He went in fast, going over the corpse in the doorway and stepping right. There wasn’t a good place to move in the entryway; it…
Peter Nealen - Veteran and Author
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New Wave of Murders Hits Baltimore While estimates are still coming in, at least seventy-two people have been killed in a fresh wave of…
John Brannigan was not a happy man.
The fact that he was wearing a tux, sitting at a very expensive table in a very expensive, very exclusive restaurant, high atop a luxury hotel in the middle of San Francisco, would have been bad enough. Ever since his forced retirement from the Marine Corps and the death of his wife, Rebecca, of cancer a short time later, he’d essentially retired to the mountains, living not too differently from an old-time mountain man. Fancy restaurants, fancy clothes, and big cities put his teeth on edge. He’d gotten a haircut and shaved his cheeks and chin, but his massive, bristling handlebar remained, setting him apart even more than his broad shoulders and six-foot-four-inch stature from the soft men around him.
But all of that was only a minor annoyance compared to the woman sitting across the table from him.
Special Agent Vito Castiglione looked up from the spotting scope as the door opened behind him. Special Agent Cara Hernandez walked into the room and stood next to him, peering out through the black mesh laid over the gap in the curtains.
“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping eyes on the objective?” she asked.
“Nobody’s budged out of that place in the last thirty-six hours,” Castiglione said dismissively. “We’ve got the whole place tied up tight. Besides, have you seen the pictures of this guy? I don’t think we really have much to worry about.” The fact that he was admiring the view presented by the willowy, olive-skinned Special Agent next to him was beside the point. She was much more interesting to look at than the dull, expensive house across the street.
She rolled her eyes at him, exasperated. He just leered back.
“Yes, I have seen the photos,” she said. “Still, you should at least pretend to be taking this warrant seriously.”
“What’s to take seriously right now?” Castiglione replied. “He’s a pasty-white billionaire wanted for bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling. He’s hardly Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. The whole point of putting an Enhanced SWAT team on him is to send a message, and none of the cameras are here yet.”
“The cameras might not be,” Hernandez replied, glancing over her shoulder, “but there are other people here who don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.” She nodded toward the door as her tone dropped. “That one in particular,” she added as she turned back to the window.
Castiglione looked over his shoulder at the door behind him as a short, severe-looking woman, who appeared to be in her late fifties, walked in, flanked by two men in plaid shirts and jeans, who nevertheless had that aura of barely-restrained violence that he’d come to associate with special operators. Castiglione hadn’t ever served in the military; he’d been a SWAT cop in Chicago before he’d signed on with the Bureau. He generally disliked the special forces types, just on general principles. They usually thought they were gods among men, and looked down on “humble” law enforcement guys like him.
But a glance from the woman in her simple but businesslike suit got him turning around and putting his eye back to the spotting scope hurriedly. He didn’t know who she was, but if she was walking around the FBI’s cordon with that kind of impunity—he didn’t even see a handler, and Special Agent Dover was usually a stickler about such things—she had to have some serious pull.
“I assure you, Special Agent Castiglione,” the woman said, her voice full of ice, “that having an Enhanced SWAT team here is most certainly not simply to ‘send a message.’ The only reason you and your team are here instead of the HRT itself is because you were closer.”
“Shit,” Phil whispered. “I knew they had a fucking drone up.”
I didn’t answer, but scanned the road carefully. Once again, thanks to the woods, we were far closer than we should have been, but the spotlights weren’t pointed at the woods, not yet, and the rising growl of the helicopter, along with the rumble of the armored cars’ diesels, seemed to have drowned out what little noise we were making. Slowly, carefully, I eased back deeper into the shadows, Phil doing the same.
Looking up and down the road, I didn’t see a good spot to cross. The six armored vehicles were spaced out along the road. They were too close to slip through, and too spread out to find a good spot to go around. At least, not with that helicopter closing in. Two klicks of open country separated us from the border at its nearest point, and that would have entailed going through Leuba.
As urgent as it was that we get the information back to Poland, we weren’t going to do anyone any good if we went charging out there and got killed or captured. And as confident as I was in my team in combat, the numbers out there on the road were telling. Especially with armored vehicles mounting remote-operated machineguns. Doesn’t matter how good you are, bucking a stacked deck like that is just going to get you killed.
