressure air gun. “One down.” Two seconds later he said, “Two down.”
“You are one spooky fuck,” said Bunny.
“They don’t pay the man to be nice, Farm Boy,” said Top. “Cut the chatter.”
I said, “Go to phase two.”
Top and Bunny headed toward the barracks making maximum use of cover. I peeled off toward the lab building. Even though this was a covert and illegal base, it was run with military efficiency. Vehicles were parked in their appropriate slots, the grass had been mown, the trees were pruned back from the fence, and all the doors, as I found out, were locked.
No problem.
There were lights on in the lab building despite the hour. That would mean the main door alarms wouldn’t be active. Only the break-in security would be armed. The keycard reader beside the front door was state-of-the-art, and all the little lights burned red. Not that it mattered, because I had my full junior James Bond kit with me. In the DMS we have a whole different take on what “state-of-the-art” actually means.
I produced another gizmo from a thigh pocket of my BDUs. This one was small and had an adhesive strip on the back. I peeled it off and stuck it to the underside of the card reader. It went to work immediately, hacking into the reader using the full intrusive oomph of MindReader. Our computer system is unique and very dangerous. It has two primary functions. First, it’s a superintrusion system that can enter and interpret any other system and then rewrite the target software so that there is absolutely no record of the hack. The second thing it does is look for patterns. Codes are a kind of pattern, and key codes are merely mathematical patterns stored on magnetic strip
s. Joe Ordinary gets stymied by them. A computer that can hack NASA or the Chinese Ghost Net? Not so much.
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 résumé.
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.