Larry’s command echoed around the hollow walls as they moved, half of the fire team holding a defensive position as the rest of the men followed Larry through the building. He could already see the rear courtyard down a long hall, a bright rectangle of flaring sunlight, rooms splitting off either side of him filled with debris and the rusting springs of old beds. A hotel or guesthouse maybe, sometime long in the past.
‘Enemy!’
Larry flinched and dropped down into a firing position as he saw a figure lunge into sight further down the corridor and the flash of an assault rifle muzzle. Bullets zipped past him as he fired, both of the men behind him likewise opening up on the silhouette confronting them with a withering hail of automatic fire.
The figure shuddered as multiple rounds tore into his body and slammed him onto his back on the ground, the rifle in his hands clattering down alongside him.
‘Advance!’
Larry, his eyes and ears supernaturally attuned now as adrenaline soared through his bloodstream, advanced in his crouched posture to the edge of the doorway, which opened out onto a small courtyard and an outbuilding perched in one corner.
The body of the man before him was riddled with bullets, blood seeping from each wound and the man’s chest rising and falling rapidly as he struggled to take his last breaths. Pink bubbles frothed around the corners of his mouth as blood leaked into his punctured lungs, and his dark eyes stared up into the hard blue sky above.
Larry watched him for a moment and then waved his men past. They bolted out into the courtyard, weapons aiming this way and that as a second fire team entered their field of view ahead, cutting off any potential enemy’s escape route.
‘North entrance clear!’ Larry called into his microphone.
‘South entrance clear!’
Larry advanced toward the outbuilding, its crumbling walls and shattered windows long abandoned. As he breached the entrance with his rifle held before him he was beginning to wonder if this whole thing had been a bust when he saw the bright white walls of the rearmost room to his right. He slowed, glanced over his shoulder and indicated to his men that he had seen something ahead. Then, he positioned them on the left side of the dark hall so that their weapons would more easily come to bear on anybody hiding in the room.
Larry crept to the edge of the door’s jam and crouched down, then nodded his head once, twice and a final third time. On the third he burst into the room in a low run as behind him two more soldiers rushed in, aiming over his head and bringing all three rifles to bear at once.
An empty room, perfectly whitewashed walls, glass in a new window. A single bed and upon it the naked form of a young woman, her eyes closed, long blonde hair. Larry lurched upright, cautious as he searched the bed for any sign of a bomb or other improvised explosive device that had taken the lives of so many troops.
‘Could be inside her.’
The gruesome suggestion of the trooper beside him was none the less tactically sound; the enemy could have inserted a motion — sensitive Improvised Explosive Device inside the woman’s body. Nobody took chances out here, not with Islamic State moving around and seemingly devoid of the tiniest morsel of compassion.
‘Check her out,’ Larry ordered.
Within seconds, an explosives specialist in the team was inside the room and scanning the body. It took only a few moments to ascertain whether the woman represented a lethal threat to the company.
‘She’s clean.’
Larry eased forward, and he didn’t need to pull out the image that his team had been provided with to tell that the woman on the bed was the target of their mission even through the blood on her face where she had been punched, blood oozing from her nose. He slipped off a glove to press two fingers to the woman’s neck and felt a pulse throbbing vibrantly beneath his touch as the woman yelped in fright.
Larry flinched as she bolted upright on the bed, sucked in a deep breath of air and screamed as she saw the heavily armed men surrounding her. Larry jumped forward and wrapped his arms around her as she flailed in panic, and he spoke slowly and clearly.
‘You’re safe, ma’am. Lieutenant Larry Bryant, 18th Infantry, US Army. You’re safe.’
It took three repeats of the sentence before the woman stopped thrashing in his arms, and Larry turned to look over his shoulder.
‘Contact C&C, tell them we found Kiera Lomas.’
X
‘We’ve got another one.’
Ethan looked up as Jarvis hurried into the office, which was filled with paperwork as Lopez and Ethan ploughed through the onerous task of searching back through every deployment that General Thompson had ever been a part of in his long career with the U.S. Army.
‘Where?’ Ethan asked.
‘Persian Gulf, less than an hour ago,’ Jarvis replied as he tossed an image of an aircraft carrier deck engulfed in flames onto the table. ‘A pilot in the Navy took his F–18 Hornet and bombed his own carrier before he flew it straight into the carnage he’d created.’
‘Jesus,’ Lopez uttered in horror, ‘casualties?’
‘Seventeen dead, thirty plus severely injured, reports are still coming in,’ Jarvis informed her. ‘This just got real serious, folks.’
Ethan looked down at the terrible images of what had happened. ‘Any details on the pilot?’
‘Commander, twelve years in the service,’ Jarvis replied, clearly angered and moved by the horrific images. ‘He was on his third combat cruise with the USS Carl Vinson. Patriot, all American boy, happily married with one young son back in Norfolk.’
‘Any radio calls? Anything to connect him to our case at Fort Benning?’ Ethan asked.
Jarvis sighed.
‘His jet was vaporized by the impact and there was nothing left of the pilot to study as he did not eject. However, we do have his last radio call and it suggests a lack of complicity in what happened.’
‘How so?’ Lopez asked.
Jarvis appeared visibly shaken as he replied.
‘He doesn’t make a sound until the last instant, when he suddenly screams in horror. It lasts a second and a half before his plane went in and the radio was cut off.’ Jarvis sucked in a deep breath. ‘The pilot deliberately targeted and bombed his own people, then flew his plane up over a loop at low speed and dove straight for the deck. Then, suddenly, at the last moment he’s afraid?’
Ethan bit his lip.
‘That’s not enough to convince us that this incident is related to what happened at Fort Benning,’ he said, knowing how bad it sounded. ‘It could be something else, no matter how bizarre.’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘I had the NRO analyze the voice recording from the carrier’s data, and they picked up an unusual transmission burst as the plane entered the carrier’s circuit. The transmission continued sporadically throughout the landing cycle and ended abruptly with the pilot’s death.’
‘What kind of transmission?’ Lopez asked.
‘The data’s too sketchy right now, but we’re trying to pin it down. Either way, something was being sent to that aircraft, a signal that may have caused this entire event to unfold. Somebody on that carrier was in control of the pilot when he died.’
Jarvis had a file tucked under his arm that he opened and laid down on the table before them as Lopez, Ethan and Hellerman gathered around.
‘Commander Sandy Vieron,’ Jarvis announced. ‘The Navy’s keeping this under wraps for now as it occurred in the Persian Gulf and there were no media aboard the ship to cover the event. It’s not going to take long though for the word to get out. I’m guessing that the Navy will put this down to a tragic accident or catastrophic mechanical failure once they’re apprised of what truly happened.’