“Back into the trees,” I whispered as Phil got close enough. “We’re going to have to lay low and wait.” I knew as well as he did that that could still go very, very wrong. We had maybe three square miles of woods to hide in, and they were crisscrossed with trails and bike paths. And the leaves were falling. We were on the clock, whatever we decided to do.
Whatever I decided to do. We might be a team, but I was still team leader, and democracy in a combat situation is always a bad idea. The buck stops here. I could, and would, take input from the team when possible, but at the end of the day, the decisions were mine.
Don’t think that’s power-tripping. It’s one hell of a responsibility, especially when more than the other eight guys on your team have their lives in your hands.
The two of us moved slowly and carefully back into the trees. We hadn’t overpenetrated into the open field, but the trees were still thin enough that if we moved too quickly, we might well still get spotted. The eye is drawn to movement, which is why stalking is often so slow and painstaking.
So far, they hadn’t turned those spotlights on the treeline. So far. If they were set up on that road, it meant that they suspected that somebody was running around in the woods around Görlitz. If they started actively hunting, I was sure that those lights were going to come into play.
The question was whether they were in place just to watch and wait, or were actively looking for us. I didn’t think we’d done anything to compromise ourselves, so I expected that they were just in place as a tripwire.
On the ground, at night, Germany didn’t look all that different from Slovakia. The differences lay in details that might not have been all that readily apparent to someone without our recent experience.
Aside from a dog barking down by Schönau-Berzdorf, it was deathly quiet. No distant thunder of artillery rumbled. No small arms fire rattled. There weren’t even any aircraft to be heard in the sky.
The lights were still on in Görlitz to the north, casting an orange glow against the low clouds overhead. Unlike the all-too common flickering light of burning towns and villages in Slovakia, it was a steady illumination, adding to the ambient light that our AN-PSQ-20 fusion goggles had to work with. It made navigation through the shadows of the German woods quite a bit easier.
That same quiet was making me suspicious. The entire landscape around us seemed asleep and dead. Given that every indicator that intelligence had gotten in the last few weeks was pointing to Görlitz being the staging point for a major offensive aimed at Poland, there should have been more activity.
Phil Kerr took a knee next to a mostly-bare tree. The fall had been colder than the Poles said was normal, and the leaves were falling fast. It was a bit of a disadvantage for us; we needed that foliage to cover us from the air.
Not that there seemed to be anything in the sky but the owls, that night.
“This is creeping me out, man,” Phil whispered as I knelt next to him. “I can’t even hear any drones. It’s like they’re not even keeping an eye on the border.”
“Oh, they’re keeping an eye on it,” I replied. “They’re just being careful about it.” I glanced up at the sky. If there were drones up there, they were the high-altitude, stealthy variety, that we wouldn’t see or hear until it was too late. And there wasn’t nearly enough overhead concealment to keep us hidden if there was.
The truth was, it was still odd. Most mechanized formations used a swarm of small, low-altitude recon drones in a sort of bubble around them, extending their eyes several hundred meters. The drones were cheap, they were easy to recharge, and they were a lot easier to keep tabs on at a tactical level. The bigger, high-altitude jobs usually piped their feeds back to theater-level control hubs, and then had to be sent to the end-user TOCs. They had their place, but for a battalion-sized mechanized unit to have no close-range drones out was just weird.
I peered through the boles of the trees ahead, but we were still too far back in the patch of woods north of Jauernick to be able to see our first Named Area of Interest, which recon flights on the Polish side of the border had tentatively identified as a mechanized battalion assembly area. It wasn’t a FOB; we’d be able to see it from a mile away if it had been; the Bundeswehr seemed to be lighting their bases up like Christmas trees for security.
Phil’s unease wasn’t misplaced. After all, we were in enemy territory, and when the enemy started acting unpredictably, that was usually bad news.
“Friendlies coming in,” I called over the radio.
“I’ve got you,” Tony replied. “Come ahead.”
It was almost dark. As thick as the woods were in that part of Slovakia, we’d had to move very carefully to avoid the locals, not to mention the occasional peacekeeper or militia patrols. It had taken slow, methodical movement, slipping from cover to cover, often halting to stay put and just watch and listen.
