For once, Nada remained silent.
Moms began reading, but it was obvious she had the words memorized. “The most basic tenet of teamwork is honesty.” She paused and glanced at Nada. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. “Except when you have to lie to someone outside the team to accomplish a mission,” Moms finished her first rule.
“Everyone on the team is a leader. Except when I make a decision.
“We do everything as a team. Except when I tell you to do something alone.
“Don’t get in a pissing contest with someone on a balcony. You just end up pissed on and smelly. If you have a problem with someone, especially one of the Acme Assets, let me know and I’ll deal with it. Which reminds me.” Moms reached into her drawer and pulled out a badge case and tossed it to Kirk. “You’re now a senior field agent of the FBI. Your photo ID will be here within an hour or so. That badge and ID will be enough to keep pretty much anyone you have to deal with who is on the outside off your ass. Someone thinks they outrank that badge, you send them to me.”
She looked back down at her Protocol. “Keep a positive attitude. Except when something has to be wet. Then you get nasty.” Kirk opened his mouth to ask, but she was quicker to the answer. “We’ve got three levels of missions here as determined by Ms. Jones. Dry, damp, and wet. Dry is something to be contained and further studied. So we want whatever it is intact.
“Damp is it’s to be contained, and if you can’t contain it intact, then you can break it.
“Wet is it’s to be contained by being utterly destroyed. Fireflies and Rifts are always wet.”
She had said the last without looking down. She glanced at the page once more to find her place. “Discipline and accountability stays inside the Nightstalkers. We are ultimately accountable only to the survival of the human race.”
Kirk blinked.
Moms looked him in the eye. “That’s no bullshit, okay?”
Kirk nodded.
“Be on time.” She frowned. “I need to reorder those two.”
“I told you that last time—” Nada began, but she waved him silent.
“Keep your mouth shut about the team when outside the team. Or Roland will pay you a visit.”
“And it will be a wet experience,” Nada added.
“Follow Protocols,” Moms said. “Even the smallest ones. And I, actually Nada, will be ripping Mac a new one for sneaking two extra beers while we’re technically on call.” Moms smiled. “And last but not least, keep your sense of humor. You’re going to need it.” She closed the book and raised her eyebrows. “Any questions or concerns?”
“No, Moms.”
Moms sat back in her seat and gestured for Nada to begin.
The team sergeant got up and picked up the top binder. “Nuclear Protocol, including facilities, materials, weapons, etcetera.” He tossed it to Kirk, who caught it. Nada picked up the second binder. “Biological Protocol. There are some nasty bugs out there, and hard as it is to believe, there are people in labs trying to make nastier ones. It’s not like Mother Nature can’t be quite the motherfucker by herself.” He tossed the second binder. Third binder: “Chemical. Really, you do need to read all this stuff, ’cause Doc or an Acme might not be by your side. Pretend you’re in graduate school for things that can kill. Learn which ones kill quickest and fastest.” He paused. “You know your three Bs, right?”
“Breathing, bleeding, broken,” Kirk said, listing the priorities for triage.
Nada nodded. “For us it’s the three Cs. Containment is the first priority. Nothing else matters if whatever shit we’re trying to deal with spreads. Then concealment.” He noted Kirk’s surprised look. “Panic can kill as much as the actual problem. Word of some of the things we’ve had to squash gets out, people will go bonkers. The people out there in the world got twenty-four-hour news channels. They’re hungry for bad shit, like the way weathermen pray for hurricanes to hit so they can stand on that pier with the wind howling around them. The news would eat up the stuff we deal with and the public would panic. War of the Worlds—type shit. The third C is control. That one is regulated by Ms. Jones’s directive whether it’s dry, damp, or wet. Got it?”
“Containment, concealment, control.”
“Good.”
Nada picked up a stack of three more binders. “This is just a bunch of stuff. And some of it is pretty weird. They list every single mission the Nightstalkers have been on since it was founded in 1948. Makes for great late-night reading.”
Moms cut in for the first time. “Don’t concern yourself so much with the problems, because some of them won’t happen again, but look at the way the team dealt with it and consider possibilities.”
Nada dumped the three binders on top of the ones already in Kirk’s lap.
He grabbed the thickest one off the desk. “This is the one I call the Dumb Shit Scientist Protocol, but don’t ever let Doc hear that. This lists all the incredibly dumb things scientists have done that damn near wiped out the human race.” Nada’s eyes shifted to the wall between the CP and Ms. Jones’s office, as if she could hear through two feet of steel-reinforced concrete. “Pretty high up on that list is what happened at Chernobyl.”
Last, Nada tossed a pocket-sized team Protocol. “That’s your first priority reading. You’ve got forty-eight hours, then anyone can ask you anything in it and you’d better know it and your place in whatever it is.
“There’s a locker with your gear on it. Check it, but don’t move anything around. I assume in the Rangers you had standard operating procedure for the way everyone rigged their gear, right? So you can grab anyone’s vest or ruck and know exactly what’s in it and where it is? We do the same.”
Kirk nodded, remembering pulling blood-and-viscera-drenched magazines out of a dead squad mate’s vest during a particularly nasty firefight.
Nada sat back behind his desk and pulled out his own team Protocol. “Moms’s Protocol is page one. Mine is page two.” He hummed something as he scanned the list. “Let me give you some of the more important ones.” His finger slid down the page. “Nothing is impossible to the man who doesn’t have to do it.” He looked up. “Ms. Jones usually keeps the politicians and the press and the various government agencies off our backs during a mission. But every once in a while someone sticks their beak in. Gotta ignore ’em or they’ll get you killed.” He looked back down.
“Smith and Wesson beats four aces.”
Kirk smiled, having heard Uncle Ray say the same thing.
Nada wasn’t smiling. “We go in packing heat and we’ve got heavy stuff on call. We can bring hell down if we need to. Don’t hesitate. Err on the side of containment rather than collateral damage. You ever see those movies where that couple manages to escape those nasty government agents trying to contain a government screw-up because they’re so fucking special?”
Kirk nodded.
“They ain’t special. If we’re containing something, there’s a reason. We kill those people if we have to. No one gets out alive. Got it?”
Kirk nodded.
“We’ve never had to nuke anything to contain it,” Moms added.
“Yet,” Nada said.
“It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far without another nuke having to be used, one way or the other,” Moms said. “But we can call in a nuke strike if the problem warrants it and Ms. Jones concurs with her superiors.” She nodded at Nada. “Please continue.”
“The latest information hasn’t been put out yet. What I mean by that is we rarely get a chance to plan a mission like most Spec Ops do. ST-6 ran rehearsals for the Bin Laden hit for months before going in. Neato and nifty keen if you can. But when we get Zevoned, it’s wheels up in thirty minutes and then it’s Moms on the sat link with Ms. Jones and we develop the plan en route. We almost always HAHO or HALO”—he paused, glanced at the badge on Kirk’s fatigue shirt, and nodded—“a recon man in first. Because even with the best intel, we usually have no clue what we’re dealing with until we get eyes on the target and then boots on the ground. So you’ve got to be prepared to adapt quickly or die.”