“We’ll have eyes on him,” Chris says. “Once we’re in the region, we can amend the plan. Hit him on the road if we have to, or follow him to his new hole.”
Chris makes it sound easy, but True knows that a change of venue will present new dangers and that any delay will drive up costs—but Lincoln knows this too and it’s his decision. So she resists the urge to play devil’s advocate. She wants the mission to go. Her heart hammers in anticipation.
Lincoln doesn’t leave them in suspense. “Let’s do it,” he says. “And the sooner we’re on site, the more options we’ll have. So alert the team. I’ll notify the flight crew. We assemble in thirty at the loading docks for transportation to the airfield. Clear?”
“Roger that,” True responds.
Chris answers, “You got it, boss.” He turns his head, looking away as he speaks to his digital assistant. “Hey Charlie, set up a group text, QRF.” True can’t hear the acknowledgment, but almost immediately, Chris is repeating Lincoln’s order. “We are a go. Assemble with gear, 1435, loading docks.” Three seconds pass—the time it takes the assistant to read back the message—then Chris says, “Send it.”
The text goes to everyone in the QRF. True hears a chime as her copy arrives. The adrenaline is pumping. She bumps fists with Chris. “See you in thirty.”
True’s identity is tracked by the house AI, Friday. That, matched with a swipe of her finger, releases the biometric lock on her office door. Her gear is ready and waiting inside.
She’s got a slim, body-hugging pack stuffed with a selection of mini-robotics, spare button batteries, spare TINSLs, recharging units, RF-shielded collection bags, medical supplies, food, water, and ammo.
In a larger duffel she has more food and water, an armored vest, and an assortment of clothes—regionally appropriate civilian attire to wear in-country, the unmarked uniform she’ll use on the mission, and an extra set of civvies, western-style, to wear on the way home.
A case holds her MARC visor—MARC being a compression of “Mission Arcana”—an augmented reality and audio communications headset. It’s a lightweight half-visor worn like oversized eyeglasses, with a top bar housing most of the electronics and a magnetic dock for her ear TINSL.
True picks it up, slips it on. It boots automatically in a couple of seconds, projecting a default date/time display and brightening the shadows under the desk. The MARC is too big, awkward, intrusive, and costly to be popular with the consumer market, but it’s a hell of an enhancement on missions. She slips on a black data glove that lets her select menu options with minimal hand movements. Voice input works too, but that can be problematic in a combat zone where commands may need to be issued in perfect silence or during the clamor of a firefight.
She twitches her index finger, running through a brief calibration sequence. Then she undertakes a short checklist, making sure the mission plan and supporting documents are up to date, and that the personnel list is complete. Right now everyone shows as offline, but that’s expected.
She powers down, packs the MARC back into its case, and shoves it into the duffel. Minimal gear with minimal weight for what is intended to be a short, fast-moving mission.
Next she opens a closet and pulls out a light jacket with ReqOps’ logo on the breast: a tan rectangle bordered in black, containing the company’s chiseled initials, ROI, the full name written out beneath.
She takes a second to check her reflection in a mirror on the inside of the door, smoothing a few stray silver strands of hair. Her fair skin shows the evidence of years, but she can still run five miles in under forty-five minutes, so fuck it.
She shrugs the jacket on, then turns to the gun safe, swiping its biometric lock. Yesterday afternoon she spent an hour on the indoor range with her Kieffer-Obermark assault rifle. Her KO is modified with an underslung shotgun. That makes it heavy, but she wants the option of clearing drone swarms at close range, so she’ll suffer the extra weight. She pulls out the hard plastic case that holds the weapon, sets it on her desk, and opens it, just to reassure herself that all is ready. She takes a 9 mm pistol too, wrapped up in a chest holster.
Only one more step and she can go.
She slips her tablet out of her thigh pocket, flips the cover open, and slips on her reading glasses. “Heads up, Ripley,” she says. “Video call to Alex.”
When the call comes through, Alex Delgado is heading out the door, due to start his shift as a county paramedic. He is fifty-one years old, two years older than True, though they share the same birthday—a coincidence that brought them together on the night they met, thirty-two years ago.
Back then, Alex was a newly minted army medic who’d enlisted for the GI Bill. He left the service four years later when his contract was up, using the education benefits he’d earned—generous in those days—to complete his paramedic’s certification. Since then, he’s worked in nine different US municipalities and even once in England, as True’s army career took the family to new postings across the country and around the world.
In Japan he was a stay-at-home dad, looking after the kids—Diego, Treasure, and Connor. In the US, his mother lived with them off and on, helping with childcare. It was a chaotic life, and there were days soaked through with debilitating fear when True was deployed and didn’t call home and he didn’t know why.
She was a woman, and in those early years she wasn’t supposed to be frontline combat—but she’d been frontline anyway. More often, he suspected, than she ever admitted to him. When the services technically opened all positions to women, she just kept doing what she’d been doing. It didn’t make a difference to her. He would complain: How do you think it feels to sit here and wonder if I’m ever going to see you again? And they’d talk it out. But in the end it came down to the same thing every time: Alex, this is what I was born to do.
Maybe that was true.
When she retired at forty-five, he let himself believe that part of her life was over. When she went to work for Lincoln she said she was going to be a trainer, that’s all. But within a year she was deploying again, overseas, on security operations, and this past year she’d participated in combat missions.
He taps his phone to accept the call. Video. She’s wearing her reading glasses. Her head is canted as she gazes down at the tablet she’s holding, a posture that enhances the lines in her cheeks—something he’s sure she doesn’t realize, or she’d hold the tablet higher. It’s a portrait view, but he doesn’t need help visualizing her figure. She’s taller than most women, and determinedly lean, her well-defined muscles honed by hours in the gym, refurbished after every pregnancy. She is forty-nine years old, the mother of three adult children, and she is still the only one he wants.
“Alex,” she says.
“You’re on, aren’t you?” Ghosts of old arguments lurk in his tone, making it sharper than he intended.
“It shouldn’t be more than a few days.”
She’d warned him a mission was possible. Another hostage rescue, this time on the other side of the world.
Now it’s real. He knows the risks, the grim possibilities. He would keep her at home if he could but that’s not an option she’ll allow.
He says, “I need you back, True.”
“I’ll be back,” she promises. “Don’t worry. I got to go.”
She isn’t one to prolong goodbyes. She ends the call, leaving him with that last admonition echoing in his mind: Don’t worry.