Phil got to his feet and started toward the ancient barn. Built of plastered stone and graying, aged timber, the roof was starting to sag and the base was overgrown, but it was still solid. I suspected it had been standing for at least a couple of centuries. It probably would still have been in use if not for the turmoil that had engulfed Slovakia over the last few years.
I carefully scanned the surrounding woods and the open field beyond for a moment, despite the fact that I knew that Scott had security set and the drone up. The abandoned farm sat right at the no-man’s land between the Belgian peacekeeping sector and one of the few, small, Loyalist Slovak Army sectors. While what was left of the Army that hadn’t gone over to the Nationalists after the initial riots was still outwardly loyal to the shaky government in Bratislava, that loyalty was in question among many of the peacekeepers, especially the Germans and Belgians. None of this would have been happening if the Slovaks hadn’t already had enough of both Brussels’ financial demands and the forced immigration, mostly of young Kosovar, Bosnian, and Syrian men. To that end, most of the EDC peacekeepers made no secret of the fact that they didn’t trust the Slovak Army.
Which made the uneasy borders between zones the best place to hide out, even though it had meant one hell of an infiltration from Hungary.
(Continued from Escalation Chapter 1)
The bad guys suddenly started moving about an hour after sunrise.
We had eyes on two sides of the house from our hide site, and so it was impossible to miss when the front door slammed open and half a dozen men rushed out, bearded and armed to the teeth. The only one who wasn’t in a rush was the guy with the Talib beard, wearing all Russian camouflage and talking into a radio. We were so close that I could actually pick out a few of the Albanian words.
I was already nervous about being within a hundred meters of the target building, but having what looked an awful lot like a terrorist react force come rushing out made my guts pucker. Only training and discipline kept me stock-still, though my hand was already on my OBR’s firing control, finger hovering near the trigger. If we’d been made, it was going to get really loud and really messy, really fast.
We were also probably all going to die in the process. Not to mention the hostage whom I was already pretty sure was tied up inside that house.
“Deacon, Weeb,” Scott Hayes’ voice said in my ear. “I think I see what’s got ‘em all stirred up. There’s company coming.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was keeping my eyes fixed somewhere just above Camouflage Jacket’s shoulder as I inched my off hand toward the push-to-talk clipped to the strap of my chest rig.
None of us had wanted to set up so close. Phil had been downright adamant that we needed to find some other way of handling the situation, as the night had worn on and we’d had to get closer and closer just to see the house through the trees. The hills we’d hiked in through were heavily forested, and just the crunch of leaves under our boots had been excruciatingly loud.
And if I could hear the guy who I was pretty sure was Ibrahim Baruti, then he could hear me.
(Continued from the Escalation Prologue)
The sound of crying echoed through the house. The place wasn’t even fully furnished yet, and Carlo Santelli had to cringe a little at just how loud Carlo Junior could get, particularly in some of the emptier rooms.
He almost didn’t hear the phone. Part of that was because of Carlo Junior’s wails, part of it was his own deafness in the aftermath of trying to walk the little tyke to quiet again. He’d failed miserably, and Melissa had come and taken the baby, leaving Santelli feeling frustrated and helpless again.
So, he wasn’t in the best frame of mind when he snatched up the phone and answered it without looking at the screen. “What?”
“Rough day, Carlo?” Brannigan asked dryly.
Santelli pressed his lips together and cussed himself silently but thoroughly. He really wasn’t cut out for this family life, and it was taking its toll. Or so he told himself.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “The baby’s colicky, and he’s being a royal…a handful.”
“You’re even trying to watch your language,” Brannigan said, sounding congratulatory. “You’re truly becoming a family man, Carlo.”
“I’m afraid I’m not doing that great a job at it, sir,” Santelli said.
“Knowing you, you’re doing a lot better than most,” Brannigan said. He paused. “I take it that this is a bad time?”
Santelli glanced toward the other room, where Melissa had disappeared with Carlo Junior. The baby was still crying, but sounded like he was finally starting to quiet down. Maybe he’d just worn himself out. He could hope.
The truth was, he desperately wanted to go on whatever job Brannigan had, even if it was—uncharacteristic for the band of under-the-table mercenaries who called themselves Brannigan’s Blackhearts—just guarding a compound for a couple weeks. He understood that work. He’d been a Marine for twenty-three years, and retired as a Sergeant Major. He was comfortable with it. This…being a husband and a father was turning out to be more than he’d bargained for, especially as his late forties were rapidly approaching.
