The driver’s head swiveled back and forth. “Where’s Michael? We have to go. We have to go before more cops come. What happened? What was that strike order, dude? I thought this was a recon job.”
“Go,” Emile said. Crouching beside the body, he stretched his neck to see beyond the front seats and out the shattered windshield.
“But Michael . . . is he down too? He went off-line before the cops came. We need to get his body.”
“I couldn’t find him. I don’t know, he might be in pursuit.”
Already beating like a race car’s engine, Logan’s heart went into overdrive. He imagined Macie running for her life—Laura and Dillon too. Run, Macie! he thought. Hide!
“What was the truck that came burning out of the garage?” the driver said. “I almost got a shot off at it, but those cops were all over me.” He paused. “Was Michael in the truck, you think?”
“I don’t know,” Emile said. “Why would he be in the truck?”
“If he wasn’t . . . we can’t just leave him.” The driver opened his door. “We can’t—”
“Yes, we can! He’ll know what to do. He’ll go native, wait for exfiltration.”
“Wait, wait.” The driver touched his helmet. “Affirmative, Command. We have—” He slammed the door, rammed the shifter into gear, and reversed. “Command said to get the hell out of here.” He changed gears, and the van lurched forward, bounding over a bump.
Emile raised up onto his knees. “Where are we going?”
“Straight through the backyard, the way the truck went, man. To the next street. Shut up. I’m transpo.”
The van bounced and rattled. Cold air streamed through the windshield opening.
Logan kneed at the body, trying to move it away.
“Hey, hey,” Emile said. He grabbed Logan’s T-shirt. “Settle down.”
Logan tried to pull away. He kicked out, landing a solid blow to Emile’s thigh.
“I mean it,” Emile said and punched him in the face, a quick jab.
Logan’s head hit the van again. The tears came. He couldn’t stop them.
The driver ripped off his helmet. He glared over his shoulder. “A kid! What the hell, man?”
What? Logan thought through a haze of confusion. The guy didn’t know that before?
“I got it covered, Anton,” Emile said. “Just drive.”
“You got what covered?” The van bounced over something. It took a hard right, and the body tumbled into Logan.
He squealed and didn’t stop: an alarm triggered by his terror. Somehow the sound came through. Emile shook him.
Changing emotions played out on the man’s face, visible in flashes as light came and went through the windows: rage, concern, sadness. He released his grip and flattened the material against Logan’s chest. He said, “Just . . . don’t. It’ll be . . .” He didn’t finish. He watched Logan cry.
“Man, I have no clue what’s going on,” the driver—Anton—continued. “How did a recon gig turn into a full-scale assault . . . and now we got a hostage, a kid?”
“I don’t know,” Emile said, seemingly to Logan. “He saw me, confronted me. I was UF, saw he was just a kid.”
“Unfiltered? Why?”
“Orders. Part of the recon,” Emile said. “I couldn’t . . .” He pressed his lips together, shook his head. He turned to the driver. “I took him, okay? I didn’t know what else to do. Next thing, the strike order came down.”
“So . . . what? We get points for taking him, or lose some?”
“I don’t think it matters now.”
“I fragged some cops. You did too. We gotta score something for them.”
Emile looked at the body. “Not this time.”
Anton swore and slapped the steering wheel.
The van turned left. The body rolled off Logan, bumping up against Emile’s legs. Without looking, Emile reached down and held the dead man’s arm.
“Must have been a setup,” Anton said. “They were waiting for us.”
“Who?”
“Whoever we were reconning. The people in the house.”
Emile frowned. His eyes found Logan’s.
He knows that’s not true, Logan thought. Whatever happened, it wasn’t that.
“So what now?” Anton said. “What do we do? What about Michael?”
Emile didn’t answer.
Anton said, “We gotta steal new wheels. We won’t make it another mile or two in this thing before it starts drawing cops like a Krispy Kreme opening.” He laughed, but even Logan could tell he didn’t feel it.
“Then do it,” Emile said.
