Shadow Ops: Control Point

and a chill ran across his back. Crowning the display was a giant bird skull, striped red and orange. Four hooded men stood behind the two marines, seated Indian style in their uniforms, their faces bruised past recognition.

But they were alive. Don’t worry about that. Focus on the room. Your job is to get the guys in to do the job.

But something about the scene nagged at him. “Sir?” He said to Fitzy, “That bird skull’s awful big. How the heck would the Apache get their hands on a Ro…”

“Focus, Keystone!” Fitzy silenced him. “Intel’s not your job here.”

Britton bit his lip and concentrated.

As he looked at the video, he felt a movement beside him, and one of the Goblin contractors began to wave a small plastic canister under his nose. The fumes rose, carrying foreign scents — spent diesel fuel, animal manure, dust, and mold. “Close your eyes,” Fitzy said. “Get a real good sense of the place.”

Britton did his best to focus on the smells and the room in the video, trying to ignore the heady silence around him, the stares of the SF operators, Fitzy, Therese, and the medical crew, Colonel Taylor. The pressure made him nervous, and he leaned on the Dampener to shunt the emotion aside. Focus, focus.

After a moment, Sharp coughed. Fitzy stirred at Britton’s side. “What do you think?”

“I’ve got it,” Britton said.

“Are you sure?”

“No, but it’ll have to do, won’t it?”

Fitzy nodded grimly. “I guess it will. All right, I want a pinhole, Keystone, open for no more than five seconds. I want a quick recon of the room and ID any threats. Can you do that?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Remember, no bigger than a pinhole. We alert the enemy to our entry, and this whole thing is going to go south.”

Britton nodded and cleared his mind. He tried to push all other thoughts from his mind’s eye, focusing on the image of the room, repeating it in his head, centering on the details of the filthy brick, the hung banner, the pile of soiled machine parts. He recalled the smells, the dull cordite tinge burning his nostrils. Then he leaned on the Dampener, letting his nervousness, his desire not to disappoint the crowd staring at him, fuel the magic. The gate materialized perfectly, barely the size of a dime, shedding a tiny pinprick of light. He looked through it, then leaned back, shutting it and nodding.

“Room’s empty, sir. No light source or obstructions. No threats visible. Looks like they abandoned it after making the video.” Britton kept his voice even, but inside he was exulting. I did it. I watched a video for a minute and sniffed a canister and I can take us right there. The control, the sense of accomplishment was almost overwhelming. Fitzy grinned at him, and Britton grinned back, grateful in spite of himself. Bastard gave me this chance.

“All right,” Sharp said. “I wish we had more time to prep, but we need to go now. Keystone, Captain TrueZero, on our six, and do not engage unless called upon. In and out, quick as we can. Normally we’d have weeks to drill for an op like this. But…but things are different.”

You bet things are different. Now the army’s got a guy who can get you there in an instant. You probably wouldn’t have even attempted this mission before. Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head.

“I’ve got it,” the SOC Hydromancer groused.

“With all due respect, sir,” Sharp said, “I need you to secure the attitude. I cannot afford to be worrying about either of you.” He nodded to his men, slipping the night-vision device into position over his eyes.

“You might want to hold off, Sergeant,” Britton said. “The gate makes a lot of light. Better wait until you’re through, and it’s closed, before you go to the night optical devices. Otherwise, you might be running this op blind.”

TrueZero smirked, and Sharp nodded, slipping up his NODs and making a you-got- me face.

Britton nodded to Fitzy and widened his stance. “Folks might want to step back a bit.”

As the group complied, he heard Therese whisper behind him, “Good luck, Oscar.”

“Yes,” added the colonel, almost as an afterthought. “God-speed.”

“Don’t fuck it up, Keystone,” Fitzy added, “or it’s your ass.”

Britton grinned and slid the gate open, wide enough to admit the operators abreast. The SOF soldiers hesitated a moment, staring at the portal. Sharp motioned them forward, and they went, following their carbine muzzles as if they were dragged by them, walking evenly, calm, perfectly stable firing platforms. Sharp made a zipping motion across his lips to Britton and TrueZero before moving through. Britton and TrueZero drew their pistols and followed behind. They entered into the darkness, and Britton shut the gate, an array of smells hitting his nose. The IO guys had gotten it almost exactly right. The air was thick, close, and freezing.

He heard the low clicks of the SF operators snapping their NODs into place, and Britton followed suit, the world transforming from black into pale green and white. He’d operated on NODs before and paused to adjust to how they flattened the world, robbing him of depth perception and color, plunging him into a weird ghost world, mechanical and unforgiving. But it was well worth it. The benefit of seeing in the dark far outweighed any minor adjustments that had to be made to do it. Britton looked left and right, able to take in the rest of the room that the camera’s aperture had cut off. Two metal doors stood at the far end. The SOF operators were already stacking up alongside it, Sharp anchoring the three men. Britton and TrueZero took up position on the door’s far side, shoulders pressed against the wall, pistols pointed at the floor, out of the line of fire as instructed.

Sharp nodded, and the operator across from him knelt, sliding what looked like a dental mirror under the door. He looked at it briefly, then nodded back to Sharp and made a fist, thumb up. Clear. He then stood and tried the door handle, his touch surprisingly gentle and silent. The handle didn’t budge. He sliced his hand flat through the air. Locked. Britton looked up at the hinges, rusted nearly solid. There would be no way to open it without making a lot of noise.

Sharp signaled TrueZero, and the SOC Hydromancer moved to the door. Britton felt his magical current surge as he placed his hands against the rusted surface, and within moments it paled, sparkling with frost and turning a faint, glowing blue that softly illuminated the darkness. The cold was so intense that Britton could feel it from his position feet away.

TrueZero stood back and kicked the door. It shattered, the metal pieces flying apart with no more sound than a broken window. The SF operators dashed through, their infrared sights casting pencil-thin beams down the hallway, invisible to all but those wearing night-vision optics.

A short hallway stretched out before them, the floor cast from the same dirty, chipped concrete, and the walls made of the same moldering brick. Graffiti covered most of it. A dog corpse sprawled to Britton’s left, stretched out among piled garbage. Two doors were set in the hallway’s left side and one in the right. Sharp signaled one of the operators to cover the two doors, while he and his remaining man knelt and checked through the garbage. Sharp flicked out his pocketknife with a soft click and slit the animal carcass, spreading it wide and peering inside the cavity with a small flashlight, checking for hidden explosives. The odor nearly made Britton gag, and he had to grit his teeth and press his forehead against the wall to keep from vomiting. By the time the feeling passed, Sharp had made the clear sign and joined his remaining man to stack on the single door. This door was unlocked, and they rolled into the room, emerging a moment later, signaling to their remaining man. Clear.

One operator moved to cover one of the remaining doors while Sharp and the other operator stacked on opposite sides of the second one. The operator knelt, sliding his mirror underneath once again, then stood and shook his head, giving an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. Can’t see. Sharp trotted to Britton’s side. “Can you look in there?” he whispered.

Britton shook his head. “I have to know what it looks like first.”

Sharp cursed and moved back into position. He pulled a grenade from his vest and tried the handle himself this time. Again, locked. He nodded to TrueZero, who ran to the door, placing his hands on it. The magic poured forth from his hands, chilling, then freezing the door; the soft blue glow began to radiate outward as the Hydromancer worked.

Then the door exploded.