Shane M. Brown
FAST: A Military Thriller
Maps
Chapter 1
Ralph Zimmerman frowned at the huge steel freight containers.
There were two of them, side by side.
They shouldn’t be here.
Ralph didn’t like mysteries. What’s more, this particular mystery made him uneasy.
Something about the containers bothered him. Something more than just their unscheduled appearance….
Pull yourself together, man. They’re just containers.
He walked completely around them again. Tapping his clipboard on one, he pressed his ear to the spot and listened. Underweight. He could tell by the hollow sound and how the container had moved on the forklift.
Then he realized what bothered him.
There are no doors.
Neither were there any external handles nor latches. In fact, there seemed to be no way of opening the containers at all. They looked designed to only open from the inside. He double-checked the freight notice on his clipboard. The authorization code checked-out, but how the hell could he open them?
Ralph worked on the bottom level of the Complex, in the basement storage area under the freight lift.
Having a bright idea, he checked the authorization code against the staff records, identifying to whom the contents belonged. Suddenly the mystery made more sense. This consignment belonged to Francis Gould, ordered the day before armed guards escorted Gould from the Complex.
Ralph tapped his class ring on the container thoughtfully, listening to the metallic echo. Vanessa Sharp had ordered Gould’s labs be immediately sealed. The containers must have arrived this morning with nowhere to go.
He hadn’t liked Gould. They had little contact, but Gould always turned up in places he didn’t belong.
Ralph thumped his palm on the container, laughing at the stupidity of the situation and his own scaredy-cat reaction. As he turned away, a tremendous wail of shrieking metal assaulted his ears.
Ralph spun. Right before his eyes, both massive containers dropped open like castle drawbridges.
But that didn’t shock him the most. It was the gunmen that came rushing out, raising their weapons….
Ralph covered his face with the clipboard, but it offered no protection as the gunmen opened fire, shredding him in a hail of gunfire that shattered the glass wall behind him and sent the clipboard spinning from his hand.
Three levels up from where Ralph’s blood spilled from his body, Dana Lantry led a group of twelve investors on a guided tour of the Complex.
Dana felt flustered.
Born in Cambridge, England, Dana had lived in the United States for nine years, and under the Arizona desert for three. According to her co-workers, not long enough to lose her posh accent.
She just prayed her accent masked her anxiety from the investors. It wasn’t just her who felt it, either. Alarm was infecting the Complex like an epidemic. Every person she spoke to shared an edge of escalating unease.
It’s little wonder, she told herself. It’s not every day a senior research scientist is caught stealing.
Francis Gould’s crime and subsequent high-speed removal by the Irish Government left everyone stunned. That was just two days ago, and long enough for people to start worrying about what Gould had been up to. And the people who looked most worried were the same people who actually knew what type of mayhem Gould could have caused.
He’s gone, Dana reminded herself. His government took him away. Whatever he was up to has been stopped.
But still, that feeling….
She turned and flashed her beaming smile at the trailing investors. The Communication Officer’s responsibility included demonstrating everything operating smoothly, regardless of how she really felt on the inside.
Dana raised her voice and continued, ‘More than eighteen percent of this Complex is constructed from genetically-enhanced building material. The unique combination of strength and flexibility was derived by genetically isolating the polysaccharide chitin found in the cell wall of fungi. This is the same building material in the hard exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans.’
Dana ticked off attributes on her fingers. ‘Our bio-construction materials won’t collapse in an earthquake. They won’t crack from foundation settling. They are resistant to the Earth’s harshest atmospheric conditions. They are cheap to produce. They are water and fire-proof, and their insulation rating is off the chart.’
Dana felt relieved to see a few positive faces as she reached the ‘hard sell’ part of her speech.
‘What about protection from other humans?’ asked a tall, middle-aged investor with bushy eyebrows and deep frown lines. His smart suit looked creased and crushed from too long sitting in a small plane. He quirked an eyebrow as though he wanted to hear about the good stuff. ‘What about the terrorism-proofing?’
Dana didn’t let her smile slip for an instant.
The Pave Hawk helicopters thundered over the Arizona desert. The long-range aircraft had refueled in flight.
There was no stopping.
Onboard the lead helicopter, five United Nations Weapons Inspectors fidgeted in their seats. The three men and two women looked uncomfortable. Five hours ago they’d been in civilian clothes. Now they were clad in military fatigues from bootstrap to chinstrap. Every few minutes, one of the inspectors checked their wristwatch then stole an uneasy glance at the accompanying Marines. Supporting the weapons inspectors were five teams of United States Marines Corps FAST Special Forces Operatives.
FAST (Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team) was charged with the tactical priorities of domestic counter-terrorism and installation security.
This morning they were doing both.
Captain Alex Coleman waited restlessly in the lead Pave Hawk. In the first seat behind the co-pilot, he sat directly across from a young female weapons inspector. Coleman had army-green eyes and a white-picket-fence smile. At thirty-four, he’d commanded a FAST platoon for the last eighteen months. He remembered taking command of the platoon four days after his thirty-second birthday. It made quite a birthday present.
His platoon jokingly called him the Tom Cruise of the elite forces. With his strong jaw line, deep dimples, and thick clipper-cut brown hair, he admitted a slight resemblance, but not enough to warrant all the remarks.
Still, he thought, catching the pretty weapons inspector’s eye so that she blushed and turned away, there are worse people to look like.
Sitting to his immediate right, the three Marines with whom he’d served in Afghanistan and Iraq swapped corny jokes to break the tension. They wore their ‘Mission Faces’. Every Marine had a mission face. It was the way they looked, the way they acted, every time they deployed for an operation. Some people stared blank-faced straight ahead. Some people fiddled with weapons. For these three, their mission faces always manifested just before touch-down.
First it started with the jokes.
‘So anyway,’ continued Corporal ‘Marlin’ Martinez. ‘What do you say to a terrorist with two black eyes?’