“You’ve been rather elusive lately, John.”
John Brannigan cupped his hands around his coffee mug and looked across the table levelly at Mark Van Zandt. General, USMC, Retired Mark Van Zandt.
“I live in the mountains, Mark,” he said. “It’s not like cell service is all that regular up there.”
Van Zandt didn’t react, at least not by much. He’d gotten better at that, but Brannigan could still read him like a book. He was pissed. It was written in every faint line of his movie-poster Marine face, above his usual polo shirt and khakis.
Unlike Van Zandt, Brannigan had shed most of the Marine Corps’ appearance upon his forcible retirement several years before. A forcible retirement, he remembered all over again, that had been enforced by the very man sitting across from him at the table in the Rocking K diner.
Still big and powerfully built, Brannigan had let his hair get shaggy and grown a thick, graying handlebar mustache. He looked more like a mountain man than a retired Marine Colonel, while Van Zandt looked like he’d just taken his uniform off to come to the diner.
“We’ve heard some…faintly disturbing things lately, John,” Hector Chavez said carefully. Brannigan’s old friend had been medically retired for heart problems, and his body had gone soft in the years since, though his mind was still keen. He was dressed down from when he’d first showed up in the Rocking K in a suit for the Khadarkh assignment, but not by that much.
“It’s a disturbing world, Hector,” Brannigan said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Let’s quit beating around the bush, John,” Van Zandt said sharply, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. The entire thing rocked, coffee sloshing a little in cups as it took his weight. “Mario Gomez’ family gets murdered. Next thing anyone knows, a whole bunch of Mexican gang-bangers get slaughtered, to include what has been reported as a balls-out firefight in the hills just over the Mexican border. Now, that sounds awfully coincidental to me. Especially when a bunch of you disappeared from Childress’ bedside at just about the same time.”
Brannigan sipped his coffee. “That does sound like an interesting coincidence,” he said mildly.
If you think I’m going to give you an inch, you’re sadly mistaken, Mark. I’ve been crucified by your type before, remember?
“Cut the crap, John,” Van Zandt all but exploded. “You know as well as I do that you went full vigilante on those assholes. I’ll admit, they probably deserved it.” When Brannigan’s face hardened, he amended, “Okay, they definitely deserved it. If the reports are true, the Espino-Gallo gang was as vicious as they come. The world’s better off without them. But dammit, you went way off the reservation on this one.”
“Oh, come off it, Mark,” Brannigan snarled, finally losing his patience. “Everything we’ve done since I agreed to go into Khadarkh has been off the reservation. You show me the Congressional authorization for any of these little operations, and then we can talk about staying on the reservation.” He all but slammed the mug on the table. “We do this because it has to be done, red tape be damned.” He stabbed a finger at Van Zandt. “And don’t try to fob this off on me alone. You knew we were going to do something, or else you wouldn’t have promised legal top cover when we talked before things kicked off. Now that the bodies are on the ground, you’re getting squeamish.” He snorted. “Not that I really should have expected anything else.”
Van Zandt actually sat back a little at that. He took a deep breath, looking down at the table. Brannigan knew he was right, and he knew that Van Zandt knew it, too. Whatever kind of legal trouble they could potentially be in if anyone went digging too deeply, he knew that the Espino-Gallos had needed killing, and that Sheriff Thomas wouldn’t be pressing charges anytime soon, either.
Having the men whom you had tried to drive off suddenly deliver your kidnapped daughter to your door with a curt, “You’re welcome,” could tend to make a man rethink his position a bit.
“Look me in the eye and tell me it was a righteous killing,” Van Zandt said.
Brannigan’s eyes narrowed at that. He didn’t need to justify his actions to Van Zandt. But he looked the former General in the eye and said, “They had it coming. They had a lot worse coming than we dished out. And if the local sheriff had done his job, we would have stood by and let him do it. You’ve got my word on that.”
His lips pressed tightly together, Van Zandt nodded, breathing a long sigh through his nose.
“Well,” Chavez said, “now that that’s out of the way, can we get down to the main reason we came here?”