“Right, right. Okay.” Anton gestured with his head. “What about him, the kid? What are we going to do with him?”
“Contact Command. See what they say.” He glanced at Logan, and turned away. “Whatever they want.”
THIRTY-TWO
Brendan Page pushed back from the monitors and slumped in his chair. “What just happened?” he said.
Ian scanned the eight screens arrayed before them. Four showed nothing but horizontal bars of color, their feeds terminated. He rolled his chair back and banged his two booted feet up onto the countertop. “We just got our butts handed to us.”
Page stared at him. He wanted to say something, but everything that came to mind simply seemed lame under the circumstances. He held his lips tight, shook his head. His eyes went back to the screens. “Four down,” he said and waved his hand at the array. “Four down!”
“Three dead, one missing,” Ian agreed.
“Two teams of four,” Page said. “Eight soldiers. Half of them gone.” Ian nodded. “Two from each team.”
“So . . . what just happened?”
Ian lifted his eyebrows and sighed. He was looking at the monitors, but Page knew he wasn’t seeing them; he was replaying the events of the last fifteen minutes, figuring them out.
Page pulled a tube out of his breast pocket and extracted a cigar from it. He felt the moment did not warrant his usual ritual of savoring the stick before lighting it: smelling it, feeling its texture, tasting the wrapper. Instead, he clipped it and lit up. He didn’t even care that he had burnt the tip by putting it too close to the flame and puffing too vigorously. He didn’t care that it would make the entire cigar taste like crap. He didn’t care, because what that cigar tasted like was what he had just witnessed from his fireteams. He puffed and puffed, filling the control room with a blue-gray haze. He took a long draw and blew a stream of smoke directly at Ian.
Ian absently fanned away the plume, deep in concentration.
“Maybe what you need to think about,” said Page, “is just who it was that kicked our butts. Let’s see. A newspaper columnist and an accountant. And in Colorado, hmm . . . a schoolteacher and a bunch of kids.” He took a puff, then another one. “I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, here, but I can’t get it out of my head: what just happened?”
Ian laced the fingers of both hands together over his chest. He sighed again, and his eyes shifted to Page. “I’ve been telling you, you’re moving too fast on this program. It’s a sound strategy. Get them while they’re young and pliable. Make them fight in real combat as well as they do on video games—and do it by confusing the two in their minds. Make them believe they’re not really killing. If and when they realize they are, make sure they care more about winning the ‘game’ than they do about the people they’re shooting. I mean, smart! It works. Look at the success we’ve had, with the troops we’ve supplied to the U.S. and NATO, so far.”
Page scowled, but he liked Ian’s confirmation of his ideas. He shook his cigar at the man. “It’s like what Eisenhower said: humans just get in the way of winning wars.”
Ian coughed and fanned more smoke away. “Actually, I think he said, ‘God help us if we take the humanity out of war.’ But he was talking politics. Commanders need to never forget that it’s fathers and brothers and sons—and daughters—they’re sending into battle.” He shook his head. “That’s not
our job. Our job is closer to what you just said. We make weapons of war.”
Page smiled. “Soldiers are just one of those weapons. Tools to get the job done. Tools, not people.”
“I’m on board with you, Brendan, I am,” Ian said. “Send soldiers into battle with one purpose, to kill the enemy. It’s what war is all about. We just have to get rid of the psychological garbage that hinders that.”
Page pulled on the cigar. When he spoke, smoke came out, as though his words were on fire. “Get rid of their humanity!” He said it as confidently as he would have told a child the world is round.
Ian poked a finger at him. “That’s what I’m saying. We haven’t reached that level with these boys. We haven’t cut deep enough.”
“They’ve gone through the same programming as the rest of them, the thousands who are fighting successfully as we speak.” He spat out a fleck of tobacco.
Ian’s head rolled back and forth. “These fireteams are different. We underestimated the psychological impact of using them in our own country, against our own people. Our program is designed to make soldiers, not hit men.”
