out, Jennifer’s face became more and more enraged. She asked the same question a few different ways, making sure her fledgling grasp of French was capturing accurately what the girl said. Eventually, the prostitute broke down and began to cry. Jennifer stopped the questioning and stroked her back, telling us what she had learned.
The story sickened me.
I could tell it shocked the rest of the team as well. I looked each man in the eye, getting a nod, one by one. I said, “Okay, Jennifer, we’ll do it. But you need to understand something.”
“What?”
I locked eyes with her. “We don’t live in a comic book. We go in, and it’s full force. You remember the Bible verse on Johnny’s hat in Indonesia? The one you asked me about, wondering if Johnny was religious?”
She nodded.
“It’s Romans 3:8, and it says ‘Let us do evil that good may come.’ It’s an inside joke and an unofficial Taskforce motto. In Cairo you said you weren’t sure of the difference between the good guys and the bad, and there’s some truth to that if you’re on the outside looking in. We don’t arrest people. We don’t play fair. We solve problems through violence. No judge. No jury. It’s against everything America stands for, and the reason for the inside joke. We do it because it’s necessary. It’s not something the average American understands sitting in his La-Z-Boy, drinking a beer.”
I paused a minute to give her a chance to say something. She didn’t.
“If we go in there, a lot of people are going to die. Based on your say-so. I don’t have enough men to dominate the place, and these guys know how to fight. They cut their teeth killing Serbians in Kosovo. We aren’t going to shoot at legs or run around shouting, ‘Freeze!’ Anybody that’s a threat will be eliminated. Killed. No questions asked.”
I spoke softer, about something only she and I would know. “You remember Guatemala? What you saw there? That’s what’s going to happen here. You good with that?”
She grew distant for a minute, thinking of the maelstrom of violence she had experienced in Guatemala, the graphic images of the men I’d slaughtered to save her flitting through her mind.
She contemplated the child prostitute, reaching out and brushing a tear rolling down her cheek. The girl didn’t understand enough English to follow, but she sensed the lives of her friends hung in the balance. She squeezed Jennifer’s hands, a tentative smile on her face. Jennifer tried to smile back, but it came out as a grimace, like she was smiling through an injury to prove she was all right.
She said, “Okay. Let’s go do some evil.”
45
The image on the laptop looked like a black-and-white negative, with everything reversed. It was startlingly clear, allowing me to make out the individual limbs of trees even in the total darkness. Anything generating heat showed up as light shading. Anything cold showed up as dark. I spun the ball around, catching the van with Buckshot and Retro behind me, the hood pure white from the engine heat and the glass of the windshield looking like black sackcloth.
The image, fed to the laptop through fiber-optic cable, was produced by a thermal device made by FLIR industries. Called a Blackjack, it was based on the MarFLIR Talon, a nine-inch thermal and infrared sensor used in airborne and maritime environments. Of course, we took the best of that design and created our own sensor. Mounted on gimbals, it was gyrostabilized like the Talon, allowing it to be used on the move without the user getting seasick. It also maintained a healthy optical zoom capability, along with the Talon’s laser pointer capability. We kicked out everything else in order to get it small. Geo-location marking, laser range finder, lowlight CCD TV, all of that went to the curb. Our sensor was much less capable, but also a hell of a lot smaller, at only six inches in diameter. Which made it much easier to sneak through customs, like everything else we had on us.
As soon as we’d made the decision to take down what we were now calling the slave house, I sent Buckshot and Retro to our aircraft while I took Jennifer back to the hotel to change into something more suitable for an assault. While we waited for the kit, Jennifer had taken the girl into the shower and cleaned her up. I noticed that Decoy had hovered around, doing whatever Jennifer asked to make the girl more comfortable. Whatever he had acted like when we first met, something in his past had triggered a protective instinct like I’d never seen.
Eventually, Retro and Buckshot had returned from the airfield, bringing with them an arsenal of weapons and tools that would, hopefully, give us an edge on the assault. The team equipment that had come in on the jump would have been very useful if we’d remained in Egypt, but posed a serious issue getting into Europe. Luckily, Kurt had sent us a Gulfstream G4 with very special adaptations. The plane was built with a plethora of removable panels that would conceal Taskforce kit. On the outside — or inside — it looked like an ordinary airframe, but the walls themselves housed everything Buckshot had jumped in with. It caused an issue with noise isolation because the insulation had been removed to hold the kit, but that was a small price to pay.
While the G4 itself was a godsend, it did create potential risk, because my nascent company had miraculously acquired a lease on a multimillion-dollar aircraft. The plane itself was now permanently attached to our company, which was cool, but any in-depth investigation would reveal inconsistencies in the lease that potentially would cause problems. The Taskforce was big on not doing exactly what we were now doing, preferring to solve problems with a long-term solution, getting everything perfect for outside scrutiny before employment. Just like the enemy we hunted. Nothing to be done about it, because we needed the kit, and the EFPs weren’t something we could wish away.
Retro had come back with four H&K UMP assault rifles, four Glock 30s, and one H&K 416, along with a host of other unique items like the Blackjack. The UMPs and Glocks were tricked out with small red-dot sights and suppressors, but were chambered for.45 caliber, an age-old, distinctly American round. Plenty of modern cartridges beat it out in wound ballistics and carrying capacity, but it had one distinction that none of the others held: It was subsonic.
In the movies, all the actor has to do is slap a suppressor on a weapon and he’s now banging away without making any noise, but the truth of the matter is that, while the muzzle blast and explosion of the round can be effectively suppressed, all combat rounds will break the sound barrier with a loud crack, rendering the suppression useless in a clandestine assault where any noise will give you away. This forced most close-combat weapons to use special subsonic rounds in a clandestine assault, which detracted from the very capabilities they originally presented, along with altering the ballistic track of the bullet from what one had trained with. The.45, while old, didn’t have that problem. And make no mistake, it would knock a man down.
The 416 was for Jennifer. It fired a 5.56 round, just like the mainstay of the U.S. Army, and would be loud as hell, but it’s what she’d been trained on. She would be pulling security out front while we were in the house, and I wanted her comfortable with the weapon she had to use. There would be no second chances. And if she was cracking rounds downrange, it meant that the clandestine side of things had gone to shit, so a little noise wouldn’t matter.
I swung the Blackjack around with my joystick, surveying the area. Mounted on a mast, it stuck up about fifteen feet from the roof of the van, giving me a clear view of what we faced. The vehicle with the Diamondback beacon was parked out front, so the girl’s information had panned out so far. I zoomed in on the house, the lights outside generating white-hot heat with darkness surrounding it. No other heat sources.
I panned back out, surveying the long drive toward the solitary road we were now parked on. As I got to the intersection, I saw a heat source. Zooming in, I made out two men sitting outside of a guard shack. One had a cigarette in his mouth, which caused the screen to white out, blocking his features. The other was methodically cleaning a weapon. His eyes were black pools, something I always found disconcerting when looking through thermal imagery. It made a man look like he had no soul.
“Retro, I got two targets. About two hundred meters away at the entrance to the compound.”
“Roger that. Light ’em up. Buckshot and I will take care of them.”
“Everyone in my van. Final check.”
Retro and Buckshot entered the sliding door while Jennifer took the prostitute to the rear van. When she returned, I went over the rules of engagement and assault plan one final time, asking about the girl first.
