Dead Six

Hunter cut me off. “This is not a democracy, Mr. Valentine!” he barked. “Now get your ass to supply and get kitted up! Move out!” Tailor and I looked at each other, and stood up. Sarah gave me a worried glance as we left the classroom.

VALENTINE

Confederated Gulf Emirate of Zubara

April 15

2045

“Control, Nightcrawler, radio check,” I said, squeezing the transmit button on my headset.

“Read you loud and clear, Nightcrawler,” Sarah replied, all business.

“Alright, let’s go over this one more time,” Tailor said, concentrating on one of the aerial pictures of Adar’s compound. We were in the back of a large, windowless van driven by Hunter’s man, Conrad. He ignored us as we talked. The interior of the van was lit by a red light. “We’ll use the assault ladder to hop the wall here,” he said, pointing a gloved finger at a spot on the picture.

“Right,” I said. “We’ll come down behind the shed, here, and stash the ladder there.”

“We then move across the compound to the back door, here,” Tailor continued.

“Then we enter and clear. As if it’s going to be that simple.”

“It is that simple. Doing that without getting killed is the hard part.”

I leaned in close to Tailor so that Conrad couldn’t hear me. “This whole thing is screwed up, dude. We’re going to clear a house that we know has eight people in it, with just the two of us. We don’t know the interior layout. We don’t know their security measures. All we know is that one or two guys patrol the yard every half hour or so.”

“What I want to know is how we’re supposed to get close to the place by just driving up to it,” Tailor said. He had a point. The compound was in the middle of the village of Umm Bab. “Too much risk of being seen. Small town like that won’t have much traffic at night.”

“Well, why don’t we ask him, then?” I suggested, nodding my head toward our driver.

“What the hell, why not?” Tailor agreed. “Hey, buddy?” he said, moving to the front of the van and tapping the driver on the shoulder.

“What is it?” Conrad said, seemingly irritated that we were talking to him.

“How the fuck do you intend to get us to that compound without getting our asses shot off?”

“Yeah,” I said, chiming in, “what are we going to do, just drive up to the front gate and hop over it with this gay little ladder they gave us?”

Conrad was visibly annoyed now. “I’m not driving you to the target,” he answered curtly. “I don’t even know where it is. I don’t know what your objective is. I had no idea it was a ‘compound’ until you two idiots told me. I’m just dropping you off at a predetermined location. Someone else is taking it from there.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. “Where are we going from there?”

Conrad sighed. “Again, guys, I don’t know. I don’t need to know. I’m just the driver, okay?” He spoke to us like an elementary school teacher lecturing his class. “Maybe you two should just concentrate on whatever it is you’re doing back there and let me drive.”

“Listen, asshole,” Tailor said, his eyes narrowing. Before he could say anything else I put my hand on his shoulder and shook my head. He plopped back down to his seat, flipping Conrad the bird as he did so. “Pissed me off,” Tailor muttered as he picked up his packet again.

I leaned back against the wall, rubbing my eyes. We’d been driving for over an hour, and I had no idea where we were. They hadn’t issued us much in the way of equipment, either. We were each given a set of fatigues, in the blotchy A-TACS pattern, and body-armor vests. We wore night-vision goggles up on our heads. The goggles themselves were state of the art and were lighter than any kind I’d used before.

Another piece of equipment I’d never used before was the strange weapon in my hands. “What the hell is this thing?” Tailor asked, as if he’d read my mind. We’d each been issued a weird, boxy little .45-caliber submachine gun with a folding stock and a fat suppressor on the end.

“It’s a KRISS Vector,” I said after a moment. “I read about these in a gun rag. They came out a few years ago.” Each of our weapons was painted to match our fatigues and was topped with a holographic sight.

We carried the rest of our gear in pouches on our vests. Tailor had been issued some kind of tactical PDA with a GPS locator built into it. It had the coordinates preprogrammed, as well as a bunch of mission-specific information. I wondered why in the hell they didn’t just give us that in the first place instead of bothering to print out the mission packets. My .44 was on my left thigh. I had a feeling I was going to need some luck tonight.

After a seemingly endless drive, the van rolled to a stop. “We’re here,” Conrad said, looking at us in his rearview mirror. “This is where you two get off. Leave your mission packets in the van.” Tailor opened the back doors and climbed out.

“Where are we?” I asked, stepping out after him, slinging the folded assault ladder over my shoulder. The van had pulled off to the side of a long dirt road that cut through the desert. Far off in the distance, I could see the amber glow of Zubara City. The moon wasn’t out yet, and the stars were bright overhead.

Conrad shut the van’s engine off and killed the headlights. Suddenly it was dead quiet; nothing could be heard except the faint sound of the wind and the rustling of our equipment.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Tailor said, his face illuminated by the small screen on his GPS. “What the hell? We’re even farther from the target than we were at the fort!”

“Hey man, are we in the right place?” I asked, approaching the driver’s side door of the van. Conrad had gotten out and was leaning against the van. He reached underneath his 5.11 vest and retrieved a pack of cigarettes.

“We’re in the right spot,” he said nonchalantly, lighting up. “Your ride will be here shortly. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.” Tailor just shrugged, leaned against the van himself, and lit up a cigarette.

Minutes ticked by. None of us spoke. I gazed up into the night sky; it was the first time I’d been able to see the stars since I’d arrived in Zubara. I don’t think any of us wanted to ruin the rare quiet moment we were having.

The quiet was suddenly interrupted by a low beeping sound. Conrad pulled out a device that looked like a pager and read the little display.“Your ride is here,” he said, putting the gadget back into his pocket. Tailor and I looked around. No lights could be seen on the road. Not a single car had driven by in the few minutes we’d been standing there.

“Where?” I asked. Conrad just shook his head like I was stupid. A moment later, I heard a dull thwup-thwup-thwup noise. It sounded like a helicopter off in the distance.

“Is that a chopper?” Tailor asked.

“Something like that,” Conrad said. I wondered what in the hell he was being so coy about. I quickly found out. The thwupping noise grew louder, but the helicopter still sounded far off in the distance, and it was difficult to tell which direction it was coming from. Then I saw a black shape slowly moving across the sky; the helicopter was a lot closer than it sounded.

“Now, what the hell is that?” Tailor asked as the helicopter approached.

“I have no idea,” I said. Seeing new and strange things had become the theme of the evening, it seemed. I’m something of an aviation buff. As a matter of fact, I have a private pilot’s license. But I’d never seen anything like the machine that was setting down in the desert in front of us.

It wasn’t very big, maybe the size of an old Huey. Its hull was painted black and was made up of oddly curved and faceted surfaces. The chopper looked like a bastard love-child of a Huey and the RAH-66 Comanche. It kicked up a cloud of white dust as it touched down onto the bleached, rocky Zubaran desert, but it still was ridiculously quiet. The muted whine of turbine engines could be heard over the dull thwupping of the rotor. The rotor blades themselves appeared to be very wide and were oddly shaped.

“It’s a stealth helicopter,” I said, somewhat in disbelief. There I was, working for a secret government organization, engaged in an honest-to-goodness black operation, and I was about to climb onto a genuine black helicopter. I shook my head. Tailor laughed to himself.

The chopper settled onto the desert floor, and an off-kilter-looking door slid open on the side of the fuselage. The interior cabin was lit with a red light.