Page closed his eyes and frowned dismissively. “Shouldn’t matter. An enemy is an enemy.”
“It does matter. That’s what I’m saying we underestimated.”
“The virtual overlays are supposed to take care of that.”
Ian pulled his feet off of the counter and put them on the floor. He leaned forward and rubbed his palms over his face.
Page could hear the rough skin chafing over Ian’s whiskers like sandpaper.
His friend said, “It helps, making men look like women, blood appear as meaningless as spilled paint, stuff like that. But our boys know when they’re still in the States. They know how far they travel, they know they’re dealing with American cars and locks and power supplies. Listen, man, the hit on this Hutch guy was practically up the street. And what was that? It wasn’t supposed to be a hit.”
Page scowled at his cigar. It really was nasty. “It went off the tracks, that kid showing up and all.”
Ian stood. He walked to the observation window and looked into the VR chamber.
Page could see his friend’s face reflected in the glass—in the best of times it was craggy and just-plain-mean looking; add a dose of displeasure to it, as now, and the man appeared ready to tear the throat out of a lion.
Ian said, “So knock the kid out and carry on. Don’t turn what was essentially a reconnaissance mission into a slaughter.”
“Emile panicked, grabbed the kid. Hutch saw it and started freaking out.” Page dropped the stogie on the floor and ground it out. “It is what it is.”
Ian turned around. “The objective was to scare the guy.”
Page shrugged. “I guess we did that.”
“They weren’t ready for your order: ‘Take ’em out! Kill them all!’”
“They should have been ready for anything.”
“Brendan, we’re still figuring all of this out: the psychological conditioning, how far we can push them.” He started to say something else, but closed his mouth. The lines in his face became bottomless crevices. He returned to his chair and collapsed into it.
“So what you’re saying,” Page said, “is that this mess is all our fault.”
Ian’s eyebrows went up. “Essentially, yeah.” The man studied Page’s face. He said, “Well, they should have responded better. I think they had let their guard down. They were supposed to observe adult civilians. They weren’t expecting a fight. Especially not that kind of fight.”
On two of the monitors, Page watched the soldiers pace back and forth between trees. One of them swung his perspective—in night-vision green—to two bodies on the ground. The view swung away again, quickly, as though in anger. They had decided that retrieving the bodies at the motel and jacking another vehicle would give Hutch and Jim O’Dey more of a lead than the soldiers could safely close. They had carried their fallen comrades into the forest and were now awaiting extraction—which, in this case, entailed an Outis Hummer driving up the road fifteen miles.
Almost to himself, Page said, “Should have known.”
“How’s that?”
“We’ve seen the Feds’ videos from Canada, read the transcripts, the depositions, Hutch and . . .” He snapped his fingers, trying to remember.
Ian said, “Laura Fuller.”
“They were fighters up there. No reason to think they wouldn’t be here.”
“So we got the kid,” Ian said.
“It’s not Dillon.” The boy’s face had been clear enough when the soldier grabbed him, and again in the van when he tied him up. Hutch had even confirmed it. “It’s Hutch’s boy.”
“Changes everything.” Ian rubbed his hands together. “Hutch gets him back in exchange for giving up this . . . vendetta he’s got for you.”
“I don’t think so.” Page was thinking it through, looking at all the pieces, seeing how they fit together. He looked at his friend. “Haven’t you ever been obsessed, Ian?”
Ian considered it. “There was this girl once, in Shanghai. . . .”
“Not the same thing. Grabbing his kid? That’s just fuel on the fire. He’s not gonna stop, even if he gets his kid back. Oh, he’ll play the game, tell us he’ll do anything to get his son back. He might even believe it. But in a week or a month or a year, he’ll be right back at it, pounding at me harder than ever. He’ll be smarter, though. He’ll stash his family somewhere first. He’ll keep moving, so we can’t get him. All the while—pound, pound, pound. First there’ll be cracks in all the things we’ve done to protect ourselves. Then he’ll find one that looks especially fragile, and he’ll work on it until everything I’ve built comes crashing down.”
