CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT
“Here we are,” said Bunny. He pulled off the street into the parking lot of a big factory that was shrouded in shadows.
Pushkin Dynamics looked exactly like the fiction they were trying to sell. A big, sprawling, old, two-story weather-stained brick factory. It should have had “nondescript” painted over the door. There were a few cars in the lot, clustered together as if for warmth.
I tapped my earbud. “Bug, we’re at the second location. Where are we with the security cameras?”
“Their external camera system is connected via Wi-Fi to the security office,” said Bug, “and there’s a hardline backup. So, naturally I hijacked it. Recorded a ten-minute loop, and it’s on continuous playback. You’re good.”
“Owe you a case of Red Bull.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Another vehicle that was parked in deep shadows flashed its lights and Bunny parked beside it. I got out and shook Top’s hand, nodded to the others.
“Gear up fast,” I said. “Full kits. Lethal and nonlethal guns, the Toybox, all of it. Mission briefing starts now.”
I was the only one in civvies, and I stripped down to thermal underwear and pulled on DMS versions of ACUs — the all-black army combat uniforms we wore for gigs like this. Nonreflective, without insignias or patches of any kind, and made from a special blend that made virtually no rustling sounds even when running. We all put on utility belts with plenty of gadgets and gewgaws, as well as lots of extra magazines. I still had my gas dart pistol, but now I also wore a shoulder rig with a Croatian HS2000, one of the handguns favored by ISIL. All of the weapons we carried were of the kind favored by those guys. If it came to a gunfight, we wouldn’t stop to pick up our brass. Let the Russians get pissed off at ISIL for any damage we did. Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.
I watched the team covertly as I shrugged into body armor. I saw Top checking the gear of the only woman on the team, Tracy Cole, a former soldier-turned-cop from South Carolina. Cole had signed on during the Dogs of War gig and had, in the short time she’d run with us, been through the storm lands enough times to have the souvenir key chain. And some scars. She was practical, tough, smart, and reliable. Couldn’t ask for a better combination. We’d had one DMS candidate who thought women couldn’t handle the rigors of combat as well as men. Notice I said “had.” That boy is still working through physical therapy, after which he’ll likely go off in search of a clue. Cole’s combat call sign was Gorgon, and like her namesake, you wouldn’t want to try and stare her down.
Standing by himself was Steve Duffy, call sign Spartan; a sturdy guy with an Irish face and cold eyes. He’d been attached to the Warehouse in Baltimore, and I arranged his transfer to Echo Team last year. Duffy had been personally trained by Sam Imura and earned his hard-won seal of approval as an expert with any long gun. Second best in the DMS, which put him in the top three or four worldwide. Unlike most snipers I’ve known, Duffy was not a laconic loner with questionable social skills. He was the hammer of God with a rifle, but off the clock he was hilarious and affable and… well, normal. Not sure why I found that mildly disturbing.
To his right were the two newest DMS members, Brendan Tate and Pete Smith. Tate’s combat call sign was Coffey, because he looked like the huge black guy from that old Stephen King movie, The Green Mile. He wasn’t as tall as that actor had been, or even as tall as Bunny, for that matter, but Tate had the kind of stocky build that gave his enemies serious pause. Duffy once remarked that Tate looked “like he could bench-press North Dakota while getting a blow job.” Now… why or how oral sex factored into, or indeed validated, that observation is one of those things about military humor that makes sense without making sense. You have to understand how soldiers think for it to be funny. We all thought it was hilarious. Tate was our team’s tech geek, and he had a lot of Doc Holliday’s nasty toys with him.
Pete Smith, call sign Darth Sidious, was Tate’s former patrol partner from their cop days in Durham, North Carolina. He didn’t look like a soldier at all, or even a cop. Looked more like a high school gym teacher or Little League coach. He was easygoing, eager to please, and served as our utility infielder. Pete was the kind of cat who could play any position and never got ruffled.
For Smith and Tate, this was their first field op. It was Duffy’s first time on a gig outside of the continental U.S. Cole had been on a short thing in Mexico, but that was it. So, the nervous Nellie part of me wasn’t all that happy about taking a mostly green team into a mission as covert and critical as this.
On the other hand, Top had trained Cole, Tate, and Smith, and that meant I had no doubts at all about how they would handle themselves. Top is a nice guy, except when he’s running team exercises or under live fire. Actually, I think he’s at his meanest and most inflexible when he’s teaching. A lot of people get booted by him, and even more quit to do something easier. Like giving rectal thermometers to cranky honey badgers. The candidates who make it all the way through and earn Top’s grudging seal of approval are the kind you can genuinely trust to have your back no matter how much shit is raining down.
That said, the stakes were high.
We worked in silence and got as ready as it is possible to get for facing the unknown. Ghost sat watching me, and it was odd because he sat a little farther away than he normally would. And he watched me with a steadiness that was borderline creepy. Like he expected me to do something wrong. I smiled at him, but his expression and body language did not change a bit.
I told them everything I’d learned from Yuri Rolgavitch and made sure they were all keyed into the mission intel channel. We all wore Google Scout glasses, which were something developed exclusively for the DMS by one of Church’s friends in the industry. They were several steps above standard night-vision. We could switch to thermal scans and cycle through ultraviolet and infrared. And we could get hard data projected onto one lens. We all still wore small tactical computers strapped to our forearms. Especially for a job like this where we are making it up as we go, there’s never “too much” when it comes to access to fresh intel. I was about to begin mapping out our approach when Bug contacted us.
“Cowboy,” he said quickly, sounding stressed, “we picked up a police call for Rolgavitch Technologies.”
“Yuri woke up pretty quick,” I said.
“No,” said Bug. “Yuri Rolgavitch is dead.”
“Bullshit. I darted him with horsey, and we checked ahead of time to make sure he wasn’t allergic to any of the components. No way that killed—”
“Cowboy,” Bug cut in, “Rolgavitch called the police to say he’d been robbed, but when they arrived he attacked them with a golf club. Beat one cop’s head in. Killed him… and then another officer shot him.”
“What?” I demanded.
“Yeah, death by cop. He also started a fire in his office and half the building is burning.”
CHAPTER NINETY-NINE
“So what do these Reptilians want?” asked Doc.
Junie was busy refilling their teacups and took a moment with that. She brought the cups back and sat again. “Here’s the central problem with the UFO conspiracy world. A lot of people — the majority of all people on Earth, by the way — believe that we have been visited by alien races. Now, most reasonable people, when they see a strange light in the sky, may think ‘Okay, that’s a UFO,’ but their default opinion is that it is precisely that. An unidentified flying object. A smaller percentage will assume that any UFO is automatically of alien origin. An even smaller group will make snap judgments — based on whatever underpins their own belief systems — that they may be from this world or that. Often that depends on the shape or movements of the observed craft. And then we get down to those people who see a UFO, decide it is alien, and then purport to know the planet of origin, the nature of the species, and the details of their agenda.”