He was staring at the wall, seeing the future.
“You can’t know all that,” Ian said.
Page moved his eyes to him. “I know obsession.”
Neither man spoke for a long time. They watched the monitors as the local team stowed the bodies into the Hummer. The men removed their helmets, and the screens flicked to black, then to the multicolored test pattern.
“So?” Ian said. “How do you want to handle it?”
“From every angle,” Page said. He stood up, touched his finger to the boy’s face on the screen. “We got the kid. He’s Plan B.”
“What’s Plan A?”
“There’s only one way to handle someone who just won’t stop coming at you.”
Ian waited, while Page checked his cigar tube and found it empty.
Page tucked it back into a pocket and said, “You stop him. Hard. Right in his tracks.”
THIRTY-THREE
Jim was bleeding out fast.
Twenty minutes after fleeing the motel, Hutch pulled onto a dark dirt road. Jim had been unconscious. His pulse was weak, his breathing fast and shallow. Hutch ripped off his own shirt and secured it to the wound with his belt.
Now, in a blood-smeared white T-shirt, he was back on the road. He punched prompts on the portable GPS unit suction-cupped to the windshield. The closest hospital was the Kirkland Medical Center, about twenty minutes out.
“Hang in there, buddy,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Every time he passed a convenience store or gas station, he fought the urge to pull over. He had to reach Laura. Had to. His need to find out what had happened, to get the cops to his house, to make sure everyone was okay, made him dizzy. He kept thinking he could do something for them—if he only knew the situation. For the hundredth time, Hutch mentally kicked himself for the outburst that had destroyed Jim’s phone.
He had to get home as soon as possible. It was necessary to his heart. Hearing Logan’s scream, followed by Page’s thrusting Hutch into blind oblivion, then sending killers after him . . . His insides felt wrenched completely out of place. His chest hurt, his throat, his stomach. Forget the firefight he’d just gone through. Forget that he was a terrible aim and it had almost got him killed. Even forget—God help me—Ji
m’s galloping ride toward Death’s eternal parade. What made Hutch ache on every level was the terror that something had happened to his kids and to Dillon and Laura. Every second without knowing they were okay was like being in the dark with creatures that swooped down to gouge his flesh with their claws and teeth.
His eyes kept flipping to the rearview mirror. He kept the van moving at just over the speed limit, which kept cops off him but reduced his ability to detect trouble. At faster speeds, headlights closing in on him would spell trouble. Now it simply meant other drivers knew the road better and were impatient.
The last thing he wanted to see was an Outis team of soldiers bearing down on him. The second-to-last thing was a cop. It wouldn’t take Colombo to figure out he’d been part of the chaos at the motel. Even if he could prove his innocence, they would detain him for questioning. And even the thought of delaying his access to Logan, Macie, Laura, and Dillon made him nauseated.
It was obvious the soldiers had stolen the van. A child seat was strapped to the rear bench. The floor was littered with potato chip bags, candy wrappers, and the packaging of other fat-inducing fare he couldn’t imagine those soldiers putting into their systems. Of course, the definitive evidence was the lack of an ignition key. Instead, a strip of metal the size of a Popsicle stick protruded out of the ignition.
He had not inspected the complete interior, but he thought the soldiers had left nothing behind. No spare ammo, no maps or notes about their operation. Not even a medical kit. They likely carried everything they needed. That way, they’d have it wherever they were, and if they had to leave the van without returning to it, no evidence would lead to Outis.
The one exception was the GPS. It made sense they would use one. Their success depended on quick ingress and egress, probably into unfamiliar places. Only the motel’s address resided in its memory. Undoubtedly, wiping it clean was on some checklist of their postmission duties, along with cleaning their weapons, stitching their cuts, and cleaning blood spatter off their clothes.
He jumped at the sound of a female voice. “In one mile, take exit 211, on the right.” He found the GPS’s volume dial and muted it.